lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer..

Hola!
August is half over, and I feel rather unproductive of late. I am not working these days, and my Chinese classes don't start until the beginning of September. So I'm pretty much just hanging around, working on my guitar skills (haha!), cleaning up and organizing stuff accumulated from the last two years, and spending time building relationships with people. I suppose all that is kind of productive, especially the last one!
Two of my roomates have been bitten by the painting bug and decided to beautify their rooms by painting the walls a beautiful shade of eggshell. Or buttercream. Or...white. Whatever. So our apartment has had furniture all over the place, and a lovely scent of paint fumes has permeated every corner of the house. But the results are great, and their rooms look amazingly improved! All the walls in our apartment are dingy to say the least, and most are covered with sticky stuff from years of Things being hung on the walls, etc. My solution, as a lazy person by nature, is to simply cover up the dinginess and stickiness with other stuff to make the walls more dingy and sticky in the future. My roomates, both being fixer uppers by nature and wanting to make the world a better place, put the hard work into a more permanent solution. I'm proud of them! They worked really hard.
Every year in February, the public schools here give a three week "winter vacation" break. One week of this is also usually Chinese New Year holiday break which we foreign teachers get off. Since I'll be a student and only teaching a few hours in evenings, I will also get the three week vacation. Why am I telling you all this now, in August? Banner church is planning a Winter Camp for university students, and it will be an all English outreach camp. This is a big difference from the bilingual camps we helped with the last couple of years. This time, us foreigners from the Banner English zone will be running the camp. AAAUGH! I was put in charge (er, rather, volunteered) to head up the games committee. I have a few general ideas, but I need to put a lot of work into specifics. We went to scount out the facility last week, it's a nice college campus at a Presbyterian bible college about an hours drive outside Taichung, in Hsinchu (which incidentally is where all the "made in Taiwan" computers, like Acer, factories are). We also have a small groups committee, a drama committee, a promotion and advertising committee, and a worship/music committee. The Banner pastors will do the messages. This is a huge project. I, as well as all my teammates, would really appreciate your prayers! We need to not only get our stuff planned out, but also recruit people to help us at the camp. AAUGH! It's only August, but we're feeling some pressure.
Soooooo, that's that. Life is good. Life is great, actually! Although I have way too much down time, I know that will change once school starts, so I am trying to enjoy my time off for now. Transition, new possibilities, and fun! I like August! :)
Until next time!