Homeless no more!

So I'm finally settled in my summer house, with Kitty (yes, that's the cat's name) and Jenny, my housemate. It is lovely. I am very much enjoying eating real food - I made some delicious cold cucumber soup today - and being able to have a fixed place to work and put my stuff.

The weekend has been excellent, too - lots of aikido, lots of socializing, a little bit of work on the Taoism book... This project is pretty interesting, too. My latest challenge is to go through a box of student work from the term and pull out quotable or interesting passages, so he can have a section of student responses and interpretations of Applied New Taoism. (Picture a pile of 60 journals of responses to class notes, and 60 10-page final projects. It's going to be a big job...) A lot of it is really boring, because some people not only can't write but also have nothing original to say, but every once in a while I've stumbled on something really smart, often written by really improbable people. The Tao has been connected to the Sistine Chapel, Aesop's fables, Bob Marley, Rene Magritte, the Grand Canyon, and Woody Allen - and I've barely put a dent in this box. So it's not bad, compared to some other peoples' boring summer jobs.

It's nice to be a little more settled. It finally seems really like summer; there's much less to worry about when you're not sleeping on someone's spare bed and living out of a duffel bag.

edit: I've just been searching for potential publishers for Qiguang's book, and I've been looking on Amazon to see who else has published Taoism books, and guess what I've found? "The Taoist Manual: An Illustrated Guide Applying Taoism to Daily Life." uh oh. I guess someone's beat him to the punch... So do I tell him his revolutionary new book has already been written?