School begins; hotmail ends

Dajia hao!

Good news and bad news...

First the good news! School has begun! Everything is under way and things are moving fast around here. These first couple of days have been a blast and a great learning experience. Every day we're challenged with new vocab and working on things like grammar, pronunciation, and our character writing. It's crazy how fast they're moving and Tojer and I are really glad we studied ahead a little. Yesterday we had an International Student meeting and I decided to take a "shadow boxing" class, or what's known as Tai-chi. All around town you can see people doing it in the morning, but because we're not so diligent and school starts at 8:00am, they opened up a class on Wednesday's from 3 to 5. So like I said, we're keeping plenty busy around here and are glad we've been able to start school up. It's also nice because there are foreigners from all over the world at the Language College, so it's nice getting to know all kinds of different people. In our A-ban class there are two Americans (Tojer and I), a Korean guy, a Canadian guy, an Italian guy, a Swedish guy, and one girl who is Mongolian. So far 7 of us, but it's kind of strange because the class list has about 14 names on it. We'll see if we get some more students in the next couple days.
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So, school's going good. Things here at the house are also going well. Everyone is working hard and our Father continues to work many things out before our eyes. T.C.'s adoption papers were submitted to the police department and that's all in the works. The situation with the new house is still kind of rough right now, but there has been a little bit of progress. We might be able to make payments on the 15th story place we were considering that isn't far from here. It's supposed to be something like the full payment up front, but that seems to be impossible and so Tim and Trudy might be able to work some things out with the guy who owns the building. Like I said, it's all in the works, so please keep that situation lifted. We'll be booted out of this place eventually, so the sooner things work out with a new place, probably the better.
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As for the bad news...hotmail is officially dead to me now...there's a rumor that Beijing has kind of shut it down for the purpose of using the bandwidth for Olympic activities or something like that. I'm not sure how that works, but the fact is that hotmail isn't working. So, I've started a new email address with Gmail, a.meigide@gmail.com. I don't have anyone's email addresses, so please send me an email at my new address, and if anyone knows other people who need my email, this will be it for now.
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Still no camera, and it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon, so no pictures for now. : ( If anyone wants to see info or look at pictures of the university I'm attending, you can check it out online by searching Hainan University or by copying and pasting 海南大学 into your search bar. Tomorrow morning there's some kind of big student assembly thing going on, so I'm looking forward to that.
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Other than just school starting up, things are going same as usual around here. I was able to share on Sunday at our foreign fellowship, which was pretty cool. Tim was planning on being out of town so he asked me if I could cover for him. I was sharing on the book of Gal. and just some things I've been learning lately. It was pretty similiar to some things I've written on the blog in the last couple of weeks. I just hope He used it for something. : )
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I hope to hear from everyone soon! Please keep us lifted up as we seek to obey the boss in all things.