1) I voted!! Or at least have the ballot and am ready to vote and mail it off tomorrow. Yay!!! I went with Minnesota, which means that I get to vote for Obama and Franken and Tim Walz (tipping my hand here; oops :-/), so I'm pretty excited. I'm slightly pessimistic about whether my vote will make it because: a) There's a decent chance it won't make it to Minnesota by the 4th, given that I'm still waiting on a package here that was sent more than three weeks ago; b) even if it does, you're supposed to put the same passport/drivers license/SSN that you gave them in the application, and I don't remember which one I used; and c) I printed out the ballot on 8x11 normal letter paper, but it's supposed to be bigger and it's an optical ballot. Also I don't have a black marker to use with it. So we'll see, but this is still exciting.
2) I got a new thumbdrive. Not particularly great, but what was cool about this one is:
--It's 4G, so 8 times as big as my old one.
--It will mostly likely work, even without being propped up into the USB slot. And it has a cap!
--I bought it from some random stand that appeared this morning beside (on?) the railroad tracks by my school.
--I paid 70 kuai for it, about $10. I'm glad I didn't end up going for the 8G $80 one at Best Buy last summer.
3) I got to hang out with some of my former classmates, which was great fun and consisted of a nice mix of English, Chinese, and Vietnamese (which was cheating since only two people could understand it, but...). At one point this involved this Japanese guy lighting a cigarette, putting on his paper boy hat, and scampering up a nearby tree to impersonate a monkey. Great fun :-). AND I met a new Chinese friend who is cool and just started university here. Also, we were hanging out later with one of her friends and I ended up looking through their English text, and one section was on "Writing Emails." It was awesome: covered the use of all caps and emoticons to emphasize points, and lots of parenthetical statements. And then for the exercises they had to take letters and change them to sound more like emails. Very nice, and actually I think a pretty useful lesson (see this blog post).
4) Said Chinese pengyou took me to a used bookstore because she wanted to buy English books to read. I was pretty pessimistic: looking at the racks, it was alll Chinese and mostly textbooks, except for one copy of Bass Guitar for Dummies. But the owner started digging and pulled up 8-10 English books, mostly from the 70's (a biography of Getty, a discussion of the future from a Cornell prof written in 1970, the third Space Odyssey book..). But then he whipped out from nowhere Longitude, which I liked a lot and recommend highly, and Complications, the one book I started and wanted to read this summer, but couldn't for a string of reasons. I sort of jumped and exclaimed when I saw it, which they laughed at, and then bought it for $2. Nice.
So yeah, a good afternoon, even though the frisbee people switched locations and didn't tell me so I ended up missing that. We'll see how the rest of the week develops......
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