Month: March 2011
Saturday Feature: Tree Planting Day
Spring has arrived. And every year in early spring the Chinese people (at least in this area) celebrate a special event: Tree Planting Day. Special ceremonies take place, and regularly, the foreign faculty of our university is invited to participate in the activities. Our university has its own tree planting day, which took place yesterday. I joined some of my students who participated – each equipped with their wash bowl (for watering), and was surprised at the number of students who had showed up for the occasion. Hundreds of them crowded the place, eager to contribute their “good deed of the year,” making me wonder how – with all those people – they’d still be able to plant the trees. I was more amazed to see how smooth things unfolded as groups of students gathered around to plant their trees. Fortunately, there was a whole forest of trees waiting to be planted, so there was plenty of opportunities to do some digging. And now, our campus has a new forest in the backyard!
Freebie Friday: Small
I’m excited to have my website back to the way it should be, and I’m even more excited to have the next template ready for you, featuring my layout “Small.” This time, I went on a little search to maybe find some of the pages you create with these templates in the galleries, and lo! I discovered a gem. It’s this beauty by lynnirene, using my template Holiday Happiness: I love the color palette, and I would’ve never guessed that she used this template for it. Great job, lynnirene! So, fellow digiscrappers, don’t forget to hook me up with what you create with those templates. And until then, enjoy scrapping with this new one. ETA: There was a problem with the file. Thanks for pointing this out to me. It should be fixed now, (I just downloaded and unzipped it without problems), so just try again. Sorry to make you keep coming back. Note: Please don’t re-distribute this template in any way (you may share the link to this post), and when you use this …
Fun with Chinglish: The Basement of Wisdoms
From some stationary: “Patience is the basement for all wisdoms.” Note: When posting anything in the Fun with Chinglish section, I don’t mean to show disrespect towards anything or anyone in any way. I’m simply sharing the fun we get to have with all those great signs & documents!
Tree Planting Day
Tree Planting Day has come, and our school has organized a huge tree planting event in the back of the school.
Around Town: New Super Waka
They are everywhere in the area: the Waka supermarkets. Our campus alone has several of them. In the beginning of the year, another Waka just opened its doors down the road from our campus. To date, it’s the biggest supermarket in town – a real asset around here. Now, we don’t have to make the laborious trip to the city anymore, when we need butter or the likes. They even have cheese – an absolute rarity in these parts. Never before has cheese or butter been sold in this town, which means it’s a definite step up from when I first arrived here!
Enable Me: Ideas for Titles
You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, I posted a tutorial on how to make your titles stand out. Back then I promised to hook you up with some great resources to inspire you and help you find the right title. So, today’s the day. Many of us experience this at some point: you finished your page, it looks great, but you just don’t know what title to use. You don’t want to refer to the much over-used “something-something- Memories,” yet again, or any of the other oh-so-typical phrases that you see all over the galleries. But your brain is having a blockage. You just can’t think of any fun or interesting title, you’re stuck! But there’s a way out of your dilemma. There are lots of scrapbooking websites (traditional and digital) out there that offer lists of suggestions for titles. Many are sorted by occasion/topic/event etc. which makes finding a title four your page really easy. Just find the topic that matches the theme of your layout and check out their inspiration. …
Food Corner: Spicy Potato Slices with Soy Sauce
Another very common dish around here are the sliced spicy potatoes that are fried in soy sauce. For this dish you take uncooked potatoes, and cut them into thin slices, much thinner than fries. They are thrown into the wok and fried with oil and salt, and usually you add some green peppers and some of the hot red peppers, and of course the soy sauce. Though the name says spicy potato, it doesn’t really taste that hot. Unless, of course, you don’t pay attention to sort out the red peppers. Those are really spicy, though there are many Chinese who enjoy eating the red peppers, too!
Fixed it! And a Freebie
Good news! It seems like the bug got fixed, finally! I’m starting to know my way around my website again – yay for that! And a BIG thanks to my sister’s fiance who was the man of the hour! So, hopefully I’m going to be able to get back to the routine right away (am hoping to get some extra posting done this weekend, and if time allows, I’ll even have a new freebie for you, so keep watching for something new these coming days). To make your wait a little sweeter, I’ve got a little something from Cindy Schneider that I’d like to share. She’s offering one of her gorgeous templates as a freebie on facebook!
So sorry!
Can you tell that we were having trouble making the switch? I’m so sorry that mistyhilltops.com has been such a mess these last few days. Thanks to my sister and her fiance who spent countless hours trying to figure out what was wrong, we finally narrowed the possibilities down to one problem. It’s not completely solved, yet, but at least we know what has caused this mess, and we were able to get things back in place somewhat. We are trying hard to get mistyhilltops.com fully restored, and hopefully before long we’ll get back into our usual posting routine again. My apologies, and thanks for your patience!