MAH-JONGG AND OTHER STORIES

Well, my class of 14 Korean middle-school EFL teachers left Saturday, freeing up,I hope, immense time slots in my weeks unil this term ends March 13.

A few weekends ago, an old U-of-I (Illinois) colleague who I used to jam with (me on piano, he and another teacher on guitars) and now lives in Phoenix invited me to go along with his son and him and another co-worker to hike in the Superstition Mountains just east of the city.



It's been an unusually wet year, so the "desert" was carpeted with green in all directions. (To an ex-Saudi Aramco Brat, it hardly qualifies as REAL desert!) Large saguaro cacti - a forest of them - headed up the slopes of the mountain. Weather's been cool, so we started out early morning with jackets and stripped down layer by layer as it got closer to high noon with its ... 75 degrees! Here are a few photos:







Last weekend, I was invited to the apartment of a Chinese student of mine from Manchuria (Harbin) in gratitude for several sessions helping her get her application ready for the Master's in Comparative Literature here at ASU. She was maddeningly blase about the deadline (innocently, I believe), so I was trying to canjole and coerce as politely as I could to make sure she had at least SOMETHING in to the department by the February 1 due date.

She lives with her older brother, a chemistry lecturer at ASU, in a pleasant apartment. He startleed me by saying some very positive things about the banned Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama - surely inviting a court appearance if said back home! (The brother seems to be a devout Buddhist). And for propriety's sake, she had invited several others as well. After hearty helpings of Chinese home cooking, they brought out the mah-jongg tiles, and proceded to teach me and one other American undergrad the rules of the game. It was fun, and me any my partner Shu-Min actually won a few times! Nice to know ageing dogs can still learn new tricks!