Busier than an one-armed bricklayer in Beruit

This little gem of Vernacula australiana best describes the last four weeks in my hectic life.

I am glad to announce that I have moved on from my former life as a TUB, and I'm now dipping my toes back into the 'half-pat' lifestyle.

I'm going to expand on some of the points I make here, but this is what has been going on over the last few weeks...

• Parental Unit Entertainer
  A three-week visit by my parents coincided with most of what I'm writing below. It was great to spend time with them in Shanghai, although I think they would feel differently about my recommendation on attending the insanely crowded Longhua Temple Festival over the May Holiday break. Other highlights were non-stop eating, buying massive amounts of pearl jewellery, tailored clothes, gifts, and sharing a number of Guinness at The Blarney Stone with my family and Shanghai pals. Mum & Dad also hit Xi'an on a tour, and later traveled to HK on their way home to Brisneyland, but I didn't join them for those adventures. Probably the highlight of the time I spent with them was a brief Suzhou day-trip for a garden tour (much to my mother's delight). The perfect bookend for the day was the marvellous Bullet train service. The Nanjing-Shanghai express stops briefly in Suzhou. Nothing beats the experience of firstly standing on the train platform in Suzhou at 8:30pm, and scarcely one hour later we were all at home in my Jing'an District apartment. Amazing. The only sour note during their whole trip was my Dad's incessant handkerchief use, which I think was the source of the contagion my 'Olds' brought with them from Oz. I also felt a touch guilty that during their visit as I was working my arse-off smashing all of the below things together at one time.
• Charity Guy
  In my last blog entry, I wrote about the ChinaNext charity auction that I organised through the Shanghai Flickr Meet up group. Our evening was a success, raising just over RMB9,500 for Xin Shi Ji Xiao Xue (New Century Primary School) in Pudong. 1750 students, no library. Well, not anymore. I hope to put something similar together again before we leave China.
• SHiist Happenings
  From the end of April until the last 2 weeks, I have been writing consistently for Shanghaiist. At one point I took over the editing duties while Dan covered an Asian golf tournament in Nanjing. That was an interesting time, particularly after publishing this piece that I drew a lot of criticism for. Gotta love it. I haven't even had a chance to write that long-waited for, cunning rebuttal. I put it somewhere around here...
• The Blogger
  I've already chatted about my column in The City Weekend magazine. So far, four of my pieces have been published, with another in the works as we speak. Reporting on the blogging world is a bit tough as not a lot seems to be happening out there (except for the reaction to Ben Ross' barber shop experiment), but I got onto that one for this coming issue a week or so ago.
• Tutors In China
  I registered for this tutoring and teaching service over a month ago now hoping to pick up a few extra RMB over the close to the northern hemisphere school year. Despite the travel out to expat-havens of Kangqiao and Minhang, I've picked up some nice work teaching predominantly mathematics to IB students. It has been fun teaching again.
• Pearls of wisdom...
  Linda mentioned in her blog yesterday that Zhulin Pearls has been growing steadily over the past few months, and that there are a few interesting developments coming up soon. It seems everyone loves pearl jewellery in Australia, despite the fact that pearls are considered 'elderly' or 'American'. You can be the judge of that statement.
• You can call me Sir...
  Just after my parent's departure for HK, I accepted a sub-teaching contract the Puxi campus of The British International School. I'm teaching ICT (information and computing technology) and also history to middle-school students. The best thing about this experience is that the pay is good and that I love teaching, but I love teaching science a lot more. The worst thing is the early morning commute and relatively long-school days. I'll be out here for the next week or so.
• Chinese biotech reemerges in my life...
  I'm not going to say too much about this right at the moment, but it looks like I may be going back to my A-game of biotechnology for a crust. Stay tuned.

So that's about it. The last week or so in my life has been spent getting up before 6am and spending the bulk of my day running around the place, or at least commuting from meetings, work commitments, and fitting in a smidgen of socialising.

Also, congratulatiosn to Matt-man and Shirl who got hitched recently, and DaDan and Lozza who just delivered baby Euclid Cool Jnr. into the world. It's all happening!