Wednesday, 14 April 2010

Just a briefish post today — mostly, to say that this blog, which has been rather moribund for nearly four months will, one day, and perhaps sooner than you think, spring back to life in earnest. (That day is not quite yet, so don't get your hopes up for this post.)

The story of "an American (or two) in Shanghai" is, of course, basically over. We aren't there any more. We've been back in the States since before last year ended, in fact. Not too many loose ends to catch you all up on, except to say that, as so many things do, the little idea of shipping our luggage back to the states, unaccompanied, via Fed Ex, proved to be of the ilk best described as "it will only end in tears." When it seemed "too easy" on the day I said hello to the Fed Ex man, and temporary goodbye to the suitcases, I really should have known. The suitcases made it from Shanghai to Alaska in record time. Getting them any closer to our San Diego home took about two weeks, lots of trouble, and even some more money. There was a little matter of United States Customs to deal with. Unaccompanied luggage does not easily clear customs. An absolutely complete and finely detailed inventory of the contents must be provided. Everything must be assigned a value. Anything that was taken out of the country is allowed to return duty free. Anything acquired abroad and not used for at least a year is dutiable upon return. That would all have been fine if I had only known about it in advance. The China Fed Ex people who should have told me didn't. But once one's luggage is in Alaska, it's a little inconvenient to be attempting to compile an inventory. It turns out that with just a little persuasion one can get the customs people to make the inventory for you. Then you just have to assign monetary values to everything. Like to pairs of underwear that are old enough to embarrass one that one still owns them let alone wears them. We also had some trouble placing values on some of the "souvenir" types of gifts people gave us as we were departing. One of them was some tea, which caused its own headaches. Tea is food. Food in luggage at customs is very, very bad indeed. Anyhow, we did finally see our suitcases again. And, at least for the one that contained nearly 50 pounds of music, that was a very, very good thing indeed.

So with that loose end tied off, we pretty much close the whole China chapter.

So why is this blog going to go through a renaissance?

Well ... ahem ... yours truly is preparing to go on another adventure — it's not travel this time, I'm staying home, it's something else. I'm doing something that is, if anything, far loonier than packing up and heading to Shanghai for four months.

I'm going back to grad school.

That's right. This autumn, at age 53 (!), I'm going to start work on the degree I probably have should have pursued 33 years ago — a Master of Music in Piano Performance. I'm actually all set. I've been officially admitted to the MM in PP program at San Diego State University's School of Music and Dance. I even found out today that I did well enough on my audition to get a little scholarship. With luck and determination, in two years' time, at age 55 (!) I'll have my degree, and the cornerstone of a new career.

So that's what I'm going to be writing about.

Look for this blog to get a little bit of a redesign in the coming months. I will archive off the China chapters somewhere, to make room for the new story. In the meantime, I did a bit of maintenance today, repairing some hyperlinks in the old posts that had "deteriorated". Hopefully all is well with them once more, in the unlikely event that anybody will ever again try to follow them.

So that's it for today. See you in these pages around August!