That is a little bit misleading. I haven’t graduated yet from the Hi-Tech MBA program at Walden University but I have completed and turned in all of the required work, so I am effectively finished with my Masters degree after two years and nine months. Yea! I am so happy. Now I have time to chill and have already read (almost) two books and learned 75 Chinese characters. That is what the “becomes literate” part of the title is talking about. I decided last week that it was time to start learning Chinese characters because I am tired of not knowing what is going on. It is really a strange feeling to drive down the street and see dozens of stores that you have no idea what they are based on the name because it is written in characters. So my goal is to learn 25 new characters a week. So far, I am ahead of schedule, but I am finding that as I learn new characters, I have to go back and relearn ones I knew before because the new characters have similar properties that helped me remember the initial characters causing me to become confused. I am told that if you know 1800 characters, you can get by (there are more than 30,000). So my goal is learn between 1800 – 2000 characters. It really seems impossible at this point, but heck I never thought I would know 75. One of my favorite sayings is “a journey of 1000 miles begins with one step.” Very applicable right now.

I have never appreciated Idaho more than I did this past month. My trip was only supposed to be two and a half weeks long but after Andy started sending me emails telling me how hot and humid it was in Shanghai, I decided to extend the trip through the 4th and stay a whole month. I did not regret the decision at all as it was really SO beautiful in Idaho and it gave me some time to actually see a lot of the friends and family who I miss while in China.