Summer is back!

Summer has arrived along with the (got to be experienced to believe)Yichang heat. I still prefer summer to winter though and I have to admit the seemingly never ending grey skies and cold of China winter is one of the most difficult things about living here. The fact that I love summer but spend the year chasing winter is only made easier by the fact that winter in Western Australia is much more tolerable than Chinese winters. Sorry farmers but when I come back for my holiday next week, I'm hoping for some winter sunshine and and less of the grey skies and rain.
I'm looking forward to seeing my family, meeting new members of my family like my niece and our new four legged family member :-) and giving everyone a big hug.

Mini Dell Making life easier

Since living in China and teaching ESL, much of my life revolves around my laptop and the internet. Contacting home, sourcing lesson ideas, making up lesson plans etc take up much of my time. My Dell Inspiron is fantastic but has very large screen and is very heavy. A few days ago I decided to treat myself and buy a Dell Inspiron mini 10'. It's really very compact, light and will make travelling around much easier. I use my computer a lot in lessons and I often spend weekends at my friends house so I'm always carrying my laptop around, not to mention back and forth between Australia and China...so I consider it a very valuable investment. My new little laptop is ultra cool and I'm enjoying checking it all out. Because I had to set up all the programs that I use frequently, it got me thinking about what I think is like my survival pack for being on the internet when you live in China...or be it any country away from your own patch of grass.
In no particular order here it is
1) Witopia - personal VPN
2) Skype
3) Avast antivirus and Malawarebytes
4)Mozilla Firefox (for me it just seems much more reliable and quicker than I.E. and I use many handy add ons to organise my internet and help me learn Chinese)

A couple of things that are not crucial but just make life a little easier
PPTV - I can watch some cool shows in English or with English subtitles
Blogger - To keep my family and friends in touch with what is going on

Not much really but these few things make so much difference.