oh yeah....

After much consideration, I have decided I will buy a Macbook. It will cost me twice as much as the IBM laptop I was going to get, but it will be something I will use for a few years rather than upgrade next year already.

Other than leasing my vehicle with $2500 down, this will be my biggest purchase here. Without a credit card to boot. But someone from church works at IBM so he can get me a $66 employee discount by the looks of it. Boy, Apple doesn't discount for much. Too bad, I missed the free mini-IPod offer they had with a Macbook purchase.

Surprisingly, I have been somewhat preoccupied and busy these last few weeks. The TCBC (Tucson Chinese Baptist Church) Career fellowship has quite a few social events. Either birthdays or dinners and prayer meeting in addition to the Friday fellowship. I even joined a Fantasy B-ball league they're going to do which I'm looking forward to as I used to like watching the NBA.

I feel like I'm on one big long retreat or camp, because I don't have a "home" here and that I'm still in transition until I can finally go home. It's ok with me, a sense of permanency or placing roots would be too much right now.

On Friday nights, I hang and attend with the cantonese fellowship. It givex me a good chance to practice my cantonese and also to diversify my friends. Most of them are students or early career with a couple of guys close to my age, which helps. The cantonese fellowship is fun, i think how HK people converse is so cute sometimes.

On the English side, there is a small group of us which consists of people who are family-less and recently moved to Tucson because of work. With this group, we hang out for dinner and games on any spare night we get on the weekends.

At the church, almost everyone is in IT. They predominantly work at Raytheon (Defence Missiles, etc) or IBM.

I have a TCBC sister whom I am starting to consider a good friend. She's from LA and so talks like a valley girl which I've teased her about. She points out how i say 'hey' alot, which I do. She's here at the Univ. of Arizona to study to become a general practioner.

Very few medical field personnel at TCBC.

What I like about TCBC is their sense of community. And also authenticity, it appears to be a solid teaching and preaching church. They are also missions oriented. That is why I've stayed at this church. I need to transfer membership to be able to serve, so that will be something to consider down the road.

There are still some hot spotty days here in the desert, but it has cooled down so that especially in the evenings, it's like perfection. Perfect temperature.

I've also been thinking ahead to see what i should do for the Thanksgiving long weekend here in the U.S in Nov. It's a big deal down here, almost a 4 day weekend for lots of people.

I can either go to LA with a few friends from here, go to the Bay area by myself but get to be with relatives or take trips to Vegas or San Diego or maybe even the Baja Mexico coast....let's not leave out, go to Grand Canyon.

Buying my laptop, going away on trips, I need to submit this all to God and ask if it's ok to use His money for that. For His blessing and peace.

Grace to you, Vien