Folks, I’m quickly approaching a critical mass. If you hear something pop, or if Delray Beach suddenly vanishes off the map in fiery conflagration of flames and stuff, that was probably just me.

I’m just two weeks away from a back-to-back shoot of two small independent movies. I’m still casting these things and I put about 100 miles on my car today scouting locations. The good news is that two of the harder-to-find locations got locked down today. It was great.

I will likely grow more scarce in the coming days, but I’m definitely going to bang out at least one more podcast before I drop off the radar.

Tonight I had a long chat with a friend of mine who lived most of her life in Chengdu, but now lives here in Florida. I tried out some of my Mandarin on her and she was very impressed! (More by my willingness to appear foolish than any real aptitude on my part, but I’ll take it. Haha!)

What really impressed her was my knowledge of certain cultural-specific things, like 矛盾， 愚公移山，and 心有灵犀一点同。

I also managed to get this phrase past my lips without butchering it: 我想我的中文和你的英文一样好。Go me!

I gotta tell you, though, I have a long road ahead of me before I graduate to the next level. I’m not going to get much studying done over the next few weeks, either. I keep trying to listen to the podcasts in the car, but I’m not focused on them. I may just have to throttle back for the next three weeks until this shoot is over.

I guess we’ll see.