A little bit about us

This is the old welcome page from our web page

Michael and Cara realized that they wanted to spend their lives together, so they decided to get married. There was no time to plan the religious wedding and actually get their friends and family into town, so on June 4th they had a small civil ceremony.

In August Michael is moving to China. Cara will be following at the end of September. In the summer of 2006 they are planning on having a religious wedding with friends and family in Pennsylvania. They will be in China for 3 years.

Michael is currently hiding away up in the Green Mountains of Vermont, trying to figure out how to speak Chinese. He's at Middlebury College's summer Chinese language immersion program, where the school packs a full academic year of language study into nine intensive weeks. The program is defined by its Language Pledge, whereby students pledge to use only the target language (in Michael's case, Mandarin Chinese) for the entirety of the nine weeks. (Just to clarify one small issue: There is a well understood caveat to the language pledge which changes it to read 'use only the target language unless speaking to one's spouse.") Michael anticipates a lot of short conversations, punctuated with "Huh?" and "Wo bu zhidao." ("I don't know.")

Cara is currently finishing up her project with Harris. She is still living up in Northern Virigina, just outside of DC though she will be making a few trips back to Florida before taking the plunge overseas. Though a great company, Cara will be leaving Harris so she is looking for new work. There have been a couple leads but nothing definite at this point. Worse case, she will try to get a graduate degree with the time off work.