Simian Farmer

The China Diary (8 of 10)

Just a quickie today as I'm currently in between ripping out the carpet in the nursery and starting to unroll the underlay.

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Sunday, 26th March 1989
Hua Du Hotel
Beijing

Sorry I didn't write yesterday, but I was just too tired to so I put it off till today.  Yesterday wasn't really all that exciting anyway.  We went to a Buddhist temple and John got a chop made for himself and that was the high point of the day.  We then had dinner in the lounge of the hotel after we visited the Wall of Xian and the settled in for the night in our tiny room.  Today we had breakfast in the restaurant downstairs and then left for the airport and took off for Beijing.  When we arrived, (about 12:00) we drove for about 1 hr. from the airport to a little place in town and had some lunch.  After lunch, we came back to our hotel and settled in for the day.  I was stuck on the bottom floor with the other schools while St. Rose got the third floor.  So I spent the whole night going up and down the creaky elevator visiting everybody.  For the past couple days, I've been writing a song on China, I'll sing it to you when I get back.  After visiting for hours on end, I came back, got unchanged, and wrote this.

G'night!

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It strikes me as odd that I'd promise to sing the song I was writing.  To whom did I make that promise??  Since I don't think I've ever sung it to anyone, I'll post it here before this little series is over.  Sing it to yourself or something.

Sorry, no pics today.  Time I got back to getting under-layed.

Ah, there's the rub!

The Dilbert Syndrome... with haggis!

So this, honestly, is my schedule for Friday.  And a wee smidge of Saturday too:
*****

5.30 am - Haul ass outta bed.

6.00 - 8.30 am - Try to cram most of a day's work into two hours.  (I can bank on about a half hour of time wastage in there.)

8.30 - 9.00 am - Have a pre-meeting meeting.

9.00 am - 12.00 pm - Have the meeting where I get to present for the last hour.

12.00 - 1.00 pm - Lunch meeting to review the meeting just concluded.

1.00 - 3.00 pm - Volunteer time at the university for the engineering career fair where I get to answer the same five questions ad nauseum.

3.30 pm - Arrive home and lay out clothes for my Super Wicked Awesome Holy Cow This Is Better Than Christmas... Burns Night Supper!!

4.30 pm - I am fully dressed in my Scotch finest (regimental) and out the door to head downtown.

5.15 pm - Knock on door of friend's suite and partake of fine cheeses and single malt scotch for about an hour.

6 ish pm - Down to hotel lobby to partake of the 'free' bar that comes courtesy of the overpriced tickets for this rather exclusive supper.

7.00 - 11.00 pm - Eat, drink and be merry.  Be sure to scoop the last of the haggis off the stomach walls so as not to waste any.  Gawdstrewth that's damn fine stuff!!  Revel in the ineluctable aural orgasm that comes from listening to the pipes and drums on stage for half an hour.  Choke back tears if they play Amazing Grace.

11.15 pm - Stand and join hands with 500 other men dressed in pleated skirts and attempt to sing Auld Lang Syne.

11.30 pm - Back up to the hotel suite for post-event port and cheese.

1.00 am - Home again, home again jiggity-jig.

6.00 am - Get up to head into work for a few hours on a Saturday to make up for too many meetings on Friday, and be home in time for Dex's swimming class at noon.

12.00 - 12.30 pm - Swim class!!

1.00 pm - Take a deep breath.

Better than formaldehyde

A great preservative against angry and mutinous thoughts, and all impatience and quarreling, is to have some great business and interest in your mind, which, like a sponge shall suck up your attention and keep you from brooding over what displeases you.

-- Joseph Rickaby

The China Diary (7 of 10)

Very little of this diary entry makes sense to me.  I have no idea what 'forms' I was filling out nor what Irish play I was referring to towards the end.   Or why I apologised about it to my mother.

A pagoda is multi-storied structure, erected as a memorial or a shrine.  Given the rather petulant nature of pretty much all of my diary entries to date, I'm surprised that I didn't complain about them more.  There is nothing in my memory quite as ubiquitous as the pagodas on my China trip.  "Oh look, another pagoda!" was a common condescension uttered on the many tour bus rides we took.

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Friday, 24 March 1989
Xian Hotel
Xian

We had to get up really early again today because we had to catch a plane here to Xi'an.  As soon as we landed, we went straight to the hotel, filled out the forms, and had to wait because the rooms weren't ready, so we went to a 7-storey pagoda and took pictures from the top.  (I forgot, we had lunch before the pagoda.)  After the pagoda we went to this little complex of stores (fun?) and looked and didn't buy a thing.  We then went back to the hotel and our rooms were ready this time.  So we went in and Mike and I got the smallest room in the whole place.  Everybody else's was a lot bigger than ours, so we settled in and goofed off for a couple hours, and then got changed into our good clothes for dinner down in the lounge.  About the only good thing there was the orange pop and the french fries.  After dinner, we went across the street to a theatre and saw the most boring "play" I've ever seen.  Even worse (sorry Mom) than the Irish play.  Half of the people at our table slept through most of it.  After the play, it was ten o'clock so we came back to our oh so big hotel room and changed, wrote this, and will shortly go to bed.  Goodnight!

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This picture is of me and the chaperone, Mr. M.  His daughter was on the trip also, Christine.  (Seems that it would have been a little awkward doing a trip like this with one's dad, but I suppose she was used to it since he was also her teacher back home.)

And continuing with the habit of posting pictures a day ahead of a potentially relevant diary entry, this was snapped just outside the Forbidden City in Beijing.  Being open to tourists, it ain't so verboten no more.

15 seconds: Tub Time

I mentioned in a previous post how I intended to start to make use of Typepad's new video feature.  Sad part of that tale being that I don't have access to any sort of digital recording device other than my five year-old Nikon Coolpix camera.  It's serviced me well over the years (almost 4,000 shots taken to date), though its 2.0 megapixel capacity is now laughable.

It does have very minimal video capability in that it can shoot 15-second clips of questionable quality, sans sound.  So until somebody buys me a better unit, I'll post about 15 seconds of real life up here once a week or so.  I'll do my best to nab some quality moments of the boy.  (I'll see how long I can do it since playing video just might kick the shit out of my monthly bandwidth allotment.)

Here, last night  in the tub, he's being a pig.

No, quite literally, he's being a pig.  He can do a horse, cat, cow, monkey, fish and a lion.  His lion in truly impressive, though Iwon't be putting it up here... the gutteral roar is an integral piece that would sadly be missing.  Is there anything sadder than a lion who's lost his roar?  Perhaps an emu who's lost a leg.  Or an elephant with a stunted trunk.  Or a hippopotamus who's just not quite as hip as all the rest of the opotamuses.

Who cares; watch the pig.

You have bled with Wallace, now bleed with me!

I went and donated blood over my lunch hour today.  Well, technically just the platelets, so it took a bit longer since they had to run it all through a machine that goes PING! in order to reinsert the red blood cells... but that's beside the point.

This is not something about which I would ordinarily post, except for the fact that today was my 42^nd donation.

I will just sit here for the remainder of the afternoon at work and wait to be enlightened by the question corresponding to Life, the Universe and Everything.

I'll let you know what I find out.

The Toddler Transfer

How to ensure that your toddler makes the journey from crib to kiddie bed in a smooth manner and with minimal emotional scarring.  And by that I mean yours.

(A 12-Step Program)

Adherence to the guidelines espoused below does not guarantee a successful toddler transfer.  The author takes no responsibility for the behaviour of your child or, more importantly, you.

Quite frankly, the author tries to minimise his responsibility as a general rule.

The China Diary (6 of 10)

I think this was my longest diary entry.  Took up two whole pages, right down to the bottom line of the second.  The picture of the three unsmiling ladies from yesterday pertains directly to the lunch restaurant referenced in the entry below.  My bad.

And I can't spell 'proficiency'.  Other than that, I've been impressed to date with my spelling and grammar from 17 years ago, if not at all with my levels of creativity and introspection.

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Thursday, 23rd March 1989
Hua Ting Guest House
Shanghai

Today I got up and had "breakfast", if you can call it that down in the dining hall.  We then went to a local middle school and saw a couple of their classrooms.  After the school, we went to a local farm and saw the people's house and surrounding area.  After the farm house, we went to a carpet factory and it's amazing at the proficientcy of the workers there.  We then went to a nearby jade factory and it was amazing at the intricacy of the work.  Then we went to a real dump for lunch that had the windows open and had no heating and it was raining.  Most of the food I wouldn't have fed to a dog.  After that enlightening experience we went back to our hotel for a couple hours and then left to a hotel on the other end of city for dinner.  The squid (I didn't know what it was when I ate it) was okay, but quite chewy.  I didn't bother to venture to try the fish head soup.  We then came back to the hotel and Mike and I went to the Sheraton next door and all I bought was a lollipop.  We then came back, did some visiting, and then came to my room, got changed and started writing this.  Not as good as Hong Kong, but not a bad day overall.

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Do you remember those days when it was really cool to fold your jean cuffs over and then roll them up so that they were both tapered AND riding high on your ankle?  I think it was a fad that lasted for about a week.  I was all over it.

Five of our intrepid nine that travelled to China.  That's Julie, Asha, Julie, me and Stan.  Two Julies.  (The father of one of the Julies, incidentally, owned the Denver Broncos.  Circa 1989 of course.  Still may; I've never really given a rat's ass about the NFL.  13 points if you can guess her last name.) And I totally had a crush on Asha in the worst way.  Especially after we got back from China.  I remember I got my hands on her address (you thought I was going to say something other than 'address' there didn't you?  Pervert.)  Anyway, I got my hands on her address and tried to mail her some mementos from the trip, along with a letter, as a discrete sign that I was interested.

I was crushed when the letter came back returned.  And I never made any more gestures of solicitation towards her.  Ran fresh out of gumption.  Piece of advice?  If you want to send a pair of chopsticks to someone in the mail, don't stuff them into a letter-sized envelope, affix regular postage and expect them to get there.  Because you, too, will be crushed when they come back undeliverable.  And all your optimistic dreams of falling in love and having babies and maybe one day getting to touch her boobies will crumble into adolescent ruin when you read those three indelible words:

Return To Sender.

Alpha Bytes

For anyone wondering if there was a secret message hidden in Jason Fox's bowl of Alpha Bytes cereal in last Wednesday's Foxtrot Comic: