Essays in Idleness

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Essays in Idleness

 

Good book!

Am I Moving?

 Not really.  I’ll still be on planet Earth.

Three Apartments Tuesday

 Tuesday, July 26th, I was in Xishan, Hui Shan and Jiangyin.  In each place, I was at an apartment that I will/have/was sleep/slept/sleeping in.  (End a sentence in a preposition!)

The Xishan apartment was 120 square meters; the Hui Shan was and still is 89 square meters, and the Jiangyin was 57 square meters.

General Observations, Thoughts along with some Personal Anecdotes #1?

• This is a blog entry with bullit points. I just feel like making one.

• My mood as I write this? Glum. Why? The world is clownish; I am lonely; a 14 year old son is far worse that a two year old one; moving because you lost a job is depressing; and I seemed locked out, because of personal circumstances, from living a life that has any meaning.

• The school I was working at was to have had its graduation ceremony for its students on June 30^th. But because there were Covid cases in the area on June 29^th , the authorities that decided that the school year was finished. So the ceremony was cancelled. But then it turned out that it was postponed. I got a message asking if I would go to it. I didn't want to but I thought it best if I did. So, I went. I first sat in my old chair in the teachers office not knowing what to do with myself. I found out that the graduation play we had rehearsed over a month ago was to be performed. I was fortunate to have not thrown the play script out and spent time studying it... I didn't do so much interaction with the children. It seemed that they didn't really care to see me. Just before the play began, we learned that the girl playing the main character was not present. We got a clever girl to take over the role. Another clever girl I had take over the first girl's role. The play went off pretty well. After the performances there was a ceremony of sorts where the children were given diplomas. I felt emotional as that was happening. As soon as it was over and I feel comfortable enough, I left.

• I am deleting contacts on my WeChat. It is time to look forward and forget about the year 2021-22.

• My visa expires on August 12. This is another thing that is ruining my summer. For as of July 24^th, I haven't found an apartment in Jiangyin so I can have residency there which I need to renew my visa. The problem I am having with getting an apartment is that my darling wife wants to have as cheap an apartment as possible, and I want something with more room.

• I am reading The Path to Rome by Hillaire Belloc and Essays in Idleness (The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko). Both books which were written in a different time and might as well have been written on a different planet. I am enjoying both books immensely. Belloc's book is a travel book that I find hard to put down. It meanders and goes off on tangents, but Belloc is a Catholic reactionary and I find his observations and comments compelling and very agreeable. Are there people like him anywhere in this current world? Are there people like him about the expatriates of Wuxi or China? I haven't met any. I heard of Kenko's book by reading David Warren's Essays in Idleness blog. Warren said Kenko played a part in the naming of his blog and he highly recommended the ancient book. Warren is a Catholic reactionary in the manner of Belloc and Davila and I of course followed his recommendation and I find Kenko to be a great read. Essays in Idleness, the book, is full of observations and anecdotes that keep me from jumping out the window as my glumness , I mentioned earlier, would have me do. The best life is the simple life is the general impression one gets by reading Kenko, and you can rid yourself of many modern day problems by seeing how Kenko diminishes most of them to the unimportance they really have.

• I keep imagining that Justin Trudeau gets assassinated and that my reaction is to express my glee loudly on social media, especially WeChat.

• My son was so angry at me last week that he said things for which I should have punched him in the mouth. I had to let it go. My son has my wife's temper but he has my inability to stay angry for a long time. My issue with Tony has been his playing too much on his screen devices, his inability to clean up after himself, his inability to respond quickly to my requests, and his spending too little time out of doors. His issues with me seem to be my getting on his case all the time and my impatience at his slowness to respond to my requests because it is interrupting the game he is playing.

• I went to the pub and talked to some people the first time. The second time, I went I was uncommunicative. I didn't want to talk because I was feeling glum and it felt so much better to read Kenko.

• Inaction speaks louder than silence.

• How you do like your corn? Do you like it on the cob, off the cob, by the cob, under the cob, in the cob, along the cob, near the cob, opposite the cob, behind the cob, in front of the the cob, besides the cob, tangent to the cob, parallel to the cob or at the cob?

Are there really people who think masks work?

I have lived in China, ground zero for the Covid Stupidity the world has been experiencing  the past two years.  I haven’t bothered to wear a mask, except to avoid aggravation and in those circumstances, it was for show and not done in a proper manner.  Are there really people who are adamant that wearing masks is useful?  I read about them but I have never meet them.

Three Apartment Complexes Saturday

Saturday, July 23rd was my father's birthday.  He would have been 90 if he was still with us.  

This Saturday was also a day where I got to be in three apartment complexs: my old, my current and my new.   (Note:  I also refer to these complexes as communities or neighborhoods or estates.)

I started the day in Xishan where my current-but-not-for-long 120 square meter apartment is located.  

From there I drove my son Tony to his baseball practice in an area which wasn't ever my 'hood.  From there it was back to Xishan where I prepared to go where I will start residing in August: Jiangyin.

Using the GPS on my phone, it took me over an hour to drive from the Xishan 'hood to the complex in Jiangyin where I should be living and soon will be living.  There were a lot of trucks on the route which was one of the three options the GPS offered.  I choose the route I was on because I didn't have to pay tolls.   The route was annoying to drive because of all the trucks and my having to always get out of the left turn lane, which was what the left lane I was driving in would sometimes turn into and sometimes not.  And because traffic was heavy with all the trucks, I had to be extra cautious when changing lanes.  

The drive did mark the first time I had been to Jiangyin since the Covid panic started.  Along the way, I saw some landmarks that  I recalled from my visits to Jiangyin, all those years ago, like the 80 story building erected in the countryside and the office building that contained the Jiangyin Canilx.  I also saw a lot of hills.  I like hilly terrain especially because I lived in the plains of North America for too many years.

I went to Jiangyin to look at apartments.  I looked at them in the neighborhood that is across from the school where I will be teaching.  I got to the estate early and so did a little driving in the area till the girls showing me the apartment arrived.  The terrain was more interesting than that I can see around My old Hui Shan 'hood as well as Xishan.  I saw hills that had to be twice as high as the ones I have hiked on in Xishan.  However, I didn't see much shopping and the road in front of the complex was like a freeway with lots of cars doing at least 60 kmh as they passed.  But the killer was that the three apartments I looked at were not at all adequate.  They were one bedroom apartments, about 50 square meters in size.  The bedrooms didn't have closets; the kitchens had no space for me to put any of my appliances in; and the living rooms had no room for my shelves.  And the topper was that the bathrooms didn't really have showers!  It was an bathroom arrangment I had never seen before in apartment hunting in China.  I had seen bathrooms where there was no stall, so that when you took a shower, the entire floor of the bathroom would get wet.  Till July 23rd , I thought this was the lamest, but the shower arrangment in the three apartments was something that I had never before could have imagined.   When I looked at the first bathroom, I had to ask where the shower was.  I was told that the one bedroom apartments didn't have showers in the bathrooms.  What the tiny bathrooms had were a toilet and a sink.  Between the toilet and the sink was a tap with a shower head attached to a hose.  There was a drain beside the toilet. The space between the toilet and the sink was barely enough to stand straight in.  If I took a shower in that space, I would get the toilet seat and the sink wet and they would be covered with shampoo.  The bathrooms, I had seen in Wuxi that horrified me because they had no stalls, at least had room to take a shower.  Anyway, there was no way I could rent any of these apartments.  I will have to look at larger apartments in that complex.

From Jiangyin, I decided to drive back to the Hui Shan District where the original Casa Kaulins, 89 square meters, is located.  I again didn't take a toll road.  I drove on a route called Liu Xiake, or something to that effect,  which I had driven many a time in years gone by.  I saw the Metro Line, which I had heard about many years ago, being built between Yanqiao and Jiangyin.  I can hardly wait for that line to be completed.

I drove back Hui Shan in order to take a familiar route back to the Xishan apartment where I will live for less than a fortnight.  I also wanted to see where my new apartment complex was in relation to my old one and how construction on that subway line was doing.

Currently Reading

 

A Spliced Together Video Done on July 20, 2022.

 

Hui Shan District’s People Square is Being Renovated.

 

Go into a Mall, Show a Code; Then Go into a Store, Show a Code.

 This is what happened when I went into Center 66, aka Hen Long Mall in Wuxi, China.

The Code I am talking about is the QR Code off the Liangxi Health App that has to be on all phones during the current Covid silliness.  So I was asked ti show my code, to show that I had been tested for Covid, to enter the Mall.  I then had to show the code again to enter the Apple Store and then the Grocery Store.

Really annoying since I am using my old and now slow IPhone Six to produce the necessary code.

July 18 Andis Edmunds Kaulins

 

Nikko Hotel Blocked

 

Nice Comment

 I came upon this comment when reading a recent column by Rex Murphy on Canada’s current federal government:

We will not survive three more months of this stupid, feckless government let alone three more years. Singh-you jerk! Do your job as an opposition leader and vote along with the conservatives to put this government out of business and save our country!!

I made a rant against against Singh as well.

NAT Testing Station

 That’s my son waiting for them to enter his i.d. Information.  The girl is being swabbed.

Will You Marry Me?

 

A Short Video Taken in the Wuxi, China Livat Mall on July 13, 2022.

 

McDonalds in the Time of a Silly Health Panic

 

Don’t Go Out! Says My Wife

 

Currently Reading

 

70,000 Lives Saved?

I've been listening to the podcast No Agenda recently.  The podcast is of a conservative, deplorable, dissident right bent and it plays clips of liberal progressive saying things about current affairs.  This was Rush Limbaugh's schtick and he was especially hated by the liberal progressives for it.  They could never find a foil for it.

A clip I heard recently on the No Agenda podcast was some Canadian female Federal Health Minister's response to a question about why some particular covid measure — an app — was still in place.  She responded by avoiding the question first with blather (Canadians are so quiet and humble, blah, blah, blah) and then quoting some newly-release study that supposedly showed that 70,000 lives  had been saved by the government's covid measures.  The minister also, when talking about this study, dished the American's response to Covid.  She didn't answer the question but instead left one with the impression that the covid measures weren't going to go away.

I have thoughts about the minister's answer.  The 70,000 number is surely b.s.  How could they come what with that number?  Were they counting?  How do you define a patient's life as being saved? (Was Hank Aaron's life saved for ten days after he took the vaccine? Was Justin Trudeau's life saved the first time or the second time he contracted covid?)  Was the number generated by a model with assumptions that the measures were effective?  And who made the model?  Could these people be trusted?  And when the 70,000 number was come up with, did they minus the deaths that could be attributed to the covid measures like missed surgeries and procedures, lack of exercise, assorted lockdown damage, economic damage, emotional damage brought on by social isolation,  and vaccine deaths?  And was a cost benefit analysis done?  I suspect not.

Thoughts?  Email me at andiskaulins@hotmail.com.

The Tall One on the Right…

 …is our apartment for now.

Cultural Appropriation Is a Good Thing!

 It’s cultural appropriation when women use a washing machine.  Washing machines were invented by men.  Therefore cultural appropriation is a good thing 

My Son Got His Canadian Passport Renewed!

 I wrote about the travails of renewing my son Tony’s passport here.

Well, he finally got his passport yesterday.  It was all done by courier and phone calls.

We didn’t have to camp out overnight like they are doing now at passport offices in Canada.

Nice View

 

This photo was taken from a hill trail in the Xishan District of Wuxi.

Some Chinese Happy about Abe’s Assassination

 July 7, 1937 was the date that the China-Japan War is said to have started.

July 7, 2022 was the 85th anniversary to Chinese of the start of the war.  7/7 is noted by Nationalist Mainland Chinese.

Abe was shot on 7/8.  Apparently some Chinese made note of 7/8 being so close to 7/7 and sawAbe’s 7/8 death as a sort of cosmic revenge on the Japanese.

My son Tony tells me that weird memes were circulating on the Chinese internet with the killer and Abe’s images.

Nasal Swab Test Result & Pass Card

 

On the left is the nasal swab test result test indicator.  That’s what I call it.  Damned if I know and want to know what the more precise term is.  The red line is negative which is good.  So I’m not pregnant or don’t have Covid or something like that.

The green card I would show to the apartment complex entrance guards if I was to leave the complex.  Now why I would do that!?! It’s so wonderful here.

Books I’m Currently Reading

 

My Son’s Baseball Camp Cancelled

 

In a previous blog entry, I reported to a few rare readers, or maybe no readers, that my son was at a baseball camp and that on the first night, the hotel, that all the participants were to stay in for the camp, was expropriated by the government for quarantine purposes.  At the time, when reporting this story to others on social media, someone asked me why the camp hadn’t been cancelled.

Well, it was cancelled six days later.  Someone in the government phoned the person running the camp to cancel it.  So parents had to either pick up their children at the replacement hotel or have the children driven back to their homes.  The hotel was a 42 minute drive from the Xishan apartment, I am staying in till August 5, so I decided, given how there were roadblocks everywhere, to have Tony driven to me.

The driver at one point me had Tony call me to say that they didn’t know how to get to the Xishan apartment because of the roadblocks that had been placed around the city.

Eventually Tony made it to the entrance of the Xishan apartment complex.  I went down from the 19th floor apartment to greet him and I saw that he was being hassled by the security guards.  They wanted to know where he was coming from and whether he was NAT tested.  So, Tony had his hands full with his luggage, his phone, my phone (to get Wifi) and a clipboard with a form he had to fill out.  It was maddening for me to watch this.  

Filling out forms in order to pass through the entrance to where one lives.  What has the world come to?  Over two years ago, I said that the Covid response was going to make everywhere as annoying as a modern airport.  I was correct.  How anyone, with a conscience or an ability to think critically, could support the government’s covid response is unimaginable.

A Spliced Together Video Done on July 7, 2022 (Not January 7th)

 

The Travails of Renewing My Son Tony’s Passport

My son Tony's passport expired on March 13.  It is now July 7, and he still doesn't have his new one.  A lot has happened to cause this to be so.

I started the process back in February.  I sent out the application to the Canadian consulate in Shanghai, but made some mistakes and so I had to redo the application.  The mistakes caused me to change the applicant for Tony's passport from myself, his father, to Jenny, my wife and his mother.

The second application arrived in Shanghai just on the eve of the city's great 63 day lockdown.  The staff weren't able to go to the consulate to do any work.  There was uncertainty as to where the second application package was.  The consulate staff I wrote an enquiry to said the package may not have been at the consulate.  My wife contacted the delivery company and they said it was there.  Nothing for us to do but wait for the lockdown to end.

When the lockdown finally ended, I sent an enquiry letter to find out what the status of Tony's application was.  I got a response saying that it was being processed.

Yesterday, my wife got a phone call from the consulate saying that Tony's passport was ready, but the they couldn't deliver it to us because Wuxi was now classified as a high risk area by the pandemic authorities.  It seems our options were to wait for Wuxi's high risk status to end or go to Shanghai to pick up the passport ourselves.  How we can go to Shanghai with the travel restrictions in place and quarantining is beyond me.

I asked around on WeChat about deliveries to Wuxi being stopped.  At first, no one knew of this and many reported that they had gotten packages and documents from Shanghai very recently.  But soon others started telling me that the deliveries were being stopped.  It seems that again a stage in the process of getting Tony his new passport met up with bad timing.

A Spliced Together Video Done on July 6, 2022.

 

A Spliced Together Video Done on July 5, 2022

 

Not in a Good Mood

Stupid me.  I didn't do the Nasal Swab Test properly.  I used two kits and didn't get any red lines to show up in the test result indicator.  After, I still went to the lineup for the throat swab and had that test done.  It was irksome and so I let out a diatribe of f-words on a social media chat.

If I have any attentive readers, they may recall I said something about getting a job at a High School in Jiangyin city.  Jiangyin is part of Wuxi.  It borders on the Hui Shan district where our apartment is.  We, that be my wife & I, had planned to for me to drive to the High School from our apartment every day.  Now, with no end to the Covid nonsense, we have decided that I will rent an apartment in Jiangyin and come back to Wuxi every fortnight.  

So I am having to slowly get rid of stuff in the Xishan apartment which I have rented till the end of July.  There is too much stuff here for me to deal with.  Another reason I will have to rent an apartment in Jiangyin is that there isn't enough room in the Hui Shan apartment for all the stuff we have.  We bought stuff for the apartment in Xishan thinking we would move it in two years to our new 27th floor apartment which is being built now.  My being forced to leave the school in Xishan after one year ruined those plans.  That's another thing contributing to my bad mood.

Another reason I am not in a good mood is that I am in an awkward position socially.  For three months at school, I had to avoid people because I was in an awkward position of not being part of the family anymore, as it were.  Now, I am by myself basically, since I have no colleagues.  If I do run into acquaintances I feel peeved to say the least.

At least, the farmers in Holland are fighting a good fight.  And I pray the rosary to keep me from going completely off the deep end.

A Spliced Together Video Done on July 4, 2022

 

The Madness of the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward

 This zero Covid policy must come from the same mass psychosis that produced those two stirring events in Chinese history.

Self Administered Covid Nasal Tests

 They are distributing nasal Covid test kits in my apartment “community.”

I got one on Sunday evening and put it on the dining room table.  Monday morning, I lined up for the usual test where they stick a swab down your throat.  I then got another nasal kit.

I suppose the procedure from now on is that you self-administer the nasal test before doing the throat test.

What was the point of the throat test?  It was never enough it would seem if another test is now necessary.

Wearing a Mask in High Humidity is Stupid!

 I just tried to not wear a mask in the now compulsory daily NAT test line.

A man in a blue hazmat suit gave me a mask.  He had be eyeing me before.

Standing in line, the heat and humidity rendered the mask wearing pointless.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Covid Stupidity just in time for the start of Summer

 The second last day of my time at the kindergarten, we received news that cases had been found in Wuxi.  It was a conspiracy observed one of the teachers. For it seemed that every time there was a holiday, the government would announce cases  as if they didn’t want people to travel.  This was said between preparations for the graduation ceremony that was to be held the next day.

In the evening, just as I had finished ironing some nice clothes for the ceremony, I read on WeChat that the government had declared that the school year was over.  So the ceremony was cancelled.  The teacher still had to go to school though.  The teachers wondered why.

The last day of my time at the kindergarten was spent standing around waiting for permission to leave.  It was a sad day for me.  Not so much because there was no closure with the children I had spent time with since September, but because my being let go was official.  I was in a situation where I was ashamed to say what had happened to me and to say how my summer plans had thereby been ruined.  Tears came to my eyes a couple times during the day.

Seven weeks I now have off.   I doubt if I am going to travel.  I have to move stuff out of the Xishan apartment.  My wife Jeany does not want me to risk going somewhere and then being put in quarantine. (There is a person I am talking to on Instagram who had to quarantine for two weeks in Wuxi after coming from Shanghai).

The first day of my life after kindergarten was Trucker Day aka Dominion Day aka Canada Day, the national day of Canada.  On a Canadians in China WeChat group, I made statements in support of the truckers and some prominent anti-lockdown Canadians like the Polish pastor persecuted in Alberta.  It seemed that some people in the group wanted to derail possible trucker support by talking about the plight of aboriginals.   I wouldn’t have anything of it, and called the people doing it regime stooges.  One of them talked of aboriginal pipeline protestors being harassed by RCMP as being more egregious than what was done to the truckers in February and so how could he be a regime stooge.  The aboriginals I told him were regime-approved victims.  The point probably went over his head.  

On July 1, I was at the Huai Shan apartment which I will sleep in starting August 1.  It was so small.  It will be a while before I stop cursing what happened to me at the kindergarten.

July 2, Jenny told me that 72 cases had been found in Wuxi.  Is there going to be another lockdown? I wondered.  How will my travel plans will be affected? I saw many ask on WeChat groups.   In the morning, I took Tony to his baseball camp which is being held in Wuxi and they were to stay in a five star hotel.  In the evening, I got a phone call  from him where he sounded disappointed.  The government had expropriated the hotel they were staying in so it could be used as a quarantine hotel.  They were put in a less nice hotel.  In the evening, there was to be a get-together with some of the teachers from my now former school that I was looking forward.  Lockdown fears cancelled this  One of the teachers who was moving to Xiamen on the 6th decided to catch an earlier flight (on the 3rd) so as to avoid lockdowns.  I was faced with a lonely Saturday night in the Xishan apartment so I decided to take the subway to downtown Wuxi.  There, I noticed the traffic was reduced to a dribble.  I then saw that the Nanchang Temple market areas and walk streets had been closed.  Restaurants were still open which was why I ended up drinking two beers by myself at the Red Lion.  The Lion wasn’t that busy which put me in a good mood, or better to say a not so somber mood.

I heard there were lockdowns in the Liangxi district of Wuxi.  For me, there have been daily NAT tests.

One of the things you rare readerscan expect from me in July & August, will be some blog entries.