Friday Observations

• June 3 would have been my Aunt Ritma's birthday.  Last year, I was looking forward to seeing her on an upcoming trip to Canada.  I did see her in the hospital.  A few months later, she died.  She is gone but not forgotten by me and all who knew her.  Ritma Jurevics R.I.P.
• It is steamy hot in Wuxi.  I am feeling zapped.
• The sidewalks in the neighborhood near Casa K are being torn up for reasons I can't fathom.  The sidewalks seemed perfectly fine as sidewalks in China go.  And they are being torn up in the most inexplicable of spots like near intersections, bridges, and bus stops.  It was just this morning I saw, workmen with sledgehammers tearing up sidewalk at my bus stop -- the stop, as far as I can tell, isn't moving.
• Also, intersections near Casa K are also being manned by traffic cops with whistles directing cars about.  To me having the cops there seem superfluous for the intersections do have traffic lights.  But it shows that Hui Shan is becoming important.
• Dallas beats Miami in the NBA.  Yippe!!  Just maybe!  Just maybe, Evil will not prevail.
• Jenny and Tony will be spending a week in her hometown.  I will be manning Casa K by myself, waiting for them to come back because I refuse, on principle, to become a teenager again.
• Some leopards never change their spots.  What is it with people?  And the Chinese let them come here to teach English.
• I was listening to an Extension 720 podcast when the question of to wear bifocals or not, came up.  This has become a subject of concern for me since I started wearing reading glasses last summer.  At work, I find myself wearing the glasses all the time.  I will walk around with the glasses on the tip of nose, only pulling them up when I need to read.  This is annoying thing to have to do so I wonder if I will have to do what my father did which was wear bifocals.  On the podcast, one of the guests a professor talked about this problem, saying he wore his reading glasses and not bifocals out of vanity.  I can add that in humid Wuxi, glasses slipping on a wet nose is not at all a groovy feeling.
• Meanwhile on another podcast, the host Mark Levin just recently lost his dog Pepsi.  I remember the first pet I had as a child was a collie named Pepsi.  When we got the dog, he came in a Pepsi box, and so we called him Pepsi.  I thought it was an excellent name for a dog though I remember many wisenheimers scoffing at it. I very much appreciate hearing that Levin, a great right-wing talk show host, named his dog Pepsi.  To have thoughts like a great mind is a wonderful thing.  I still remember the sorrow I felt when my family moved -- my father was in the military -- and we had to give Pepsi away.  I still have a memory in my mind of Pepsi being in a room with me and looking up at me the way that only Dogs can at their masters.