The Andis Kaulins in China Diary: October 21 to October 27, 2013

Monday [October 21]

[Home Laptop]

Don't work today. I will be a homebody instead of a office-chair body.

I got Tony off to school at 7:00 AM. He roused me out of this morning, which I think was a first. Usually, I rouse him out of his slumber.

I spend the morning on the computer, taking videos, editing videos and reading in bed. I produce Views of China from Casa Kaulins #32 and #33, and Scenes from My Life in Wuxi, China #48.

Yesterday, I parked my e-bike at the Wanda Plaza and then later found it was blocked off by e-bikes that choose to park all around it. I had to physically grab these other e-bikes and clear a path for myself to get out. It so happened that one of the drivers of the e-bike came upon me moving his bike. I swore at him; he smiled at me. I think it was one of those weaselly smiles that Chinese make when they have been caught red-handed.

I made mention of Paul Krugman in the October 14 to 20 issue of the AKIC Weekly. Just now, about 16:10, I got a Google News Alert email for Andis Kaulins which turned out to be a link to some other Andis Kaulins saying something favorable about Paul Krugman. How annoying! This Andis Kaulins is going to have to change his name. I have some suggestions. He can call himself Andrew Krugman, Adolf Krugman, Wiemar Republic Krugman, Ponzi Krugman, Barrack Obama Krugman, Zimbabwe Greece Spain Italy North Korea Soviet Union Krugman, Barabbas Krugman, Vladimir Barabbas Kim Il Sung Un Jung Pelosi Biden Rockefeller Krugman, or Juan Peron the Second. How dare that person whose name I wouldn't mention if it wasn't my name defame and besmirch my fine name and his fine name by agreeing with a drug taking charlatan. Andis Kaulins, who doesn't live in Wuxi, change your name!

A little knock on the door at 16:15. Who is it? Tony!!!

What did you do on your days off? Thankfully, no one asks me that question anymore.

Tuesday [October 22]

[Home Laptop]

I will work 13:00 to 21:00 today.

I have sent Tony off to school.

I am trying to get Tony to say that Daddy is right and Tony is wrong. To his credit, Tony understands what I am saying but he won't say it when I ask him to. He say that I am wrong.

Last evening, I took Tony to the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza.

This morning, I read an article about Gypsies in Taki's Magazine. In one passage of the article Gypsies were said to be Jews without accomplishments. However, the article in saying this left one thinking that the article's author also thought Jews were parasitical.

At the entrance to my school is a poster of me where I called myself a Gypsy. I didn't think that I was labeling myself a parasite, but just a person with no firm roots anywhere because I had moved a lot in my life.

Gypsies and Jews, in the article, were said to tend to stay aloof from the rest of the population. I am that way. However, my aloofness came from an inherited shyness which has evolved into a kind of passive aggressive resentment.

[School Laptop]

I took the 25 bus to work.

Wednesday [October 23]

[School Laptop]

I work 13:00 to 21:00 today.

I didn't have much to say yesterday. I don't have much to say today but I will try.

It's our 7^th Wedding Anniversary this Sunday. Yes.

On Friday, October 27, 2006, Jenny & I took the train to Nanjing to get our wedding license. We were supposed to have gotten it on the 23^rd. We had made a trip of it to Nanjing on that date and stayed overnight at a nice hotel, making love and all that, only to learn the next day that Jenny's paperwork was wrong and so she had to go back to her hometown to get some forms corrected. Jenny was very upset at the time. I shrugged my shoulders, but I think how I flattered I am now in retrospect that someone would be upset that they couldn't marry me right away. We returned on the 27^th on Jenny's insistence. I had to switch shifts to get it done. There was no night of passion spent at a hotel as I had to go back to work the next day.

I think I will consider October 27 to be our wedding anniversary instead of December 3 when we had our wedding party. I didn't particularly enjoy December 3, 2006. I think of the relationships that have been broken since then and all the people I invited to the party that I wish I hadn't in retrospect, particularly one Scottish piece of English Teacher scum. But at least the music at the party was all Sinatra – so there was one touch of class.

October 27, 2006 and August 23, 2007 are the best days I have ever spent in China. For it was on those days that Jenny became my wife and my son Tony was born.

Whose faults were these relationship breakups? They were my decisions for the most part. But if they hadn't been my decisions, they would have happened anyway. They were becoming intolerable.

I hoping to create a Toss Tossing Game GUI with Python.

Thursday [October 24]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 21:00. It's my longest workday of the week.

I succeeded yesterday in creating a crude coin tossing game with a Graphical User Interface. I know how to refresh the various elements of the GUI when the coin is tossed and results are produced. I of course need to refine it. I have to figure out like how to position the various elements of my program on the GUI canvas.

[LECTOR: Why? ANDIS: Because I don't want to lose my sanity. LECTOR: You think you are sane and everybody else isn't? ANDIS: Of course I don't think that. I know that I am insane or am at least willing to admit the possibility. I don't want to come in contact with people who really think they are sane or act on the pretense of being pseudo-cool crazy. LECTOR: What do you mean by pseudo-cool crazy? ANDIS: The people who bragging of the insane and crazy things they do.]

I took the 602支and the 81 buses to get to work.

A very happy student, who has graduated from university, tells me she is happy because she can sleep in every day. I remember being filled with anxiety about what I was going to do when I graduated with my second bachelor's degree. And of course the anxiety was well-founded.

Another student, who works in HR, tells me she prefers to hire non-Wuxi people. Wuxi people she says are rich already and not very ambitious when it comes to working, preferring to take it easy.

Funny how her idea of natives being lazy was not so different from a Canadian's idea of natives being lazy.

We, that be the Kaulins Family China, may be posing for portrait style photographs on our anniversary day.

For the economic historians who may read my blog, I will mention that the big breakfast I had at McDonald's this morning was 22 rmb.

Friday [October 25]

[School Laptop]

I work 11:00 to 21:00 today.

Last night, I had Wifi while I was waiting for the 635 bus. A rather pleasant occurrence. When I am getting a Wifi signal, My Ipod will make train whistling noises to tell me I am receiving email updates. Imagine my surprise when listening a podcast of Ben Shapiro speaking and staring at the Moresky360 building to hear a train coming in.

This morning, I stood on the same spot and didn't get Wifi.

I didn't have breakfast at McDonald's this morning. I figured that two pieces of toast and a large mug of tea at Casa Kaulins would suffice.

It is Anniversary Seven Day minus two.

I made substantial progress toward designing my coin toss GUI program yesterday afternoon. I have a toss button which when pressed will show the score and line-score progress of my coin tossing matches. I just need now to pretty the GUI up. My next project will be to create a GUI for a round robin tournament.

It's Friday. Time for some interior monologue mixed with third person narration. I almost forgot about that. I'll do this now; and at lunch, I will prep my classes. My first one is at three. Two students. Talk about family. Andis reclined in his chair and looked at his desk. He saw a pair of scissors. Put those back! He surveyed the desktop again. What a mess! Papers. Pens. Stapler! Put that back! Andis then yawned for a good five seconds. What I am so sleepy considering I am not so busy? Call this a job! It is more a case of keep myself occupied. Now. What to think? My mind is blank. What do I hear? Andis heard the voices of some teachers who were in nearby classes. BEICs. I wonder if they stick with it. Andis saw a carton containing a piece of cake from 85 bakery. It was on my desk on Tuesday. I will keep there as a sort of social-chemical experiment. Will it become stinky? Will someone take it away?

The Wuxi Peach Maoists. Oh six and one. Will they ever win a match-up this year? Never give up. A win now is a way to really stick it to the other team. They slap themselves for losing a game they thought was in the bag – the joys of being a spoiler.

Andis saw a short girl round a corner to get to her office. Marketing. They have awful jobs. Worse than having to talk to students who have nothing to say. If I didn't say inanities I would have nothing to say. Better to be quiet than to risk saying something inane.

Andis again leaned back in his chair. He took off his glasses. He wiped tears from his eyes. Tears of boredom? Tears of tiredness. Insane to get up so early and then don't do any real work till the evening.

Andis wondered what to think then. What to have for lunch? Already decided that. I won't. I will wait for supper. I have a package of M&Ms in the backpack if need be.

In someone came. Silence. I will be glad when I have this office again to myself.

Andis looked at the photo of him, his wife, and his son. Don't look at the hair so closely. A big patch of hair at front top of my head doesn't block the view of my bald spot. I can't see the hint of it clearly. Still, Tony and Jenny look cool. Yes!!!

I have a coin toss game GUI that works. It will let me toss a coin, keep a current line-score scoreboard of the toss results, and will even finish correctly in the last “inning” of the game.

Saturday [October 26]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 18:00 today.

It is Anniversary Seven minus one. We will be going to the Jin Ling Hotel tomorrow for a deluxe buffet dinner.

This afternoon, the school will have a Halloween Party. I am not sure what is going to happen. I won't wear a costume.

The wife wanted me to wear a costume, of sorts, tonight for a family portrait shot. Fortunately she changed her plan and we will be doing the photo session on Monday after Tony's school is finished. I wasn't keen on having to rush to a photo studio after having finished work, and then having to put on a suit.

I have nothing against wearing suits but I am afraid that I have adopted the modern habit of dressing casually all the time so that the suit I do have is ill-fitting and ill-maintained and cheap-looking. So if I do wear a suit, even half-ass well, I am better off dressing casually.... Either way I look bad but with a suit I look ridiculous.

A young student tells me that in grade two, students are able to go to school by themselves. I recall, but I will admit that my memory is fuzzy, going to school by myself in grade one.

[Home Laptop]

At the Halloween party, I snagged an Iron Man mask for Tony. You can see him wearing it at Tony Kaulins in China Wordpress.

It was bloody awkward having to not seem bored at the party. They carved pumpkins and wore unimaginative contests.

The only thing that kept me interested was the pretty young M.C.

Jenny told me that she was going to go downtown with Tony. They were first going to eat at a restaurant near Casa Kaulins and then take a bus downtown. This meant that I would have to eat dinner by myself downtown. I had no idea what to eat so I decided to check out the Hen Long Plaza, the second big shopping mall to open in Wuxi last month. The Plaza was cavernous, with seven floors, and was full of many expensive clothing stores. I was surprised to see a store for Major League Baseball on the 7^th floor. However, it sold mostly New York Yankee memorabilia.

While on the subject of MLB, I know the World Series is taking place now. It doesn't seem to be a big deal. The only sports talk I have heard of on my podcasts is about the NFL. The match-up in this year's World Series is classic: Cardinals and Red Sox. Still. No buzz.

I have to admit that I don't care for the way the MLB is being marketed on its website. What's with this new expressions like walk-off? Is MLB trying to imitate the NFL and at the same time try to create some new hipness? What's with the fashion of players wearing barbarian viking beards? And why don't they wear stirrup pants anymore? My image of MLB is from the seventies and eighties and nineties. I look at the video of MLB as it is now on the Internet, and feel that it isn't the same game.

Anyway, I won't be spending much time at the Hen Long Plaza. There isn't anything there that isn't already available at the Hui Shan Wanda. It just seems so unnecessary to build two shopping centers, both with seven floors, within two blocks of each other in the downtown.

Sunday [October 27]

[Home Laptop]

Happy Anniversary! Happy Anniversary! Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary!

I have marked this special day by publishing photos and videos, from that day seven years ago, on my two Andis Kaulins in China blogs.

I uploaded three videos to Youtube over night: Scenes from My Life in Wuxi, China #48 and Views of China from Casa Kaulins #33 & #34.

What are my plans for the day? This afternoon, we will be going to the downtown to get haircuts and to have a deluxe buffet dinner at the Jin Ling Hotel.

Jenny was complaining that it was cold outside yesterday. I thought it was comfortable.

I am up early and I don't know what to do with myself.

I spent some time looking for pdf and epub copies of books recommended by David Warren.

I spent my time, as I do everyday, licking psychic wounds. Being with Tony helps me to forget all.

I read a story about Sarah Palin refusing an invitation to appear on the Piers Morgan Show. Palin has very good reasons not to. Morgan should be offering Palin a grovelling apology for comments he made about her. He was helping to circulate a satirical story about Palin as if it was true. In fact, any Leftist journalist requesting an interview with Palin should offer a grovelling apology for spreading lies about her.

Tony watches violent Lego City video on Youku.

22:52 The K family went downtown and then returned to Casa Kaulins by 10:00 PM. They went to a small salon, a two seater, for two haircuts and a hair-wash. The salon had been opened by a stylist who had worked at the salon that the K family had been going to. Jenny said the stylist was good and so the K family took two buses to the salon which was located at the end of a row of businesses on Jiankang Road near the Hubin Street Bridge.

As foretold in this blog, the K family then went to the Jinling Hotel for dinner. Andis and Jenny had their fill. Tony ate all the chicken nuggets on offer and played with a girl from another table.

The K family then did a Downtown Wuxi Mall Crawl. They walked through the Baoli Shopping Center on the way to the Suning Plaza where they went to the grocery store. And then from the Suning they made their way to the Hen Long Plaza.

At the Suning Plaza grocery store, Andis saw a Tomica plastic cup that cost 43 rmb – a completely ridiculous price, even with a Tomica premium. The cup was a small child's size and its Tomica images could have easily been peeled off.

The Kaulins family had two items of celebration at this evening's deluxe buffet dinner.

1. It was Jenny & Andis's seventh anniversary.
2. They had paid off the mortgage on their apartment.

So Tony was prodded into giving his parents a congratulatory toast.

If you ever visited the apartment – fat chance of that happening – you'd laugh. But hey! It's paid for!

Thus ends the diary for a dull week.