No Butter; USA-PRC War?; Snoring Videos; Revenge; Three of the Usual; Later, a Bonus

• The two supermarkets in my area of Wuxi don't have butter. We're down to our last bar of it. Now, it's going to become a real ordeal. I decided to look for butter on a Tuesday, and thus it was that I went to the two supermarkets. At the first one I went to, I chanced to observe a car parked/stopped in an inconsiderate manner. It was parked at the end of a narrow two-lane-wide road that had had fences put on the center line. (The fences had been put in the center of the road to stop people from parking on the side and thus leaving effectively one lane for traffic going to both directions. The fencing wasn't put right to the end of the road so as to not block pedestrian traffic. And it was in that space that the car had parked.) The car had effectively blocked one of the lanes and thus traffic was snarled. I then saw the driver of the car running to the car. He was easy to spot because he was going quickly in a panicky way towards his car. He had just picked up some food from a nearby KFC. I looked at his direction and then looked at his car a few times, and he looked at me sheepishly as locals are wont to do when they are caught doing selfish actions. It was the only satisfaction that I was to get in my fruitless search for butter.

• From the reading I have been doing on the Internet and the Chinese media I have seen my wife Jenny looking at, you would think the Chicoms and the USA were going to go to war over this virus. Accusations are flying as to who is responsible and who has been incompetent in dealing with pandemic. Well. I wonder where exactly the two sides would fight a war. There is no place that they are close to each other. I suppose they could fight in the ocean off the coast of China. But probably they would just lob ICBMs at each other. And if they did, I wish the Chicoms would do this: Nuke Seattle, Portland, California, Austin (Texas), and New York City. That would be helping Trump make America great again. (If the Americans asked me where to bomb in China, I'd tell them not to bother. The sheer ugliness of Modern China is punishment enough. Why help them by bombing it to the ground?)

• Jenny has taken two videos of me snoring. The first one, she took while I was taking an afternoon nap. I was on our bed, my head and back were propped up against a rolled-up quilt, fast asleep, snoring through my mouth. The funny thing was that my lower lip was bobbing up and down like it was made of wood. The second video was taken late at night and co-starred my son Tony. We were both snoring so loud. Our snores sounded like loud farts. Tony & I couldn't help but giggle saw it the next morning.

• Tony & I got Jenny back a day later. In the morning, we were up and she was still asleep and snoring. We took a video. She laughed, thankfully, when we showed it to her. To be fair, her snoring did not pack the wallop that ours did.

• Trouble comes in threes. The day after my search for butter, I was driving to do some mule duties for Jenny. Driving to the bakery to pick up some bread (we haven't run out of butter yet!), I ran into my first idiot just as I was exiting the apartment complex. I was making a left turn but stopped for a black SUV that was coming from my right. I was indecisive as to whether to go or not because the SUV wasn't going so fast, but ultimately I decided that it was better to stop. When the SUV finally passed by and the the coast was clear, I made my turn and quickly found myself on the ass of the SUV. It was going very slowly. I was debating whether to pass when it suddenly swerved to the left which led me to think it was going to make a u-turn. I thought to pass it on the right, but as quickly as I thought this, the SUV then made a right turn without a turn signal. Moron #1! Proceeding on my way, I encountered my second moron. I was behind him in the same lane and had a feeling he trying to change into the left lane because his car was slowing down and he seemed to be slowly swerving to the left. But because he was going slow and he was probably being an idiot, I passed around him. I then looked into my rearview mirror and saw the driver make the lane change, I suspected he was going to make, without a turn signal. Nothing to me is more proof positive than this that Chinese drivers are stupid because I have seen them do this all time. Then, after picking up the bread and driving to the mall where I parked our car in the basement so I could pick up packages for Jenny, I got on an elevator and encountered my third case of bad local manners. When it arrived at my floor, I was blocked from getting off from a family of locals trying to get on. I stood at the elevator entrance and waited for them to let me get off, which they finally did. This is one of the first things that people coming to China complain about: Why do the Chinese rush onto elevators without letting people get off first? (I didn't swear at the family who was blocking me. I was able to check myself this time.)

• Later that same day, I drove Tony to this park when we can play catch and Tony can use our bat to hit balls. When we parked, we saw workers were putting up these six foot tall sections of fence to stop park goers from sneaking through woods to get into the park. I was disappointed to see this because we had been sneaking through the woods and it was a bit of a pain to have to walk through the park entrance and go around to get to the field where we did our baseball thing, but what could I do? It really wasn't that far. And the park entrance had a security guard shack. When we got to the field, there were people who were dismantling the BBQ equipment they had been using. We then saw them walking through the woods. And we then heard these people yelling. Looking at what was going on, we saw that the people who had the BBQ were trying to climb over the fences, which must have been put up just after they had snuck through the woods to get to the field where they had had their BBQ. The workers and other park staff were the ones who were screaming. Typical.