Lots of Uniforms and Signs; Coding with Python; Don't Go Anywhere During a Chinese Public Holiday!; Chinese Restaurant; Photos;

• Thursday, the last day of May, I walked to my Wife Jenny's office building to get some packages which had been left in lockers for pickup. Along, the way I had to get through a couple of intersections. At the first one, which is near the entrance to the Casa Kaulins apartment complex, I took photos that could convey the chaos that takes place at intersections when turning cars don't yield to oncoming traffic. At the next intersection, I would have loved to have taken photos of what I saw but didn't because I didn't think it would be a good idea. I saw these guys with signs. At first I thought they were for a store doing a promotion. But when I came back to the intersection, after having picked up the packages for my wife, I saw that each intersection was manned by a person in security uniform holding a sign. I wasn't sure what the signs said but it looked like the government trying to tell the motorists something. As well, I saw about six of the yellow traffic storm troopers looking to pull over motorists and e-bikers and crappy-looking commercial vehicles.

• I have gotten back into Python coding. I want to try to get Tony to learn it. I learned Python a few years go for something to do. For some reason, I gave it up it. Recently I got the idea (I can't remember how now) to try to teach it to Tony. My work was on file so I was able to bring it back and get it to work. Now, for fun, I have been working on making the old code better. I had made programs that could create sports style standings for 4 team leagues and 5 team leagues. Just in the past week, I coded so I could create standings for 6 and 8 team leagues. I found it very absorbing to get the bugs out of the code. It is sort of detective and tester work.

• May 1^st, my wife had this idea to go to some park in Wuxi (in the Li Hu area if you care.). When she told me the idea, my first reaction was that I hoped the place wasn't crowded. Jenny then put pressure on me to not be so negative, so I said I wanted to go, even I couldn't hide my misgivings very well. And went we did. And the place was crowded as I expected. When we saw all these people and a traffic jam of cars, we decided immediately to go back home. And on the way back home, we had to get through three traffic jams. We should have just stayed home. So despite knowing better, I went out on a Chinese public holiday. And I have to wonder about all the Chinese people who were out on a holiday. Why didn't they know better? Mass stupidity.

• May 2^nd (or was it the 3^rd?), we went to this restaurant in the Dong Ting area of Wuxi. It was the first time we had been in a sit down Chinese-style restaurant since before the Spring Festival. We were invited by some friends of Jenny. They all spoke Chinese. I basically sat mute. Sadly, I haven't learned to speak much Chinese after all these years. Anytime I do try, I am not understood by the locals because of my bad tones, my bad pronunciation or the locals inability to believe that foreigners can speak Chinese; and so I give up and I go mute. I try to listen to what is being said, but I can only pick up the stock phrases I have learned from my Chinese study (which I do do daily) but everything else is goobly-gook. At the restaurant we went to, we were in a private room with a round table with a rotating pedestal in the center. I noticed that every dish placed in the pedestal came with these serving chopsticks, which I later confirmed had been placed there on account of the virus. I used them every time when I took food from the pedestal dishes though I noticed that most of the others, especially the kids, weren't following the protocol. So, there were kids at the dinner and they were all playing games on an electronic device. The male adults all smoked and I was given about six cigarettes which made me ill when I tried to smoke them. (I am not a quitter when it comes to smoking but I think I will be now. The cigarettes really disgusted me.)

• Tony was back to school on May 6^th. That morning, after driving him there, I went for a walk and took a lot of photos which I have published in my photo blog.