I'm Back; Tony's in an International School; the School is Bureaucratic; Gratitude; Good Decision; Old Footbridge; Isolation; Huawei Woman and Two of the Three T's; My Current Mask-Wearing Habits

• Sometime during the Summer, I stopped blogging. I got into a panic about actually being busy at school and I also found other ways to keep occupied like playing with my Duo app and reading a lot of e-books. I did start up two entries but never got around to finishing and publishing them. Perhaps I will publish them after I publish this one.

• Big news in my life now: my son Tony is boarding at an international school which is a forty-minute drive from Casa Kaulins. After the first week, he is depressed because he would much rather be at home. He even suggested that he would rather be at his old school which is a horrific Chinese public school. When I told him that he would have been boarding at that school as well, he countered that it was closer to home. So, when I asked him which school he would prefer if they were both close to home, he said he would prefer his current school. Perhaps, we will rent an apartment close to the international school and Tony can be with me every night. I suppose this violates some rule of parenting but Tony & I are best buddies.

• I find his new school to be bureaucratic. There is this internet portal that parents have to access to get information about what they are doing with the kids and it leaves me with the impression that this school might as well be the federal government of the Canada. The portal is slow and confusing to use, and the messages that are published in it reek of bureaucratic dialect. Homeschool! Homeschool! Homeschool!

• I did a Speaker's corner about gratitude. One of the retired teachers told me she was grateful to the Communist Party because she had a pension. Okay, i thought.

• I sometimes take the train to work, though I'd rather not because of the mandatory mask wearing. I choose if I can to sit in the car in the front or the car in the rear. Usually there is no one else sitting in these cars. One time, it looked like I would have an empty car all to myself, but then I saw a pram with child and a grandfather and another woman coming to the car I wanted to enter. I decided to move away from them which proved to be a good decision because I looked down to see them fussing over the child and talking in a loud manner. I was wanting to read my Tropic of Cancer.

• I had found this old footbridge that I liked to go to that was in a park that is near Casa Kaulins. To get to it, one has to walk through some woods and then climb a bit of slope and then follow a path. The bridge spans a canal and the area around it is quite quiet and interesting to explore. I hadn't been to it for a few months, I had some free time and so I decided to visit it. I was disappointed. To get to it, I walked through bushes and weeds that had grown since I had last visited it. And when I got to the bridge, I saw that it was being used a sort of stopper for the canal growth that accumulates on the surfaces of all the canals in Wuxi. It was like the canal that the bridge spanned had turned into a dump for mulch.

• Despite being around so many people, I am isolated. The problem is that these people are Chinese and I am not. Isolation, I read, makes people's social skills atrophy from lack of use. Not that I had great social skills to begin with, but I really can't be bothered to talk to anyone and don't relish the opportunity to meet other expats. Still, I crave company. But no one around me measures up.

• I had a SPC where the Huawei woman and Tibet and Taiwan came up. I should let them have their say and not responded and been evasive, but in a very obviously evasive way so I don't feel like so much of a schmuck.

• Mostly, I haven't been wearing a mask and make a point of putting it over my Adam's apple in place where wearing it is mandatory. I read about the lengths to which enforcement of mask-wearing has been enforced in North America and I am flabbergasted. I thought I was living in the totalitarian state!!!