Diary: April 29 to May 5, 2014

Highlights

• I answer the question: What are some nice memories you have?
• Thursday was a holiday. I got angry at Tony because he only wanted to go to the mall. It could have been worse. He could have wanted to have done something to mark International Socialism Day.
• Via email, I received the first sign that I was becoming aged.
• A David Warren essay lead me to waxing.
• Other than that it was another week of going to school, talking to students, and consuming media via my Ipad.
• One evening after work, I was distressed to see my bus pull into the stop when I was still on the third floor.
• Tony doesn't like doing his Chinese homework.

Tuesday [April 29]

[School Laptop]

• Today's shift: 13:00 to 21:00. Tomorrow's shift will be the same. Thursday will be a holiday which I am looking forward to.
• Yesterday, I finished reading American Gun by Chris Kyle. I read it to annoy progressive types.
• Last night, I watched the fourth episode of the fourth season of Game of Thrones. It wasn't a great episode. It just seemed to be transitioning the series's various plot lines along. Towards the end of the episode, there were characters from a plot line I had almost forgotten about. The last time, some of these characters appeared was in season three!
• I also began watching Game Six of the 1986 World Series – a game with one of the most dramatic and heart-wrenching conclusions of all time. After three innings, the Red Sox had a two nothing lead – Clemens had yet to allow a hit.
• What question should I deal with this week? I said last week that I would ask myself a softball question, so: What are some nice memories you have? The first one is the birth of my son. Another one is of my mother hugging my father on his death bed. And then there was the time when my wife was dancing with my father.
• I forgot to mention. Yesterday, I was walking past the car dealerships in my area of Wuxi. From them, I could have taken a good photo of the Metro riding past, but it didn't. I did instead see that a Mazda dealership had been closed down. There was all this empty space around the building and the showroom looked particularly forlorn. I have never seen an abandoned car dealership before.

Wednesday [April 30]

[Home Laptop]

• I just got an email from a friend of mine [HM in fact] telling me he got news that he will become a grandfather. It is a milestone for me. I have never had anyone send me “I am going to be a grandfather” news before.
• It means I am getting old.
• Tony is awful at learning Chinese characters. He got a four out of a hundred score on a recent test. Jenny says he really hates doing the Chinese character practice. Last week, he took to not bringing his Chinese homework home. On Friday, he left the homework at his desk at school. Jenny was suspicious about why he didn't bring any Chinese homework home and talked to the teacher. So yesterday the teacher made a point of it to put the homework in Tony's backpack and to tell Jenny that she had done so. But when Tony arrived home, he didn't bring the Chinese homework with him. He told Jenny that he took it out of his bag and left it at his desk.
• Having Jenny tell me this story filled me with chagrined amusement. What a bugger! I thought.
• But it shows that he does get ideas. Last week, he got the idea to bring his Ultraman and Godzilla toys to a table with a model real estate presentation in order to reenact fight scenes he had seen on Youku.
• Last night, a student told me about citizens in Nanjing beating up the Chengguan (Chinese: 城管; pinyin: Chéngguǎn). I have heard about these government bully types on the Internet but it was the first time, a student told me about them. She got the news about them on the Internet. She told me that stories of the abuses of the Chengguan are reported in the government media.

[School Laptop]

• My shift today: 13:00 to 21:00. Tomorrow – I will say it again – is a holiday.
• What are some nice memories you have? Going to Met Stadium in the 1970's to see the Minnesota Vikings play the Miami Dolphins in an exhibition game. Going to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Going to the Bay in Downtown Winnipeg with an Aunt in the 1970s and buying Beatles songs on 45 rpm records. Driving in New Mexico. Seeing desert in Arizona.

Thursday [May 1]

[Home Laptop]

• Holiday! I sleep in.
• Unfortunately, Jenny has a bad cold. I will have to make sure she is doing as well as she can.
• I hope I can drag Tony out of the house and away from the Ipad.
• I finished watching Game Six of the 1986 World Series. For all its drama, the game seemed to have been poorly played. There was an error by Ray Knight that shouldn't have been made by a major leaguer that lead to the game even having gone to extra innings. The Mets fifth and sixth runs were scored on account of Red Sox bumbling.
• This morning, I finished watching Mother, Jugs & Speed, a movie about a private ambulance company in Los Angeles. Mother was Bill Crosby, Jugs was Raquel Welch, and Harvey Kietel was Speed. Larry Hagman played this creepy character who ogled at Raquel and had sex with one of the patients who was unconscious. The film is now a 1970s artifact but it is not without its merit. Bill Crosby gave a great performance as a cynical veteran driver who drinks as he drives. Tony watched part of the film with me. He liked the scenes with the ambulances rushing around the streets. He didn't seem to be put off by the 1970 vintage look of all the vehicles in the movie.
• It is sunny outside. A perfect day to take Tony trainspotting.

[Later]

• I swore at Tony this afternoon. I got him out of the apartment but he just wanted to go to the shopping mall, that is the Wanda Plaza. I indulged Tony up to a point. I took him to the two arcades in the Mall and then to the KFC and then to a courtyard or mezzanine{?} area where I sat and watched him play with other kids. After those twenty minutes of watching, I told Tony that it was time to get out of the f***ing mall. The noise and the crowds were driving me mad. When Tony got upset and started to cry, I really over did it with the f-bombs. It is so f***ing pathetic that all you want to do is hang out at the Shopping Mall on a day when you should be outside enjoying the nice weather and exploring the countryside around our apartment! Instead you want to be like all the f***ing unimaginative and zombie types who have nothing better to do than go to this f***ing mall! At one point, Tony told me to f*** off. [Best to prepare him for the nonsense he will encounter in his life.]
• I got Tony out of the Mall, and took him via e-bike to the Wu Culture Park where we wandered about for forty minutes. The Wu Culture Park is not a bad place to waste an afternoon, at least in comparison to the Wanda Mall. The Park has interesting buildings, exhibits, and walkways. However, it was at a pagoda in the park that I had my second session of swearing at Tony. He then earned my ire by refusing to come into the pagoda. When he didn't even want to come in for even a minute, I really laid into him. WTF is wrong with you! Are you f***ing scared! How about letting Daddy look at something for a minute? I had my outburst in front of a couple of other families. I eventually went up the pagoda myself and let Tony stew and sob at the entrance. But I then went downstairs and carried him up, full of apologies.
• “Tony” I said. “There are some things that Daddy does that you shouldn't do and that Daddy shouldn't do either!”
• From the park, we took the e-bike to the Wuxi Jiangyin bridge where we saw one train and went home. We then took the bus downtown to meet Jenny at the Grandma's restaurant in Sunning Plaza. She had had coffee with a classmate she went to school with in Nanjing.
• What are some nice memories you have? Seeing Iggy Pop in Winnipeg. Seeing REM and U2 on consecutive nights in Minneapolis. Giving a donation to a nun in Chilliwack. Talking to the Nuns who lived next to my elementary school in Quebec.

Friday [May 2]

[Home Laptop]

• A three day holiday for Tony and many others in China, but I got to work.
• I wake up feeling like crap. It must be because yesterday I drank a bottle of beer and two shots of Crown Royal.

[School Laptop]

• Today's shift: 11:00 to 21:00.
• I took a crowded 25 bus – crowded on account of the holiday – to work. With temperatures feeling summer-like, I was very much glad when the ride was over and I was downtown. [I had a seat but didn't look up from my Ipad to see if there were women with children or old people standing nearby.]
• David Warren's latest essay was on silence. He complained about the noise of the modern world. He said it was grand to live, for a time, in an area where nobody owned cars. Modern men, he said, could not stand silence. Anyway, he said these and other things, and I agreed with his observations and his sentiments. I can add but these thoughts or observations. I achieve silence, of a sort, in the office at work. It is sometimes the silence of an empty office; empty that is except me. It is sometimes the silence of an office where no one is talking. The latter silence is an uncomfortable silence. It maybe stems from the modern feeling that one should not be silent in the comfort of others or from my misanthropy where the presence of others makes me uncomfortable. I prefer silence with solitude – a solitude spent with books. I am not sure if I could enjoy a silence with nothing but my thoughts.
• As for Warren's observation about cars. So many of my neighbors in my apartment complex have cars; and I hate it. Part of this hatred of mine surely comes from the fact that I don't have a car myself. But as a pedestrian, I can justly be angry at how cars make walking hard and almost dangerous. To be fair, Chinese people, like people from Canada, when put in cars are isolating themselves from other people; but, this is also unfortunately true about the drivers in Wuxi: they are all inconsiderate brutes when it comes to pedestrians, and it makes me wish all Chinese drivers were back on bicycles.
• I hate what cars do to this apartment complex – they destroy the pavement.
• With more and more people in China having cars, more and more places in China are becoming not worth going to. Many places in China are being built to accommodate cars and are hence utterly charmless like commercial developments in North America that are surrounded or fronted by big parking lots.
• What are some nice memories you have? From my immediate past, I would say that yesterday, it was nice to ride the bus with Tony with each of us having an Ipad. I could watch Olivier performing Hamlet while Tony could play his games. From my more distant past. I remember skating around Stanley Park in Vancouver twice; seeing the Mariners play at Safeco Field in Seattle; jogging on the country roads near Brandon, Manitoba; wandering book stores, used and new, all over the world; playing billiards and snooker in Brandon, Manitoba; walking to Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis from my grandmother's house; listening to Sinatra CDs; watching Brandon Wheat King games in the Keystone center; buying Tony toys; talking to pretty girls in Chinaa; attending a Vancouver Canadian game where I got to talk to this old man who had been a musician and performed with Dean Martin – it beat seeing the beauty of British Columbia, and was probably the best time I had in B.C.
• No Takara Tomy Plarail at the Ba Bai Ban toy department! I just went to look for something to buy Tony and discovered this disappointing fact. Is Takara Tomy available anywhere in Wuxi?
• Student Lu Fei went to the pub last night got a black eye and a swollen lip because he got punched by a parking attendant during a dispute about parking.

Saturday [May 3]

[School Laptop]

• My shift today: 10:00 to 18:00.
• Jenny bought Tony a toy yesterday. It was some of kind of transformer toy that wasn't cheap. Tony, you see, won't stand for cheap toys. When I came home last night, Tony proudly showed the new toy to me.
• After finishing my classes last night, I was walking down a third floor corridor when I saw below an 118 bus pull into the bus stop where I was planning to go to catch it. I often take the 118 bus to get to the stop where I catch the 635 which takes me to the Hui Shan District. Seeing the 118 bus from the third floor just then made me curse. The next 118 bus wouldn't come in time for me to get to the 635 stop where I can get a seat for my fifty minute ride home. So I instead took the 67 bus and hoofed it (walked at a brisk pace) to get to the 635 stop. It takes me ten minutes to walk from where I de-board the 67 to get to my ideal 635 stop. As I do this ten minute walk, I pass another 635 stop where, if I wait, there would have been a chance I would have lost the competition to get a seat. (At this stop, sometimes as many as twenty people board and people jostle intently to get on first and get a seat).
• What are some nice memories you have? Seeing my brother's band play in a pub in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The name of the pub was the Saint Charles if I remember correctly. Seeing a no-hitter pitched in a minor league game in Vancouver, and being one of the few fans in the stands who was aware that a no-hitter was being pitched. Watching the Winnipeg Goldeyes clinch a Northern League Championship in their first season.

Sunday [May 4]

[Home Laptop]

• No shift today.
• Tony goes to school. Because the Chinese had May 1^st to May 3^rd off, that is Thursday to Saturday, they will have to work from Sunday to Friday.
• I am spending the morning on the computer. I published two entries to the Wuxi China Expatdom Blog. I am processing four video files so I can watch them on my Apple products.
• A student told me that the Chinese were annoyed that Obama came to Asia and didn't visit them. I told them that was one thing worse than Obama not visiting, and that was Obama visiting. Obama, I told the student, would have made a speech that bored everyone, so the Chinese should be grateful.
• I am reading another book on Mathematics: Infinite Ascent by David Berlinski.
• Picked up a pizza at the Wanda Plaza Pizza Hut last night. The person who took my order said they knew me. I am one of the few foreigners who come to that restaurant, I would suppose. I picked up an Hawaiian pizza and Tony was not pleased. I had to pick the pineapple pieces out for him before he would eat the pizza.
• Jenny goes to Tony's school everyday to feed him lunch. He won't eat the cafeteria food.
• What are some nice memories you have? Having Tony sit beside me at bedtime. Reading to Tony at bedtime. Hiking the mountains and hills of British Columbia. Pretty girls coming to talk to me. Eating Cheese Nips at Salisbury House in Winnipeg. Watching bands at the Spectrum Cabaret in Winnipeg. The occasional mentions I have gotten on the Internet.
• Finished watching a Fistful of Dynamite. James Caan plays an Irishmen and Rod Steiger plays a Mexican in the film which is set during the Mexican Revolution. Contains the usual Sergio Leone flourishes.
• Finished watching the 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet starring Laurence Olivier. Great film.
• Finished reading Infinite Ascent by David Berlinski. The book is a history of Mathematics. I can't say I completely understood it. I can't say I even half understood it.
• I read bits of the Bible, an Italian grammar book, a small anthology of Tennyson poetry, As You Like It, a book about Deng Xiaopeng written by Ezra Vogel, a book about Teaching English, and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton.
• Watched the replay of the perfect game that Denis Martinez pitched for the Expos in 1992.

Monday [May 5]

[Home Laptop]

• No shift today.
• Jenny was sick yesterday. She slept all day while I took in media on my Ipad.
• Yesterday evening, I took Tony to the Wanda Plaza to have supper.
• I don't feel so hot today. I won't do much and I won't blog much.
• What are some nice memories you have? Watching Denis Martinez pitch the perfect game live on the television. Getting Maurice Richard's autograph in Fredericton, New Brunswick at a Montreal Canadien old-timers game. Getting Don Cherry's autograph at Brandon's Keystone Center during a Wheat King's game. Being able to get Frank Mahovlich's autograph at the Brandon Keystone Center during a Maple Leaf's old-timers game. Watching the Jets play in the old Winnipeg Arena. Going to Husky Stadium to see the Seahawks play. Going to Husky Stadium to see the Huskies play. Watching the Canadian Junior Hockey Team trounce the Soviet Junior Hockey Team 7-0 at the Winnipeg Arena in 1981. Twenty years later, I saw a replay of the game on the TSN classic channel. I also remember seeing the Jets beat the Red Army team but I don't recall the year it happened.
• The entrance gate to our complex is finally being repaired two weeks after it broke which was two weeks after it was installed. [I mentioned the gate in last week's entry.] Ah! Yes! Chinese workmanship! Almost as bad as Andis Kaulins workmanship.
• Episode five of the fourth season of Game of Thrones has been downloaded. Jenny has two episodes to watch. She refuses to watch one episode at a time.
• I was able to take photos of a Wuxi Metro and the seemingly abandoned Mazda dealership today. [Refer to April 29].

Diary: March 25 to March 31, 2014

Highlights

• Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? I toyed with this question during this week of the AKIC Diary.
• I had to get myself a new pair of shoes – no an easy thing to do if you are size 47 like I am.
• I discovered a new Wuxi Expat site.
• I had some two breakfast days.
• I saw the Wuxi Metro train doing test runs.
• I accidentally deleted a lot of old photos.

Tuesday [March 25]

[Home Laptop]

• Jenny came home early yesterday from her hometown, surprising Tony & I. We weren't expecting her till this morning.
• She was too tired to make us supper so we went to KFC where they misunderstood my order.
• It is raining this morning. So I wonder what I should wear when I go to work.
• The truth is that I will be enduring the rain to get downtown for no discernible reason. The school is empty of students during the day. I will have a lot of time to putt around on my interests until the evening when I do have some students to talk with.
• Jenny says they have found the wreckage of the missing Malaysian airliner. I went to Drudge and saw nothing definite.
• Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? This question was posed to David Warren and was answered by him in his latest blog entry. I am thinking to answer it for myself. Instead of trying to answer it in one entry. I will intersperse my diary this week with some thoughts that I have had about the question.

[School Laptop]

• I am at school for a 13:00 to 21:00 shift.
• I took the 25 bus which, these days, crosses the Hui Shan Big Bridge and parallels a Wuxi Metro Bridge. This morning while on the bridge, I saw the Wuxi Metro Train crossing its bridge – a first of what will be an not uncommon sight in the future.
• The train is running prettily regularly on the line near Casa Kaulins, although it is not yet open to the public. Yesterday when I picked up Tony and took him home via e-bike, we saw the metro train running after we had actually talked of the possibility of seeing it.
• Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? The first thought I have about this is really to ask myself the first part of the question: Do you consider yourself in be in exile? I like to say I am, but if I am, what am I in exile from? I've never really had a home per se. I was born in Germany and quickly moved. My childhood was one of the base brat, always moving, never feeling a part of any place. Brandon, where my mother lives, was never really a hometown for me. I moved there in my last year of high school.
• Am I in exile? I do feel I am not at home, but then I have always felt that way being the child of immigrants.
• Of course, I did choose to move to China. But Canada never seemed like home to me. I was an outsider there much more than China.

Wednesday [March 26]

[Home Laptop]

• I will be at school for a 13:00 to 21:00 shift today.
• Last night, I didn't sleep very well. To pass the time, I tried to recall the division winners in Major League Baseball from 1969 to the present. After the baseball strike of the 1990's as well as the adoption of the wildcard, I can't recall with any precision who won the division titles. I can recall all the winners from 1969 to about 1986 easily. You would think I would have a harder time recalling further back in time who won, but I can't now tell you who won the World Series last year. I ceased to follow baseball closely when it adopted the wildcard.
• Last night, to all hours, I also got out of bed to see how my downloading was going. On my Ipod, I was watching eight episodes, which became available all at once, of Rex Murphy's commentary on the CBC slowly download. As well, I watched the ninth episode of the Kenneth Clark Civilisation be downloaded as well. For some reason, the file I had of that episode wasn't complete.
• Yesterday, I had a student talk me out of failing him. His indignation was more than I could handle. I had felt I had to fail him because his sentence-making was poor. Give him a word to make a sentence with and he would string together a sentence with a series of unrelated clauses where he tried to give me a definition of a word and then proceed to misuse it. I had to ask him many questions to get him to further show me he knew what the word meant. And often times, he would claim to know the word but only after I made an example sentence with the word to jog his memory. But I let him pass anyway. “I thought we were friends!” he said. This must be how the Chinese do business.
• 635 Sophia was on the 635 last night and so I showed her a bunch of photos of Tony in order to make conversation.
• The exile question. I have labeled myself as a gypsy – people who could be said to be exiled from birth.

[School Laptop]

• I took the 25 bus. Dumb me, I didn't sit on the side of the bus that would have allowed me to take a photo of the metro train if it happened to be on its bridge near the Hui Shan Big Bridge. It wouldn't have made a difference if the train hadn't been on the bridge, but as luck would have, it was on the bridge and a great photo opportunity was missed.
• Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? Come to think of it, I have exiled myself within Wuxi. I live in the Hui Shan District, far from the city center. Heck even at work, I exiled myself in my office and into my silence. So maybe I have self-imposed an exile on myself.
• There is an encyclopedia of Trains and Locomotives in my school's library. Tomorrow, I will take the book out and bring it to Tony. I may ask the powers that be if I can buy the book off them or get Jenny to ask them for me.

Thursday [March 27]

[School Laptop]

• My shift today: 10:00 to 21:00.
• It is sunny outside, a pleasant enough day.
• I had two breakfasts this morning. At Casa K, oatmeal; at the Xueqian and Zhongshan Roads McDonald's, egg sausage sandwich and two hash-browns.
• Rare readers of my blog and even more rare attentive readers of my blog may recall that I said something about a public bike stall being built near the Jia Zhou Yang Fang apartment building and another stall being built near the Jia Zhou Yang Fang bus stop. This morning, I noticed that the stall at an intersection near the apartment had been taken down and that only the stall near the bus stop was intact. The stall near the apartment had never been used and so it is curious that two weeks after having been built, it was taken down. Somebody made a mistake.
• Yesterday, I was slapped in the face with a reality that actually showed that my approach to certain manners had been correct and I should never waver in my approach.
• There is a hole beneath your nose.
• Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? I have to say that I am in an exile and that it is self-imposed. I choose to come to China; I choose to move to the fringes of Wuxi; I choose to marry the girl I did and to raise a child with her; and I choose to stay aloof from co-workers and other expatriates. The question is should I make efforts to get out of this exile? I don't think I should, at least for this within-Wuxi-exile.
• I am in an exile that is self-imposed due to some inaction on my part. These are the exiles from my family and Canada, as well as the exile of the spirit that I have because of Wuxi and Wuxi Expatriates. These are exiles I have to take actions about.
• Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? There is an imposed exile we have by being born and having to deal with matters of living in this world.
• I was listening to a podcast where the guest was rating and grading the presidents of the United States of America. Obama, the current president, was graded poorly. Obama had had a enormous opportunity but he squandered it, said the guest who did the grading. I will add that Obama talked of trying to transcend partisan divisions and pulling of a Ronald Reagan like feat of creating coalitions and changing the assumptions of political discourse, but failed – he didn't come close and quickly abandoned any efforts to do so as soon as he was inaugurated. Obama needed to do something to his movement which would have been like William F Buckley expelling the John Birchers from the Conservative movement, but he didn't. He let the crazies of his party control the discourse. He couldn't bring the nation above racialism to an America where skin colour didn't matter.
• It may well be that Obama was doomed from the beginning. The movement he had built had no foundations and was nothing more than airy platitudes.
• [Later] I went to a shoe store on Jia Feng or Jian Kang Road (anyway, not the road that goes around the downtown) to buy some shoes. It is the only place I know of in Wuxi that sells shoes larger than size 44. Unfortunately, the selection was not very good and the shoes I did think to buy were ugly as sin. They also wanted me to pay a lot of money for them and Jenny, who I got to talk them via phone, talked them down 600 rmb from the 900 they first asked for. I ended up walking away without the shoes and a quandary as to whether I should go back and buy them tomorrow.

Friday [March 28]

[School Laptop]

• My shift today is from 11:00 to 21:00.
• I won't buy the shoes from the shop. We, that be Jenny and I, will chance it and order a pair of shoes from the Internet. I got bad vibes from the clerk there anyway who seemed disappointed when Jenny started negotiating with here.
• I sat on the proper side of the 25 bus this morning. That is, the proper side of the bus if I wanted to take a photo of the metro train if it happened to be on the bridge near the Hui Shan Big Bridge. Of course, the train wasn't on the bridge when I had my camera all ready.
• I have a horrible class with horrible students, the kind that seem to suffer from clinical depression, at 8:00 PM this evening.
• I did an English Corner about books last night, and out of fourteen people, only I and two students were actually reading books at the moment. Everyone else was too busy to read. So I had to spend a great deal of time with idioms using the work book like “throw the book at him” and “cook the books.”
• I have brought home the train book I had seen in our school library. It is filled with lots of great photos of trains that I am sure Tony will enjoy. I hope to have Tony see the book this evening after he has done his homework. I have left it on a shelf in the bedroom. I told Tony to phone me this afternoon. If he does, I will tell him that there is a surprise for him on the shelf....

Saturday [March 29]

[School Laptop]

• I have a 10:00 to 18:00 Shift today.
• Tony liked the train book, when he was finally able to see it. I had tried three times, unsuccessfully by mobile phone, to tell Tony to see what I had placed on the shelf above our bed, but he still hadn't finished his homework.
• My fourth try to tell him was made between classes at 7:55 PM. He was excited when he saw the book. When I arrived home later, he was carrying with him, clutching it like he does when he has gotten a new toy. When I arrived home, he even made a show of it for as I entered the apartment, by appearing from behind a couch with the book and exclaiming “I got it!”
• The 635 bus, which I took home after class, was packed like a sardine can last night. I got on the bus early, when it was empty, and got a seat in the corner at the very back. I watched the end of an Astaire-Rogers film entitled Carefree. It wasn't a great movie, having a plot that was resolved rather convolutedly and it could have had more dance and song numbers; but the ones it did have were full of grace and Astaire singing that “Must you dance every dance with the same fortunate men” song made the movie worth watching again if only for that scene.
• It is raining heavily this morning. I have my umbrella open in the office in order to dry it.
• I listened to the latest John Derbyshire Podcast this morning. He made mention of an interesting way of categorizing people when he divided them into word people and thing people. Before hearing his explanation, I would have categorized myself as a word person – being not good with my hands and more cerebral in my interests. But Derbyshire said that Leftists are more word people because they believe that words matter and from words we can make the world a better place. Leftists are ones for changing the language and filling it with euphemisms. Conservatives, being more interested in the reality of the thing, find Leftist wordplay to be silly and divorced from a reality which could never conform to Leftist Utopian fantasies. So, I am a thing person in the sense Derb describes. But I am far removed from the world of practical manners of the hands on things people, nonetheless.
• I see that there is a new website attempting to serve Wuxi Expats called Wuxi City Guide. It is the third attempt, that I know of, to do this. The first one, Wuxi Life, has becoming Wuxi Dead. It now is filled with advertising and occasional pleas from lonely Expats looking for companionship. The second site, Wuxi Guide Dot Net, died after its founder (the Ayatollah of Mordor) returned to his home and native land. For a short time, it had a lively group of commentators but it went to tears because too many of them were sexpats and worry warts about controversy. This new site does post some articles and is even attempting to get some forums started. I wish them luck, but I suspect that like the other sites it will fail to be lively and controversial enough, for despite being a small city, Wuxi is too big and its Expats are into too many disparate pockets to form one community.
• And then there is my site attempting to mock Wuxi Expats called Wuxi China Expatdom, but that is another story....
• Apparently the days when I first came to Wuxi: 2004 to 2006 were the good old days for the Wuxi Expat Community, and something happened, presumably the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted in a lot of tearing down and replacement with soul less shopping mall décor which torn up that community as well.
• Of course, they didn't seem like golden days when I was experiencing them. Right now with a growing Tony, life is a lot better.

Sunday [March 30]

[School Laptop]

• I work an extra shift today at school: 10:00 to 17:00.
• Last night, I had to spend the evening looking for file recovery programs because I mistakenly reformatted a USB drive that contained a lot of old photos including from when Tony was born, portrait photos, and our first visit to Canada. Now, I know that a delete really means that an address is turned off with out the file actually being wiped, and that a complete scan of a drive can discover files, that though technically deleted, are still in place. So I had to look for software to do that. What I discovered was that these programs have a catch: you got to pay for them! So, I am looking for free recovery software via torrent.
• If worse comes to worst, I can recover many photos from my blog and facebook sites. This may not placate Jenny who was really pissed at me.
• So, I have to hope and pray that a recovery program can bring back all those old photos.
• That problem ruined my evening and I fell a little, in a way, hung over about it this morning.
• Students at #1 High School will be going to Yixing for four days for what seems to be a kind of spring camping outing. They will be living in barracks type accommodation, cooking their own food, and whatever other activities the students have planned.
• I just had lunch: a beef wrap from McDonald's which seems to be advertised as being something healthy. But is not why I am making this entry. On the way to McDonald's I waited and then crossed, on a green pedestrian signal, the intersection at Xueqian and Zhongshan Roads. At the corner I cross, I usually try to make right-turning vehicles yield to me. The fact that the drivers never slow down and have no consideration for pedestrians always gets at my craw, as the expression I believe goes; and so I try to make the vehicles stop. Just now, I was unsuccessful as a square mini-van passed so close to me that I could see the color of the eyes of the drivers and passengers. I could then easily have punched or kicked the van with great effect but my nerve failed me.

Monday [March 31]

• The last day of March. No shifts.
• Yesterday afternoon, I got off work early and so went to the Baoli Carrefour and bought three tubs of the margarine the K family likes. Canola Harvest hasn't been available the Hui Shan Tesco the past two weeks. This trip was a rare chance for me to wander the Wuxi Downtown on a Sunday afternoon, and I saw foreigners who don't work at my school for the first time in weeks. To me, it now seems that foreigners have complexions that are pasty like milk.
• From Carrefour, I took the 602支 to the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza where I meet Jenny & Tony at a newly opened Thai Restaurant. Jenny liked the food very much and in telling me so, she took a jibe at Xinjiang Food that we have disagreements about. I actually like the Thai food as well, though I still prefer Xinjiang Food. We had shrimp in curry sauce (it would have been better if the curry was Indian and not Chinese, and the shrimp were peeled), pineapple-fried rice, some beef on skewers, and a tarot salad – all very tasty. The restaurant is expensive however which on the good side, means the place isn't crowded, but on the bad side, means it is expensive. I give it four stars out of five.
• I did try this Thai Beer. Brand name of Chang. It was alright. It tasted almost like a dark ale.
• We then spent the evening at home. I was able to find a free file recovery program but I wasn't able to recover all the files I had deleted from the USB, and so I am going to have to go through my blog archives to copy the photos I posted. [Rare reader, you are invited to check out the archives as well. There is a lot of interesting stuff there.]
• Tony and I finished watching One Million BC starring Raquel Welch. Tony really liked the film, not because of Raquel Welch, but because of the special effects, which though primitive by the standards of today, had a nice cartoon feel to them. The problem with the film was its convoluted ending. I suppose it was a vehicle to show a scantily clad Raquel Welch, but the film didn't suffer from poor production values and the world it depicted, though very unrealistic, was interesting. But the film had no plot. A battle between two tribes at the end of the film was interrupted by a volcanic eruption. Raquel and the other protagonists survived and that was that.
• I wore the shoes Jenny bought on Taobao to work on Sunday. They fit pretty well. I was afraid, when I tried them on, that they would turn out to be too tight. So far, they feel tight but snug.
• I used the free file recovery software but alas I didn't recover as many files as I had been hoping. I will earn Jenny's wrath again!! Aaaahhh!