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.

The Andis Kaulins in China Diary for September 30 to October 6, 2013

Monday [September 30]

[Home Laptop]

Tony went to school.

Andis read fifty pages of the Search of Modern China. He also watched the first hour of a movie in which Ava Gardner plays a woman named Pandora.

Andis picked Tony up at two p.m. His school got out early today. The parking around the school was frightful, even for the e-bikers. There was even a traffic jam with an irate motorist which made Andis laugh.

At three PM, the K family took a bus downtown so they could go to the Grandma's restaurant in the Nanchang Market.

They got to the Grandma's restaurant at 4:30PM. They were quickly seated but had to wait for their guests to arrive.

The guests, two of Tony's Primary School teachers, arrived at 6:05 PM. Andis was annoyed.

Jenny and the teachers chatted till about 8:00 PM. During that time, Andis read about five chapters of the novel Quo Vadis. He also came up with an idea to write a piece about taking up smoking again – it is something he would put on the school's website.

The K family arrived home about 10:00 PM.

Tuesday [October 1]

[Home Laptop]

Chinese National Day. I didn't work.

We had lunch, at the Wanda Plaza Pizza Hut, with an American who is teaching English at Jiangsu Xishan High School which is the Hui Shan District, just down the street from the Tesco and Wanda Plaza. Bill, I learned, is from California and has had experience teaching in Vietnam before coming to Wuxi.

Why did he come to Wuxi? He told me because of what he read in my blog. My bloggings, he said, made him choose a gig in Wuxi instead of in Shanghai.

He went on to tell me that I must be famous because of my blog. It seems that any time a teacher explores the possibility of teaching in Wuxi, my website appears high on the search rankings.

I mention what he said not to be boastful. When he said I was famous, I immediately thought that it couldn't be so. I really think I am like the Unabomber, the Unabomber of Wuxi. I sit in my small apartment in the hinterland of Wuxi sending out packets of satire and reaction.

If I really was famous, I would be getting speaking fees and engaging in more correspondence with readers. It could be that my reactionary views turn off lots of readers.

Anyway, I learned that there are twelve foreigners living at the Xishan High School. I never would have thunk it. It seems that I'd never cross paths with any of them, except Bill, because I work evenings and weekends and don't have much time to hang in the area of the Xishan school. The teachers hang out at the Starbucks at the Wanda Plaza but the chances of my being there in the evenings are rare.

The Xishan High School teachers are given dormitory style accommodations in their school. One of the reasons Bill wanted to talk to me was to see what I could tell him about renting an apartment in the area. The school accommodations left something to be desired, he told me.

After lunch with Bill, the K family wandered through the Wanda Plaza. There were far too many people there for Andis. He told Jenny that he wanted to be beamed out. After an hour of conversation with a foreigner, he was plum tuckered out.

Andis ordered a chocolate sundae at the McDonald's ice cream stand. It was just his luck that the chocolate syrup was running out. He saw the manager, a chubby woman with short hair and glasses, desperately tapping on the syrup dispenser trying to get the requisite amount of chocolate on his sundae. The manager had to run to the main restaurant counter with his sundae to get another bag of syrup.

What is AKIC's opinion of Starbucks? He is not a fan. He doesn't really like to consume anything they serve there, whether it be a beverage of food; and he thinks the atmosphere doesn't rate the premium that makes its product so expensive.

In the evening, Andis took Tony on an E-Bike ride to Yanqiao town. He got there just as the crowds were all making their way home.

Wednesday [October 2]

[Home Laptop]

I don't work today. The fourth of my five days off. The second of the three day Chinese National Holiday.

I didn't bespatter my blogs with any National Day symbols. The Mao Dynasty is not truly worthy of celebration.

When I took Tony to Yanqiao town last night, I bought him a book that I shown him in a book store. The book was a full of fold-and-glue-together trucks, emergency vehicles, and trains; and so he liked it immediately. When we got home, he had me put together the firetruck for him. This morning, he stuck his face into my face to wake me up and ask me to put together one of the buses in the book. Now, I wish I hadn't shown him that book. I hate arts and crafty things.

I have an idea for my Views of China from Casa Kaulins video series. I will record drive-bys. That is, I will focus the camera on one vehicle or person moving past the Casa Kaulins window. Five or Six of these drive-bys will make a VOCFCK video. VOCFCK #27 will be the first.

I have set up the train set for Tony. He specifically asked me to set the track on bridges. He usually asks me to do this, but this time he asked because he was thinking to reenact the CRH high speed train crash of last year. He watched a video reenactment of the crash on Youku many times over. What had happened was that one train stalled out on the tracks because of an electrical problem brought on by a thunderstorm and then another train then ran into it. Train cars flew off the track which runs on a fifty meter high platform bridge. One car ended leaning against the side of the track bridge, one end in the air, the other in the ground. Tony had a train car do the same thing with the train set.

Tony wanted to go out and look at trains. So, I took him to the 惠江大桥 (pinyin: hui jiang da qiao), the bridge that links Wuxi and Jiangyin, and is our usual place to watch trains.

Before we got to the bridge, we rode through some spots of countryside residences that hadn't yet been claimed by apartment building developers. The countryside, we passed, didn't look at all natural. It seemed to be a place on the fringe of a garbage dump. Anything resembling a bigger patch of natural woodland was used as a dumping spot for trash.

At the Hui Jiang Bridge, we saw one train, and then Tony, after having begged to look at trains, wanted to go back. I suppose this was because he was annoyed at my being annoyed at him. What had happened was that he had decided to sit on the e-bike, as it was parked, despite my telling him not to. When the e-bike tipped over as I feared it would, I really got annoyed at Tony and absolutely blasted him verbally for not having listened to me. My harangue caused him to put on a pouty hurt look which caused me to immediately give him a consoling hug. But he had lost interest in spotting trains and looking at the goats ( which were grazing nearby under the Hui Jiang Bridge) after his mishap.

Tony, even in a pouty mood, didn't want to go home without spending some time in the Hui Shan Central Park. There, he tried to play with kids who didn't seemed interested in playing with him. Like father; like son.

Andis, who finds the time spent at the park playground dreadfully dull, passed the time reading Quo Vadis on his Ipod. After finishing a chapter, he wandered the hill going to spots of the park that he hadn't stood at before. At one place, he saw some older persons using farming tools to clear a spot of grass on a little bump of land standing amidst a swamp. Were they going to use the spot to grow some vegetables? Andis wondered. At another spot he was sickened to see to tissue paper and turds. The public park was disgusting beyond all belief, still, to Andis whose Western eyes were nine years removed from Canada.

Thursday [October 3]

[Home Laptop]

Last day of the holiday.

Last night, Andis & Tony went to the Tesco KFC (as opposed to the Wanda KFC) for dinner. Jenny went downtown to have her hair done.

In the middle of dinner, Andis noticed that Tony had put his pants on backwards. So Andis, not giving two cares about the decorum of it, took Tony's pants off and put them on proper.

The weather being nice, Andis & Tony walked to the Wanda Plaza. After a search of the places where toys could be bought, a boat that could be a bathtub toy was found and purchased. Andis & Tony returned home where it was no problem to get Tony to take a bath.

Tony then went to bed at a decent time.

Andis read David Warren's excitement about the government shutdown in the USA, and became excited himself. He hopes it lasts a long time. The Democrats, particularly Obama and Harry Reid are totally at fault in this affair.

Andis finished watching Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. An interesting movie with Ava Gardner looking very beautiful in an adult way, and James Mason speaking in a compelling style. He then started watching Hud with Paul Newman.

On his days off, Andis has had a chance to wander around the area passing by residences. Even the poorest looking neighborhoods, full of dank dirty decaying structures, have cars parked everywhere. What portion of their budgets are put into having a car?

Finishing watching Hud. I'll remember you Honey! You're the one the got away! Funny, I thought the line had “baby,” not “honey.” It was the second time I had seen the movie. From the first viewing, I remembered not liking the Hud character and not quite understanding the attraction between him and the strong woman character. The rest of the story I had completely forgotten. I find I'd liked the movie much better, watching it a second time.

The first time, the film left me cold. For the life of me, I can't remember exactly when it was that I saw the movie the first time.

There is a reason, I now see, why Newman is a movie star. His appearance. Those deep set eyes. And he doesn't ever overplay it. He is cool.

In the afternoon, Tony decided, after refusing earlier when asked, to go out of doors. He decided that he wanted to be taken to the playground at the Hui Shan Central Park. I didn't want to, preferring instead to take Tony an an e-bike ride of exploration around the area, but he wouldn't have anything to do with it, so to the park we went. I told Tony he had half an hour to play – thirty minutes being about all I can stand at the park which is dirty and trashy and full of too many people starring at me.

I had taken some solace from having seen that the people running the park had placed barriers at the entrance to stop visitors from driving their cars into the park using the park sidewalks as roadways. But as I entered the park I saw three vehicles had driven in all the same. Bloody toads, I thought, how did they do it? (When I told Jenny about this in the evening, she said that that was like Chinese to not care rules and other people. And if there was a way to get around common rules of behavior, they would find a way, she added.)

I suppose they will have to put tank barriers around the park to stop the vehicles from being driven in.

Much to my relief, Tony wanted to leave the park after fifteen minutes. However, he wanted to go to the Wanda Plaza and still wasn't interested in my exploration ideas, and so we went to the Wanda Plaza. There, we wandered. Tony went to his favorite haunts: a curio shop that sells toys and the Apple shop. We also went to the arcade and it was good to see that Tony was tall enough to play a driving game which had steering wheel and foot pedals. We capped our time together at the McDonald's where I had a double cheeseburger for the first time in the Hui Shan District after having lived there for five years...

Friday [October 4]

[School Laptop]

I work 11:00 to 21:00 today. It isn't a holiday officially, though it is for many Chinese who had their days off shifted around so they could get October 1 to October 7 off.

I don't feel like going work today. I really am going through the motions.

I wore long sleeves today. Maybe, I shouldn't have. I am sweating in the noon hour heat.

Saturday [October 4]

[School Laptop]

I work 10:00 to 18:00 today.

Alpha Kilo Indian Charlie

Tango Kilo Indian Charlie

Last night, on the bus ride home, I began to watch the movie Becket. I had found it mentioned on a list of top 100 Catholic movies on the Internet. After having watched about thirty minutes of it, I think it is a smashing picture with Peter O'Toole, Lawrence of Arabia, performing great in his role as the King and Richard Burton playing the role of Becket.

A interesting thing happened as I was watching the film. A scene early in the movie featured characters in ecclesiastical garb. A woman next to me saw this, tapped me on the shoulder, and showed me a cross that she had on what looked to be a transistor radio, but perhaps was her mobile phone. I guess she was a Christian. It was good to see.

[Home Laptop]

Tony & Jenny came downtown and met me after I finished teaching classes. We had dinner at Baishiluo and then walked to the newly open Suning Plaza.

Suning Plaza is a new shopping mall next to the Moresky360 Building and opposite the Banana Leaf Restaurant. I believe it was built on the former location of the #1 People's Hospital but Jenny says it wasn't. When I first heard about the Suning Plaza opening, I sarcastically thought that it was just what Wuxi needed: another large shopping mall. I had no intention of going to it but the idea to visit it came to me at dinnertime when Jenny said she wanted to go for a wander after we finished eating. The new mall was seven stories high with lots of clothing stores and restaurants. I don't see myself spending much time at that place other than to eat at a restaurant. The mall had nothing in it that other shopping areas in downtown Wuxi already had.

I will have to do some penance after my behavior on the bus. I didn't lost my temper or anything like that on that bus. I just was acting thoughtlessly and hadn't realized I was till Jenny pointed it out to me. I seemed to be too happy to have been able to get a seat on the bus, said Jenny, and I was earning the ire of someone standing next to me. I shall have to make a point of not being the first to get on the 635 bus and do a stretch of standing on my way home to make up for it.

Sunday [October 6]

[School Laptop]

I don't work today.

It is a rainy day. Not much to do but stay indoors.

I was out early in the morning to do an errand and I was wearing a e-bike raincoat while riding the e-bike. Something I hadn't done in years. There was a time when I took my e-bike from Casa Kaulins all the way to Zhongshan and Xueqian roads. Flat tires forced me to ride the bus.

I finished the 1964 film Becket starring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. It was a great movie, with a great story, well-acted, well-shot with great sets.

A typhoon is supposed to come to Wuxi. Of course, it won't be hitting Wuxi full bore since Wuxi is about 100 km or so inland, but I won't be going out tomorrow.

We are supposed to go to the Wanda Plaza tonight. Jenny is treating the family that gives Tony a ride to school in the morning to dinner. Hopefully, we will go to the Xinjiang Restaurant.

I wasn't aware that the National Hockey League had realigned its division so that the Winnipeg Jets are now in the West instead of in a division of teams from the Atlantic Seaboard. But I found out soon enough as I looked at the NHL standings for the first time this season. The Jets have won their first two games of the season.

Jenny says the Typhoon will come to Wuxi tonight. We will have to close the windows, batten the hatches as it were.