Tony & Andis Driving in China #5

Tony & Andis Driving in China #4

Tony's Interested in the World Cup!

I knew the World Cup was coming and so I put a World Cup app on my phone.

My son Tony then told me that he was interested in the tournament and that he wanted to watch some of the matches.  And so I put the World Cup app on his phone.  This interest of his seemingly came out of the blue.  I hadn't planned on even mentioning to him that the tournament was taking place.  Where this interest came from I can only conjecture. Was it his classmates?  A teacher at school or at his numerous after-school places?

When I was Tony's age, I remember watching the coverage on the 1974 World Cup.  1974 was the second year that I was into sports.  This interest was the result, I recall, from my father buying me a Toronto Maple Leafs table hockey game for Christmas in 1972.  It was his attempt to turn me into a Leafs fan.  It quickly failed because I instead became enamoured with the Montreal Canadiens.  I watched a lot of their 1973 Stanley Cup run although I have distinct memories of being forced to go to bed early on the night they clinched the cup.  Anyway, the point of that digression is that on my own, I developed my own sports interests.  And Tony has done the same, though I wonder if actually watching a Kickball* match would bore him.

In the World Cup, I will be cheering for Poland; the Poland that I imagine is reactionary and Catholic.  You can click here to see for whom Tony will be cheering.

*It is from David Warren that I call that sport, being played in the World Cup, Kickball.  I don't like calling it soccer because that word is gay, and I don't call it football because the Americans already have a sport called Football.  I wouldn't want to argue with some Football players about the semantics or syntax of their calling their sport Football because most of them are two or three times as big as Kickball players.

Wuxi China Metro Train Crossing the Xi Bei Canal #2

Extracting Ourselves from a Traffic Jam

Every once in a while, when I take Tony to school, the traffic lights at two major intersections near Tony's school stop working.  At the intersections, there are three lanes going left, right and straight.  The local drivers, being selfish and not knowing how to act in uncontrolled intersections, cause traffic trying to get through to grind to halt.  The only ones who can get through are perhaps the ones making right turns.

This latest morning of having to deal with this was particularly annoying for me because I had to be at work early.  So in a fit of impatience, I impulsively thought that I could finesse my way through the first intersection, but I quickly regretted it because a truck making a right turn from my right hand side was trapped and blocking my way.  However, I was lucky because I could back out and do what I should have done in the first place: which was make a right turn and try my luck at the other intersection.  

But heading toward it, I saw the lights were out there as well.  There, I thought first to make a left turn, thinking again I could finesse my way through, but again there was a truck trying to get through the intersection that was trapped by cars trying to go in three other directions.  Anyway, it was a situation that a few policeman would be needed to fix, and there were none in sight.  So, my only choice was to make Tony get out of the car and have him walk a block to his school.  He readily agreed to do this and I was, after making a four point back-up and turn-around that confused the drivers surrounding me, able to make a right turn in a direction toward a road with no traffic and get myself home and then to work on time.

Wuxi China Metro Train Crossing the Xi Bei Canal #3

Tony & Andis Driving in China #3

Tony & Andis Driving in China #1

If We Get Tony a Drum Set, Where Would We Put It?

My wife Jenny told me that Tony is playing air drums in his math class, and that he really wants a drum set.

He would like to put in in the empty space we have in our living room.  But that would of course cause conflict with all our neighbors.  Jenny also has an office that she rents, but that wouldn't do either for putting a drum set because her office in is a mixed residential commercial building.  Someone would get annoyed.