Back to Our Regular Schedules

The Chinese Labor holiday is over and we are back to our normal schedules. It feels good to get back into my usual routine. I haven't been getting the best sleep this past week. We love our internet telephone line and being able to keep our old number helps us keep in touch with people back in the U.S. Unfortunately, that also means telemarketers. We have put our number on the National Do Not Call List, but we still get calls. Since our number looks like a normal Georgia telephone number, people don't know we aren't actually in Georgia or even in the U.S. This means that we get telemarketer calls during normal U.S. business hours, which in China means the middle of the night. The worst has been this past week where we got a telephone call at around 2am from an unidentified caller (we have caller ID). Not just once, but for 3 consecutive nights at roughly the same time. One of those mornings, that telemarketing call was followed by a second one from another company a couple of hours later. Bleah. I am a somewhat light sleeper and once I have been woken up, I have a hard time falling back to sleep. The third night, I anticipated an early AM wake up call, so I positioned the telephone in a convenient place. I managed to answer it on the second ring but no one responded on the other end! No one! And then the line went dead. I was so annoyed. An internet search showed that the number belonged to Six Flags and that other people had also been similarly annoyed with a no answer-hangup. We called the number back and left a message to stop calling. So far, so good.

Yesterday, we had Penny, her sister (Li Li), and her sister's son (Dan Dan) over for dinner. Between Eric's Joe collection and our game console, Dan Dan was enjoying himself immensely. In China, it is considered impolite to call your elders by their first name. Instead, you refer to them as 'Aunt' (ā yí) and 'Uncle' (shū shu). Dan Dan was informed that Eric Shū Shu understood some Mandarin, but he had to speak slowly. Throughout the evening Dan Dan spoke --- very --- slowly --- and --- distinctly to Eric. To me, however, he spoke in his usual rapid Mandarin, forgetting that I know even less Mandarin than Eric. He told me a story about his grandmother and a cat. That is about all I managed to pick up. Li Li saw Mugsy sleeping on the bed and commented on how real our cat looked. For a minute I thought we had the stuffed toy cat out someplace, but then realized that she was referring to Mugs. I patted him to get him to stir a bit and we all laughed hard at the 'real' cat.



Eric had bought a new Snake Eyes back in the U.S. about a year or so ago. These are the new generation Joes. They're about 8-10 inches tall and have been designed to look more like Japanese anime characters. Eric had it in his office back in the U.S. and he brought it with him here. He gave it to Dan Dan. Here, they're looking at all of Snake Eyes' accessories.

We also played Wii games. We bought several new games over the weekend. One of which is called 'Mama Cook Off' and the objective is to prepare meals by chopping, stirring, and cooking items. We both burned our shrimp dishes and neither of us can figure out the proper way to tear lettuce leaves. Another game is called 'Elebits' and you need to find and capture all these little creatures that are bits of electricity (get it?). You can tear up a room in search of these creatures. Eric and I were playing it together and he kept flinging a bookcase around. I think that is the main reason why he likes to play that game.

Dinner was easy to serve since I had prepared much of it in advance. I just needed to warm everything and put some rice in the cooker and that was it. I made a lot of food because I just have no idea how much people can eat, especially a 10-year old active boy. I made pork ribs with a garlicky black bean sauce, roasted chicken legs, meatballs, bok choy, and green beans with garlic. Later on, Eric and Dan Dan were playing with his Joes. It must make no sense to a 10-year old boy why Eric just keeps all these toys to look at.



Today, I went out and bought a few things for the house. Paper towels, cat litter, and the like. I am reminded of my college days when I run my errands. Now, like then, I do not have a car and I use my backpack to schlep stuff home. I put a 10 L bag of cat litter in my backpack today and brought it home on the metro. The package doesn't give weight, but I imagine it weighs about 20 lbs. The metro was crowded today. I was in an already full car when a dozen+ people came out of nowhere and crammed themselves into the car at the last minute. From my limited viewpoint, it appeared that a person got caught temporarily in the doors. I had bought some rolls at the bakery and had to work hard to keep them from being smashed.

Now I'm at home. I've emptied out the last 2 packing boxes and I'm quite pleased with myself. I've put some laundry out on the balcony to dry. I had forgotten how wonderful clothes smell when you've dried them out on a line.