September 15th Today’s first job, now that we had electricity again, was to upload photos from the phone to the computer and complete the Blog from Friday to yesterday, before uploading it to the web. Outside was looking much better, it wasn’t raining, what a waste of a day!
Most of the town is now passable for both foot and mobile traffic.
One of the good things here is that it is not only the government who do the
clear up, lots of ordinary people help too. We used to see it in
Being housebound meant that we would have fewer photos today. However, the young apprentice intrepid explorer, moi, found a bug outside the window!
The electricity kept going off intermittently today, resulting in me losing my work. One time it ruined the Picasa database so I had to uninstall and reinstall the software. As if I wasn’t busy enough Huan came to ask me to print out some music for her. The printer was out of toner and the new toner kept giving me an error message.
Huan spotted a little chip on the underside of the old toner, not visible on the new one. This was one of the pair of spare toners that we bought with the printer.
You can see the chip in that last photo. To avoid having to unwrap the second spare we contacted the original supplier, who thankfully was still available on Taobao. We told him what the problem was and attached those photos. He told us to remove the chip from the old toner and put it into the new one, there was a place for it. Eureka, problem solved! Huan was pleased.
Just before dinner I lost all power again so I made sure everything was off and we set off for a very short walk to the buffet restaurant. Huan almost trod on this one!
Here are today’s healthy choices.
I’m happy to say that Picasa had not failed this time so I could get back to work. Of course the ‘face’ database will take a long time but I am trying to remove everyone who is not family. I may also have to look into buying another UPS as well, more expense.
September 16th Our door surround man arrived this morning and got busy straight away.
I also got busy and emptied a bookcase so that I could get behind it to see what new sockets I would have to order for the office.
Huan managed to catch me taking parts of our desk to pieces too. That will be replaced as soon as the sockets are finished.
I spent some time on Taobao ordering the electrical items and the new desks and also browsing for phones. There are far too many sources of information on the internet so in the end we visited our ISP. Here I am having a go at the salesman about the missing phone, the one we had seen earlier this week. I shouldn’t have tried to wind him up, he was extremely helpful. In fact between him and Huan I ended up ordering a far more expensive phone than I had been planning to. You can’t see it yet though, the colour I wanted was out of stock so we had to order it.
On our way to the shopping centre I had to stop and put these two gentlemen to rights, they didn’t know that Huan was Chinese!
After our quick shop it was time for dinner, a nice healthy one. The little bit on the right of Huan’s dish and in the centre of mind is pork kidney. I have never seen it prepared like that before so we both had to try it. It was not bad at all, all I have to do no is learn how they did it.
On the way home I stopped to chat with Doudou and Dafu. I think they were looking at ‘Mum’.
As we passed our nearest bridge Huan pointed out that the control buildings had suffered some damage. As we got nearer we could see that the mountain actually came down the hill and pushed all the control and instrumentation equipment right out of the other side.
Behind the building we found that we could not go home that way, at least not this evening.
Back home I thought I should show you why I need a new phone. Actually I suppose I really only need another new battery but this phone has had enough of them. I have not opened it; the battery has swollen; only the plastic case, not in the picture, keeps it all together.
Huan also asked me to throw away my ‘splinter’. I have had this, in
this little 6cm container, since one of our last rehearsals for
September 17th Today’s first worker was me, fitting a ‘basket’ in the second bathroom.
Door finisher turned up too although Huan took fewer photos today.
I left Huan to supervise and went out to fetch money for her Taobao account and to buy our lunch. Photography subjects were rare but some snowbirds have returned.
I decided we should have Ròu jiā mó for lunch and had to wait while they prepared them for me. I took the opportunity to sneak a coffee and a fag, no photos of that though.
After we scoffed our lovely lunch and finished our naps, Lù jīnglǐ and Xiǎo wáng came to remove the bunk bed from our second bedroom. When we moved here in 2015 we had all these wonderful ideas about visitors from foreign parts. Well we were very disappointed. Apart from our children, none of our siblings, on either side, or any of our friends have visited us. We will be replacing the bed tomorrow, but this is how the room looks now.
In the evening we went out to order the bed and as we had to get back in time for Huan’s online keyboard lesson we had burgers for dinner. I forgot to record them for posterity but you can have the pictorial history of Wallace’s instead.
September 18th The new bed for the second bedroom would arrive this morning but first it was time for the local workforce to get down to it. As always, the director was present!
Bedroom man turned up before I finished, just as well or you would have had far too many snaps of me. I hope you have enough of him, I did prune a few.
The room appears much lighter now, it will be even more so when we clear the window sill.
Baps were missing from our freezer and we needed milk for the fridge so we rushed out. Once we were out, the baps took second place because we didn’t have time. We did have lunch though.
On the way home we met an enormous dog, any ideas on what make it is?
Naps were imperative today as we both got up last night because we couldn’t sleep and went back to bed at three. After our naps we had an important journey to make. My new phone had arrived, Huan forgot all about photos. She did however take some of me getting a new number for the new phone.
Sometimes doing things like this can be a pain in the proverbial, meaning Huan has to try and translate every detail for me. Today both the sales guy and the accounts lady spoke very good English. Of course I still have no idea what really happened but I do now have a new phone and a new number. Here are new and old side by side.
I will show you photos from the new phone when I manage to work it all out. The old phone was a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10x Pro with its user interface overlaid on Android 12. The new phone is a Huawei Nova 16 Pro, its user interface has nothing to do with Android at all. Instead it is using Huawei’s own software Harmony OS Version 6.1.0. Much learning will be needed!
Being far too busy we ate out for the second time today.
On our way home we popped into a curtain shop, preliminary investigations for the office. Also I frog-marched Huan into the pharmacy, she has been coughing for days. Hopefully the medicines they gave her will sort her out.
September 19th Saturday came round again, as it often does, so we decided a nice relaxing walk through the market would make a nice change. We took the Huawei and left the camera at home. Things started well, here’s our first photo of the day.
Apart from cropping nothing else has been changed and I have no idea how to use my phone camera yet, that may take some time. The rest of today’s photos are the same, all auto. Here are some zoom trials, X1, X2, X3.72, and X10, much better than the old Xiaomi phone.
Here’s a X10 of a dog on our new beach.
We should of course have looked up at the sky! Here’s Huan buying some sweet corn for lunch tomorrow and a crop showing her shoe.
The only saving grace about the rain was that it was much easier to walk around today.
On the way home we tried a selfie, it’s good enough.
Just before the house we snapped a very active butterfly. The Xiaomi would never have captured this. I took two with the Huawei, I think this one passed the test.
We did make a short video in the market; the Li ladies were dancing in the rain. If you want to check it out, go here - https://youtu.be/Lr23sxTKIrc
After our normal naps we moved the furniture around in the second bedroom again, hopefully for the last time! Within minutes the boss was feeling off and had to disappear back to bed. She stayed there for the rest of the day. In fact she is still there as I write this a nearly half past eight. As for me, well my work had already been organised, not by SWMBO for a change but all by myself. I had to clear out all the old desks ready for Lu and Wang to take them. I also needed to clear all the books off the window sill so that I would have a place to use the computer in the interim. New desks should arrive before too long.
All that hard work meant that I needed a break so I disappeared downstairs for a coffee and yet another fag. What a bad boy I am this month! I sat in the convenience garden; our old ones are in there somewhere. It was nice to just sit and relax.
Back upstairs all that was left was to show you how far I had got.
I’d hate you to think that I was ignoring Huan while all this was going on, I wasn’t. In fact I popped in a few times, even made rice soup one time. However, she changed her mind. I tried giving her the medicine she bought yesterday, that was also declined.
My work was done for the day, I made myself a sausage, egg, cheese and gherkin sandwich, it did the job for this evening. Tomorrow I will be back to electrical work again, replacing all the sockets in the office. The new ones arrived today.
The clear out includes memories,
memories of shows, but needs must. All the brass items, mostly used as props,
have already gone, all the scripts went up to
September 20th Well I got down to my work this morning and the director was not there to take a million photos. She had missed her music lesson last night so she was doing some catching up this morning. I completed the sockets without her.
Huan did manage to catch me doing the A/C socket though; in fact she caught me on two sides because the wire was very short between the two sides of the wall.
The only part left undone was the wall light. I had been hoping that it had been installed in a normal flush mounting fitting. Instead they appear to have filled any hole that was there. I will have to order a surface mounting box for what we want to do.
Later in the afternoon Lu and Wang turned up to remove the old office desks and bookcases. After eleven years we are quite glad to see them go, we bought too cheap.
We had a little walk around town before dinner to see if we could find non-white surface mounting boxes. We couldn’t. Instead, here are our dinners.
Back home for Huan’s daily lesson, my Blog creation and more Taobao searching. Funnily enough the sounds of the keyboard stopped after a while. The ‘bait’ of six three lessons and a cheap tutorial book changed to rather a large charge for the next two months. On top of that there was no book in the express delivery lockers. Huan immediately dropped out! If you sign up for something locally there is no guarantee that they will still be here in a few weeks or months, how is the internet any different. She’s a wise lady is Mrs. Bob.
September 21st This morning I was a lonely boy in the house. Huan had to go and renew her Hainan Hukou card so I sent her off alone. It took me a while to throw her out; even promising that I would empty the washing machine and hang the clothes didn’t convince her. Eventually she went and the whole process was very quick. She caught a bus outside our place with no waiting, got through the new card process with no bother and then caught a bus home again with just a little wait. In that little wait she found a few cows to photograph.
While she was out I did my duty and hung up the washing. The office floor also got a clean; it was needed before the desks arrive. Apart from that all I did was my daily Chinese lessons. For some reason we napped rather too long today. I then spent ages transferring photos from my old phone to my new phone, by Bluetooth. Later on I worked out that it can be done with the USB connector on the new phone, yesterday I had failed to get that option working. Huan’s appetite has returned so we visited the spicy place again.
Here are our dinners, some kind of chicken soup for Huan and tomato soup for me.
We did a bit of shopping afterwards and then while waiting for the lift, on the walkway, I looked up and saw the moon. I’ll give it a go I thought and set the phone to X10 magnification. I have no idea what the phone did, I certainly didn’t ask it to do anything at all, but I am not at all displeased with the result. What say you? This is a heavily cropped version. The old phone would certainly never have done that.
Slowly our humble abode is taking shape once again, next week you may even see new desks. All you have to do is subscribe and don’t forget to click to enlarge and comment. Until then we both bid you a fond farewell.
