More Cooking, New Printer, Phone Camera Comparison, Gifs

June 23^rd The BOSS was out early today, the final rehearsal. I had thought the show was on Thursday but it’s actually tomorrow. By nine o’clock I was falling asleep in front of the computer again, I’m getting worse than my fathers, (yes, I had two). Forcing my eyes open with a couple of toothpicks I decided to cook this afternoon’s dinner this morning, thus leaving the afternoon free to go back to the Chinese Medicine hospital for the doc to check my chest.

As I was having my well deserved NAAFI break, around half past ten, I received a panicky phone call from SWMBO. “Where are you?” I guess she thought I was out walking somewhere. When I reassured her that I was at home cooking she told me that the printer had arrived and the courier company was waiting downstairs for me. That was fast; we only ordered it on Sunday!

After lunch I got down to it, with the supervising manager checking my every move and sometimes even trying to get her fingers in. I got mine into the box to remove the spare black ink bottles and they came out like this.

The printer itself was in perfect condition, the box was very well protected. Now if only they had put the black ink bottles in a plastic bag… Here’s the new (small) beast sitting on the window sill, it looks a lot more fragile than the old HP, feels it too. Still, you get what you pay for.

The white box on the side is the ‘ink tanks’ which are by now almost standard ‘extras’ on all printers sold in China. Setting up was easy enough, all the instructions were in English (French included too), I think it was originally meant for Canada. They even provide a special earth connection which it seems is mandatory in Canada, it would do no good at all here!

Next up was testing it to make sure all was OK, it was. Printing from the front tray or the back tray, scanning from the flatbed or the ADF, even the fax set-up was easy but that may take me a while to test. I need a friend with a fax. The ‘proof of the pudding is always in the eating’ as they say and so the final test for us was printing out a photo of Huan and her brother and sisters to put on our sibling wall. “It’s dark on one side” came the plaintive remark to which I responded “That is the fault of whoever took the photo, not me”. All the photos on the sibling wall are done in Sepia, just in case you wondered about the colour.

So, what did I cook for our dinner? Today it was a concoction of my own, not from a recipe. First boil some noodles, when ready take off, rinse and set aside. Second, boil some carrots and cauliflower, again set aside. Third, fry some onions and garlic, add some chopped chicken breast along with some Italian seasoning and cook. Once that was ready, add the carrots and cauliflower, simmer just a little, add some Greek yoghurt and cheese, simmer just a little more. Finally, add the noodles, stir like crazy and serve. The result was delicious!

June 24^th BREAKING NEWS! As reported by our chief roving reported, Ms (harangue the committee) Huan, there is news on the gas front. As the owner of the company we were dealing with died, (a long time ago, see previous posts), his family decided they don’t want the company anymore. Well, it seems, in the Chinese way of doing things, the onus now falls on the previous company who sold this part to this company. Lost? So am I, and I still don’t see how this gets us anywhere neared getting our gas problems sorted.

Reveille was early today, I was the chauffeur for Huan and Yu, and also their tame photographer. When we arrived I was told that I was expected and given a ‘seat at the table’. Not bad I thought, I’ll be able to get some good photos and maybe videos too.

Unfortunately, at least when the choir was singing, the position was not practical at all; the choir mistress was between me and the choir! I didn’t have the heart to move from where I was, not with all the other people with cameras and phones all over the place. Still, they had a lovely group photo in the other room before they performed.

Was it a good show? To say they had been rehearsing for less than two weeks I think they did a marvellous job. I did manage a few videos with the Keymission and the Fuji but ran into problems with both. The Keymission overheated and the Fuji ran out of power, both in the middle of different performances. Never mind, there will be many videos flying around for the next couple of days while they all share with each other. They were all very pleased with themselves and I had to take final group photos and promise to ‘perform’ myself next time!

The three teachers are on the left of the front row and they all sing very well. The gent second from the left has had a lung transplant after which, to help his recuperation, he taught himself to sing. If you heard him, you wouldn’t believe it, he may not have the power of a Pavarotti but he sings very well, so much so that he performs solos just like the other two.

Back home and it was my turn to cook again, Huan has been just a little too busy. Today was another of Bob’s concoctions, this time a sausage casserole but with the left over noodles that we had bought on Monday. Fresh noodles don’t keep very well. So how was this one made? First the noodles were boiled and set aside, second I fried some garlic and spring onions, with the green part then added some chopped up sausages. Two types of sausage were used, one sweet dry Chinese one that I use instead of chorizo and three ordinary ones, but with pepper in them. Following that was a lot of chopped tomato and a little tomato sauce, simmer a while, add a tin of kidney beans, simmer a little longer. Finally add the noodles and heat through. As always, or nearly always, we were both satisfied with the result.

After dinner I did my usual and sat on the balcony with a little iced coffee and a fag and then did a double take. I have never seen so much traffic on our road before, it was so bad we had police controlling both the crossroads at one end and the entrance to the ‘council flats’ at the other end. Huan thought it was due to everyone being on holiday for the next three days because of Dragon Boat Festival. It did look a bit like a British Bank Holiday weekend after the lifting of Lockdown!

Huan was a happy bunny for a while, her new phone arrived. She wasn’t happy long though, it requires a ‘nano Sim card’ whereas her existing one is a ‘micro’ Sim card. As you know, Huan does not have the patience of a saint so she was straight out to the phone shop! That was the easy part. We had put the phone into English so that I could help her with the set up and installation of apps like Alipay and WeChat. Alipay was easy enough, WeChat was impossible. We did manage in the end by putting her phone back to Chinese. For some reason, which we haven’t been able to find out yet, the phone also came with no instructions. I am seriously reconsidering buying a cheap Android, I may have to splash out a bit more!

June 25^th Before we could do anything this morning Huan’s phone had to be charged! She had played with it so much last night that it was just about empty. We could have charged it overnight but we don’t like leaving things like that in the other room overnight and we also don’t like phones in the bedroom.

Before we left home we experimented with the camera on Huan’s phone which didn’t turn out so well. I had set the camera up last night for 16:9 and 8MB. Her first two photos of the scenery outside our bedroom were weird, almost soft focus. That could have been something to do with the ‘beauty’ settings but as it’s all back to Chinese now I’m lost. Her next photo was only 500kB, I have no idea how she managed that. At last we got one that worked, the colour is much better than her old phone but still not all that natural. This is it after a Picasa tweak.

By quarter to ten we were off to the hospital to see if the Chinese doctor was there. I didn’t believe he would be, after all, we do have three days public holiday. Huan thought that doctors always worked, even during holidays. He wasn’t there and won’t be back until Sunday, I got great pleasure out of saying “I told you so” even if it was a bit mean.

Another trip to the bank was next to put some more money into Taobao, yes, I have decided on which phone to buy. More on that when it arrives, but I can tell you, it’s as cheap as chips, just like Huan’s. Also just like hers, there will be no instruction manual as according to the shop, “All androids are the same and no one needs a book.” I told Huan she should have told him that we were not 20 year old nerds but OAPs!

Today’s dinner plans were spoiled, twice. My first choice was a quiche made without pastry but using sweet potatoes instead. The filing was supposed to be spinach but, just like Monday, none was available. Thinking on my feet I thought I’ll make Huan a Scottish “Stovie” but with lamb instead of beef and sweet potatoes instead of normal. This is the most common way to buy lamb here; supermarkets don’t sell it any other way, that would mean a trip to the wholesalers.

After lunch I spent hours playing with Huan’s old phone, it seemed like hours to me, trying to see if I could find English WeChat in the store and trying to install Endomondo from an apk file. I was successful on both points hence the order was made for my new phone. Wasting all that time though had put the kybosh on the ‘Stovie’ so a basic lamb stew was made instead. It looks like you’re going to get a lot of food pictures this week!

There followed a lazy evening for me while Huan went out for her usual walk with Yu. She had extra reason today though, she was going to ask Yu to help her with one of the capabilities of the Alipay app. Now as you would expect, the Alipay app is a way of paying for things, online and in some shops too. What you may not expect is that it also has a little subprogram that counts your steps when you’re walking and puts money into your account as a reward. Who pays for it I don’t know, possibly large companies and advertisers who would like to see where you go?

June 26^th So today’s plan was an easy one, go for a short walk around half the river, it’s been a while, and on the way take some photos with my old phone, Nokia Lumia 1020, and with Huan’s new phone, Little Chilli Mate 30 Max, for comparison purposes. In each case I have chosen only the low resolution from the Nokia and not the higher version. I won’t show you all of the photos we took, there are too many. First, right by our gate, an electric scooter with many colours, not a bad test subject.

If you guessed the first picture was the Nokia you’d be right. It will also be the first photo in all the other comparisons. Little Chilli isn’t too bad here but the colours aren’t quite right. These two were cropped to get the scooter in almost the same place, none of the others have been cropped. No Picasa adjustments have been made to either Huan’s or my photos.

Next up was a normal picture of the men on the bridge again, we were stood almost next to each other, and no zoom was used.

Here the difference is more marked, the Nokia looks better. The photos have been resized for uploading to the blog but before that, the Nokia was 1.9MB and the Chilli was 6.2MB, just goes to show that size is most definitely not everything.

A zoom from the same spot was the next test; those little men are up on the near support today.

This was a real disappointment. The Chilli is abysmal, it’s a terrible photo. Whether or not we did something wrong with Huan’s camera we have no idea. It’s set up on automatic to take 16:9 at 16MB, Huan doesn’t think she changed anything on the shutter controls. Both phones were zoomed in by ‘pinching’ the screen.

Next up we took a normal street scene.

Again the Nokia is a better photo but the Chilli doesn’t fare too badly here. If I use the “I’m feeling lucky” function in Picasa it improves it dramatically. In other words, it can be tweaked, even by amateurs. The zoomed men on the bridge couldn’t be improved much at all.

We stopped at the weir to take some snaps and videos of the water cascading over the inflated dam. The snaps were not too bad and although the Nokia was better, Little Chilli did well enough. In the videos though, the focus on the moving water was much better with the Nokia.

Something I often do when I’m out is take photos of signs and notices so that Huan can translate them for me when I get home. We found one today.

In this case, although the colours are not quite right on the Chilli, the words are well in focus, to my weary eyes, almost more in focus than the Nokia.

We compared a few close up shots of flowers, not so easy to compare where we both made errors with our focussing, but for the most part, Little Chilli’s colours were not as vibrant.

For our final comparison we thought we’d try a selfie. Now Huan’s phone has all the usual beautification buttons but as far as we know she didn’t use any of them. She also had problems pressing the shutter button although she later found out that the volume button can be used as the shutter when in camera mode. Now if we’d had a manual, we’d have known that!

The photo was taken with the sun shining directly on us, which I think is far more obvious on the Nokia than the Chilli. There was no one click fix for the Chilli photo in Picasa, but it wasn’t too difficult for me to improve it with the use of ‘warmify’ and ‘saturation’.

So what do you think? Let me know in the comments. As for me, now I’m getting very worried about the phone I have ordered, for the hugely expensive price of about 75 pounds, a Genuine Hengyu P40 pro. Still, I can always use the Nokia as a camera only, if I don’t feel like taking the Fuji out with me. It even has a camera grip accessory which improves battery life.

I’ll bet you think that’s enough photos for one day don’t you? Well, it’s not; I have to include today’s dinner. I was the chef again. I suppose that’s not quite true because I didn’t actually cook anything today, I just heated it up in the pan. As is usual for my cooking, we had enough left over yesterday to feed us again today but I modified it. Last night before putting it in the fridge I gave it a good old whiz, practicing for when we have no teeth left. It worked well, reminded me of being a child and always having just soup and bread for dinner on Saturdays. Mind you, that soup came from a tin; this was home made and thus better for us!

June 27^th No comparison photos for you today, in fact no photos at all. Our daily walk was a little better, just over five and a half kilometres in an hour and twenty four minutes. Huan still thinks it’s too much and that my feet will swell if I walk further or faster. It’s actually the other way round, if do walk further and faster my feet swell far less. Anyway, my plan was just to pass by the Bap shop and then come home again. We failed, neither the owner or his wife were there and there were no signs of life today. Our intital thought was that we were too late and they had sold our but then we decided that they must have disappeared for the three day holiday.

We did take a few photos on our way round, mine were just to give me a record of where we walked today. Huan took twenty five pictures of the cats that you saw last week, June 19^th, but none of them were worth reproducing here!

Yesterday, I had warned Huan that we would be taking a photo of her cooking efforts today, it was fish, vegetables and sweet potatoes. Guess what? I forgot all about it…

June 28^th Taobao can sometimes be a bit of a hit and miss affair, especially when buying clothes or footwear. A few days ago we ordered some shorts for me, neither of us could really understand the sizing so we ordered the largest pair available. On this occasion we were very lucky, the seller called Huan on her phone and told her that the size we had ordered was good for someone who weighed a hundred and fifty kilos! He suggested a size to her, they arrived yesterday and here’s me trying them on this morning.

As you can see they fitted well enough so we took them out for a drive, back to the hospital. We almost couldn’t get in to see the doctor, the hospital wanted to see Huan’s “Health Check” and she had left her phone at home. Eventually, by convincing the nurse / receptionist that we had not left Wuzhishan for a long time, and by filling in all our contact information, we got in. Huan was not very happy about all this kerfuffle but I explained to her that it was probably because of the three days holiday just gone by.

Anyway, once we were in, the doctor seemed reasonably happy with the progress of my chest so I thought we’d be off home. No, the CMO had other ideas! She had translated my minor worries but now she became the doctor’s boss and told him what we wanted! The outcome is I have another week’s worth of brown gunge to smear on twice daily. Bless her little cotton socks, she only has my best interests at heart really.

With the extra time we spent in the hospital today I managed to get us to Woye Café again, the owners were quite pleased to see us; we were the first, and probably the last, customers of the day. They are also having water problems at the moment, worse than ours; theirs is only working twice a day. I think our rooftop tanks save us from that. They told us that the reservoir, Tàipíng shuǐkù, is very low on water. They had bought stacks of bottled water so were still able to make drinks, for me a cappuccino and for Huan and iced tea, very nice they were too.

After lunch, because I was not going to be able to ‘wet my chest’ for the next week, I hopped into the bath and took with me “Kings of Albion” which is a tale of “a bunch of tourists from the East looking for a missing kinsman during the Wars of the Roses”. It’s not a bad read.

June 29^th What a boring morning, staying in waiting for a delivery. According to Taobao, my new phone had been in Wuzhishan since yesterday so we thought it would be delivered this morning. It wasn’t.

A lot of my friends have, quite rightly, have been posting pictures of themselves on Facebook wishing the Royal Corps of Signals a happy 100th. To alleviate the boredom I thought I would do the same. Unfortunately, I have almost nothing left, no bits of uniform, no beret, not even any photos in uniform of those days, no memorabilia on my walls etc. Come on, let me hear you say "Aaaaaahhhhhh..." So, I dug out what I do have, a cap badge, two collar dogs, (not used), a veteran's badge and two ties, one Corps tie, one 27th Signal Regiment Hong Kong tie, a track suit, (bought when I was 24 for an upgrading course, called a T1), and of course a bottle of port! Putting all of that together I made a nice little gif again and shared it on FB. Happy Birthday to the Royal Corps of Signals, "Certa Cito"!

By lunchtime we still hadn’t heard from the delivery company so we went off and did our shopping. They eventually turned up as we were eating our dinner, fish, chips and some green vegetables. Now I wouldn’t say I was excited but I was looking forward to unwrapping a new phone, learning how to use Android etc. Within minutes I had decided that this phone was going back, no matter how much I had to argue with the boss about it. The photographs taken with it were horrendous. If they had been as good as Huan’s old phone, I would have accepted it, but they were even worse than her new phone. At a rough guess I would say that the camera lenses are just cheap imitations of real lenses, very cheap imitations. Anyway, Huan agreed with me so back it goes. Taobao is not bad like that, it is possible to return goods. In our case, we have a good ‘customer reputation’ so a return address was given to us almost immediately. You do have to pay for the return shipping but on small items that’s not worth worrying about.

So, what to do about my need for Android? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, when we need to use a health card, I will use Huan’s old phone, until I have saved enough pennies again and we see what comes out in the next few months. Her camera, while not on a par with my Nokia, will at least do for ‘emergencies’ and if we are going somewhere special, we can take the Fuji camera and the Nokia, with its grip, as a camera. Problem solved.

Another week comes to a close, see you soon!

Cooking, Picasa, Rip-Offs, Raiding the Piggy-Bank.

June 16^th Both of us were confined to barracks today, me because the boss gave me orders; and Huan because today’s choral session was cancelled due to the rain. The sluice gates on the first bridge were opened to release the flow from the mountain, not the one where we get our water from but the one that is used for white water rafting. The old sluice gates are of no effect whatsoever and before long the water was deep in front of our house again. Two photos from today, the first is a view of the clouds through the trees, where’s that bigger zoom when you need it, the second one shows that the embankment they built to keep the water away from the construction area didn’t really work.

For the rest of the day Huan did her best impression of Hyacinth Bucket again and tortured my ears non stop. I started binge watching “Lewis” because I couldn’t find any more “Saint” episodes. In the evening chef Bob was once more on duty and today I took us for a normal English style dinner, pork fillets, mashed potatoes and peas. The peas were out of a tin but I tarted them up with fried mushrooms, garlic and green onions then reheated them in the microwave with a knob of butter. When you only have one hotplate you have to find other ways! Various kinds of sauce and mustard were on hand but we didn’t need them.

June 17^th My ‘curfew’ was supposed to end today, but when we got up I was a little worried that it wouldn’t. The rain was still with us; in fact it had been raining nearly all night. Luck was on my side though because we had to go out, lottery tickets needed buying for today and tomorrow. Unlike the lottery in the UK, you can only buy for the next one here, not for more than one in advance. Today is “Sports Lottery” day and tomorrow is “Welfare Lottery” day, hence the purchasing of two tickets. We kept an eye on the weather and set off out when we thought that the rain had eased off. It had, but before too long it came back again. Never mind, Huan had her trusty brolly and I didn’t get too wet.

The only photos we took were camera selfies with me holding the camera at arm’s length in my left hand. Some turned out OK. I thought that today I would show you a couple of examples of what you can do, as an amateur photographer, with no camera or post processing skills at all. This first one is “Duotone”, using only two colours.

The second is “Sepia” and “Soft Focus”.

And the last is “Saturation”; don’t you just love our blue eyes?

So how can a dummy like me turn out different types of photos like this? Those of you who have long memories may remember a photo management program produced by Google and called “Picasa”. It has been discontinued which means there is no longer any support for it but if you only want to use it on your computer, it’s fine. It’s not supposed to work with Windows 10 but they lie, it does work, both on Win10 Home, (Huan’s PC), and Win10 Pro, my PC. It’s a piece of cake to use it and it provides a lot more than you see above. If you’re interested you need to download Picasa 3, it is still available on the internet. For me, it’s great software for not only editing your photographs but managing them too. Bonus, it’s free!

Both cooks were busy today, although I suppose only one was actually cooking. Huan took us to Italy for a Pepperoni pizza, very nice it was too. She makes a mean pizza! My job was just to put together a side salad to make sure we had our daily quota of vegetables. I make a mean salad! As always, too much was made, we’ll be having salad for lunch tomorrow and the leftover pizza has gone into the freezer to feed us another three times. I hasten to add that the “nouvelle cuisine” look was for the picture only; we did both eat a lot more than that!

June 18^th Once again the best laid plans of mice and men etc. I had forgotten it was Thursday and that Huan had singing this morning until she came into the office ready to go. In my head I planned where I would walk to get to the right place to meet her when she finished. This is where the plan went wrong. I kept nodding off at the computer and by the time I got out there wasn’t enough time left to carry out my plan. Yesterdays sandals were still recovering so I dug out the reserves from the bottom of the shoe rack. Walking towards the lift they didn’t feel quite right so I backtracked to the front door. Have you ever wondered what happens to footwear in a hot and humid climate? This is what I found.

Hurriedly I found something else to wear and I managed to meet Huan just as she was walking out of the choir practice compound. Our combined plan was next, go and visit the printer doctor to see if there was any news. There was. It wasn’t good. According to them a new print head was required, which I agreed with, some part that moves back and forth, perhaps that was right and a new mother board. How on earth was that damaged, I went nowhere near it. Anyway, the repair price was going to be over ¥3000.00 so we left it in the shop for them to do as they wished. I spent the rest of the day on the internet looking at printers and wondering when they all went up so much in price. Our old was the HP7610 and the replacement HP7612 costs a little more than the repair would have cost. I think I may have to set my sights a little lower!

June 19^th Is life eventually getting back to normal? Slowly it is. I mean it is quite normal for us to get the weather forecast wrong which we did again today. One day we will learn not to trust the computer. We were out fairly early this morning for a gentle, not too fast and not too far, walk. We did go a bit faster than this chap mind and he’s even got a “go faster” stripe!

How do you keep mice away from you sacks of food? Use cats of course, and this small shop has quite a few. There were four when we were there but the owner said there are quite a few more. I guess the older ones could be having a daytime snooze.

Just a few minutes later the rain came down, an hour and a half too early according to the forecast. I tried to take a photo of it today, not such an easy thing to do, at least not when the camera is always set to automatic.

Coming back via the open air market we heard a noise, neither of us were sure what it was or where it came from. It turned out to be a “muted” quack and it was coming from a small three wheeled farm vehicle where we spotted this fellow all by himself. Needless to say he wouldn’t come anywhere near me at all, he probably didn’t want to go the same way his siblings had already gone. We had a good chat though.

The rest of the day was spent trying to get online to FB, looking for recommendations about which replacement printer to buy and searching Taobao for perfection at minimal cost! Getting online was a proverbial pain in the posterior, it happens now and then. I did get some printer recommendations; they helped me in my Taobao search. I now probably have twenty bookmarks to go through with Huan.

June 20^th In the morning it was singing for Huan, fighting walls for me. I failed and had to revert to “Starsky & Hutch”. Still, it’s good to have a fall back. Of course I spent hours on Taobao trying to decide what printer to buy as well. I decided to buy a HP Smart Tank until I read the specifications on an English web site. They have a duty cycle of how many pages you can print every month but, and I didn’t realise this, they also have a minimum number of pages you should print. In this case it was 400 a month! For us it’s more like a dozen or so a week. Back to the drawing board.

Hours later, still stuck in the quagmire. It doesn’t help that model numbers are sometimes different in China to what they are in the west. Taobao can also be very frustrating although we would be lost without it. There are times when the description of the article bears no relation to what is advertised at the head of the page and of course some pages are old and now defunct. I’ll try again tomorrow.

June 21^st Huan was a little worried about the cost of a new printer and, if I’m honest, I suppose I was too. Last night I had a brainwave and looted the lottery winnings box. We have an ornament in the living room inscribed with the words “New House Fund” which is where I deposit our lottery winnings, such as they are. There was enough money in there, I took out ¥1600.00. The last time I raided this source was when I had to buy a new computer in 2018. Perhaps we should rename it “Replacement IT Fund”!

Anyway, that gave us an excuse to out, not that we really need one, but we that money now had to be deposited in what we call the Taobao bank. It’s an account in Huan’s name that we put money into for her phone and for our Taobao needs, separate to our other accounts. When you live in China, and especially in a smaller city like us, (only 140,000 people), you rely a lot on buying things online, which means mostly Taobao.

So off we toddled to the bank, via the nearby riverside where, to our amazement, we saw that they were doing some work related to the stays for the footbridge. I’m still not sure if there are additional cables to go up but the guys were busy on the tops today, one of them is even wearing a safety harness!

Like many places, we see rip-offs of Western logos but today I saw a rip-off of a rip-off. I did a double take when we walked passed the Pianoboy shop so had to take a picture of the Playboy shop as well so you could see both.

I had planned our timings so that we had to stop at the town square where I could have a nice bottle of cold coffee and a ciggie. Life is pretty much back to normal there, perhaps not as many children as usual but then again, it is Sunday morning.

Arriving home we spotted one of the insects that we’ve seen many times in the past and that we’ve showed you, usually on a tree outside our house. However, we’ve never seen one of them moving before. Today I took a video of one and lo and behold, a spider also joined the party.

After lunch, I narrowed my printer choices down to three, a Canon, an Epson and an HP, and then looked for some reviews on the ‘western’ internet. The Canon came out at #1, the Epson at #2 and the HP at #3 so the HP was off the list. I still fancied the Epson though, I preferred the fact it had push buttons and not a touch screen. Next it was Huan’s turn on Taobao; she has to ask the questions for me. “Does it have a network connection, an RJ45 socket?” I hear you ask “Why?” The answer is we like to be able to print off either computer. Their answer was “No”, that meant the Epson was binned. It was time to talk to the Canon man; the first question was the same. His answer was no too. This is where Taobao is not always as good as it should be. I asked Huan to ask him if he was sure and he said he was. I thought he was wrong so I went back on to the review website to confirm, where I found a picture of the rear of the printer showing the various connections including an RJ45. This picture I sent to Huan, she sent it to the store; all went quiet for a few minutes. Maybe he went to look in the box! Success, he came back with not only a verbal yes, but a list of specs that were not available on the store page. All my other questions, “Can we use photo paper”, “Does it have English” and “Does it have an English book” were answered positively so the order was made. We will soon receive a Canon 8520 All-in-one.

My purchase didn’t use all the money so the next thing I know Huan is looking at phones, well she does need a new one. Being her usual self I couldn’t convince to have any of the more well known brand names, you know, Huawei, Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo etc, instead she chose one that translates as “Small Chilli”! It’s only 4G, but we have no real need for 5G yet, it has 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, 8MP selfie camera, 16MP rear camera (4 lenses), all of which is way more than her present phone so it should suffice. It is certainly cheap enough, only ¥550.00, who knows, at that price I may go for one myself.

My day was finished off perfectly by a lovely long Skype call with #1 son. He and Amber seem to be coping fairly well with the problems of ‘lockdown’, both looked happy and healthy.

June 22^nd And Monday rolls round yet again in what seems record time, even faster than the week before. It’s all to with advancing years so it seems, I remember some scientist explaining it once. You can Google it if you want to know more. Today gave me an unexpected extra walk this week, Huan has a rehearsal for her upcoming show to be performed during the Dragon Boat Festival. You can learn more about that by following this link and even more by following the links within this link. Don’t say I never give you anything!

https://www.travelchinaguide.com/essential/holidays/dragon-boat.htm

The route I planned today took me past the ‘printer doctor’ first to give them the installation CD for the dead HP. “But it doesn’t work” they said to which I replied “Well I don’t need it anymore do I”. They took it anyway. Dog friends were next on my route but the first one, a Scotty I think, was very backwards in coming forwards today. Perhaps his Dad warned him off!

As for the rest of them, I didn’t find any of them at all; I do hope they’re not all sulking after my frequent absences recently. The riverside tea shops were all busy as I was walking back home, I often wonder if the people have no work to go to. Huan thinks they are mostly country folk who have been recompensed for their farms and lands and now have nothing else to do, the balance being made up of snowbirds.

The river itself was almost empty, for some reason they’ve drained it. Mind you, the locals were happy about that and I saw many of them with buckets in hand wading through the mud. At a rough guess they were looking for shells and/or crabs. Here are a couple of them, I’m not sure I would fancy wading though that mud!

Down at our end the water was still trying to escape, there was not enough to go over the dam so the only way out was through the inoperable sluice gates. Nice view though.

To finish off our week, Huan came home with a couple of photographs of her group, dressed as for the show sans make-up or hairdos. I think this stage is also the one they will be performing on and which I may have to attend as an audience member. Spot the enormous space for people to watch! To be able to watch you have to be there very early and then not leave your seat for three or more hours! What I need is to know what time Huan is on. With the way they normally organize things here I don’t hold out much hope for finding that out. Wish me luck!

And that’s it for now, see you again next week. Don’t forget to share with your friends, subscribe for email notifications or even to leave comments if you so wish. Bieeeeeee!