Taobao, The Weather, Under the Weather, Brawn & Storytime

October 27^th We woke up to a lovely day today and with Huan out for choir practice I thought a nice walk would be on the cards. I was wrong. Her Majesty put me on Taobao duty, I had to stay in and wait for the laptop. I kept myself busy until it arrived and then cooked this evening’s dinner before Huan came home.
 
Once Huan arrived we started up the laptop, first going into BIOS. That was in English so my first worry was assuaged. Carrying on through the boot process the laptop went straight into Windows with no installation questions and therefore no language choice. It booted up in Chinese. Trying to change the language to English didn’t work so we got on the chat with the trader. He told us that he ‘forgot’ we wanted an English option and that he would send us a USB version to which we replied that we would withhold our agreement to pay until we received that and tested it. All packed up and stored for the next few days. Here’s what it looks like, from the website, and also the ‘putting it into English’ control panel view. PS I won’t be playing games on it!

After our tasty dinner of chicken noodle soup it was a short walk for me before a little guitar and Chinese practice. Talking about the soup with Huan we decided that Chinese people would more than likely enjoy it but would never buy it, it’s more expensive to make than the way they make it!

I took the ‘bridge to nowhere’ route to see if there were any major changes intending to arrive back in our complex in time to see Huan and the gang giving it their all with their drums and Hulusi. The bridge has no changes but I did have to make a slight detour to get on the right track after the bridge, the normal track has been overrun with garbage!

Rain is what I was worried about this evening so I cut my walk short and headed home, chatted to a couple of schoolchildren on the way. They showed me their books but couldn’t actually read them for me, or communicate very well. Still, they had a little practice which made them happy, something to tell their parents about when they reached home.

Along the way I made a short video, for posterity you understand, showing the two bridges to the future ‘park island’. The whole project was supposed to be finished by the end of the year, we can’t see that happening. Of course they may have meant before Chinese New Year, that is a possibility, if we don’t have too much more rain.

October 28th What a miserable day! As if the rain wasn’t enough I was struck down with yet another bug, I seem to have had nothing but since we came back from Sanya. Huan went off for her morning music but before going made me a nice hot ginger drink. My, it was a fierce one, I could feel it burning my throat on the way down. For the rest of the day all I had to do was add a little more water.
 
Our only entertainment for the rest of the day was Taobao, All Bran, no problem, Weetabix, no problem, headphones, yes problem. One of the disadvantages of ordering from Taobao is that often the instructions are in Chinese only. Plugging the headphones in worked fine, which is what I will do here at home. Getting the Bluetooth to pair and work was nigh on impossible to start with. Eventually we understood the Bluetooth name was F9 but it was still disconnecting as soon as it connected. Finally, looking at the phone at the right time in the sequence, I saw that the headphones only had 20% charge so were probably automatically disconnecting and switching off. Nothing about that in the instructions, or at least we didn’t see it. After a charging period, up to 90%, success, all worked fine, I could listen to music and even speak to Huan, through my phone to hers. The microphone is not top notch but it will do as I will hardly ever use that function.
 
Huan didn’t even get her evening practice in today, the rain never let up at all. Let’s hope tomorrow is a better day.
 
October 29^th My hopes were dashed, the weather was still miserable and I wasn’t much better. I even had to miss out on a nice lunch today. Huan’s singing teacher is off to Sanya for the winter and as he always does, he’s inviting everyone for lunch, not free of course. I was quite looking forward to it, my last ‘blow-out’ before next month’s blood tests. Instead my NAAFI break was standing on the balcony recording the monthly air raid siren tests and my lunch was a bacon bap.
 
Huan came home and sent all kinds of stuff over to my WeChat, as usual, the quality leaves a great deal to be desired. I kept only a few of the photos, here’s one of Huan’s table with their teacher in pride of place.

As you can see from the photo, they had plenty of food so Huan didn’t need a big dinner and although I was beginning to feel better I still wasn’t 100% To make life easy and as a last splurge, no fried food for the next two weeks, we had almost the same as my lunch, bacon baps but with the addition of one egg each. For the next two weeks there will be no chocolate for me, nothing with sugar in it, mostly fish and vegetables to eat and water to drink. With a little luck my blood tests will give Dr. Tim, and me, nothing to worry about.

October 30^th Still under the weather but I made sure I got out before the rain started today. I was in desperate need of some fresh air. Of course I didn’t get much because I was wearing a mask to keep my bugs to myself!

Good news for Huan, sort of anyway, the court case concerning the original maintenance company has been dropped. They had filed a case against the residents’ committee so Huan was one of the defendants in the case. The company lost their case in the first two courts and had appealed to a higher court but they have now decided to withdraw their case. They also had to pay the costs so Huan is not out of pocket. I’m still not at all clear what has happened but at least that’s one less thing for us to worry about. Now all we have to do is wait and see how the gas company case goes, I’m not sure who is suing who there, or how much longer it will be. It’s now been twenty two months!

October 31^st The CO confined me to barracks again and put me on Taobao standby, waiting for the USB (English) for the laptop and some lovely bubbly bath stuff, also for me. Both arrived just after lunch. Huan was out morning, afternoon and evening while I fought with the laptop. Changing it to English was easy, insert USB and boot from it. A side effect was that it removed the partitions they had installed and all the Chinese software that I didn’t want anyway. Why was I fighting it? Well, I love Windows 10, much prefer it over previous versions but it does seem to have one big failing and that is getting computers to network with each other, the old ‘homegroup’ facility has been removed. I was trying all sorts, it even came down to swapping cables in the end. Finally I got it working, well after midnight!

November 1^st “No sun, no moon! No morn, no noon, No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member. No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! November!” (November by Thomas Hood)

A new month, a new day, an almost new Bob, feeling much better than the last few days. I even took Freddy out for a walk, he didn’t behave well, I think he needs a service. There may be somewhere in Haikou but there’s definitely nowhere in Wuzhishan. Consequently the first few photos were taken with Marvin instead, he started off with a little spider.

The spider was on the doorframe of the ‘band practice room’ where the gang were busy doing their thing. I could only get photo of all of them by using Marvin’s wide angle function; he is good for something now and then.

The observant among you may notice that there is a gentleman playing the euphonium. Huan knows that I played the same instrument many moons ago in an army brass band so she piped up asking if I wanted to buy one. After fifty two years I doubt if I would even remember one scale never mind the multitudes that I knew then! Speak of the devil, the last time I saw them she was on the bass drum, today she was on cymbals, I made sure not to get my head in the way, just in case!

The weather was even on my side today.

Not all was sunshine and roses, I failed to get any sausages, they weren’t going to be ready until afternoon by which time I would end up being far too busy. I did get my order in for twenty more baps on Tuesday morning though and even found that the Xinjiang bread bakers have returned from the north, that was lunch sorted out.

This morning the computers were networking well together so in the afternoon I began the job of copying some of the necessary files across from the desktop to the laptop. These are files that I may or may not need when we are sitting in hotel rooms. All was going well until I reached one particular folder then I kept getting the message “Access denied”. There was nothing in the folder I was trying to copy other than pure data files, why only this one folder? I searched so many different sites, spent hours on sharing, permissions and security, getting more and more confused. All my settings on both computers were correct, other folders had been transferred. In the end I tried something that nobody had suggested on any site anywhere and I disabled the firewall on the laptop for the private network. Magic! It worked. I still can’t explain how I was able to copy all the other folders across though. All’s well that ends well, but it was another late night!

November 2^nd Monday again and shopping again, Huan skipped her morning practice with the local band of noise makers. Before that though, and as we are short on photos this week, how about a bit of brawn? Imagine trying to comb that in the morning!

More brawn in the supermarket, but unlike ours in the UK this only has pigskin inside the gelatine. The shop assistant was adamant that it was very tasty and that we should try it. She gave us both just a piece of the gelatine and we both hated it!

For me most of the rest of the day was on the laptop again, installing software, sometimes with no difficulty, other times with great difficulty. Still, I got it all done and also learned that Lightworks will not work on the laptop either. Maybe it’s time I became less paranoid and stopped saving all my dashcam videos. Alternatively, I could just save them “as is” on the laptop, nothing else will be saved permanently there.

When Huan went out to make more noise I hopped into the bath, using the bubble bath we had received on Saturday. Her ladyship did make sure she took photos before she went out though. If you’re wondering what’s going on here, I am reading to the ducks, “Hornet’s Nest” by Patricia Cornwell. They seemed to enjoy it too!

And now that I am all clean it’s time to say goodbye for another week. Hopefully, the bugs will stay away from me and life will return to normal, lots of walks in the countryside and lots of photos too. See you next time!