Summer is Sacred

If I was a kid, I’d suggest this was a rip off.  If I was a kid, raised to think that August was sacred and September was when school started, that some time around Labor Day weekend you had no choice but to head back in to school . . . and then one year was abruptly told to show up August 15, for the first days of school, this would be a profound bummer and I would have complained with a fullness.  My kids started back up today, quietly having known for a while that the date was when it was and that it was immutable.  And I’m here feeling like its fall, even though its still mid (ok, mid-late) summer.  My wife noted, wisely, that the autumn had already begun in the Chinese lunar calendar.  But I can’t help it.  August 15 is still summer.  Even if I lived in Tierra Del Fuego I think I’d need to call mid-August summer.

They’ve come to thinking of it as normal though.  And they don’t seem to consider it a major compromise.  To be fair they will be getting time off at Christmas, Chinese New Year and spring break.  Chinese New Year was obviously irrelevant for us.  So they get more time off during the year.  Still, something about the summer, is sacred.

I dropped them off this morning.  They’d been up for hours.  They’re both as jet-lagged as I am.  I hope they make it through the day without hitting a wall.  I will definitely be taking a nap.  And I will be on a shopping mission.  Not for pencils or binders, but rather an external hard drive.  My younger daughter turns her old computer in for a new one today and if she wants any of the old material, she needs to make a copy.  I’m sure we have one lying around some where and I’m sure there is a much cooler way to do this in the cloud, but with only so many hours to go, till its all too late, I am heading over to the local computer store to find one. 

I feel like an oldster asking for a 500G external HD.  The smallest they sell is 1 Terabyte.  And this is a cool eight hundred renminbi.  I try to imagine my daughter’s frustration about loosing her photos.  And it isn’t the first time she’s specified that she needed a solution here.  I reluctantly pull up eight, one-hundred yuan notes and give them to the young lady behind the counter who confronts me with cautious skepticism, assuming I don’t understand not only the language and the culture, but anything about the technology, either.