They Have a Name

Recommended:  A vacation to nowhere.  Today is the ultimate day of the Christmas, New Year’s down time.  We didn’t go anywhere.  But I caught myself up on work and made some incremental progress on things that reward one for the time spent.  Damn near every day I got over to the gym.  Now the inside of my left elbow sore from lifting all these weights, but that’s OK.  The rest of my body feels pretty good.  I read my Chinese news articles, every morning and while literacy is still an illusive goal, I can feel the impact when I look at Chinese text elsewhere in my day-to-day.  My brain is attuned and responds with curiosity rather than simple rejection.

My daughter needed help with her college essays and we reviewed them every day.  I got her FAFSA forms in, like I was supposed to. I got quite a few proposals out and a few actually came back, redlined, close to completion.  And we got our son and his wife moved back to Beijing and into a new apartment, down in Wang Jing.  Looking out from the thrity-first floor, you think about all you can see and all you can’t.  Is it a northern view or a western view?  What do I care.  Here all I can see is a tree. 

My daughter-in -aw is from Foshan.  Normally I wouldn’t head to a Cantonese place, but with her driving the menu, I insisted.  They’d found a good spot at the top floor of the mall (where else?) and we had clams and scallops and guiyu, which translates into Mandarin Fish, a meaningless term.   My wife saw a gent pulling on plastic gloves to eat pipa shrimp at the neighboring table.  There is no obvious English word for them but if you want to know what they look like throw 琵琶虾

 into Google images.  (Wait. I wrote too soon.  They have a name and are called: “Mantis Shrimp.”) They look like a lobster tail without a head or arms.  Conversely they look like a large insect.  I remember them from my engagement dinner to my wife, twenty-two years ago in rural Shandong.  I ate them then, but I passed on the crispy mantis, last evening.

Writing today.  Editing mostly.  I’m caught up.  I just haven’t posted anything in ages.  I’m probably going to have to go out and take some photos too.  And for the first time, I am going to try to post from this lap top which should be easy but I’ve resisted doing so.  I need to sync my old photos with this cloud based photo repository that I have with Apple.  Von Freeman on the air.  Never-hoid-of-em, but when I learned that his son Chico came from a hard bop tenor father I decided to dig in.  Commanding, spacious, and there is forever more jazz to discover.

Sunday, 01/06/19