And Made Their Way Out

I’m gonna head to the gym soon.  It’s ochre out there.  A proper yellow Beijing day where you can’t see the sky and everything looks particulate.  Won’t stop me.  But I will stop to take some photos.  I’m going to post a bunch of entries and I don’t think I’ve shot a photo all week.  My phone is not healthy.  Not long ago I’d fixed a battery issue and fixed a charging issue and fixed an audio jack issue and my old iPhone 6 was doing everything I needed it too.  Late last night I’d first notice and this morning I was confronted once again with a touch screen that wasn’t responsive.  And I sat there like a chimpanzee pounding at the screen hoping something would happen.  And when nothing did, I turned it off and on again, which fixed things, but only for a moment. 

I wrote my phone-fixer guy, “Kevin” who has a little booth out at our front desk area.  “Are you still around?” I asked.  It’s already three days before Lunar New Year, but, I reckoned, he lives in Beijing.  “No.  On vacation.  I won’t be back till the eighth of the month.”  Our Ayi has headed back to Hubei and indeed, by now, half the city has likely vacated and made their way out, back into the realm, away from the citadel.  But the guards at the kids school, haven’t left yet because, for some reason the gym is still open today and tomorrow.  I’ll go get in the last few days before the long shut down.

What a time I had yesterday trying to open a simple account on Ali Cloud.  I want to share a large video with some people in China.  They can’t access Google Drive and so it should be simple.  Just upload it to Ali.  But Ali has to locate me geographically.  And if I say I’m in the U.S., which can be easily spoofed to appear that I am, they want to have a U.S. cell phone to text me a special message at.  If I try to sign up as if I’m in China, I’m thwarted as well.  I had a similar problem the other night when I tried to pay LinkedIn for a service fee.  "Here.  I’ll pay you."  But they wouldn’t take my money because they were convinced I was in China.  What does it matter?  The threads between our two parallel internet universe are become ever more frayed, surely. 

Dull, xanthous afternoon.  It won’t be tomorrow, but soon I’ll hear the thuds of fireworks off in the distance.  We’re thinking of heading off to old-sod on Tuesday, the first day of New Year.   It looks like you and take a high-speed train to Dezhou, (home of the train-side paji-chicken) and then it’s another hour’s drive up to Wudi.  We should be there the night before but this year, that night before is also my older one’s eighteenth birthday and it's ok, if she doesn’t want to spend it, rolling dough and stuffing dumplings.  Eighteen years ago.  That’s quite some time ago.

Saturday, 02/02/19