Blog

Intruding

29/5/2021

Gary Numan's been my favourite singer since 1979. Some forty odd years on he is still producing amazing albums and this week his latest, "Intruder", reached No.2 in the charts. Amazing!

I actually "bought" this album nearly three years ago before any tracks were even written. That pre-order qualified me to watch video updates from Gary each month, showing how he writes, rewrites and records each song in his studio. So I felt I knew the album really well before it was even released last week!

"My" cathedral

27/5/2021

JD and I spent a fun couple of hours building this kit of St. Paul's Cathedral the other day. JD was chief popper-outer and bender for each piece we needed, while I constructed them.

Ooops!

25/5/2021

Reservoir re-served

23/5/2021

Last weekend I took JD to the reservoir which I discovered a month ago. He was very keen to swim and, since there were lots of kids in the water (and Jiajia is away on business!), we had a few hours in and out of the water. I made the mistake of swimming without a T-shirt on and got pretty sunburned despite wearing "waterproof" sun cream lotion.

JD also insisted on buying a fishing net and proceeded to catch a dozen shrimp and a clam! A 20 minute e-bike drive home - fun afternoon out.

d'Rant!

21/5/2021

66

19/5/2021

JD had a blast last weekend, spending an afternoon/evening with his best friend, "LiuLiu" (translates as "66") and his younger brother. LiuLiu is in JD's school/year but a different class. They became friends at Kindergarten and still meet up at school break times to play together.

While JiaJia chatted to LiuLiu's mum, I watched the kids running around and playing in the forest. Then we had a nice meal together at a nearby restaurant. Fresh air, exercise and tasty food.

Happy Half Birthday to me!

17/5/2021

Back to affront

15/5/2021

Whichever way you look at it, this girl's
sweatshirt has a lot of backwards English!

Liking the cycling

13/5/2021

I completed my 100th cycling session today. I was given the exercise bike six months ago as a Birthday present, so I reckon that's about four times a week on average since then.

And how do I know it's exactly 100? Well, I time my sessions by watching a 45-minute episode of a TV show called, "West Wing", and I've just watched the 100th episode.

How to make a bad impBession...

11/5/2021

Flying fish?

9/5/2021

It's that time of year again when I have to wade through hundreds of essays and try not to be too negative about the mangled English therein. Some students show small signs of improvement while others fail to understand the most basic of instructions ("400 words, not 207"! "5 paragraphs, not 7 or 2!"). Others just leave me bewildered....

Pruit?

7/5/2021

Happy bought-day!

5/5/2021

We don't know when exactly our two hamsters were born. but we know that we bought them a year ago today! JD stopped taking much interest in them pretty early on, but it was his idea to give them a little celebration today. So we had two tiny cakes with candles and a rendition of "Happy Bought-day". "Bitey" is still full of energy, but "Whitey" has been sick for a month now - barely able to walk or eat, but resolutely refusing to die!

Throw it where?

3/5/2021

Flaming good

1/5/2021

One of my students taught me to make an origami flamingo last week!