I left Cass home snug in bed on Saturday and again yesterday as I searched the northeast coast for surf. Dan and I met up on both days, yesterday had the whole family with him. We got some pretty good, pretty big stormies on Saturday at Green ball, but had a futile search yesterday and just chased the waves from beach to point. It was very frustrating!
One thing that did lighten my mood a little was my fancy new GPS system, which I bought a week or so ago and hadn’t had the chance to test drive. It works really well, and even though all the names of the roads are written in Chinese, it still does the trick. It has a pretty small screen and is fairly basic, but it does everything I want it to do. Testing it out on known routes it has done an excellent job, so I’m confident when we travel farther afield it will help out.
Of course, we’ve been treated to a cacophony of firecrackers at all hours of the day and night, but we’re so used to it now that it has little effect. One thing I don’t think we’ll ever get used to is the droning constant singing that drifts across from the temple on the other side of the river. It’s hard to describe, but perhaps imagine a vinyl record slowed down to about a tenth of its original speed, lacking any kind of tune or musical merit and mix in the wailing of a cat on heat and you’ll get some idea!
Cass has cooked up a big batch of pumpkin soup which we’ve enjoyed for a few meals already and we’ve managed to get out and about during the breaks in the rain to stroll around the neighbourhood. There’s not been a lot else to do as all businesses have been closed for the last 4 days. We’re pretty confident a lot of them will start opening up again today, so we’re going to take the car out to B&Q (hardware house kinda thing) and then maybe even onwards down to the HsinYi area of 101 to get some late lunch/early dinner. We’ll see how energetic we are at the time!
We slept in till 9.30 this morning. You know how the accumulated effects of work, life etc build for a while and when you get a break it all just hits? It’s a bit like that for us this week. I’ve managed to succumb to a minor cold as well, so the dreary conditions are extra incentives to pretty much do nothing at all. We’re reading, watching movies, petting the cats, getting out for some exercise when the weather permits and pretty much doing nothing else at all…..bliss!
Photos: a very strange and very large bird we spied outside the tennis courts opposite, some Chinese new year decorations at school, the famous “pencil” Shi Dong elementary school near our house (see the size of those pencils?!), some wild Green Ball surf, a man praying in the park and the garden of our neigbour out the back. You can see we haven’t strayed too far from home this week!