What's Up Al ? 遊記隨筆 生活點滴

The thought of being house-bound and grounded for 6 months seemed unbearable not that long ago, but we managed to get through this period without much effort as there were just so many to-do-things on the so many to-do-lists to catch up with. To start with the last thing first - Community Testing ! The government (bless them) arranged technical personnels and test tents from Motherland (bless them too) and all we had to do was to reserve ourselves a time slot on the Internet, at a very convenient location about 15 minutes' drive from home and before you could say Voilà, 5 minutes of taking sample (poking nose and deep throat probing), we received our results 2 days later - Negative ! Wasn't that just marvelous as these past two weeks I had been getting headaches, sneezing and coughing non-stop in the mornings, so the test came just in time to clear the suspicions ! About 1.8 million fellow citizens were tested with over 40 cases of asymptomatic cases found !

Just for our own record on how we "quarantined" ourselves these past six months - we bought a new TV (the snow flakes and the double ghosting did it) and a new boiler (water wasn't boiled when it came out the shower head did it). We also witnessed in our back garden, at least three species of local birdies building nests, laying eggs and feeding their young and it was a wonderful sight to see the hatched and grown finally took off but yet remaining close to our house and their parents ! Yes, we gave a hand in the process in scaring off those rather predatory large eagles ... And now onto a completely new topic, TV soaps - we had not been great fans of locally produced TV dramas and as a result we hardly knew the names of the oodles of TV starlets and up-and-coming Di Neros, Jolies or Chow Yun Fats ... ; we had found these dramas a waste of time and often the themes were not very interesting. But all that changed somewhat during these few months as we managed to pick out the ones we found funny and comical (to name a few : 機場特警,降魔的,殺手,迷網,反黑路人甲) and what we found more interesting than the dramas themselves, was that the same actors and actresses kept turning up again and again in different soaps and in different period costumes !

To keep body and mind in good shape, we did quick compressed shopping in town (like repeatedly performing 100 M sprints from the car and brought back kilos of rice and veg), power walks in the surrounding neighbourhood (face masks voluntary most of the time) and I re-captured my half-hearted enthusiasm in the game of GO chess (圍棋) by playing against real players around the world on the Internet (my goodness they're good !) and also against AI software and I even found a software which helped me perform case scenarios and diagnosis. Mandy on the other hand, found a new singing teacher who's married to a French national and currently living in the city. Mandy was taught in her first and so far only lesson (they left for France for their Summer break) a new singing technique akin to a cat meowing and screaming at the same time - time to turn on the air-con to drown out the noise in case our neighbours thought I was strangling a feline friend ... 

Fingers crossed and the Health Code (Electronic Health Certification QR Code held on a personal mobile phone) would be available soon and we could get our travelling boots on again to go exploring all over China. And happy Mid-Autumn Festival, have a famous Mooncake !