Category: Uncategorized

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And Windy Has Stormy Eyes…

Yesterday, the wind kicked up and then unleashed a hell of a rainstorm. No thunder that I could hear, no lightning, just wind and rain. It was one of those days you’re glad to be inside with either a good book or lots of videos to watch.

But it did clear up and I walked to the grocery store to stock up on greens for juicing. I’m trying to clean up my diet a bit. I can see some improvements even with one day of juicing.

Plus, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos from Sean of Steel. Sean used to weigh more than 600 pounds. And what he does is reaction videos of My 600 Pound Life. I was surprised to learn that for a lot of these people, they turned to food when things got bad. If they were bullied, abused by their parents, chaotic homelife, whatever, they turned to food. I realized I do that too, but I’ve never gotten over 200 pounds. For most of these people, going from 600 pounds to 400 pounds is a victory. As I type this, this is the video that’s playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug1-4NSZqfM

And also I’ve noticed that when I juice, I feel calmer. It’s crazy to think that sugar can make you anxious, but I think it works that way for me.

If you want to know about juicing, check out https://www.rebootwithjoe.com/. Joe Cross is an Australian who decided he could cure himself–from the inside. He’s got some bucks, and in 2010 he released a movie he made himself called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. It’s a funny documentary about Joe’s journey across the United States (he’s visited it several times and really enjoys it) and talked to people about their eating habits and how long they think they would live. He would make them juice and tell them what exactly he was doing. For two months, he consumed nothing but juice. But it was juice that was healthy, not Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry (YUM!). He lost like 80 pounds and was able to get off his meds for urticaria.

Diet has such a huge impact on us, we don’t even really know. I highly recommend this movie. It’s really well done. You can watch the movie for free if you join his mailing list. If you go to https://www.rebootwithjoe.com/joes-films/ you can see other places to watch the movie.

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Sad China Horse for the Win!

So I went back to Fuzhou Zoo because I didn’t get to see everything.

And I’m glad I went back.

I don’t usually stop to buy souvenirs, but I noticed one of the stalls had Sad China Horse, the viral Chinese New Year sensation.

I’m not a smiler. So for me, the Sad China Horse was like Grumpy Cat reborn. I loved that Grumpy Cat looked the way I felt most of the time. So the Sad China Horse struck a chord with me. Of course I couldn’t find one.

But then I glanced over at the stall on the way back from the big cat area (only the leopards were doing anything, everyone else was in their caves) and what do I see but Viral Sensation Sad China Horse!

Sad China Horse, looking none too happy at the bird exhibit at Fuzhou Zoo.

So I bought one. It’s rare that I really, REALLY want something, and at a mere $2.80, how could I pass that up?

Yes, I also bought a smiley face horse too. Always look on the bright side of life…

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Going to the Zoo!

I haven’t been to a zoo in years, so I went to Fuzhou Zoo today. I saw almost everything, and I’m going to go back to see what I missed (big cats/elephants).

The zoo is really pretty, but not exactly wheelchair friendly. I saw some elevators, but it seemed like quite a few exhibits you had to climb stairs for. Especially for the parrot exhibit, but it was worth it as they had a Myna bird that said “hello” and “nihao.”

The zoo is built into the side of a mountain, hence the steps. But it was really nicely laid out. It gave the impression one was in the jungle while at the zoo. Lots of vegetation, and shaded walking paths, which was nice, since it was a bright sunny day today. I expected the zoo to be packed, but it wasn’t.

There was a map, but I pretty much just started walking once I got in. It was 30 yuan, which is basically $4.20 or so.

The first exhibit was on a pond, and I saw a pelican and a turtle. I saw just about everything except the big cats and the elephants.

Pelican and turtle stand off. When I got closer, the turtle looked plenty mad.

The reptile building was pretty impressive, as was the bird display. I was afraid after climbing probably 50 steps that it wouldn’t, but they had some beautiful birds and the talking Myna was amusing.

The Myna was saying “nihao” and “hello.”

There’s interactive stuff like a petting zoo with llamas and bunnies, you can feed giraffes if you want, and I got a kick out of feeding the fish. The fish food was laying in bags in a plastic container well away from the fish action. If you hadn’t climbed up there, you wouldn’t know it was there. And it was on the honor system, with a QR code to scan. The price was pretty cheap, I thought. $1.40 for a small bag of pellets. I fed the koi fish in the lower pond, as well as the big gray fish in the upper pond.

Fish pellet soon to be gone.
I don’t THINK this is a blobfish, but then again…

There are a few food kiosks along the way, with places to sit. The water I bought was on the honor system. The coolers are locked. You scan the QR code, and then tap the photo of what you want. You type in your payment code, and the cooler door unlocks and you grab what it is you want. I’m always surprised at how many of these “honor coolers” there are in China. But I guess with security cameras everywhere, it keeps people honest. But it would NEVER go over in the states. It saves on having some minimum wage employee standing or sitting there all day, but at the same time, I do wonder how much food they lose.

Not even worth of a minimum-wage fish food seller!

It was nice to get some pictures of wildlife without having to risk my life on a safari. And I’m so glad the zoo wasn’t busy.

On the way back, I didn’t want to go down all those steps I climbed up to see the birds. So I took a meandering road down. At least they had that for wheelchair-bound people. But overall, unless there were some secret roads I didn’t know about, I wouldn’t say this is a very wheelchair friendly venue. But they do have those elongated golf cart/open air buses that you can ride. A driver asked me if I wanted a ride, and I did. Ten yuan ($1.40) for a very pleasant ride back to the front gate.

There looked to be some sort of carnival/amusement park place across the street, but I don’t think it was open. Maybe it’s a night thing, since the zoo is open until 6 p.m.

I’m glad I went and I felt it was well worth the money. Families might want to make a day of it, but if you’re by yourself you could probably see everything in about four hours time. Maybe longer if you decide to feed a few critters.

Fuzhou Zoo Entrance. The first exhibits are fish in giant aquariums.
I thought this fence was awfully low for a lion… but I guess they wanted the turtle to be more intimidating or something.
Chinese alligator. I was shocked at how close I was able to get.
White Rhino.
The majority of the animals chose their left profile, for some odd reason.
Meerkat on guard duty.
Doesn’this turtle look PISSED???

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Movie Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Yeah, I know. I’m late to the party. But this was one of the DVDS I thought I’d get around to watching years ago.

During Covid, I had a chance to get a bunch of DVDs for basically free. I insisted on giving the couple who were moving back to France $14 USD to take two big boxes of DVDs. Some of them didn’t work, some of them I weren’t interested in, but there were quite a few that I thought worth saving.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower wasn’t one of them. I tried it tonight, and I just couldn’t get excited about it. Normally, I like underdog movies where the character who is spat upon and mock rises up. But this wasn’t doing it for me.

Charlie is facing his first day as a high school freshman. I’m not sure what his prior story is, but we get glimmers of it, but not enough for me to put it together. There’s something up with his Aunt Helen, and I think it has to do with her molesting him, but I’m not sure. I think she’s dead.

Charlie copes by writing letters (to Aunt Helen?) as he deals with his new hell, er I mean high school. His English teacher doesn’t seem too bad, and they form a bond.

Anyway, Charlie goes to a high school football game and runs into seniors and stepsiblings Patrick and, oh, what is her name? Hold on. Oh！It’s Sam, played by Emma “Hermione” Watson.

IMDB says Charlie was played by Logan Lerman and Patrick was played by Ezra Miller.

Patrick and Sam are seniors, and of course as it always happens in high school, take Charlie under their wings and introduce them to drinking, drugs, and what seems to be 1980s music. Makes sense, since Stephen Chbosky, the writer of the novel the movie is based on, is a GenXer. I’ve noticed that teen movies that have taken place in the 2010s seem to have a LOT of 1980s songs, or influences. I taught a class the novel Hard Wired, and his teenage protagonist had an ear for 1980s music. When I contacted the author for a Zoom call with my class, he confessed to being a GenXer.

People, the music you listened to in your youth and in your 20s until about 33 or so, is the stuff that you will measure all music that comes after it. Everything after whatever you listened to during the time of your youth will be crap. Scientific studies have been done on that. So if I meet a teenager who just happens to like Culture Club and Tears for Fears, I’m gonna bet that he has GenX parents that played nothing else. Just like I wasn’t fond of music of the 1940s and 1950s, my parents were fond of Wham, Journey, or the Pet Shop Boys.

Music influences aside, this movie was rather meh. There’s the whole “I’m gonna kill myself if I don’t get into the college of my choice” trope, the “secretly gay couple” trope, the “the girl I really like is involved with a jerk” trope, and having unsupervised parties in impossbily huge houses trope.

Charlie keeps hinting about being “bad” and we’re left to wonder if it’s his best friend’s suicide that messed him up or his Aunt Helen’s fatal car accident that he thinks he caused. These hints are sprinkled in the movie, and I suppose if you read the book you’d be in the know, but as Cinema Sins says, “the books. do. not. matter.”

Nothing really dramatic happens in this movie. I kept wondering when this movie was supposed to be happening. Was it in 2011, or 1981?

I’ll admit the friendship between Charlie and his older friends is sweet, but is that the way kids act? Did 2011 kids actually make CASSETTE mix tapes? A few years prior to that, my niece and nephew made me a mix CD (of songs THEY liked, not surprisingly). They probably didn’t know what a cassette tape looked like.

So is there a happy ending? Sort of. Nobody commits suicide or dies, so that’s a win.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m too old to appreciate teenage movies made way after I graduated, but I don’t think so. I loved Mean Girls, and really enjoyed Ten Things I Hate about You. But having grown up in the John Hughes era of teenage movies, maybe I’ll be forever scarred. I’ll be that annoying adult who says, “they just don’t make teenage movies like they used to anymore. Same with the music.” TPOBAW just didn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s a bit too idealistic for my tastes. I stuck with it.

But I got rid of it. Hopefully one of the trash picker residents can find something useful to do with it.

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I Miss You, Dad

Twenty-six years ago today, my father died.

Nothing prepares you for that, even though I knew it was coming.

I remember being afraid when he died. Even though he couldn’t have possibly fended off an attacker, he had lived in the living room for months. Not having him there was scary.

We went to Applebee’s that afternoon. There was a thunderstorm, and as I heard the thunder, I liked to think it was my Dad, arguing with God, about something.

It took me a very long time to mature as an adult. And as happens when you get older, you understand your parents just a little bit more. Or you think you do.

I miss my Dad. There are questions I would have liked to ask him. It’s strange how there are things you feel like you don’t dare discuss with your parents. I remember breaking into tears, when I found out something about his health that he accepted stoically. There were spots on his liver and lung. They never got biopsied, because they weren’t sure he’d survive the surgery. He opted to do nothing. I remember kneeling by his bed, crying, and saying how sorry I was this was happening to him.

His response: “These things happen, in life.”

I wonder if he was scared. I wonder how he felt when he lost his job and he was in his 50s. I remember him typing his resume on this Spanish-language Underwood. I remember him starting to cry and smashing his fist on the table. I’d never seen him so upset. He eventually got a job, and things went back to normal.

But I wonder how happy he was. It’s not something I spent a lot of time thinking about; chalk it up to self-centeredness and immaturity. Now I wonder. He didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. I remember him confessing he felt there was a “vendetta” against him at work. I wonder how he dealt with the pressure. But when I was around 10, he had a heart attack. He lived, and eventually had a triple-bypass in his 70s.

But like most men of his era, he didn’t really talk about things. I know he probably put up with racism. I wonder how much of that he dealt with that at work, but kept going.

I can’t imagine the pressure. He had a family and a mortgage. I had only myself, and a dog.

Yet as unhappy as I imagine him to be, far away from the culture he grew up in and his first language, he must have been very, very strong. I wonder how much of those naps he took when he got home from work were a way of coping with depression.

He had the occasional beer, but that was it.

We did stuff together, backyard games of catch, the weekend Komets games, the Sunday morning trips to Ohio to buy lottery tickets. The first single lens reflex he ever bought me. Encouraging my interest in photography.

I wish I could have, would have, talked to him more. To say that I think I get it now. I don’t have kids and never will, but by presenting a rock-solid face to the world even though I think he was hiding an unhappiness that never occurred to me until several years ago.

Or maybe I’m imagining it.

I’m sorry Dad. Sorry if I ever let you down, as I’m sure I did. I miss you. I wish I had you and Mom to talk to about the craziness of the world. How you keep going. How you find the answers.

I hope you are happy now. I have a hard time believing in the afterlife, but I hope there is one for you and Mom.

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Going to the Dentist in China

I’m in the vicinity, but WHERE?

I went to the dentist today. I hadn’t been in years. I don’t enjoy going to the dentist, but it’s not for the usual reasons. My mouth isn’t very big, so it’s uncomfortable. Secondly, I take really good care of my teeth. Back in the day, dad dropped a few thousand on my braces. Probably around $9,643 in today’s dollars. When I saw the horror story slide show they forced me to watch to emphasize the importance of dental hygiene, they didn’t have to make me watch it twice. I brushed after everything I ate. Dad bought the WaterPik Dr. Eugene Dellinger suggested I use. I was known for having the cleanest teeth among his patients. I took that shit seriously.

It was just another thing to get out of the way this summer. I asked someone for recommendations, and so I went today.

There’s nothing about this that says, “dental services.”

I had an address, but wasn’t expecting the facility to be in a mall. In Guangzhou, the dentist was on a quiet street. This place was in a mall. A sign on the outside told me I was in the right place, but I wasn’t sure where exactly in the mall it was. I went inside. I asked a couple of people.

Hallway to…not the dentist’s.

One guy took me down a long hallway, only for me to exit with no dentist in sight. I went back inside and asked someone who looked like a cop. He walked away, not wanting to deal with someone not fluent in Chinese.

I finally went back to a couple of guys standing inside the door of the main mall entrance. They pointed me upstairs, to a store with a sign that said, “Makeup.”

Ooooooookay. As I got closer, I saw something that said, “AngelAlign” and figured I was in the right place. I went inside and they had my phone number. I went back to a bench and sat down.

Shortly I was ushered into a typical dental office cubicle, with the giant light, and a computer monitor in my face. The table was on the right, the little sink on the left. The chair was unusually comfortable.

The dental technician and I used translation apps to communicate. They said my teeth were in very good shape and she got on with her work.

That’s about it. A cleaning went for 238 Renminbi, or less than $34.

The mall goes by two names: the “Eternal Center” and Times Square.
The view from the chair.

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Thanks for the Warning

Someone I haven’t spoken to in years sent me a Facebook message warning me about my house being in the county delinquent tax sale.

I thought it might be a scam, so I didn’t click on the link. Instead I went through an alternative route. Saw the listing for someone with my name, but the address was different.

I thought it was strange, him tipping me off like that. I thanked him for the warning, but I’d paid this spring’s property tax.

And I checked my mail; I never got a letter saying it was up for sale. That’s how they do it. I think you have three tax cycles before they put it up for sale. Taxes are due fall and spring. So you have around a year and a half before they put it in the tax sale. And even so, they send out a letter to warn you. Usually it lists the full amount due, then there’s the amount that keeps it from going in the sale. That amount isn’t too bad. I have had that happen before, and I’ve paid the minimum.

I hope I’m never that poor again.