The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I had one. Everybody has to have one every once in a while.

Everybody else I work with seemingly got very sick from the moon-cakes that the school gave us for Mid-autumn Festival. (This is a guess and not an accusation.) Let me count my blessings. Not me. No, instead I chipped a tooth on God knows what--a rock, a nut shell. I was among the two people in fifty who got a bad moon cake, according to the government's newspaper.

I have not had running-water for over a week and got this amusing update from the person charged by the school with monitoring the situation, "I called the guy, he is looking for the broken pipe, there are 16 places he needs to find, but now he has just found 11. So he is not sure how long it will take." The guy? I dunno, but there is a notice in Chinese at the front door to the apartment building with a phone number for the guy. I have an image of a small, rodent-like miner crawling around in the dirt underneath our  seven story building. I feel worse for the families who need to cook and for the dozens of elderly citizens who live in this complex--the ones who sit in the courtyard all day on uncomfortable-looking folding canvas stools, playing mahjong and drying eggplants and peppers on large gauge screens.

After a week, I finally extricated my rank, foul, pink laundry from the front-loading washer, which has been in there since the electricity went out. When the electricity came back on there was no water so I, the famous laundry guy, neglected to do a g--d-- thing about it. Live and learn. I had to drain the water out the emergency drainage valve before I opened the door. Now the bathroom smells like five day old wet laundry. It is all ruined and pink from the floral sheets that were supplied when I moved here in February. No matter how many times I wash them they still turn everything pink.

I am not going to Australia, though. I will spend two more years in China. You heard it here first. Tune in next time to find out why.