Category: Uncategorized

The relativity of wilderness

Leaving Monday for 6 weeks in China. This years New Year is being spent in ZhuHai. Normally we are in Beijing or some other place. Mary’s sister HaiYan and daughter Yuki are coming to spend the week so a Zhuhai New Year it will be. During the discussion of what to do there were suggestions of going to Hong Kong and Macau. Or going to the local hot springs and sit in hot water with a bunch of other people or one suggestion that got me thinking, that being go to the wilderness. Now the locals apparently call it the wilderness but that is a relative term I think.
The wilderness is an area on a local island that is, as near as I can tell, a wetland preserve. If you leave our apartment and turn right about a half mile up you come to a big bridge that leads to this island.

There seems too be a small village and some other stuff and some open land. Total it is about 10 times the land area of Central Park. But it is not what I would call wilderness of course.
The pearl River delta which Zhuhai is located is one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

Starting at the bottom left is Macau at 73350 per square mile, which is just nuts, then Zhuhai which to my surprise is relatively deserted at 2320 then Guangzhou at 17161 (I don’t count Fosan and Donguan but they are about the same, all looks like the same place to me) and on the lower right Shenzhen at at 19425 and Hong Kong at 17273. The estimates of this areas population is 120 million.
With that kind of population the term wilderness by our standards is meaningless but I guess makes perfect sense there. For people that have not been there that level of population density is hard to have a concept of. If I take the density of most of the region of 17500 people per square mile and convert that to more familiar places that might help.
To put that density within the city limits of Portland Indiana the population would be 81375. The current is 6261.
La Veta Co. population of 800 would grow to 21000.

The metro Phoenix area with a population of 3.2 million ( 2 counties of the Phoenix area) becomes 254 million or 80% of the US population. Not much room for wilderness there.
So as we spend the new year in the Pearl River Delta amongst all those people it could be worse. Most of them will be on transportation going somewhere else .

The new apartment

While I was there this time we were looking for a new apartment. Mary has been in the same place for all 10 years and it was time to move for various reasons. We went and looked a a few but didn’t find any she wanted except for one that had a nice ocean view but it had other issues including an owner that didn’t want to negotiate. Finally just before we left for Beijing we found one she liked and agreed to rent. We moved Wednesday before I came home on Friday. It is about a half mile away and closer to the village on the 7 (top) floor. The view from the front balcony

The tall buildings to the right are the old apartment complex
Looking to the left from the front balcony. That brown spot on the hill is a shooting range used in the morning by army or police. We didn’t know that.

Entryway from the balcony into living and dining area.

Typical high end Chinese kitchen.

Master br and bath

2 of the three normal bathrooms come equipped with Beaureguard the bathroom butler devices and this one also has the ball washer device.

The other master bedroom that also has a full bath and Beaureguard.

The dining area looking onto the back balcony

The back balcony

Off the balcony to the left is a separate room and bathroom I guess for maid or something. But it does provide the opportunity for practicing the use of the infamous Asian toilet.

And I mean practice. The few times I have been forced by events to use one of these things I felt like what a German bombardier must have felt like during WWII (the big one) without the use of the top secret Allied bombsight.  NO targeting ability at all. His General guy says “Herr Vienersnitzle geten ina z areoplane and go bombenzen the buildingza” and he had no choice but get in the general area and let them fly and hope they hit a target. Using the Asian toilet is a lot like that. Anyway we now have a practice unit if anyone is interested.

Those were pictures I took when we did our walk around and Mary has already changed a lot and the maid has cleaned about everything.
Mary bought a couch and even with the back off it would not fit in the elevator so it had to be brought up the outside of the building 7 stories.

Shortly after this picture the guy in the white shirt climbed over the rail and held on by one arm and fiddled with the couch so the others could lift it over the rail. Nuts they are all nuts.

They got it in without anyone dying, Mary has take over one of the 2 remaining bedrooms as her office and the other is used to store all the extra bedding and stuff we don’t want.
The place is called Sunny Melody, for some reason and it’s mascot is a long neck chicken.

And as an added bonus if you go to the back balcony and lean out looking to the North you can just barely see the ‘view from Mary’s office building’ behind the blue silo and on a more clear day you can see the white factory building.

So there is now plenty of room in China so everyone come visit, just not all at once.

 

I’m back Yusmith is back and the world is safe.

I got back from China last Friday and have spent the weekend getting Yusmith back up and running. It seems that we had an issue the likes of which only high level guys like Mark Zuckerberg and guys like that have. My server crashed, which is normally not a huge deal, it’s happens about once a year. This time though it happened right in the middle of a WordPress update thus making the great Yusmith site non existent after I had repaired the server. My server has 4 2T hard drives configured in a Raid array to protect for 1 drive to fail. Which it does. When one fails you pull out the dead drive and replace it and the system rebuilds itself.I this case what it rebuilds did not fix the problem because the failure occurred just as WordPress was updating itself and its configuration file was lost and the php database that keeps track of everything could not be accessed.So after the 24 hours to rebuild everything I then had to download the archived backup I keep updated at an Amazon backup service downloaded and installed which took another 24 hours so the world was without Yusmith for over 48 hours. But now it is safe and I can update the 10 anniversary party for Sepstar, the trip to Beijing and the new apartment. So to hold you over until then her is another menu item from the neighborhood restaurant.

Before the picture it turns out This was still not fixed and another 2 days of fiddling with the software to finally get it fixed so here you go the offical return of Yusmith, the black hole of the web.

 

Another new menu item at the neighborhood restaurant

There is another new taste treat added to the menu of the restaurant across the road from our apartment in Zhuhai.

MMMMM Tasty

As long as we are discussing the neighborhood restaurant Mary has been uncharacteristically repetitive in her food ordering the last 3 times we have been there. Now before I tell you about her food selection, that she has ordered 3 times in a row, don’t get your hopes up that you will go the the Betty Crocker cookbook, seafood section, to throw this together for tonight’s meal  because it is not included there for some reason.

Nothing like a big bowl of FISH LIPS to satisfy your hunger pains.

In hindsight, this must have been the last good day of the year.

Last Saturday, before Mary headed back to China, we took off in the car and drove the back roads toward Lake Michigan passing through the small villages, apple orchards and wineries along the way. We ended up at the city park in St. Joseph around noon of a perfect fall day.

We could wonder around the dunes and the beach under the bright blue sky and we could watch the waves crashing to the shore.

The light house was sitting serenely before taking on it’s winter coat of ice.

Nearby a gull was working on it’s tan in preparation of a long period of no sun.

So as the time to leave comes we make note of the lonely piece of driftwood left by the overnight tide and Mary searches for her shoes

after which we head to the car where Mary poses with her new car (aka the dickmobile) and then we head for home on what has turned out to be the last good day of the fall.

It’s been wet and cloudy since and now it has turned cold. This years warm weather is over and at this point I hope the leaves fall off the trees before I leave for China in a week so I can get them cleaned up before I go.