What Did You Do Today?

So what did my day include? I got up at 6. I had time so that I could have slept much later and it would have been fine, but I am still jet lagging a wee bit and one of the last pieces to go is early morning rising. I had devotions from John 2. When Mary told the servants to do “whatever Jesus tells you,” what did she expect to happen? How did she possibly think Jesus was going to solve the lack of wine? Had he provided food from thin air in their family home before? But the Scriptures specifically says this was his first miracle. The point for me was not to solve the problem for God, but to simply give it to Him and see what he does with it. I needed that word in regard to my hip right now.

I did my hip stretching exercises. I can do phase 2 fairly easily, but it hurts to stand on the bad leg to stretch the good leg. Is that suppose to be the case? I thought it was when I stretch the bad leg that I should feel pain?

I had finished checking the essays from classes yesterday, so added in the grades to the gradebook and saved everything to a flashdrive, because the big effort for today was to take my computer to be fixed and what if I lost everything on the hard drive in the process? By then Rick was up and so we progressed to making the weeks food. Calico beans in the crock pot and General Tso’s chicken in the Instant Pot. We wanted to wait for the cleaning ladies to arrive. They come Tuesday morning for their 15 minute cleaning fest, but the computer man had just sent a WeChat (social media) message to come this morning to have my computer looked at. We particularly wanted to talk to the cleaning ladies because this is the usual method to report problems, and our door has not closed properly for a week. (Anywhere else that might be scary, but things are so safe here, we barely gave it any thought that our door was not even closed most nights.) So at about 10:30 we set off to find the computer man.

A year ago we bought laptops from him. About a month ago I started to get a message from the computer god’s saying that my Windows license had expired. I am sure that it probably was a pirated English version installed to begin with. Two weeks ago a student/friend spent 3 hours trying to call and solve the problem for me, but with no results. When we looked for the computer man the day after we arrived back in China, we found that he had moved and even the phone number that was left behind had been passed on to a not very nice nor helpful lady who tried to sell us other services. Finally, last week through a friend of a friend we were able to contact the computer man. He sent pictures and the number of the metro exit to us so we could hopefully find him.

Beijing Metros Subways are spectacular, …but not really handicapped accessible. I needed to take my walker since I knew that there would be lots of walking. At some metro station accesses there is a handicapped turn stile that accommodates a walker, and sometimes not. If not, you have to send someone through first and then heft the walker over the turnstile to them. At times this is accomplished with many worker bees buzzing around in a foreign language trying to be helpful. (Usually they are very, very helpful, but sometimes you just want to be left alone to go over turn stiles, or up escalators by yourself.)

After much back and forth we finally found the building, which was 12 stories and quite large. We got off the elevator on the third floor at kiosk A189 or so, which meant there were 189 kiosks in A section alone on this floor. His number was H15!!! Does it give you a hint about the size? We finally stopped and sent a WeChat message as to the number we were at and he came and found us. …and fixed my computer. We left Rick’s there for him to mess with this week.

We were then directed to Carrefour because we had some grocery shopping to do. I don’t remember what country (or continent) I was in the last time I was in a Carrefour, but it is as big and complex as I remember it. I think it might be a French version of Walmart??? Huge and overwhelming but we did find the few things we wanted and Rick packed them away in a backpack on his back because he needed to carry them all the way home.

We then had to find our way out of the building. No minor feat. At one point we were stuck wandering in the maze of a Chinese food court about a block big at lunch time. Because at that point I was being pushed in the walker, my eye level perspective was different from most people. The most memorable thing was the bamboo shoots which were quite phallic in appearance.  We finally did find our way back to the subway and home.

Rick has been just super this whole year long ordeal of my hip. He pushes me in the walker, or holds me up while I hobble, or pulls my leg up and over the bike, etc. etc. As much as I get a work out, he gets twice. I do feel definite progress this week, albeit slow. I know that I can walk a mile with the walker now….that is a literal mile, not a figurative mile, without pain. I can take some steps without support, but it hurts. Still progress. We got home at 2:00. What else should we do today?

PS. Just got this on FB as a memory about the original purchase. Just interesting.

Well, we bought 2 (I repeat 2) laptops. Lenovo. Very good price for China and have what we need. Of course then the dear man who sold it to us had to run all over finding an English operating system (Windows) rather than the Chinese system that was on it. Now we are trying to get Office to work,...Will it let us download in China? etc. Even though we sat in the little kiosk for 4 hours it was worth it. Thank you for your support,