Day with the kids, evening watching the Test

Without the wife and kids I woke up at 8am and it felt like a veritable lie-in. No breakfast to go out and get, no clothes to get kids to wear, no tooth-brushing or washing of faces. I actually believe I'm on holiday. At 10am I decided to go to Waipo's to see the kids, as without them is nice for a bit, but I miss them a lot after a while.... We went to Ma Laoban's computer shop to get a cable from the laptop to the tv, and both the kids enjoyed themselves playing silly flash games on the computers on display. Before I knew it it was lunchtime so I took them to a local place where I managed to get them to eat some zhou. They just don't seem to have appetites during daylight hours and getting them to eat anything other than sweets is like getting blood from a stone. That's the fault of too many spoiling aunts really...they seem to think that the first set of teeth need to be extracted as soon as possible, with copious amounts of chewy sweets.

The kids wouldn't sleep, which meant I couldn't either, so I ended up making good use of Awl's broken laptop to let them watch some of their favourite Mr Bean. In the afternoon we stopped off at Ma Laoban's again where I swapped an incorrectly bought AV cable for a USB extension so that the laptop would have good connectivity under the tv. There's still no sound but we'll sort that out soon. We went back to Waipo's where I selfishly dumped the kids again in the evening as I wanted to watch the grand prix. It appeared that CCTV5 was only showing a swimming competition which annoyed me a lot as I had to find a stream to watch the race and missed the first couple of laps. Well, it was worth it as the race was thrilling from start to finish and I wasn't even able to go to the fridge to grab a beer until nearly halfway, such was the excitement and lack of adverts.

Kids pacified by watching Mr Bean

After the race I rang Waipo and she said the kids were fine, and that she had a Set Top Box she could lend us so we could watch real tv. I came round to take it after 10pm and the kids both said they were more than happy to stay the night there again! So armed with a STB I set off on the electric bike to find an AV cable so I could watch tv. As it was gone 10pm I set this as a goal for myself. I was confident that at this time I could find such a cable....but try as I might, every likely looking shop that I went to didn't have one. I must have tried 20 such outlets until the last failure pointed me at next-door, which appeared to be a stationery shop that was pulling down its shutters. I asked about the cable and after a little rummaging around, by which time for some reason a small crowd of kids had gathered outside, they found the cable I needed - and only wanted 2 kuai. I left after a great many "hellos" and "goodbyes" with the locals, secretly satisfied that I had Mission Successful yet again...

Back home, with no kids to worry about again, I was happy to stay awake for a while to watch us play very well against India in the test match on a decent stream through the tv with a weak beer, almost like being there (well watching from home, anyway).

Feet up, watching the Test against India with a cold beer - nice!