Wii!

Finally slept before 3am, at 2.59am, but as though Morpheus was teasing me I woke up 24 minutes later. But with the help of a long podcast I managed to drop off till 7am when I thought about getting up until it was 10am. As is usual, the routine is stepping in of me going to get four portions of jiaozi and the boys getting up later to eat it. Except this time Nezha was awake. He'd asked me for some melatonin last night and it seems to have done the trick.

They had no particular plans but I wanted to see if I could get our old Wii working again, one of the few things salvaged from our old house. It and its accoutrements were dirtier and yellower than ever, and I had severe doubts. I started by cleaning the main box, which had had its folding flaps lost many moons ago. I dared clean it and the power cable just to see if the red light would come on. Thankfully I'd left an adapter on the power cable so I put it in its stand and plugged it in an lo and behold the red light did indeed come on. But that was the first of many things that could go wrong; I had to fix the broken component cable (as I hadn't brought the HDMI adapter - silly me), then see if it would actually connect to the tv, then attach the sensor, clean and set up the Wiimotes with nunchucks etc., then hope that the old external HDD would spin up and work. If any of these went wrong it wouldn't work. But one by one I set it up. It was a real pain trying to plug in the component cables but at least the tv had this connection. But it was a real faff trying to get to them after taking a photo with my phone to see the order of the colours. But when I eventually coaxed the remote control to change input to component I saw to my satisfaction the old Wii interface, with Youtube and iPlayer etc. that would never work again. It even had the correct date and was only a couple of hours out so the internal battery must have been working.

My beloved first Wii still going strong

Next was to set up a Wiimote. I was ok to buy batteries but didn't want to venture into the searing heat so looked about and was not surprised to see a couple of random AA batteries in different places. Yes! The Wiimote came to life and I connected it to its mother station and I appeared to have a functioning Wii! Next was to see if the HDD was working so went to the Homebrew channel to try but unfortunately it didn't pick it up. But I tried the suggested "unplug and replug" and this time the titles turned up on the screen (all owned of course). I dared choose Mario Kart Wii (I even brought the disk with me) and it fired up! Ah nostalgia...even the kids now can share this with me with the Wii and recently have been playing on it at home. To my chagrin I came 8th in Luigi Circuit in the Mushroom Cup, and then in Moo Moo Meadows I was doing ok until the controller jammed turning left. I unplugged and replugged it in eventually but by now I was half a lap from 11th nearing the end of the first lap. Thanks partly to skill and partly to MK Wii's simple AI I managed to catch up within a lap and coast to victory as Daisy on the Mach bike. I got through Mushroom Gorge and Toad's Factory mostly unscathed for another victory. Simple pleasures.

Not my best win but felt better

Well there was to be no siesta; I'd got up relatively early in order to get an early night as I had no idea what time we'd be going to the funeral tomorrow. I'd asked Jiuma on Weixin but she hadn't got back to me. Anyway it was 5.30pm so I asked Leilei if he was hungry. He was eating sunflower seeds which meant he was, so I said we'd go out for a bite in half an hour. Nezha had apparently gone out by himself an hour ago and managed to order a huge bowl of rice and thank the owner and say it was "hao chi" which is pretty good progress. He said he wasn't hungry but joined us as we went across the road to Tan's aunty's place, which happened to be closed so we picked one nearby and asked if they did chao fen. Yep, plus some jiu gui yumi (drunken sweetcorn) and a pork dish, plus a large bottle of full-sugar Coke. The boys both wolfed down the fen and were nearly full by the time the yumi came, over which Nezha was asking if I believed we really put a man on the moon. I said I had no real reason to disbelieve it. Then we got on to politics and whether I thought capitalism was right...ah a tricky one. I just explained that I don't like being polarised and that both sides have their virtues.

I'd like to have had a longer conversation but Leilei had spilt Coke over the table and himself and wasn't too happy. I said I'd go to play ping pong and they were both interested in coming which surprised me in a positive way. But they wanted to go to the Guanmart supermarket first and I needed to get my raquet and theirs.

So I changed clothes and turned up and so did they. It was busier than usual but some ladies let us get on their table. Soon it was Nezha and Leilei against them and they found out the hard way (as I did many years ago) that they were shit. But to be fair it didn't stop them trying and Nezha did improve a bit. I motioned to go at 9.15pm but Leilei said he wanted to play me and I would never let him down in such a situation (we first did this when he was 5). We had a great session where I was clearly better but he won some great rallies and I was proud of him!

Boys vs girls

I left the two of them playing as I wanted to shower and get to the supermarket before it closed. Indeed I got there at 10:10 and managed to pick up the shower gel I forgot the other day. I really wanted some boiled eggs so asked a fu wu yuan. She really wanted to help and was lovely but said the only cooked eggs were quail eggs. She took me to where they were and I duly spooned a few into a bag then got it weighed. Then, with 10 minutes before closing, I asked for "wash body soap" and was told to go upstairs, which I did and found the soap but also the boiled eggs I'd been looking for. Oh poor lady she probably didn't know what wasn't on her floor.

It should have been an early night but I ended up chatting with Mat and Awl till the early hours. But only because Jiuma had finally got back to me to say not to go to the funeral tomorrow as it would be too hot. As if that would be a good reason....