There are always things I want to write down—maybe trivial bits and pieces, maybe just the record of a day that drifted by.
A keychain that looked a little too suggestive
A couple of days ago, I took two really nice keychains from Jintao. They were the road-sign style that has been popular lately. I posted them in Moments in the early hours of yesterday.
Turns out that kind of thing is easy for people to read the wrong way 😂😂. My senior even joked that it looked like some kind of high-level hint.
Libin came to work in Dongguan
I slept in until after one in the afternoon today. When I woke up, I saw that Libin had messaged me on WeChat around noon. We ended up talking over WeChat call, and that was when I learned he had found a job in Dongguan, not far from where I was. He said he was coming over.
He arrived after 4:30 that afternoon. He needed to rent a place the same day, do his medical check the next day, and start work on Friday.
After he got the apartment sorted out—we ended up living about 9 kilometers apart—we went out for barbecue.
Riding around Songshan Lake, then tea at night
After staying in my rented place for quite a while, I went out one afternoon to find Libin. We rode bicycles around the Songshan Lake area. The scenery really was good, especially the lakeside stretch with a little patch of sand. It honestly felt like a miniature beach by the sea.
From there we kept riding to Binhu for a COVID test, and also walked around the camping area nearby.
Later that night, we went back to Libin’s place to eat and drink a bit. I tried the qinggan pu'er he had just received, along with some raw pu'er.
When it was time to head back, I rode about 8.5 kilometers to my own place. The road home felt pretty smooth to cycle. At the very least, it was easier than riding in Shenzhen, and I was clearly moving faster than before. The only downside was how long the red lights seemed to last.
Almost got locked down again
I had planned to get up at nine this morning.
Instead, I slept until noon and went out for rice noodle rolls. While eating, I noticed the supermarket across the street had suddenly been sealed off. We were just sitting there feeling lucky we hadn’t gone in to buy groceries and cook for ourselves, watching it all happen from where we were eating.
After the meal, Libin went to catch his ride, and I went off to buy a data cable.
Then, out of nowhere, it was my own building’s turn. The building I lived in was put under control measures—people could enter, but not leave. When I asked the epidemic control staff what was going on, they just said they didn’t know.
So I could only wander around outside for a while. I guessed it was probably like the hotel incident before, where a pooled ten-person nucleic acid test had come back positive, and the restrictions were part of the screening process.
Lately it feels like every possible kind of bad luck has found me. There’s a saying that with luck like this, not buying a lottery ticket would be a waste—so I actually bought one.
Fortunately, it was later confirmed that nothing serious was going on. The control measures were lifted, and the landlord sent a notice saying people could come and go again.
And then, as if the day still hadn’t had enough, I managed to break a Kindle that afternoon. Absolute pain.
A notice that felt historic
The "Communications Itinerary Card" would officially go offline on the 13th.
After three years of the pandemic, it finally felt like a bit of light was showing through.
Huawei’s annual Family Day
Another yearly Family Day came around.
Making Hui Lai’s winter solstice dumplings
Tomorrow is the winter solstice. Back home, almost every household makes dongzhi jian for the occasion.
That reminded me of last year, when Zhanwen, Shaoxiang, and I made them together in Guangzhou.
This year the three of us weren’t in the same city anymore. Libin had come to Dongguan for work not long before, so the two of us got moving instead—went out to buy the ingredients, made the dongzhi jian, boiled them, took photos, and then ate them.
The feeling of New Year is getting stronger
By the end of the year, the holiday atmosphere was getting heavier and heavier. The malls had basically all started putting up their New Year’s Eve displays.