It’s all Double-Dutch to me

Amanda will occasionally tease me by “cursing” me in Chinese. This I accept.
But this evening, in the kitchen, she muttered something that I didn’t understand and when I asked her what she had said her reply was “Oh, it’s ok… Not even Mandarin speakers would have understood that. It was in my local dialect.”
What ?!
My few words of Mandarin, (my name, “Nihao”, and about five items of food), don’t stand a chance of helping me to understand her when she’s blabbering in Mandarin, but now I’m expected not to understand her in some strange dialect too !
That woman expects too much of me.

Times are hard

Right, that’s it. Either that hamster starts paying rent or she goes !

While the wife’s away….

Amanda in KLM Business Class

Amanda has had to go back to Nanning for a month to see the family. Her Dad’s not well and has been asking her to go back so now is the best time as she has found a part-time job in a care home which she should start about a month from now once the disclosure paperwork has gone through.
When we were online checking her in for her flights we were picking her seats and I spotted an available seat where I wouldn’t have expected one to be offered for her.
Not giving her the chance to say that she would prefer her “normal seat” (window, just by the middle exit) I said to her “Oh, there’s a good one, grab that !”. As it was late at night and she’d had a long day she was in no mood to put up much of a struggle so the deed was done.
She was more than pleasantly surprised when she boarded the flight at Schiphol, and had to check with the cabin crew two or three times that a mistake hadn’t been made.
I just got a call from her in Chengdu and she says she slept all the way. That’s the first time ever! Given how busy she has been over the past week and how tired she was when I left her at the airport in Edinburgh I’m so glad it worked out that way for her.
It’s also the first time I’ve ever been able to get an upgrade for anybody, despite years of trying, so I’m pretty happy about that too.
Now, while the wife’s away, I’m hoping to be able to get around to a few blog posts that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. They’ll be somewhat varied so there should be something for everyone.

Starting the day with a laugh

There is a small group of blogs that I subscribe to and I woke up this morning to two new posts that had an effect on me.
One I will be contacting the author directly for further useful information.
The other is worth pointing my readers at because I’m still laughing now. If ever a post by one of my friends warranted hitting the Freshly Pressed board it’s this one.
Thanks for the laugh, Cheri.

Tom’s Diner

Yes, that takes me back…..

So having played around with the various farming and restaurant elements on QQ, (all in Chinese ), I decided I wanted to try setting up a restaurant of my own on there. None of the attached farms and factories, just the restaurant element.

Why ?  Because that’s the bit that has the design element as well, and I love playing around with that part of it. (See later, below)

Eventually Amanda set me up with my own ID and a starter restaurant. Well, what else could I call it ?…

Tom's Diner (Click for full size picture if you want)

That’s me having a quiet word in the waitress’s ear, and Amanda doing the cooking with a silly mask on.

It’s only very basic at the moment (because it’s only been open 36 hours), but from little acorns etc. etc.

Eventually the plan will be to have something like Amanda’s (design by yours truly), but that’s a couple of months down the road yet.

Amanda's Restaurant

As you can see, although all the restaurants are actually on just one level I’ve been playing around with the perspective effects you can achieve by careful utilisation of the available pieces. Click on the pic for a full screen version to get the full effect. I’ve actually seen designs that appear to have four different levels on a board of about the same size as Amanda’s, although whether they work particularly well from a gameplay point of view is probably another matter. (Reminder to self: Must have a word to Amanda about that cleaner ! )

I’m also working on field designs within Farmerama, although the recent Alien Visit challenge forced me to temporarily abandon what I was working on there in favour of making a tidy profit on the Cow market.

Such a busy life….

Time to come clean about “Angry Poo”

(It will be interesting to see which search engine terms feed into a blog post with that as a title)

Yes, it’s time to come clean about why I haven’t been blogging much lately.  Blame Amanda. (!)

I used to watch from a distance as colleagues at work messed around during their lunch breaks carefully tending their Facebook Farms. Occasionally I would enquire, “How’s your Coo’s ?”, but given my total dislike of Facebook that’s about as far as it went… until Amanda revealed the amount of time she spent playing with the farming game on QQ, which is like a Chinese version of Facebook. (Yuk !!!)

However, with her spending so much time on it I thought to myself, “I might take a look and see if there’s another free, non-Facebook, English language farming game that I like the look of, just to see what the fascination is.”

Mistake.

Big mistake !

Farmerama Logo

I have now been farming for two and a half months.  I have three farms on Farmerama (all at around level 50), have spreadsheets tabulating information about crops, trees, animals and their relative benefits with regard to cash and experience points, neighbours and their complete gift histories, etc., etc..  If you want to know which is the best crop to plant at any particular time of the day (or night) in order to take best advantage of the various challenges that might be on offer, just give me a call !

And, I’ve been given control of one of Amanda’s QQ farms (with its associated restaurant, crops and animals) along with monitoring her and her nephew’s similar “businesses”.

Help !!!

It certainly helps to pass the time, that’s for sure.  Constant calls of “Go to John’s animals…”, “You have angry customers…”, “You can take my Rice in ten minutes…”, interspersed with “Haha… I got your Sheep…”, “I can’t, I’m in the middle of something….”, “Oh, I can’t bash any more mozzies today “, and so on, and so forth.

Well, what’s life for if you can’t have fun together, eh ?

I’m seriously considering starting a new blog with some “Tips for beginners” for Farmerama-ers, along with pointing out some of the high (and low) lights of it, showing some of my favourite graphics (very often the best part of the game), and such like.

Oh yes… and the “Angry Poo”… ?

Well that’s on QQ, appears in the animal field, and you get a bonus for shovelling it up…

Angry Poo

Ain’t it cute ?

Must dash, have two fields full of strawberries to harvest….

Frosty the Snowmam (Yep, that’s right)

Frosty the Snowmam

I think I probably made a snowman in the winter of ’63; I know I did make one once when I was a kid.

Amanda has never made a snowman before and, dear little wife that she is, she badgered the living daylights out of me this morning until I finally went out to help her and offer some well needed technical advice. (It’s what us men are for).

There was me thinking that she would just go downstairs and make a little one outside the door, maybe behind my car. But, oh no, over into the car park she went to make as big a one as she could !

“Frosty” ended up at 4ft 3inches (1.3m) and with no arms, but oh, so cute.

I don’t think my back will forgive me this side of Christmas but Amanda’s happy, and that’s what matters.

Oh, and yes, it is called “Frosty the Snowmam“, because that was how Amanda labelled the folder that she uploaded the pictures into.

 

Do my delicate bits have “Kick Me” written all over them ?

Image via Wikipedia

There goes life again, patiently waiting in the shadows to leap out and kick me right where it hurts.

Amanda moved over here last Friday; I’m “back to the wall” financially at the moment after spending out on her visa (UK Government rip-off), and all the flights, and having just come back from two weeks holiday; we are struggling to find work for her; and then what happens ?

Today we were all laid off at work as the company folded.

Great ! Yippee-dabby-doobie !

I might as well go to a tattooist, drop my pants, spread my legs, and tell him to start writing “Kick Me” all over whatever he finds there.

The company can’t afford to pay us any redundancy money, so there will be about a six week wait for the Government scheme to come up with anything, and that won’t be much.

Amanda is taking it very well at the moment, but with no sign of any income at all for the next few weeks and only enough dosh available to cover food for the next two weeks (no bills, just food), it looks like things are going to get a little tough.

Thanks a bunch, Life, I love you too !

Update: 23 Sep 09:00

Forgot to mention:

Yesterday I got a call from Amanda saying that a light bulb in the living room had exploded and tripped the main fuse so I had to go home to reset things for her, then last night my printer went kaput just as I needed to print out some very important paperwork (and now I won’t have access to an office printer either).

Now this morning I went to pull the kitchen window closed and the hook came off in my hands, spilling the attachments over an inaccessible part of the roof downstairs just as the kettle developed a leak and will (desperately) need replacing.

Keep kicking !

Amanda and Mary Poppins are the same person

Do you remember Mary Poppins ?

Do you remember the plethora of weird things that she pulled out of her Salisbury travel bag ?

Having seen what Amanda managed to produce from the suitcases when she was unpacking the other day I think she must be Mary Poppins in disguise.

Yes, given that this was Amanda’s “moving” trip and I had to book an extra case on the flight I knew there would be endless amounts of clothes and quite a few more pairs of shoes, but the list of other items was quite impressive…

Webcam & Mic
Rice cooker
Spoons/scoops for attaching to outside of rice cooker
Spare bowl for rice cooker
DVDs of Nanning Folk Festival
2 Electric adaptors and 2 extension leads
1kg Chicken Powder Seasoning
Set of place mats and Coasters
Upright chrome drying rack for kitchen, designed for holding chopping boards, knives and chopsticks
Chinese New Year door decoration
Dried salty fish (very smelly, but very well wrapped)
Dried Longan berries
Pork Floss 200g
Pack of dried mini-shrimp
Preserved eggs (pack of 8 )
Duck wing (1)
Chinese bacon
Chinese sausages (4 packs)
1 vacu-packed pillow
Water melon seeds (large pack)
More sausages
2 boxes of soft-grip gel ink pens
Sauce for hot bean curd (6 packs)
Some liquid for helping with the cooking (clear alcohol of some sort)
A shoebox full of assorted (Chinese) medicines
59 moisturising face masks
2 new pairs of shoes for wearing with her Qipao’s (very smart)
1 gold handbag, one blue double wallet, same purpose as shoes
A plastic mini heat-preserving lunch box with sections for soup, rice and main dish
Moon Cakes (seemingly hundreds of)
Another pack of CDs/DVDs in a travel holder

Somehow we’ve managed to find homes for it all, but it’s really emphasised the need to move to somewhere bigger.

What’s the first question a new resident in the UK asks ?

Arrived home with Amanda at about lunchtime yesterday.  :-)

As we started to look around the place at all the suitcases and bags that needed unpacking (!) I spotted a police van and car pulling away from one on the blocks in the cul-de-sac opposite and I mentioned to Amanda that I thought some “undesirables” must have moved in over there some time back because I had seen the police there in numbers on a quite a few occasions over the past couple of months.

A. “Do I need to register with the police ?”

T. “Why ?”

A. “Don’t the police need to know there’s a foreigner living here now ?”

T. “No, darling… Not in this country.”

Thanks, Kelly, for reminding me of that.