China Diary: Day Forty Two
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The third day of my holiday week building websites went mostly as I had hoped. In the morning I was able to do some nice tweaking on Mr.Danoff, and load up The Uncertainty Principle. When I started doing The UP I was not considering having a print edition available to buy, but it came to me as I was writing the HTML. It will be interesting to see if it works or not.

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Another one of my goals for this week was to take my oboe out of its case. I am happy to report, that after not doing it for all of last year despite forcing my parents to ship it to Japan for triple figures, I finally did it,

I was slightly scared to find some moisture there, as the film tube which I used to soak my reed still had water from 2003. Thankfully the Renard Oboe seemed to be mostly alright. A few of the keys are sticky, but amazingly it seemed fine and one of my reeds still even worked.

Playing notes on it for the first time brought back all sorts of memories I had forgotten about my band days. I got lightheaded just playing a few notes, so I certainly need to be careful, and take it slow. Playing horribly on the oboe was one of the most satisfying feelings I have had for a long time, though.

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While I was playing basketball in the afternoon, this high school student who had come over was trying to beat me to his right with a sprint to the basket. He was one of the best players I had seen on the AFLS court. He attacked the rim relentlessly and could make a jumper with a hand in his face in addition to beating you off the dribble. We started the day as teammates, but I was relishing this late opportunity to compete.

He was just passing me with his sprint about to make a layup, when he hit one of the kids, then me, then his glasses hit the ground and he smashed them.

The text above was mostly written in the afternoon of October 8th, 2009 about October 7th, 2009. The text below was written today, on the date of publication.