With a face only a mother could love, who wouldn’t want to come home to this? Well, my lovely wife had a very hard and long week last week. She started on Sunday due to the Chinese New Year, worked until 11pm or later almost every night and stumbled head first into the weekend to crash. Just enough of a break before she returned to work this week to find she will be hitting at least 4 different cities in the next two weeks. Just in case you thought our weekend was all glitz and glam, I wanted to share with you some photos:


Sunday morning was like any other morning. Heavy curtains shielded the pollution…er…sunlight from our room. As I go to look out the window, I am amazed to see what was clear the day before is covered in snow. Guess we are not warming up soon after all. Guess I am not going to drum practice on my bike either.

This weekend we also got a new washing machine. We have bought a new washer and dryer for many reasons:

  • The old washer was inefficient and took a long time to wash
  • The dryer needed to vent to the outside and could not in its present location. It also did not dry well.
  • The washer would not heat water internally and would not be good for washing baby clothes, diapers and underwear.
  • The old washer shocked the crap out of the Ayi every time she stuck her hand in it.

It is hard to say which reason was the most important… Anyway, it was delivered Saturday and of course we wanted to test it out. So we threw in some assorted towels and some detergent and hit what we thought said go. I say, “thought” because of course the machine is in Chinese so we have no idea what it says. We also do not know what the instruction manual says. We (“I”) also did not understand when I bought it that a man would be coming on Monday to install the washer, for good reason. 45 minutes into the cycle, we heard what sounded like an earthquake. The washer had gone into its spin cycle and was shaking its way out of the bathroom door through glass, marble, door stops, etc… I could not believe it, and by the time I got downstairs it had stopped. I pushed the machine back in place and waited. Sure enough, it did it again. It looked like a 747 taking off, with the washer spinning extremely fast and the machine actually lifting off the ground with me trying desperately to hold it down. I pulled the plug and started to complain. “Why can’t stuff in China just work?” “Why is everything so difficult?” Discussions ensued about taking it back, calling the Whirlpool, throwing it out the window. You know the usual.

Well, it turns out that it can work if you can read. The first step in the manual actually indicated that 4 LARGE plugs needed to be pulled from the back of the machine before using it. I can only assume this is for the counter spin and the pins were holding it in place so it was not damaged during shipping. If it was not damaged during shipping, we probably burnt the rotor out when we ran it at full speed while still screwed down! The pictures show the size of the bolts and the rather SMALL warning on the guide. Who knew you had to remove this stuff before using it, and why isn’t there some sort of red tape over the start button or the door to tell you this? Ikea, please teach Whirlpool how to print instruction manuals for the truly stupid. I guess that is why you have someone come and install it for you. I just did not pay attention to my own advice and watch first. Needless to say it is all right and the Ayi is slightly less crispy this week.

I will leave you with two more examples of our exciting weekend:

Those Chinese will ride anything.

Our super fabulous guard dog.