过年好

祝大家过年好，万事如意。

So I’m desperately trying to keep my fingers warm enough to work a keyboard up here in the village. Only one room of the house is warm, and that’s only relatively speaking, and that room doesn’t have the phone. I suppose I could try to persuade lzh to buy an extra 20-odd metres of broadband cable if she goes into the county town to shop as she’s threatening to do today, and then I could get online in that warmer room, and if perhaps she can get the right plug, we may also be able to set things up so that both computers can get online at once, but that’s going a bit too far. Cold as it may be, I’ve coped with this a million times before and I’ll cope with it again. The only annoying thing is having to close the curtains so I can see. This room would probably warm up a bit if I could keep the curtains open and still see the screen.

Anyway, we’ll probably be very busy this Spring Festival, and I don’t know how much time I’ll have to make use of the new broadband connection we have up here- and it’s pretty cool, too, probably faster than the university connection. So I thought I’d pre-emptively wish everyone a Happy New Year in case I don’t get time later on.

And the fireworks have already started. The neighbours started around dawn, and there’ve been intermittent bangs and booms since then.

And so far I haven’t noticed any unusual traffic on the Datong-Qinhuangdao Railway, which runs just a couple of hundred metres south of here, despite all the extra coal they’re supposed to be shipping to help thaw out the south. Then again, I haven’t really being paying attention. Still, we do here the rumble of the coal trains passing pretty clearly, especially at night. Maybe I was just too buggered last night, having slept so little the night before. Did see an empty coal train heading for Datong yesterday afternoon, though, but that is hardly unusual.

Oh, and while I’m at it: Happy Birthday New Zealand! 168 years old, and still going strong!

This is also a test post, because Stuart warned me that he’ll be updating the blogtown code over the next couple of days, and last time he did that everything that was written in Chinese got buggered up. Maybe it’s too early yet, but so far, so good. Just to try and make sure:

俺们夜儿个下午到了延庆，天特晴，可是非常冷。