We have to get at least one air-conditioner to equip our home with this summer.
For my seven past summers in Beijing, and actually all my more than 30 past summers, I either didn’t lived in an air-conditioned home, or when I live in one, I seldom used air-conditioners. I don’t like big electricity bills or the air blown from long-serving air-conditioners that smells of old dust particles.
But, this summer is different. My family now live in a home we can call our own. My wife and I bought it last year literally right before we could no longer afford it. For your information, the price of our apartment in southern suburban Beijing has sky-rocketed by around 85% since we bought it last June.
Now a one-line cruel joke for people in my neck of the woods: “Don’t provoke your husband or your friend.”
It’s been an excruciatingly horrible time for people in Daxing, Beijing for the past several weeks, where my wife and I moved into an apartment we bought last summer as our first home. One (November 23, 2009), two (December 28, 2009), and three (December 31, 2009) gruesome murders had happened in less than 40 days. These murders are alarmingly common in two aspects: the suspects are extremely closely associated with the victims and whole families were eliminated.
Continued from the first part…
After graduation, he joined a Sino-Japanese joint venture in Mudanjiang, Heilongjiang. This company carves gravestones and sells them to Japan. He started from the very junior level and worked all the way up to be the chief financial officer. When he no longer found his job there challenging, he decided to go to Beijing for greater career prospects. His boss wouldn’t let him go. But, he’d made up his mind. About two months had since passed before he could eventually leave the company. After that, four people were needed to take over his job.
We all attended a secondary accounting school in Jiamusi, Heilongjiang, which had later changed its name and then been upgraded to be part of the University of Jiamusi. In other words, the school has long ceased to exist and only our shared memory makes the school still alive.
12 years has passed since graduation. I hadn’t since seen any of the boys and girls until the end of last year, when I met again our youngest boy in Beijing.
In Chaoyang Park (June 20, 2009)
I finally upgraded my three blogs* to the latest WordPress software (2.7.X) that now supports one-click upgrading of core software files. To be fair, upgrading WordPress has always been easy enough, but now it’s even easier.
In the past, when I felt like upgrading my WP software, I had to download a new .zip file, unpacked it, and then uploaded them to my server to override old files before I ran the upgrade file.
