Day 47

It's 47 days until we blow this chicken hut.  47 is a prime number and prime numbers kind of weird me out.  Especially large prime numbers.  It seems arrogant of a number to be so large and yet refuse to be indivisible.  Uncharitable.

It's also day 4 of the Blue Rocketship Adventure.  4 is not a prime number but it is the Chinese equivalent of 13.  The pronunciation of four sounds like the word for death in Chinese, which unnerves Chinese people.  I advocate that simply renaming the number would get rid of a lot of problems, but so far no one agrees with me.

Actually I'm not really sure if the Blue Rocketship Adventure continues because I haven't been out today.  It was still going on in elevators one and two last night.  Last night when I got home from work I wanted to check and see if they had spread to the other three elevators, but, get this---all three elevators were shut down!  So, first the rocketships come, then the elevators shut down.  Things are starting to get freaky.

So I'm a bit scared to go out and find out if the rocketships are still there, but I'd bet a not insignificant amount of money that they are because of the interaction I had last night with the security guard.  I came home from work last night and saw that three of our five elevators were shut down.  I started walking down the hallway towards them before I realixed they were turned off, and as soon as I did the security guard was on his feet calling me back, gesturing with his hand the same way people do when they're telling a truck it can keep backing up because it's not anywhere near hitting the fence.  Apparently even approaching the sacred resting elevators is strictly off limits.

To be fair, I guess I know why he doesn't want people rummaging around down there.  In one of the buildings where I work there's an elevator for odd-numbered floors and an elevator for even-numbered floors.  Even though this is clearly posted on bright yellow signs outside the elevators, people get in the wrong elevator all the time.  When you aren, for example, in the Odd Elevator and you push a button for an even-numbered floor, nothing happens.  It doesn't light up.  People get confused, try to push it again.  Me personally, I'd do a maximum of three standard puses before I gave up.  But I've seen people push the button literally dozens of tines in increasing intensity, from tapping to pushing to punching to pounding.  I've been in elevators with broken buttons before and wondered how an elevator button gets broken, but the answer is the age-old answer that answers most questions: People are nuts.

So the security guard is truly and rightly concerned about people coming along and beating the beans out of the elevatory buttons which is actually pretty dern likely.  Seeing that the lighted panel of the elevator is dark is sufficient for me to get the message, but not, sad to say, for others.  A good Button Pounding is in order.

So I came back to the front and got in the first elevator when it arrived.  The Blue Rocketship was of course present, staring at me.  I almost let it go, but at the last minute I stopped the elevator door from closing and shouted, "Excuse me!" and pointed to the glowing bloe object hovering, like a UFO, in the light fixture.  "Oh," he says to me in Chinese, "Don't worry, that's not a problem."

So apparently his security guard duties include constant vigilance to safeguard the structural integrity of elevator buttons, but apparently spending 10 seconds removing a phallus from two elevators that service hundreds of young children is apparently outside the scope of his work.  The hotel portion of the building does sell rooms by the hour...no, I refuse to go there.  That way ends only in tears.

So, the unremovable Rockets are still there, and may or may not be causeing elevator malfunctions. In othere news, I have been spending a lot of time on Craigslist.  Since no one (so far) has responded to my resume and coverletter explaining that I will be available for work in October, and that I can only be interviewed over the phone or via Skype (I know, it's a shicker that employers aren't falling all over themselves.) I have migrated over to the for sale section.  I CANNOT WAIT to have an apartment in the US.  Our place here has served us well, but it's small and there's very little I can do to decorate it.  Decor items are absurdly, amazingly, ridiculously overpriced, and any that are not look like they came from the home of Hyacinth Bucket.  No good.  And I can't make stuff because there are no craft stores here! 

Anyway, there's some seriously good stuff on there.  In the past when we were looking for a couch CL was a wasteland of distirbingly stained and torn upholstery, but now that we have no buying power there's tons of great stuff.  I hope that trend continues until we actually get our own place.  And appliances!  I've wanted a Kitchenaid mixer for years, but I've never thought to look on CL.  It may be because it took me so long to get over my jealousy of my mom, who found one at a garage sale for $15.  Yes, not $150, there's no zero missing there.  FIFTEEN.  That woman is seriously lucky.  Never go with her to a party at which you're hoping to win the door prize, because she's gonna win it.  Sometimes I, the fruit of her womb, can wheedle it out of her.  But not with the stand mixer!  Oh well.  When we get back to the US I'll just spend a couple weeks living on rice and PB&J, and then buy one off of CL. 

Now if you're reading this, please don't go onto Craigslist and buy up ALL the awesome stuff.  Okay, you can now, but save some for me this fall.

That's the thing.