Bon mot for the week

"You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance."

Ray Bradbury (1920- )

Oiveh! Back in Beijing over a week, but no posts on here because I've had first no Internet connection at all, then no reliable Internet connection, then a crappy landline connection but no wi-fi, and now, still, after 10 days, no bloody VPN. The techies from Witopia are supposed to be trying to rummage around in my computer tonight to see if they can find out what the problem is. I have found a temporary and rather unsatisfactory 'fix' of my own; but I want to know why the service I paid good money for, and which has proved remarkably robust against Chinese interference in the past, has suddenly turned into a piece of crap (it's not the Chinese Internet that's defeating it, it's my new computer!).

And this is only ONE of several ways in which Life has conspired to crap on me from a great height over the past month. I am not a happy camper at the moment.

We might get 'normal service' back in a day or two. Or I might get confined to a mental institution. The latter is seeming more likely...