Sunday 22^nd October, 2017 1415

And the tussle with the school continues. It was put to me that two of my five classes would be on the ground floor while the other three would still be in my current room – with a useless computer.

So that would have seen me playing at Chris Bonnington each day and still having to locate spare rooms for 3 classes to show videos. It's not Janet's fault but she is taking the brunt. I told her I would squat in 402 (my room for the past year) and pointed out that repairing or replacing my set should not really be a huge obstacle – or was the school THAT poor?

I may now have been temporarily located all the time for now in 318 and the leader will make a decision on spending money this coming week. No wonder there are no nets on the basketball hoops!

Today I had three things to do and have yet to do any. Buy some gas, that's now gone by the board as I'm too lazy and anyway I have 12 days or so left. Start withdrawing money in order to amass enough by Wednesday to get Pat to repay my debt – that will be done a little later when I shop. Finally, email Pat with my Taobao list.

Except although I can get on the Taobao home page, whenever I try to search for an item it opens a new page as normal but I always get “server took too long to respond”. I've trawled online for solutions and none of them work. The cause is either Avast antivirus, Windows firewall or the new laptop settings I think but I am damned if I know how to solve it.

I did have a brainwave. I disconnected the new set from the VPN (you can only connect one device at any time) and fired up the old one – it never had that problem. Google search engine doesn't work without a VPN, neither does Chrome. Taobao is in Chinese and Chrome automatically translates.

Having now gotten used to a laptop that is up and running in about 30 seconds, it seemed like the Old Girl took an hour to wake up. The VPN wouldn't connect. There have been updates and her system is outmoded so I tried to see if I could upgrade. Maybe I could but it's Catch 22. Without a VPN connected the damned update automatically tries to go through Google so no go there. I tried every location site to no avail. I have emailed Kevin for advice because not being able to get Taobao is a major problem for me. If he can't help then I shall contact Dean. If he can't either then I suppose it is back to the computer shop to ask them.

On the bright side, with the new unit, even with the clampdown while Congress is sitting, I can always get connected – albeit rarely on a UK site but normally long enough to start UK downloads.

Life is never easy, is it?