Monday 7^th September, 2020 1930

Having spent a lazyish day indoors yesterday and being a trifle more energetic today by way of shopping and cooking a vegetable soup, I planned to go out at 1600 to do so. Cooking for Jody is really inhibiting me what with the aversion to cheese and mostly meat. Well that will all be changing shortly and she will need to fend for herself. Not that she's not happy to, it's just that if I have a guest I like to cook for them. The reason she will be getting her own?

I now have 5/8 of my timetable. Every single class is after 1430 with Mon and Tue seeing 1830 finishes. I won't be cooking at that time so it is time to clear out the freezer and batch cook lasagne, bolognese etc for freezing. It just remains to see what the English dept come up with that I can scream blue murder about – 0800 start and 4.5 hour lunch break etc.

Having been told I won't be teaching until week 3 (21^st September) I wasn't entirely overjoyed to be told at 1430 today that I will in fact be teaching one class earlier, like, tomorrow afternoon! Ok, nothing I cannot take in my stride, it was just that a little more notice would have been better. And it's only two academic hours.

We have been holding back on booking the Xining luxury break. This was because Dean Bitch the Bully was telling everyone the national holiday might be cancelled as you may remember. Today Brenda called me and said she had checked with Mr Zhang and his reply was basically she was talking testicles. When I told Brenda the source of the rumour it was quite obvious I am not the only one with a low opinion of the person in question.

The problem is, being national holiday the train tickets are evaporating faster than a pee in the Atacama desert. I am waiting for Jody to come home to book whatever we can get. If we are lucky we can still get 1^st class there but coming back it will probably be hard sleeper or hard seats. Not a big thing for a two and a half hour journey you may think, but due to DB's lies, we daren't book our tickets through an agency before they came on sale. In China you can't buy rail tickets more than 30 days in advance so the trick is to use an agent who will snap them up the moment they go on sale. Costs 5¥ a ticket but well worth it.

So back to the grind tomorrow for a couple of hours.