We really didn’t stay in Shenyang long enough to get to know the city as well as perhaps we wanted, but we were there just long enough to make our apartment feel a little bit like home.  And that is why it made it even more frustrating to repack everything we had previously shipped as well as all the additional goods we purchased since we arrived.   Some of the stuff we bought seemed like too much trouble to ship, so we left it.  We probably could have found a way if we had more than one day to move down south, but since we were stuck with the fixed schedule, neither me or Phil cared if we lost out on a few 100 yuan.

Our apartment was small, but it was decent.  The bed was soft and the room was bright.  It didn’t have the greatest view in the world – we had a series of train tracks outside to look at – but we  could see the city all around us since we were on the 15th floor – technically 14th.  4 is a bad number in China.  Sounds too much like the word they use for death.  Our bathroom wasn’t too shabby, but when you took a shower you had to make sure you were done by the time the number on the water heater got to 32 or so or else you would be stuck with cold water.  With me having such long hair, 32 always seemed to get there way too quickly.  It was always like a race against a ticking time bomb, and I always seemed to flipping lose!

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Today, when Phil came home from lunch, he walked in and immediately said, “A car drove into one of the apartments and smashed up a few cars, too.”  I had to see it to believe it.

Just like Phil said, a car had jumped the curb, obliterated one car, dented the hell out of another one, and had driven head first into the front left side of the apartment building, barely missing the window.  The damage on the vehicle indicated speed, but I couldn’t fathom why the car had been driving so fast and how the accident occurred.

After lunch, I took the trash out, and decided to stop and ask some of the people standing around what had happened.  The woman I had talked to said she had seen the car right outside the apartment complex, before the accident, with a 50 gallon trash can lodged under the car.  Two cops were parked next to it.  She said that while at a gas station, the accelerator of the car had gotten stuck and forced the guy to run over the trash can.  The cops looked at the car, did something to it, and let the guy go.  Ten minutes later, driving into the apartment complex, the accelerator got stuck again.  The car rapidly increased in speed.  Nothing the guy did could stop it – at least not that he could think of while it was happening.  I don’t know how or why he decided that ramming into a line of cars and a apartment was a good idea, but that is what he did.

Thankfully, no one was hurt, but man, I felt bad for the pretty Mustang that got taken out.  I can’t imagine how the owners of the cars felt when they went outside and saw the carnage.

It wasn’t the first time I had heard of an accelerator getting stuck.  A year or so ago, I was watching the news, and saw where a woman had called 911 from her cell phone because she couldn’t get her car to stop.  She couldn’t even get it to slow down.  The car was reaching speeds like 80 or possibly more, it may have been a 100, before two cop cars smashed into both sides of her car to make it stop.  I really hope my car never does something crazy like that.  I don’t how I would react.

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This is what happens when you throw left over, supposedly dead seeds into a pot and have no intention of them becoming anything.

When they first sprouted, we thought they were all cucumbers, so we we let them climb up a tomato cage. Big mistake. Turns out, a lot of our supposed cucumbers are actually cantaloupe. Now we have to support the cantaloupes hanging in the sky by pantyhose. Yes, pantyhose. At least, that is what the internet suggested for people who don’t have a lot of space in their garden. You can’t really see it in this photo, unless you look really, really hard, but there is a cantaloupe hanging 3/4ths of the way up(center). It is a slightly less green. I really hope this pantyhose idea works.

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