Saturday night's alright for sweating...

Apologies to Elton John for misappropriating his lyrics there, but damn is it hot today.

It's Saturday night. I've spent a day teaching my adult students (without breakfast this morning to boot). I went shopping for some necessities (Lucas got his first taste of Lego-like blocks!). Now I'm sitting in my apartment at almost 11PM drenched to the core because it's 32°C (75% humidity – humidex calculation says it feels like 47°C!) and my apartment is being "cooled" by a single room-sized air conditioner off in the corner of a single bedroom.

Welcome to summer in Wuhan, one of the "Three Hells Furnaces" of China. (The other two are Nanjing and Chongqing.)

And it isn't even July yet!

Yeah, so, well, I missed a day. Sue me.

Yesterday, courtesy of a week of insufficient sleep followed by a night with at most four hours of sleep I was a zombie come update time. I'd like to say that I decided not to write my blog but that's not what happened. Instead I sat at my keyboard and drooled lightly. No decision was involved at all.

I had my first Saturday session teaching at Wuhuan Engineering today. It went well. As is usual for adult students I had a class of motivated people willing to do what I told them even if sometimes they weren't quite sure why. (I always wind up explaining why, but I like to leave a bit of a sense of curiosity in my students at times to keep them interested.) The theme of this week's set of lessons was "learning how to learn" so I closed off the week with a semi-unregulated discussion consisting of them discussing (in English, this being the whole point) things like what they wanted from the course and how they viewed the relationship of teacher to student.

I got some surprisingly good thoughts from them. I really love teaching adult students.

In other news, it's hot now. Yesterday cracked 34C and today I think peaked at 35 or even 36. Even now, at 7PM, it's 31C. Thankfully we haven't hit the high humidity yet. It's only 55% which makes the current "feels like" temperature something like 35. Given that it's only early May, I think this summer is going to be a real scorcher to make up for last summer's mild summer.

Weather warning (plus the shame of Canada).

First the shame side. The Province has an interesting editorial that harmonizes with my view on that Robert Dziekanski fiasco in Vancouver. Nobody who isn't circling the wagons can look at that situation and say that everything went the way it should have. As the editorial points out, every involved agency in that sordid affair has brought changes into effect to prevent such an incident from happening again. Every agency, that is, except the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The RCMP in this matter have smeared not only their force's honour and reputation, they've smeared the reputation of the country as a whole. I know of no Canadian expats anywhere who've not had to contend with people asking questions about Robert Dziekanski and how his death was allowed to happen. Canada's image as a kind, gentle and above all humane nation was struck a serious blow by this affair and it looks like the RCMP are bound and determined to keep it that way.

The testimony of the first officer (Constable Gerry Rundel, for the record) is flatly laughable. Four burly, presumably well-trained men (they'd better be damned well trained for the price tag that force bears!) in body armour felt afraid of a solitary pudgy man with a stapler? Excuse me? If it were not an actionable piece of slander or libel (whichever applies to online communication) I would suggest that Constable Rundel has been spending just a little bit too much time in the special section of the evidence room with the funny plants if he thinks this is a plausible explanation.

This goes double for when this same "peace officer" said he was afraid of the man's combative stance. (That combative stance, for the record, as the video shows, was hands down at his side, albeit with a stapler in his hand. Pretty fierce weapon a desktop stapler. I can see why four burly, well-trained, armoured police officers were in fear for their lives!)

Finally, the flat-out lying in the testimony gets to me. Constable Rundel claims that the four "peace officers" in question didn't discuss a game plan before encountering Robert Dziekanski. That this was allowed to go unanswered in the inquiry is beyond belief. In the video of the matter – the full video, not the bowdlerized version that reached television – you can clearly hear one officer asking for clearance to taze and another giving it: both before the officers had even come on the scene, mind, to assess the situation. Not only had some planning been done beforehand (and caught on record) but that planning basically consisted of "let's taze him and call it a day".

Not the RCMP's finest hour indeed. I can't help but remember that the Airborne regiment was disbanded for similar behaviour and they, arguably, had something resembling a reason to pound that Somali kid. (Not a good reason, note, just something resembling a reason.)

OK, rant is over. On to the weather. Tomorrow is going to be a lovely day according to forecasts. A high of 0C with freezing rain and the threat of a full-blown ice storm. Given the hinky nature of infrastructure in this city, if the ice storm happens you can expect me to be incommunicado for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on the severity. If I suddenly drop off the face of the planet don't worry about it. I'm probably just shivering in my home without electricity and/or Internet.

Global warming my ass.

First week of school.

Well, before I talk about my usual boring drivel, let me talk about a shameful thing I have done. I have signed up for Facebook. I resisted it for years, but it finally caught up with me. (Thankfully I've managed to avoid the pressure to sign up for MySpace or LiveJournal!) My blog here gets echoed over to Facebook, but pictures and stuff like that don't show up over there so this blog is still the main point of contact if you want to keep track of things.

The shame aside, this week was my first week of classes in the new year. In a pleasant surprise, I'm now only teaching four hours at the Sweathogs campus and eight hours with the real students. Three out of my four classes in the main campus are my students from last term and the last one is the one I inherited from Virginia after she went home in the middle of last term because of her cancer's sudden and drastic return. (I'll blog on her at some point but right now don't feel like it for reasons which will become obvious when I finally do get around to it.) The two classes at the Sweathogs campus, however, are new to me. They were Gudrun's students (the new teacher who replaced Peter when he ditched for a job that paid over five times as much) last term, but apparently I got them this term and she got at least two of mine from last term. The poor girl.

I really hate having to constantly contrast the two campuses, but really, it doesn't get much more "light and day" in comparison. Out of my four classes at the main campus, each class 27-29 students (except for the one I got from Virginia which weighs in at 39), I had four students missing total and maybe two or three who came in a few seconds late. Out of my two classes at the Sweathogs campus, one class at 24, the other 25 students, I had six students from one class not show up at all and three from the second (plus an additional four who snuck out at break and didn't come back before I closed the door). And I had well over a dozen total who came in late – some of them as much as fifteen minutes late.

You may have spotted that bit about the ones who snuck out at break and didn't make it back in time? Yeah. I'm harsh with those retards this term. And here's the funny thing: I told them I was going to do it. I gave them a single sheet of very simple rules that very clearly stated I would be doing this! It doesn't get much clearer than "the door closes when the bell rings and if you're not in here, you're marked absent". Yet four boys decided to sneak out during the ten minute break to buy breakfast. (Why aren't they buying breakfast before class starts? Well, you got me there. I have no damned idea!)

This term I'm not going to take any bullshit from these cretins. Their marks are divided into 40% for performance in the first half of term and 60% for the second half. I told them that missing class three times means that first mark is 0 and missing class five times means that second mark is also 0. And four boys decided to test it and are 20% of their way to getting zero for the whole course.

God-damned idiots.

At least, however, I get this all over with early in the week. My first class with the Sweathogs is Monday morning and my second is Wednesday. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings are good students and Friday afternoon is my last class of good students. I end the week on a very high double note.

The weather has taken a turn for the colder in this first week. In the two weeks leading up to classes the weather was getting warmer and warmer to the point that we were seeing 25C in the daytime and lows of 11C at night. Now, however, we're getting rain and temperatures that break 10C in the daytime only if we're lucky. I know you guys in Canada are laughing at the notion that this represents cold weather, but let me point out three salient features of this weather: humidity that never goes below 80% and is usually stuck straight up at 100%, medium to high winds and, last but not least, nothing at all is ever insulated so that outside temperature and humidity is pretty much also your inside temperature and humidity. Only the winds get broken. Somewhat. When your crazed wife and her crazed mother aren't opening them all for circulation. (I'm SO in trouble for that now when Joan reads this!)

Still, the weather this winter was a joy compared to last winter. This winter we had the usual two days with snow, none of which stayed on the ground longer than a few hours. It's almost embarrassing that I had a winter jacket, a fleece vest, a pair of winter gloves and a nice wool sweater sent from Canada this year to keep me warm. I mean I put them to good use here and there, but for the most part it was all overkill.

Help me! I'm melting!

Out of morbid curiosity, I decided one day to write a little computer program that calculated the humidex according to this formula here. (The formula is a pain in the ass to do by hand, you see.) This results in me having waaaaaaaay too much information about just how unpleasant the weather in Wuhan is on any given day.

According to the weather report I have, the current temperature is 35°C and the dew point is 28°C. So, plugging this into my little utility:

$ humidex 35 28
50.90470549019746

I get confirmation that I am, indeed, living somewhere in Bolgia Eight.

Humidex of 51?!?! Come on! Why not just set me on fire, dammit!?

Bad Moon Rising

"I hear hurricanes a-blowin'.
I know the end is comin' soon.
I fear rivers overflowin'.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin."

So, last evening the sky suddenly—very suddenly—went black. My well-lit office suddenly plunged into darkness. I turned my head to look out the window and leaped into action, rushing to my bedroom, going out onto the balcony and pulling in the clothes that were hanging there....

Let's fade out to a time about two months ago. As before the world suddenly turned black, but I had no idea what was coming. Curiously I looked out the window at a world plunged into twilight grey. I watched as a lake whose surface is usually glass suddenly started to froth. I watched as a sign atop a nearby hotel suddenly lost one of its characters, the "letter" floating away like a leaf caught in a zephyr. Only the leaf, in this case, was a sizable chunk of metal.

I continued watching, still not quite fathoming what I was seeing as a large strip of stainless steel siding was stripped from a building's roof. As trees ever-closer to my apartment started sway and, in some cases, actually bend in the wind. Then it struck the building, just as I was getting out of my chair to investigate further. The wind blasting through my wide-open window (three metres away) nearly pushed me back into the chair.

Needless to say this started a big panic. Windows were shut everywhere and clothing, which was snapping in the wind like ever so many flags, was hastily collected. All just in time for the rain to start falling. Rain with drops so huge that at first glance I thought it was hail.So you can understand why, upon seeing the world go dark, I rushed into action. And none too soon, because the tempest that struck last night was far worse than the one I first witnessed.

First came the winds, easily stronger than the one that stripped the siding from a building and tossed it around like crumpled paper. The trees were all bending last night and, surveying the scene this morning, several of them snapped. A nice, tall pine, for example, that has always had a good, triangular profile now looks like it's wilting because the top snapped and is hanging to one side. Three trees right next to my building have had major load-bearing branches just break off, one falling toward and almost leaning on the building. A pile of wood palates in a neighbouring yard that was once stacked neatly is now scattered to the four corners and what's left of the pile proper has a thick tree branch stuck on it.

Next came the rain. Only the rain didn't come in drops. It came as a torrent. I sometimes joke about Niagara Falls opening up over Wuhan. Last night it did. I won't be joking about it anymore. Now unlike that last rainstorm I detailed, East Lake didn't jump its banks and flood streets. This rain didn't actually last all that long. It fell out of the sky and briefly turned all the streets into rivers (I'll explain how I know this below), but the torrent lasted maybe five minutes. Then it turned to regular rain for about 20 minutes. Then it went away leaving only (much-weakened) wind behind.

And lightening. Oh man was there lightning last night! The most glorious display I've seen since that tornado that wreaked havoc in Edmonton and then passed over where I lived in Regina (sans tornado). When that storm struck, there was constant lightning, turning the world into an eerie, strobe-lit scene. I even witnessed it striking a radar tower at the airport (which then spewed sparks far and wide and proceeded to catch fire).
That's what it was like last night, although as far as I could see nothing actually hit the ground; it was all an aerial display that put the best of fireworks to shame for sheer glory. (Oddly there was very little thunder, and what there was was very muted rumblings long-delayed after the lightning that triggered it. I think the closest the lightning ever came was about 5km from timing it -- and that was the stuff that was directly overhead!)

And the power loss. Did I mention that yet? I didn't? Well, suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, all the power in my building cut out. And in the neighbourhood buildings. And in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Indeed as far as the eye could see there was no light at all (aside from the flickering stuff overhead). Now there's an inconveniently placed mountain between me and the bulk of the city, but given what I saw, I suspect the whole city had been plunged into darkness. Obviously the lightning did touch down somewhere, and where it touched it wreaked havoc. For a good 20 minutes nobody had any light other than the occasional flashlight or candle visible in the windows. Then, after I briefly looked up from my Nintendo DS, I noticed that the business district kitty-corner across the lake from us had light. Shortly afterwards the neighbours around us all had light. We were an island of darkness in the neighbourhood, matching the university behind us. Our compound is owned by the university, you see, and, apparently, gets its power feed from the university, not the neighbourhood grid.

At this point I got tired of sitting in the dark while everybody around us had light. The rain had long ago stopped. I was curious to see what the rain did in the neighbourhood, and it was time for my evening exercise walk anyway. So, over Joan's objections (who was convinced I was going to get struck by lightning which had, by that point, receded to over 20km away) I went out for my walk. This is where I saw the aftermath and concluded that the rain had turned all the roads into raging rivers.

Everywhere I looked I saw signs of things being swept into the streets and down the hill -- including things like piles of bricks. The street vendors were all out in force by this point, but it was apparent from watching them that they were tense and unhappy. One DVD vendor was carefully inspecting his stock, for example, while one vendor of fried potatoes had a pile of raw potato chunks piled on the dirt next to a half-empty bucket of the things. Obviously it had been knocked over by a miniature flash flood.

We got our lights back, eventually. In fact the timing scared about ten years from my life. When I went out for my walk I, naturally, walked down the stairs. (Elevators use electricity, recall.) When I reached the last step, I stretched my arm out to open the door and at exactly the same moment that I touched the door, all of the university district lights came on. The hallway lit up. The building's exterior lights lit up. The bank of electrical metres lit up and beeped in unison. I jumped out of my skin and clung to the ceiling.

All in all quite a fun day.