Hurrah for Two Day Work Weeks

It's Saturday, and it's smoggy, and hot outside. But not even that can dim our enthusiasm for Beijing.

Okay. That's not entirely true.
I'm typing this from the confines of my air conditioned bedroom, and have not set foot into the heat or smog yet today. It's perfectly possible, nay - likely that come nine or ten tonight we'll be singing an entirely different tune. One of sore feet, sweaty backs, and arms tired from lugging loot around the city.
We're heading out to Panjiayuan to get Super Husband a few pairs of glasses (at $30 a pop we can afford to buy more than one at a time) and then over to the Panjiayuan Antiques Market. We don't exactly have a list for ourselves right now, but I've not been during the weekend when it's supposed to be full of all kinds of goodies from ages past, and present.
Our previous trip there yielded some nice silk purses and bags, and some chopsticks. And that was on a Monday, so who knows what a Saturday will yield.

******
Skip to eight hours after that first bit was written and we have successfully procured three new pairs of glasses for Super Husband (two sporty/informal pairs, and a "business" pair), a silver bracelet with the 12 signs of the Chinese Zodiac on it, a silk table runner, and a calligraphy set. Getting the lenses in the glasses took so long that we didn't get to Panjiayuan until after 4pm, and they begin packing up around 4:45 for a 5 o'clock closing, but over all we were fairly productive.
Add to that some homemade french fries and I'm calling it a day.

We were also full of energy because this past week was only a two day work week. Huzzah and Hurrah. It's amazing the difference that kind of thing can make.
On Friday the Red Lions, Maroon Lions, Teacher Korey, and I attempted to make ice cream in a bag. I'm putting pretty heavy emphasis on attempted. I'm not ducking the blame here, but it's pretty much all the nurse's fault. Hers, and the fact that the freezer at the school isn't worth a hang. I asked the nurse (she's the only one that's allowed in the kitchen besides the cooks) to freeze plastic ziplock bags of water so that we could just break up the ice and put our bags of sugary milk in there and shake shake shake. Without telling me, she deemed it unhealthy to freeze stuff in plastic bags, and instead put a huge bowl of water in the freezer. That would have been annoying, but fine. Except only the top 1/2inch layer froze, and the rest was just cold water. So, we worked with what we had. After 10 minutes of shaking yielded no results we decided to just put the bags of "ice cream" into the freezer until it was time to send the kids home, six hours later. When I went to check on it at 4:50 we still just had cold milk.
I was so disappointed.  So we sent bags of milk home with our kids and told them to freeze it at home, and hopefully it would work.
On Saturday morning one of the moms sent me a photo of her son eating his ice cream, so at least they finally got to enjoy the fruits of their (really, I did all the work) labour.

Now it's Sunday, and we're FaceTiming with Super Husband's brother. We can't decide whether to spend the day being lazy (our prerogative) or go shopping for things to send back to Houston with my mom. Because she's coming to Beijing on a business trip, and I'm so excited. Although she and I will both have to work, we'll at least have a few dinners together.