The Haikou Foreign Affairs Office is one of my regular clients for a variety of projects. In terms of emergency notices (which don't necessarily need to be disease related but which always are), they have a special social welfare rate. 

The last Covid outbreak happened about a month or six weeks ago and I'd never gotten around to billing them as tallying up the word count from a bunch of messages is the sort of pain in the ass nuisance task which you'd think—after 9 years of having an assistant—I would remember I don't have to do myself but can ask my assistant to do for me. As well, the rate which I've agreed on for "jobs done for the greater good of society" is really quite low¹ and I don't see the point in issuing a bill when it's not going to be that much money.

My liaison and I had just gotten around to talking about how the bill really ought to be sent, had even gotten around to making up a list of all the files with his word count² for me to crosscheck when he said "forget about it, more work for you".

"More work for me" is another Covid outbreak, this time an extremely infectious subvariant of Omicron that seems to have come via illicit connections between the Hainanese and Vietnamese fishing fleets doing anything from drug smuggling to attending a cousin's wedding³.

"More work for me" turned into side of the road work breaks turned into definitely going to need to get my laptop out for the batch of documents I'm being sent tonight. And the Front Desk lady is looking dubious at my pre-printed Temporary Residence Registration Form for Foreigners not because I'm a foreigner or because it's been waterproofed with packing tape⁴ but because I filled in my home address as being on Hainan Island and "when was the last time you were there?"

Before all this happens, I've got a stunning day that starts with me dumping 3.3kg of weight in a box to go back to Haikou⁵, continues with a bridge from 1968 with some nice figured concrete, old sandstone block farmhouses where the blocks kind of sort of look like the fishscale bricks I've been told to watch out for as they indicate the presence of Han Dynasty Tombs in the area⁶, and segues into a short detour to check out an old building that turns into a long stop to watch a blacksmith at his craft.

I am officially less than 1,000km from home and unlike other times when getting this close means deciding between actually riding fast for once or giving up and taking a bus part of the way because I'm really starting to miss my friends, there's the very real possibility that the 20 days it would otherwise take me to meander my way down to the ferry won't be enough for things to be open.

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¹ They didn't lowball me, I volunteered. 

² Bloody fucking annoying thing that no one can explain to me is how the character count for Chinese changes by as much as 5% depending on what version of Microsoft Word you are running or if you have an Apple device.

³ Over the 11 years that my company has been legally registered, I've been asked on at least five separate occasions by people in counties in the west coast of the island if I could help find a preferably Chinese speaking native Vietnamese teacher for that county's police on account of issues with drunk and disorderly visits by members of the Vietnamese fishing fleet.

⁴ In point of fact, making the Form look like shit has made it look more authentically believable.

⁵ Which the post office warns me "might take a while to get there" on account of the current situation with Covid

⁶ I'm almost certain I actually have seen bricks like this up in Yi County where there are in fact Han Tombs that very well may have been raided for building materials