Today is a holiday in HK for the Mid-Autumn festival. I'm not quite sure how mid autumn is in September, especially as its 33 dgrees with 95% humidity. Last night our apartment complex, affectionately known as Disneyland, was awash with children up way too late swinging fluro bands and laterns at each other. It looked like great fun and next year JC is a sure starter. It is a festival of the full moon, mooncakes, laterns and family dinners. And it's a long weekend.

Last night I had another pleasant customer service experience. I had been warned that dealing with any customer service rep on a telephone can be a frustrating experience. There is little language barrier as almost everyone can speak some English. Making the nature of a complaint/request understood can be another matter. Yet in the short time I've been here I have had only one bad experience. Last night was a good experience. The Cable TV lady rang back in response to an email, listened couteously to my problem, asked the stock questions, realised it could be a techincal fault and apologised profusely that someone would not be able to contact me until Monday. Then there's our experience of technicians and home handymen, that's a whole different kettle of fish. Most of these have been unmitigated disasters.

This morning was a party at the Aberdeen Marina Club for one of JC's classmates. HK is interesting with its clubs. They are fully enclosed entertainment worlds - and I am jealously not a member of one. Yet. The way deflation has gripped the club rental market, combined with the net outflow of expats, I soon expect the clubs to be begging me for my patronage. I also soon expect George Bush will tap me as his successor.

Central is flooded as usual with helpers who have a day off with nowhere to go. Every time I walk past I find it fascinating. I imagine that friends get together and gossip about the latest goings-on both here and at home. I also imagine they keep commenting on how handsome I am as I walk past.

There is only one news story today that really matters. PB, the cutest (and cheekiest) 1 yr old girl in HK, has finally given up her morning sleep and is on one sleep a day. Suddenly we can reclaim the mornings and actually venture out at a liesurely pace. This replaces the previous mad scramble to get out for 2 hours once she woke around 11am. Mrs M is not happy at this turn of events as she had a firm roster of plans each weekday morning while PB slept.

The funny thing about kids is once you get them worked out, they go and change on you. The flip side is that at least for a few years they think you are the smartest, funniest and all round best couple of people in the whole wide world. This is called childhood innocence. It's when they start to realise you're only an ordinary person who can make mistakes, have emotions and sometimes prefer to NOT watch Barbie the 40th time that everything changes. They can start to relate to you as people, and then it becomes a balance between being parent/child and person/person. This is the famous cliched "letting go" thing. Given the current number of child related expenses, the letting go thing is not going to be as difficult as it sounds.