The firecrackers grew louder and louder. Every household had put up Spring Festival couplets, and the air was filled with the smell of meat and gunpowder smoke. New Year was drawing ever closer.
On New Year's Eve, firecrackers went off nonstop throughout the team. Around noon in particular, the successive bursts made Li Long feel as though he had gone twenty years into the future.
After all, last year, the firecrackers had been loudest on the morning of New Year's Day.
It made sense when he thought about it. This year alone, he had led the team members through several big jobs, and every household had earned some money. On top of that, after production quotas were assigned to individual households, the weather had cooperated, and their harvests had been much better than when they farmed collectively. Everyone he had run into these past two days had been smiling and happy.
They had dumplings at noon. Li Long had wanted to go back to the Stable, but Li Jianguo stopped him.
That morning, he and Li Jianguo had pasted up the couplets together. The rooms had already been cleaned two days earlier. A little before that, Li Long had done something big: he had gone to the Department Store in Stone City and bought an eighteen-inch color television!
Li Long had originally thought two thousand yuan at most would cover it. Only after arriving did he see that, at the Stone City Department Store, a fourteen-inch black-and-white television cost over six hundred yuan, a fourteen-inch color television cost sixteen hundred, and the eighteen-inch color television he wanted cost twenty-four hundred!
There, Li Long also saw a rather familiar multipurpose television. It was nine inches, with a television on one side and a radio on the other.
How big was nine