Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
I’ve been gone from the states for so long, I didn’t even understand what a hoco proposal poster was. My immediate thought was that it must put an awful lot of pressure on the girls. But when I asked my daughter, she said girls feel insulted if you don’t make a poster.
I’m so old and out of it.
The title of this post was an answer to “how to ask someone to hoco without a poster,” which appeared among the first page of search results for “hoco poster,” along with an illustrated WikiHow guide.
Seriously, how did I ever live without it?
This was not too bad of a year for flooding, but it has definitely gotten worse than when we moved here. The enlargement of the pond in front of our house and the concrete road sinking has contributed to making the stretch right in front of our house the most prone to flooding. Luckily, we built our house more that a meter off the ground anticipating this or worse. Most of the houses around us get wet inside. Seeing your house surrounded by water is like living in Ponyo world, so it’s not all bad.
This soft indoor cat came into our backyard and Pickle was like nuh uh.
I felt kinda bad for it and hoped it would come back sometime, but I haven’t seen it.
I’m pretty good at finding fixes for computer problems, but I give up on this one. Canon made a real piece of shit. Do not buy:
CanoScan LiDE 400
There are so many problems documented online with this flatbed scanner model, and Canon has done absolutely nothing about it except sometimes offer to trade in your faulty unit for another quite possibly faulty unit (but only if you live in the USA). I’m not going to link all of the problems I found because just searching the model name (LiDE 300 or LiDE 400) brings up:
A. Canon’s useless website and
B. Complaints about these products
Save yourself a headache and stay far, far away from these products.
//
FULL ERROR TEXT FOR SEARCH ENGINES:
Cannot communicate with scanner for these reasons:
- Scanner is turned off.
- USB cable is connected.
- Canon scammed you.
Please check and try again.
Scanner driver will be closed.
Code:2, 156,33
While Isan Sound Goes Global, Mina and I are going to see Tyler.
After our house and the Kujira got flooded, I needed wheels and bought the Triton pickup. I halfheartedly tried to sell it a while back, but we ended up using to haul stuff for student activities and whatnot. Having a pickup and a sedan turns out to be a lot more convenient than having two sedans, badassedness aside. So the Crown has been sitting at my mechanic’s place waiting for daddy to kick up funds for bodywork, paint, and fixing the flooded aircon… So yeah, it’s been almost 3 years, even though she’s always on my mind.
The registration has to be done before next March or it gets de-registered completely, which would mean something more permanent, so that’s not going to happen. So I’m thinking of getting the registration and taxes renewed, and the AC fixed, and getting her safe to be on the road, and just driving her again for a while. As is. Because even like this, she’s kinda badass in this ago of soulless EV plastic trash.
I regret nothing. Except accidentally washing my passport when I got back home from all the trips. We went to Pattaya and Phuket on separate trips to visit students interning at various hotels. Met a lot of cool people and saw a lot of crazy things.
I got what seemed to be food poisoning in Pattaya, possibly from a beloved plate of seafood rad na, but who knows? Food poisoning happens (for me, every five years or so), and the culprit is not always clear. I took off for the Phuket trip still feeling nauseous. On the plane from Don Muang to Phuket, we sat in back of a foreign family that smelled of a wet horse stall at a glue factory. They spoke French and slapped the shit out of their kid when she got scared at takeoff. I made up my mind, right then and there, to vomit on the back of the father’s head if I couldn’t keep it down. I kept turning greener and greener (as did the people around me), but held it down. But best believe I was standing up before we were fully stopped and running off that plane…
The adventures on road trips make life worth living.
Nam and I met at Tenri University in Japan 30+ years ago. Over the years, we kept in touch with Tendai from Thailand both formally and otherwise, which led to formal MOU signings between Tenri university and Nam’s employer, Mahasarakham University, as well as mine, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University. This eventually led to yearly trips from Tendai to MSU with groups of up to 20 students, as well as Nam taking students from Mina’s high school (with her uni students acting as chaperones) for intensive Japanese language training and cultural study in Tenri.
The Tendai group always has a couple destinations when they come over, and they left for Phayao yesterday after spending a few days here. One of the highlights was visiting a Muay Thai camp about 20 minutes away, where students from my university showed us a choreographed routine they had performed at the Maha Sarakham 160 year founding anniversary celebrations the day before.
Come to find out, their coach (a teacher at my uni) attended the sports college next door and was one class below Tony Jaa! I do see some Ong Bak inspiration in their routine.
Anyway, Dabrun Muay Thai Camp posted some photos to FB: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BQUe5vLuN/
As did the moo krata restaurant we ate at later that night: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19Uz7k3Jz1/
Hope to see all of you again soon!
I found the deal of deals to be my new workhorse:
I bought it off a nearby uni student flipping it on FB Marketplace. When I saw the ad, I asked them to hold it and went to check it out that night. For the new price of the graphics card only, I got the whole system.
But why?
When I found time to go through the system properly, I found the previous owner had added an RGB controller almost as an afterthought and wired it incorrectly, possibly frying the AIO LCD and causing other power problems. Trying to fix the rat king of RGB cables, I caused the controller to emit magic smoke as it said goodbye to this cruel world and blinked off forever. I ordered another $3 controller and a couple of intake fans off of Shopee and waited a few days for them to arrive. One of the new fans was faulty, so I had to wait another week… Finally, I had everything together and I finished it off with a GPU support and some of my treasured Pantone action figures.
It’s running Ollama now, and I did some test edits with Premiere.
I played the BF6 beta this past weekend, and it was really very nice, averaging 130+ fps at pretty high settings (I actually can’t remember them) and no frame generation enabled.
What takes too much time every damn time I put together a new (used) system is naming it. So here’s to you and me, Mentaiko.
