Category: Chillin’

COVID-19 Numbers, USA

Doubled nationwide and doubled in Hamilton city (not county), in comparison to 10 days ago. People from other countries cannot understand why many Americans won’t wear masks, but it’s simpler than you’d think – Freedom or Death!

It would be remiss not to mention that arsonists have tried to destroy at least 50 5G towers in several countries in the EU, UK, and US. It has not helped the spread of the coronavirus at all.

We bought Covid 19 insurance

Many insurance companies started offering it in Thailand from about last week, and the rates are similar. We just have the lowest tier of coverage, which starts at about 250 baht (one time payment) and covers up to 200,000 baht in medical expenses for a year. The higher tiers cover about double that.

I have to go pick up Max in Washington state in a couple months, so it seemed prudent. I looked at air tickets last night, and the transit countries (Japan, Korea, China, etc.) are all hot zones, except for Taiwan. So, hopefully Taiwan stays safe and I can use Eva Air. But who knows how all this will turn out. Fucking pandemics, man. Really inconsiderate.

Catch!

When we play catch or practice hitting balls around the vacant lots and parks around here, people stop to watch. Hmm… I’ve never seen anyone else playing baseball in Thailand, either! I’m not a big baseball fan or anything, but it’s great for kids’ hand-eye coordination.

I found the equipment for sale at a secondhand Japanese goods store in town. This was a very popular business until very recently – you could buy containers of household stuff from Japan at various Thai shipping ports for around 70,000 baht and up. A lot of people started used Japanese good shops with stuff from a single container. You couldn’t see what was in the container before you bought it, so there would be some new stores opening with tons of old clothes, others loaded with baby strollers and rice cookers (the wrong voltage for TH), and many with just worthless crap. The best containers were probably the ones loaded with wooden furniture and bicycles. Many of the products were packed in similar moving company boxes, which led to speculation as to where this stuff was coming from.

Now that I’ve Googled a bit, UPDATE: We export used clothing from Japan to Thailand

Rogue One AKA Star Wars in Dubai

For me, this is the second or third best movie in the entire series, behind Empire Strikes Back and maybe A New Hope. Definitely better than Return of the Jedi.

I really loved that Donnie Yen was in it, but kind of hated his mystical Tai Chi Yojimbo character (we get it, blind people’s other senses are finely attuned as hell, and Asians all have Jedi-like intuition except when driving ha fucking ha). And goddamn Star Wars weapons always piss me off – why does his sidekick with the belt-fed MG have to rack the slide like a goddamn Remington 870 after every shot at the end? Is it an over/under plasma LMG/shotty?

Aside from the usual cookie cutter Star Wars plot and minor nitpicks, the movie just worked. No fucking teddy bear creatures, no annoying CGI sidekicks, no damn jedis doing inexplicably stupid shit. The droids were fucking dope. And the final tie in to A New Hope! It was pretty goddamn satisfying. Now if Joss Whedon would just do a second season of Firefly with the same budget as the original, I’d be happy. Might as well hope for a season 2 of Freaks and Geeks, tho.

Freed Fishies

I had contemplated throwing all of our aquarium fish back into the pond in front of our house for quite a while. I had gotten quite lazy about cleaning the tank, and with a big pleco in there, there was just shit everywhere. The remaining fish were pleco, a native plant-eater called pla kady, and a stickleback-sized minnow of unknown species who washed up on our driveway less than a week ago after rain and flooding (which is getting worse every year). Today I finally got around to washing the tank and cracked it, badly, when laying it on its side. So I asked Max and Mina what they thought and they actually open to the thought of throwing the fish back in the pond to “be with their families.” Finding fucking Nemo, that surprised me.

So that’s where they went. The cruel irony is that they might not last a full day restored to the wild. You see, the excavator came and cleared away vegetation on the banks again, so the pond was once again made accessible. So at sundown, a bunch of foreign workers came and strung up nets inside of the pond to catch many future meals (the pond, which hasn’t been seriously fished for years now, is chock full of fish). I asked Nam to call the housing office to come chase the hunter gatherers away, because I don’t want them coming back to check their nets when we and our neighbors are gone during the day (since they are in a good spot to scope out empty homes when at the pond). The response was swift, and the workers disappeared, but the nets are still out there (the workers will definitely be back for their nets, no matter what). So I’m afraid the fish I released today, especially big, dumb Pleco, are going to get caught. This bothers me.

Trash Raider

There is a fat gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus) in our house that raids the kitchen trash when I leave the lid off. He runs away as soon as he hears someone approaching the kitchen, but I can hear the crumpling of the trash bag as he explores. Sometimes I leave the lid of the trash off just so I can hear him exploring…. He’s been with us for a couple years now (they apparently live 5-10 years), so I consider him a friend, but he’s still very skittish.

Although he probably just hangs around the trash to catch flies, I like to believe that he’s eating our leftovers; perhaps a tasty bit of stir fried basil-stained rice here, and a few nips of mango peelings there. I’ve yet to catch him in the act, though. Even Nam, who really hates geckos, thinks this little guy’s trash raiding habit is amusing… We call him Mr. Fatty because he’s just about the piggiest common gecko we’ve ever seen.

Things to chew on

I hate waiting.

When I’m waiting somewhere in an office, or in a line, or in a classroom with nothing better to do, I find myself thinking about other things that annoy me.

Like, you know when you’re walking in an air-conditioned shopping mall in a third world country, with only tall glass separating your sterile consumerist biosphere from the rotten hell that surrounds you? The knowledge that when you step outside those doors, the stench of poor people will cling to your chest, so why not walk around some more? Being born into this world where you’ve been lucky enough to be among the people wasting time inside, as opposed to one of the desperate souls rooting through the garbage looking for cans outside, is the ultimate reason you’re able to justify the guilt of being in such a position – it really wasn’t your doing anyway.

Or, you know when you see old houses that haven’t been kept up and some of the roofing tiles are missing or out of place?

Or how seeing some young asshole reminds you of yourself (maybe not so) long ago?

Yeah, shit like that annoys me.

That’s why I hate waiting.