Category: Chillin’

Summer Thundershowers Over Upper Thailand

Newsflash:

The intense high pressure system from China remains over upper Thailand. This causes summer thunderstorm i.e. thundershowers with gust over the country during 14-15 March, 2009. People should beware of severe weather in the period. Wind and wave in the Gulf is strength.

(I really dig whoever updates that website; their English reads like poetry, or bad subtitles, which I love equally.)
China has finally given me something nice, in the form of an intense high pressure system. It rained most of last night quite hard and the temperature this morning is 19.5 degrees C (67 degrees F) as opposed to yesterday at the same time when it was around 35 C (95 F). It is cool and its nice to have a break from the dulling torpidity of the hot season here in Thailand. The baby is sleeping peacefully without a fan or the AC on, which is a blessing in itself.

Someone turned the heat up…

…it was probably that big, feral, omniscient monkey in the sky.
In two weeks it went from the high 70s (F) to over 100 degrees during the afternoon. It was hot. I decided to walk home since Nam dropped me off this morning. I walked a few miles and emptied the bottle of water I carried along. People drove by in/on all sorts of motored conveyances, and wondered where the hell the crazy Japanese guy was walking. NOBODY WALKS IN THAILAND.
I’m the walking dude.

Water!

Nam was trying to sleep in this morning as Max has been keeping her up at night for the past few weeks, but the funniest thing happened: A man selling jugs of distilled water drove his pickup by the front of the house yelling, “nam na krup! nam na krup!” (water! water!), so Nam came running out of the bedroom a couple minutes later rubbing her eyes and asking who was here…
When she saw the guy selling water down the street she asked me to please kill him.

Slogging through my cellphone photos

From September 2003 to May 2006, I ran a moblog as well as a moblog sidebar as a PHP include on this blog. I really liked it and think I was one of the most prolific adopters of moblogging at the time.This golden era ended when the gateway I used to e-mail blog entries from my phone suddenly died. I had put so much work into tweaking the sidebar publishing system and maintaining it over the years that I really couldn’t bear the idea of doing it half-assed with a flickr widget or starting over from scratch again, so I just omitted it from the design completely. Sad.
Anyhow, all of that doesn’t really matter anymore because I’ve ended up in a GSM country where the phones are just beginning to evolve to where Japanese keitais were about eight years ago. E-mail? Internet? PC Modem? These functions are all available for a hefty sum of money, but are really quite pathetic from a Japanese user’s perspective so I don’t even bother. Here, mobiles are for voice com and texting and capturing photos/video for mainly offline use, and that’s it.
So. I’ve downloaded photos from the crappy camera on my crappy phone via USB cable, Bluetooth, IR, and primitive GSM voodoo, and it’s time to get it online in the spirit of my long lost moblog. The next several entries are all from my camera’s phone, and represent the best out of a hundred or so I took last year.

Very busy new year

In the past six days we’ve come back from our trip to Surin, started on grading midterms, and daddy just got back from a volunteer teaching gig out in the sticks to help out less privileged mooban children. Now all he needs to do is visit some friends who need help, check a family registration translation, finish grading midterms, and get in some more quality time with the baby.
Updates will follow after that.

Exercising Atrophied Illustrator Muscles

Well it took a whole day, but I finished our nengajo (traditional Japanese New Years cards) design! Yay! Max helped out by drooling on my keyboard and now all we have to do is get them printed, handwrite addresses and short greetings (mommy’s job), and send them out in the post!
Since we changed addresses from last year we want to get the drop on everybody before they send cards to our old address… But to be quite honest, we have been bad analog correspondents – we haven’t sent cards since we left Japan (didn’t send very consistently then either, although we did the very last year we were there).
Time to take a nap with baby until midnight.

lost in the ether

I did something today I’d never done before: I lost a chunk of my photo archives. The last 200 photos or so, including the originals of the ones used in the last two posts. The ones on the blog are all that remain… I did this because I was disk juggling and creating backups while I was too tired, overwriting data and formatting a disk that I assumed had been backed up already. Oops. I only write this here as a future warning to all: DON’T FORMAT DISKS WHEN TIRED!!
That is all.

Mahoroba is Japanese Arcadia

Max was overtired and sleep-deprived today, so he just threw a big fit on and off for a couple hours. It was impossible to get any work done, but I still love him with all my heart.
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Sometimes, though, I stay in the bathroom longer than I need to… And I’m not even reading. The ceiling fan turns and water from the shower drips with a steady rhythm… I’m hesitant to leave my sphere of tranquility. It seems that Thailand is my new Yamato and my bathroom is the precise location of Mahoroba.
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See? I’m not the only one hesitant to emerge from my hiding place:
Amaterasu_Emerges.jpg