On my way home from the gym about an hour ago, I spotted a familiar silhouette on the side of the road… I saw it after my headlights had passed over, but some primal part of my brain recognized the dark shape and screamed POSSIBLE FOOD SOURCE. I stopped and backed up a bit, and got out of the car.
The rear running lights on my car shine through 38 year old lenses, so they aren’t that bright. But they were bright enough to show that I had found a pretty big turtle with pretty yellow stripes running up and down his legs and neck; his shell was about 9 inches long and he weighed around four pounds. When I picked him up, he tried to pee on me but my daddy reflexes are too well-tuned to get caught with such clumsy reptilian attempts (in contrast, Max has successfully barfed, peed, and crapped on me all in one day).
I decided to take him home instead of leaving him to get run over so far from a water source. I wondered how he had gotten there… Was he an escaped pet? On a walkabout? Or was he the ghost of my dead pink chicken, Pinky, come to say goodbye to daddy once again? (I miss that chicken, godammit!)
I put him on the hood of the Kuj (and he of course peed all over it), then drove home. I showed him to Max, who was kind of impressed, and Nam said I should let it go in the pond in front of our house. So we walked it down to the water’s edge, mumbled some quasi-religious well wishes common to those who don’t really care about religion but sometimes like to acknowledge there are greater forces than ourselves out there somewhere, and I tossed it into the water.
Then I washed off my hood with a half-empty bottle of water from my gym bag.
If that turtle makes it through the winter, avoids being eaten by the workers who net fish in our pond, and doesn’t get run over anytime soon, I’ll be really happy.
Category: Exploits
We hates steps with overhangs, preeeecious!
Daddy took Max to work today and Max tripped on the marble steps to the main building because there are 1″ overhangs on each one… there is no apparent reason to have overhangs on steps, other than to make people (especially children) trip on them. Max hit the lip of the next step with his face and his canine tooth cut the inside of his mouth… Tears! Pain! Much sadness and shock!
Luckily, daddy had milk ready in the car. Milk makes everything better.
Wherein I confront craziness
In the interest of getting everything on the record, we decided to confront the crazy bitch, at her request, at the police station last Thursday, dependant on a couple of things. We first called in a favor and asked about the officer in charge and got back the answer that he had a reputation for being straight, and a good cop. That was a good sign, because a chance you take when going to the cops here in an unclear case like this one is that the cops are either sided with your opponents for whatever reason, or the cops themselves want something. So I wired myself with a cellphone transmitting to my PC at home.
That accomplished, we brought along Nam’s little sister to help watch Max and went to the station. The entire meeting lasted 30 minutes, because everybody except the crazy bitch wanted it to end quickly. She brought along a female teacher from Nam’s university for whatever reason and even she seemingly wanted it to end quickly. Why? Because in those thirty minutes, the crazy bitch never indicated what she wanted until the very end but did manage to tell everyone how she nearly caused an accident in the middle of an intersection when she pulled alongside me, in the lane for oncoming traffic, and expected me to sideswipe some kids on motorbikes to make room for her… And then got so angry because I didn’t accommodate her that she followed me for a kilometer, pulled in front of my car, and slammed on her brakes to cause an accident – WITH KIDS IN THE CAR!!! (and from what I saw, they weren’t even wearing seatbelts, because both of them were thrown forward, hard.)
By the time the cop heard this, he’d pretty much had enough of her so he kept repeating the same question, namely asking just what it was that she wanted. Because she wouldn’t say what she wanted, I got the strange feeling she was waiting for an apology from me but was somehow too embarrassed to ask for it. You’d never guess it, but… Just for the hell of it, I apologized. And guess what? That was that. Rather, that was it. The whole time, she wanted an apology from me for somehow causing her to almost (intentionally) cause two accidents in two minutes. When everybody realized that, it was like light bulbs went on above their heads. Nam, me, the cop, the crazy bitch’s friend. I mean road rage is one thing, but trying to cause accidents and then admitting it to a cop in a police station because you think it’ll get someone else in trouble, all because you want an apology is… fucking crazy, or as the Chinese exchange students at the good ol’ U of T used to say, C-R-A-Z-I-O-U-S.
So, the situation is resolved. I actually felt good about making the crazy bitch feel good, too (by apologizing). I could’ve really pissed her off by letting it get to the “demanding an apology” stage and then refusing to do so – I had every right to – but even though I intensely disliked her, I felt sorry for her at the same time. Someday, when I get to Buddhist anti-purgatory, I expect some fucking deity to remember the time I was nice to a crazy person, and perhaps just temporarily put out the fire burning my ass off.
That is all.
No work accomplished today
I wanted to get some midterm grading done the past five hours, but I ended up entertaining Max instead. He wouldn’t go to sleep and Nam was busy putting together slides for a presentation in Bangkok at some lexicographical conference in ten days – it takes precedence over my work so I had to watch the baby (of course, pretty soon he will be the toddler and there will be a new baby).
I really need to get as much grading done as I can in chunks because with 11 classes (7 different courses; 3 which I’ve done before but am improving and 4 new ones), a few hundred students, and 35 hours in the classroom a week, it’s impossible to finish all at once or very quickly.
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Something else also popped up this evening: A couple cops came by the house and asked us to call another cop about a traffic accident or something. It turns out that some crazy bitch who tried to make me rear-end her because I wouldn’t let her cut me off while making a dangerous turn into a signal-less intersection (whew!) reported my license number to the police… I remember it very well because it happened on my birthday last week and I was really pissed off, but refrained from cussing her out because I felt bad for the kids in the car… I couldn’t believe that she cut in front of me, waited for my car to get close, and then stomped on the brakes to try and cause an accident with kids in the car. Of course, there’s really nothing she can do unless she makes a bullshit claim, so we’ll see what happens. Basically the cop who Nam called asked us to work it out because this woman came and complained about me “teasing” her… That would be the part where I told her she was a horrible driver and should be more careful with kids in the car…
I feel the cops really have no business asking us about anything or to do anything since nothing happened (apparently by her account as well as mine), but maybe she has a brother on the force or something. If it comes to a “who has bigger friends” contest, though, I will be prepared and show no mercy…
Monkey Time at Kosamphi Forest Park
A few weeks ago we decided to go out for a drive. It was time to take Max for his first visit to the monkey park in the nearby town of Kosum Phisai, so we put his car seat in the trusty old Kujira and were on our way. We took the Kujira instead of the Cefiro because:
- Monkeys are little bastards that scratch up cars for fun
- Max sleeps really well in the Crown with its worn suspension and lulling vibration
- It’s a proper cruising car!!
Max spots some fellow monkeys!
To a normal person, this might just look like a bunch of monkeys sitting in a row, but this sight reminded me of cruising by a red light district in Osaka at night where house after house had an old women standing in the doorway, beckoning passers by to come in (I suppose old women just remind me of monkeys).
Check out the ghost reflection of the key in the ignition!
In the rearview
A discerning mommy wondering whether tthis sun-dried banana is organic or not (it is).
This is why we took the old car.
The Kosamphi Monkey Center (AKA Kosamphi Forest Park, also spelled “Kosumphi”) is a great place to visit if you are tired of seeing giant catfish, and indeed, I think they should just call it a “monkey sanctuary.”
smell my armpit
I forgot to post my instructional photo on how to harvest bananas, caveman style:
Unable to hold the clump with one hand while chopping with the other (the clump was hanging over into the neighbor’s yard in an awkward position – don’t worry they got their cut!), I instead used E. Honda power to rip it off.
This was taken a couple months ago in our backyard. We pretty much have the best tasting bananas in the world, and they are the perfect food for babies. We even sun-dried some and made chips. Yum!
P.S. That’s an empty bird’s nest constructed in between the fruit. We’d spotted it before but never saw what kind of birds made it – I made sure it was vacant before starting the harvest.
P.P.S. After harvesting bananas you cut down the tree (actually a “pseudostem”) because it only bears fruit once. Ours get quite thick by the time the fruit is ripe, around the diameter of a basketball, or larger at the base.
P.P.P.S. I bought this bad ass thick brush knife, about 18″ long, maybe carved from a leaf spring. It’s fun as hell to concentrate and try cutting down banana trees with one stroke, although it’s kinda cramped in our backyard so I have to be really careful not to cut my own leg or get crushed by a vengeful felled pseudostem.
Himiko’s Punch Perm (aka Pimiko’s Punch Perm – PPP)
As in, they have reconfirmed Himiko’s tomb as the kofun (burial mound) in Sakurai that T and Adam and I walked around on the way past Miwa Jinja on a cold drizzly day a few years back. You see, this is important because the location of the Yamato kingdom has always been disputed by tourist money-deficient Kyushans who just can’t accept the fact that Nara always has been and always will be the one, the only, the Kingdom of Heavenlike Yamato, biiiiotches.
What Kyushu is lacking in ancient bronze mirrors from China (burial mound evidence), however, it makes up for in cultural value.
So let that be a lesson to you – Nara has all the dope ancient shit and Kyushu has much better hairstylists (we know firsthand since we [as in, most of Cosmic Buddha plus friends and family] were in a commercial for one in Saga ten years ago..).
That is all.
Baby Mantis
The other day I felt a spider running on my shoulder so I caught it in my hand. It turned out to be a baby praying mantis the size of a match head, still nearly translucent with black stripes over its joints. It was like the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I held it in my palm and poked at it with my pinky finger, and it boxed with me for a while. I decided it was too risky to go inside for my camera and just let the little guy go in my new row of baby winged beans.
Away for a few…
The English Program at my university is leaving tomorrow at 5:30 AM for a four day trip to a national forest in Saraburi for our annual English Camp. It will be sad to leave the baby and Nam for so long, but it should be fun…
Volunteering in Kalasin
Last week a few of us teachers were asked to visit some classes being taught on a volunteer basis by our Business English major students out in Kalasin. We went out without much info and assumed these were classes being taught at a school. As it turned out, one of our student’s family had created an ad hoc classroom outside their house and was hosting free lessons for two weeks since schools are mostly on holiday during October. Children from their village as well as neighboring villages attended, with younger kids coming in the morning and older ones in the afternoon, perhaps 30 kids per session.
The classes were being taught by a few of our students who stayed at the house for the duration of the project.
We went and basically had a lot of fun thinking up activities on the spot… I sweat a lot as it was a really hot day, so I can honestly say that I contributed a lot of salt to my polo shirt.
Our student’s house/farm has a shrimp pond out back, so our reward for lunch was huge platters of steamed prawns, raw prawns with garlic, and epic tom yum goong with shrimp the size of mini-lobsters in it.
We also helped out with the afternoon class and took a quick trip to a popular “beach” up the road just a couple kilos, at the Lampao Dam reservoir.
All in all it was a great day, and the dedication of our students really impressed us. When asked why they were doing it, they said they didn’t want to just waste their holidays away. Well done!