Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
Pickle has a long history of posing in bowl-shaped objects. This one is a planter, which has a serious crack in its side in this photo, and that broke in half when I brushed against it with my Honda Wave’s tire shortly after. This other one is a sink we bought at Chatuchak and brought back in the trunk of our Cefiro long ago. Her family has a proud history of chilling in bowls – here is her mom or sister (we can’t remember which), nine years ago, also in a planter.
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.
The last remaining member of our squirrel assassin clan.
Sitting on a fence post in front of our house, soaking up the sun.
When we built our house in Thailand 17 years ago, we had a Japanese-style name plate carved in granite. When we were thinking of selling our house and moving back to the states last year after the floods, we painted it it over and put an artsy plastic address number over it. Then, when we decided not to move back after all, I eventually scraped all the paint off it… No harm, no foul, I guess.
Someday, I will make a list all of the vehicles I have owned over the years. A truck has never been among them, until recently. After our neighborhood and my precious Crown was flooded in 2022 (the Crown is sitting at my mechanic’s place, waiting for me to save enough money for a proper restoration), I needed new wheels. Since both of our kids were studying in the USA at the time, I figured we could get away with a standard size pickup and got a great deal on the Triton. It’s been great for carrying stuff around.
An older lady in the neighborhood was giving away huge potted plants, so Nam and I headed over to her house after work one night.
She told us the local name of the plants, which I have since forgotten, and I have since misidentified them several times. We originally thought they were giant lilies (Crinum asiaticum), but that appears not to be the case.
We gave the two shown on the back of the truck to Nam’s mom and kept the twins in the pot on our driveway shown in the top pic. The twins were eventually infected with rust, so I had to do some serious leaf removal.
Female, I guess.
AKA Japanese rhinoceros beetle, Japanese horned beetle, or kabutomushi (カブトムシ).
They show up in our yard at least once a year. The males are more impressive, with their long horn. I was not shocked to read about their use in Chinese medicine, but I was surprised to see that researchers have discovered that their larva show anti-obesity and antibiotic effects. Thank you, Wikipedia!
This pic reminds me of a photo of her mom, Donut, as a kitten.
Here, Pickle can be seen resting on the track for our front gate. She routinely sits in dangerous places, like in front of cars, and then moves only at the last second, no matter how many times she’s warned.
I’m too lazy too look it up, but Pickle must be around 5-6 years old now. She keeps the surrounding rodent population in check, so she is invaluable, but she is the most needy and meowy cat we’ve ever had… Pickle! Shut up!
Its been nearly 20 years since I set up a moblog sidebar and posted tiny pictures from my Hitachi clamshell over iMode to my MovableType blog… But today I just got the itch to see where we are in terms of easy accessibility to WordPress moblogging.
It’s kind of in between rainy periods right now, which is hard on my lawn, since I assume it’s gonna rain and don’t water every day as I’m accustomed to doing the rest of the year. So yesterday, I performed my rain ritual and watered the yard thoroughly, and also washed the dust off my truck. It worked.
