He made such a nice omelet: Leftover roast pork and cheese, topped with eggplant & meat sauce.
Category: Photos
Songkran Babies
It was a hot Songkran and we spent the whole week at home, playing in our new pool/bath (a big concrete mixing tub made of black plastic).
Max ran all around the neighborhood, naked in the summer heat.
When Max turned 2
The happy birthday song is his favorite thing in the world and he made us sing it many, many times.
Mosquitoes Eating Fruit (Part 1 – Jackfruit)
In or new Thai house, we’ve noticed mosquitoes sucking moisture out of sponges around the sink area, or from damp towels or rags. I suppose this is normal behavior, but we never really noticed it until we lived in this house. The past year, we’ve started to notice them sucking on various fruits we leave out on the counters. I’ve decided to start recording these images because I feel there’s a greatly underestimated demand for knowing what mosquitoes that aren’t sucking blood are sucking.
In this case, it was jackfruit.
Click to see the entire Mosquitoes Eating Fruit Series.
Yes or No?
Emperor Maximus strongly disagrees.
Mina’s passport photo
The vice consul who handled our case thought this was a great passport photo.
What Mina Thinks of Bangkok (Daddy Concurs)
Quite predictably, the long car ride to and from Bangkok was not appreciated by either baby, which they were quite vocal about. This was a kind of test run; do we really want to unleash these two on a plane full of innocents for the cumulative nineteen or so hours it takes to get back to Cali (w/one stopover)? The answer might just be children’s cold medicine…
Mina’s birth abroad has been duly reported, and her passport is in the works. Legally, she’s not a citizen exactly but has all the same rights as a citizen when she gets the passport. Say what? Yeah, it’s kind of a funny thing (though not half as funny as finding out that there is a Thai way of counting months for the Chinese zodiac and that Mina is a Tiger like me instead of an Ox because she was born in December) that way. I asked the vice consul to explain better what a non-citizen who bears all the rights (and responsibilities) of a citizen is, but even she didn’t know, so hey, that’s some pedantic shit right there.
Bangkok was hot and muggy as ever, and it was a relief to get back home. It’s hotter here, but it’s kind of a clean heat – Bangkok pollution just has a way of working itself into every pore and just making you sticky and gross. Plus, the scourge of mosquitoes in our room was epic. They attacked Max and I until Nam and I just got fed up with it and turned on all the lights and went medieval on their asses. It was like a Tarantino scene because I kept having to use various tools to get at these mosquitoes hiding in different places – a rolled-up newspaper to bat one off the ceiling, and a pillow to smash on in a headboard groove. One even got inside Mina’s portable framed mosquito net and bit her cheek, which woke her up, too.
Itchy, screaming babies at 3 in the morning sucks hard. So getting payback against the insect kingdom in general felt really good, and after we devoted twenty minutes to smashing every bug in the room, we fell asleep again and had no more problems. Up until that though, I’ve never seen mosquitoes so voracious. We had the AC and two floor fans pointed at Max and the bastards were still getting through to torture him.
Cornershop Kway Chap
Last week I visited at a noodle shop that I thought was new, but my coworker said it’s been around for a few years.
This is mainly what they sell, standard kway chap noodles served Vietnamese style in clear chicken stock with rice noodles of medium thickness (you can also get instant ramen served in kway chap stock).
This is opposed to the other style of kway chap popular in Thailand, the Chinese kind in brown stock with blood cubes, bamboo shoots, and spiral flat noodles (this Chinese kind is usually done very poorly in Thailand IMHO, but when done properly, with fresh ingredients and duck meat, can be very tasty).
A vital key to surviving in any given area over an extended period of time is knowing the secret menus of your favorite haunts. The secret menu of this place was somewhat amusing:
I loves me some chicken bones! (They use a bunch of these for the broth every day.)
Notes: This shop is located on Soi Srisawat between RMU and Spirit House Kway Chap, on the right side if headed away from RMU. Kway chap w/o egg 20 baht, w/egg 25 baht, chicken carcass 20 (25?) baht.
