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“It would be an honor if you would go to homecoming with me”
I’ve been gone from the states for so long, I didn’t even understand what a hoco proposal poster was. My immediate thought was that it must put an awful lot of pressure on the girls. But when I asked my daughter, she said girls feel insulted if you don’t make a poster. I’m so old and out of it. The title of this post was an answer to “how to ask someone to hoco without a poster,” which appeared among the first page of search results for “hoco poster,” along with an illustrated WikiHow guide.
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Violent Fan
Seriously, how did I ever live without it?
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Flooding 2025
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.
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showdown
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.
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Canon CanoScan LiDE 400 code 2, 156,33
I’m pretty good at finding fixes for computer problems, but I give up on this one. Canon made a real piece of shit. Do not buy:CanoScan LiDE 400 There are so many problems documented online with this flatbed scanner model, and Canon has done absolutely nothing about it except sometimes offer to trade in your faulty unit for another quite possibly faulty unit (but only if you live in the USA). I’m not going to link all of the problems I found because just searching the model name (LiDE 300 or LiDE 400) brings up:A. Canon’s useless website andB. Complaints about these products Save yourself a headache and stay far,…
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East to West, West to East
While Isan Sound Goes Global, Mina and I are going to see Tyler.
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Crown update
After our house and the Kujira got flooded, I needed wheels and bought the Triton pickup. I halfheartedly tried to sell it a while back, but we ended up using to haul stuff for student activities and whatnot. Having a pickup and a sedan turns out to be a lot more convenient than having two sedans, badassedness aside. So the Crown has been sitting at my mechanic’s place waiting for daddy to kick up funds for bodywork, paint, and fixing the flooded aircon… So yeah, it’s been almost 3 years, even though she’s always on my mind. The registration has to be done before next March or it gets de-registered…
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A few shorts from the past month
I regret nothing. Except accidentally washing my passport when I got back home from all the trips. We went to Pattaya and Phuket on separate trips to visit students interning at various hotels. Met a lot of cool people and saw a lot of crazy things. I got what seemed to be food poisoning in Pattaya, possibly from a beloved plate of seafood rad na, but who knows? Food poisoning happens (for me, every five years or so), and the culprit is not always clear. I took off for the Phuket trip still feeling nauseous. On the plane from Don Muang to Phuket, we sat in back of a foreign…
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Tendai Visit – August 2025
Nam and I met at Tenri University in Japan 30+ years ago. Over the years, we kept in touch with Tendai from Thailand both formally and otherwise, which led to formal MOU signings between Tenri university and Nam’s employer, Mahasarakham University, as well as mine, Rajabhat Maha Sarakham University. This eventually led to yearly trips from Tendai to MSU with groups of up to 20 students, as well as Nam taking students from Mina’s high school (with her uni students acting as chaperones) for intensive Japanese language training and cultural study in Tenri. The Tendai group always has a couple destinations when they come over, and they left for Phayao…
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Mentaiko
I found the deal of deals to be my new workhorse: I bought it off a nearby uni student flipping it on FB Marketplace. When I saw the ad, I asked them to hold it and went to check it out that night. For the new price of the graphics card only, I got the whole system. But why? When I found time to go through the system properly, I found the previous owner had added an RGB controller almost as an afterthought and wired it incorrectly, possibly frying the AIO LCD and causing other power problems. Trying to fix the rat king of RGB cables, I caused the controller…
