Our First Houseguest

After you've finally got everything unpacked- the office is all setup, dishes are in the cupboards, toothbrushes are in a little jar next to the sink, the utility room has all the boxes of extra stuff packed away that you won't see until the next move; you get that first night that you can just hang out and relax. We ended up spending that night reading. The interior of the new place is so relaxing and nice. It's very western in style and if I had one adjective for it, I would say it was 'clean'. So it was such a peculiar moment in my life when I looked up over the rim of my book and made eye contact with a 12" rat that just sauntered into the bedroom. Moments later, it reversed itself as Pui started squealing. So now I'm in the position of having to deal with a rat problem. I hate new houses.

So I go to the super store and go to the rodent ailse. For some god awful Buddhist reason there are no hinge-swinging rat traps. All they have is these 14" pizza plates with this special rat glue. You basically put some bait in the center, the rat goes for it and wallaa, you've caught yourself a rat.

What the box doesn't tell you (but of course you know it's going to happen), you don't just catch yourself a rat, you catch yourself a live rat. So now I have to figure out how to kill this huge thing. Pui (being the sweet little Buddhist that she is) wanted me to try and get the thing out of the trap (outside of course) and see if it could get away. After just about putting a broom handle through his stomach, I was able to dislodge him; only to have him get helplessly stuck to the broom. There was no way this thing would ever walk again. So I'm like, o.k., I'll put the end of the broom under the water in the canal behind our house, come back five minutes later and deal with it. Only the thing that happened was that 5 minutes later that little bastard somehow crawled up the broom handle 2 feet to get it's nose about 1" out of the water. At this point we figured this thing could probably survive anything, so I kindly scraped him off the broom onto my neighbors fence and waved a unfond farewell. That would suck so bad if my neighbors read this.

One More Time

Back in my college days it seemed like I was moving around all the time. An average year would start with me living in one apartment, moving home for the summer and then going back and finding another apartment in the fall. After I became a homeowner, I was kind of hoping these days of moving were behind me. So I find it a little exasperating that I've ended up in occupying 5 different residences in 2008. Pui and I just lost the sublease on the 'greatest place ever' and had to start apartment hunting. It's also funny that every time I move, I end up going through all the crap I own and getting rid of about 1/2 of it. Which means by now, I should only have about 10% of my original belongings. For some reason though it keeps getting worse instead of better.


So the new place is much nicer than the last one, 3 bedrooms, washer/dryer, entertainment room, patio, a stream in the back yard. I haven't shot a video of it yet, but I will soon. Until then, here is a photo album. It's got some really weird extra stuff. Imagine if you had money to do any crazy thing you wanted to do to pimp out your house - this is that place. A good example is my office. It has this 200lb. pocket door that when you slide it closed, 16 black fluorescent lights that are mounted in the floor come on automatically. You can also toggle it so the lights come on when it's open and off when it's closed. Who would ever do such a crazy ass thing? Every room is wired for surround sound through a central amp. These are the kinds of superfluous amenities that I'm trying to escape in America. It's so ironic that I ended up in a place that has them.

Anyways, the place is pretty sweet, the location isn't quite as good. We ended up buying a motorcycle for Pui so she could get back and forth to work. If the economy ever turns around in America, we might try to buy the last house we were in so I can cut my number of residences back down to two.

Rinse, Lather, Repeat

Thailand makes one thing very easy for me- being happy. I get to wake up every day and pretty much do whatever I want. I was just looking through photos from last year around this time and I'm doing pretty much the same things, taking Thai language classes and climbing (or ziplining as this photo would indicate) . As far as the Thai class, this class was the 4th level class so you would think that I would be getting pretty good. I would say I'm definitely getting better, but I've got so far to go. I love the reading and the writing so I keep focussing on that. There is nothing I love more than watching a really bad American movie and trying to see if I can read the subtitles in Thai at the bottom. I'm at about 30-40% right now, but that is much better than my 20% from last year. As far as speaking, that hasn't improved much, but my listening is good enough that Thai people can't gossip about my hair without me knowing about it.

As far as the climbing, I'm trying to go about 5 days a week. I've had some far off goal of climbing 5.12 ever since I was probably 15, and I think this is going to be the year. I'm getting cut up, freaked out, and exhausted every time I go out, but I keep asking for more. Pui has also been out climbing a lot more. She red pointed a 5.10b a few weeks back that has been her nemisis for the last two years.

Freezing in Thailand

It's easy to think of activities that you shouldn't participate in during certain seasons. Swimming in the Snake in November, skiing the slushy Tetons in July, mountain biking Ditch Creek in the mud season. Just because you can do those things, doesn't mean you necessarily should. And so it would go for Pui and I on our decision to drive up to the highest mountain in Thailand (8,414 ft) in the rainy season on a motorcycle. From minute number one to hour number 8 the rain would fall. First as a drizzle in pea soup like fog then eventually to a full on down pour. I'm so glad I caught the experience of driving a motorcycle in the rainy season on video to remind me never to get more than 30 minutes from home during that time of year.

In addition to the rain, it was about 40 degrees up there with 40 mile an hour winds. After about the fourth hour of that I felt like Lloyd and Harry in Dumb & Dumber when they decide to ride their moped to Aspen in the winter.

Harry: "I think I've got to go to the bathroom"

Lloyd: "Just go man"


Harry: "....."

Lloyd: "That feels nice"

The Lawsuits We Would Have

Now and again I'll see things that are so incredibly negligent. Today I was driving the motorcycle on one of the major highways - 6 lanes. Up ahead there was a road crew putting in a telephone pole. Instead of blocking off a couple of lanes to do the work (like they might do for a wedding), they suspended the concrete telephone pole right across all three lanes of the side they were working on. The crane holding the pole up was using some kind of hemp looking rope that didn't look like it could support a kite, let alone a 2 ton concrete structure; the workers looked like got a job from the temp agency that morning. So anyways, usually in these situations you want to get through it as soon as possible; which in this case means hitting the accelerator and getting to the other side. Just as I started to drive under it, one of the workers dropped a bolt the size of a baby's arm about 2 feet off the left side of my bike. Driving at 50mph, this entry just about didn't make it into this blog.

Domestic Disturbance

As many of you know, there are few things that get under my skin as much as a spiders- particularly ones residing in my house. So it was to my particular chagrin when I came home to find a palm sized one hanging out next to our dish drainer. There are few times that I have a hard time living the Buddhist lifestyle as much as when I am forced to follow the rule "Thou Shalt Not Kill Spiders". Of course it would probably be easiest to just ignore that I ever saw the thing and move on. However, just the thought of that thing coming out from a dark corner when I least expect it, well, it's just too much.

So the next 1/2 hour would be spent trying to trap lightning in a bottle, without touching it of course. The whole thing got a lot more complicated when it escaped into the underside of the cupboard that holds all the coffee cups (it has a slotted bottom to allow them to dry). After covering up the slots with a cutting board, I went through the most terrifying task of lifting each coffee cup, one by one, bit by bit, hoping against hope that the giant spider wouldn't be faster at getting out of the cup, than I would be at slamming it back down.

Not even close. A scream, a dropped cutting board, a broken cup later- the spider dropped down into the sink. What was so interesting was that the little monster couldn't pull itself out. It looked exactly like the little spiders that you find in your bath tub. I was able to eventually put a plastic bucket over the top of him and ferry him over to my neighbors yard. I only captured a little of it on video, but I feel like it shows the drama of looking for the spider pretty well.