Fish are jumping and the cotton is high.
It has been a while, and my apologies to the numerous fans out there who have been awaiting news and photos.
First of all, it is almost impossible for a man of my fragility to live on sleep deprivation, teach, translate and update a blog.
Others can, I cannot.
The baby is cute I can assure you. Cute when he sleeps, cute when he eats, cute when he gurgles in joy. Less cute, much less cute, when he screams bloody hunger at 2 in the morning.
OK, here is the news scoop of the month: we bought a pool. Yes, folks, an above-ground plastic pool complete with pump and filter and chloride tablets and even a cover to keep the nasties out when we’re not using it.
A simple Internet search led us to a German in Udon Thani who is selling these things out of his house:
Nice enough guy but not much of a businessman. Instead of selling me the chloride tablets adapted for the pool he sent me down the road to a pool shop and let me fend for myself, calculating cubic meters of water, (The pool has a diameter of 3.6 meters and is 90 centimeters deep. If you can calculate the number of cubic meters of water in the pool you win ten points!) and learning all about PH from someone whose English is less than great.
Now, here’s the funny thing. I’m sure you have all memorized every word of this blog and know everything about how life functions here. So you know without me having to remind you that water enters our cistern every night and that is our daily allotment of H2O. The water trickles in slowly, painfully. So how do you fill a pool?
Well, believe it or not, there is a municipal service that you can call, a cell phone, and tell them that you have a swimming pool. Within a few hours (!!!!!!) they show up with a big truck full of water and fill your pool for you. Now we know what to do if we are in a Bo Mee Nam situation again.
So to resume – roads aren’t paved, garbage stagnates by the sides of the roads, medical care is across the Mekong… but if you have a swimming pool you can get water delivered to your door in a matter of hours.
Truly a worker’s paradise!
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