Friday (2 September 2016)
Nong Song Hong was good to us, but… it will be good to move on as well. Be as it may, we’re sure gonna miss this place. Adri woke up this morning with a just-eleven-more-working-days-left look in her eyes and I understood. In two weeks’ time Adri’s stint will come to an end, the stint of Teaching English in a Foreign Language (TEFL). She insisted on getting practical teaching experience after completing her TEFL course towards the end of last year and so it was that we ended up in rural Thailand, in Nong Song Hong. Okay, so now she’s been there, done that, got the mental scars… now it’s time to move on, almost.

Last night when Adri and I rode into town it was dark all around, too dark to see, but it was also too dark in our immediate vicinity which I found rather odd. It was then that I realized that our headlight was on but no one was home, it must have gone kapoof just then. I mentioned this to Frank this morning and at around 11:00 he fetched the bike and had it fixed at the local Yamaha dealer. He also apparently replaced the front brake pads. This is the joy of renting; you don’t have to worry about anything!

Since having replaced the screen on my Iphone a few short weeks ago it truly felt as good as new. Until this afternoon that is. I was busy on the laptop, reaching for my Ipad that was behind the screen, not realizing that the Iphone was on top of it. It’s then that I heard Shitty Shitty Bang Bang as the phone trampolined on the tiled floor, it probably was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but it sounded real shitty to me. My heart stopped beating until I finally reached out for the phone, my worst fears realized; I now have a 1cm crack at the top left hand corner of the phone. It does not impede it’s functioning of course, but… but… I just don’t like cracked up things. Anyway, I will try and live with it for a while; maybe it goes away… not the crack, my urge to replace the screen.

There was a new cleaning lady in town who did a spot of gardening this afternoon when there was nothing left to clean. Really, this place is spotless. She somehow found a lot of grass to rake right outside my window where I was busy blogging. Every time I looked up, there she was, just staring at me. When she noticed that I noticed she would quickly find ample grass to rake in her immediate vicinity and start raking vigorously, furrowing canals into the ground uprooting trees and grass and the like. Every time I looked up, the same scene played out, her doing that staring thing. I can understand that she has not been around many farangs before but this was downright creepy… it freaked me out, man!

Adri came home drained, really drained. Her last class of the day was a dark horror movie come to life. Kids were yelling and talking and generally misbehaving while she was trying to do speaking tests with the kids one by one. The rest of the class just did not have the decency to afford their classmates a fair chance to succeed. Adri chased them all out of the class and called them in one by one which worked much better.

I mention “speaking test” rather than “oral test” in the paragraph above for good reason as Jay had a situation in his class this week. When he wrote “Oral test” on the whiteboard, most of the kids in the class put their hands to their mouths giggling “ooooh teacha!!” pointing at the white board. He quickly rubbed out the “oral” and replaced it with “speaking”.

The pupils could not pronounce Michelle’s name when she arrived at the school so she told them to sommer (just) call her Mickey Mouse. And so it was that Michelle, Jay, Adri and I were sitting outside on our patio having a pre-dinner drink when we heard a yell from behind us “Teacha Micky Mouse!” It was one of Mickey Mouse’s pupils walking by who just happens to be the daughter of Mott, you know, the one with The Hoople. Mott is back in town with her new French boyfriend in tow. I have not yet met le monsieur but I am sure he is a fine old dude. One can only hope for the sake of The Hoople.

It was Friday night and Jay and I had our customary cheeseburger in paradise at the resort’s resident restaurant. Michelle had a pork steak with heaps of broccoli, just what her doctor ordered and Adri had a pork mince and veggie dish, all great once again. We were chatting away about this and that when the restaurant’s lights started fading and Oi came around to collect her alms, the people needed an early night, and so did we.

We read and relaxed until after midnight when we switched off. While waiting for sleep to swoop, and deep in thought, those very same thoughts turned dark when I thought of my cracked up phone, I was still deeply annoyed with myself… darkly so.

Saturday (3 September 2016)
As reported last week, we were planning on going to Buri Ram for the weekend but work got it the way. There was yet another extracurricular English lesson course this weekend and Adri was requested to attend, both Saturday and Sunday. Adri has had a rough few weeks. Two weeks ago she worked all weekend, last weekend was off, this weekend and the next are fully booked out for these extracurricular English lessons. To be honest, I do not see Buri in our future.

Adri insisted that she ride to school on her own, leaving me to sleep in which I did, how nice if her. My first cuppa I had in bed while reading, my second was out on the front porch… A fresh breeze was blowing which made me spend more time out there than I should have, but soon enough it was once a again all about getting the web site sorted for next Friday’s launch.

To ensure that the spam filter called Akismet was properly activated I wanted to send myself a dirty message but was advised against it by Google, it might just add my email address to its spam directory which could probably cause me untold grief in the future. So, I was pressed to take the word of the WordPress gurus and just accept that it was activated in the background and working fine. I did send a few normal emails through and I could see them noted on the Akismet dashboard as OK, so all seems fine.

I then installed the Jetpack plugin suite which provides one with a host of additional functionality that you may or may not use. While I was playing around with a few of those I was surprised by a visit from Adri just past 11:00. She felt underutilized at school and decided to come home, they could phone her if and when she is really required.

After I installed Jetpack the system just seemed to take a bit of a backseat, really struggling to cope with what I was trying to do, or maybe it was I that was not coping. “Uh oh” maybe Jetpack broke something, but a reboot is always a good idea in such circumstances, and it was. Turns out there was a Windows 10 update waiting in the wings that required a reboot, no warning though. How did I know there was an update? After the reboot my “ (quote) and @ (at) keys were reversed so had to change my Language Preferences on Windows 10 from English UK to English SA. Sorry Jetpack for doubting you.

I then installed and activated the WPtouch Mobile Plugin. Even though the WordPress theme that I am currently using is a fully responsive theme, meaning that it automatically reformats the site when displayed on a mobile device, I wanted to try out a different format. I was very happy with the result although the jury is still out on which facility I will use on launch day.

Then it was on to backups and I identified and downloaded two backup plugins, UpdraftPlus and BackUpWordPress.  I tested both and downloaded the created backup files to my laptop and also scheduled future backups on both for the next month or so. Both seem pretty useful so we’ll see which one I end up using.

I then downloaded and activated the WP Super Cache plugin. The software notified that there were known clashes with WPtouch Mobile that I installed earlier, so followed the instructions on setting the relevant parameters in order to circumvent these clashes…

It was now late, I was tired, so I clashed… crashed.

Sunday (4 September 2016)
Adri once again opted to ride herself to school. I’m starting to suspect that she does not want me to have transport in order to keep me chair-bound and slogging away at the blogging. And maybe she’s right, the less distractions, the better I guess.

But of course I was distracted by my daily news fix and was not totally surprised when Jakarta made it to the news headlines. Now you may remember that when we were in Indonesia in March this year I often bemoaned the fact that it was never easy to get hold of a beer, or any alcohol for that matter. On the larger islands like Java, beers are hard to come by, bars even more so. Over the years the government had systematically tightened the noose on alcohol sales to the point that it was banned from being sold at minimarts such as 7/11. If you did find alcohol in the larger supermarkets they were hidden away and sometimes even locked away.

On the touristy islands such as Bali and Lombok of course there are plenty bars so it is not a problem there… not yet it seems though. The New York Time reported the following this morning.

“… in Jakarta… where Parliament is debating legislation that would ban beer, wine and spirits across the thousands of islands that make up this country. For Bali, whose beaches, lush landscapes and cultural attractions drew four million visitors last year, the effect would be something like the end of the world, said Mr. Partha, the chairman of the Bali Tourism Board.”

And I suspect Mr. Partha is right, It will be the end of the world, so I’m just glad we went there when we did.

There were rather amusing responses to the Trump kids’ tweet that claimed that their daddy Donald was an outsider, you can read the full Huffington Post article here. By the way, can we call this lot “Trump and his Trumpets”, or maybe rather his “Trump-pets”?

I often make blog notes on the Ipad after which I email it to myself to be included in the blog’s Word working document. The subject field of this email would invariably be a non-thought provoking one like a full stop. This morning as I opened such an email I wiped away this speck of dust on the screen and when it would not budge I thought, “Damn, a dead pixie, or is that a pixel”. It was that damn full stop.

This reminded me of an incident back at work last year. Francois had an embedded animated GIF of some sort in his email signature, depicting an ant furiously running around in little circles and all about. We were in a meeting when, Amanda displayed one such email on the overhead projector for discussion purposes. I then saw her furiously pressing her thumb down on her screen only realizing after the fifth squish that the ant was not real. That was a real “gotcha” moment; unfortunately Francois was not there to witness his masterpiece at work. I am sure he had caught out many people with this gimmick.

Talking about screens, I was still so very peeved about dropping my phone and cracking its three week old screen. Man, that was so stupid. Every time I look at that crack, it gets on by twits… somehow that didn’t come out right, but you know what I mean. I was really annoyed with myself but I never can stay angry with me for long, so I declare myself now officially over it.

I continued working to get the web site ready and learned about embeds and shortcodes and also using some additional plugins from the Jetpack plugin suite. I looked at the different options of photo galleries and embedding Youtube videos within the site, and then played around with different ways of structuring the posts.

But it was now finally time to confront the issue which leaves pictures, taken with an Iphone, upside-down in WordPress. There is a facility within the WordPress Media Library which allows one to flip and/or rotate a photo. After doing that fumble the image displays correctly within the media library and also within the posts and pages. But when it is presented in a live environment it displays just fine on a desktop/laptop, but not on mobile devices such as the Ipad and Iphone, the images there are still topsy turvy.

So the time had arrived to finally fix this issue. I identified four plugins that could all probably do the job but the Image Rotation Repair plugin just looked to be the safest and most reliable. I installed it, activated it and… it just worked. I can now view all my images sitting down, no more handstands for me. I now cleared out all the pictures that were in the Media Library, ready for the hordes that will need to be loaded over the next few weeks.

I learnt that it is prudent to upload your personal videos to Youtube and display it on your site from there, rather than loading it directly onto your site, due to the sheer size of video files. Now that got me thinking. I once tried my hand, not very successfully I might add, at video editing. My project was to consolidate and edit the footage – from two video cameras – which was shot during a two-week bareboat sailing trip that Mark, Sandy, Adri and I undertook in Turkey and Croatia. The result was pretty much mediocre but it was a lot of fun though. Hmm… maybe this could be another little project, uploading that result to Youtube and… But I am not sure whether I still have a copy of that final edited product of way back then, we’ll see.

Summer had arrived… Summer and Lucy that is, who came by for a visit and a swim, bearing gifts of sweet stuff that they had made for Adri, knowing what a sweet tooth she has. They will still be in Nong Song Hong for another seven months after we leave as they had signed up to teach Chinese here for a full year. I was just thinking, their job must so tough, they’re teaching Chinese, in English, to Thai pupils. Wow!

Anyway, they will be going to Hua Hin for their holiday break between semesters and dearly wanted to have the link to our blog so they could read up on our trip there earlier in the year. Once they saw some of the pictures they were oohing and aahing, knowing they made the right decision for their holiday destination. It was good to know that the blog was at least of some use to somebody!

As you by now know, good restaurant help is hard to come by in rural Thailand and there was yet another new waitress doing duty tonight. Frank found her through the department of labour, she apparently worked in a hotel as a cashier, “A boom-boom hotel though” Frank added surreptitiously.

It was not long before Frank offered us some German pear schnapps from his private stash, kept in his home rather than behind the bar, for obvious reasons. Man, this stuff was delicious. I remember years ago owning a bottle of Specht Apfel Schnapps, but not for too long though.

The conversation for some reason turned to lady-boys, don’t ask… don’t know, and Frank, having been in Thailand for the longest time, reckoned that he could spot a lady-boy a mile off. “They look and act more feminine than their female counterparts, even in the way they walk”, he noted before continuing “Thai woman-folk tend to walk like a duck, it’s just a fact.” He was quick to point out though that it was not entirely their fault but due to them wearing flip-flops most of the time due to the tropical heat.

I noticed for the first time that the resort restaurant had pork mince rissole on the menu, not sure how that could have escaped my usually hawk-like attention to detail on menus. It was too late to change my order of Penang Curry, although I was in the end served with a Green Curry, courtesy of our new boom-boom waitress in training.

Mott, her daughter and her monsieur was also at the restaurant and as we left we went by and introduced ourselves to him. He seemed like a nice enough chap, I am happy for Mott if it all works out according to plan; she really is a nice girl.

Monday (5 September 2016)
Just before I entered our bungalow after dropping Adri off at school, in a fit of angst I stomped on this huge black and yellow spider, at least five metres in diameter, maybe it was centimeters. And yes, it was intentional, you know how I detest goggas (creepy crawlies and allsorts) and I’d rather do the stomping than have it stomping on me while I’m asleep at night. They always do that.

And that’s how I came to take note of the mowers mowing away. It was lawn mowing day at the resort, so I was expecting an onslaught of goggas coming my way, trying to escape the blade attack from the other side.

It was not long before the resort turned silent; the two mowers were sitting in the shade which turned out to be a two hour siesta of some sorts. They should have been whacking bushes, not bushwhacking. It was past 13:00, coinciding with Frank’s return from Khon Kaen, that they took up arms once again.

Dolly who had accompanied Frank to Khon Kaen came walking past, picking up the pace as she walked by the already cut grass. “Oi ,yoi, yoi, I am allergic to cut grass”, she exclaimed as she hurried off to ingest her friend, the antihistamine .

During the course of the morning I dusted off my Yoga Studio app, rolled out the mat (it was not red though) and did a spot of yoga. It felt like I was visiting the zoo today having had to contend with the Downward Dog, Downward Frog (no really), Cat, Cow, Cobra, Camel, Crab, Lizard, Fish, Extended Puppy… I was so happy when I reached the Corpse.

A breezy breeze blew through which was cool, quite literally, so I opted to sit outside blogging on the patio, notwithstanding the imminent gogga attack that was slowly advancing in my direction. Today’s high was purported to be 31 degrees, not bad considering one has gotten used to the second digit being much higher up on that numerical ladder.

Frank came around looking rather piraty with a makeshift eye patch over his right eye. A few weeks back he was grinding away at some steel object when a miniscule steel particle sidestepped his grinding goggles and took up lodging somewhere on his right eye. He tried every trick in his book to evict the errant tenant but had no luck. This morning he went to an eye specialist in Khon Kaen who removed it within minutes, and without any discomfort, hence the piraty look this afternoon. Arrrr…?

Jay arrived at the bungalow to a strong Sangsom and Coke which he enjoyed while I was finishing up my beer and while Adri was cutting short her visit to Dolly. When all was enjoyed we moved to the restaurant and tonight I ordered the rissole which I spotted lurking on the menu; Adri had a pizza and Jay the Penang curry.

That Penang curry followed the same script as mine last night, it ended up being a Green Curry. Wow, we had to make Oi or Frank aware of this but did not want to get this poor waitress into trouble. Adri though discussed it with Oi, it turns out it was Oi who got it wrong, not the poor waitress. What still irked me though was that – when questioned – the waitress looked down at the Green Curry and proclaimed that it was indeed Penang Curry… Both nights!

The rissole was great, turned out to be smallish oblong shaped spicy pork mince frikkadelle (meatballs) covered in breadcrumbs and deep-fried; there was a sounder of swine on that plate. Oi came around while I was enjoying my swine questioning ”spicy spiceyyyyyy?” I nodded through my tears, it was simply delicious.

Jay tonight regaled us with stories of his family, friends and foes; very entertaining and very insightful I must say. After we had our fill of all we shone Jay’s way home again tonight, him on the bike, us on the bike, us on the motorized one though. He was riding the school director’s fancy bicycle, we clocked him at 35km/h, breaking his previous record of 30.

Tuesday (6 September 2016)
We were blissfully unaware of the heavy rains that fell during the night; we woke up to the wet evidence thereof in the morning, with a sun struggling to make itself visible even though the cloud cover was thinning.

I was busy blogging under the cool waves of the air-con when there was a bash on the door. It was not a knock; I know what a knock sounds like. “I come clean room for youuuuu” I heard through the door which I suspected now had a gaping hole in it. Not sure why the cleaning lady would want to announce herself in such a harsh fashion. Peeved off I moved my stuff outside to the patio while she started polishing the place.

Today I continued prepping the web site for its launch on Friday. The idea is that, as from this week, all new posts will only get published on the www.travelandall.com platform while in the background I will be migrating all the other posts in this series from the old platform to this one. There is no automated migration route between the two platforms thus everything needs to be crafted by hand.

Probably sounds worse than it is though. The text can merely be kattepissed (cut and pasted) which is no problem. The images are another story though. Each must be re-uploaded from the laptop, named and inserted one by one into the post. On the old platform, once the images were uploaded and named, it automatically interspersed images throughout the blog text. I looked for a plugin with similar functionality on WordPress but I came up empty-handed.

I started migrating the very first post in the series called A Sabbatical Begins and gave it a very quick glance over. You can imagine my surprise when I later read about betel nuts on CNN, which got a fleeting mention in my original post dating back to last year. The CNN article described betel nuts as Asia’s deadly addiction. These nuts are chewed by almost a tenth of the world’s population and are apparently highly carcinogenic. It was reported that more than 5,700 Taiwanese people are diagnosed with oral cancer each year, 2,300 of whom are killed by the disease.

Continuing with the prepping of the web site I turned to migrating the second post in this series called Week two of our sabbatical… and still going strong.  And now that I standardized on a process of inserting images it went much quicker. I’m hoping that I can soon solicit Adri’s help with this migration once she finishes her teaching contract.

It was much later in the day when the three German fellows – who checked in last night – came to life and started drifting towards the pool area. The first fellow is very old, the next one shortish and roundish with a very big voice. Completing the trio was a more normalish looking guy, he was just very big. Last night they shuffled this huge ice chest into the restaurant, the ice chest the size of a full sized coffin folded over once, filled to capacity with Heineken. It was not long before there was an array of dead bottle bodies lying about the place. Now I know Thais often take their own dops (drinks) to a restaurant but have never seen farangs do it. Call me old fashioned but I believe you drink from the establishment’s stock when they’re entertaining you.

Adri and I went to the market for supper, same same as many times before, but still it never disappoints. After supper we read and relaxed and it was just after 20:00 when I simply could not keep my eyes open. I told Adri to wake me in 30 minutes, I woke up at 00:30 – that’s not what I meant – when Adri got ready for bed. Groan.

Wednesday (7 September 2016)
We woke up once again to the evidence of heavy downpours overnight, the clouds still thick with rain but holding back. Adri suggested that it was a perfect day for me to sleep in, and I agreed. It was then that Adri suggested, or rather insisted, that she drive herself to school today. It was only later that I was wondering whether there was an ulterior motive to this insistence. Was it to keep me away from the monthly Nong Song Hong market that takes place on the 7^th, and today just happened to be that day? Or was it perhaps to enable her to go to that market ? But I suspect it was something much less sinister; she might have to give one of the Chinese girls a lift back to the resort as they were coming for dinner with us tonight.

Talking about dinner, the other day Michelle questioned our use of supper versus dinner because in certain parts of the US they may mean different things to different people. To me supper and dinner could essentially be used interchangeably for the evening meal. This is true, but apparently not the full truth. There is no doubt that supper is the evening meal but dinner means the “main meal of the day”, so could be either lunch or supper, depending on what time of the day you have your main meal.

With everybody’s fast-paced lives I suspect that most people have their main meal in the evenings, like us, so using the two words interchangeably is quite okay, I guess. Some people also seem to think that dinner is a more posh affair than supper, thus would be used more when going to a restaurant for an evening meal. Okay, so Lucy and Summer are coming for dinner tonight, but tomorrow night Adri and I will have supper at home. Capeesh?

I was blogging away, listening to an 80s music channel on TuneIn Radio when the Jon and Vangelis song called I’ll Find My Way Home came on. I love Jon And Vangelis’ music but somehow this song had escaped my attention throughout the ages, great song though. If you like Jon and Vangelis, go ahead and click on the video below, if you don’t… don’t.

 

Summer and Lucy arrived at the resort just past 16:30 for a swim and dinner. After the three girls had their swim and were ready for dinner I joined them at the pool to escort them to the restaurant. As we walked towards the restaurant the aforementioned German trio, who had been in the restaurant for a while, suddenly became alive and friendly with their salacious eyes popping and weaving all over our two adopted kids. Adri and I did not take too kindly to their unwelcome attention, neither did the kids. Dirty old men… Anyway, maybe they were just being friendly!

Lucy does not drink alcohol at all but Summer apparently does fancy a tipple now and then, and so it was that she was staring lovingly into the eyes of the picture of the Breezer bottle on the menu. Prompting her to order one she refused, her Government told them to be on their best behavior when they are working abroad and should refrain from drinking alcohol. Good advice I’d say and I take my hat off to her for following that advice.

Summer had the tom yum soup, Lucy the spaghetti bolognaise (she dearly wants to go to Italy, so this was the next best thing for her) and Adri had her normal vitamin and mineral veggie dish with chicken. I took a chance and again ordered the Penang curry, and guess what, I got the Penang curry. As they say, try and if you at first fail, try again until your succeed. This nugget of wisdom really works!

Jay who was too tired to join us for dinner tonight arrived once we had finished ours. He got bored with himself and bored with the takeaway dinner he was planning so decided to join us after all. Once all was done and consumed at around 20:30 we gave the girls and boy a shining escort home.

Thursday (8 September 2016)
Adri once again insisted on me having a lie-in and I did not protest too much as she grabbed the keys and were out of there. I used the opportunity to have my first coffee in bed and catch up on some news.

This morning it was reported on CNN that exercise can cancel out the effects of drinking; now there’s a thought. A study that lasted 10 years found that “drinking at hazardous levels each week increases the risk of death from cancer and other causes and that exercise ‘appeared to wipe off completely’ the inflated risk of cancer death resulting from alcohol.” They go on to specify hazardous drinking as being “8 to 20 US standard drinks for women and 21 to 49 for men”.

Wow, those numbers really do sound hazardous, but whoever heard of the term hazardous drinking being used? And why do they make a distinction between men and woman, so they believe women are more hazardous than men after a few drinks? Sexists. And by the way, why does hazardous drinking stop at 49, or do they accept that if you reach that level you would probably already be dead? Anyway, according to the hazardous figures quoted above I believe I can now be classified as a closet teetotaler.

I was blogging and fine tuning the web site outside on the patio when the mowers starting moving and mowing late this morning. I was not prepared to stay on the lookout for flying debris and flies so I moved inside and continued tokkeling (typing) away there.

Most of the day was spent on the web site fiddling here, fiddling there, doodahing here and everywhere, getting it ready for its activation tomorrow.

Adri got home just before 17:00 and she was tired, did not want to do anything other than eat and sleep. We rode into town, stopped off at our favourite fried rice stall but sadly he was packing up, seems like he had some urgent business to attend to. As we turned around, there was Bass getting his Pad Thai fix from the stall next door. After a quick chat we promised to see him tomorrow afternoon for cappuccino pan song.

We did eventually get our fried rice with chicken from another stall but it was just not as good as our favourite, not bad though. When we got home with our takeaways an icy cold big Chang was vying for my attention. I had to choose between that icy cold beer and that steaming hot chicken fried rice takeaway. This was a difficult choice because I prefer to have them separately, but after my mind was made up I saw the Chang slunk back into the fridge, no hard feelings though. Oh crap, I really may be a closet teetotaler.

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