Friday - spent pretty much the whole day wound up because a mate borrowed my motorbike for a few minutes on Thursday, and didn’t bother to bring it back, or call or anything. I had to go hunt for it at his house and bring it back myself when I woke up so my missus could go to market. He’s been a mate a long time, so it’s a long and complicated story, but I’ve had enough and it’s about time he learned to show some basic respect. And not just to me. It seems his others friends around here are also fed up of doing him favours and ending up out of pocket in return. I tried to explain the situation to him on the phone today, but he still seems to be of the opinion that he is the one that has done everyone else all the favours! Unbelievable. If he comes back next year with the same attitude, I doubt he will be able to find anyone willing to talk to him, let alone help him do anything. Given that he, and his electric cables, have to come across other people’s land to get to his house from the road, he really should be careful about how he treats his friends and neighbours.
Saturday - travelled down to Samui with P’Fai in his car. Two weeks ago, we took P’Chai and all his tools down to Samui, and spent a couple of days. When we left the island, only the first post had been put in place. Two weeks later, we go to collect P’Chai and the tools and the house is finished, is looking beautiful, and only cost a couple of hundred quid. The reason it was so cheap is that they used almost entirely offcuts of coconut wood, plus some leftover (nicer) bits of wood from P’Chai’s old house in Samui (which had been delapidated for a year or so). I collected some paperwork from my lawyer, and spent the evening at a local pub with live music that P’Chai had recently found. I’ll take my camera next time, as it was really quite beautiful. In the evening, I took P’Fai to meet Ay and some other Samui people. They sat drinking beer and exchanging farming-related stories, while I struggled to keep up with their deep southern Thai accents. I managed to get most of it.
Sunday - I met up with Pa Deng and went to see Ton, who used to live next door to me in Samui, ordain at the local wat (Buddhist temple). Part of the ceremony was that all the guests had to cut off a part of his hair, and then it’s shaved completely. He’s then ordained in a chanting ceremony by some more senior monks. I had to leave shortly after that, so I didn’t get to see him in his orange robes. I doubt he’ll ordain for more than a few days or weeks, as I think it’s just something that all Thais do to repay respect to their parents for their upbringing. He’ll probably be back at work as normal in a few weeks. Some Thais join up to seriously study the religion, but not many. I expect a lot more than become Christian monks in England!
Monday - Worked offline in the garden all morning, while P’Chai finished the last bits of the house. Went into the kohsamui.com office in the afternoon to help them with some problems, and to sync up my offline work and e-mail etc. Good news is that they’ve finally got ADSL, so we just need to find them a decent router. I ended up staying longer than I planned, as I had to help with another customer problem whilst I was on-line. That evening, I let P’Fai have his turn with the one mattress, so I got to sleep outside on a wooden floor with the mosquitoes for a few uncomfortable hours :)
Tuesday - packed up the tools, and headed home. Arrived at about 4pm, and got a call to investigate a website problem. Spent an hour in the Internet cafe, then went home and collapsed. Spent the evening with Mee, who still thinks I don’t have enough time (or energy!) to spend with her, because I’m always busy. Managed to sneak an hour in to compile ‘anjuta’ from GNOME CVS and play with it - very promising! Hopefully, I can help make it an environment for developing PHP applications, as ‘gedit’ isn’t cutting it, and being able to do things like automatically ‘xmllint’ (or ‘php -l’) files before they’re saved (or committed) would probably save me a lot of time in the long run!
Wednesday - went to Bang Saphan to collect my modem but it hadn’t arrived. Bought some netting to try to keep out the hundreds of ‘malairng mao’ (drunk flies) that are starting to come into the house in the evenings (now rainy season has started!). They buzz around the my laptop screen and Mee’s TV, and some are even ending up in the cooking pan when Mee’s cooking. Spent most of the day hanging around in Bang Saphan while P’Chai and P’Bot took care of some business of their own. Spent the evening in the Internet shop again, fixing some problems for a customer.
Thursday - collected modem from Bang Saphan first thing. I took the CBR400, but shortly after setting off, a hundred red ants appeared from somewhere in the bodywork and took up position all over the fairing, handlebars and dials etc, eventually working their way into my clothes and biting me in various places. I managed to put up with it for just over half an hour, and on arriving home, I parked my bike up in the sun for a couple of hours. No more ants. Spent the rest of the day on-line, syncing, uploading, working etc.
Friday - spent pretty much the whole day working through bug tickets for paid work. Starting to get back on top of them.