Alright already.

Here's a lovely picture from Patrick. This was taken from the skywalk between 2 BTS stations. On the left is CentralWorld, an enormous mall. The lighted photos on the bottom are part of an underwater photography display. The picture of Sawyer with the stick below was taken the same day down on the sidewalk by the fountain.

This is a statue in Lumpini Park.



This is from the Sunday brunch at Trader Vic's at the Marriott on the Chao Phraya river. I really can't describe how elaborate this brunch is. It's a buffet with everything under the sun. The desserts are great: ice cream bar, snow cone bar, cakes, a million kinds of chocolates, a chocolate fountain, fruit... We're not going to be in Bangkok much longer, I'll miss this stuff, I really don't want to talk about it anymore.



A nice random picture from way back in January when Pat's parents, aunt, and brother were visiting. This was at one of the many temples in Ayutthaya, what used to be the capitol of Thailand. Sawyer learned the word "Buddha" at these very Buddhas. He now says, "Hi Buddha!" whenever he sees one. If we're in a taxi, he loves pointing out the "tiny Buddha" on the dashboard which is somewhat amusing to the drivers.


In case you're wondering.........THREE MORE WEEKS Woohooooo!!!

Ava plug

If you haven't checked out the Ava and Dylan blog on the left, you need to. The most recent post (at least as I'm typing this now) is a song Ava sings for her brother. Unbelievably cute. Here is a picture of my very own cutie looking oh so serious.

The Happiest Place on Earth

Also known as Funarium. Massive, air-conditioned, western-designed (in other words, pretty safe). This place is unbelievable. It is a huge blessing for mommies in Bangkok. They've thought of everything. There is food, bathrooms with changing tables and tiny kid-sized toilets and sinks, a big art room with volunteers ready to help your kid with a craft, a giant climbing structure, smaller toddler structure, bike track, basketball cage. There are giant slides just like the ones at carnivals, the ones where you actually get some air. In the US we'd be asking, "How long until this place is overrun with teenagers and the guy working the slide tries to sell 5-year-olds weed?" That stuff doesn't seem to happen much here. Oh my gosh it is so much fun. I get way too excited when we're on our way to funarium.






Here is Sawyer on the kiddie slide in the toddler section. The tongue comes out when he concentrates.



Sawyer: "Even if there's a little bit of swine flu on this red ball, it's so much fun it's worth it!"



The big slide. The red flame indicates the fast lane. I didn't know that at first. The far right is the slow lane. I still have a burn on my arm from that thing. They must have greased it up last Saturday. Haven't had problems since then.



The ball pit in the big blue structure. This takes some explaining. The big purple cylinder has a red button. Push the red button and air shoots out of the holes, causing the balls to hover in the air. It's not meant for giant kids to sit on it and air out their sweaty shirts. Maybe they should put a sign up as a reminder.





In this ball pit is another button. This causes the overhead machine to turn into a vacuum. You can send the balls flying through the two tubes on the sides. They collect in the section above you. This machine is on an automatic timer and when it turns off, all the balls fall out on your head. Sawyer liked to just lay down and wait for the avalanche. Yahoooooo!!!

Spongebob Anderson

One night in Bangkok...

So it's 2am in Bangkok and here's why I'm loving it and not wanting to leave.

We listened to someone totally butcher "No Woman No Cry" in a bar called Country Road (singular, not plural). And it was funny. And really painful.

In this same bar a roach crawled up Pat's ankle, decided it just wasn't worth it, and crawled under me and toward the other table. Awesome.

The nachos on Soi 8. This time they weren't made with Doritos which would make for an awful disappointment. But somehow, they were still the best. Okay, who am I kidding. It was the Thai whiskey that made them great. But by then I was drinking water.

Some Australian guy bought us shots of Thai whiskey. It smelled like molasses and tasted like your worst nightmare. I pretended to do it and drank half. It was half of my worst nightmare.

The dj in the place on Soi 8 played some Le Chic and had an afro that appropriately matched the song. He is too cool for school. I've always wanted an afro. How did this Thai guy, who should have stick-straight hair, get a slammin' afro? I never asked, but next time I will.

Sawyer went to bed under the safe supervision of our fantastic Arlyn.

One band tonight played John Denver. They also played a Beatles medley. All of these were with thick Thai accents. It doesn't matter how much or how little talent you have, the accent makes it entertaining.

I will miss these fun nights! Time to sleep it off, reread this post, and feel kind of silly for actually putting these thoughts into words.

My Hands Are Really Cold Right Now

This will be a long one.

I just finished eating my second dinner. The first was leftover rice and chicken stir-fry. Healthy. The second was 2 slices of Pizza Company pizza. Not even close to healthy. Remember in Tommy Boy when David Spade says, "I can actually hear you getting fatter." That's echoed through my head about 10 times in the last few minutes. Talk about a bad inner dialogue.

Re-run Warning: For those of you who have heard my mold story a bazillion times, skip this here paragraph.

You see that gorgeous pool down there in the video? Well we can't go there anymore. We no longer live in Four Wings Mansion. Well our mansion had some problems. I can no longer say I live in a mansion. Long story short (haha that's funny right?): The wood floor in Sawyer's room started to buckle and develop hills. I started to get dizzy walking in because it felt like the room was bouncing around me. Turns out, I was bouncing on the floor. We had the handy dandy less-is-more maintenance guys come up. They said the a/c was probably leaking. They fixed it. Or they sat in there making noise for an hour and left. They came back the next day and pulled up all the floor. Not before using little pieces of masking tape to label every single 2 inch by 5 inch piece. When they pulled it up, the floor and the bottoms of the wood pieces were a few different colors. The black and green colors are what stand out in my mind. It immediately smelled like a wet basement. The concrete floor was damp. Our handy dandy less-is-more maintenance guys trucked the wood outside our apartment and proceeded to scrape the mold off. After that I'm sure they were planning on putting it all back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. This is not all the wood, however. Some of it was still in Sawyer's room untouched and un-lifted. It looked flat and dry enough to the guys, why mess with it, right? There's som tam and tom yum to be eaten. Mai pen rai. No problem. Oh, and this is in a room where we didn't already know the a/c was leaking. It's been leaking in our bedroom for a year, but there's a carpet down in there and a bed covering most of the floor near the a/c. Who knows what's growing there. The housing people from the embassy come out, smell the room, make faces and say that they'll make sure this problem is taken care of properly. This worried me a bit. We only had 3 months left at that point and I wondered if they would give us a bandaid and call it a day. A few days (and no nagging later) they tell us to move out. So within a couple days we packed up the essentials and moved into a 3 bedroom extended stay Marriott. For those of you who aren't living in Thailand, this is a prime example of the way things work here. The a/c breaks, they roll it out and roll in one just as old. It works a while and then breaks. These things have to be as old as Bob Barker and instead of fixing this problem, the root of the problem, they just ride it out. They ride it out with all the labor it takes to maintain them. They ride it out as they have to fix the flooring. They ride it out while people move out. So Thai. And if you think I sound cynical, come live here a while. And if you have lived here a while and still think that, then put on some regular sunglasses because the rosy ones don't work so well. There are some things about this place that irritate me a bit (just like in the US) and cutting corners is one of them. It's not charming. It's not such a cute and beautiful way to live. It's stupid. Anyway, now the rest of our stuff is at the apartment and will be packed out to be shipped to the US on Friday. Enough of the rant, maybe more later.

Funny story. So Thai.
They have the same types of drive-through car washes at the gas stations here in Bangkok as they have in the US. The kind with the arch that sprays water and soap and who knows what else on your car and moves back and forth around you while your car is in park? Pat and Sawyer and I love to drive through them. Sometimes I like to blast music in there. Sometimes I just like to listen to the sounds of the car wash. Sawyer used to enjoy them, then started to get a little scared of them. He's gotten to like them again. A few months ago, we decided to use the same one we'd used a few times in the past. The Thai guys were outside the car wash and did a preliminary wipe down of the car. They were much more thorough this time for a reason unbeknownst to us at the time. After the wipe down, we realized they were trying to tell us something. Here's my thought process:

- Ahhh okay the car wash is broken. See he's saying it doesn't work, we should just leave.
- No wait, he says go ahead. Okay... (we drive in)
- Hang on, the thing - the thing that moves back and forth with the water isn't moving back and forth.
- It's supposed to come back to us right...? Should we drive forward more? Are we in all the way?
- What's he saying?
- Oh....My....I have to put this on the blog. This is awesome.

Whatever mechanism that makes that arch move back and forth around your car was taking the day off. The arch wasn't moving. It was only spraying water. So he asked us to drive back in the little car wash building and forth over and over so that the water would hit all parts of the car. So we did. This was one of the funniest things I've ever done. It's like tightening a screw in a chair by holding the screwdriver still and spinning the lawnmower around and around. Pat was actually behind the wheel so he had the best job. We had to give these guys a big tip. They made my day.

The smaller pics on the left are from our Photo Booth feature on the imac. It is one sure way to make Pat and I laugh hysterically.

Rainy Day

Not a whole lot going on for us today so we thought we'd give karaoke a try. After teaching Sawyer the "testing 1, 2, 3" thing, he pretty much just counted in the microphone. If you listen closely you'll hear him start singing the birthday song. Every so often I'll let him watch a little American Idol and he absolutely loves it. He sings the words he can pick out and dances. His golf club has been his "mackaphone" lately and he runs for it the moment he sees singing on t.v.