Spike modelling his cage.

In preparation for moving to the US I have asked for a quote for shipping the animals. The thought of sending them with the movers scares me, I would rather have them accompany us however the thought of arriving in the States with 2 cats and a dog but no home and a 2 day road journey to Minnesota is daunting in the extreme. So I want to know how much my other option is going to cost.

The movers asked for size and weight of animals and dimensions of cage. I just took this picture to see if this cage would be okay. The answer is no, we need to buy new airline compliant cages - I'm cool with that, it is safer.

Anyway, although I only uploaded this from my phone to my blog for convenience (to send the photo to the movers) it got a comment so I will leave it. In fact I will do more than that - I will use the post to answer the question.

Mita goes crazy if you put her in a cage. I sometimes have to put her in one when travelling and she always throws up all over it. It's just too stressful for her.

And an unrelated question: is he yappy? Mat says every single chi...thingy is yappy and that's why he doesn't want one. I'm hoping you'll say he's well behaved and there's no reason why we shouldn't get one;

Spike loves his cage because that is where he sleeps every night, and has done since he was a puppy. If he gets tired when he is pootling around in the day (on the rare occasions we let him do his own thing) he will often sneak into his cage for a nap. He also runs into the cage and sits and waits for a treat after he has 'been' outside.

And he never yaps. If he barks it is for a good reason, to alert us to a possible intruder (the maid - who he adores, the water delivery guy - who he doesn't) or because he has heard another dog bark in distress or anger. But he will bark once or twice and once we acknowledge his voice he is quiet. He never does that pointless endless yapping - but that is because he knows we listen to him. I think Chihuahuas (and all small dogs) are often spoilt rotten at first but neglected later - when the novelty of owning a new baby has worn off. We love him to pieces, but we rarely treat him like a little dog. And from his point of view he is as big as a bear and as brave as a lion... and of course like everyone in our household he has strong streak of wolf in him. RWAAAHHHHRRR!!

Love and marriage

It is hard to imagine a more unassuming wedding day. Dom and I got up, showered, dressed and hopped on the bike to go to Khun Nulek's office (Khun Nulek, right in the picture, is our fixer). We sat around a while waiting for her to arrive and when she did she made a few copies and then we all got in her car and drove to the Sansai District Office.

There we took a number and waited.

People arrived and sat and took care of business (birth, marriage, death, divorce, family book registration, and ID card all in one crazy little world). There was no air-con, but ceiling fans whirred slowly so as not to disturb the paperwork. A kid sitting next to Dom drank a cartoon of milk and then puked on the floor and the ceiling fan obligingly stirred the smell into the air. Next to me an old lady slept - sprawled across the bench. Her business done, she left and we were able to shuffle right, away from the sick and wait some more.

Eventually it was our turn. We moved from bench to desk and Khun Nulek and the other lady pictured laboriously filled in our paperwork, first by hand, then on computer - which was printed, and then by hand again.

They gave up part of their lunch to marry us and joked about their pay rate O-free rather than OT (though I am sure the 2,000 baht I saw our fixer slip into an envelope in the car helped soothe the rumbling stomachs).

By 12.30 I was Mrs Dumais. My husband and I went for lunch, popped home to show Fon our pink lotus edged certificate and then we went to work.

It was, simply, one of the happiest days of my life.

Sometimes

Sometimes, despite all your best efforts, it rains. Sometimes you lose sight of sky, sun and hills and the view is obscured by a shifting wave of grey. Wet cobwebs, close enough touch (net curtains soaked in seawater), close enough to taste (an old dusty picture frame with a zing like the tines of a fork). Sometimes the rain on your face smells of salt sorrow and regret.

Sometimes you have days like this and you just have to let it fall.

Be yourself

I'm trying to embrace my inner demon. Well, kind of. After yet another OOE (overly emotional event) chez Northlands I was grumbling to a Foxy friend who had inquired how my Wolf was feeling, post drama. My grumble was:

Wolf is dealing with it much better than I am. He has one burst of anger and all the girlies are instantly pm'ing him and telling him they love him and didn't mean to hurt HIM or make HIM angry. And he is ok. I have one burst of anger and feel like the bad tempered bitch who would have no members if I didn't have my adorable Wolf to come along and clean up the mess I made.

To which she replied:

You are a bad tempered bitch.

I think she was joking but I know it is how I am viewed by some. Probably. Sometimes I wish people would just TELL you what they thought of you. Not out of some egotistical desire for affirmation but because it would be so much easier to have a more complete and realistic self-image that way. I mean I role-played the Goddess of the Underworld for so long (years) I absorbed aspects of her into my actual identity. It can change a woman, I still have to remind myself I don't command legions of demonic undead everytime I log on. I struggle with virtual in combination with realistic.

I have another friend (online) who deals with several... layers of identity. I still don't really understand where they come from, but I do think role-playing extensively over a period of years can damage your (mental) health. Playing a role reaches the parts real life doesn't reach and fucks them up, bad. I briefly flirted with a new RP character called Lolah Magic (actually another incarnation of the Goddess, but a mortal one) who was a lesbian motorbike riding thief hiding out in a convent (yes she was a lesbian nun - I'm not afraid to embrace porno-cliché). She still keeps me awake at night. But, really, thank God I never got the chance to explore that identity. I would be scarred for life, and possibly the afterlife.

I touched on the nature of identity (particularly online) in my studies. My tutor said "I am very careful to be myself online" and while I appreciated the value and sincerity of that assertion, it did occur to me that was possibly easier if you hadn't enter the interwebs through the dark and mysterious sidedoor that is role-play.

Incidentally, today's picture is a drawing done by one of my colleague's primary learners. When he showed it to me I looked at is nervously - wondering if this child had planted a camera in my bathroom. Aside from the green legs and banana feet, this is almost exactly how I look in the morning, in the shower, before I have become fully human.

I have a fetish...

...for stationery.

And like many other fetishes worth having Thailand is a good place to indulge myself. I am a real connoisseur too – I don’t just get turned on by post it notes, glue sticks, multi-coloured bull-dog clips and high-lighter pens I like it ALL.

For example these are a few of my favourite kinks: old-fashioned financial ledgers – lined for double entry, with lickable gummed labels and 100’s of individually numbered pages; full sets of graphite pencils that range from 9H-to 9B; manila envelopes of all sizes and sticky labels – round square and rectangular; acetate sheets for making OHP transparencies (though of course I never do that); index cards of all sizes (white and coloured); blocks of Chinese ink with grinding stones (and bottles of ink too, for the days you really don’t have time to make from scratch) and Chinese brushes with fake bamboo handles; pots of latex glue; and bags of plaster of paris and super hero rubber moulds; patties of polymer clay; drawing pins with transparent triangular knobs; gold rings for binding papers that look like pirates’ earrings; mechanical pencils with tiny boxes of lead of varying diameters; putty rubbers, ink rubbers, scented rubbers, rubbers for the end of your pencil, and retractable rubbers in the shape of a pen; craft knives that look like scalpels; tape of every colour and width - transparent, magic, glittering, canvas, brown gummed (for taping wet watercolour paper onto a board) and masking; staplers; holepunches; scissors; paper paper paper; notebooks and pens…

…and of course you must buy this pen to go with that notebook because that notebook absolutely MUST be written on by this pen and if you don’t understand that you may as well just stop reading now and wait for tomorrow’s post.

And of course in this also I have found my perfect match – for a kink is just a repressed and shameful secret unless you can share it with your lover. Thanks to Dom I own things I would have never bought for myself: a guillotine for precision paper slicing; a pencil sharpener that you can attach to the desk; whole entire POTS of pens; BOXES of HB pencils with unsharpened ends… yes you understand, when it comes to private stationery use Dom thinks like an office supplier.

We are even thinking of moving into lamination.

Full circle

I remember my first night in Thailand. I had come with my then future but now ex husband for a two-week holiday from Singapore to meet his family, his country. I stood in the window of our Bangkok YMCA hotel room (it was almost classy 16 years ago) looking out onto a busy, pre-skytrain Sathorn Road, crammed with gaudy taxis, tacky billboard ads for M150, beggars on footbridges, the ugly mess of tangled wires and I said, "promise you will never ask me to live here".

Three years later we moved into an apartment across the river in Lardya, Thonburi. Our apartment block was next door to Thonburi comedy cafe and I think most of the other inhabitants were hookers. We lived in a box with a bed, a toilet and a balcony that we could take it in turns to stand on. Noi bought us a little t.v. that I watched but couldn't understand. I remember being mystified by a segment of a comedy show that appeared to revolve around a transgendered juggling dwarf. I expressed my (finely trained) western scorn and Noi did his best to explain why it was funny. I didn't get it.

I hated Thailand for almost four years and then one day I woke up and realised I was in love with it. The ugly mess of tangled wires and tacky billboard ads for M150 had become invisible. The gaudy taxis filled the streets with rainbows and I didn't need anyone to explain to me why transgendered juggling dwarves were funny. To clarify, they still didn't amuse me, but the world had expanded and there was plenty of room for those who found dwarves (and other birth defects) funny and I to co-exist.

About that time a woman I loved decided to return to the UK with her husband and son after about 7 years in Thailand. She was a friend and hero to me: she had lived in Isarn and spoke Thai fluently. Everyone adored her and she had, until recently, adored everyone. When I asked her why she had decided to leave she said "I have to go before I start to hate it". I didn't get it.

Nine years later. Today. I get it. My connection to Thailand was severed with the divorce. I try to love it with the passion I once had but the best I can manage it lukewarm respect. Yes, it is lovely and diverse, the people can be wonderful, the food is great and living here affords me a fantastic lifestyle. But today I sat in Icon Plaza while Dom was talking to our favourite tech guy, sipping a latte, looking at the film poster pictured above - and I experienced the hot flooding return of scorn for a society that found transgendered juggling dwarves (and other birth defects) funny.

I expect I'll start seeing the ugly mess of tangled wires and billboard ads for M150 again soon.

Motion

"Keep the paint up, and the rubber down!" Author unknown.

Tonight as we drove to dinner I tried to take a few pics that capture the sense of moving through the streets of Chiang Mai on the bike. I wanted to capture that because although I don't particularly enjoy it now I am sure it is something I will look back on fondly.

A drive through one hundred smells: rain-drenched tarmac, exhaust fumes, incense, dried squid, roasting chillies, jasmine, fetid canal, sun scorched earth. A drive through one hundred near deaths: the idiot on the Honda Dream talking on the phone, the songthaew driver swerving across lanes to pick up a passenger, the Isuzu running a red light, the boy on a monkey bike trying to scare the farang, the jealous guy on his girlfriend's baby pink Fino.

At least I hope it's his girlfriend's.

Right now I spend most of the time hating this mode of motion, the lunacy of Thai drivers, the stress, Dom's anger. But I know one day I will remember this and smile.