Wonderful Christmas

It was great to be home for Christmas this year. The last time that we were in the U.S. for Christmas, Aleena was only 2 years old, and Jacob was the same age that Aleena is now.

Santa was pretty generous to us this year. The kids didn't get to open a lot of presents here, as some of them are still back in Thailand. Nalin did write the old fat man a note telling him that we'd be here for Christmas, so he did deliver at least one of their presents here.

Over the last six months or so, every time that we are in a restaurant or out, the kids want to borrow Tim's iPhone to play games. Santa must have been watching, because they each got their own iTouch's. To say that they are a hit would be an understatement. Nalin had already filled up half of her 8gb (actually closer to 6.5) of space with photos and videos that she made. They love the little free apps available.

Tim and I both received Kindles for Christmas. I had almost ordered one in Thailand about a month ago before we knew that we were coming, but the wait was 7-9 weeks. In addition, Tim received a Canon HG20 video recorder, while I received an iPhone 4. We purchased the iPhone in Thailand, and Tim had told me that it hadn't arrived yet so that I wouldn't receive it until we got back, so I was surprised a bit. It only came in two days before we left, so I almost did wait. Of course, I got my Canon 5D Mark II about a month before Christmas. I don't know if that counts as a Christmas present or not, but overall it was a pretty good holiday season.

But of course, Christmas isn't all about phat loot and electronics. We spent Christmas Eve at mom's and dad's and saw family. Tim hadn't seen some of the family in almost four years.

On Christmas morning, we opened presents at the house from Santa and the immediate family. It was nice celebrating it with Eric, Heather and Ethan. Since the kids got the iTouches, they didn't get a lot of other presents, so they would open one, then wait for Ethan to open three or four. Fortunately, they did a pretty good job of waiting, and Ethan is a much faster gift-opener than he was in the past.

In the afternoon, we went to my Uncle Steve's and Aunt Carolyn's house. Just as dinner was starting, Nalin's allergies started acting up so we had to leave.

This afternoon we are going back to mom's and dad's to exchange gifts with the grandparents, and Laura's and Eric's families. In the past, we would do that after the Christmas Eve party at mom's and dad's, but the kids would be exhausted by the time we started opening presents, so we moved it.

My guess is that shopping will be on the agenda starting tomorrow. The kids have some Christmas money to spend, and there are things that they can get here that are harder to get in Thailand. Tim and I are also not adverse to doing some shopping.

I think Jacob summed it up best when I asked him how he liked Christmas this year. "Dad, this is the best Christmas that I've had in a long time."

Christmas at Home

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Originally uploaded by ebvImages

The kids are enjoying their first Christmas here in the states since 2006. They are all very excited about seeing the snow; in fact they made their first snowballs in the parking lot at the airport upon our arrival. Fortunately for us, there is plenty of the white stuff on the ground for the kids to play with, but its already cleared off the roads.

Today (Christmas Eve), we go to my parents house to celebrate with my dad's family. Tomorrow we will celebrate together with our family and my brother Eric's in the morning, and then go to my Uncle Steve's in the afternoon. On Sunday, we will be back to mom and dad's to exchange presents with the grandparents and cousins.

We are still adjusting our sleep schedule, although at different paces. Jacob and I are pretty close to a normal sleep schedule, while Tim and the girls are slower to adjust. In fairness to Tim, part of the reason that she is adjusting more slowly is because of Aleena.

Definitely glad that we decided to come here.

Christmas at Home

_MG_6191.jpg
Originally uploaded by ebvImages

The kids are enjoying their first Christmas here in the states since 2006. They are all very excited about seeing the snow; in fact they made their first snowballs in the parking lot at the airport upon our arrival. Fortunately for us, there is plenty of the white stuff on the ground for the kids to play with, but its already cleared off the roads.

Today (Christmas Eve), we go to my parents house to celebrate with my dad's family. Tomorrow we will celebrate together with our family and my brother Eric's in the morning, and then go to my Uncle Steve's in the afternoon. On Sunday, we will be back to mom and dad's to exchange presents with the grandparents and cousins.

We are still adjusting our sleep schedule, although at different paces. Jacob and I are pretty close to a normal sleep schedule, while Tim and the girls are slower to adjust. In fairness to Tim, part of the reason that she is adjusting more slowly is because of Aleena.

Definitely glad that we decided to come here.

Yaow Back Tomorrow

In a definite bit of good news, Yaow gets out of the hospital tomorrow. Fortunately, everything went well.

It will be a little while before she will be at full strength, but it will be nice to have her back.  I told her friend Meow to let her know that I had not washed a single dish while she was gone, so that there was plenty for her to do when she returned.  She knew that I was joking of course.  

In fact, I did cook, do laundry, dishes and clean (okay, straightened up a little) this past week.  For the most part I didn't mess anything up too much.  I did bring the wrong pair of pants for Aleena's gymnastics practice on Thursday, but she was okay practicing in her one piece.  On Friday, I brought the wrong pants to dance practice.  I had the right style, but grabbed the wrong size.  I am not sure why the pair I bought for her next year was sitting with her other clothes, but we made it work.  

Still, very glad to see Yaow return and very happy that she is better.    

Wish You Still Snored

I was talking to my wife this morning after her run.  She was telling me how she had woken up early in the morning and couldn't fall back to sleep.  She wanted to talk, and couldn't tell if I was awake or not.  Then she told me "I wish you still snored, then I could tell if you were awake or asleep."

That is something that I never quite expected to hear.  As some of you know, I had sleep apnea for quite a few years.  I snored loudly and would stop breathing.  Miraculously, Tim was able to sleep through it all.  Finally, in 1998 I broke down and had surgery to remove my tonsils, fix my deviated septum, and remove my uvula.  

It was a pretty amazing transformation.  Not only did I stop snoring and sleep better, I started dreaming again.  It was such a vivid experience at first, because I had not remembered dreaming in over ten years.

As I put on some weight since the surgery, I started snoring again.  I no longer had apnea and didn't snore as loudly as I had before, but I still snored.  Apparently the exercise and weight loss has eliminated the snoring, or at least reduced it to the point where Tim can no longer hear it.    

Embarrassing Videos

Over the last few months, there have been videos released on Youtube allegedly showing people associated with the Thai Supreme Court meeting with people who may have business before that court.  One of the first was an alleged meeting between the secretary of one of the judges and someone high up in the Democrat party.  There is currently a case before the court which could result in the disbanding of the Democrat party.

Recently there was a video that purported to show a meeting between a man associated with the court and some young men.  The conversation is supposed to involve the more senior man warning the younger men not to say anything about acquiring some tests.

There have been a dozen or so videos released.  The Thai government immediately moves to block these videos from viewing on Youtube.  They often get reposted, so its not clear how effective that is in preventing the dissemination of these videos.

How has the Thai court reacted to these videos which purport to show corruption and threaten to erase any credibility that the court might have?  Do they deny the charges or point out that the videos may not be what they seem to represent?  No, they declare that the videos are illegal and the government attempts to block them from viewing in Thailand.

I guess there is some irony in the fact that the men who found former PM Thaksin guilty of corruption are now embroiled in a corruption controversy themselves.  Ironic?  Perhaps.  Surprising?  No.

Freed For Now

The Myanmar military junta released Nobel Peace Price winner and pro-democracy activist Aaung San Suu Kyi from house arrest.  After the party it supported came out victorious in the rigged elections, the junta must have felt that she posed little internal threat, and that releasing her would somewhat ease the international criticism heaped upon them.

Ms. Kyi is free for now.  Of course if she goes on to start a true pro-democracy movement, as many of those in the West hope, she may find herself once again confined in her home.  Or, perhaps the government will allow her to exist as a symbol to placate the West, while making sure that any real democracy movement will fail.

Sorry, Its Not a Free Speech Issue

Amazon is under fire for selling a book titled The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure.  They defend their decision to sell the e-book on the grounds that not selling something a book because of the content is censorship.


I am definitely on the side of free speech, but Amazon has got this one wrong.  I believe that censorship by the government is wrong.  If the U.S. or another government tried to censor such a book, then there would be real free speech questions involved.  I might even find myself in the position of defending the legal right to publish of such a repulsive 


This is plain and simply about Amazon's choice to sell a product or not.  While they have the legal right to sell this book, they are not required to do so.  Just as it is Amazon's legal right to sell the book, so is it the legal right of consumers to show their displeasure with that decision.  If that displeasure is in the form of boycotting Amazon and its products, it could be a costly one for the online retailer.


Amazon may think that it is defending an important principle; that a book should be available even if it deals with an extremely unpopular or even repulsive topic.  Ultimately, however, Amazon is not an advocacy group, it is a business with shareholders and customers.  If decides to keep selling this title, which will likely sell very few copies, it might find that its principles are very expensive indeed, and those don't go well on the balance sheet.   

Bad Luck

Right now my car is in the garage for a slipped transmission, my computer monitor is in the shop, and my maid/nanny is in the hospital with appendicitis. Tim took Yaow to the hospital this morning and hopefully everything will go well.  

So for a while I am going to have to actually cook, clean and do laundry.  Well, at least order food in, and do enough cleaning and laundry to get by for a while.     

The Exercise Bug

As you probably know if you read this blog regularly, about two years ago I set out to lose a bunch of weight.  I was pretty successful, dropping in excess of fifty-five pounds over about a nine month period.  My success was largely due to exercise and diet.  I was a little off and on with the diet, but when I was exercising five or six days a week, sometimes twice a day, I had some latitude in my eating.

Over the last year, I put back on about twenty pounds of the weight that I had lost.  I think the high point was when I was back in the U.S. this summer.  My exercise routine was pretty dismal then, and I ate like a man who didn't care much about his waist.  

My goal had been to get back on track when I returned from the U.S., but a hurt foot slowed me down a bit.  I still exercised some, but my diet was terrible, and I couldn't run.  A few weeks ago, my foot finally felt better enough to run, and I started a bit of jogging. 

I decided on Halloween, of all days, that I was going to drop some more weight.  I put myself on a pretty strict diet for the first five or six days, and have relaxed it a bit.  In addition to avoiding eating a lot of food, I have pretty much given up sweets and stopped eating anything after dinner.  Tonight I did have a bowl of Captain Crunch for dessert, but that's about as far as I've gone with sweets.

The other part of the equation is my exercise routine.  Over the last ten days, I've exercised nine, taking off last Sunday.  I am lifting weights for thirty minutes three days a week, and running every day.  Most days I am running twice a day, I'll run about five kilometers in the morning, and another five in the afternoon or evening.  I'm not running very fast, and really don't care about my pace at this point.  My goal is just to get out there and do it, as I know time and effort will build endurance and speed.

One thing that I am a little wary of is over doing it, but I'm in that frame of mind where I don't want to take a day off.  A couple of days last week, I woke up thinking that I might just rest that day, but I couldn't.  I felt myself compelled to at least run.  My attitude now is a lot like it was when started two years ago.

So far I've definitely seen some success.  I am probably down around thirteen pounds from when I returned from the U.S., a decent chunk of that lost in the last few weeks.  I still have a long way to go, but I'm glad to be focused again.  

Over Three Years

I was playing around with the blog templates today, and it dawned on me that I have been posting to the blog pretty regularly for over three years now.  Of course, I've been living over here for three years, and since the purpose of the blog is to share some of my thoughts and experiences, I guess it makes sense.  

Still, when I started, I would not have been certain that I would have made it three years (blogging or living in Thailand).  Its nice that this didn't become one of those projects that I start and then abandon after its no longer new.  

And if you are reading this, thanks.

Passporting

Today Tim and I took Jacob to get his passport renewed. We had to take him out of school in the morning to get it done, as the ACS (American Citizen Services) branch of the U.S. Embassy is open from 7:00 until 2:00 p.m., and minor passports require the minor and both parents.

I scheduled an appointment for 8:45 a.m., figuring that it would give us plenty of time with traffic. We ended up arriving just before our appointment. When you arrive at the ACS, you have to surrender your electronic devices and go through a metal detector. We were waiting in line behind a man (perhaps American) and a Thai woman. The man knew one of the people at the desk and was having a long conversation with him. I got the impression the guy was a jackass. Finally we managed to get around them, and then got stuck behind a Thai woman trying to go through the metal detector. She had a USB drive or something and was standing in front of the detector fishing through her purse. The guard just sits there and looks at her. Jacob walked through on his own, and he's telling us to wait. Finally Tim made a gesture to go through and we walked around her.

Everything went pretty smoothly except the photograph. I took Jacob's photo and printed it, but neglected to make sure it had a white background. It had a gray background. It would have taken me about thirty seconds in Photoshop or Lightroom to fix it, but once again I screwed it up. Its amazing; I'm actually pretty good with a camera and computers, but every time I deal with immigration, I end up having to fill in the same form at least three times, and there is always something wrong with the photos.

Fortunately, they let us go through the interview and bring photos back afterwards. There are a few places close by, so after we were finished, we went and had Jacob's photo taken. I returned it to the ACS while Tim took Jacob to Au Bon Pain.

A couple of interesting things. The woman who interviewed Jacob was from Florence Kentucky. The guy who was acting chummy with the guard at the front desk was having trouble of some sort. While many of the people at the ACS are Americans, there are also Thai people who work there. This man was talking to a Thai worker, and demanding to know the name of his boss. He had some sort of appointment, and was not pleased at how things were going. I later heard him complaining to someone else about something. I stand by my first assessment; jackass.

Of course, no trip to the ACS is complete without some weirdo fellow countryman. When I returned with Jacob's photos, I just had to go and drop them off at a window. I stood there waiting for someone to come over to make sure there end up in the right place. A man comes up next to me, looking red faced and perhaps a little like a bum. He put his paperwork through the slot, and I noticed that it had a 500 baht (about $15) bill with it. Trying to be helpful, I pointed behind him and said "you pay back there". He informed me that he had already paid.

Now, I'm not going to get into an argument with one of the less fortunate people who share my country of origin, but I'm wondering why the hell he is passing money through the window. I've read stories before that people who deal with the THAI immigration officials sometimes have to pay "tea money" to get paper work processed.  Even in those cases, its a little more subtle than shoving a visible 500 baht bill in the slot with your paperwork.  There is no reason that you need to slip a little extra money at the American Embassy.  My guess is that even for the Thai employees, its a pretty decent job, and I'm willing to bet that if you get caught accepting extra payments you will not be working there any longer.  Sure enough, the clerk came over and took everything but the money.  He then took Jacob's photos and attached them to the forms, before working on the other guys issue.

Jacob's passport should be ready in two weeks.  Fortunately, I can pick it up by myself.

Faux Elections

This week, the basket case of a country, Myanmar (formerly Burma) will hold its much touted elections.  The last time Myanmar had elections in 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi's party stormed to victory.  The ruling military junta at the time simply ignored the elections and Ms. Kyi has spent most of the last twenty years under house arrest.  She is scheduled to be released a week after the new elections.

Not willing to risk another embarrassing lost, the military junta has stacked the deck in its favor.  Twenty-five percent of the legislative positions are reserved for high ranking generals.  Since under the new Constitution it takes more than seventy-five percent to overrule the military leadership, the military will remain in command.  

Of course, even for the remaining seats, the elections are hardly fair.  There are two government/military sponsored party that comprise 2/3 of the candidates for elected office.  While the government provides financial support for these parties, it has put up many challenges for smaller parties.  Millions of Myanmar ethnic minorities have been ruled ineligible to vote.  

The purpose of the election is supposed to give some sort of legitimacy to the ruling junta's holding on to power.  I'm not sure who they think that they are fooling, because at least outside Myanmar, everyone knows what is going on.  I guess this might give some cover to countries like China who support Myanmar, but really, this election does nothing.    

Ms. Kyi's party has decided to boycott the sham elections.  The government threatened that if enough people do not turn out, they will simply cancel the elections.  For the people of Myanmar, I doubt that it will make any difference at all.  Does it matter if the guy who has a gun pointed at your temple and his boot on your neck is wearing a suit or an army uniform? 

Soccer Photos

Here are some photos from today's soccer games.




Jacob and his buddy Kavin before the game.





Making the save.

First Soccer Matches of the Season

Jacob and Aleena had their first soccer matches of the season today.  Nalin decided not to play this year.  

Aleena is in the 4-6 group "mini" girl division.  They don't actually have structured teams, rather we just form them into teams on a week to week basis.  Last year she played in the same league and there were more formal teams.  The reason that they didn't do that this year was that they didn't have enough girls sign up.  

Aleena enjoys soccer as a fun social time.  She does run around after the ball and kick it occasionally, but she isn't too serious about it, and is more interested in having fun with her friends that she is scoring or winning the game.

Of course things are a bit more competitive in the 10 to 11 year old league that Jacob plays in.  Jacob was the goalie, and in the beginning, he made some good saves.  Later in the game, however, the other team was able to score quite a few goals.  Some of them he might have been able to stop, while many others would have been very difficult.  His team won 12-7.  The score in the other 10-11 year old league game was 10-7, so I think at this age, the kids ability to score outstrips their ability to play defense and defend the goal.