You know, I’m quite proud of my accomplishments in a certain area. Although it sounds gross, my accomplishments in the bathroom are the polar opposite of gross, in fact the epitome of cleanliness.

Soap is the number one accomplishment. I love finishing a bar of soap. I don’t know why, but I suspect it’s because it’s a relatively rare event. Finishing a roll of toilet paper is much, much less rewarding. While not being particularly remotely frugal, I also quite like  forcing slivers of soap together. I think it’s the “crazy mad scientist” aspect I like about this. I’m currently using the Imperial Leather fragrances range of soap, and each comes in a super-bright neon shade, so it’s a visual delight when slivers are merged. Currently the blue and green bars are merged, and the orange bar will soon join them, if I can resist using the sliver bar, in an effort to finish it.

The second great accomplishment is finishing a tube of toothpaste. Of course, you could cheat by buying small tubes, but where’s the gratification in that?  It’s wierd … I also make superhuman efforts to use every last drop in the tube, again providing a stark contrast to the non-frugal norm of my life. Maybe I’m frugal only when it comes to bathroom products? I do like buying new toothbrushes at the drop of a hat, though, so perhaps my soap/toothpaste fetish are the only examples that point to any fiscal responsibility on my part.

Glenn sent me a book for my birthday about loot farming online. It’s incredibly interesting, and if it wasn’t harder than it looks I’d be all over that.

Just so it’s a matter of public record, there were two people I didn’t get birthday wishes or messages from that I would’ve expected to. I guess that shows you. Rather than shame them publically, I will just say it’s lucky I’m not like the guy I read about in “Watching the English” who kept a formal document of his friends and their position on his list. When they did something to displease him, or to please him immensely, he would alter the list and sent a letter to the affected parties advising them of their new position.

Unlike this guy, I keep my list private, and would only tell the other people on the list who has displeased me.

Well Dean-mas was great. Mint was very sweet to me, and we had a lovely breakfast (included in the rate of AU$45/night) before coming back to the room for a rest.

We hit the Warorot markets and enjoyed famous Chiang Mai-style sausage with rice for lunch. Mint bought some bits and pieces, I bought Lara a birthday present (how’s THAT for thinking ahead?) and we came home for a sleep.

Well, Mint had a sleep. I checked some emails and wasted some time on the internet. Among the gifts I received, Rob Wilson was kind enough to give me a gift voucher for RedBubble, an online art gallery that allows artists to publish their work, and consumers to buy prints/shirts/cards of that work. Neat idea. I frittered away precious hours making a list of favourites, which you can see for yourself here.

Just finished “afternoon tea” with Her Mintiness and her mother will be arriving at 6pm, after a drama-filled day of waiting to be granted permission to leave the area and visit in Chiang Mai.  As a result, there’ll be no going “out” to celebrate my birthday but we might do that tomorrow instead.

Man, who’s this gorgeous kid? Happy Birthday to me (and to a lesser extent, Glenn) :p

Sitting in the Royal Silk Lounge at Suvarnabhumi (pronounced Soo-wanna-poorn) airport (pronounced air-port) gives me some time to rat-a-tat out a quick blog post.

Mint didn’t quite believe me that we could eat for free in the lounge, and on the (arduous) walk there, she doubted it so hard she was tempted to buy boring food from vendors. Now that we’re here, and my predictions of free food have been validated, all recollection of this disbelief has vanished and she sits here like she owns the place.

I finally finished the book I was reading last night (Watching the English, by Kate Fox), as I didn’t want to take it with me to Chiang Mai, and I also didn’t want to feel guilty about starting a new book, or reading magazines, in the interim. The last 40 pages or so flew by, mostly because I was doing a pretty half-assed job of reading them, but there were some interesting parts that broke up the boring parts. I liked the parts about class-consciousness of the English, but found the summaries boring. If anyone wants to read it, let me know and I’ll post it.

Speaking of “posting it”, yesterday I sent Glenn’s gift to him, and in a way, I hope it won’t prove useful:  here is a link to the book’s page, I have tiny-urlled it to make it a hidden link … if Glenn wants to know what it is BEFORE his birthday, well that’s his funeral.

Mum’s version of a Chicken Fricassee (affectionately known as Chicken Custard) is delicious and simple. In Bangkok, it was slightly more difficult because of the ingredients, but I persevered and was rewarded.

It’s essentially a combination of cheese, cream, chicken and asparagus over rice, topped with paprika. The challenges I faced were in the purchase of cheese (where regular old “tasty” cheese can fetch as high as AU$30/kilo … I eventually found Coon Shredded Tasty in a 250g bag for AU$6.50 at Carrefour) and the asparagus, because I was too lazy to want to use real asparagus. In the end I found tinned asparagus (white only, no green was available anywhere) after scouring four (count them … “four”) supermarkets. There were two tins that needed opening, and without THE BIG KITCHEN KNIFE, perhaps I would never have succeeded. Note to self: buy a can opener.

Also worth noting is that having rice pre-cooked can help, if your only “saucepan” available is a rice cooker. You may need to wash the rice cooker first, which is always and annoying chore, but rest assured that the dish does come together brilliantly in a rice cooker.

How did it compare? Well, I thought mine was cheesier, so I could’ve probably used less cheese, but I like cheese so it wasn’t like I was disappointed or anything.

What did Mint think? She was … curious. Not curious enough to eat a portion, but curious enough to taste (there was no gagging) and generally pop-up around offering (unsolicited) advice on whether the chicken was cooked enough yet.

I have leftovers for the next time I feel homesick and/or hungry, although it’s definately the unhealthiest thing I have eaten in months. There’s a small carton of cream and 250g of cheese in there, people.

Today I hope to have the calendar back. Sorry for the delay.

Hey everyone … I know that it’s Sunday and probably a bunch of you will be too disconnected from the webiverse to read this update until you sit at your desk tomorrow, but I’ve got some free time, and I feel like ablogging. Suckas.

It’s very exciting, you know. This Thursday, Glenn and I are officially a year older. Can you believe it? I’ll be 29. My god, 29. I remember when 18 felt years away. Now I’m closer to being 36 than I am to being 18. There’s some truly amazing maths for you, folks.

I like the internet, I think that’s no secret. Particularly I like stumbling upon a new site that I really like (whether it be a webcomic, a blog or whatever) and reading it TO DEATH.  At the moment I have stumbled across a few beauties that I am enjoying no-end: I Don’t Think It’s Going To Rain (caps are the author’s, not mine) and Brianna’s Random Access Babble. I think the first also displayed this link-worthy but not COMPLETELY work-safe article: 9 Words That Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean (again, caps are the author’s.) The non-work-safe-ness warnging is due to random bikini pics for no apparent reason.  NOT THAT I’M COMPLAINING.

Yesterday I enjoyed a good sulk. I dragged myself to the gym, despite not really wanting to go, and 20 minutes in, I fell on the treadmill and gave myself the mother of all scrapes. Nobody else was in the gym at the time, but I was still quite … shat off. How dare the gym do this to me? I didn’t even want to GO! So I cut the session short, went straight to 7-11 (which the Thai’s abbreviate to “7″) and bought bread to make a PB&J, and a bottle of milo and a banana cake. This was my sulky dinner.

This afternoon I am cooking Mum’s famous Chicken Custard. I was supposed to do it yesterday, but the sulk overtook me.

I hope everyone had a good Valentine’s.

Mint and I went to Nathorn Seafood, and had a great meal together. Regular readers may recall it was also the place we took her family for our “engagement” dinner. I looove the pineapple rice (fried rice baked in a pineapply shell with pineapple, prawns and ham) and there was also a crab that couldn’t be eaten so I ate it for breakfast. Also on the menu was fried cuttlefish, Thai fish cakes, hot and sour chicken soup, fried prawns in a pineapple sauce and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. It was great.

I also bought her a pretty dress, which she’s wearing today. I wanted to take a picture but wasn’t allowed as it hasn’t been washed and ironed etc etc as yet.

For me, she snuck out early in the morning (a rare feat indeed for her Mintyness) and bought omelette and rice for me for breakfast. And a rose. Oh I bought her a rose too. I forgot that part.

I went to the doctor again yesterday for some more medicines to make me hear. I have a new antibiotic which I’m quietly confident about, as it’s the same one I’ve had success with in the past in the west.

This weekend is our last before going to Chiang Mai. I booked our hotel last night and got a pretty good rate: better than even wotif could get. Time will tell if it’s adequate.

Planning for the American trip is going well.

So far, I have paid for the booth, I have my flights on the correct days, I have organized the car hire, I have paid for the hotel in Salt Lake. So, I’m well on my way.

The blog continues to evolve. Bek asked if it were possible to receive the whole entry in an email, instead of an excerpt with a link. Sadly, it isn’t. I asked the author if it were possible already, and he replied:

Dean,

This is only possible if you make a hack to the code or pay me to make the hack for you

And frankly, I’m not going to pay, or go looking in the code myself. I want to promote a sense of community, and have people reply/comment to blog posts, and this is less likely if they just read it in their email client.

Also, there’s a new “widget” on the sidebar that includes a random image. At the moment, they’re just random place-holder images from around Bangkok, but soon they will feature a vetted list of every picture I own. That means that a lot of readers of this blog will soon have a random chance of seeing themself on the internet everytime I post. That’s sure to be a bigger buzz than just seeing your name in print.

Dad helpfully offered some advice:

Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started Catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.
In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.”

The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant, only monkeys everywhere!

Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.