So you might have noticed that I don't talk about my job here much, and there are several reasons for that. It's mostly because I've read a lot of people blog about teaching and I personally found it less than enthralling, and that was before I was teaching. My not blogging about teaching definitely is not an indication that I don't enjoy it... (After writing the previous passage, I realize that the only thing less enthralling than reading about English teaching on a blog is reading about why an English teacher who blogs doesn't blog about work.)

Anyhow, today I had the hardest time figuring out what a student was trying to write about for an in-class assignment on what he had done for summer vacation. The words that caught my eyes on the page were "I went home and bred my niece." Haha, I thought, and pointed out the mistake. He immediately corrected the sentence to "I went home and breed my niece."

I told him to look up the word in the dictionary, which he did, and then turned quite red with embarrassment. Great, I thought, now I'll finally figure out what he was trying to say. He corrected the sentence for the second time, and this time it said, "I went home and breeds my niece." By this time I was feeling really quite sorry for his niece and decided to drop it altogether; I corrected his sentence to "I went home and took care of my niece."

I'm still a bit unclear about what he was trying to say, though.

There - I've gone and blogged about English teaching, and the world might even be a bit better for it. Watch your nieces, though.

Pretty much every foreigner in Thailand on a non-immigrant visa is supposed to report into immigration every 90 days. This may be in the form of a letter, except if the immigration officer tells you to report in person (or send a representative from your organization in). Of course, all the teachers at our school got stuck with the latter method, and the girl who usually goes in for us (we have to report to immigration in Nong Khai, on the border with Laos) was busy, so a coworker and I went in a university car. Nam also came along with us to help clear any snags that might come up (none did, luckily).

(My mom came out all the way from the states yesterday to stay with us and the baby for a month and a half.)

(We have a new nanny, who just started coming over last week.)

So we had to leave the baby at home all day with my mom who speaks no Thai and our nanny who speaks no English, and it was the longest time Nam has ever spent away from the baby. So you can probably guess the recurring topic of conversation in the car, three hours there and three hours back.

Of course, we got back home and everything was fine. Mom is still mom, nanny is still nanny, and baby is still unconcerned about the rising price of oil, so all is well.

This sounds interesting.

As a sidenote, Thailand is more "green" in some ways than first world countries. For instance, they sell B5 diesel here at major gas station chains - B5 is 5% biodiesel. And Hi-octane gasoline (95) is all but gone around these parts, supplanted by its E20 (20% methanol) equivalent. Whether this is truly better for the planet in the long run or not is up for debate. It sure isn't better for some older cars!

I met a fellow who has made a small-scale biodiesel production facility in his garage; this is an area I am interested in.

I also want to try building a solar chicken barbecue array - as cheaply as possible. Maybe I'll attempt an Archimedes' death ray out of bits of broken mirror.

So in Japan-speak, a bunch of us ran headfirst into a cultural wall yesterday, and it was a rather bracing slap in the face after having conquered so many other challenges in the semi-distant past...

We went to the sports college next to my university, most famous for being the alma mater of the "Jackie Chan of Thailand" (Tony Jaa), in order to start a thrice-weekly regimen of swimming in their Olympic-sized pool. So we paid 40 Baht (adult price, about $1.20) admission fee, and were promptly rejected entry int o the pool for "not wearing swimming suits." But the thing is, we were wearing swimming suits. So it ended up being a huge argument with us on one side showing mesh liners and insisting that these were, indeed, pieces of swimwear, and some hick-ass PE teacher on the the other side insisting that they were not (I'm convinced this backward inaka motherfucker thinks that mesh liners are just built-in underwear.).

Anyways.

We fought the law, and the law declared that only skin-tight swimsuits are suitable for use in this particular pool, i.e., the law won. Fags. What kind of sickos want to see my fat ass in a speedo, anyway?

P.S. I must admit it feels kind of dirty cursing on the same page I post the baby's photos. I guess I'll just have to pretend he isn't looking at me.

craigslist rocks. One of the things I miss most about Japan is Yahoo auctions. Thailand, or for that matter, most of the rest of the world simply has too fiendish a mentality for any kind of shopping/auction system employing the honor system to work.