I Wish I Had Thought of This:

If you like to bake, as I do, you soon run into the problem of where to store all those essential baking pans. Cookie sheets, pizza pan, cake pans in assorted sizes, pie plates, bundt pans, springform pans and more. If you have a small kitchen like mine it’s even worse. I know what your cabinets look like, because mine look that way, too.

I got one of those vertical organizers for holding things like pan lids and baking sheets. It takes up the entire top shelf in the pan cabinet. It keeps the nonstick surfaces from scratching, but it’s not an efficient use of space. So I ran across this little gem while wandering around the Ikea website:

I want about three sets of these. One an inch from the top of the cabinet for my cookie sheets and pizza pan. One two inches below that for my cake pans and pie plates and griddle. Another one two inches below that for my cutting boards. I will have to set a shelf of some kind on the second shelf to support the cake pans and pie plates, but that’s easily done. By using 5 inches of otherwise wasted space I will reclaim an entire shelf.

But you don’t even have to buy the brackets from Ikea. You can hammer in four brads and set a piece of quarter-inch plywood on them. You can hammer in more brads and lace twine to support something light. You can even modify this idea to suspend your cutting boards horizontally below your upper cabinets. They would be off the counter but easy to grab there. My mind is swirling with the possibilities.

Bathing

I took a bath yesterday. This may not sound like a big deal to you, but after 3 years of showers only it was glorious. There were no bubbles, no perfume, no powdering and pampering. It was steamy hot water until I was pruney. I loved it.

When I was in the Philippines the ladies were advised that if the water was unsafe for drinking, it was also unsafe for bathing. Something about bacteria, fungi, and parasites. I applied this bit of wisdom to my life in Thailand. We had a positively gorgeous blue tub, over 5 feet long with armrests molded in the sides. I took showers in it for three years, because the water was unsafe for drinking.

There are benefits to living in the USA.

Back in the USA

We’ve been back in the USA for over three weeks now. The plan to try living without a car? It lasted two days after arrival. We got caught in a nasty cold pouring rain the second day, with a bit of a walk from the bus stop to our destination, and then back, using a bus stop with no shelter. Jim was afraid I would get sick out in that cold rain, and he says he didn’t want his stubbornness about not having a car to be the cause of me getting ill. We got a car on day 3.

So we have a shiny new red 2009 Chevy Aveo, and we love it. Jim says it is nicer than our Honda Jazz/Fit we had in Thailand. It’s not a hatchback, but has a spacious 2-body trunk. We have a free year of OnStar, too, and 0% financing. Woot! Being out of the country for three years left Jim with a wholly clean license, so the car insurance was less expensive than I feared. And we got a discount by getting renter’s insurance from the same company. Jim is keeping that license clean by not speeding.

Our apartment is almost fully furnished, thanks to Ikea. All our furniture is from there, except Jim’s desk. If you are curious, just ask and can link you to what we bought.

Our bedroom is white and blue, a calm retreat. It has warm fluffy down alternative pillows and comforter. The living room is white and birch, with a red sofa. It really needs that splash of color. We are using the far end of the living room as a dining nook, and using the dining nook as my office. It’s really working well for me, to be open to the kitchen. My desk and bookcase are white, as is my chair. The dining room table and chairs are birch. No real decorating has been done yet. Plenty of time for that.

We are both happy to be back. Jim is following the Detroit Lions, seeing how long they can extend their record-setting losing streak. I am shopping at the local food coop and farmer’s market for fresh food. I still shop at Meijer’s, but I’m spending far less there than I would otherwise. I can’t wait for the kitchen appliances I ordered to arrive! Having only a toaster and coffeemaker is a bit limiting.

Business Class!

I made our reservations for our flight home. Flying to Detroit from Thailand is miserable. It’s about a 23 hour trip, with a 2-hour layover in Tokyo. That 2-hour layover is just enough time to clear security, use a restroom, and board the next flight. Having to clear security again in Tokyo baffles me. I have been nowhere but the airport boarding gate or 35,000 feet since the last time I cleared security. Precisely how was I supposed to acquire any contraband?

Flying Coach, aka cattle car, is a horror. There is enough leg room for your knees to clear the back of the seat in front of you, and not an inch more. The food is barely edible, and frequently barely warm. Trying to use a restroom is an exercise in quick reflexes, as they no longer allow a queue to form. You might be terrorists standing in line by the restroom doors to plot, not merely passengers who desperately need to relieve themselves.

Thank God for frequent flyer miles.

I was able to use those miles to upgrade our Coach price tickets to Business Class. Flying Business class on an international flight is almost a joy. I will be able to sleep, because my seat will recline nearly flat instead of nearly reclining. The food is quite good, and comes on a real plate, with metal utensils, fabric napkin, and even a small fabric tablecloth for my tray table. I particularly enjoy relaxing with a free glass of white wine while cattle car loads, and it comes in a stemmed glass, not a plastic cup.

You get greeted by name, and they really do try to make you comfortable. You get a pillow, blanket, slippers or socks, toothbrush and toothpaste, comb, and one of those nightshades to cover your eyes for sleeping. They will let you sleep through a meal in Coach, but if you do you simply miss the meal. In Business Class they will bring you that meal as soon as you wake. You have three feet of leg room, and all seats are either aisle or window. Best of all, you have a place to plug in your laptop, PDA, or Kindle to recharge it for the long, long trip.

I like flying Business Class.

It’s All a Blur

Literally. I broke my glasses the other day, the stereotypical geeky crack dead center of the bridge. We could get me new glasses here, and less expensively than back in the US. But I don’t want to do that. I want to wait until we are back in the US to replace them. If I get them here the bifocal line will be in the wrong place, just as the progressive lens areas of the glasses that just broke are in the wrong place. I’d only have to get yet another pair of glasses in the US that would be right. Jim is willing to do that for me, so I can see. But to me it’s spending an extra few hundred dollars that we don’t need to spend. I’ll wait and spend it just once.

I have a couple of weeks of daily wear contacts, and reading glasses to use with them. I can go blurry most of the time, and use those when I need to be able to see. I can read at length in comfort without any glasses. I’ll be fine.

Too Good to be True

About a week ago I walked into IBeat, the authorized Apple reseller at The Mall, and told them I wanted to buy a new iMac. I built the iMac I wanted on the ordering screen. They saved the info in a webpage capture, telling me it would take 3 to 5 weeks. About 4 days later, I got a phone call telling me my iMac would be ready on Friday. When I went to The Mall Thursday to get my teeth cleaned, Jim and I checked at IBeat. My iMac was in!!!

They seemed anxious for me to pay for it and take it home. No offer to open the box and set it up for us. They open the box and plug in every single electrical object I have ever bought here, including light bulbs. Does this raise any alarms or questions in your mind? It did in ours. Upon checking, we saw it was indeed one of the newest iMacs (1 Firewire port, 4 USB ports). We insisted it be started up so we could check the system specifications. They dutifully booted it up to the hardware diagnostics screen. Sure enough, it was the stock high end model of the new iMac, not the one I ordered.

The only difference is the video card, but I definitely want the ATI Radeon 4850 instead of the NVidia GT130. Why? Because I was wholly unable to find any information about the GT130 (or the GT120) on the NVidia website. This causes me to suspect it is for the iMac only, and won’t be well supported by PC game manufacturers. does it even support DirectX? I couldn’t find out. The ATI Radeon 4850 was available for both PC and Mac, and had excellent reviews as the sweet spot of price vs performance.

We pointed out that this was not the computer I had requested. They acted as if they had never read the specification list. I had specifically pointed out to them, several times, the upgrade to the video card. So now they say I will get my computer in 21 days. I think it will be the right one this time.

Raisin Bran

I have noticed that you can buy a good selection of American cold cereals in Bangkok. They generally cost about $10 a box, and I don’t mean the large boxes, either. Cheerios and other such things have not been a part of our life for almost three years now. Who wants to pay that much for cereal?

I was at the supermarket at The Mall, Freshmart, cruising the farang food aisle, when I saw some new cereal boxes on display. There were two brands of organic cereal, Barbara’s and Cascadian Farms, with a variety of types in each brand. I have never heard of Barbara’s, but I have had Cascadian Farms before. Checking the prices, I saw a box of Cascadian Farms Raisin Bran was a mere 220 baht, or about $6. Still a steep price, but recalling that organic cereal is more expensive than regular, and that the price of food has been climbing, I decided it was close to the same price as in the US.

I just ate my first bowl of cereal in three years. The raisins were plump and plentiful, the bran flakes were crisp, and the milk was from a local dairy. It may not become my standard breakfast, but it’s going into the routine rotation with the peanut butter on toast, the yogurt with muesli, and the occasional scrambled egg. Color me content.

Of course, this does not mean I will ever again see Cascadian Farms cereal once this supply is gone. Sometimes I think they buy their farang food from overstock discounters. The result is that if you see something you like, you’d better buy it, because you may never see it again. Right now they have a lot of organic farang food. I may try the Amy’s brand salsa.

Lifestyle Upgrade

This is as good as it’s going to get. Note that it slows down substantially after 3PM when school lets out, on school holidays, and of course on weekends. Believe me when I tell you just how large an improvement this is.

Ash Wednesday Penitence

I thought I was giving up coffee for Lent. Apparently I was mistaken and I was giving up the Internet for Lent. Well, for the first three days of Lent, anyway.

I was excited on Ash Wednesday. Not only was I going to get ashes smudged on my forehead, but my Internet package upgrade to Premier service (2meg/1meg) was going to take effect. I put the new username and password into our router settings, and prepared for blazing speed. I was underwhelmed. It was not only not blazing, but something I wouldn’t even call speed.

We gave it half a day or so, and then I called the Call Center. The Call Center can only be called from a mobile phone. It’s the local equivalent of those *-something numbers in the US. They offer a English language menu option, but unless you press 9 before they finish the sentence telling you what to press (“to continue in English, please press 9″) you get Thai. Your finger had better be on that 9 button before she starts talking. Once you successfully navigate the voice menus, they put you on hold while your mobile phone minutes tick away.

Eventually a nice Call Center lady told me a technician would call me. The technician called on Jim’s mobile instead of the land line. Jim was working on music with his headphones on, because he was not expecting a call. So we missed the technician’s phone call and he never called back. Day 1 with barely useable Internet.

The next day the service had degraded from a 10K upload speed to some unmeasurably low speed. We printed out a copy of the speed test screen and took it in to the TT&T office at The Mall. They called the Call Center and arranged for a technician to come to our house that afternoon. The technicians came. They saw the problem. They made half a dozen phone calls. Then they left, saying that the trouble was with the phone exchange and it would be fixed by 6PM. It wasn’t. I called the Call Center around 7PM, per the instructions from the technicians. They promised to have a technician call me at 10AM the next day. Day 2 with wholly unusable Internet.

Day 3 dawned with a worse download speed than before, and a still unmeasurable upload speed. When no technician had called by 11AM I called the Call Center yet again. There was a bit of confusion on the part of the nice lady, because she could not understand how it was possible that the technicians had come to my house and had not fixed the problem. She then wanted to send a technician out to my house again. What part of “the problem is not at my house” is so hard to understand? I gave up and had Jim call them.

Jim insisted that a technician be sent to the house, after humoring the nice lady by removing the power from the router for 10 minutes. She actually thought that would solve the problem. No technician ever came, but the Internet suddenly started working again. Jim got a phone call an hour after it began working, informing him that a fiber-optic cable somewhere had been repaired.

We really did go get ashes on our forehead. We went to the Thai service, as no English one was scheduled. We got to see the inside of the main church for the first time. We were both amazed by the beauty of the crucifix on the wall behind the altar. I wanted to take a picture, but it didn’t seem like the proper thing to do. It was miserably hot in the church, as it was nearly full, the end of a very warm day, and all the doors were open so the only cooling was a few fans.

I am getting tired of fried fish.

Fat Tuesday

There are certain days when I miss being in the US. Fat Tuesday is one of them. I miss being in the US because I can’t get paczki (pronounced POONCH key) here. Ground zero for paczki lovers is the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck with its old Polish bakeries. Those bakeries still produce prodigious quantities of paczki every Fat Tuesday, and the lines are still around the block at 6AM to buy them.

The lines are the same, but the people in the lines have changed. Hamtramck is no longer a Polish suburb, but is a Muslim area, like Dearborn. The Hamtramck Muslims have adopted Fat Tuesday for the sake of the paczki, and that’s who you find standing in line to buy paczki now. Paczki transcend religion because they are that good. They are like a filled doughnut, but with a richer dough that seems to melt in your mouth.

I am making do today with Dunkin’ Donuts filled doughnuts. Not the same, but the best I can do here.