How to Load a Truck

It’s only rattan and bamboo chaises. It’s not all that top-heavy. Really.

Please excuse the quality of the photo. It was taken through a dirty windshield while driving down the road. I thought you wouldn’t mind too much due to the, ah, interesting nature of the photo.

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.

More about Moving

The date to sell the house has been moved up from October to mid-August. That’s when the loan is finalized. We expect to be out of Thailand and back in the USA by the end of August. The best part is that it means we will not have to renew our annual visa in September!

I have arranged for an apartment to be available for us the day after we arrive. We will have the actual address before we leave here! I should know it in about 3 weeks. Then we can begin the misery that is address changing.

I have a quote from a very reputable moving company for shipping our household goods. It’s the price I expected to pay, so we will be accepting the offer and setting the date for probably the 17th of August. We won’t be moving any furniture, not when the cost is roughly $500 per cubic yard. We shipped $25,000 worth of household goods here, and will be shipping about the same back, for about $5,000 each way.

Once the household goods are shipped, we move into a hotel downtown and sell the car. We transfer the money from the sales to our US bank, confirm the arrival of said funds, and then we are free to go. I plan to leave a window of about a week for the money to be transferred. It shouldn’t be necessary, it only takes 1 or 2 days, but Jim is cautious that way, and any issues will be easier to resolve from here than the US.

I have not yet purchased tickets for the flight home. That’s the next thing on the to-do list after the details for the household goods shipment are arranged, which I will do tomorrow, since it’s Sunday here.

We are “eating down” our food, trying to run out of things. Unfortunately, the swine flu has finally arrived in Thailand. I’d like to have some food stockpiled to get through a few weeks without having to visit The Mall. It seems that circumstances just aren’t cooperating.

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.

Going to America

After our lovely almost 3 year sojourn in Thailand we are returning to the US to live. Partly it’s the civil unrest, which is becoming more frequent and more violent with each repetition. It looks like a gradual slide into civil war, which will be accelerated when the much beloved and revered King passes away. The succession will be disputed, and historically all Thai civil wars are over the Royal succession. Mostly, though, it’s that Jim’s mother needs us, and we want to be there for her.

The day after we made the decision we told our neighbors across the street. They are wonderful people, and have been the best possible friends that they could possibly be, in spite of the language barrier. It seems that one of their sons wants our house, so they will be buying it from us. We are selling it for a price on the low side of fair, and including everything we don’t ship back to the US, so everybody is happy. They also want our car, the other main item we need to sell. We will get a realistic price from the dealer today.

Curiously, this is, in a very real way, the story of my life. Serendipity rules. It’s not that bad things never happen, it’s that freakishly coincidental good things happen too often for it to be mere chance. For example, we sold our house in the US in 1 week, when other houses in our area had languished on the market for as long as 2 years. We sold it just before the home prices in our area dropped like shares of automaker stock. Jimmy decided to retire, and we proceeded to plan accordingly for the next two years. Just before he applied for his pension, they announced cash buyouts as a retirement incentive. You get the drift.

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.

iPhone

I’ve had my iPhone for two and a half weeks now. I already can’t imagine not having it. It’s everything my various past PDAs have tried and failed to be: calendar, contacts, maps, entertainment while on the go, and, yes, phone. I use it to time the laundry so I get it from the washer to the dryer before it starts to mildew.* I use it to make critically timed attacks in Travian** when I am away from my computer. On rare occasions, I even use it make or receive a phone call.

I would really be thrilled to be using it for my grocery shopping list, but I can’t. I have a couple of free, “lite” game versions that I would like to upgrade to the full version, but I can’t do that, either. I can look over a vista of commercial apps for my iPhone, but I can’t buy any of them.

You see, the iTunes Store and my bank have a disagreement about zipcodes. The iTunes store insists that a zipcode has 5 digits and only 5 digits. If you enter a “zip plus four” zipcode on the billing address for your iTunes account it rejects it. Contrarily, my bank insists that a zipcode has 9 digits. If you enter a 5 digit zipcode on their address change form, it automagically adds the other 4 digits. Hence, whenever I try to use my bank card to buy an iPhone app, I get a failed authorization due to a zipcode mismatch.

I have had the bank manually change my address, but the extra digits reappeared.

I have emailed Apple support about this issue, too. They suggested some other ways to pay -all of which required using a credit card, which will then be rejected for a zipcode mismatch. The only viable option was Paypal, and I am not interested in hooking that up to my main bank account.

As Borg of America does their routine issuing of new debit cards when the old ones expire, complete with 9 digit addresses, more iTunes users will fall into this little catch-22. It makes no sense whatever for Apple to resist the addressing system of one of the largest banks in the country.

But until Apple relents I am stuck with free apps only, and no grocery list.

* Please note that my wash cycle is from 1¼ to 2½ hours long. It’s easy to get involved in something else and forget the laundry.

** Do not click this link. If you do, be prepared to give up large chunks of your life to this addictive, real-time, year-long game.