It’s just like Flying a kite (22.05.2009)

I think trouble is coming :), yesterday when we came home (in the city), we found my mother very excited, she couldn’t wait to tell us that you have taken your first couple of steps… you are already a handful on your four, can not imagine you running around and us trying to keep up… I am already knackered just thinking about it.

Ok, imagine this, there were 3 of us, sitting in a triangle formation, your grandmother has this down to perfection… here goes…

First is to make you stand up (by holding you under your arms) then wait until you are almost still (waiting for you to be still is like waiting for the rain to stop in a monsoon season)

Slowly, we transfer one of our hand from underneath your arm to grab on to your shirt (at the back), then remove the other hand, so what we have now is you standing by your own with only us holding on to the back of your shirt, honestly it is like just flying a kite, you would be swaying from side to side and of course we have absolutely no control whatever… :)

Here comes the tricky part, ‘aiming’, let say you started with me, so now I have you in the ‘launch’ position… (check list… standing (yep), shirt holding (yep), smiling (yep)). Aiming is 80% luck and 20% destiny, what I did was to wait until you looked at your mother and the real signal is when you stick out both of your arms… now ‘THAT’ is the time to let go…

Talking about a great example of a ‘waddle’, grown ups usually walked that bad usually only after a few pints of snake bite & black, right now you can only manage 3 to 4 steps (in an almost straight line).

Today we have Gymboree, I am sure the rest of your classmate, Taeya and Pound would now be waking too… can not wait to see them all with you today, thinking about all of you waddling around makes me smile…

Love you.

M&D

Monsoon is here

It had been raining quite hard for the past couple of days, it was an absolute nightmare on this past Thursday and Friday, when it began to rain heavily right through the rush hour, driving on the roads really tested one’s ability to remain calm. The rain will make you driver slower and to add to it, all the accidents that happens and you have a recipe for a fantastic traffic jam.

Last Thursday, we had left the house a little late, but it took us over 2 hours to get into the city where usually it only take around an hour, meaning after dropping you off and driving to my office, I didn’t get into the office on that day until around 11, by the time I had settled in it was lunch time (talking about feeling guilty), and I was not the only one.

But we don’t really mind the rain, it means all the farmers will now have enough water for their farm, the weather seems to be getting a little strange of late. There is a ‘winter’ season, but usually it only consists of one or two cooler days, but last year there were some weeks where one would say it was actually ‘cold’, the ‘summer’ is getting hotter and hotter by the year. This year is absolutely noticeable, the heat was quite unbearable.

Some say that the peak of the summer is our ‘Songkran day’, then slowly we move into the monsoon season, always, the first rain is the hardest with very strong gale and this year was no different. Since the first rain we have been getting heavy downpour almost everyday, we are now in May, so there will be many more months of rain yet.

Turning slightly “Orange”

Several times during this past two to three weeks, several people had mentioned that you looked slightly ‘orange’, and when putting you next to us you can really notice that you are slightly orange… Well, this was not that surprising to us, your diet consists of quite a lot of pumpkins and carrots, but in reality you should have turn “green” considering how much more of the green vegetables you’ve been eating (Broccoli, Chinese Cabbage, Ivy Gourd, Spinach, courgettes and etc).

Anyway, all the comments we’ve been getting got us a little paranoid today, so on your way back (from your swimming exercise), your mother popped in to see the Doc. just in case. Well, apparently as long as your eye is still white all should be fine, but we’ve been told to lay off all the ‘orange’ food for the time being.

No more carrots/pumpkins for a while… :)

Love you.

Mum and Dad

Happy First Birthday

Happy Birthday… you are a massive 1 year old (May 5th), luckily you were born on a public holiday (Chatmonkol Day) so I had a day off. As you can see, your right eye is still a little green, trust me it looks a lot better than just a couple of days ago.

After your breakfast and your morning sleep we decided to go out, the first port of call was ‘Baromrachakarnjanapisekanusorn’ temple, it was close by and had become well known through television (still getting use to the camera, this time I had left it on iso 1600 by mistake… so the pics look a little grainy… :) )
 

It was such a hot day even for Thailand, moving from building to building we had to walk barefoot on searing hot stone floor, I should have taken some clips of us running across the hot floor, it was not a pretty sight.

After  arriving there, it was not difficult to gasp why it took over 12 years to build this Chinese style temple; full of small detail and very well structurally organised, all in all very impressive.

I don’t want to admit this, but I think your mother can take better photos than I can on this camera.

After the temple, the next stop was a water market near by, your mother came across this from one of the guide she was given (sorry I can not remember the name of this water market), it was about 20 Kms away but the drive took longer than it should because the roads were terrible (most of the roads were under construction). We must have arrived there around 15:00, but the market was already closing, most of the stalls were closing up, so the plan to have a late lunch here went out of the window.

  

Driving back home was not that bad, we had to stop off at a market near our home to get some dinner, your mother and I were both totally famish, more importantly we had to get you a cake… how can it be a birthday without a cake? :)

Of course we took forever shopping, this time our stomachs were much larger than our eyes… Anyway, we got a cake and a candle as you can see (sorry, this photo was captured from an mp4 clip so the quality is rather terrible).

I am still trying to find a free mp4 editor program, so there will be no post of any clip until then…

Love you.

Mum and Dad

Not the Hospital again…

It is only a few days away from your first Birthday, your mother and I were discussing where we should take you for that special day, but we didn’t expect that we had to visit the hospital again.

There had been 3 big scares for us, first was the gas thing, to hear you cry from pain was totally unbearable. Not long after that was your allergic reaction to the medicine, to see you all red was frightening (but at least you were smiling), and no so long ago was the very high temperature… and now… you went and fell off your high cot (you should have heard the thump).

Sunday, 26th at around 9 am… your mother was only a couple of steps away, but you managed to climb on the cot’s railing when it went passed your waist the law of gravity did the rest. It must have been around 3 and a bit feet off the ground; head first… can you imagine our torment?

Huge bruise on the right temple, and a vicious black eye… it looked horrible, even I didn’t want to take a picture of it. It has been almost a week now, bruised eye is so much better but it is still a little purple. All through the past week you had been your normal self, still playing and eating well, so we had no concern (the Doctor said to keep a close eye on you).

This was by far the worst thing we had to face with you.
 

Yesterday was May 1st, a national holiday, with nothing better to do we took you on a small adventure. Decided to park the car at Chamchuri square, then caught the MRT (underground train) to Silom, changed onto the BTS (overhead sky train) to Siam. It was not that bad nor that easy, getting through both MRT and BTS with a huge pram was a challenge, it made us realised that the whole public transport didn’t make that much provisions for the disabled (I mean we only had a pram, so we always could just carry you when it was necessary).

There were no special lanes for the disabled, just as an example, if one was to exit the station on a wheelchair, one had to go to the exit then insert the token so that the exit gate would open, but the exit gate is tiny, meaning one had to go all the way to the entrance where there is a manual door wide enough for the wheelchair… what a pain in the %$#. This is just getting out of a station, getting to the station itself can be almost impossible, not all of the stations (MRT and BTS) even have elevators… How can one call this ‘public’ transport?

Because you are now moving so much, I had decided to get a small camcorder to compliment the new DSLR I had recently bought. The quality of the VDO was not high on my requirement list (anything better than the VDO mode on a point and shoot would do), so I had gone with the Sanyo CA9… not a bad choice considering what I needed, the additional bonus is the 1.5 meter waterproof capability. So I am no longer taking pictures, just small clips of VDO, what a laugh it had been, I have this shot of you trying to walk (holding tightly to Gio) while we were waiting for the MRT train… beautiful…

This afternoon you’ll be going to Gymboree and I am sure there will be many more great shots there… can not wait…

Love you so much

M&D

Rant: Acer Aspire M5711

Just bought a new Desktop for the office, Acer Aspire M5711, here in Thailand, to keep the cost down many of the brands do not ship the unit with a ‘common’ OS, this one came with Linux (point to note, the price that you often see do not include a monitor…)

So the first thing one did was to install XP, only to find out that XP isn’t native to this PC (in Thailand), Acer.co.th only supply the drivers for Vista. It was a nightmare trying to search for XP drivers (there are some brilliant forums out there (komku.blogspot.com). Anyhow, after spending a lot of time fiddling (and doing all the workarounds, nLite, USB FDD, change bios and etc… MEGA frustration), suffering defeat I’d decided to move to Vista.

Genuine Vista Home Premium installation was also a real pain, initially the installation page asked for a driver for CD/DVD bay??? (WTF number 1, “ You are loading the OS DVD from the CD/DVD bay that you are requesting the driver for, WHY?”), once again the forum came to the rescue, basically, downloaded the chipset driver from acer.co.th, expand it, look for the specific driver, copy it to a FDD, connect the USB FDD to the PC and let it search for the driver… bingo… the OS began to install.

After the OS installation comes the ‘drivers’ installation, wanting the latest driver I had decided to download it from the official acer.co.th instead of using the supplied CD, however (WTF number 2)  not all of the drivers were offered as a download, so you’ll still need to hunt some of the drivers from the supplied CD (such as the Modem driver).

Here comes WTF number 3, after everything, the dreaded yellow triangle (with an ! in the middle) was smiling at me on the ‘device manager page’ it was on the ‘network controller icon’, meaning the OS does not know what this equipment was… no description was given… ended up downloading a small program call UKD (Unknown Device, http://www.halfdone.com/Development/UnknownDevices/). Only to found out that my suspicion was correct, it was the wireless LAN.

Anyhow, the driver for this was not to be found on the official acer.co.th nor was it on the CD! But UKD had given me the chip manufacturer, so after visiting their site, it left me totally dumbfounded, although all the drivers were there but it was not possible to determine which driver one needs as one was not given the model number of the wireless LAN card.

Getting frustrated again… once again returning to the web for solution, after googling ‘wireless lan driver Acer M5711’, and skimming through the results, once link caught my attention (Acer Service Center Web (SABY) (http://www2.acer.co.th/acerthai2/index.pho?method=webboard&postnew=1&id=29820&gid=13), to my understanding (and I had really tried, a lot…) this page was not linked to the official acer.co.th (WTF number 4).

SABY is an official ACER support page, based on a forum model, it also has a link to a “software & download” page, I had assumed that it would take me back to the ‘download’ page found from acer.co.th… but NO… it took me to a different download site, a MUCH better and MUCH more in-depth…and there it was… waiting for me… ‘Driver WLAN for Vista’… I was a very happy man… :)

Now everything was done, I had spent time reading some of the post on the forum… very interesting and very colourful, I am not the first to be totally frustrated by this problem… I wished they would make this information accessible from the official acer.co.th… I don’t I shall touch Acer product again… (well unless they gave it away for free).

Burning Up…

You gave us such a fright again, it must have been last Monday evening (09.03.2009) when we discovered you had a bit of a temperature, we weren’t too worried about it, you often get a little hot but when the morning comes around all would be back to normal.

Well, this time your temperature remained quite high, the ‘armpit’ thermometer (you’ll be glad to know that we could have stuck the thermometer up where the sun does not shine but we didn’t :) ) read 37.9, which is the highest ever for you, so guess where your next stop would be?

The usual routine of every Hospital visit is the same; go up to the nurse to tell who you were and what was wrong, the next step will be the measuring of your height, weight and temperature… well, after the nurse read your ‘ear’ thermometer, she jumped out of her skin, it actually read 39.

We weren’t going to see the Doc… instead she rushed you into this little room to rub you down with a cool towel… you sure didn’t enjoy that one bit, oh, only if you could talk…

After about 25 minutes of non stop crying and screaming… your temperature dropped down to 38.6, still rather high but no longer in the danger zone… The Doc. turned out to be really very nice, we discovered that your throat was a little sore, so some antibiotic, and other medicine was prescribed.

In the evening your temperature went up 39.4 (we went out and bought one of those ‘ear’ thermometer as well, so much faster, so much better), but you were still very cheerful like nothing was wrong, but you should have seen our faces… talking about stress!… anyhow, we did what the Doc. said, all we could do was to rub you down with a cool towel, and hope the medicine would do their magic… We even bought a cool (sticky) pad for your forehead… it was actually quite useful and certainly worked (your mother and I both tried it as well).

By the time Wednesday morning arrived, your temperature was down to a respectable 37.x (sorry, can not remember) and by the time the evening came you were back to normal… but you still had a runny nose. Feeding you the medicine is an art one needs about 25 years to perfect, because we only had 10 months so far it was fun to say the least. One time you managed to chucked up in about 5 seconds all of your breakfast on to the floor which took an hour to get it into you in the first place…

Anyway, a week later we are still monitoring  your temperature… we promise to stop when you are 29, OK? :)

 

Loving you always,

 

Mum and Dad

Present from Mama

You woke up early again today, nothing new here I'd guess, as it is in your KPI  to make us as tired as you could :) There was a fantastic surprise waiting for me this morning… as it is my BD today. Your mother had bought me a grip for the new camera, totally out of blue, I had told her not to get me anything as we are saving to start a small business together, you’ll hear more on this later.

Usually she would buy me clothes, as I have no taste (accept when it comes to electronic gadgets, then I am a little SJ), so getting this grip was a total surprise… and she went such a long way to get it as well… :)

Talking about BD, next week it will be your mother’s BD, my mother’s BD and one of our close friend’s BD, all of them were born on the same day!

I have to go, I can hear you screaming downstairs… :)

Oh… What a Trip…

The plan was a simple one, ask the boss for the Friday off (Friday the 13th), then spend a nice and relaxing long weekend in Hua Hin  The packing started on Thursday evening… then it dawned on us “this trip won’t be as relaxing as it should be…” in fact it was NO WHERE NEAR… :)

We had literally took half the house (the decision to buy a foldable cot was the right decision after all). By this time we were 2 hours late (the plan was to leave at eleven), so I was getting a little stroppy (your mother will say, ‘nothing new there’… )

Packing all that in the car would have made a great IQ exam! Fit it all in, we certainly did... “There was no way we could have forgotten anything” ran through my mind as I close the back door of the car… (remember these words).

‘Hua Hin’ is a very famous seaside town to the South of Bangkok (around 2 and a half hours by car), our beloved King has a palace there so the lifestyle and the community  is completely different than ‘Bang San’ (to the east of Bangkok).

The drive down was great, the sun was shining (the birds were singing), the road was pretty empty, you seemed to be enjoying the new scenery… It must have been around 16:00 when we arrived at ‘Sheraton Hua Hin’, your mother seemed to like the hotel (and that is how we judge the level of happiness in our family , if she is happy then you and I are happy… ok? get use to it :) )

We didn’t even bothered unpacking, our  first priority was to prepare your late afternoon snack… (oh what a mess that was).  

Dining with a view didn’t seem to make you eat any faster :) but your mother have all the patience in the world… I just couldn’t wait to take you out for a walk about!

 
 

We wanted you to have your first swim (more like a sit) in the sea straight away, but despite having taken half of the house on this trip, I had managed to forgot the detergent for your bottles!!!

So after your quick walk we had to go in to town, so no sitting in the sea  (the town was not more than 15 minutes away), while in town managed to find a nice restaurant on the edge of the town, boasting ‘Restaurant with the best view in Hua Hin’, and they could well be right… (no pics here, it was getting too dark). After the restaurant we had to rushed to the supermarket to get the detergent, then rushed back again to the Resort, we were rushing all the way as it was getting very late and you need to have your dinner before bath time.

It must have been the new surrounding or the sea air, but you just wouldn’t go to sleep… your mother and I was close to collapsing with exhaustion… but you were still smiling and screaming and smiling and shouting and NOT SLEEPING… WHY??? :)

The next day, we had decided not to go into town again, too much time was wasted in driving and certainly finding a parking space was a nightmare… After breakfast (another mess), we headed straight to the sea…
 

First real glimpse of the sea :)“A penny for your thought?”

 

 

  
When this photo was taken (left), you were totally lost in your thought, gazing out to the horizon, no smile, no sound, no movement…

The sun was far too hot, and soon you made your way back to the resort for a quick dip in the huge pool. Then we went for a long walk along the beach, where you felt a sleep in my arms…

 



 

Our second night was as tiring as the first, you just wouldn’t go to sleep… it was well past midnight again before you started to calm down and eventually felt a sleep.

Our final day (not quite a full day as the plan was to check out at around 14:00), we only had a few things on our to-do list…. Breakfast, rest, back to the sea, a long swim in the pool, lunch and finally check out… :) 

As soon as we arrived home, my parents were here waiting to see you (not us), and we couldn’t be more glad for their help :)

Now that our first trip is out of the way, we are already planning for the second trip… we had even thought of going overseas… but looking back on this trip, I think we are going to be domestically bounded for a few more months yet :)

 

Love you

Mum and Dad.

Stupid me…

This past Saturday, I did something pretty stupid and was lucky it didn’t turn out to be more serious. As soon as you get older you’ll noticed all the trees which surrounded our house (just beyond the fence), well, one of these tree had a huge branch that was hanging a little low.

A huge step ladder and one saw later, I was now positioned right below that annoying branch. The step ladder was an industrial sized, it was folded into 4 sections and can be configured into several shapes, with the height that was facing me the step ladder was configured into a very, very tall triangle (probably about 3 metres from ground to the apex).

All was set, and a few minutes later (tip toeing on the very top rung of the ladder) I was very happily hacking and sawing away at the branch, shifting my weight back and fore, the progress was quicker that I had anticipated and soon there was the familiar ‘cracking’ sound… then I realised that the huge branch was doomed to fall right on top of me, the ladder and the concrete floor 3 metres below.

It was just like a cartoon, ‘crack, crack, crack’… followed very quickly with a ‘oh ohhhhh’ as I glanced at the branch then at the ladder, then at the floor below. Then there was a blank period, I haven’t had a blank period since the ‘snake bite and black’ night out so many years ago.

Honestly, after the ‘oh ohhhhh’, the next thing I remembered, I was walking back to the house, right hand on my head trying to stop the blood from washing over my eyes. Back in the house, had a quick wash, then rushed out again to clean up the fallen branch and the equipment, and found the saw covered in blood (still not sure if it was the branch or the saw that gave me the cut on my head).

Deep purple bruises ran right down the inside of my left leg which is almost identical to the set that ran on the outside of my right leg, my right back and shoulder was (and still is) hurting like mad, not to mention the cut on the head that just wouldn’t stop seeping blood…

To cut a long story short, the nurse gave me an injection (for something which I am still not sure), and loads of medicines… Now 2 days later, things are getting better… the bruises will go away soon, the headaches will too soon stop, but the feeling of total stupidity will, I think remain with me for the foreseeable future, well until your mother stop telling me that I am no longer 26 (why she had chosen 26 I would never know).

Love you.

 

Dad