Imagine the north

In preparation for moving to the US I have asked for a quote for shipping the animals. The thought of sending them with the movers scares me, I would rather have them accompany us however the thought of arriving in the States with 2 cats and a dog but no home and a 2 day road journey to Minnesota is daunting in the extreme. So I want to know how much my other option is going to cost. The movers asked for size and weight of animals and dimensions of cage. I just took this picture to see if this cage would be okay. The answer is no, we need to buy new airline compliant cages - I'm cool with that, it is safer. Anyway, although I only uploaded this from my phone to my blog for convenience (to send the photo to the movers) it got a comment so I will leave it. In fact I will do more than that - I will use the post to answer the question. Mita goes crazy if you put her in a cage. I sometimes have to put her in one when travelling and she always throws up all over it. It'

It is hard to imagine a more unassuming wedding day. Dom and I got up, showered, dressed and hopped on the bike to go to Khun Nulek's office (Khun Nulek, right in the picture, is our fixer). We sat around a while waiting for her to arrive and when she did she made a few copies and then we all got in her car and drove to the Sansai District Office. There we took a number and waited. People arrived and sat and took care of business (birth, marriage, death, divorce, family book registration, and ID card all in one crazy little world). There was no air-con, but ceiling fans whirred slowly so as not to disturb the paperwork. A kid sitting next to Dom drank a cartoon of milk and then puked on the floor and the ceiling fan obligingly stirred the smell into the air. Next to me an old lady slept - sprawled across the bench. Her business done, she left and we were able to shuffle right, away from the sick and wait some more. Eventually it was our turn. We moved from bench to

Sometimes, despite all your best efforts, it rains. Sometimes you lose sight of sky, sun and hills and the view is obscured by a shifting wave of grey. Wet cobwebs, close enough touch (net curtains soaked in seawater), close enough to taste (an old dusty picture frame with a zing like the tines of a fork). Sometimes the rain on your face smells of salt sorrow and regret. Sometimes you have days like this and you just have to let it fall.

I'm trying to embrace my inner demon. Well, kind of. After yet another OOE (overly emotional event) chez Northlands I was grumbling to a Foxy friend who had inquired how my Wolf was feeling, post drama. My grumble was: Wolf is dealing with it much better than I am. He has one burst of anger and all the girlies are instantly pm'ing him and telling him they love him and didn't mean to hurt HIM or make HIM angry. And he is ok. I have one burst of anger and feel like the bad tempered bitch who would have no members if I didn't have my adorable Wolf to come along and clean up the mess I made. To which she replied: You are a bad tempered bitch. I think she was joking but I know it is how I am viewed by some. Probably. Sometimes I wish people would just TELL you what they thought of you. Not out of some egotistical desire for affirmation but because it would be so much easier to have a more complete and realistic self-image that way. I mean I role-played the God

...for stationery. And like many other fetishes worth having Thailand is a good place to indulge myself. I am a real connoisseur too – I don’t just get turned on by post it notes, glue sticks, multi-coloured bull-dog clips and high-lighter pens I like it ALL. For example these are a few of my favourite kinks: old-fashioned financial ledgers – lined for double entry, with lickable gummed labels and 100’s of individually numbered pages; full sets of graphite pencils that range from 9H-to 9B; manila envelopes of all sizes and sticky labels – round square and rectangular; acetate sheets for making OHP transparencies (though of course I never do that); index cards of all sizes (white and coloured); blocks of Chinese ink with grinding stones (and bottles of ink too, for the days you really don’t have time to make from scratch) and Chinese brushes with fake bamboo handles; pots of latex glue; and bags of plaster of paris and super hero rubber moulds; patties of polymer clay; drawing pi

I remember my first night in Thailand. I had come with my then future but now ex husband for a two-week holiday from Singapore to meet his family, his country. I stood in the window of our Bangkok YMCA hotel room (it was almost classy 16 years ago) looking out onto a busy, pre-skytrain Sathorn Road, crammed with gaudy taxis, tacky billboard ads for M150 , beggars on footbridges, the ugly mess of tangled wires and I said, "promise you will never ask me to live here". Three years later we moved into an apartment across the river in Lardya, Thonburi. Our apartment block was next door to Thonburi comedy cafe and I think most of the other inhabitants were hookers. We lived in a box with a bed, a toilet and a balcony that we could take it in turns to stand on. Noi bought us a little t.v. that I watched but couldn't understand. I remember being mystified by a segment of a comedy show that appeared to revolve around a transgendered juggling dwarf. I expressed my (finel

"Keep the paint up, and the rubber down! " Author unknown. Tonight as we drove to dinner I tried to take a few pics that capture the sense of moving through the streets of Chiang Mai on the bike. I wanted to capture that because although I don't particularly enjoy it now I am sure it is something I will look back on fondly. A drive through one hundred smells: rain-drenched tarmac, exhaust fumes, incense, dried squid, roasting chillies, jasmine, fetid canal, sun scorched earth. A drive through one hundred near deaths: the idiot on the Honda Dream talking on the phone, the songthaew driver swerving across lanes to pick up a passenger, the Isuzu running a red light, the boy on a monkey bike trying to scare the farang, the jealous guy on his girlfriend's baby pink Fino. At least I hope it's his girlfriend's. Right now I spend most of the time hating this mode of motion, the lunacy of Thai drivers, the stress, Dom's anger. But I know one day I will