My Hands Are Really Cold Right Now

This will be a long one.

I just finished eating my second dinner. The first was leftover rice and chicken stir-fry. Healthy. The second was 2 slices of Pizza Company pizza. Not even close to healthy. Remember in Tommy Boy when David Spade says, "I can actually hear you getting fatter." That's echoed through my head about 10 times in the last few minutes. Talk about a bad inner dialogue.

Re-run Warning: For those of you who have heard my mold story a bazillion times, skip this here paragraph.

You see that gorgeous pool down there in the video? Well we can't go there anymore. We no longer live in Four Wings Mansion. Well our mansion had some problems. I can no longer say I live in a mansion. Long story short (haha that's funny right?): The wood floor in Sawyer's room started to buckle and develop hills. I started to get dizzy walking in because it felt like the room was bouncing around me. Turns out, I was bouncing on the floor. We had the handy dandy less-is-more maintenance guys come up. They said the a/c was probably leaking. They fixed it. Or they sat in there making noise for an hour and left. They came back the next day and pulled up all the floor. Not before using little pieces of masking tape to label every single 2 inch by 5 inch piece. When they pulled it up, the floor and the bottoms of the wood pieces were a few different colors. The black and green colors are what stand out in my mind. It immediately smelled like a wet basement. The concrete floor was damp. Our handy dandy less-is-more maintenance guys trucked the wood outside our apartment and proceeded to scrape the mold off. After that I'm sure they were planning on putting it all back together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. This is not all the wood, however. Some of it was still in Sawyer's room untouched and un-lifted. It looked flat and dry enough to the guys, why mess with it, right? There's som tam and tom yum to be eaten. Mai pen rai. No problem. Oh, and this is in a room where we didn't already know the a/c was leaking. It's been leaking in our bedroom for a year, but there's a carpet down in there and a bed covering most of the floor near the a/c. Who knows what's growing there. The housing people from the embassy come out, smell the room, make faces and say that they'll make sure this problem is taken care of properly. This worried me a bit. We only had 3 months left at that point and I wondered if they would give us a bandaid and call it a day. A few days (and no nagging later) they tell us to move out. So within a couple days we packed up the essentials and moved into a 3 bedroom extended stay Marriott. For those of you who aren't living in Thailand, this is a prime example of the way things work here. The a/c breaks, they roll it out and roll in one just as old. It works a while and then breaks. These things have to be as old as Bob Barker and instead of fixing this problem, the root of the problem, they just ride it out. They ride it out with all the labor it takes to maintain them. They ride it out as they have to fix the flooring. They ride it out while people move out. So Thai. And if you think I sound cynical, come live here a while. And if you have lived here a while and still think that, then put on some regular sunglasses because the rosy ones don't work so well. There are some things about this place that irritate me a bit (just like in the US) and cutting corners is one of them. It's not charming. It's not such a cute and beautiful way to live. It's stupid. Anyway, now the rest of our stuff is at the apartment and will be packed out to be shipped to the US on Friday. Enough of the rant, maybe more later.

Funny story. So Thai.
They have the same types of drive-through car washes at the gas stations here in Bangkok as they have in the US. The kind with the arch that sprays water and soap and who knows what else on your car and moves back and forth around you while your car is in park? Pat and Sawyer and I love to drive through them. Sometimes I like to blast music in there. Sometimes I just like to listen to the sounds of the car wash. Sawyer used to enjoy them, then started to get a little scared of them. He's gotten to like them again. A few months ago, we decided to use the same one we'd used a few times in the past. The Thai guys were outside the car wash and did a preliminary wipe down of the car. They were much more thorough this time for a reason unbeknownst to us at the time. After the wipe down, we realized they were trying to tell us something. Here's my thought process:

- Ahhh okay the car wash is broken. See he's saying it doesn't work, we should just leave.
- No wait, he says go ahead. Okay... (we drive in)
- Hang on, the thing - the thing that moves back and forth with the water isn't moving back and forth.
- It's supposed to come back to us right...? Should we drive forward more? Are we in all the way?
- What's he saying?
- Oh....My....I have to put this on the blog. This is awesome.

Whatever mechanism that makes that arch move back and forth around your car was taking the day off. The arch wasn't moving. It was only spraying water. So he asked us to drive back in the little car wash building and forth over and over so that the water would hit all parts of the car. So we did. This was one of the funniest things I've ever done. It's like tightening a screw in a chair by holding the screwdriver still and spinning the lawnmower around and around. Pat was actually behind the wheel so he had the best job. We had to give these guys a big tip. They made my day.

The smaller pics on the left are from our Photo Booth feature on the imac. It is one sure way to make Pat and I laugh hysterically.