hawt again

It's balmy, it's breezy, it's 32 degrees-y. Yes, the blink-and-you'll-miss it Bangkok winter has officially passed. Today I had to turn on the air con while Ji was napping because he was drenched in sweat and was clad only in a pair of shorts. Ah, sweet tropical winter, we will remember you fondly during the next 11 months of fiery hotness.

Christmas here was low key and relaxed, kind of like the entire month of December. Ji woke up and opened his stocking full of snacks, and then we webcammed with the fam while he tore open his gifts. Somehow his Uncles' gift of two battery powered Transformers (Robots. In disguise!) was a bigger hit than my package of Pooh Bear kleenex. I dunno, I just suck at buying toys for Ji. I always have. He has SO MANY toys that there are many that he hasn't even ever played with. And that's just on this continent. He has entire roomful of other toys, and a rocking chair, and a ukelele back in Canada. When I go to shops and look at toys I just can't buy any. I usually get Ji books for gifts, but I've given him about 8 recently that we haven't even read yet. Our bookshelves are groaning. Thus, the kleenex. Seems like a step up from last year when I bought him a tube of toothpaste. Heh.

He knows who butters the gift toast anyways. His father. For his birthday Phet bought him a MORE THAN 400 piece car track set (Turner, can't wait for you to come and hang out and enjoy this with us...and our 6000 video games...and of course the Transformers. You and Phet can go buy us gals some see-thru plastic Barbie high-heeled slippers and we'll leave you alone for days). Phet had tried to interest Ji in the wooden toys section but given the opportunity to pick for himself, Ji was having nothing of that Pinnochial crap, no sir. For Christmas Ji once again faced the wood-or-plastic conundrum and went plastic all the way, selecting a stick-a-plastic-stick-into-Batman-and-watch-his-motorcycle-tear-across-the-floor contraption. You see why I buy toiletries?

Speaking of Ji, he had a good question the other day when we were walking up Thong Lor to meet Phet for dinner. I was telling him about diamonds, and Ji asked what was special about them. I told him that they were rare and very strong. He asked, "How strong?" I replied, "Well, the only thing that can cut a diamond is another diamond. They make diamond cutters out of diamonds to cut new diamonds." Ji turned to me and said, "Ok, but how did they cut the first diamond?" Yeah! How DID they?

Since Christmas we've been taking it eeeeaaassssyyyy. Phet's been waking up at 8:30 and coming home by 5:30. It's nuts.

In another very exciting kitchen development, I operated the oven for the first time EVER. Yes, we have lived in this apartment for a year and I've never tried to turn on the oven. Sure, I could use the heat as an excuse, but really I was just too lazy to figure it out. It's gas. I've never used a gas oven before. It could've been hard, right? Uh, no. All I needed was a handy dandy lighter and I was all set. Ji and I had a great time baking brownies (from a box) and baked potatoes. I also made some tasty porkchops with apples and onions which were fine until I turned the broiler on, at which point the broiler juuuust about dripped noxious black gunk onto the porkchops and the oven filled with toxic smoke. So I rescued the chops and deglazed the sauce in a stove-top frying pan. But BOY were those baked potatoes good.

Just as a little back info on the cooking laziness (some of youse who know me as the girl who baked all the apple pies for her own wedding with the help of just one friend may not have believed that I have grown so sluggish in my old age)... The problems are as follows:

1. Ji and I get fed rice, meat, soup, and fruit every day at lunch and we don't want to eat too much when we get home. But what we do want to eat we want to eat right away and we don't want to have to cook.

2. Currently I don't eat wheat and our household doesn't eat chicken or eggs or duck or any other poultry products. I like tofu but Phet's not a big fan. Ji eats fishballs but neither his father nor I do. Phet doesn't eat leftovers.

3. We don't have a grill or barbeque.

4. Anything out of the ordinary Thai selection is unavailable or prohibitively expensive here. So, no bulgur or tahini. No bulgogi sauce. No jerk sauce. No corn meal. No gluten-free pasta or bread. No turnip pickles. No capers or canned anchovies.

5. Even here tomatoes are not currently in season.

But now, I vow to return to the kitchen on a more frequent basis despite these setbacks. I ought to be happy to have the oven - we've never had one overseas before, and in Laos and Vietnam I did all my cooking on two gas burners.

One last note before I depart: Had a VIVID dream that Aunt Cathie and Uncle Pat bought a new house. Get this, it was at the shore of the lake in Toronto, and it was part of a new architectural development. The house was made of thick ceramic, and was arrange like a long rectangle all on one floor. The rooms followed one after the other in straight-forward sequence. Like, the first room was a dining room, then a bedroom, then a kitchen, and then this main great room. The great room had a three-storey high ceiling, and you could see from this room that the walls of all the other rooms did not go right up to the ceiling, but ended several feet short of it. Seemed cool in the dream, but I don't know if you want to hear everything going on in your house all the time in real life. Then, the really cool thing was that all the houses in this development came with gigantic plastic play structures in the great rooms, like those play areas at malls, where kids can climb way, way up and then slide down and so on. However, this play area was a little bit not-100%-safe and I was looking at it thinking, hm, this house might be nice, but they got ripped off on the play structure.

So just in case you're buying some crazy ceramic house, Uncle Pat, check the play structure out carefully! [Bangkok-30-December-2005]