joe diamond wants you!

Missing the famous brother and brilliant sister alot the past few weeks. I'm not sure exactly why - I usually miss my family in general, but recently I've been wishing I could see my siblings. Not long now, though, till my wish comes true. A few weeks of school, a trip to Pakse, and then we're on our way home.

Things are interesting at school these days; it looks like I may be shifting out of Kindergarden and into Primary. I won't know which class I'll be taking, but the powers that be tell me that they are going to merge the K2 classes so they'll only need one K2 teacher. Me, I'm happy to do something new, so I've said it's no problem if the other teacher wants to stick with K2. The only teeny tiny thing I'm worried about is having to learn math above a Kindergarden level. Ai ai ai, will I have to FINALLY learn my times tables? I vowed to memorize them this year after Emma gave me a shower curtain with all of the multiplication tables printed on it, but I still daydream while I wash my hair and have yet to get past the 3s (and even then I only got up to 3 x 6). Well, one and all, if I move on up to the second floor, I will have to start training my braining.

Yesterday we headed over to James' place after school. He got a fancy new hi-fi set for his bachelor pad and we were invited over to watch DVDs. We walked over to the skytrain station and went from Ekkamai to Asoke. The Bangkok transit system is baffling if you're used to the TTC. If you transfer vehicles you must purchase a new ticket. Not only that, the subway, skytrain, and different bus routes are run by different companies, each with their own ticketing system. So, for example, at Ekkamai we bought tickets from a machine. The machine shoots out magnetized cards that you then stick into the turnstile. The tickets get eaten by the exit turnstile. Then, at Asoke, we went down into the new subway system, where we had to pay a ticketing agent for magnetized black plastic tokens, about the size and thickness of a loonie, and these were then swiped at the entrance turnstile and eaten by the exit turnstile. Phew! Then, had we chosen to get on a bus, we'd have had to buy a paper ticket from the on-bus ticket seller. Instead, though, we hopped in a cab and went to James' condo complex.

There was some kind of weird techno glitch and we couldn't reach James on his cell phone, or Phet's other colleague on her cell phone, and the front desk couldn't get James to pick up in his room. I fell asleep in the condo lobby while Ji watched violent cartoons on TV. Phet fretted that James had had a car accident. A half hour later, James came downstairs and asked us why we hadn't called yet. Ah, the brilliance of modern day communication technologies. (Just a side note re tech stuff - take a look at the Balzac page, check out the first photo gallery, and let me know what you think. Do you like the set up? Does it take way to long to load? Are the photos too big or too small? Is the navigation ok?)

Mind you, dinner was tasty, and the hi-fi system was cool, so that sort of made up for the starving nap in the lobby.

Today Ji had a good day at school. All the kids stayed out of his way cause he was gussied up in his new Joe Diamond shirt that I picked up at the weekend market:

I figure I'd better get him ready for military school, cause GOD KNOWS he's going there one day. [Bangkok-16-June-2005]