OK, that was just to get your attention, since most of you seem to be more interested in meeting Holm and Sandee than me. But then, that's quite understandable
Well I'll be in BKK May 27, along with my mom and my little boy Holm. Holm has never met his granddad (my dad), who has lived in BKK for 21 years now. I've been visiting him there for the last 19 years LOL - time has certainly passed - BKK and Thailand have gone through a few changes in that time! So have many of the people on this s
In response to some of the debate in the forums about the Iraq war.
I think Slurms is being loyal to his country, by being a citizen who thinks and questions. Democracy is dead without such citizens, period.
There's a difference between being loyal to your country and being loyal to its leaders. And even being a loyal follower does not mean you need to be uncritical: "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." (Junius, an 18t
Today is a perfect day for humour.
Not only did I add a couple more acid testimonials to my wonderful sister's profile but I also got 2 guys hitting on me here on TF. These guys apparently think I am my gf Sand. The first obviously just didn't read my profile. The second came along while I was writing this journal entry about the first. The second read my profile but thinks I might be lying about being male, that really I'm Sand not Ling/Graham. I'm chatting with him on Yahoo and will inc
This is my position on missionaries. You might call it Ling's Missionary Position.
I can't stand them. There are exceptions, but overall, I can't stand them. I don't mean just Christian missionaries, though my experience has been limited to these. I'm sure Muslim missionaries are not any better. But I can't think of any other world religions that are so active in trying to spread themselves, and too often it has been done in deeply offensive or fatal ways.
The whole idea bothers me. Peop
LOL I was just checking over my profile here at TF and clicked on the link to pics of my gf Sand on my own webpage, and... I was told the page was unavailable because it had gone over some kind of traffic limit!
Seems that page was suddenly very popular, or one person kept loading it repeatedly. Well, she is cute so I don't blame you for looking
But now I'm curious ah... who was visiting, who kept loading the page???? 555555555
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Eh???? What's this???? And now my profile has mysterious
Well I had a great day with Holm yesterday. I still have to clean up
His mom brought him over early and he and I played with his cars and played with the computer mouse (he realized he could make the pointer move on the screen) and pushed his stroller up and down the building hallway. After a brief nap and a light lunch we phoned Sand and said hello. He always says "hi" on the phone to her, and then babbles on in his own language.
Then it was the "get-baby-dressed-to-go-outside-in-the-snow
Mondnacht
Es war, als ha"tt der Himmel
Die Erde still geku"sst,
Dass sie im Blu"tenschimmer
Von ihm nur tra"umen mu"sst.
Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die A"hren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis die Wa"lder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.
Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flu"gel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flo"ge sie nach Haus.
--Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff
Moonlit Night
It was as though the sky
Had silently kissed the earth,
So that she in the shimmer
Der Panther
Sein Blick ist vom Voru"bergehn der Sta"be
so mu"d geworden, dass er nichts mehr ha"lt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Sta"be ga"be
und hinter tausend Sta"ben keine Welt.
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der beta"ubt ein grosser Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und
OK, so Cambodia isn't actually in Thailand
But, give it a few years and you never know! There is a LOT of Thai business there, Thai hotels and companies and joint ventures with local companies. And a certain Thai prime minister's holding company, currently controlled by his wife without any influence or interference by him, seems to have the controlling share of the telecom market and is involved in other business too: Cambodia Shinawatra company, or Camshin for short.
Sand and I arrived a
Jan. 25, 1759 was the birthday of Scotland's national poet, Robert Burns. It's celebrated every year among Scots and descendants of Scots, and frankly, it's celebrated by anyone who loves a good whisky.
There are some very elaborate Burns' dinners, but to me the essential ingredients are 3: good whisky, reading out Burns' poem To A Haggis, and eating a haggis.
A haggis is a sheep's stomach stuffed with the other organs of the sheep minced up with oatmeal, beef fat, maybe onions, and various
Rrrrrr.. I got logged out of TF due to inactivity and lost the journal entry I was typing (but had stopped to do something else). Serves me right! Som nam na!
Well, at the end of the last part we were back in BKK early evening on Dec. 31, and we both went back to our respective places. Sand went home and I went to my dad's place. But we met again for the New Year countdown, at Chidlom, across from the World Trade Center (or whatever it is called now). I was supposed to meet Sand and some of
Hm hm hm... many things to write... I better break this up into parts.
Well Sandee and I did a couple of trips, to Cambodia and down south to Phuket, Phang-nga and Trang. The rest of the time we were in Bangkok, and I visited family while I was in BKK too. While in BKK I also got to meet some TF members, which was fun.
Last time I was in Thailand Thai Airways was having a promotion, and I won a free ticket from BKK to Phuket return, which I had to use before Dec. 31, 2003. So that's the fir
A second entry for today! The one on cold weather is below Oh I will be posting some pics from our trips soon too.
I have noticed quotes from The Little Prince a lot. See for example butthead's profile on TF. I bought Sandee a lovely copy of it recently because she couldn't find her own Thai translation of it. (I found the English translation in BKK at Asia Books. The original is French and I saw that too, but she doesn't read French.) I brought it along to Cambodia and read it to her a
Hey I'm back in Toronto for a while now and had a wonderful time with Sandee in Thailand (and Cambodia!). I will write a few journal entries about our trips and about meeting various people from TF. Hey I can't wait for the new "Testimonials" feature to begin operation!
It's -15 here today with wind chill making the temperature feel like -30. So nice to arrive back to this! From 33 (in Phnom Penh) to -30 in just a day! And I didn't have a coat or a jacket or a hat or gloves LOL. I was jus
Well I'm flying to Thailand in a few hours, but will stop overnight in Tokyo on the way. I'm just packing now (and trying to clean my apartment at the same time 55555).
So I won't be back on TF for a couple of days... don't miss me too much
Hmmm... I'll be out of BKK fairly often with S. but still hope to meet up with some of you ... coffee or clubs anyone?
I'm not talking about turkey, the large bird commonly eaten in North America for xmas dinner. I'm talking about a guy who behaved offensively to one of my friends.
That guy shall remain nameless, but is from TF. Let's call him Turkey. My friend is a ladyboy who used to have a profile on TF. Let's call her Ladyboy. Turkey probably got Ladyboy's mobile number from her TF profile, because it used to be up there.
Turkey has returned to Bangkok and is looking for dates. He phones up one frien
Last night I had a late dinner. I was washing dishes and chatting online and on the phone, and suddenly it was almost midnight before I started to make dinner. That's ok. When I'm by myself I usually eat really late... I work on "Spanish time" then
So I had a nice large filet of freshwater whitefish, bought from Mennonites, who get it from native fishermen. LOL, the fish has travelled an interesting route to get to me. (Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites are communities of European-descended
Today I tutored a friend for a couple of hours in an empty classroom at school. Because of some health problems he had to drop out for a year and a half, but he's getting ready to return, and I'm helping him redo a course he's already done, in order to refresh his mind and also hopefully so that he'll get more out of it the second time around. (The course is a notoriously difficult math department offering, usually using a notoriously difficult but innocent looking book that everyone knows as
Well thanks everybody who was giving me the 5 star votes. I'm tired of playing the game. Just wanted to see where I could get to. I haven't used any devious tactics like having fake profiles to vote for me and vote against others... that's just silly. I just tried to be Mr. Nice and gave out plenty of 5 star ratings (most of them deserved for one reason or another!!), but it's too exhausting 5555 I had my 15 minutes of fame on the top guy list, now it's turn for others and I will sink into
Well I just wrote a comment on athaigirl's journal entry about mocha latte frappe (yum) and Coffee World in BKK, and that made me want coffee.
But I still don't have any in the house. I ran out and haven't bought more. I've been drinking tea, which I enjoy... but... coffee is very special
I think I might be an addict. Although I don't drink a lot of coffee, I'm a very regular user. Oh well, I suppose there are worse addictions in the world, like being online too much LOL
I'll have to giv
My problem with journals is that I think I have to do something special in order to write about it! But if a journal is just for me (well, this one isn't), then I can write any damn thing I please!
So I'm going to try it out....
I just ate a tomato. It had a nice taste, but of something other than tomato. I can't really place the taste, I know it is something familiar to me. I wonder if it is one of those GMO tomatoes ("franken-tomato" ) and what I am tasting is the result of introducing mo
Well, that forum topic "what is your favourite song?" got me going....
I sing Blackbird (The Beatles) and Mining for Gold (traditional song, but learned it from a Cowboy Junkies CD) to my little boy... along with 1960s and 1970s protest songs LOL from before I became conscious of music. I sing him The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald too, a song about a ship that was lost in a bad November storm on huge Lake Superior (the largest freshwater lake in the world, sits between Canada and the USA). A
Well, I'm not much of a journal writer, although I keep hearing what a good thing it is for you.
My first ever journal I kept on my first ever trip by myself, when I was 16. I rode my bicycle from Houston to the coast of California and up the coast to Vancouver. That was my introduction to travelling, and I have been addicted ever since. Anyway I tried to keep a journal, was good at first, but I was writing it in felt-tip pen. I got caught in a horrendous rainstorm, in fact I was right insid
