Monthly Archives: November 2011

Guest Post from My Dad

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11

In the interest of keeping my typing wordcount up for NaNoWriMo (ha, ha.  I’m so behind it’s pathetic), today’s post is going to be a guest post.

For those that don’t know – which is pretty much everyone – my dad lives over in Thailand.


Why does he live over in Thailand?

Well, to be honest, after reading his emails over the past couple of years, I’m not really sure.

At any rate, here are some of the funnier excerpts about life in Thailand.  Oh, and for reference, here is  a Tokay lizard (it’s actually a gecko):

He refers to them, so I thought you might want to see what they look like.

And here is what they sound like:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR9tn0yNqQo]

The Tokay geckos live in the wall and during mating season they make that noise from 10pm to 2am.

And now onto his emails:

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I was doing my nightly flashlight-in-hand-careful-of-snakes search of the eaves of the house for Tokay lizards.  I found some small white globes under the eave next to the front porch……eggs.

I got a long stick and broke two of the three, but the last was hard to get to. While going after number three the mama lizard showed up. Of course I poked her with the pointed stick to either kill her or get her to move. She came out of the eave and came toward me, so I slapped at her over my right shoulder while doing the macho thing of dropping the stick and running to the other side of the porch.

I’m glad I was alone. (<–Becky in:  BWAHAHAHAHA.  But now it’s on the Internet!)

I eventually replaced the stick in my manly hand and got close enough to pop the egg.

The next day a Karin guy came by and I asked him about getting rid of the mama lizard. He did what all of the Thais do – shrug their shoulders and say, “Let them stay, they are good luck.”

Well, I don’t need several two pound good luck lizards running up the kitchen wall when I turn on the light or lurking in the bathroom when I go there at night,  so “live and let live” to me has become “live somewhere else or die“.

Over here, in addition to a regular fishing pole with a rod and reel, you can buy a “fishing pole” that looks like a wooden rifle, but with just the wooden part. On this there is a very large rubber band and a six inch long piece of sharpened metal that you can attach string to – it’s kind of like a cross bow for shooting fish.

Are you getting the picture yet? Can you envision Hunter Dad lurking the eaves of his domain with his tokay killing crossbow in hand?

YES!

…..Except they cost around $21 and I only have one lizard left…. so to make a long story short I have a six foot piece of metal with two of the before-mentioned projectiles welded to the end for stabbing.  Hey,  it beats a pointed stick. Oh yeah, I found out that if the lizard is nesting it will attack and can jump up to three feet. They are nicknamed the bulldog lizard because when they bite they don’t let go.

So last night I went outside and looked several times for my adversary, but she not there….Anyway that is why I am late wishing you a happy birthday,  I didn’t forget, I was just trying to fight my way through blood-thirsty lizards to reach the keyboard. Hope you have a good birthday and I’ll see you when I can.

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You asked about how life here is going? Well, it is all bugs, beer and lizards right now.

 Bugs: All kinds all shapes and colors. They have bugs so small they can fit through the screens in the windows.  I  believe these are the ones that bite the ankles, all the time.  There is a bug repellent that works but you can’t put it on all of the time. The next best thing is a fan – the circulating air keeps them away. My morning ritual is to get up, turn the computer on and make coffee as fast as possible. The reason for this is the “ankle biters ” are hungry in the morning and they attack. I sit at the computer, but before I do I turn the fan on and aim it towards my feet to keep them away.

 Beer:  What can I say? It relieves the boredom.  I don’t sit around and drink beer all of the time, but once or sometimes twice a week we will go into town (30 kilometers round trip) and see what the tourists are doing. There’s not a lot of tourists right now, so mostly we just sit and watch the cars go by.

 Lizards: what can I say that I haven’t already said?

A lot.

I am tired of them and have declared all out war on anything lizard-like. Why?  The reasons are many right now.  A week ago it was mating season for the house lizards, so  they “chirp”ed.  I didn’t know lizards did that until I moved over here.

“chiik,ckiik,chiik,chiik” most of the night.

I had four living in my kitchen –  they started getting together and having babies.

I’d open the refrigerator and one falls off the door and runs away.

Throw something in the trash and one runs out of the trash.

Go to the bathroom and lizards are on the wall.

Now, outside I don’t mind, but just give me some space.  So against whatever Christian upbringing I have had, and trying not to let the Buddhist people around me know, I stomp, swat, drown and otherwise destroy the little pests in any way that I can.   “DEATH TO ALL LIZARDS”.

When the boredom kicks in there is TV.  Not much help – the programs here are really bad.  They’re mostly revenge/kung fu or monster shows.  Every vampire movie ever made is on here on a  regular basis.  The advertisements  for the next month on HBO are mostly second rate hits from years ago….”Guns of Navarone” with David Nivens (20 plus years old), “Inner Space” (10-15 years old), “Brian Stoker’s Dracula” …… you get the picture, I am sure.  Anyway, all the shows are worthless. Today I watched “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl” and “Earth versus Spider”.  Not a good day for TV.

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The Lizards:

It is an on going battle.  I have killed two more of the bigger ones and two or three of their babies. Now the house is crawling with the smaller,  everyday type of “house lizard”. I am constantly killing the baby ones.

It is funny how the attitude changes.

When I first got here I remember seeing a baby lizard in the bathroom and thinking it was a good thing – it will keep all of the mosquitoes away, so I kind of watched it grow up.

Now?  A baby lizard? Get the flyswatter and kill the little bastard before it can grow up and have more babies.

Tonight I discovered an ants’ nest between the toilet and the wall. I saw one of the big black ants go behind the upper part of the toilet, so I sprayed water and washed out 20 or 30 ants with eggs. I spent about 5 minutes killing them.

Things were finally things back to normal until I looked on the living room floor, and there was a different kind of ant, maybe 50 of them….. So again with the killing spree of God’s little creatures. It seems like that is all I do anymore –  run around trying to keep Thai nature at bay…….I hate environmentalists.

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I have upset the ecological balance. About a month ago I killed one of the large Tokay lizards. I recently learned that they eat the other smaller lizards and I believe the baby Tokays.

I have been trying to come up with a way to rectify this and have devised a plan. I will paint myself green and yellow and live in the attic for a week yelling “TO KAY” between the hours of 10 pm and around 2 am. If it comes to it I may have to eat a few lizards just to convince them I am serious.

I hope it doesn’t come to that.

My only problem is I don’t know if the female or the male is the one that yells. If it’s the male, no problem, I don’t think I will be attractive enough to worry about it. If, on the other hand,  the female is the one that does the mating yell…well, I worry about the aggressiveness of the lizard and the cramped space of the attic.  I will let you know how my experiment works out…..life in the jungle gets weird.

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It’s All Worth It

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8

Yesterday was an…err… “trying” day with the DragonMonkey.

From the moment he woke up he knew exactly what he wanted out of life – he wanted whatever it was we, the parents, didn’t want.

Don’t jump on the couch? What’s that we just said?  He’d look slyly over at us from over his shoulder and then….. Jump.  JUMP.  JUMP JUMP JUMPJUMPJUMPJUMPJUMPJUMPJU—

When he is accidentally bad, he gets a stern talking to.  When he is just plain bad, he gets time in the corner.  When he’s really bad, he gets time out in his crib until he is finished with whatever tantrum he’s currently throwing.

When he looks at us with that angry little smirk and deliberately does whatever it is we just told him not to do, he gets three spanks (sorry, Internet, but them’s the breaks – I hate people who hit children, but I do believe in spanking.  If you don’t understand the difference, then you should probably stick with time outs.) followed by time out in his crib until he’s in a better mood.

Yesterday was chock-full of spank-then-cribs.

He fed the fish a big bowl of peanut butter.

He deliberately jumped on every piece of furniture we had – even going so far as to holler out, “Mama! Yook!  Yook at me!  Yook!” when I didn’t notice he was being bad.

He colored on furniture.

He smeared food on the ground.

He screamed and chased and hit at the dog with his blankie, until we finally locked poor Bad Max up in the kennel to save him from the monstrosity that is my three year old.

He ripped apart his train table and scattered the pieces around the living room.

When we bought the train table the pieces were all screwed down into the board to prevent him from destroying the track.  He has managed to do it anyways.  The buildings are lopsided and threadbare from his rough handling, and the tracks are misaligned and missing sections from where he spent days on end using his fingertips to pry them up from the table.  Instead of the cheerful, happy train table we had when we bought it,the whole thing has a desolate, desperate, half-abandoned air. The Bean calls it Chernobyl Station.

He threw fits every time we denied him anything.

No, DragonMonkey, you may not touch the kitchen butcher knife.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

No, Dragonmonkey, you leave poor Bad Max alone!

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

No, DragonMonkey, you be nice to your brother! Don’t you dare rip that toy out of his hands!

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!

No, DragonMonkey, stay out of the toilet!  No, DragonMonkey, get off the kitchen table!  No, DragonMonkey, no coloring on the furniture!  Quit kicking the cats!  Don’t pinch the dog!  Don’t throw your toys!  Leave the DVD player alone!  Get off the furniture!  No hitting your dad!  Don’t jump on me!

Etc, etc, ad nauseum.

When I took him out to go splash in rain puddles and play along the riverbed in hopes of improving his mood, he threw a fit when I took Max’s leash from him for a brief moment.

I don’t know if I mention this before, but about once a week he throws a pass-out kind of a fit.  He’ll silently cry/scream until he runs out of breath and turns blue.  Then, before he can suck in a huge lungful of air to turn his silent crying into a loud shriek, he’ll completely run out of air and crash to the ground and pass out.

It scared the crap out of me the first few times it happened.  Then, on the third time, I decided to employ my grandma’s technique.  Apparently I used to do something similar – whenever I would get angry enough, I would deliberately hold my breath until I passed out, simply because I knew it bothered my mom.

Yes, yes, I know.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Anyways, the next time the Dragonmonkey initiated his pass-out-tantrum mode, I did what my Grandma did to cure me:  I gave him a firm, no-nonsense swat on the behind, designed to startle him into a normal crying sequence.

It worked on me.

Unfortunately, it did not work on the DragonMonkey.  Instead of startling him into breathing, the air whooshed out of him in surprised shock, turning him from kind a purplish-blue to a completely brilliant shade of cyan, and he dropped like a stone and stayed unconscious for about 10 full seconds.

When someone suggested I try water (spraying him with a water bottle), I got the same extremely stressful reaction.

Needless to say, when he wants to cry-to-passing-out nowadays, I just kind of let him do his thing.  I stay close by to so I can catch him and lower him to the ground when his legs give out, but I just kind of ignore the theatrics in hopes he’ll grow out of it.

So, yesterday, when I took Max’s leash from him as we passed a jogger, to make sure Max didn’t escape and go make a new friend, the DragonMonkey threw a fit.  Once I lowered him to the ground and watched him begin waking up, I decided I might as well capture it on film, so I can torture him when he gets older.  Man, I just really can’t wait until he’s a teenager.

The day didn’t go much better from there. While I escaped off to the library to see if I could catch up a bit on my NaNoWriMo wordcount, The Bean accidentally grabbed the baby snacks (I bought some wheat puffed snacks to test The Squid’s allergies…looks like he might be okay!  Woohoo!) and fed them to the DragonMonkey.  Oh, boy.  GLUTEN.  And loads of it.

By the time I came home, I no longer had a three year old child running around the house – I had a skittery, screamy, anger-filled, gluten-infested monstrosity of a child.

Unfortunately for me, The Bean had some work he had to catch up on, so I was on my own.  Moping about the house by myself, I decided to head out to the local mall to let the DragonMonkey run around and burn off some of his gluteny energy.  Frustrated, lonely, and vaguely depressed, I decided to try and curl my hair in hopes of making myself a little better before heading out into the world of carefree teenagers and gorgeous young 20-somethings.  The end result was really pretty, but the fact that I had nobody around to show off to just made me feel even worse.  I couldn’t get grumpy at The Bean – the poor guy was working on a Saturday night.

Still.  Poor me.  Poor, poor Becky.  All alone. Again.  Nobody to share things with.  Again.  All by herself…. with only two whiny, angry babies to keep her company. Again.  Poor, poor Becky.

With a trample of toddler hooves, the DragonMonkey screeched around the corner, and skidded to a halt in front of me.  He stared at me for a moment, with wide eyes, pointed at my hair, and then petted his own head for emphasis, so I could know exactly what he was talking about.

“Mama!”  he sounded breathlessly surprised, and he smiled widely.  “You yook so cute!”  It came out clear as day – this entire sentence from a kid who still speaks mostly in mumbles and two or three word sentences.

I stared at him in amazement…. had I just heard what I thought I heard?

“What’d you say?”

He pet his head, and then pointed at my hair.  “Mama.  You yook so cute!”  He smiled at me in admiration for a moment longer then tore down the hallway and skittered around the corner.

So worth it.  All of it.  All the screaming, and the tantrums, and the stretch marks, and the bigger hips, and the sleepless nights, and the projectile puking, and the diaper blowouts and the lack of freedom, and the toys I step on in the middle of the night – all of it so worth it, just for that one moment.