I was living in Chiang Mai Thailand during the early part of 2010 when I wrote the following:
This and that from re Thai r ment. March 6, 2010
It is hot. Chiang Mai has shared in the heatwave that has struck Southeast Asia for the last week or two. Although the mornings and evenings continue to enjoy wonderful spring-like temperatures, mid-day temperatures approach 100 degrees. Ordinarily, that temperature would drive me indoors, however, the Sala that I sit in writing this remains very pleasant. Other parts of Southeast Asia are hitting temperatures of 110 degrees or more. It all appears to reflect the regional differentiation in climate produced by the general global warming. The decade just past has been the warmest and driest on record, consistent with the temperature reports for the globe as a whole. The climate models I have reviewed predict that this trend of warmer and drier weather for Southeast Asia will continue into the foreseeable future. We have already seen the climate of the Northeast portion of Thailand, the country’s poorest, change from semi-tropical to semi-arid during the past decade or so. Given that the ASEAN nations of Southeast Asia contain a population of 600 million almost twice that of Europe and their lack of modern infrastructure, I expect we will see significant population movements regionally in the next decade.
For the past week, I have been forced to forgo my normal writing schedule (emails, novels, journals) and succumb to pressure to complete a number of children’s stories by next week when Hayden returns from Bangkok. I got started on this because I ran out of children’s books to read to Hayden at bedtime. When my daughter Jessica was a child, at bedtime I would make up stories to tell her. Unfortunately, long before the story was finished, much to her dismay and amusement. I would fall asleep. In order to avoid inflicting that trauma on another child, I decided to write down the stories so that we can read them together. I chose to use Google Images to illustrate the stories with cartoons and photographs to add interest. Once it got out that I was doing this I began to receive demands and deadlines to produce new stories, not from Hayden or other children who couldn’t care less, but from their parents. I am under the gun to finish one of the stories by Thursday of this week for parental review.
One group of stories is a series of detective tales staring Hayden and his stuffed animal friends “Snaky the Snake”, “Buddy the Bear,” “Whitey the White Tiger” and other creatures of his bedroom menagerie. Also appearing in the stories are some of the creatures living in the gardens and empty lots around the house. They include “Feral Kitty (one of the feral cat pack that lives in the lot next door), “Boo-blue bird”, “Francis the Fraidy Frog”, “Clarence the Cross-eyed” the king of the cobra’s living in the lot next door (yes, we have cobras as neighbors in the lot that I have dubbed the “Wild-lands”) and in Bangkok “Ratty the Great, King of the Rats, the 10347th of his Line” and others. The humans in the story include me “Pookie the Old,” Nikki the Pilot” and “Pi Nuan.” Pi Nuan is the name of the maid and is usually the heroine of the adventures while Nikki and Pookie prove to be pompous and mostly useless. In addition to the Prologue, the first three tales are, “The Case of the Missing Breakfast,” “The case of the Monster of the Wild-lands” and the Case of Close Encounters of the Rat Kind”. The latter I have to finish by Thursday or suffer the consequences.
Apparently, I wrote an entire book of fairy tales. I do not remember this. Some of the titles I recognize, but I cannot recall any of the stories. This makes me sad.
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