Why no pictures?  I need to get some pictures to share with you since I’ve had several consecutive entries with no pictures.  With the cloudy, rainy, humid weather there just hasn’t been nice light with which to take photos.

This week, Tawn and I are taking the next big step towards owning the condo: placing a first installment down in the amount of a one million baht (about $27,000) payment to the owner.  We will have 30 subsequent days to get the remainder of the amount from a bank loan.  This week we’ll also begin the process of applying for these loans, to see whether or not we can get a joint loan.  This is technically not-doable because I don’t have a work permit here.  But as with all things in Thailand, we’ll see.  The process of putting an installment down to the current owner to ensure that you will buy help to eliminate people buying with nothing down – a questionable practice that helps push more people to the edge of fiscal disaster.

Sunday morning we met with our designer, Ble*, to review the architectural plans, which he has had drawn up.  It reignites the flow of juices that have lain largely dormant since Mr. Geraci’s architectural drafting class in high school.  I’m done the basic design work for the kitchen, having some specific ideas how I’d like the space arranged.  These plans and notes have been handed over to Ble for his inclusion in to the master plans.

In the afternoon, Tawn and I did an hour of yoga at home.  Very good exercise and I’m getting back into the habit of yoga three times a week, which was interrupted in December when we had all our guests.  I don’t take yoga nearly to the extent he does, but I find it to be an incredibly dynamic way to exercise both my mind and my body at the same time.  Additionally, I like that it gives me a very good sense of appreciation for my body and its own unique abilities and limitations.  Unlike a lot of exercise (going to the gym, for example) where there seems to be a lot of implicit (or sometimes, explicit) competition, yoga is uniquely your own thing and it is non-competitive.

We went upstairs to our neighbor Vic’s apartment and had afternoon coffee, chatted for about an hour trying to understand how Thai politicians have co-opted the King’s “Sufficiency Economy” philosophy for their own political ends.  The engaging conversation eventually moved on to whether materialism and consumerism are the direct descendants of capitalism or not. 

Did you know that Tawn is running his own blog now?  His username is TawnBino.

*Ble, pronounced “bun”… as in the Thai way of pronouncing the English word “apple”: “ap-bun”