We leave for the United States on Thursday afternoon and with each trip we take, we try to get better at preparing in advance.  We’re both less stressed when we’re not packing the night before and running around trying to tie up loose ends on the way to the airport.

I’m pleased to report that we’re actually doing a good job this time around.  We managed to complete many of our to-do items this weekend while still having some time for relaxing and socializing.  We must be making some progress as our years advance!

Here’s some bits and pieces from the weekend:

Friday night I prepared dinner for Tawn since he came home late (after 8:00) and tired.  In addition to finishing up the chicken and spinach lasagna from a few days earlier, I prepared a dish of roasted beets, onions and sweet potatoes, below.

Drizzled with a little balsamic vinegar, they were fantastic.  The next morning, Tawn took the leftover veggies, chopped them up and scrambled them with some eggs and a sprinkling of mozzarella cheese.  Tasty way to start our Saturday.

Saturday was all about the errands, working down the list one item at a time.  These errands included a stop at Trish’s dressmakers to pay them and see how they’re doing on the first three orders, which are for my sister, mother and grandmother.  (They are the guinea pigs.)  We picked up a roll-aboard suitcase that was in for repairs after the in-line skate wheel cracked.  We picked up dry cleaning and shopped for some small gifts for friends.

Needing sustinence to keep us going, we ate lunch at a Japanese restaurant on Ekkamai.  It is one of those “grill it at your table” places but since we didn’t want to smell like food for the rest of the afternoon, we asked them to grill the food for us.  Below: garlic rice, grilled veggies and grilled pork.

They provided bibs to protect you from the splatters from the grill.  While we didn’t grill ourselves, I thought the bib was still a good idea.  I should have one of these with me all the time.

In the late afternoon, Tawn met with some clients.  We’re doing a side project for friends of a friend.  Their body care company is launching a new line of shampoos, bath gels, lotions, etc. and they were unhappy with the copywriters they hired.  The mutual friend recommended me and Tawn so now we’re coming up with names, tag lines, and label descriptions for thirty-six products.  Jacks of all trades – that’s what we are.

While Tawn was doing the presentation, I wandered around and killed some time.  Here’s a billboard at the corner of Asoke and Sukhumvit Roads advertising California Wow gym, which used to be affiliated with the 24 Hour Fitness chain in the US and still uses the high-pressure sales tactics which 24 Hour eventually stopped using after too many complaints to consumer protection groups.

This billboard normally has nearly naked and very buff women on it, but I guess they’ve decided to start targetting the men.  Which makes sense when you consider that 80% of the men in their gyms are gay.  The billboard offers one year for free, presumably when you sign up for a long-term contract.

The funny thing is, this billboard faces the very large True Fitness gym across the street.  Dozens and dozens of treadmills and other cardio devices face out the window and look directly at this billboard.

From the “odd transportation” department, here’s a picture of a street vendor cart being pulled by a motorbike.  They managed to get into a small fender-bender with a car but there wasn’t any noticable damage.

If you are an insurance adjuster, I’m sure you’re having a stress attack right now.

After Tawn was finished, we met up for facial appointments at a small Japanese brand back on Soi Sukhumvit 25.  This is only the second time in my life I’ve had a facial and, frankly, I’m not sure what the big deal is.  My face felt as stretched and tight as it does when I wash it with a bar of hand soap, which I know is the wrong thing to do.

But I had a seaweed mask, steam treatment, and the little machine that sucks your pores clean.  Well, at least that is my understanding of what happened.  Afterwards, I didn’t really feel like I looked ten years younger but maybe that wasn’t the goal.

Generally speaking, I’m a “the more, the merrier” type of guy.  For example, several invited guests for our recent Thanksgiving dinner called me just a day or two beforehand asking if it would be okay to bring an extra person.

“Absolutely,” I responded without hesitation.

There are some times, though, when I think that more isn’t merrier.  And I’m not sure how to gracefully handle those situations.

For example, when I am trying to introduce people (one person or a couple) from one social circle to people from another social circle.  In these circumstances, it can be very overwhelming to the “outsider” to introduce them to a lot of people at once.  There are many names, faces and details to remember and, unless the seating arrangement at the table is really conducive to a lot of interaction, they usually only get to talk extensively with those people seated closest to them. 

There is a difference in these situation based on the setting.  A meal that takes place at a long rectangular table, a round table, and a party where people can circulate, entering and exiting different conversations, are entirely different circumstances for introducing people from different social circles. 

What might be very effective guest lists in a party might not work so well at a table, especially a rectangular one where eye contact is limited to those adjacent to you.  The ideal there is a round table seating six to eight.

The circumstances get even more challenging when there are multiple groups being combined: party A has only vaguely met party B and party C has not met either party A or B.  Seating arrangements become critical then.

So I find myself in these situations where I invite specific people to a meal with the purpose of introducing them, and I find the invitation “hijacked” (forgive the expression) and other people invited, creating a guest list that doesn’t work as well.  Sometimes the hijacking is run by me in a way where I can tactfully suggest that I’d like to keep the guest list limited.  Other times I feel like there isn’t a tactful way for me to say no and so we wind up with a different dynamic.

Control freak?  Maybe.  Perhaps I’m just a social engineer.  But I think about situations where I’ve been invited to meet other people over a meal.  When it is a fairly small group, I’ve felt more comfortable, found it easier to interact with each of the people, and afterwards have walked away feeling like I made a meaningful connection with the other people.

Part of the challenge is that in our larger social group here in Khrungthep, there are two types of get-togethers we have and I think the distinction between the two is sometimes fuzzy.  We have general group meals where the number of invitees can expand or contract easily.  Usually, these include only people who already know each other.  But we also have meals that are more purposeful, usually to introduce specific friends or visitors to other people with whom they may have common interests.  And it isn’t always clear who “owns” the invitation rights in those situations.

Maybe I need to be specific when I send out the invitations by SMS: “I am inviting you and only these following people (A, B, C…) to lunch.”  I hate to be such a meanie about it.

What do you think?

After posting yesterday’s audio postcard, I started thinking about birds and one particular memory came to me.  My paternal grandparents enjoyed watching birds, not in an Audobon Society sort of way, but in a more midwestern way.  They had several bird feeders hanging under the eaves outside the kitchen window, a few more hanging from the two large elm trees in their backyard, and always had a bird bath cleaned and filled out back. 

In fact, in the winter, there was always a heated bird bath: a plastic tub on the back steps with about three litres of water in it, with an electric device that kept the water above freezing throughout the coldest months.  I don’t know how many birds were still around, but they had water to drink and a place to swim.

My grandparents enjoyed watching the birds that would come to feed just outside the kitchen windows.  When my sister and I were visiting, we’d commonly hear one or the other of my grandparents call us to come into the kitchen.  It tooks us a while to learn that we could not come racing into the kitchen because we’d frighten the birds away.

There would be large blue jays, bright red cardinals, sparrows, finches and several other types of birds.  They were beautiful to watch.

Back at home in Silicon Valley, we had a bird bath, too.  One of my chores was to scrub it out and refill it.  I’m sure it attracted many birds but the bird-watching wasn’t as up close and personal as it was at my grandparents’ house.

That’s your random memory for today.

You may have noticed some subtle changes to the look and feel of my blog.  After several years keeping things the same, I wanted to freshen things up a bit.  Xanga has all these “themes” and different ways to customize your page, but I find them difficult to use.  Plus, I have only enough HTML coding knowledge to be dangerous and not much more. 

The “christao” logo was designed by my cousin Alexandra, a talented graphic designer and illustrator.  Hopefully, you enjoy the new look.

Today is Constitution Day here in Thailand, the day when we celebrate the twenty different constitutions we have had since the start of our on-again, off-again experiment with constitutional monarchy in 1932.  The news says that we may be days away from a new government, with the Democrat Party forming a working coalition for the first time since 1995.

Here are some odds and ends:

Thanksgiving leftovers are finally finished, more than week after we celebrated.  The extra turkey was immediately frozen in smaller packages but the stuffing, sweet potatoes, peas, cranberry sauce and pecan pie lasted a long time.

I have to share with you, ever since I started Thanksgiving dinner preparations including a trial run of the cornbread stuffing and the pecan pie, I’ve been feeling very bloated.  This only cleared up after the leftovers were finished.  Could I possibly be allergic to the cornmeal and corn syrup?  I’ve never noticed such symptoms before.

Aren’t the little serving dishes cute?  I needed something that would fit in the toaster oven as we don’t have a microwave and I don’t want to heat up the big oven to reheat dinner.

Tawn was feeling a little under the weather a few days ago, so I took him to the neighborhood hospital, Samitivej.  The lobby areas are so nicely decorated and have so much natural light that I enjoyed sitting there reading a magazine while Tawn saw the doctor.  Maybe I should just walk over and use their lobby as my living room.  I’m sure they wouldn’t really notice and probably wouldn’t mind.

Left, the windows at Samitivej Hospital. 

There are many interesting things in the neighborhood.  You just have to get out and find them.  The other day we stopped at the local branch of Kasikorn Bank, right at the mouth of Thong Lor Soi 9.  To the side is a car park that is shared by several businesses and at the back of the car park is the customary spirit house. 

This spirit house, however, was a bit unconventional in its mirrored mosaic tile decorations, below.  I like to call it “disco Ganesh”.

Over the weekend, I rode my bicycle to a temple down near Sukhumvit 109.  While there, I saw this cat sitting in the sunlight on the temple steps, napping.  It seemed wholly unconcerned as the worshipers took off their shoes, stepped over and around it, and went about their religious affairs.

After the post-Thanksgiving bloated feeling, I came to realize that I don’t actually eat as much fiber and as many vegetables as I think I do.  I love veggies and I do eat oatmeal for breakfast each morning, but a lot of my lunches and dinners are mostly carbs and meat, even if the food is often Thai or Asian.

That has to change.  This week I have made a conscious effort to introduce more veggies into our diet.  For Tuesday night dinner, homemade chicken and spinach lasagna.  There’s only a single breast’s worth of chicken in this whole lasagna, the balance being made up of spinach, onions, tomatoes and mushrooms.

Accompanying the lasagna was a large salad with mixed greens, bell peppers, tomatoes, fennel, celery, kidney beans, roasted beet root, eggs, and a sprinkling of pecans.  Lightly dressed, I think this makes for a pretty healthy meal.

Now, if I can just lose ten pounds before Christmas, I’ll have plenty of room to eat all the holidays dishes I want, right?

Nights out here in the Big Mango seem to fall into the usual trio of possibilities: dinner, a movie, or dinner and a movie.  So we were excited about the opportunity to spice things up a bit when Matt and Si invited us over for board games.

Where have board games gone in my life?  I loved board games as a child and played them even through university.  But somewhere in my adult life I left board games behind, forgetting how exciting, competitive and inexpensive a night with a board game can be.

After drinks and appetizers at Matt and Si’s condo on Soi Lang Suan and a casual dinner at a Thai restaurant down the street, we returned for several rounds of Aggravation.  They have the classic version of the game which has a dark board and a symmetrical, asterisk-shaped path.  This is the same version I played for hours on end with my paternal grandparents.

Making things particularly interesting, they have two house rules: When you roll a four, you have to go backwards by that many spaces; and you play in pairs with your rolls helping your partner after you have won.

It was a fun, low-key evening and something we need to do more often.