A "big, happy day".

I woke up this morning when the "looster" crowed, loudly, about 10 feet from my head. And fell back to sleep promptly. Was the first night in many moons that I've slept for 10 hours. Was simply wonderful!
 After I got up I sat and groggily watched from the kitchen step while Lisl put chocolate chip muffins in the oven. Then Mom asked us to join a google hang out (video chat) and lo and behold there was a living room full of people to talk to! Including a few Lattins, was quite nice to "see" everybody again. : )
 The weather was beyond gorgeous today, I did a couple loads of laundry and got a kick out of watching the wind whip it around all afternoon. When  Halla woke up from her morning nap I took her straight outside to see the lovely weather. She was just as impressed as I was, and nicely pretended to know exactly what I was talking about when I exclaimed over the "wind in the trees, and a blue, blue sky and sunshine!!!". It had just poured down big drops of rain for a little bit too so everything was washed, fresh and cool.
 I asked Lisl (who was sitting at the picnic table with her babies, soaking it all in) when I carried the first load out, if she had any idea how blessed we are. On days like today it always amazes me how I can be so happy when I know so many people who have big, hard things they're facing. Had to think of my cousin and her husband who are going through something very very hard and unfathomable to me, doesn't seem quite fair that I get this much happiness. I'd gladly give them my happy for a while. May God bless them richly with His joy.
This evening we went over to the Airport Plaza (a mall) to meet Mae Wahn for the evening. Twas a lovely, wonderful, amazing evening. There is a link at the bottom of this post to the pictures on Lisl's blog.
 We went inside the mall to eat pizza. Pizza Company has the best pizza. If ever you come to Chaing Mai you should definitely try it. I'd tell you that you should try certain Thai foods too, but I can't ever remember what they're called. Let alone spell the names correctly! :) I think the one I'm going to miss the most though is just plain old chicken and sticky rice. It's comfort food. It makes your heart content and happy. And the only way to eat it is sitting Indian style on the floor, in a circle with good friends.
I think perhaps when I get home I'm going to make it for the youth group and make them sit on the floor in a circle to eat it. :)
Okay, back off the rabbit trail, to the mall... All down the middle of the mall there are a bunch of college-aged kids wrapping a carousal, a ferris wheel, and something else, (I don't remember what the other thing was) in florist blocks. And they have buckets and buckets of hundreds of flowers and ceder, waiting to completely cover them with. The cedar and flowers are real too, the smell made me miss the cabin.
 There is a food festival going on outside of the mall too right now. There are lots and lots and lots of food booths. You go and pick what you'd like to eat and either take it home to eat, or sit right down there at one of the 100 or 200 or so little round, yellow, tables and eat it. Dru and I picked out some Sushi to take home.  The Sushi was a first for me. And yes I liked it! : ) Although I'd be great with it not having an aftertaste.
 Lisl and Dru have the babies tucked into bed and I should head that way too.
 Here is the link to Lisl's blog.
God is very good to me! -Frank
 Quote of the day (taken from Explorers of the Nile): "We let the streams flow on and do not inquire whence they rise, or whither they flow". -Chief Kesembe
 I'm not sure why that phrase in particular caught my eye at first. But I've been thinking about it since.  How often do we need to take it in simple faith that God loves to bless us. And learn to just "let the stream flow on and not inquire whence it rises, and whither it flows". I think too often we feel we have to earn God's blessings and know why we're getting them. God simply loves to bless us. 

The Tourist and The Tree

            (This story is not related to The Princess and the Pea)

                                                                   ~ Francis R Graber~

I love Wisconsin but I have a couple terrible problems with it. For instance, everywhere you look there are trees, dogs, and cows. It’s bad, very bad.

   I was walking along reading my newspaper this morning, “Loose cow on 42”nd street was chased by neighborhood dogs.”, and BOOM, I ran into a tree!

  Not only do you have tree’s, you have sneaky little tree’s, the kind that you run into and get slapped in the face with. You turn around, fist flying, ready to defeat the foe, and discover a what? A tree!

  I really think that native northerners have some sort of tree radar built into them.

You know, “beep, beep, beep, BEEP”.

 None of you bother to tell the tourist where they could get one though. You’re full of information about the latest bear invasion, who shot the biggest white tailed deer, and who caught the latest whopper of a musky on Lac Courte Oreilles. But do you tell us about getting a tree radar? Na, you think, let ‘em die.

  I walked into a tourist shop the other day. “Voices of the North” or something like that was the name. Guess what hit me in the face, (figuratively this time, good thing too, I’d probably have sued).  A post card with “If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?” written across it in big bold letters. These things hurt my feelings!

   How would you like if you’d visit Hawaii and walk into your first tourist shop and see something like that? No, never mind, you don’t have feelings.

   I take that back, you all seem to have a thing about dogs. Little tiny dogs, big dogs, ugly dogs, dog’s that you look at twice to decide if you know what species they’re from, yeah, all kinds of dogs. You also have a thing with letting them run loose.

   I jumped out of my car the other morning at an old farm house to ask if I could take a picture of their back pasture. And I declare I heard someone sneeze, “sic ‘em”, loud and clear, don’t ask me why they didn’t bother to call off their dog.  Then suddenly this dog, this HUGE dog, came galloping around the corner of the porch. I saw that he was headed in for the kill and I took off for my car.

   It was a long lane and there was a huge mud puddle in the middle of it so I’d parked my car and walked the rest of the way in. As I was running I suddenly remembered this puddle and veered to the left to avoid ruining my 300$, specially bought for WI, hiking boots.   

   I have a word of warning to all tourists, never, ever, veer.

 Remember those trees? Well the granddaddy of all trees was watching this whole display and decided to come get a closer look. And we both happened to be going in the same direction.

 I now have a brand new nose and a cast on my left arm for everybody here to sign. I also have a new pair of pants. That dog must have been pretty hungry.

 I do not have a thing for dogs. I hate trees.

And you have snow! The kind that is cold! I’m not a very big fan of snow. I like when it’s in its proper places, on the north and south poles where I can look at pictures of penguins and polar bears serenely playing in it. But if you ask me it does NOT belong in the USA.

 Neither do I like to step out of my nice warm house into that freezing stuff.

The other day I went outside and suddenly my flip-flop shod feet were frozen solid, rock hard solid. And as if that wasn’t enough I slipped on the icy doorstep and went flying lickety-split down the street.

 I do NOT like redheaded boys. They laugh at tourists who are flying down icy, snow covered streets in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. I DO like redheaded little girls. They beat merrily on little boys heads with hockey sticks. I find this to be very, very funny.

It makes me happy.

 When I have kids of my own I’m going to bring them up here sometime and have them show you how to properly treat a tourist and a new comer.

  One time when I was a little boy my folks decided to take me up to MN for a year. I tried to convince them that I was happy right where I was but they must have decided that a year of sheer torture would be good for me because we left three days later.

 I’m afraid they didn’t realize what a dark and horrible memory that year would be for me.  Neither did they have any suspicion as to how much money they would end up paying for my psychological help for the next few years. On the other hand they probably knew about the doctor’s bill’s they would have for my broken limbs. They always did say that I was the clumsiest kid around.

  The neighbor hood children were husky Norwegians who liked nothing better than picking on poor unsuspecting little new comers. Unless it was putting tacks in the teachers chairs, or watching their younger siblings lick the silo ladder at 20 below zero.

  My first introduction to their type of humor was Hans asking me if I’d ever been cow tipping. Considering the fact that I’d never even seen a real live cow, let alone “tipped” one, I had to admit that I had not. 

 He invited me over night the next night and told me to bring a sleeping bag and flashlight with. When I asked him if I should bring a tent too he smirked at me and said “what, think you can fit a cow in it?”.  I turned beet red and hightailed it home.

 The next day I came to school trembling with fear and feeling slightly nauseated. The nausea part got worse when I found out that he’d invited half the school to come see the new kid go cow tipping.

 That night after supper the boys all dug out their sleeping backs and flashlights and headed out to the back pasture. Hans’ Dad had built a campfire out there and we sat around telling spooky stories till about midnight…  A lil’ after that one of the boys said, “hey Hans, there's a cow over there”. I looked up with big eye’s to behold not a docile cow like the pictures showed, but a hippo, a very large hippo. 

 This hippo was standing chewing her cud quietly and she looked as if let alone, she would stay on her side of the pasture. My nausea came very close to causing me to throw up when I heard that cow tipping was meant literally. I was to walk up to the hippo, and push her over. “Only takes a little shove”.

 I took my flashlight bravely in hand and headed out across the field, the other boy’s lights following me as I went. I’m proud to say that I did not scream loud enough for the boys to hear when I stepped in the first “cow pie”, I’m afraid I did scream pretty loudly though when I stepped in the thistle, and then again when I shone my light over towards the hippo and discovered that there was not only one, but millions of hippos watching me as I made my long and painful journey across that field.

  Hippos do not tip over easily. It took a very hard shove to get any sort of reaction other than an unhappy moo from her… When she finally did react it was by slapping her tail in my face and giving me a hard kick at the same time.

 I toppled on the ground with a howl, leaped to my feet, and began flying across the field towards the distant fire. Cows can fly. They can fly very fast, and they prefer traveling in herds. 

 The boys by the fire had commenced a sort of shrieking laughter that reminded me horribly of the laughter they were describing in the spooky stories. That and the Indian war jig they were dancing around the fire combined with the flying hippos was enough to send me into a state of complete hysteria. 

 Mom and Dad had a hard time talking the psychiatrist out of enrolling them as well when they told him the story a few months later.

 However, the point of this meeting isn't to discuss my dark and miserable youth. 

 It’s to discuss you, ahem. (Drum roll please!)

 How many of you read blogs and don’t comment? Okay, let me re-word that.

I’d like everyone to please close your eyes. Now. I wanna see a show of hands.

Ah, I thought so… Bother. This is going to call for several more evenings worth of meetings. 

Taking Steps

Today was a count-your-happy-things sort of day for me.

<> The quick smile at a girl my age as we zoomed down the same road. Her's was just as big.
<> The happy conversation with Mae Wahn while sitting on her floor and looking at old pictures. She told me a little bit about when she was younger. She first went to Bangkok to find a job when she was my age, younger maybe. She said she was 18. That sounds big and scary to me. Wow. She had relatives in Bangkok though, so that helped.
<> Pii Phone stopped in this evening and asked if I'd like to go with her to the place she works. So we hopped onto the motor-bike with Halla in-between and went. It was fun to get out and see. After we got back we (Dru's and I) packed up a cake and ice-cream and went over to her house for an hour.
<> I had two different Thai people look at me with surprise when heard that my name was Frank. I thought that was kinda funny because none of the others knew it was a boy's name. "It's a good thing to have a different name." :) Yeah, I've always kinda gotten a kick out of the fact that it's a boys name.
 Today, amidst the enjoyment of Thai smiles it hit me hard how much I'm missing the English ones. (A huge thank-you to the two Sarah's who took the time to talk to me today, you have no idea how much that meant!) Lisl asked me if I'd like to go over and spend a few days with Sarah Brown and sit in on some IGo classes this week... I might. But it sounds scary to me.
Which is odd. Because I'm the girl who hopped on a motor-bike with a Thai lady I've only seen a few times, and we only understand a few words of each others languages, without hesitation. And thoroughly enjoyed myself.
 I think ultimately it comes to acceptance. The Thai people have been kind and friendly and interested in me. To the American kids I'm just another American.
 I think it's easy for people (including myself) to forget to look beyond the happy face, the name, how many siblings they have, and if they've been to Thailand before. And think about where that person is in life and what their needs might be.
  Sitting in church today, soaking in the happy fact that God has shown the way for a step in my life, it suddenly occurred to me that I need to keep moving forward. Life isn't about taking a step, then stopping in your tracks and glorying in that fact. It's about taking a step, thanking the Lord, and taking another.
 I was praying, and asking about the next step, and I think I discovered today that one of my next steps is learning to notice the needs of others more, and better. I'm a talker, and I do allot of it. But how often do I ask the other person how they are, really truly, deep inside.  Holding someone's hand as they take the next step can mean the world to them. 

Things I've Learned Today

  1. Thai sun is very sunshiny... watches that will cause odd stripes on one's arm (should one happen to get a sunburn), should not be worn when one is planning to spend their morning driving about.
2. Elephant's heads are prickly.
3. Elephants do not scare me any more than horses ever did. I find this to be odd... (horses impress me with their size, but I am not scared of them).
4. Thai countryside is gloriously lush and beautiful.
5. When one wants to get the very best juice one should go to the little road side shop in Mae Wahn's village and ask for naam sap-bpa-rot (pineapple juice).
6. Riding in the back of a truck (after a coffee break at an air conditioned coffee shop) with your sister (and you happen to be a WI logger's girls), holds joys closely akin to chocolate and caramel.
6. (Yes, I realize I used six twice, this is just the other half of the first six). How to spell caramel.
7. When one gets home and washes off all of the sweat, one feels very happy deep within one's being and working in the yard on a sunshiny day makes a person feel gloriously spoiled.
8. The neighbor's college aged boy is home for a two weeks. He speaks enough English to make you nervous about talking, about him, in front of him, to your sister.
9. When one is climbing about de-limbing a tree it is best to make quite sure that your left hand is far away from the saw... It is also wise to not allow said saw to bounce. It can cause rather hamburgery looking cuts... even if the cut does happen to be small and virtually insignificant.
10. Bpaa Duan shall never allow me to forget that she named me Ky-Mook. (I'm fine with this, as long as she keeps remembering to call me Ky-Mook several times in a row just to make me smile and nod, I'm happy. It means she is forgetting to ask me to count to ten for her). I love Bpaa Duan btw, and shall miss her when I go home. She's been kind and friendly to me, beyond what the average middle aged American would have been to an 18 year old Thai girl.
11. Lisl makes marvelous pancakes. (I actually knew this before, but it was firmly reestablished in my mind tonight).
12. One of Jimmy's sons is back. He is small. I shall wait to remove him until tomorrow.
13. God is very good to me!

Critters, Thai Study, Ladies Meeting, And The Market

*Critters

There is a cross-eyed frog staring at me. I find this disturbing. And I’m seriously considering going over and turning him face-about. I don’t care if it is only a toy frog.

Jube and his friends found the frog who had been making tropical noises outside of my window last evening. I didn’t hear any noises last night. If you can’t figure out why, you haven’t been around little boys very much. The funny part is that Jube still has some sort of frog residue on his hands. It’s black, and acts like pitch. But it’s not really sticky. Odd.

They found a Tokay gecko too. “When the Tokay bites, they often won't let go for a few minutes or even up to an hour or more, and it is very difficult to remove without causing harm to the gecko. For this reason, it is considered to be best as an ornamental animal for experienced reptile owners.”-Wiki

The Tokay is a very large gecko, the males can get up to 20 inches long. Some of them are a brilliant blue, with bright orange spots. The one the boys found is dead now.

I killed a large cockroach, with bug spray, and a plastic cup. While Jube stood by and said in comforting tones (to the large cockroach). "That’s okay, it will be all right. That’s okay...".

I think I’ve removed all of Jimmy’s family from my room for the time being. This I love.

*Thai Class

Yesterday when Pii Ang got here we discovered that I’d studied the wrong lesson. This was disturbing to me. I’m not a confidant student by far, and studying the wrong lesson is very addling to my poor brain. On the whole I’ve really enjoyed it though. Right now I’m not sure how much farther I want to go with it, since I pretty much know everything thing I’m actually going to use. So we shall see what happens with that.

*Ladies Meeting

Lisl and I went to ladies meeting this morning. Twas very nice. Joyce had a lovely table set when we walked in the door and a yummy breakfast prepared. My Mom would describe Joyce’s house as “a lovely, gracious, home”. And it’s every bit true.

The ladies are lovely women too. I was sitting there hearing the talk going on. And it occurred to me that ladies like these are the role models for we young “plain” girls. Gracious women who’s goal in life is to stand behind their men, be encouragers to all, and glorify the Lord.  I’ve had virtually no youth interaction since being here and its been a growing time for me in realizing how many trivial things there are that I as a young person am inclined to cling to.

*Market

We all piled into/onto the truck the other day, dropped the babies off at Mae Wahns, and Dru went to a coffee shop, while Lisl and I went fabric shopping and explored the market. It was one of those times when you suddenly discover that you’re completely spoiled and life is good. I got a beautiful piece of blue fabric and some presents for home people.

We found roses and orchids and gerbera daisies to make bouquets with… While slurping two different stands versions of strawberry shakes. Mine was too better Lisl!(Mine had a distinct gelatin flavor, this is not a bad thing. I’m the person who always liked the grape flavored children's Motrin).  And when we were done we went and found Dru hiding in an air conditioned coffee shop. Eating cheese cake. And we informed him in one unanimous breath that we wanted double cheese burgers and fries. So we went and found a McDonalds. We drove about on one-way back roads, going the wrong direction, and pretending that we couldn’t read any of the signs. Because we’re farangs of course, so we don’t know what a one-way sign looks like, ahem.

We found a parking lot, and after the gentleman in a uniform made Dru get back in and park between the lines *giggle*, we walked through the ritzy hotel and finally found a McDonalds. If ever you decide that you’re sick of “gross fast food cheeseburgers and fries” try going for a month without any form of beef. That meal was heaven on earth. : )

So goes my life in Thailand. God is very good to me! –Francis