ouch!

...the rains are abaiting and the insects make up for lost time, it seems.
The electricity is still feeble and slightly soaked. The unmistakable sound of a new electric fire- the problems in the kitchen had been solved by polly my neighbor's son: he learned how ' to be politician'  from the ngo's- according to his brother who is learning english, but somehow can't get the difference in sound between politician and electrician (or electricity for that matter: you have problem politics? he asks, when i come looking for his brother...)
well anyways there was that sound again,but by now it is far too dark to trouble the 'politician' so i just turned off the outside lights that were making that hissing sound and hoped for the best...
and it worked - until i went to the toilet. dark there of course, but i know my way around found the pot and sat down .there must have been something on the seat.... ouch!!! i must have sat down on an ant.. ouch... aouch again! this is NOT an ant! no it was not, it was one of those mean 2 inch big  and very painful cambodian hornets...that i flattened with my sorry hide, and it took revenge. ouch, and i am out of hystamines.. and in a foul mood, it hurts!!!
yet another fun night in paradise!!!

high winds, feeble sun..

..after a rather scary night, the winds are still high, but a feeble sun is trying to break through the clouds...
not much damage luckily, apart from some of my passionfruit vines beeing ripped off the roof and a small electrical fire in the kitchen nothing seems amiss. The river did go up a little bit, but not too much and is receeding slowly now.
due to the electrical` pericles there is no current in my kitchen and i am separated from my kitchen motors for now. Moni is supposed to fix it, but has not shown up yet....
everything is dripping wet, and as soon as a ray of two of sun have made some inroads a quick shower drenches everything anew...
Seems that the storm did very much damage in the lowlands of cambo and flooded at least the komong thom area, but that is about all we know yet.

waiting for the cyclone to hit....

cyclone Ketsana is about to hit da nang in less than two hours...That is still quite a`ways from here, but we do feel the storm all right already: torrential rains, fierce gusts of wind that do not howl but screech, its cold and wet and the river is- very- high again....there is nothing one can do but batten down the hatches- provided one has them- and wait and hope for the best....strangely enough i did have customers for lunch and have a reservation for tonight (provided they can made it down of course) seems the weather creates an urge of impulse for want of a better word, in westerners for... comfort food. so comfort food it is....

..and the jungle stands in ominous silence?....

it has been a busy week at the restaurant, loads of fun customers, and i kept trotting at an if not brisk at  at least a fun pace.
 today the rains are coming down again as if there will never be sun again, and the stream of guests has dried up again so to speak.
But.. i am quite tired, so i will go to bed early.... and sleep: if  nature will let me that is...
you must all have read at some time of other,those wonderful books where the hero/ and or/ heroine gets to spend the night in the jungle- involontarily most of the time. and the text will go; ' as the night falls, the jungle stands in ominous silence' - or some such... Are you kidding??? somebody- the writer in this case has not done their homework). the jungle, silent??  the jungle never, never shuts up (nor the creatures that live within, as it may be. the case.) there are always the crickets, of course: chrischris chris chrischrischris and so on. that is only one kind of course; the next cricket  goes 'chrickchrik- chrick chrick'- and the next one sounds like a cellphone, the old fashioned kind going off- all night . then there is the sound of small creatures getting killed by bigger creatures: squeek, sceetch-craaw.!! as in : game over. then there are the frogs: they sound like a myriad of symphony orchestras tuning up( all night).: brooh. boon brrooh boon... (quite soothing actually)
Add some gibbons in the distance- those are a noisy lot: bobblegobble ouuukouuk, brraaah! and some insistent night bird on some mission ofrother going: boon, booon- boon- boon. all night....
ad the wind, the river and the odd ouwl Huueehhuuhee!
ominous silence it is not....- it's a bloody racket!!

 I guess it is time to get back into the kitchen and work....and I will need customers, that is for sure... am still hurting, and think i would like to take a break in Phnom Penh

I' like to imagine Iddy sitting own little lotus flower, attentively looking up at Buddha. And Buddha will patiently explain: wait for nine days and rest, then your soul will be free to roam the worlds for ninety nine days and on the hundredth day you will be reborn, and as you only brought joy to the world you may choose who you want to be. And Iddy will say really? Truly? And Buddha will smile and say, yes it is true, and Iddy will give a little chirp. wag her tail and happily jump  so that lotus flower will shake ever so slightly, and then she will curl up at Buddha' s feet for seven days.

RIP,iddy.

one does think, as one gets older that one gets immune to grief, or at least that one can put it into its place and leave it there and let it wither away by lack of attention. not so, if only...
iddy died last night in my arms, and i can not stop crying...its just a dog, i try to tell myself, but that is not what is- was, not at all.She was a character, a personality and very much a part of our life here. just growing up, beginning to be a person, and then there were the things she stood for; the two years or so, that i cooked for bhp, and iddy, my treat for completing my little share of the project (well, i hope),a reminder that- what? that it can be done, than one can triumph over adversity, logistics enz. and have fun doing so....
i can not look anywhere without thinking that i will see her, skipping about, chasing a chicken, barking at a bill collector, or hiding one of her many treasures carefully behind the jackfruit tree. her reddish fur a streek of colour in the rainy season's green as she decides to' do something' about our neighbors cow..
iddy was proof that one 'can run away' with the circus' and get away with it, but in the end: the circus runs away with us, and make no mistake.

Iddy Troubles

literally overnight our little Iddy seems to have hit puberty and has become quite an insufferable little menace: it had been raining for days and days without let up. Needless to say, the dogs` who hate water in any form or size stayed in as much as possible and began to suffer from something akin to cabin fever, and of course they did blame me for the rain: as far as they are concerned it is my task to stop that wet foolishness outside.
Every night I had to get up several times to check out the river and make sure that we were not in any danger from flooding and subsequent drowning. ( That in turn did wonders for my disposition, and left me pretty tired too). So when after several nights of this I had to get up yet again, barely conscious I crawled outside, no the river had not yet gone over the rim, good, back to the house close the door, grab a towel- the last dry one- and back to bed and to sleep. Ohh my Iddy is making a racket... took me several minutes to figure out that the noise came from outside! When I opened the door- feeling terribly guilty ,of course, in she marched, ecstatically happy to seem me to begin with, and then: she started kicking her back heels, the way male dogs do when they want to make a very strong point to other male dogs.. and she kicked her legs and kicked them and then some more..reminding me vaguely of a kid trying out four letter words.
The next day she really started kicking her heels sending mud, earth grass and dog turds flying every which way. And she kept at it too. Jarring old Elvis's patience who happens to think that kicking heels is his prerogative. Does Iddy have a case of gender confusion, we wonder?
Next thing we know is she starts following bill, back to the coffee shop when he comes to do his Internet here in the mornings. Bill who is a gentles soul and then some, will retrace his steps down the hill as soon as he discovers Iddy and deliver her back home (actually Dt did her one better there: she went through a phase when she would stow away in my customer's suv s, just to pop up on the seat next to the driver miles from home on some difficult jungle stretch forcing them to turn the car around to deliver her back home. Fortunately Dt outgrew that one.).
Of course, Iddy is smarter than all of us combined, and once she figured out that bill will deliver her back post haste, she left before bill, who found her at the coffee shop, bleeding from a tear under her eye, obviously she had gotten into a scrape and gotten roughed up pretty good. When I arrived at the shop to take her home, there she was, leashed, proudly grinning her best Mona Lisa grin, all but willing to go back home. Fought me tooth and nail on the motor bike, and is now doing time on an -albeit long- leash....I do not want to get unduly worried about her new behavior, but the question is is...how` much should I let her get away with... and ,I can see Elvis's patience wearing thin, as she kicks him wakes him up pulls his ear and does her very best to provoke him.... Dt is not much help in this she looks on, not unlike a proud mother who's brat can do no wrong......

Iddy is really on a protest jag.. and is driving us all quite crazy; first thing this morning she waited till I was in the bathroom, truly at the point of no return – me thus-( about 6 am, we do get up early here) and she took off.. Elvis followed her to the gate and when I finally made it there, he said to me; she went that way, she can't do that!! well she did, so i phoned Bill and sure enough she had arrived at the coffee shop. ( this is dangerous, she can not just wander around like that, there is traffic and the very real danger of her getting stolen:let's face it, she looks expensive and she is still not very massive and it is a holiday and people need money...)Bill had leashed Iddy, he had no string, so he used a piece of electric cable. When I came up to the coffee shop Iddy had stripped most of the cable of its insulation, feverishly working on the rest. She was not very happy to see me. So I went to the market, when I was finished there I picked her up, tierd to get her onto the moto; she did not want to come and fought me tooth and nail- scratched me up really good. When I finally got her home, I did leash her, and she still managed to pick a good fight with Elvis- probably for telling on her- now Elvis has a limp, Iddy is foul mooded- still leashed – and a Vietnamese ceramic( majolica) elephant- 4 feet high, a veritable monument to bad taste that I dearly loved -lays in smithereens....
About to despair, I thought back' :Elvis was no better at that age!!! there was all those times when he stole mangoes at the little corner market in snookyville, and he would streak down the road with a mango in his mouth followed by a formidable and very enraged market lady armed with her flip flop. And all those times he took off and I searched for hours just to find him sitting in a most disreputable gambling table in one if those renegade gambling parlors watching the crap games..
..or he would be crapping right on the garden path leading towards Rodolph very upscale restaurant next door- actually we always enjoyed that one, Rodolph being an asshole.
Soo.. Elvis should be talking..
so, well,he turned out all right, I remind myself time and again... but all you out there any bright ideas???? please, i` am a bit- now that is an euphemism - worried!!!!

...and it shall be sustainable...

The other day I heard a wonderful; story:
in the fairy world of local` ngos the word sustainable is very fashionable and gets used in every second sentence' everything has to become; sustainable ( that ngo's and sustainable are about as oximoronic as America and culture seems to bother them not.)
So there was this very rich ngo ,who invited another very rich ngo to watch the latest sustainable project they had just finished: a well (sustainable) and a filter installation (sustainable) to clean the village's water to make it all sustainable... the well was beautiful” I.e it was pretty and it actually worked, I.e. There was water coming out of it. Now they went to the filter installation (sustainable) housed in a very sustainable hut, pretty local( sustainable) materials and inside the (sustainable) water filter installation: and it worked!.. only the locals had modified it to some spiritual and of course sustainable goal: neatly reassembled the filter installation had become a very ( sustainable) distillery,` happily churning out the local moonshine... and so the project was finally, truly sustainable, (although the ngo s didn' t think this funny at all...)

..half a tea`bag

the rains are still doing their very  best to make our lives as miserable as possible. surprisingly, the guests keep showing up at the restaurant, and most of them, even more surprisingly are absolutely delightfull!!!!
but, there will always be a hair or two in the soup so to speak: today two french ( of course, french) arrived, classic NCV"s ( no commercial values): they ordered two cups of hot water with one(1!) teabag- for half the price- of course. i told them that i do not do half tea bags, one bag p.p. or none. They went for - oh horrors- one tea bag each!!!

rain rain and rain ,and more mud of course

it has been raining now for days on end, the river gets higher and higher and has me worried; it is not yet quite at the door, but it looks like it might be so soon. the wash hangs on the line getitng soaked and more soaked and begins to rot, garmets that have been taken into the house and hang from many places fare not much better....
we all are , wet and freezing, depressed and wondering if we will ever see the sun again: or have a shadow for that matter, aww, well ,we can always- as a form of compensation- admire - like narcissus-our bedraggled appearances in the many newly emerged rivers, puddles and streams.. 
strangely; the restaurant is doing very well indeed- i should have no customeres at all, but for some undefinable reason, a steady steream of tourists brave the rain, mud and slippery garden path- the odd one gobsmakking  onto the ground.. and they want' food, food and more food' . where do they come from? i do not know.. but they are nice people too, and the restaurant is more fun than it has been in a long time....
meanwhile the river rises and it feels a bit  like dancing on a vulcano....

three is a crowd

The relationship between DT and little Iddy has always been, well, guarded at best. Now it seems that the ‘murder of the mutt’ changed all that… the ladies seem to have bonded, paw in paw they lay on the couch, undoubtedly hurting from the fight- anybody who ever beat up anybody will know what I mean- but there they sleep, snoring and farting and totally happy. but , three is a crowd and poor Elvis is decidedly not well come in this new feminist structure, he looks on, snorts ambles over to me, lays his head on my knee and mourns with a sigh and a barely concealed whine….( I tell him never to mind those bitches, and pet him, and he almost believes me..)

When Iddy is not sharing the couch with DT, she decided that I need protection. So there she lays in front of the so very steep stairs that leads from the loft to the restaurant. And it does get very dark here at night and of course she does not tell me that she is guarding me and lays there... several times now I have been sent flying: into my library- section south east asian history, - plenty of hard covers- ouch…

And Iddy does grow, ever so often I think, that she is small for her age, and barely grows, and then the next morning it seems as if she shot up an inch over night. The collar has been let out to the last notch to accommodate her quadruple chins, and she is almost as high as Elvis, though not nearly as wide nor as heavy.

For a long time she was able to sleep under the tables at the coffee shop, when she got too big for that she moved up onto the footrest/ newspaper shelf under the table. Now, well she still fits but it is a tight one: paws hang out on one side, the tail on the other, then her head goes outboard... needless to say, we all have to hang tightly to our beers while this maneuvering goes on, until finally, she still somehow manages to fit. Still. For how long that will last? We wonder…

aww, life can be nasty out here

..sooner or later, thus had to happen, but still   we all are a bit upset, although each of us for different reasons: me because I fear that the neighbors might be pissed off, Iddy because she thinks she does not get enough credit,   Elvis because he was at home and did not participate and Dt because I did not let her take home what? Our neighbors’ dead dog, the one DT and Iddy sent a better- next incarnation with scary precision and efficiency….

..we were walking down from the coffee shop, just rounding the bent towards my property when one of the neighbors three mutts decided to attack me, I kicked it- Iddy grabbed it by the ear, and Dt let out an almost human screech and just went for it.. And I... let her. (. I still carry the scars from one such attack- enough to prevent me from ever wearing a skirt shorter than ankle length- and they still hurt), and bad person that I am just looked on... in the end i lifted off dt by her collar and reeled iddy in- too late, i think, the dog crawled away and there was a lot of blood, i propelled my beloved renegades home- just to find that all the blood on them- a lot – was not theirs.. and there was almost nothing for me to disinfect…

What now, should I punish my dogs for doing their job? No way, they did exactly what they are supposed to do: take care of their human…. Still, coming from the west I find that principle a bit hard to stomach, I am glad that miserable mutt is gone before it hurts one of my customers, or- another child- he had already bitten a kid, who was just walking by on her way back from school the other day….but still, it was bloody…but as there is no legislation here to prevent any dog in  the streets to harm just anybody just walking by in the street…kids even, and no police will come and do anything about it/ and people refuse to either train or restrain their dogs… well…still….