Toy Boy

I've been living here for 20 years and swimming almost every day, and I'd never bother with a pool heater. For the few weeks of the year when the water might be a bit chilly for our tastes - and this 'Winter' there wasn't a single day in that category as far as I'm concerned - it's much more economical to just buy a wet suit. Or just take the philosophical view and embrace the joys of cold water swimming, it's been proven to have many health benefits... ...including improving your libido, so the missus will be happy, lol.

it seems the mayor has a cunning plan to get tourists to spend more time and money in the city - you simply prevent them from ever leaving! lol

Light rain in South Pattaya twice this morning, too, though it didn't last for very long and there were no puddles left on the road, so I'm wondering if I can cancel this afternoon's watering duty in the garden? I just went for a drive down to Na Jomtien and, looking at the water standing down there, they seem to have had quite a lot more.

Here's another Thai craft beer, this one is supposed to be a Helles lager. I admit that I don't have much experience of Helles beers, you don't really see much of them outside Germany, I guess, so credit to them for trying. My best memory of the Helles genre is the Kuchlbauer Helles, which is a really great pint, very clean and rounded and pleasant. This Thai attempt was OK, but it had a bit of a chemical tang to it. My taste buds may have just been playing up when I drank it, and I'd be willing to try it again, but it was far from cheap at 139 Baht for a half-litre can from Villa, so I'm not rushing out to buy some more.

Think about it, you'll get it.... lol

Yep, and the GF seems to have even greater debt woes than usual and, being the sensitive, supportive type that I am, I told her to fix it herself, I'm not bailing her out again. The gardener wanted to borrow 40K Baht off me a few months ago as her new office supplies business needed capital. I said no. Then a week ago she was trying to borrow money from me to get her phone fixed, and again I said no. So she's got two businesses at least that I know of, yet she can't afford to get her phone repaired? Of course, in a country of 70 million, a couple of anecdotal tales like that mean nothing, but they didn't used to be as disorganised and insolvent. My guess is they're listening to complete crap advice on social media and losing their money that way. Which on its own is irrelevant, but scale it up by the millions of people who might be in similar situations and the banks and country could have a serious problem.

There seems to be a trend in extra-strong stouts these days. The Lion Stout from Sri Lanka is a good drink but, at 8.8%, it's far too strong for my ageing liver. Then I noticed another one a few days back, made here in Thailand I think, and that was something like 6.8% AFAICR. I've not tried it yet, and I haven't seen Coopers stout here yet.

I noticed this one in Friendship, it was the last bottle so I thought I'd give it a try. Apparently, Coopers is a well-established brewery from Adelaide. Not really my cup of tea, to be honest, a bit same-same.

Happy days!

With the roads in Britain these days, there's no need to go to the beach for a dip this summer...

The largest lakes compared by size.

Check the map, traffic can now only go south down Beach Road towards Na Jomtien.

I don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but Jomtien Beach Road is now one way (heading south) from the Dongtan cop shop to Soi Chaiyapruek, while they start digging it all up for the next 2 years or so. Most of the side streets have also been made one-way, so you can only drive to Immigration on Soi 5 from Second Road now, though I expect a lot of people will still try to get there from the beach lol.

I tried a can of this Thai craft rice lager from Friendship, not cheap at 95 Baht, and memorable mainly for what a mess of tastes it was, no balance at all. I'm unclear if it's a 100% rice brew or, like Beer Lao Gold (one of my favourites), a lager made mainly from malted barley with a malted rice adjunct. And they didn't show much imagination in selecting the rice variety, just off-the shelf Thai jasmine rice or Khao Horm Malee, at least the people at Beer Lao did some homework and used a specialised rice, Khao Kai Noy. Just because jasmine rice might go down well with your pad gra prao for tea, but that doesn't mean it's good for making beer, lol.

Bird watching mostly, especially the tropical birds that have somehow lost all their plumage and engage in an exotic mating dance, lol.

I saw that when Larry posted it, but it's only for Android devices and I'm watching it on a (locked-down) Samsung TV. I know I could probably install it on my phone and then cast the ad-free YT video from the phone to the TV, but this stuff is supposed to make your life simpler... lol

... and just to make sure people interested don't convert to the wrong religion:

About 15 years ago, I did the Death March route in Bataan. First I visited Corregidor while in Manila, then headed up to AC for a week. While there, I hired a taxi and we drove down to Mariveles, then slowly retraced the route all the way back up to the monument at Tarlac, stopping off at anything interesting along the way. I did it at the same time of year as the real thing, in April when the sun gets directly overhead (Pattaya residents will understand the reason for choosing that date, lol), and it was bloody hot, even in an air-conditioned taxi. The intention was to head up to Camp O'Donnell the next day but the driver didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I ran out of time on that trip, but the next year I returned and found Camp O'Donnell in Capas. The driver the year before didn't have a clue what I meant as it's now called the Capas National Shrine. I'd intended completing the whole thing by heading across to San Fernando (if you want to know more about that then watch the excellent 2005 film 'The Great Raid') but again I ran out of time, and that's still on my to-do list. The problem with AC is that there are so many distractions... I was surprised nobody was running tours to visit the route, but at that time there were lots of kidnappings going on, with many police road blocks on the peninsula, and it wasn't safe to be driving after dark. Doing it myself and piecemeal like that was quite expensive and time-consuming, but I'm glad I made the effort. The whole route from Mariveles up the Bataan peninsula has a special road marker every kilometre along it.

Nope, only that the adverts seem to be getting longer and longer. I never minded 5 seconds of compulsory watching of the ads and then skip to the video, but now it mostly seems to be a fixed 20 seconds. With all the adverts during videos too, I've given up on it, downloaded around a hundred music videos from Bit Torrents and stuck them on an external HDD to watch, blissfully advert-free. I enjoy watching a bit of music on the TV before I go to sleep, but so many manic Thai adverts on YT were doing my head in.

Found this on the Wales Online website... our much-loved Dear Leader, lol