The children gone

Tau, his wife Duan and the two children Joi and Deam left at 3am on Joi's truck on his regular trip to market at Ban Doon. From there they will make their way by several buses to his new place of employment. It is school holidays for the children and this is a form of vacation.
Quiet without them. Just Waree and me most of the time although as it is Saturday Waree's father watched kick boxing on TV for a while.

In the morning we went to the market at one of the temples. Many ladies stopped to talk to Waree about her being up and about less than a week after having a baby. In fact she only spent one day in bed and we went shopping on the way home from hospital. There was great concern that Waree had not had the fire treatment.

It is customary for women after childbirth to spend one to two weeks by a hot fire. I have seen one lady whose bed was above the fire and another in a small outside enclosure beside a large fire of glowing charcoal. In both cases they were sweating profusely and it must have been very uncomfortable.

I can only assume that this treatment may help by stimulating blood flow but I have Googled the subject and cannot find any reference to postpartum heat treatment. We asked Waree's specialist about this and he laughed and said that the local people like to do this but it doesnt do any good.

For the first time since the disk crash I managed to start doing some painting. I want to do some vineyard scenes in oil pastels to coincide with the Artist's Palette article about my work. I got as far as a thumbnail sketch and a rough pencil drawing. I have to work downstairs as I need more room to paint but in the afternoon it became very humid so I didn't get much done.

In the evening we went to the farm. The florescent light which was hanging over the water for the fish to feed on insects attracted to the light has been moved to the bank over two sheets of corrugated iron sloping down into buckets. Thousands of insects buzzed around the light dropping into the water in the buckets.

Catching insects


Waree told me that in the morning they would sort through the insects and select the bigger ones which they could sell as food for as much as 500 baht (about $15) the rest would be fed to the fish.

Earlier at Joi's shop I had seen Waree's sister Rat sorting through a bucket of insects with Joi's children. I have eaten insects before and they taste OK but I don't like the scaly bits. Its like eating prawns (shrimps) with their shells on.


Eating insects