Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Daily Report: Birthday, BBQ, and Berating Brother

Morning went fine. Leftover chicken and rice for lunch.

Every afternoon, Thai kids get out of school, and head immediately to the internet cafés, where they promptly crash the country's internet by playing online games. Today was particularly bad. I could barely get any work done, and finally gave up at about 5:30.

I really need to get in touch with my ISP and tell them that they need to run a phone line out to my neighborhood that bypasses the 3 monstrous schools (and their closely-orbiting internet cafés) between myself and TOT. We're all on the same DSL line, and it's killing me.


Denny's Beer Barrel Pub takes over as
titleholder of World's Largest Burger
I went out to Bob's BBQ tonight with Pot for dinner. (Pui stayed home drinking beer with Riza.) The restaurant whom Bob supplanted with his own World's Largest Hamburger has returned fire, beating out Bob's 78-pound brute with a 120-pound monster.

I keep thinking that eventually the Guinness World Record people would call the whole large hamburger thing ridiculous, and close the competition... but when you have people with 60-inch fingernails as company, ridiculous comes with the territory, I suppose... and a 120-pound hamburger is fairly reasonable in comparison.

Tonight was Riza's birthday, so we all hung out at her house drinking beer. Pui is becoming addicted to her Giffarine cosmetics selling job. She gets a couple of beers in her, and she just can't stop talking about it. She reads the monthly newsletter again and again, daydreams about making it to Triple Gold Star, and even has a portrait of (what I'm guessing is) the patron saint of Giffarine that she keeps next to her bed.

I only wish I had that much zeal for my own job.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and Riza's party ended when Pui got a phone call telling her that her brother was out getting drunk with the same idiot who had gotten him into trouble with an errant gunshot ricochet last week. To say that Pui was angry would be an understatement. To say that 4 or 5 beers amplified her anger would also be an understatement. She's a quiet little girl with a quiet little voice, but when she yells, she wakes the neighborhood, and she stood outside on the phone, yelling at her family louder than she has ever yelled before.

Of course, after she yelled, she started crying, and just generally lost it. I took her home, took over responsibility for getting Pot ready for bed, and got everybody tucked in for the night.

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