i'm going to try to stop using so many smiley faces and exclamation points in the future

but it's going to be a difficult addiction to overcome. please be patient.

welcome to what will be a very random and hopefully not but probably somewhat snarky post. we salute you and invite you to make yourselves comfortable. notice the optimistic plural pronoun. i wouldn't have to worry about that if i were writing in thai, but, seeing as my thai spelling--and, oh wait, vocabulary--doth suck, i'm stuck with "yourselves."

[interruption: i was just startled by a large toad that collided with my mosquito net. inside my bedroom. last night, our room was home to a 4-inch grasshopper. it has also been known to temporarily house curious birds and astronomically proportioned spiders. still no scorpions, however. yeah, baby.]

first order of business: we are now, officially, "non-immigrants" in thailand, with shiny visa stickers and everything. "non-immigrant" in thailand is code for "immigrant," which sort of makes sense, except for the fact that it doesn't make sense at all. be that as it may, we can now work, legally. nick is choosing to follow that course, while i will probably stick with my shady criminal volunteer aka no-pay pastime (the spelling of this word has always put me in mind of a french meat dish or dessert).

second order of business: we have [finally] purchased my moto. there is a proliferation of adorable motos in northern thailand, my two favorite being this:



and this:



don't even tell me you don't covet the honda. it's totally a sexer, even though i still can't figure out what a sexer is, despite nick's repeated efforts to point out all sexers on the road. somehow i think he would label my application of the term here incorrect, but i don't care.

my new-to-me "honda dream exces" doesn't look at all like either of these fine examples, and it is older than my youngest brother, who is 10, but younger than my youngest sister, who is 15. whoa, weird. heidi's 15? anyway, it is old and black and praying-mantis-shaped and muddy. but none of that matters, because it represents FREEDOM for me, and that FREEDOM is delicious.

plus, the mud isn't its fault. it's just the result of the morning following my purchase, when i went to the farm to look for paw so he could adjust the idle, and i very slowly drove over a ginormous patch of mud that i thought had dried to a brutal crust. it was only half-dry, meaning it wrested control of the front tire from me, and at 5k/h, that means you tip over. like a cow. then, if you're me, you hastily right your now sputtering steed, look about frantically to make sure the farm and surrounding dirt roads really are devoid of nosy neighbors who call your host parents to tattle on you for driving like a maniac (nick's story, not mine--thus far), throw off your shirt to wring out the mud and wipe off your arm, replace your garment with nervous alacrity that results in your using the neck hole as an arm hole by accident, then mount the now silent moto and realize with shock and horror that your knee is BLEEDING. wow, that was one exlamation mark that wanted to happen. then you realize your arm and leg are also leaking some of the offensive evidence, AND you have a burn on your other leg from the exhaust pipe. then you feel like a freaking moron and wonder how you could've possibly scraped yourself up so impressively on very squishy, soft mud. THEN you sneak home and wash yourself a little more thoroughly at the outdoor pump and successfully conceal your really idiotic cow-tipping incident from your already hyper-freaking-out-about-you-driving host parents (i think). gee whiz. oh, and run, shhh. let's keep this our secret, eh?

i debated about revealing my idiocy to the internet world, and, consequently, my parents, but i decided it's okay. because i'm not as bad a driver as this makes me sound; stiff mud is just impossible to drive in and will consequently not become a habit. also, i didn't brace my fall with my left foot, because the mud to my left was most definitely not dry, as it was swimming in green slime, so i would've just slipped and then added a painful splits-induced injury to my tally. in order to quell the nervousness this incident incurred, however, i forced myself to drive to the city today to have lunch with my lover, swap books from the drunk irishman who takes my money so i can enjoy the written word, and buy a better helmet. it's lilac with white stripes. i am so trendy. nick got sick of waiting for me to pick a blanging hat after a while, but i explained that, with such a drab vehicle, i'm entitled--yup, entitled, cuz i'm an uhmerikuhn--to one aesthetic concession. that's exactly what i said, and i was pleased that i used two 3-syllable words in a row. my vocabulary has, admittedly, been a little peaked lately.

equally as thrilling as my newfound independence was the french sandwich stand we found in vientiane (capital of laos, haunt of the visa-runner) last week; not only were these sandwiches unearthily delectible, but they were also half the price of all other foodstuffs in the city. we ate them for breakfast and, at my insistence, again at lunch. this amused the cute lady who sold them, especially after i begged nick to take identical pictures of me eating within 4 hours of each other. and now i won't even post them here as i'd planned, because i don't want to get out from under the mosquito net to fetch the camera card. maybe next time.

speaking of laos, it's fabulous. call me a commie, but aside from the astoundingly high prices--by thai standards, of course--and the, well, lack of anything really to DO, vientiane was the shiz. we rented the tiny moto of the owner of our guest house and cruised about the sleepy little city, except cruise implies that we didn't almost fly off the two-small-for-two-white-people seat 100 times because of truly colossal potholes riddling the way. and it was fun! oops. oh, well, i like that one. so there. ! plus, the national museum was faaascinating. if you are in vientiane, make sure you go. but if you're american, be prepared to feel like a major, erm, prick. totally worth the buck fifty, though, even just to see the ancient history section--they used to bury their dead standing up in giant pots in the middle of a valley! and all these megalithic urns are still there, speckling the fields like alien droppings. go, laos. you were cool.

hey, guess what? i'm actually done talking about myself for tonight. it's 11:30, and i still have to plan my lesson for tomorrow, and my sweet husband is sprawled out on the bed in his clothes, snoring. trying to wake him up for his necessary nighttime shower is as painful as he insists it is to wake me up... at any time... for any reason. what can i say? i like my sleep. which is why i now, finally, bid you all adieu.