Watchng ;paint dry

March 4 2017

The painters finished on Thursday afternoon. The first two days they took two hour lunch breaks and by Thursday they were desperate to finish so they came early and skipped lunch and managed to leave by 4 or 4:30.

The house looks great. There is nothing like a fresh coat of paint to make a room sparkle. Now we are waiting for the oil based paint to fully dry and harden. It was used on all the wood: baseboards, doors and door frames, two sections of the counter top, cabinets and shelves. All our kitchen stuff is either on the dining room table, the bar or the guest bedroom bed. We have done very little cooking and for the most part we have eaten all meals except breakfast in restaurants or small eateries where you sit outside by a cart. There is no need to make ourselves crazy by trying to cook under these circumstances. Going out to eat here is usually $2.-$6 total. The other night we stumbled across a Swiss owned restaurant.  The next night we went there for dinner and I managed to spend $ 24 with us each having a soup or salad, a pasta dish and we shared a bowl of gelato. We will experience sticker shock when we return to the US in April. Yesterday we had a framed painting we have here re-matted required the frame shop take the backing off, cut a new mat and reassembled the backing and they replaced a broken hanger piece all for $7.50 total. HA!

March 9

It took seven days for the oil based paint to cure so that we could put our kitchen back together. I couldn’t believe how long it took but alas, it is done and I am thankful. We made short work of putting everything back in place. We celebrated by having a grand meal: crepes stuffed with fresh sautéed spinach and goat cheese. We had left over batter so the next night we had crepes with sautéed bananas, Nutella and maple syrup. We are not exactly suffering here in Thailand. I had dropped to 132 pounds so this will put some pounds back on. Bummer.

March 11, 2017

Tomorrow, Sunday, we leave at 6:15 p.m. for nine days in Malaysia. We will take a train from Phetchaburi where we live and head south. We change trains at the border, early Monday morning then go to a town called Butterworth where we will get off the train and take a ferry to Penang, an island and stay in George Town for four nights. From there we fly to Melaaca, about two hours south of Kuala Lumpur for two nights then to KL for one night. We will fly back to southern Thailand and then take a train back to Phetchaburi, arriving around 2:00 a.m.  We will travel with our friends Kay and Bill who live about five hours south of us. He’s American and she is Thai.