Boonie living in a tiny village, if it can be called that

[JustSumGai]

Kok Noi I think, I was told it means small village, an understatement, it's two roads meeting at a T surrounded by many miles of rice and cane.

the last 2 are of the big city Phen :)  Sadly that good food place is no longer there DAMN but they served GOOD stuff.  OH, and the hut they hung out in is knocked down now. "Dad" has an old tuk tuk and he shows up from time to time to collect the massive pile of plastic bottles and other trash that Mom collects, and off they go to turn it into I dunn, a few hundred baht?

 

[JustSumGai]

our palatial bed chamber, view out the front right upper floor window (my fav store upper left), some kinda big Do (Buddhist holiday?), typical dinner, view towards the highway (bout a mile), again towards the store, with across from it a bigger shop, beauty shop and little coffee stand,  oh look! could that be cane burning off? haha, some neighbors (thru my fav fence, bamboo, now it's some crappy cobbled together metal job), the little shop, the bigger one with beauty and coffee shop on right and the ladies sewing circle in front of the beauty shop

[JustSumGai]

they seem to love to hack stuff down, I don't get it, just when a tree or lawn is looking good, it's trimmed back to (death in one case I saw) not much, or hoe'd up.  Don't see many cars here,  lots of work vehicles tho. Dad is lookin pretty ripped for a guy around 70 eh? The bamboo pipe? well, it's boring there :) Nothing good to put in it tho. Occasionally an elephant wanders by, sometimes 2. Ya sense movement in the corner of your eye, look up and there is this great gray thing slowly moving by :) I gotta say this is one of the things I do love about the boonies. Also the locals...one old guy waves and says hello twice a day when he goes out to check on his buffalo in the fields. Gotta love the old dame using a farm cart to transport the kiddies.

[BigTel]

Superb pics and naration there JSG  

[Jimmy Cargopants]

Great pictures, thanks for sharing.

[markm]

well done , nice read . well everyone looks well fed. not to many worries up there by the look of it. and  a nice clean village. 

[Quinn]

Top reporting.

[Woodie]

I hope Stool Pusher does not see the tractor. He will be around to "borrow"it.

He needs one with a blade and discs. Perfect!

[stoolpusher]

Great JSG 

  Do you do any farming there or do you just stay with the family? .

   We have just started planting rice and then the sugar cane will be ready , I will be posting photos soon in one of my threads 

[JustSumGai]

oh no Stoolie, I'm about as poor as they are. Just my ladyboy "wife", tho that seems to be fading away to just close friends.  These are old photos from around 2015 or so. Much of it has changed in small ways...the house in distance on right of road going to highway is GONE.  4 or 5 guys TOTALLY dismantled it over a period of a few days and they built a new one set back more. Plus as my ladyboy can NOT leave ANYTHING as it is (boring she says) EVERY LITTLE THING on that property has changed ten times since then. They're on the 3rd gate (each one gets uglier). She's got some compulsion to try something new.  ONE day I hear whacking in the back (there's an open area that might have at one time been planned as roofed, but is open)...I go back and she's smacking the cinderblock wall with the Estwing framing hammer I brought, and motions it's going down. I pushed on it, and it went DOWN easy. Now that area is open to a shade roofed kitchen area, or god knows what by now.

[JustSumGai]

Polly has a little sewing biz, relocated from north of Pattaya, came home to "take car Mom", couple working knives I got for taking home, supplies for Mom to cop a buzz, some more shots of traffic that goes by. The crowd across the street is the funeral meeting for a very likeable young guy who died in construction in Bangkok. Terrible pity, the other brother survives, wasted on that nasty white whiskey. So it goes

[markm]

that sounds a bit bleak. yes i have seen the results of thai whiskey. my other half informed me last night her sisters s drunked husband (45) had a punch up with her younger brother (19) still in conscription with the army .i said he should know better , then she tells me it happens all the time, the older is drunk every night . and he is not an orphan in that life style . and he is a motor bike mechanic so its not as if he has nothing to occupy himself. just plain stupid is all. 

[JustSumGai]

yeah, local expat's father in law just wasted away and died recently, it takes a while. This guy was drinking from sun up to sun down, and just laying around. Smoking was the least of his worries.  If your brain is SO weak that you cannot think up a better way to wait for death (that's just called living to most of us) then perhaps you should grow some balls and top yourself instead of making family and village watch your slow demise. I mean granted, country life can be boring as hell, but damn... This old guy could not even eat the last few weeks he just lay around out front for everyone to see, and waited for death.  Meanwhile everyone that COULD took out life insurance policies on him.

[BigTel]

10 hours ago, JustSumGai said:

couple working knives I got for taking home

They both look like Aranyik Knives, I have the Aranyik E Toh and it made short work of cutting down Bamboo, superb quality and will last a lifetime .

[JustSumGai]

the bamboo handle is deadly as the base of my thumb can attest to, chopping up saplings to toss in the truck. Good thickness and taper, takes a SHARP edge. I think I paid about 150 for it, maybe a lil more. The other is cruder, much thicker blade, like a cross between a machete and a hatchet :)  Neither is what I'd call superb quality, but for the money, good, and will do the job. I mean you can see on each side of the blade...file/sanding marks, they ripple and dip in places, not a flat face by a long shot, but I cannot afford superb.  I would rate the Western Bowie I paid $65 for years ago as very good.  I'd go to war with that baby :)

I see some joker on ebay selling one like the machete/hatchet one for $49. geez, I think that one also cost around 150 baht, less than $6. And he's sold 18 of em.  I'm  in the wrong business haha.

[stoolpusher]

Seem like the ones we use here for all sorts of chopping , I used one on the scorpion that tried to take my arm off the other night .

[Pdoggg]

32 minutes ago, stoolpusher said:

use here for all sorts of chopping , I used one on the scorpion that tried to take my arm off the other night

It seems it is more common in Thailand than in most countries that pooyings chop of their partner's member.  Not very ladylike which reminds me of the one liner, "that was no lady; that was my wife".

[JustSumGai]

yeah, similar, cept for that rounded end I guess. I got one like that for Mom. Cost a bit more, off the back of a traveling shop truck. I been meaning to fit my narang with a fat wood handle. Heavy as the blade is, you can really whump some sizeable stuff and then it wants to slip your grasp.

[JustSumGai]

 

[Pdoggg]

Looks like quite a nice house!   

[Woodie]

5 hours ago, Pdoggg said:

Looks like quite a nice house!   

Yes it does, and though it would not win House of the Year in Home and Garden, it provides everything you would need without having to keep up with the Jones'es.

What's with David Livingstone with the Pith helmet doing in Thailand?. All he needs is the native porters following behind!.

[stoolpusher]

I am really liking these photos JSG , the only thing different here is there are no elephants walking past , only buffalo 

[JustSumGai]

I was helping Polly burn some bamboo left on the edge of the field when they cleared along the canal. It's my alternate hat of choice, boonie being #1 Actually the sun helmet is better but you can't find em in LOS, so I wear it sparingly.  Held off the head by a band with straps inside the hat. You get airflow and it's light :P The early one on the right obviously has more airflow, new one has a bit too much lacquer or whatever. 

thanks for the likes...I've got some more.

[JustSumGai]

the media center :) , the yard after Mom decided they needed to level the yard more (the bathroom is now probably a foot below grade and that hacked tree is dead and burned), the "fence" (I preferred the old rusty strands of barb wire, you could see all around then),  the community center? build, and the bane of my existence there (along with a dozen CONSTANTLY crowing roosters, and the barking dogs which like to socialize in front of the house as I am trying to drop off to sleep), it's about 100 feet away from the bed and at the same level as my poor besieged ears, a machete from El Salvador, made by a German company, at work in Udon, Mom enjoying her back treatment courtesy of grandson, and a show of some sort happening at Central.