Typical, you wait for a blog for 3 weeks and then 5 come at once

I have been busy the last 3 weeks with a lot of things which I will write about later some of which are building an extension on to my house, hunting, birthday and driving. Hopefully now the building is completed I will be back to regularish blogs :) Apologies once again.

Here's a couple of teaser pics of one building day:

Me fast asleep a few hours after the pic above which was hard work and then drinking some local whisky with the builders.

Bicycle

I recently bought a bicycle as my family only has a small bmx bike and that's not really suitable for the adults to be using. They get a lot of use out of the bike so I feel it was a good purchase at £50.
Some of you may of already seen the picture already but I wanted to a quick blog post about it.

Farming 2

I dont have any pics of this process of our farming but I will write a small paragraph about it so not to bore anyone.
So after the tractor tilled the soil we dug small holes a few feet apart, added a couple of corn seeds, then added a small hand full of plant food and then using our feet covered the hole with dirt and pressed it lightly on top. Nothing too exciting here but we did this for about a week to cover all their land.

Our shop

The last time I wrote about the shop I said there would be another update as it's changed a bit since then.
So moved the snacks around to near the entrance, removed the blue net drop down and placed some lino over half the concrete floor.
This is the entrance to our shop with the movable fence to allow our customers to walk in and the drop down blue blind for us to close the shop at night. There are gaps in the blinds but there stealing isnt that much a problem in the village and when we close the shop we move any valuable stock inside the house. If anyone does walk up the drive the dogs will bark and Moni's father sleeps most of the night in his little house at the start of the driveway because he isnt allowed to smoke in the main house.

We expanded our stock with one more snack shelving unit and places to hang up products as well.

At the moment of writing this article everyone is celebrating a festival (which I am still trying to find out what it is exactly as it doesn't seem to be a national festival) that lasts a week and fireworks are a big part of it so here you see a table of our fireworks for sale and a blurred pic of Fern a kid next door and Mixer in the background.

This is more the adult section where we have our hot water kettle, shampoo, whiskey, tobacco and so on. Please excuse the mess underneath the counter this is taken in the morning and we haven't gotten round to cleaning it up yet. I do need to make some boxes below to store all that stuff in as its not rubbish and all empty glass/plastic bottles can be sold to someone in the village who sells them to a recycle company.

Like I said this is the morning and the shop is not open properly yet so all the blinds around the shop are down not to mention its pouring with rain outside.

Mixers School

Occasionally I take Mixer to school/day care so have gotten to know his teachers and one morning they asked if I would be able to help out for a morning and let them take some pictures of me doing so. They will use the pictures to promote the school to try and get more budget as they were able to get a foreigner to come and help teach the kids some English. I don't have any pics during the day activities I did with them only at the end.

I taught them head, shoulders, knees and toes which the teachers got me to write down and they later translated it to Thai/Isaan and they all now sing and dance to it. I did join in with the kids singing and dancing to some Thai karaoke videos without being asked which the teachers seemed to be pleased about.

This is of me and the class I helped teach:

This is me receiving a piggy bank money box as a gift with some money in.

I am enjoying some biscuits and coffee after dancing with the kids.

The teachers also wrote me a letter in Thai/Isaan to say thanks for taking the time to help them out.