How To Satisfy Your Woman

Today is my wedding anniversary; Husband and I have been married for twenty years. (How the hell did that happen?)

I’m going to leave you with an anecdote. Apt? Possibly.

My advice to anyone looking for specific books in the English Language bookshops in Bangkok is to ask. Their shelving confuses me. Their decisions about genre, and therefore where a book ought to be, are quite different from mine. It used to lead to frustration; now, after a swift check where I think it should be, I ask and they locate it. (99% of the time they DO locate it, so clearly they understand their system which is the main thing.)

But I’m a great browser too and I can often be found checking out the aisles on how to make a better version of me. I live in constant hope that ‘how to’ books will make me a better writer/cook/knitter/parent/whichever skill I am currently desiring.

I must have been in such an aisle when I spotted these two books, side by side:

*How to Satisfy Your Woman

*Household Hints and Tips

Not quite Hurricane Irene

It’s just typical that the moment I decide I am reblogging our internet goes up in a  puff of smoke. Actually it just sort of fizzled out.

We had a storm on Saturday night; quite a humdinger. I am reluctant to make a big deal of our storm because at the same moment Hurricane Irene was rampaging up the east coast of America. During the rainy season we get lots of big, impressive storms and yes, I’m sure some of them do some damage but they aren’t hurricanes. I do have some perspective.

We arrived home, Husband from dropping Daughter at a friend’s and I from my ‘office’ at Starbucks Emporium, to find the apartment in darkness and a very stroppy Son flumpy footing it around the apartment. He’d just clocked off from working and was about to start getting on with his real life (computer game of the moment) when all the power cut out.

We’d planned a curry and a film. The lights stayed out for quite some time. Husband worried that he might run out of Angry Birds battery power and I was trying to read by candlelight. Son continued to strop around. And then there was light, shortly followed by the curry delivery. Hurrah!

Hello? *Waves*

I'm sorry I've been AWOL.

What have I been up to? I've been to the UK and eaten quite a lot of cake - most of it wheat free but not all of it. Sorry body. It was my Dad's 82nd birthday and Daughter and Sister made him a 'light chocolate cake' from Harry Eastwood's Red Velvet Chocolate Heartache book. It was quite simply the best cake I've ever eaten.

My sister taught me to make tzatziki and I cooked quite a lot; most out of character.

I raced like a maniac around the countryside seeing people and doing things but people drove and trained around England to come and see us too. Thank you people. Several things got cancelled and we weren't able to reschedule and other things didn't get arranged in the first place. I'm so sorry to people I didn't manage to see.

We got back to Bangkok just in time for Sister in Law and her family to arrive. They had a week in the city and then we all set off for a week by the sea - Koh Samed. I'll skim over the fact that I had what I think might have been flu while there. At least I could look at the sea while I felt crap.

And then the kids went back to school and it felt like we'd never been away.

I feel very 'start of a new term' though. We've started planning for our Melbourne Cup hats - I am feeling very excited about these. And I've bought myself a food processor (both Husband and I bought food processors to the relationship. We both had them as students and bits had broken off so that nothing fitted together in the end. They were judged too falling apart to make the trip to Thailand. Both were twenty years old which I reckon was pretty bloody marvellous and is why this week I bought a new Kenwood.) I've continued to cook quite a lot - tzatziki, hummus, leek and potato soup, guacamole. I'm failing to buy sweet potatoes in Bangkok at the moment so I can make Leon's sweet potato falafel. Leon says it must be the ones that are orange inside. Somewhere else it said there are Japanese sweet potato and the internet said that what Americans call yams, often aren't. Or something. So I keep going to gaze at sweet potato shaped things in greengrocers, wondering if they're the right thing to buy.

And I'm writing. I've had five days of storming writing or rewriting to be accurate. I appear to have worked out what needs doing with the novel and I feel a bit floaty about it.

I'm beginning to think the fairies might have dropped in and exchanged me for a slightly better model.