Before I tell you about that though, I want to tell you what led to this bike.  

2018 Honda Rebel 500

Back in 2018 I bought a new 2018 Honda Rebel 500 to replace my Honda Phantom 200.  This was a great bike, and we did a lot of rides on it, lots of lovely trips.  The first trip we did on this bike was a trip from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi to Sangkaburi to Sai Yok to Nakhon Prathom to Bangkok.  It was such a lovely trip to get used to the bike.  We have also done multiple trips to Khao Yai and a trip to Sukhothai and a number of lunch runs with friends and multiple safety courses with Honda.  

This was a lovely bike, which I loved to ride, with lots of memories.  The whole time I had this bike, I only dropped it twice.  The first time was when I did a slow u-turn in the middle of a major road here in Bangkok and the person on the back of the bike wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and leaned over and I wasn't expecting it and the bike fell.  The second time was when I was on one of the safety courses, and it was late in the day, I lost concentration on what I was doing and I leaned the bike over too far and then felt the bike start to go, gave it a little extra throttle to set it back up, but the back tire broke loose and then I caught the platform and the bike went down hard.  

One thing was, after owning the Rebel for about six (6) months, I started looking at other bikes.  One of the youtubers that I follow, Ryan FortNine (https://www.youtube.com/@FortNine), rode a 2015 Suzuki V-Strom 1000 and he did two reviews on in.

Because of these two videos, I started looking at the cost of the Suzuki V-Strom.  One of the things I noticed, at the time, is that they were a little bit cheaper than the Honda Africa Twin.

When my Honda Rebel 500 was almost paid off, I decided to sell it and get a bigger bike.  I felt like I was ready.  I was at the local Honda dealership and they showed me a Honda Rebel DCT 1100.  I took it. for a test ride, and it felt nice.  I went home and talked to @hirondelle about it, and she said that if we were going to get another bike, she didn't want another Rebel, because after about thirty (30) minutes on the back of the bike, she starts to not feel so good, and at about forty-five (45) minutes, she needs a break, and an hour, she needs at least a thirty (30) minute break.  It had a lot to do with the leg position for her on the back of the Rebel.  So we looked at what Honda bikes would be good for a pillion rider, and it was recommended an Africa Twin.  I started looking hard at Africa Twins.  I took a couple for a test ride, and I had @hirondelle go with me for a test ride.  She actually loved the feeling of riding on the back of that big machine.  We talked about what we needed to do to get one, and crunched some numbers.  We originally decided to get a new one, but then later on, we decided to get a used one, and save quite a bit of money.  

One day, I had a Triumph Tiger come up in my feed on Facebook, so I looked at them.  Even the second hand ones were coming up as more expensive than a new Honda Africa Twin, but something weird happened when I was doing that.  I was reminded of all the research I did on the Suzuki V-Strom 1000.  So I decided to go back and take a look at the research I did on the V-Strom and the videos that Ryan FortNine did on the Suzuki V-Strom.

This convinced me to take a second look at the V-Strom.  While I was doing that, @hirondelle looked for bikes that are comfortable for the pillion rider.  She shared with me four (4) lists.  On those four lists, the Honda Africa Twin wasn't listed at all.  The BMW GS1200 (a bike my friend owns) was listed on two lists (2), and the Suzuki V-Strom was on all four (4) lists, so this kind of convinced me to start looking at them.  I looked at the Suzuki web site and saw that their bikes were about the same price as the Honda Africa Twin.

I decided to look at used bikes.  The Honda Africa Twin was going for about 370,000 Thai Baht, which is about 10,500 USD, and the Suzuki V-Strom was running about 320,000 Thai Baht, which is about 9000 USD.  The day I started looking at used Suzuki V-Stroms, I found a 2018 Suzuki V-Strom 1000 for 270,000 Thai Baht, which is about 7,500 USD.  I left it for a couple of weeks to see if it would go, and told @hirondelle about it and showed her pictures.  She liked how the bike looked, and we both liked that it came with a top box on the back.  After a few weeks went by, I reached out to the seller and asked for a discount, and he knocked of 10,000 Thai Baht for me, about 300 USD.  Didn't seem like a bad deal, so I asked to go have a look at it.  Tracy went with me to look at it and for me to test ride it.  I started it up, and the motor sounded good, no strange noises or anything.  I took it for a test ride and it rode smooth and felt really comfortable.  I made him an offer, that he said he couldn't do as he was selling it on consignment, so the best that he could do was 260,000 Thai Baht.  @hirondelle and I talked about it and we felt this was a good price.  Put a down payment on the bike and came back a month later to pay it off and rode off the lot with my new motorcycle!  

This bike is so comfortable for me, and for @hirondelle.  Our first big trip on it was a trip to Hua Hin, and it was so nice.  @hirondelle also said that she felt really good on it.  We both had to learn a new way to mount the bike as it was so tall, but now it's so natural for use to get on the bike this way.  We have also done a number of lunch runs with some friends on this bike and we love it.  

I have been keeping a journal for the rides that I have done on this bike, which is something new for me.  To go with that, recently, I have started using the Riser app, which a great app for riding mapping motorcycle rides and also diving directions.  You can decide if you want a curvy route, a supercurvy route or a direct route, which is pretty good.  Also, there is an option to add friends when we ride together so nobody gets lost.  I haven't tested this part yet, but I plan on it.

So, my idea is I will be making journal entries of my rides here, and I will also post my route, so people can have a look on Riser to see where I went.  I'm quite excited about this.  When I have a chance, I will post my journal entries here, but they won't have the map, but all rides after this will have the map and any images I take.  I'm really looking forward to it.  

Always Remember:  Ride your own ride, not somebody elses rides.

Part 2

As the sound of the truck disappeared in the distance, Mindy collapses to the ground in tears.  “What are we going to do, Sean?  What the hell are we going to do?”

Sean reaches down and picks up the bags and brings them over to sit down and sit next to Mindy.  “First thing we need to do is check what supplies we have.  He said there was enough food for two days for the two of us, a knife and a revolver with five rounds in it as well as a tent.  Let’s check”, Sean said as he started emptying one of the bags.

Mindy nods to Sean and picks up one of the other bags and starts to remove the contents from it, and Sean grabs the third bag and empties out with rest of the supplies.  “OK, what do we have”, Sean said as he picked up the notebook and the pencil.  He opened the notebook and on the first page was a small note from Micah.

As I said to you, you have enough food for two days for two people, and a tent.  You will also find a blanket.  Don’t lose it.  It gets cold out here at night.  Use this notebook to keep track of things like how much food you’ve eaten, landmarks, and anything else you feel is important.  

Good Luck!

Micah

Sean handed the notebook to Mindy, “Here, you can write down our inventory while I set up the tent and start a fire?”

“Start a fire?” asked Mindy hysterically.  “Why would you do that?  They will be able to see us….”

Sean grabbed Mindy and forced her to look at him.  “Stop!  I need to start a fire so we can stay warm.  We are fine for tonight.  He said they won’t come after us until noon tomorrow.  Now organize our supplies and make a note of everything we have while I start the fire and set up the tent.”  With that, Sean went back to starting the fire.  Once the fire was started, he and Mindy set up the tent for the night.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A few hours before dawn, Sean’s watch alarm went off.  He quickly got up, got some water and a little bit of breakfast for the both of them ready and then woke up Mindy.  While they ate, Seans said “We need to get moving as soon as possible.  The more distance we can cover before the sun rises, the harder it will be for the hunters to find us.”  The mention of the hunters brought Mindy around quickly and they finished their small breakfast, packed the last of their supplies, and headed north.

After walking for a few hours, Sean turned them northwest.  “Why are we turning?” Mindy asked, looking back the way they came.

“I don’t want to make it easy for them.  I think they will expect us to go one of the four main directions, so I started off going one way, and then changed, and I will change again in a few hours,” Sean said looking over his shoulder at Mindy.

“But won’t that take us longer to get to the boundary?  Won’t we run out of food?” Mindy asked on the edge of hysterics again.  

Sean stopped and took ahold of Mindy’s shoulders.  If we walk in a straight line, it will make easier for them to find us.  If we change directions every few hours or so, but keep heading towards a boundary, it will be better for us.  Yes, we only have two days worth of supplies, but we have a knife,” Sean said patting his left hip, “and I have this revolver,” patting his right hip.  “I also know how to hunt and set traps.  We will be fine if we start moving before dawn and stop after the sun sets.  We can do this.”

Mindy took a deep breath, visibly pulling herself together.  “Ok.  You’re right.  We can make it.”

@hirondelle and I had been talking about doing a trip to Sukhothai for quite a few years, but we never actually sat down to plan it.  Mostly, because my schedule is pretty busy.  This year, I ended up having a five (5) day weekend, so we decided to go for it.  

Now, before we get started, to give you an idea of how far this trip actually is, it was just shy of 851km (just shy of 529miles) round trip.  That’s about 425.5km (264 miles) to Sukhothai from our home.  We decided it would be best to break this up over two days, which is something we would normally do.

One more thing before I get started with this journey.  Once we got started on this journey, for our first stop, we stopped at a PTT gas station and almost all PTT gas stations have an Amazon Café.  Amazon Café has OK coffee and good iced lemon tea.  But it’s one of those things that is just special for when you travel.  It’s a nice little rest area.  They have a covered area outside that you sit and relax while you have a break, and some locations have an inside air-conditioned area to relax in as well.  This has become our favorite rest stop in all our journeys since this trip.  

Just to put things into perspective, when we used to do our road trips around northern Thailand, we would go from Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai to Chiang Saen to Thaton to Chiang Dao to Chiang Mai, about 565km (351 miles).  The trip we did right after we bought the Honda Rebel was Bangkok to Kanchanaburi to Sangklaburi to Saiyok to Nakhon Pathom to Bangkok which is 699km (434 miles).  So, this was our biggest journey on a bike to date.  

When we were planning, we decided that would we stop in Nakhon Sawan, which is about four (4) hours out of Bangkok, 239km (149.5miles).  One thing that happened early on, when we made one of our stops, we realized that @hirondelle had forgotten her phone.  There was a bit of a panic at first, but we decided that we would just continue on without it.  Also, during this portion of the trip, we were on a nice stretch of road where the traffic was flowing quite nicely.  There was a section that I was doing about 130kph (81mph).  While doing this, there were a group of bikes that passed us and not thinking, I just picked up the pace a bit.  Before you know it, I was cruising along at 147 kph (91mph).  It was at this point, I decided to let go of some of that throttle and we continued coasting at between 120kph (75mph) and 125kph (78mph).  We stayed at a nice hotel there called The Paradiso JK Design Hotel.  Once we stopped, we headed to the local mall to get some drinks and snacks and then back to the hotel.  We had dinner at the hotel, which was some delicious Thai food.  They also had a very good breakfast, which was nice.  The staff were really friendly and helpful.  

After breakfast, I packed up the bike and we headed out for our next stop.  Sriwilai Sukhothai Resort and Spa.  This portion of the trip was a little over 3 hours, 190km (118miles).  There were some scenic bits of this road, which was nice. Nothing too fast again, just cruising between 100kph (62mph) and 120kph (75mph).  We pulled in to Sriwilai Sukhothai Resort and Spa in the early afternoon.  Sriwilai Sukhothai had this amazing lily pond, which was huge!  They had four building that surrounded it, one of which was the building we were in.  Once we got to our room, @hirondelle relaxed for a bit, and I went and had a massage.  One of my favorite things while on holiday.  Once that was done, we had dinner then headed out to Sukhothai Historical Park to see the ruins at night.  It was supposed to be amazing, and it sure didn’t disappoint!  It was beautiful and we got some amazing pictures.  After we wondered around the lit-up parts of the park, we headed back to our resort.  In the morning, we got up and went to have breakfast, and that turned in a big pain in the ass.  We went to the restaurant, gave them our room number, found a table, and went to get our food from the buffet.  They approached us and said we couldn’t eat there.  There was some confusion about us having breakfast there.  Long story short, there was some mess up in the booking and we didn’t book breakfast and ended up having to pay for it.  Whatever.  We then went back out to the historical park and had a look at it during the day and took a lot of pictures.  It’s really cool.  Some of the best ruins in Thailand, in my opinion.  We then went to this lovely little restaurant the was kind of dead, and once we sat down, people started coming in and giving them business.  After lunch, we headed back to the resort and got massages and finished off the day with a nice dinner.  

We got up in the morning and headed back to Bangkok, with us deciding to stop in Sing Buri, which was almost five (5) hours, 281 km (175miles) from Sukhothai.  We booked a room at Zen Garden Resort.  Oh was, was this place bad!  The room they gave us smelt like feet, didn’t look very clean, had no food or restaurant or anything.  We were almost tempted to stay there, but in the end, we just couldn’t do it.  We left and found this amazing little resort called Je t’aime café & villa.  They had four (4) rooms.  Of course.  Room L, Room O, Room V, Room E.  We had Room E.  They had a nice little restaurant there, and we had dinner and ordered our breakfast.  The only bad thing was that the beds were so small, but we did sleep together in the same bed.  

We had a lovely little breakfast in the morning and then packed the bike to head to Bangkok, which was just shy of three (3) hours, 141km (88miles).  The last stretch is always the worst.  You want to stop, and have breaks, but you don’t want to stop, because you’re almost home.  It’s so hard.  We took breaks, but I think we just didn’t rest enough, and the very last bit was agony.

Outside of the last little bit, the trip was actually really good.  I really enjoyed making that trip on the bike.  Makes me want to do more long trips on the bike.

Always Remember:  If you really want to go someplace, set time aside to go.

This past year has been great!  Back in September, I stepped back on the ice and started to prepare for a hockey tournament that was coming up in November.  This was the first real hockey I’ve played since before my knee surgery.  We ended up losing all our games on the first day, but we won all our games on the second day and ended up taking first place in our division.

When I was recovering from my knee surgery, I wanted to go roller blading, so I took my skates to a local park where I used to skate before, but they stopped me and told me no skateboarding.  So, I never got to go skating, so that sucked.

Then, on 03 July 2021, a friend of mine contacted me and asked if I was interested in playing roller hockey.  Of course, I was interested.  I’ve been wanting to play hockey again; I’ve never played roller hockey and I wanted to play roller hockey since the first time I got roller blades back in the 90s.  What do I need to do?  He put me in touch with the organizer, who happened to be a guy that I played hockey with one time and chatted with.  He told me what I needed to play, roller blades, gloves, shin pads and a stick.  I added a cup to the list, because you know, you must protect the family jewels!

So, on Sunday, 04 July 2021 I packed my gear, and drove to the place.  We played on a futsal court, which was great as it had a center line, face-off dot, goal circles.  I think the guy that organized it made the nets for us to play.  So, the week before, they used a ball hockey ball to play, but a few guys decided to bring street hockey pucks, and a few of us were using these to warm up.

Once we got started, it was pretty faced paced, and the dark team (not my team) scored an early goal.  That wasn’t so bad, but it didn’t take long for them to score their second goal.  Damn!  That was quick.  Next, we were taking the ball up the court and I didn’t see anybody open, but I did see that I had an opening on the net, so I fired a shot at the net, and buried the puck in the net.  Awesome!  The game went back and forth with both teams scoring goals.  About halfway through the game, we made a new rule, no scoring from the far side of the center line, which was cool.  Made us work a little harder, but no big deal.

It was such a great night!  I had such a blast, and everybody seemed to enjoy themselves.  So much so that we are planning on doing it again the up-and-coming Sunday.  I can’t wait!

Always Remember:  If you ever get the chance to do something that you’ve always wanted to try, give it a go!

So, in 2003, I saw Ozzy Osbourne on some talk show, I don't remember which one it is now, and he was on with his daughter, Kelly, and they did this song.

It just blew me away and I immediately fell in love with this song.  I have since done some research on this song.  This piano was by Tony Iommi and the lyrics were by Geezer Butler and was inspired by  Bill Ward's breakup with his first wife.   Black Sabbath did this song in their album Vol. 4 which was released in 1972.  This is Black Sabbath's version of this amazing song which is so heartbreaking.

In 2010, one of my favorite rap artists, Eminem, sampled Changes for his song Going Through Changes for his album Recovery.  He talks about his problems with drugs and losing one of his closest friends Proof.  How he fought through his struggles for his daughters and for himself.  This song, for me, is also heartbreaking, but very inspiring as he has fought through his difficulties.

The final version of this song, which I happened to stumble upon just a few weeks ago, just tears my heart out.  This version is by Charles Bradley, which he sung after losing his mother, which really hits home for me.

Some of you may know this, I'm a huge music lover.  I love a lot of different genres of music.  These are different versions of the same song and inspire some different feelings in me.  I love when a song sung by different people can do that.

Always Remember:  Keep an open mind because you will never know what new thing you will end up loving.

I'll do my best to make this as coherent as possible, but I'm sure I will mix some thing up.  The good thing is, @hirondelle has put together a list for me to look at, so that will help keep my thoughts organized.  

So, with out too much more preamble, let me get into it.

To finish off 2019 and start off 2020, @hirondelle and I decided to go to Krabi and we asked Stef, our girlfriend, to join us.  There were some issues, but over all it was a pretty good holiday.  I wrote about it in the blog post titled Krabi 2019-2020.

January was pretty good.  About the most exciting thing in January was planning for a hockey tournament that I will talk about soon.  I was having some pain in my knee, but I did take off of hockey for 3 weeks before the tournament to rest it.

The hockey tournament was at the end of January beginning of February. They were having a 4-on-4 tournament at the rink up there.  The tournament was called The Northern Breakaway Tournament 2020.  They had two teams from Chiang Mai, a team from Hat Yai a team from Hong Kong and my team, Flying Farangs.  We had actually put together a pretty strong team for this tournament.  Below is a picture of my team.

Back Row - Tom Price, Rob Taylor, Gabor Toth, Eddie McConnell
Front Row - John Schachnovsky, Mike Nightingale, Dom Dumais, David Boere, Jesse Starosta

This tournament was a three day affair.  In the first day of games, on January 31st, we played Chiang Mai in the first game and Southern Wolf in the second game, in which we won both games.  We did lose David Boere to a broken hand in the first game and John Schachnovsky strained his groin in the second game, but David played a couple of shifts in the second game, and John continued to play throughout the tournament.  In the second day of games, we played Hong Kong Transformers, which we won, and I strained my knee in this game, but I continued to play in the rest of the tournament.  In our second game of game two, we played the Chiang Mai Jokers.  This team was arguably the best team in the tournament, although they were a very cheap team took some cheap shots.  We did give them a run for their money, though we didn't play all out.  This set us up to play them again in the championship game of this tournament on day 3.  Again, it was a really hard game, and we took less flack from them and they were still cheap, but we did eventually lose to them, and ended up taking second place in this tournament.  It was a lot of fun, not counting the cheapness from the Chiang Mai Jokers, but playing with this group of guys and being back in Chiang Mai was great.   After the tournament, I took two (2) weeks off from hockey to rest my knee again.

Right before we went to Chiang Mai for the tournament, we started hearing about this flu coming out of China, which ended up being Covid 19.  It wasn't long after we got back to Bangkok that we started hearing about cases in Thailand.

Also in February, I found out that the school I had been working for for ten (10) years decided that they weren't going to renew my contract.  I was a bit shocked at this as I had done everything they asked of me for those ten (10) years as well as helped them with a lot of things, but in hind sight, it was for the best really.  I hadn't been happy at the school for quite a few years, so that just spurred me on to find better work.  

Dottie napping on the couch

At the end of February, we also added a new member to our family here in Thailand.  On February 29th, that was when our little Dottie girl joined our family.  We weren't sure how Spike was going to take to her, because we didn't do a very good job of socializing Spike.  Now, when we first brought her home, Spike wasn't to sure what to think about her, but he didn't attack her or anything, which is good.  Then, a friend of ours, brought his puppy over, Ski, and Spike really wanted nothing to do with Ski.  Dottie and Ski were playing and Ski got a little bit rough, Ski is huge compared to Spike and Dottie, and Dottie yipped and Spike was right over there to find out what was going on.  A few days later, @hirondelle bought a couple of toys for Dottie, and Spike wanted to play with one of them, and they kind of bonded over that.  Now they get a long so well, it's like made Spike a young puppy again.  Spike who is 12 years old and Dottie who is now a year old, and they are getting along so well.  I love it!

At the beginning of March, I was hired by an agency in the hopes that they would get me into a school.  On the 11th of March, they had me do a demo lesson at a school, and while I was sitting in a very small kid's chair waiting my turn to go do my demo lesson, I stood up and almost fell over.  I was in so much pain and I couldn't put any weight on my leg at all.  I tried walking around to make it feel better, but nothing was working.  I still had to do my demo lesson, and I informed them right away at the beginning of the lesson that I had done something to my knee so my lesson wasn't going to be the best.  Well, the school was happy with my lesson and ended up hiring me, which I will get into later.  After the demo lessons, they gave us a tour of the school they were building, and then we all went back to the agency office.  From there, I got on my bike and rode home.  Talk about being in pain.  When I finally got home, I laid down the couch to have a nap and rest my knee more.  After about an hour, it wasn't any better, so we decided to go the doctors.  The doctor was awesome and he examined my knee, and ordered an x-ray and an MRI for a later date.  After the MRI it was found out that I had strained three (3) ligaments in my knee, and there was some torn cartilage in my knee, and the doctor wanted to go in and clean up the cartilage, and then drill a few holds in the bone itself to cause it to bleed into the place where the cartilage was removed to create scar tissue to act like cartilage.  On the 27th of March, I went in for my surgery, and the doctor found out that the meniscus in my knee had torn, so he stitched that back in place as well as did the rest of the surgery he had told me about.  This put me on crutches for eight (8) weeks and out of hockey for nine (9) months.  

April saw Thailand go into a lock down, which was good for me as I couldn't really go out anywhere.  I stayed home and watched Netflix and got fatter.  Also, @hirondelle got tired of me watching Netflix so much, so she bought me and Xbox 1X and some games.  Talk about exciting.  I bought a number of games, with Assassin's Creed being quite a few of them.  I bought Assassin's Creed The Ezio Collection, Assassin's Creed III, Assassin's Creed Unity (comes after Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag), Assassin's Creed Origins, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Forza Horizon 4.  While in lock down and recovering, I completed Assassin's Creed Unity as Assassin's Creed Origin's, as well as Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag on the Nintendo Switch, but I didn't complete this 100%.  I will eventually go back and do my best to attempt that, but I'm in no rush.

May didn't see much of anything from me other than playing lots of Assassin's Creed. 

At the end of June, I started at my new school.  We started prepping for the students to come back on July 1st, and I had to teach a teach the teachers class, which was fun.  I had to co-teach that class with the other English teacher that was hired.  This school hired two (2) English teachers to teach English, two (2) Filipino teachers, one (1) for math and one (1) for sciences and one (1) Vietnamese teacher to teach Chinese.  One of the things I loved right away about this school was that I got to see all my students every day in class.  This is something I've been asking for since I started teaching fifteen (15) years ago.  This is awesome! 

In March of last year, I wrote a blog post about being polyamorous. 

@hirondelle and I had been in a relationship with this lady named Stef, and we were together for almost two (2) years.  Since before the end of the year, @hirondelle and I had been talking about ending things with Stef.  It wasn't anything that Stef had been doing or not doing, it was just that @hirondelle felt that she was pulling herself away from me, and both @hirondelle and I had always said from the beginning that our relationship is #1.  We always put each other first.  When we went away together for the New Year, it seemed kind of like things might be a bit different, but it wasn't long and @hirondelle was still feeling the same.  Over the lockdown period, we didn't see Stef as much, but then we started seeing each other again, and things just weren't the same, so at the end of July, we decided to end things with Stef.  We still care about her, but not at the cost of our relationship.  It was difficult, but after a bit of time, the three (3) of us are friends and have seen each other.  

August didn't see much from me other than helping out a guy that was new to teaching, but that help didn't help him very much, because he didn't follow my suggestions or advice.

Come September, things got really interesting.  First, @hirondelle and I had been talking about getting a car, especially since starting at my new school.  She didn't like me riding my bike that far every day.  See, on the bike, in the morning, it takes me about forty-five (45) minutes to get to school, and after school, on the bike, it takes me about an hour to get home.  Personally, other than getting caught in the rain a few times, it wasn't that bad.  I'll be honest though, there was one day, I was on my way to school and I got caught in the rain.  That same day, I was on my way home from school and I got caught in the rain.  Now, on the way to school, I could stop and put on my rain gear, but on the way home, there wasn't any place for me to stop, which sucked!  That's was convinced me it was time to buy a car. 

When we first started looking, we decided that we wanted to go for some type of SUV.  The first car we decided on was a Nissan Juke.  It's a nice car with some interesting styling.  One of the things that I really liked about it were the bubble lights on the front end of the car.  Also, the look of the Nissan Juke reminded me of some of the hot wheels car from the 80s.  We also decided that we would look at second hand cars, instead of going new.  we found a Nissan Juke and went and looked at it.  It's smaller than I expected, but not too bad.  I got in the front seat, driver's side, and I couldn't get in.  I had to move the seat all the way back and tilt the steering wheel all the way up to get in, but once I got in, I could adjust the steering wheel down, but the seat had to stay as far back as it could go.  @hirondelle said I looked like I was a bit cramped.  It wasn't bad, but I could have gone for a little bit more room.

After this, we decided to go for something a little bit bigger.  We decided to go for a For EcoSport.  Not a bad little SUV.  The EcoSport was launched outside of the US in 2012, but wasn't available in USA until 2018, and it wasn't a big seller.  I guess American's don't like small SUVs, lol.  I don't know.  Any way, we looked around for the EcoSports, and we found a few, so we narrowed things down to only buy from a dealership in the hopes of getting some type of warranty.  We found a dealership that had a couple, and we went and looked, and kind of liked how it looked, and it had more room in the front for me.  One of the things both @hirondelle and I liked about the EcoSport was they had the spare tire on the back (pictured to the right).  Something that we don't see on SUVs in Thailand any more.  Any way, so we talked to the dealership about the used EcoSport.  Wasn't that just a nightmare in a half!  First, I asked if we could get financing for the EcoSport.  They salesperson asked their finance person, who called their finance company and told them that I wanted a Ford eco car.  No, they don't do financing for Ford eco cars.  I said no, I don't want an eco car, I want the SUV Ford EcoSport.  This went back and forth for a few minutes and I got so frustrated because they weren't listening to what I was saying and @hirondelle and I started to walk away.  They chased us down and had us come back.  I explained the problem and the salesperson called another salesperson over who explained to our salesperson that yes, the EcoSport is a model of Ford and that it isn't an eco car.  So they called the finance company and said we could get approval.  @hirondelle and I went home and talked about it.  Then I decided to message them and ask about oil changes and whatnot, and the salesperson told me "No.  We don't don't oil changes or service and no warranty.  Needless to say, I was a bit shocked by this, so @hirondelle and I decided that no, we would do something else.  

After some talk, and lots of research on my part, we decided we would go with a Honda BR-V.  This is even bigger than the Ford EcoSport.  One of the things we liked is we could get the version with seven (7) seats or the version with five (5) seats.  We decided we would go with the five (5) seat version because we wanted room in the back to put a cage for the Spike and Dottie.  Also, this game me room to put my hockey gear in as well.  To be honest, this was my first ever new car, and going to buy a new car was really fun.  One thing that I noticed was different for buying a new car in Thailand compared to buying a new car in USA (from what I have heard).  One thing is in the US, you go into the car dealership, and you decide on the make and model you want, then you start deciding on the options you want.  Each option adds a little bit more to your price.  Now, this is based off of what I've heard for buying new cars in the States.  In Thailand, they quote you a price, and this is what you pay for everything.  If you want to pay less, you start taking off the different options until you get to a price you want.  This was great, because there were certain options that @hirondelle wanted and certain options that I wanted.  For example, one of the options that @hirondelle wanted was she wanted roof rails on the top of the car.  For me, I wanted bluetooth in the car as well as a reverse camera.  So having these come with the price quoted, that was awesome.  There were things that we could have gotten if we had decided to go for a seven (7) seater that we didn't get with a five (5) seater, but one of those was fog lights, and well, living in Thailand, we don't get fog, so those were really not needed, so for me, that was really no big loss.  

Another thing that was pretty major for me, was something that happened at my school.  My co-worker, that I started at this school with, well, he has never taught before.  I mean he did these drama courses, but he has never taught in a school before.  I did my best to give him some advice, and things just weren't working for him.  Then he lost his partner, which was sad, but he didn't really give himself a chance to recover from that.  To go with this, he was struggling with getting all his documents for his visa, and he didn't know how to control his classes.  Well, he had a really bad day and pushed two different students to the floor in front of Thai teachers, then he stormed out the class and went over to the kindergarten school to teach his classes over there.  Needless to say, he was sent home, then when they watched the video from the class, and they saw what he did, he was terminated, not only from the school but also from the agency.  That was scary, especially like a week after this, another school was on the news for a teacher hitting kids and it was a big thing for that school and all over Thailand. 

Lots happening in September!  

Now here we are, in October.  October was another very exciting month for me.  First, this was something big.  October 05, 2020 marked fifteen (15) amazing years for @hirondelle and I.  It's been an amazing journey.  Thank you my love.  I love you.

Next, after about three (3) years away, I decided to go back to karate.  This was good and bad.  Good, because I've really been missing karate, and have been wanting to get back into martial arts of some sort.  Bad for me, because I hadn't practiced in years, and forgot all my katas, I had gotten fat, and my old Sensei had moved back to Japan.  Well, I did some research, and found out where my dojo had moved to, and I found their facebook page and I reached out to them.  I wanted to know if they still had adult classes, and what days they had classes.  They were happy to hear from me and told me that they now only teach combined classes.  They no longer have payment packages, just have to pay for every class I attend.  This was my positive of the day #275, which was on October 22nd.  

Another thing that was exciting wast that I started to go back to hockey.  On October 30th, 2020, I stepped back on the ice for my first shinny since my knee surgery.  I was a bit anxious at first, but I did OK.  It felt amazing to be back on the ice.  I loved it.  My goal was to attend about four (4) shinnies to start to get back in shape for the hockey tournament that was coming up at the end of November, but I ended up only being in two (2) different shinnies, but that's OK.  It was worth it.

In November, I played in my first hockey tournament since February.  My buddy, Ralf, set up a team to play in this tournament.  What was fun, is we had some skaters that I had never played in games with before, but I had been wanting to.  Our first day of games, we didn't do so well.  We lost our first game to Warriors B 5-0.  In our second game, against Chiang Mai, we did manage to score two goals, but we lost 9-2.  Our third game was against my BIHL team, Lion State, and we started coming together as a team, but we did lose this one 7-5.  To be honest, although we lost these games, the first and third game of the day was a lot of fun to play in.  Our game against Chiang Mai had shades of our game in February against the Chain Mai Jokers, which half the team from Chiang Mai were from the Chiang Mai Jokers.  Oh well.  Our second day of hockey was a lot better.  In our first game, we played Souther Wolf and we won this one 2-1.  Felt good to finally get a win.  In our second game, against a teamed called Old Timers, which the oldest player on this team was about 25, and the average age was about 17, this was another close one, and we won this one 1-0.  This gave us the recreational division championship, which was pretty awesome!  We were pretty stoked about that.  

https://flyingfarang.com/samrong-ice-hockey-challenge-2020/

Back row: Toni, Mark, Gary, Janne, Ralf, Alasdair, Matt, Dom
Front row: Top, Lance, Luc, Bruno, Ono

For November, we had our normal Thanksgiving Dinner at a place called Bourbon Street which does this amazing Cajun style Thanksgiving buffet.  Sadly, this year, because of Covid, they really trimmed down what they were offering because they thought there wouldn't be that many people that would come.  They had a lot of people show up.  The food was still good.  Some friends, a couple, joined us, and we ended up sitting next to another friend of ours, so that was cool.

In December, we started hearing about more cases of Covid in Thailand again, which sucked.  Also, my school decided, that since the school year was messed up because of the first wave of Covid, they would modify the schedule, which means were were scheduled to work through Christmas Day, and then have off December 31st and January 1st.  Thanks to the second wave of Covid, I had off Christmas, but sadly, with the cases climbing again, they gave us off for the whole month of January as well.

Wow!  That's a lot.  Sorry about that.  I hope it wasn't too boring for you all.  That's all for now.

Always Remember:  Keep the ones you love close to you, and tell them you love them often.

There are basically two (2) different disciplines in karate.  There is Japanese karate and Okinawan karate.  Here is a one of my favorite youtube people for martial arts, Jesse Enkamp, talking about 10 differences between Okinawan karate and Japanese karate.

Now, there isn't anything wrong with Japanese karate or Okinawan karate, it's just that Okinawan karate was where I got my start when I still lived in the States.

Now, in Thailand, I studied Japanese karate.  To be more specific, I studied JKS Shotokan Karate, which I really do enjoy.  I studied for about 3 years.  You can see my belt tests here with these videos:

10th kyu (White belt) to 8th kyu (Orange belt) test:

8th kyu (Orange belt) to 5th kyu (1st purple belt) test:

5th kyu (1st purple belt) to 4th kyu (2nd purple belt) test:

4th kyu (2nd purple belt) to 2nd kyu (2nd brown belt) test:

2nd kyu (2nd brown belt) to 1st kyu (3rd brown belt) test:

1st kyu (3rd brown belt) to Shodan (1st black belt) test:

I felt so honored when I achieved my Shodan belt.  The problem was, my life got busy, and I moved away from karate for a bit, and when I did come back, I didn't agree with some of the things that I saw happening at the dojo, and I had a really hard time with that and I ended up walking away from the dojo.  I came back a year or so later, and it was pretty much the same, just fewer students.  

Fast forward to November 2020, and I feel like I'm ready to go back to karate, actually, I'm kind of craving it.  So I went back to karate on October 22nd:

https://www.facebook.com/Timberwolf1771/posts/10157352946052676 <=== My FB post about it.

I have since done a total of 4 classes, with last night being my 4th class.  Now, I can't do as deep of stances as I used to, not yet anyway, and I can't quite move the way I used to, but I will get there.  It's just going to take some time, and I need to be patient.  Katas are slowly starting to come back, and I'm seeing different layers of the katas again which is nice.  Also last night, we were recorded doing the kata teki-shodan.  

I'm really happy to be back doing karate, and I'm looking forward to doing more.  I'm really looking forward to doing more karate.  I don't know if I will do any more tests, but I will keep learning and finding more and more layers to the katas.

Always Remember:  You should do the things you love, even if you don't get the chance to do so in the autumn of your life.  Still do it, because you love it.

Yes, I know, that's a lot of hearts, but @hirondelle knows.   

Anyway, for our 15 year anniversary, I decided I would write her a poem.  It was a bit last minute, but it was something that I wanted to do for her.  I have already given it to her, but I wanted to post it here as well.  I mean, this is one of the reasons I created a blog for, to share my writing.

Oh yeah, before you read this, I made a mistake when I originally wrote it and something in my head told me it was 16 years.  

I have since fixed it though.  

15 Years

Can you believe

On this day

15 years ago

I stepped off

Of the plane

I couldn’t even

Give you a hug

Cuz of my bags

So, I leaned in

Oh, so close

Just to be near

To feel your body

Next to mine

You leaned up

And kissed me

Like I imagined

1,000 times before

We have had

Some hard times

We have had

Some amazing times

All based in love

And now it’s been

15 short years

And I still have

Not a regret

I love you more

Then I did before

I love you

My Darkness

My Air

©October 8, 2020

Domnick M. Dumais

Always Remember: If you love somebody, tell them right now.  Don't hesitate.  

So, to start things off, I want to give a bit of a history.  I’ve led a pretty active lifestyle.  I learned how to skate when I was 2 and started playing hockey when I was 4 and I played until I was 18.  I also played soccer for a year, baseball for about 4 years, softball off and on throughout the years, American football for 3 years, professional wrestling for about 3 years, and martial arts off and on since I was 6 years old.  Also, I just started playing hockey again when I was 46 and played regularly for the last 3 years.

To say that I’ve had injuries in my life is a bit of an understatement.  I’ve had sprained ankles, torn ligaments in my fingers and strained knees, just to name a few things.

The first time I had any serious issues was when I was in the Navy.  This would be back in about 1991 or 1992.  I started having some pain in my left knee, and then I noticed that I had a lump on the side of my knee.  I went to the corpsman on base to have it checked out.  At first, they told me it was just strained ligaments and gave me some ibuprofen.  That went on for a few weeks, but it didn’t help anything.  I remember looking in their medical book and seeing something the describe all the symptoms that I was having, so I questioned him.  He didn’t like that very much, but I ended up being right.  They eventually did send me for an MRI and found out that I had a cyst on my knee.  The civilian doctor they sent me to decided that he wanted to go in and look into my knee to see what was causing the cyst.  Come to find out, part of my meniscus was deteriorating, which was causing the cyst, so he removed that part of the meniscus and the cyst ended up going away.  Now, I wasn’t a very good patient, and that night, I was at the pool hall on base and was shooting pool, walking around the pool table.  Not good for healing, but things worked out OK.  

Now, it’s been 29 years since that surgery, and I’ve played softball, practiced and taught yoga, studied Tai chi, studied Muay Thai, went back to karate and earned my Shodan (first degree black belt), gone back to ice hockey and played ball hockey.  All of which I’ve enjoyed.  I’ve had some bumps and bruises along the way, but nothing major.

As a matter of fact, the worst injury that I had (until recently) was when I strained a ligament in my finger, which I did during a karate class.  Was actually kind of funny.  I thought I had dislocated my finger, so I kept trying to pop it back into join, but nothing was happening.  It didn’t hurt at that moment, so I kept trying.  I showed my Sensei, and he said I should go to the doctors, which I did the next day.  Strained ligament in my finger, which cause the end to drop.  

After that, I had tendonitis in my shoulder, but that’s wasn’t too bad, they just had me do rehab and they gave me a shot, and some exercises to do.

About a year and a half ago, I was playing in an ice hockey tournament here in Bangkok, in one of the games, I clashed skates with another player and when down on my knees hard and popped my left knee out of joint, but when I stood back up, it went right back in.  I didn’t think much about it as this isn’t the first time that’s happened.  It happens when it pops out, while it’s out and when it goes back in, then it feels fine.  It was sore after the game, but nothing bad.  I finished up playing in the tournament and playing in the Bangkok Ice Hockey League (BIHL) and playing shinny every week for the Flying Farangs.  Some days, it was sorer than others and it would pop out of joint more often than before.  It was popping out of joint at least once a day.  That was a horrible feeling.  Sometimes, I would be sitting at my desk at work and pull my foot in under my chair, and my knee would pop out of joint.  I would have to slowly push my foot back out, sometimes with my other foot, just to get it to pop back into joint.  

Then, this past February (2020), I was asked to put together a team for an ice hockey tournament in Chiang Mai.  This was the first time I had put together a team for a tournament, so it was pretty exciting.  I decided to take a couple of weeks off from hockey to rest my knee before the tournament.  After the first game, my knee felt pretty good.  During the second game, I did something to my knee, I don’t know what, but it was sore after the game. It was progressively sorer after each game.  When we got back to Bangkok, I decided to take a month off hockey to rest it.

After I was feeling up to it again, there was an open shinny night for the SHL, so I decided to sign up for it and play.  After the game, I was feeling great.  I didn’t take any bad falls or twists or anything like, and my knee felt really good.  The next day, I felt great as well.  No pain or any issues.  This SHL shinny was on a Sunday.

That Wednesday, I had a demo lesson with a new school.  I was in a separate room, with some other teachers, waiting my turn to put on my demo lesson, sitting in a little chair made for kindergarten students.  I stood up to walk around and was suddenly in so much pain.  There was definitely something wrong with my knee.  I couldn’t put any weight on my leg because my knee felt so bad.  I tried walking it off, but nothing helped.  When it was my turn to do the demo lesson, I apologized to the school and let them know that I had hurt my knee somehow, but I still did the demo lesson.  After that, I got back on my bike and had to ride 45 minutes home.  When I got home, I relaxed and laid down a bit, in hopes that the pain would go away.  After about an hour, the pain didn’t go away.  I was starting to worry that I had done something to the ligaments in my knee.  Tore my ACL or MCL or something.  We decided to go to the hospital to see a doctor.

The doctor was pretty cool.  His name is Cholawish Chanlalit.  He listened to everything I said, gave my knee a thorough check, twisting it and turning it, which hurt like a sombitch, and then send me for an x-ray.  As is usual with things like this, the x-ray didn’t show much, and he put an order in for an MRI.  He also put in for me to see a physio therapist one time and got me some crutches to use.  After my MRI, they doctor told me that there was some cartilage damage in my knee, and he wanted to go in and clean out the damaged cartilage as well as perform microfracture surgery, which is where they drill small holes into the bone to get the marrow blood to bleed into the space where the cartilage has been removed.  What this does is it creates a cushion like cartilage from the blood, but the blood must set, so you can’t walk on that leg for a couple of weeks.

What the MRI didn’t show was that my meniscus was torn.  So, when he was inside my knee, he cleaned up the cartilage, drilled the holes in the bone and then stitched the torn piece of meniscus back in place.  

Because of this, I couldn’t walk for 7 weeks.  From not walking on my left leg for 7 weeks, I had to then rebuild all the muscle in my left leg and around my left knee.  This felt like such a long healing process to me, and the healing process had just begun.  

So, I was on crutches for 7 weeks, and the good thing about this is that it was during our lockdown period, so I couldn’t really go anywhere anyway.  Once I got the go ahead to start walking, I started walking as much as possible.  Walking with a heavy limp, but still walking.  Going up and down stairs and damn did it hurt, but I kept doing it.  I also started seeing a physiotherapist to help rebuild the strength in my leg the correct way.  This was so difficult for me, because I’ve always had fairly strong legs, and I felt so weak in my left leg.  Just doing body weight squats was really difficult for me, but I kept working on it.  I did lots of walking, sometimes maybe a little bit too much walking, but it felt good.  I still wasn’t allowed to skate yet, which sucked.  The doctor told me that maybe by I will be able to skate and play hockey in October.

So, after about 13 weeks of physiotherapy, my doctor said I could start skating and rollerblading again, because it is a non-impact on the knee joint.  I waited about 2 weeks, and then I tried to go rollerblading, but I was told to stop, because they didn’t allow rollerblading in the park we were at.  Then, a week later, I went with some friends to one of the local ice rinks to take them skating for the first time.  I didn’t go fast, and I didn’t go hard into turns or stopping or anything, I just took it easy.  It felt so good to be back on the ice.

These last few weeks, the strength in my left knee seems to be almost as strong as the strength in my right knee, which is great. This is all to how hard my physiotherapist has worked me.  There have been so many times, especially lately, after our sessions, my legs have felt so weak, but that’s good.  It’s nice to feel the strength and mobility returning to my knee.

Well, sorry for being such a long post, I hope it wasn’t too boring, but I had a lot to say.

Always remember: No matter what bad things happen in your life, if you want it bad enough, you can fight through it.
 

@hirondelle and I have been to Railay two other occasions.  The first time was when @hirondelle took me there 14 years ago before I started working in a school for the first time.  We went there in May, which is the end of the season, so there were very few people.  We stayed at Railay Bay Resort & Spa.  The first time we stayed there, it was so basic.  They had like 3 or rows of cottages/bungalows and a row of multi-level suites.  There was a dirt path that ran down to the beach.  The beach was amazing, and on our second day, we found this lovely little coffee shop that made fresh coffee.  You could hang out there, and if you didn't have something to read, they had a shelf full of books for you to take a look at.  The second time we went, it was in October, which was the end of high season, and we stayed at the same resort, Railay Bay Resort & Spa, but everything changed so much.  the villas were much nicer, and most of the villas had their own private out door jacuzzi.  It was still really nice.  

This time, when we decided to go, we looked at Railay Bay Resort & Spa, but it was so expensive, we decided to stay at a resort just north of Railay Bay & Spa at a place called Railay Phutawan Resort, which is in the mountains a little bit, which was cool.  They also had a lovely little cliff/mountain that people could learn to climb on, which was pretty cool.  I took a great nighttime photo of it.

One of the lovely things about staying at Railay, is you can't drive to it.  You have to fly into Krabi town, go to the shore, and get a boat to Railay.  So we arrived at Railay Bay East, and climbed into a trailer attached to a tractor and drove us up to the resort.  When we got up there, our room wasn't quite ready yet, so they had us go up to the bar area, which kind of over looks all of Railay East and West.  Beautiful view.  We sat there for a bit and had a drink and relaxed.

Our first day in Krabi, we spent just unwinding and recovering from getting up so early for our flight to Krabi.  It was nice though. 

Our second day, Stef took us to this beach that previously could reach by taking a sea kayak to.  Apparently, they made a walk way from Railay Bay East to this beach just south of Railay Bay East and West.  All I can say, is this is the most packed I've ever seen this beach to be.  I couldn't believe it.  I've not seen this many people on a beach since I'd been to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island back in the early 90's.  We did eventually find a nice place under some trees back up from the beach.  Stef and I did have a quick swim in the sea, but Stef was being stung by jellyfish larvae, so we decided to get out. 

After a bit, we decided to go have some pizza at a place Stef knew about on the East Bay.  We some pizza for lunch and some beers and relaxed.  I got some some great pictures of Stef and @hirondelle while we were at the pizza place.  I tell you, I'm one of the luckiest men in the world.

After we finished our pizza, Stef wanted to take me to this massage place that she went to the last time she was in Krabi, but it was closed, so we wandered back up East Bay and found another place.  We both got oil massages and they were really good.  After our massages, Stef and I headed back to the hotel to get @hirondelle to go have dinner.  Stef fancied a burger, so we found a place on Walking Street that did burgers with a guy that playing guitar, so we decided to eat there.  The music was decent, but the burgers were kind of shit.  First, they didn't have cheese, and then when we got them, they were really small.  At least I had some great company.   

The next day, we hung out around the resort mostly, but then in the evening, we decided we wanted to go have pizza at the pizza place again for dinner.  The reason why we decided on the east side, was because there were some Muay Thai fights going on at one of the local bars, and we wanted to go see them.  Once we finished dinner, that's where we went.  We saw a few fights, and they were pretty good.  No knockouts that we saw, but still really good.

For our fourth day, we walked around a bit, but we had decided to have dinner at Railay Bay Resort & Spa.  When @hirondelle and I stayed here before, it was one of our favorite places to eat, because they had the best food really. and they usually have a great seafood spread.  Sadly, they didn't have have seafood, but we ordered some good food, and I got some great sunset pictures.

The next day, was our final day.  It was New Years Eve, and our resort said we could book a table at their New Years Eve dinner, so we decided to have dinner at the resort, but I also wanted to try the kra paow burger at our coffee place, so we decided to go there for lunch.  That burger was awesome!  That night, we had dinner at our resort.  The food was really good and after dinner they had a fire show.  The fire show was cool, but the show was done with like teenagers.  Was still cool to watch.

After that, we worked our way down to the beach to watch the New Years fireworks display.  The three of us hung out and chatted while we waited.  The fireworks were awesome!  I loved them.  Once the firewoks were done, we headed back up to the room.

The next morning we caught our boat and headed back to Krabi to catch our flight back to Bangkok.

When I started playing hockey, I got to meet Cotsy myself, and we immediately struck up a fast friendship.  Cotsy suffered a knee injury that had prevented him from playing for awhile. and when he came back to hockey, he talked to me about his GoPro camera and this casing he bought for it that he could attach it to the net.  I told him to bring the casing and his camera and we would get it set up.  He brought out his camera, and we set it up.  He got some really great footage from those shinnies where he had his camera set up (see photo to the left).  It was a lot of fun.  I never actually got to play in a proper hockey game with Cotsy. only in shinny, but I got to watch him play quite a few times.

Cotsy also helped out with the Flying Farangs websited, so when I took over running the it, I met up him Scott Murray at Cotsy's place so we could talk about what I had planned for the new site and also for Cotsy to transfer all the files over to me.  We spent a coupe of hours hanging out, eating pizza and chatting about the site and about hockey.  He showed me his goalie helmet collections.  He had somebody who would personalize all his helmets, and they were pretty cool.  He also showed me his hockey DVD collection, which was pretty impressive, and then he showed me his roof top balcony.  He had an awesome place really.  

Last year, in one of the SHL games Cotsy subbed in the net, on December 13, 2018. He played for TRUE hockey, which was his first game back in competitive hockey.  TRUE did lose to Aware 4-1 that night, but Cotsy stopped 35 of 39 shots, which earned him the player of the game award for that game.

Cotsy gave a great interview.  Even though TRUE lost, he was nothing but smiles.  This is the way I will remember Cotsy, always smiling and with a kind word for everybody.  No matter where I saw him, he was always smiling and happy.

On December 1st this year, Cotsy was asked to sub again, this time for Aware against Hertz.  The first period wasn't so good for Aware, but they started making a come back in the second period.  With about 2 minutes left in the second period, Aomsin, one of the refs, came up to me and asked me if there was another goalie available because a goalie was hurt.  I quickly looked at both goalies and both seemed OK, so I asked who was hurt, and he told me Cotsy was hurt.  I went over to John, to find out if there were any other goalies.  He said no as the other two goalies from the earlier game had already left.  The end of the period sounded, and I called over the Jeremy, and John, Jeremy and I talked about it and came to a conclusion.  I could see Cotsy was on his knees.  We called Scotty over and explained what was going on.  He knew that Cotsy was hurt, and we explained his options, and he asked if they could go with 6 skaters instead of dressing somebody in goalie equipment, which was fine, so he went and explained it to his team, Aware.  While we were talking to Scotty, Aomsin assisted Cotsy to the Hertz bench.  Aomsin then came over to us and explained that Cotsy was having chest pains.  I got Brad, who is trained as a first responder and told him, then I told the rink staff to call the hospital.  I'm not going to go into all the details, but this is the most helpless I've felt in my life.  I didn't like this feeling.  Cotsy was rushed to the hospital with Scotty and John going with him.

I got home that night with a bad feeling, but I spoke to Wolf and asked him to take care of Cotsy and his family.  I found out about 12:30 a.m. that Cotsy didn't make it. He had suffered a heart attack and died at the hospital.  I was floored.  @hirondelle held me while I cried.  I'm so glad she was there, I don't know what I would have done without her.  I decided to go to work the next day, but I wasn't worth a shit.  Thai funeral services last a week and often groups of friends or family will take on the role of host on certain days.  The SHL the Flying Farangs asked for a day and were given Tuesday and so on that day, all the hockey players to come in either wearing something dark SHL or Flying Farangs.  He was so loved, we had so many hockey players come to services.  I think his family appreciative that we came, and could feel the love we had for him. 

I had shinny on Thursday, which was my first time back to the rink since Cotsy passed away.  That was really hard just walking into the rink.  I'm so glad that @hirondelle came with me.  There was such a subdued feeling in the rink. People were really down, but we all knew it needed to be done, and we knew that Cotsy would want us to get together to play the game he loved.  We started with a moment of silence to show respect to Cotsy and then we started the game.  As the game went on, people seemed to feel a little better.  It was very healing for our hearts.  There was more talk in the locker room after, not the normal amount of talk, but more than before the game.  

Cotsy, you were loved, and we will miss you.  Get a shutout for me in that rink in the sky.

Always Remember:  Live and love for today for we don't know what tomorrow will bring.

Then I was invited to play hockey on the Flying Farangs in a few tournaments. 

Then in 2018, I was asked to play for Bunteng (which I'm told means 'to have fun').  The first year I played with them, we did better than the year before, which is what I hoped for.  The year before I played with them, they took 2nd to last place in the bottom division.  The first year I played with them, we took second place in the lower division, so that was a step up.  

For 2019, Bunteng changed their name to Lion State.  With the name change, we got new jerseys, which you can see @hirondelle wearing at the right.  Pretty cool.  I was excited that they wanted me to be on their team again.  See, The Bangkok Ice Hockey League (BIHL) does things differently than the SHL.  The SHL has a draft every year.  They take all the players that sign up for full time play, put them in to a pool, and the four (4) captains do a draft, based on how they did in the previous season.  The BIHL allows the teams to come with their teams intact.  The BIHL allows each team to have up to seven (7) foreign skaters, the rest must be Thai.  Last year we had 3 foreign players on our team; myself, Scott Murray and Ralf Ditmer.  This year, I helped out captain, Ang Rattanachot, find 2 more foreign players.  I brought him Janne Kankaanpaa and Jesse Starosta.

My team, Lion State seemed ready to go for our first game, and we were teamed up against a new team named Ursus.  I found out after this game that this was the first time they had played on a full size North American rink.  We won this game 9-0!

Well, karma came back to get us, and we played Warriors A, they handed up a solid loss, we lost 0-7.  Ouch!  But, for the past 4 years or so, they have been the second best team in the league, and the last time we played them, last year, I think we lost like 14-0 or something like that, so we didn't feel too bad.

Next up, we played Nakaraj Inter, which is the better of the two Nakaraj teams, and we lost 9-1.  Ouch.  That was a tough loss.  Next we played Young Ducks, and we did really well again.  We won this one 5-3, which put our record at 2-2.  For the final game of this portion of the season, we played Grizzly Bears.  Again, we really came together as a team and we won this one 5-1, finishing off the first half of the season 3-2.

At this point in the season, the separate the teams into an upper division and a lower division.  Because of our number of goals and wins, we were bumped into the upper division, which meant we would be playing the better teams in the league.  The teams in this division were Warriors A, Thunder, Nakaraj Inter, Big Bulls, Lion State and Greatest Ice.  Really, my team, Lion State and Greatest Ice shouldn't have been in this division, but oh well.  We decided to make the best of it.

In the first game of the second half of the season, we faced off against Nakaraj Inter again.  We were expecting to get our asses handed to us again, but we came out strong and actually led for most of the game.  When we got to the third period, we were ahead 3-2.  We ended up losing in the third period 5-4, which wasn't too bad at all.  

Next we played Warriors A again and they really dominated us, and beat us 13-0.  Ouch!  Our next game we went head to head with last year's champions, Thunder.  Another game we got dominated in and lost 11-1.  

Our next game was against Greatest Ice.  This is a team we should have beat, but we just couldn't get our game going, and I was so flat.  We ended up losing this one 3-2 in the closing minutes of the game.  Very disappointing.  Our final game of the season we had to play Big Bulls.  I have a lot of friends on this team, and they are better than us, but we really pulled together in this game and played better than we had all year and we ended up winning this game in the third period 4-3!  We couldn't believe it.

The teams were now separated into three divisions; Elite Division, Division 1 and Division 2.  We did well enough to be in Division 1. 

Division 1 Teams:

• OT-Yaksa
• Warriors B
• Greatest Ice
• Lion State

As there are only four (4) teams, we only had to play two (2) games.  Our first game was against OT-Yaksa.  A team we lost to last year.  We were on a high from beating the Big Bulls, and it really pulled into this game.  Things got a bit physical in this game as well, and I got into a bit of a scrum in front of the net when they scored a goal.  They scored because they slashed our goalie to knock the puck loose, which upset me, and caused me to hit that player and sending him flying.  His team didn't take too kindly to this, and that resulted in a bit of a scrum in front of my net.  There were no penalties called, but things heated up.  In the end, we held on and won this game 5-3, which sent us to the finals to play for first place!

In the final game, we faced off against Warriors B.  This was a hard fought game, not really too physical like the game against OT-Yaksa, but it really went back and forth, but in the third period we pulled it off and won 5-4!

Talk about a fun season!  I can't wait for next season.

Always Remember:  Don't stress about the future, and don't worry about the past, for now is what matters.

Before we got these bikes though, we had to rent a bike.  We needed helmets, so we went to a local helmet shop and bought helmets.  I didn't want anything fancy, and something that would just work and wasn't pink.  I felt that would be the best thing.  I got a really simple black helmet with white stripes that looked similar to the helmet here pictured to the right. 

When we got our bikes, I felt this helmet wasn't cool for a cruising bike, so I decided to get myself a new helmet.  I wanted something that didn't make me look too much like a dork, but I wanted a helmet, because you need a helmet when you ride.  I decided to go with a "leather" covered half helmet similar to the helmet to the left.

Here are the things I liked about having a half helmet.

• I liked feeling the wind on my face.
• It was easy to wear sunglasses
• My peripherals weren't restricted when riding.
• My hearing wasn't restricted when riding.

After I lost @hirondelle's awesome Union Jack half helmet.  Sadly, I don't have any pictures of this.  When I went to buy her a new helmet, I saw a full face helmet, tried it on and it felt OK, so I bought it.  There were two things that I noticed about it right away:

• It greatly reduced my peripherals.
• It greatly reduced my hearing.

I didn't think this would be much of a problem, and that I would adapt to it, but on more than one occasion, I scared @hirondelle because I didn't see and/or hear either a car or a motorcycle that was coming up behind me.  We discussed it and decided that a full face helmet wasn't the thing for me because of these two reason, so I switched back to a half helmet.

When I went back to the big helmet shop, where I got my last two (2) helmets, I found a helmet that I thought looked interesting that was a half helmet, which looked similar to the helmet on the left.  Yes, I know it was a German Nazi style war helmet, but I didn't know that at the time, I just honestly liked the styling of it.

This helmet was great for riding around town.  It didn't reduce my peripherals at all, and it didn't reducing the sounds I heard around me.  The only problem I had with this, was when I got up to 65 km/hr (40 mph), the helmet would start to lift off of my head.  That bothered me, but it wasn't often that I would be going that fast, only on road trips.  

This helmet went with us, when we moved back to Bangkok from Chiang Mai, so that I wouldn't need to wear the small helmets that motorcycle taxi drivers carried for their passengers.

When we moved from the house we were renting in Ari to the place we lived at in Sukhumvit 47, @hirondelle made a mistake and gave my helmet to our old cleaner.  She meant to give the cleaner her helmet, but it ended up being my helmet instead.  That sad thing about this, was that this cleaner was like my arch nemesis.  It was like WTF, but eh, it was probably better that I didn't have it any more as it did lift off of my head.

After this, because I was riding motorcycle taxis a lot, a friend of mine, her boyfriend had a helmet that he didn't use, so they gave it to me.  

I used this even when I got my next bike, which was another Honda Phantom 200cc.  It was another Fire Edition, but instead of the smoke grey, this was the normal red flame one.  I wore this half helmet, on the left, the whole time I had this bike.  One of the problems with this helmet was that when I would get up to about 80 km/hr (50 mph), it would slide off the back of my head.  Another problem with this was that the chin strap wouldn't stay in place.  Every time I would put my helmet on and take it off, it would loosen a little bit.

When I got my next, a Honda Rebel 500, I still wore this helmet at first.  then, with Talking with @hirondelle about helmet, she convinced that it would be better to get a safer helmet.  This of course, Stef was all for, so I went to one of the helmet shops over near Saphan Kwai. 

I tried on a few different helmets, and this is where I started to notice what some helmet said were larges, were too tight in spots, and other helmets that said they were large felt just too large.  I did finally find a helmet that fit well.  I decided to go with a face shield this time as well, so I got a bubble that snapped to the front of the helmet that fit me.

I wore this helmet for almost a year.  One of the great things about it was that it didn't reduce my hearing, and it didn't reduce my field of view in the peripherals.  One of the problems though were that once I got up to about 70 km/hr (45 mph) it got really loud under the helmet, and also, when it rained, there is a gap at the top front where the bubble snaps to the helmet that water would just run through, and this would run right down onto my face.  A little annoying as I got the bubble to prevent water from running over my face, but I could live with it.

Now, things got really interesting.  Now I know @hirondelle has been wanting me to be a bit safer on the bike.  Not really riding safer, but being safer in general on the bike, with gear.  An example of this was convincing me to get a better helmet than the half helmet I was wearing.  Well, roughly a week ago, Stef had come over to our place to see us as she had been out of the country for a couple of weeks and she missed us, and we missed her.

We sat outside talking, and at just after midnight, Stef brought up that she felt, since I am riding more and longer, I should be more safe.  I needed a better helmet and I should have some type of jacket.  To be honest, I rebelled a bit, as I felt my 3/4 helmet was loads safer than my half helmet, and it was too hot in Thailand to wear a jacket.  

Now, the reason the time is so important to me, is because this marked the anniversary of my mother's death.  I felt that this was my mother wanting me to be safe, and using the two women that I love to help me be safe.  To go with this, @hirondelle found a great video review on mesh jackets on YouTube done by RevZilla.

So I did some research on the jackets listed in this video.  I also started doing some research on helmets.  Stef recommended a modular helmet, and a friend of mine, Ralf, used a modular helmet, so I asked him about his. 

A modular helmet is a helmet where the visor and chin bar flip up.  One of the problems that some modular helmets is that they have a lot of noise, so I asked him about this.  He said his helmet didn't have any noise until about 140 km/hr (87 mph).  His helmet is a Schuberth C3 helmet, and I liked how it looked, and when he said he had no noise, that made me even happier.  Ralf let me try his helmet on, and I liked how it felt, so I figured I had found the helmet I wanted.  

I asked Ralf about his helmet, and I did a lot of research about helmets and modular helmets, and Ralf sent me to place here in Bangkok, Thailand called Panda Rider, which has quite a lot of good quality riding gear.  This isn't your local little shop with no name helmets and gloves in there.  They carry licensed gear from places like Schuberth, Shoei and Rev'It, just to name a few.

So, on Saturday, @hirondelle and I headed out to Ladprao to try find Panda Rider.  We arrived there with just a little less than an hour left of business.  The people at Rider Panda were great.  They didn't give us any funny looks for being there with less than an hour before closing, happily answered any questions I had, made suggestions for sizes.  They never rushed me, which was great.  Lastly, while we were waiting for my helmet to come from the warehouse, the sales associate helped me search for hard case removable saddle bags for my bike, (they didn't have any) and also talked to me about a communication system for helmets, so if @hirondelle and I wanted to talk, we could.

First thing I looked at were the modular helmets, and I asked the sales associate for some help.  He had me try on a medium, and it was just too small.  Really pressed against my forehead.  So the associate had me try a large, and that fit perfect!  So we talked about what color I wanted, and he had his assistant head out to the warehouse to get the color I wanted.

Next up, was a jacket.  I knew I wanted the Rev'It Airwave 2.  I didn't want anything heavy, but I wanted protection in the elbows and shoulders.  The Rev'It Airwave 2 is a mesh jacket with armor in the elbow and in the shoulders as well as a pouch for armor in the back if wanted.  The first jacket he had me try one was a large.  It was too tight in the upper arms, in the chest and in the stomach.  I couldn't even get it zipped up.  So he had me try an XXL, and that fit just right.

Once we got everything organized and ready to go, they sales associate that his shop was having a sale next month, but because it wasn't next month yet, we could do a lucky draw and get between 10% and 30% off of the helmet.  The jacket was already on sale, which was awesome!  After everything was all said and done, the final price that we had to pay was actually less than the full price of the helmet. If I would have purchased the communication unit that night, I would have gotten 20% off, but I decided I would wait, when I come back, he said he would give 10% off when I come back.

All in all, it was a pretty awesome time at Panda Rider. 

As you can see from the picture on the right, I got all kitted up to head home.  The helmet was great. It didn't feel too heavy, and it didn't fog up, which was great, and the jacket, I could feel the air through it when I was moving down the road, which was great as it gets hot here in Thailand.

Well, that's all for now.  I hope I didn't bore you all too much.

Always Remember: There is nothing like traveling down the open road, be it 10 minutes of 10 hours, so get our there and do it!

1. This post is very very NSFW
2. Like my other stories, this work is pure fiction
3. The characters in this story are both willing participants
4. This story, in no way, shows that I think men are superior to women.  I fully believe that men and women are equal in all aspects of life and should be treated as such.
5. As this story is NSFW and adult in nature, you read at your own risk, and as such, you cannot hold the writer responsible for your reactions.
6. Feel free to comment and discuss after you have read.

While you’re in the other room changing in to your school girl outfit, I organize room to look like an office.

Mr. Davis sat at his desk as he looked over reports on his computer when he heard a knock at the door.  He looked up to see Shelly Stevens, one of his seniors. She was troublesome. “Come in Shelly”, he said.  As she stepped into his office, his eyes travelled up and down her body, taking note of how tight her blouse was and how short her skirt was and he had to suppress his shiver of desire.  When she sat down in the chair in front of his desk, he could see quite far up her legs. Her cough brought him back to her senses. “Stand up Shelly.”

“Yes sir,” she said as she stood up slowly, looking at him in the eyes.  Once she was fully standing, she lowered her eyes.

Whew, that’s better, he thought.  “Shelly. I have had a number of complaints about you this term.  You know the rules, for each complaint that I read out, you will count by two.  That is how many cane strokes you will receive. Do you understand Shelly?” he said while his eyes traveled her body.

She looked up at him and caught his eyes roaming her body and felt her excitement build, “Yes Mr. Davis, I understand,” she responded.

Mr. Davis looked back to his computer, brings up the file on Shelly.  “You were late to Mr. Erickson’s English class,” he started.

“But I forgot my books in….” she said as she tried to tried to plead as she looked up at him.

Mr. Davis looked up with a fire in his eyes.  “Excuse me? I didn’t hear you count,” he said with an edge to his voice.

Her heart started to race as her excitement built at the sound of his voice and the look in his eyes.  “I’m sorry,” she said as she slowly lowered her eyes. “Two Mr. Davis.”

Mr. Davis looked back at the file, but not before his eyes traveled her body one more time.  “You skipped Mrs. Agloth’s gym class.”

“Four Mr. Davis” she said with a slight tremor of excitement in her voice as she wondered how many of these he had.

As they go through the list, Shelly counts as Mr. Davis lists each offense, both becoming excited at the prospect of what is to come.  Mr. Davis comes to his last item on the list. “Making phone calls during class.”

Shelly opened her mouth to protest, but decided against it.  “Eighteen Mr. Davis”

“That’s not good at all Shelly,” he said as he stands up with a bulge in his pants from his erection which drew Shelly’s eyes.  He slowly walked around to the front of the desk to stand in front of her. His eyes again move up and down her body, “This uniform is not to standard.  Your blouse looks too tight. And your skirt, well, it looks too short. Kneel here so we can check.”

Shelly slowly kneeled down in front of Mr. Davis, bringing her closer to him, her eyes glued to the bulge in his pants which is now at her eye level.  “Your skirt is definitely too short Shelly. How many is that?”

Shelly licked her lips as she slowly looked up at Mr. Davis before she answered.  “Twenty Mr. Davis” she responded with a horse whisper as she knew the punishment she was about to receive and was incredibly turned on by it.

“Stand up Shelly and put your elbows on my desk,” Mr Davis said with an edge of excitement to his voice.

Shelly stood up, slowly leaned over the desk and placed her elbows on.  As she did so, the back hem of her skirt raised up to just below the curve of her ass.  She looked over her shoulder at Mr. Davie, “Like this Mr. Davis?”

“Exactly like that Shelly,” he said as he reached down, letting his fingers drag up the back of Shelly’s thigh as he moves his fingers up to the hem of Shelly’s skirt, lifting the hem of her skirt up over her ass. “Shelly.  That is very bad. You are not wearing the correct panties,” he said, grabbing hold of her thong and pulling it up, causing Shelly to gasp. He reaches over to his desk, grabbed a pair of scissors and roughly cut Shelly’s thong from her and tossed it aside.

Using his hand between Shelly’s legs and forced her legs apart with his hands, bringing his hand up, he can feel her excitement already.  He reached over and grabbed the cane. “Count out the strokes Shelly. If you don’t count it, it doesn’t count.”

“Yes, Mr. Davis”, she gets out before the first strike lands causing her to scream out.  

Mr. Davis waits a few seconds, but doesn’t her Shelly say one.  “That one doesn’t count Shelly. I will have to do it again” he says and lets another strike land.

“One Mr. Davis”, she said through clenched teeth.  Before Shelly has a chance to catch her breath, Mr. Davis lands another strike, causing Shelly to gasp.  “Two Mr. Davis”.

Mr. Davis stroked his fingers over the welts that have started to rise on Shelly’s ass.  This caused a groan to escape Shelly’s lips as she pushed back a little against his fingers. Mr. Davis strokes the cane briefly, causing Shelly’s excitement to rise more.  With another quick strike on to Shelly’s ass, causing a third welt to rise up, Shelly bit her lip to prevent a scream from escaping her. “Three Mr. Davis”. Mr. Davis can feel himself starting to swell.  The fourth strike lands on Shelly’s ass and she pants a little from the intensity of the strike. “Four Mr. Davis.”

He stroked Shelly’s ass again, he can feel each individual welt, pressing his fingers into them as they move over them causing Shelly to gasp and push against his hand. Mr Davis griped the welts on Shelly’s ass hard, which caused her to groan, which he followed with sliding his fingers up the inside of her thighs, running them along the wet folds of your pussy, which caused a moan to escape Shelly’s lips.

Mr. Davis let another strike fall on Shelly’s ass, this one harder than the previous four, which caused Shelly to yelp.  “Five Mr. Davis”, which was followed by another strike, “Six Mr. Davis”, followed by another quick strike “Seven Mr. Davis”, followed by a fourth quick strike, “Eight Mr. Davis”, Shelly said with, shaky voice. He placed his palm on her hot ass and he could feel the welts rising from where he just struck her.  He drug his fingers over the welts causing Shelly’s whole body to shake. He reached down to stroke her pussy while he pressed his hard cock against her thigh though he pants. The stroking of his fingers and the pressing of his cock against her caused her body to move and twist with desire.

Before he loses control, Mr. Davis moved away and removed his fingers from Shelly’s pussy.  With a quick snap of his wrist, he lets another strike land on Shelly welted ass. “Nine Mr. Davis” she said as she tried to control her breathing, another strike falls, “Ten Mr. Davis”, and another, “Eleven Mr. Davis”, and another “Twelve Mr. Davis” Shelly pants out.

The welts and red stripes looked good to him, he needed to touch them again, stroking his fingers over welts, dragging his fingertips over them over them, pressing his fingers into them, pressing his throbbing cock against her thigh, he reaches down and strokes her hot lips, making her moan and grind against him.  He can’t help but to think how much he is going to enjoy feeling her wet lips wrapped around his cock soon.  

Mr. Davis swings the cane again, connecting with Shelly’s “Thirteen Mr. Davis” striking again, “Fourteen Mr. Davis” striking one more time “Fifteen Mr. Davis” Shelly said as her voice breaks.

Mr. Davis couldn’t control himself any more, pressing his hand into the small of Shelly’s back, he went to unbuckle his belt, but struggles with one hand and released Shelly to use both hands.  Shelly quickly turned around and kneeled before and undoes Mr. Davis’s pants and pulls them down with his underwear, grabs Mr. Davis cock and pops it into her mouth. “Oh damn, Shelly. That feels so good” he groaned and he started thrusting into her mouth.

Before he got over excited, he pulled Shelly’s mouth off his cock, made her stand back up and bend over the desk, positioned the head of his cock against her wet pussy.  “I’m going to fuck you so hard” he growled at her and drove his cock deep into her causing her to scream out in pleasure. Each time he thrust into her, his hips smacked into her freshly caned ass, mixing Shelly’s pain in pleasure throwing her over the edge as wave after wave of orgasm crashed over her.  The intensity of Shelly’s orgasm spurred on Mr. Davis and he started thrusting faster and harder into her, as his orgasm built. Before long, he gripped her hips hard and thrust deep, cuming inside her.
 

The next big thing this year was that it was discussed, with my daughter, my ex-wife and with @hirondelle, that my daughter was supposed to move out here for a year.  This was quite a task, because we needed to get money for her flight, we needed to get her passport, we needed to get her on her first long haul flight with multiple stops.

My oldest sister, Danelle, helped us out a lot along the way.  The first thing she did was set up a go fund me account for our family to donate funds for a plane ticket for my daughter, and together, we raised enough money for her plane ticket.

Before Bretney got her passport, Danelle convinced Dena, my other sister, to join them in coming to Bangkok.

The next step was to get my daughter to get her passport, which proved to be a little more difficult as her rides to the place to do the paperwork for her passport.  Eventually, Danelle flew from Minnesota to Pennsylvania to help Bretney get her passport.

A few weeks later, Bretney sent me a message letting me know that she got her passport.  Everybody was exciting about this.  It wasn't long after this, that Bretney sent me a message asking me if it was ok that she only spent two (2) weeks here, for which I told her it was more than OK, that she could stay as long as she wanted, be it two (2) weeks, two (2) months, six (6) months or a year, doesn't matter.

To make things even more exciting, I was asked to play for the Flying Farangs in an old timers tournament here at the same time they were arriving.  The good thing is, the timing of their flight arriving lined up really well with my games.  After I finished my first game on Thursday, March 28th, and @hirondelle and I headed off to the airport to meet everybody.  I was so excited and happy when I saw them coming towards us.  Danelle was the first one to give me a big hug, then Dena, and they Bretney.  I couldn't believe it, they were finally here!  Friday night, they got to come see me play in the tournament, and we won, but in our semifinal math-up on Saturday morning, we lost out, oh well.  Next time.  Friday afternoon, I took Bretney to my hair stylist so she could get the haircut that she wanted.  

Danelle and Gen immediately headed out to Phuket, Vietnam and Cambodia for five (5) days, and after the tournament, @hirondelle and I took Dena and Bretney to Koh Samet.  I had arranged for a car to pick us up at 9:00 in the morning on Sunday.  We all piled in the car and headed off to Pattaya four (4) hours later, we arrived at the pier to get a speedboat to take us to our resort on Koh Samat.  As far as I know, this was a fist for Bretney, and she really seemed to enjoy the boat trip over.

Our first day there, Bretney and I took a walk up the beach and just chatted.  We found a shop and bought some water, and decided to walk back up the road, but changed our mind and walked back up the beach..  After relaxing a bit, we had a lovely dinner on the beach.  For our second day, we got up relatively early and decided to go swimming.  Bretney didn't join us the first day, because she forgot to bring her swimsuit, but @hirondelle, Dena and I went swimming.  Afterwards, we wandered up the beach and found a place for Dena and I to get a foot massage on the beach.  That was really nice.  We hung out at this portion of beach for a bit while we all chatted and relaxed.  All in all, we had a great time at the beach.

Coming back from the beach was quite interesting to say the least.  We caught the boat back to the mainland, and we had to wait, which wasn't bad.  Once the driver arrived, we piled into his car, which happened to be smaller than the car we went out in, but it's OK, we all fit with our bags.  The problem came in, when we got close to home, the driver missed our exit.  We were like five (5) minutes from our house.  then he took an exit to get us turned around and missed again, and turned around again, and missed again.  He finally got to a place, and I had to take over giving directions.  It was kind of funny, but frustrating all at the same time.

The next night, we met Danelle and her friend Gen for dinner at one of our favorite local places called Flow Run.  Amazing food, we love it.  We had a great dinner, and we planned our next adventure.  Our plan was to go to the summer palace, which is on the way to Ayutthaya, which is a city in Thailand that has these amazing temple ruins, finished off with a boat ride back to Bangkok, with them providing a late lunch/early dinner.  At one of the temples in Ayutthaya, I was blessed by monk, which I always do when we do this trip.  It feels good to have it done.  I actually went into two temples to get blessed.  In the second temple, the monk there is a little bit crazy, and he hit me in the top of the head when giving me my blessing.  I guess it was to make the blessing stick or something.  LOL. 

On another day, we went to Chatuchack Weekend Market.  This was a lot of fun, and we did some souvenir shopping for everybody.  This is a great place for that.  The bad thing about it is that it's about 90% outside, so you can get really hot really fast.  We decided to have lunch inside J.J. Mall, which is a mall right next door to Chatuchack market.  Once we finished eating, Danelle, Dena, Bretney and I all went to get foot massages in the basement of the mall at one of my favorite places. 

All in all, my family was here for roughly two (2) weeks.  It was awesome having them here.  It was the second time for my one sister, Danelle, to be here, and the first time for my other sister, Dena, and my daughter, Bretney to be here in Thailand.  

Well, that's all for now.  

Always Remember: Love your family as they are the only ones you've got.

About a year ago, Tracy and I decided to explore our kinky side a bit more.  In doing so, we joined a kinky community to get to know others that were already kinky.  We did some research and found out that there was what's called munch.  Basically, a munch is a place for people to meet up at a normal place, like a bar, pub or restaurant.  It's a place for people to feel comfortable and chat about things and get to know each other.  The community was very welcoming, and we met some really interesting people.  Not long after the event, Tracy and I went to England on holiday.  When we got back from England, we went to a couple more munches before we were invited to a party, which wasn't even a kink play party, it was a welcome back party for a friend of the community, at a house of one of the members of the community.  So we arrived, and we were welcome with open arms by the host.  Everybody was very friendly with us, and we made some really good friends that night.  One of those friends was somebody we reacquainted ourselves with, which was Stef.  Of all the people in the community, we started to develop a close friendship with Stef.

Over the next 6 months, Tracy and I started talking about maybe opening up our marriage, or more to the point, inviting a woman, and try a threesome.  One of the most important things, for the both of us, was that the person we decided to try this with really needed to be attracted to the both, not just me, and not just Tracy, but both.  The one person that we thought would be good for us, if she liked us, was Stef, because we had already built a friendship with her.  During a birthday party at Stef's house, Stef approached me and let me know that if Tracy and I wanted to, she would like to play with us.  A little later in the night, Stef also talked to Tracy about.  She told us how she thought both Tracy and I were cool and how much she liked us.

After the party, Tracy and I went home and we talked about it a little bit.  Both of us were quite excited by the idea, but we made sure not to make any decisions then, and went to bed and let things settle in our head.  The next day we talked about it off and on, and decided that would like to try it.  I contacted Stef, and we made a date.  The original plan was that we were going to have Stef come to our place, but we had some issues, and we moved the date to Stef's place.  We arrived, and Stef's, and had dinner just chatted for quite some time.  Don't worry, I'm not going to give you all the gory details or the play by play.  Let's just say that we had a really good night and if anything, it brought the three of us closer.  Over the next few days and weeks, we talked about it, and decided that we wanted to do it again, but this time, do a weekend thing.  This time, Stef came to our house.  We went to a restaurant near us and had a lovely dinner and talked a lot.  We went back to our place and chatted and got closer.  We spent Friday night, all day Saturday and Sunday morning.

About mid December, I found out that Tracy was going to Hong Kong for work during my birthday, and she asked me if I would like to go, and then a few days later, she asked if we should invite Stef, so when we went to a party at Stef's place, early in the night, we asked Stef if she would join us in the kitchen for a moment, and asked her if she would like to go to Hong Kong with us.  This was a big step for us for a few different reasons.  First, Tracy would already be in Hong Kong, so Stef and I would fly out together.  Second, Tracy would have to stay in the hotel her work paid for on the Thursday night and work on Friday, so Stef and I would spend the night together in the hotel together, alone and part of Friday together alone until Tracy could join us later in the evening.  Stef loved the idea agreed.

Christmas was fast approaching, and Tracy and I wanted to spend it with Stef, so we asked her if she wanted to have Christmas with us, and she accepted, and we arranged another multi-day.  On Christmas Eve, we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Bourbon Street, which does a Cajun Style Buffet which is just delicious.  Sadly, they made a mistake and didn't have our table that we booked, but they made up for it by putting us in a private area, so it was just the three (3) of us, which was really nice.  After dinner, we got a taxi back to our place and opened gifts.  We spent Christmas Day together, just relaxing and played a really interesting game.  On the 26th, we had a nice breakfast and then Stef went home.

Also, we weren't just getting together for dates.  If there was a munch or a party, or an art night or something, we would see Stef at these.  Stef also wanted us, and those close to her to meet her parents.  This was a big step for Stef, because although her parents knew she was polyamorous they hadn't met everybody together at one sitting.  We got to meet them and they met everybody and we had a lovely dinner and chatted and got to know them.

The following Monday, Tracy was off to Hong Kong, and I had until Thursday to get to get things organized in my head to go to Hong Kong with Stef on the following Thursday.  I got approval from my school to leave after lunch on Thursday, so I could take care of any last second things, and at 4:00 pm, I headed off to Makasan Station to meet Stef, and we boarded the Airport Rail Link and headed to the airport together.  Once we were all checked in, we sat down for some snacks and beers and Stef gave me my birthday card with a lovely picture in it.  We boarded the plane and off to Hong Kong.  Once in Hong Kong, things were a bit hectic as we had to find the hotel, but it wasn't too bad, and we checked into the hotel, went to the room relaxed.  The following morning, Stef and I went out and about, and I won't go too much into the Hong Kong trip as you can read all about it in the blog post titled Special Birthday Gift.

Next up was Stef's birthday, which we celebrated a two in one birthday on Tracy's birthday.  Stef booked a lovely dinner at the Sofitel Rooftop Restaurant where we had mussels for dinner and then we went back to Stef's place for a nice night together.  In February, we had quite a few dates.  First, as I said was Tracy's birthday, then we got together on the on the 8th, we had dinner together on the 14th, with Stef spending the night, and then we had another weekend date near the end of February after the Poly munch.  

In March, five (5) of us went to Pattaya for a dive weekend.  It was our friend Colin and his girlfriend Emma, Tracy, Stef and I.  It was a lovely weekend and we really enjoyed it.  On March 8th, we had our 6th month anniversary, and we celebrated it together.  We also had a date on the 22nd, which was the Thai Election day, and we jokingly called Erection day.. .well, because obviously.

When all this started out, we didn't think it would be where we are now.  I think the three (3) of us just thought it would be a night of sex, one time, maybe more if we all enjoyed it.  What we didn't expect was that the three of us would end up falling in love with each other.  It's been an amazing ride, and maybe I will right another post about it when we hit the one year mark.  I'm not sure yet.  We are just playing things by ear, and one of the most important things is that we don't want any of the three of us to change.

Always Remember:  Always follow your heart, it will never lead you wrong. 

Back in January, I was talking to a friend of mine, Colin, a fellow American living here in Bangkok.  We were talking, and he told me how go goes scuba diving.  I mentioned that it scuba diving was one of the things I've always wanted to try.  Colin looked at me and said I should try what's called a Try Dive.  What that is, is you a dive instructor teaches you some of the very very basics of diving, then you go out and you do one shallow dive, and one dive a little bit deeper.  This sounded really go to me, but I said I would think about it.  A few weeks later, and I had heard that Colin was really excited to go diving with me, which got me excited about it.  I started to think about it seriously.  So after discussing it with Tracy, we decided we would do it.  Tracy would sit on the boat with Colin's girlfriend and Colin, Stef and I would all go out.

About two (2) weeks before we went, I was contacted by a guy named Alex that does dive training.  He asked me a few questions, which were pretty easy.  After talking to him for a few minutes on the phone, he told me that I will have to fill out a questionnaire, which was no big deal.  Alex also explained a little bit about the dive to me, it's called Discover Scuba Diving.  He gave me the option doing the basics on the boat and in the sea, or I could meet him at his place, and we could go over the basics and go in the pool for clearing my regulator and my mask.  I chose to go to his place before the dive so it would be one less thing I had to think about before the dive.

So I arrived at my dive instructor's, Chris, condo.  He came down and got me and brought me up to his place.  The first thing he showed me was called a Buoyancy Control Device (BCD).  Basically, the BCD is a vest for diving.  There are straps on the back of the BCD to hold the air tank in place, there are also areas on the vest to clip pouches/lights/cameras or whatever you want to connect there.  There is also a high pressure hose connector to connect your air tank to your vest for the air bladders (buoyancy), and lots of emergency release valves.  When diving, you want to keep your BCD deflated, and not really use it to control your buoyancy, you want to use your breath to control your buoyancy.  When you're on the surface, you use your BCD to keep you on the surface. 

The next thing I learned about was the regulator.  The different parts of the regulator are:

• First Stage - Which you connect to your air tank
• Console - Which you use to tell how much air you have in your tank and your depth
• Low Pressure Hose- which you connect to your BCD so you can fill it with air when needed.
• Regulator - Which is what you use to breath
• Octopus - Which is your second breather, which is usually yellow.

Chris then explained to me how to clear my regulator when in the water, which is, you put the regulator back in your mouth and then blow out through it with a longish exhale, which will force any water out of it.  

Next up was the diving fins, which he explained how to easily put on and how to take off before getting out of the water.

The last thing he showed me was the diving mask.  With this, Chris showed me how to check the fit of the mask.  To do that, you place the mask against your face and inhale with your nose, which will create a suction, and the mask should stick to your face for a couple of seconds, if it fits properly.  Then Chris explained to me how to clear water from the mask, because sometimes, masks get water in them.  What you do, is take a deep breath from your regulator, hold the top of the mask against your face, and blow out through your nose.  This causes your mask to fill with air, and it wants to escape from the top, but since it can't, it pushes down, forcing the water out the bottom of the mask.  

Once we did all this, Chris took me out to his condo's pool so I could show him clearing my mask and also clearing my regulator, using a snorkel instead.  Down at the pool Chris explained things to me again, and about how to make it so your mask doesn't fog up, you could use anti-fog, you could use spit, or you could use baby shampoo.  Baby shampoo??  I know right, but he said it works great, which I will explain later.

After this, he explained to me how to jump into the water with the tank on my back, you are standing on the diving platform at the back of the boat, and you take a big step out away from the boat.  It has to be a big step, because you need to clear the tank from the diving platform.  Once in the water, Chris explained to me what some of the main hand signals are. 

• OK - touch the index finger to the thumb in a circle and the rest of the fingers pointed up
• Ascend - thumb pointing up
• Descend - thumb pointing down
• Something wrong - hand horizontal flat and rock thumb to pinky and back and then point to what is wrong.
• Direction - use your whole hand to point in the direction, fingers first
• Buddy up - put index fingers together side by side
• Split up - split side by side index finger apart
• Shark - make a fin with your hand and place on your head
• Trigger fish - make a gun with your hand
• Turtle - place one hand on the other hand, palm to back of hand and lace your fingers together

Chris then showed me how to let water into my mask and then clear it, and had me repeat it, then filled the mask full of water and then cleared it, he demoed and I followed.  We did these a couple of time, until I could do it consistently.

After this, Chris showed me how to clear my regulator, replacing the regulator with the snorkel.  This reminded me of when I was a kit and I tried using a snorkel.  I never really like them because they always seemed to fill with water on me or they seemed so hard to breath through.  I hoped that breathing through the regulator would be easier.

The last thing Chris wanted me to do for the day was to show re-pressurizing my ears, so we went down the toe bottom of the pool and I pinched my nose and gave a slight blow to re-pressurize my ears.  Sorted, all ready for Saturday!

Come Friday night, we met Stef at her condo and then we met up with Colin and Emma and we all climbed into the SUV with our bags and headed out to Pattaya, which we arrived at roughly about 2 a.m., checked into our crazy room (really should have taken some pictures of it as it was really cool and interesting.  They had a stage and pole for pole dancing right in the room, and tub with a jacuzzi in it, dancing lights, karaoke machine, three (3) TVs in the room, one with regular porn on it, one with ladyboy porn and the last one was turned off.  We actually didn't waste a lot of time as we had to be up in a few hours to meet the Divemaster, Dave, and my instructor, Chris.  We were all up and heading to the cafe at about eight, where we all got some coffee and something to eat.  I had a blueberry danish, one of my favorite things.  Chris and Dave met us at the cafe.  After we all ate, we headed off to the boat.  Once the rest of the other party showed up, we got underway.  

On our way to the dive site, I talked to Chris and he we went over again the things I needed to know, clearing my regulator, clearing my mask, and then we set up my dive equipment.  Chris showed me how to choose a tank that has been filled, and then I had to show Chris that I remember how to do all of this.  Then he had me inflate my BCD to show me that you can't over fill it, there are safety releases that will automatically release any extra air.  Once my BCD and regulator were all set up on the tank, he showed me how to see if my regulator was OK and see if there were any smells coming from the air in the tank, and everything was ok.  After that, I went back up onto the top deck to be with the rest of my group.

The water was really choppy this day, and for the first time in my life, I started to feel a bit sick.  I controlled it with my breathing pretty well.  When we got to our dive site, I met Chris down at the prepping area and started to get ready, putting my wetsuit on and my diving gear.  Once I was all set, I stood there, talking to Chris about some last second things, and sadly, I just couldn't hold my breakfast down, and I got sick over the side of the boat.  I felt horrible, but everybody kept telling me that I will feel much better once I'm in the water, so once I rinsed my mouth out, I walked over to the dive deck, Chris jumped in, I put my flippers on and I jumped in.

Once in the water, it was a lot better on the surface, but it was still quite rough, but no where near as bad as on the boat.  Once in the water, we defogged our masks, cleared our regulators and checked in the water.  One of the bad things, is there were a lot of sea urchins on the bed, so we had to swim around on the surface a bit to find a place that didn't have as many urchins.  Once we found a place, we put our masks on, our regulators in and released all the air from our BCDs, and started sinking.  I only went a little way under the water, so Chris had to add more weight to my weight belt, and then we sank down to the sea bed.  I think at that part, we were at about three (3) or four (4) meters deep.  Once there, I showed that I could clear my mask, took me 2 times, but actually not a problem.  After that, I had to clear my regulator, which is, so I took a deep breath, pulled my regulator out of my mouth, help the nozzle up so all the air came out, then put the regulator back in my mouth and exhaled.  Easy.  Next he had me find my regulator, which is I had to take a deep breath, take my regulator our, put it behind me and release it.  Then I had to swing my right arm around, slowly backwards in windmill motion and hook the regulator with my arm and bring my arm all the way around so the regulator is in front of my body, then grab the regulator and clear the regulator.  Pretty simple stuff.  Then I had to make my body horizontal, and breathe in and out normal and try balance my body in the water, then breathe in to raise my body, and out to lower my body.

Once I got this down, we started swimming around.  Talk about an amazing feeling!  We swam over some coral, saw quite a few urchins, some some interesting fish, and then saw this really really amazingly blue fish, which I think is called a Blue Damsel.  It kind of looked like the fish off to the right of this paragraph.  I was shocked by how blue it was.  While were were swimming around, we saw a squirt gun, some rope, and only one little pice of trash, which Chris picked up.

We spent about forty (40) minutes under water, when Chris signaled that we should start heading for the surface.  At this point, he inflated his safety sausage, and then headed up to the first holding point, which is about 5m, and sat there for a few minutes, then we headed to the surface and inflated our BCD.  The water seemed to have gotten rougher, but that could have just been in comparison to what it was like under the surface.  Also, Stef, Colin and their group had surfaced as well.  We all swam to the lifesaver ring on the rope and started working our way to the boat.  We had to wait for the waves to settle a bit for each person before we climbed out.  Once out of the water, I worked my way over to tank rack and dropped off my my tank, took off my BCD, then my mask.  

All in all, it was an amazing dive, and I found out that I had gone down to about seven (7) meters.  Shortly after being back on the boat, they served lunch, but I started feeling sick again, so I decided not to eat.  While I was talking to Dave on the top deck, I felt like I was going to get sick again, so I worked my way down to the lower deck to hang out the window, just in case.  Although I didn't get sick, I didn't feel much better by the time we reached the next dive site, and I didn't feel well enough to get back in the water.  I did eventually take one of the sea sickness pills, but it didn't take effect soon enough for me to get in the water.  I ended up laying down on one of the chairs on the top deck and taking a nap, which I felt loads better after I work up.  

After this, I really want to do my Open Water Certification, which means I can go down to eighteen (18) meters and my Advanced Open Water Certification, which means I can go deeper, thirty (30) meters and other options.  I absolutely loved it.

Always Remember: If you have a bucket list, you should start doing the things on your bucket list now!

After we had agreed on this, Tracy asked me if I would be OK if we decided to invite our friend, Stef, to go with me.  So Stef would fly out with me on Thursday night, and we would spend the rest of Thursday night together, and half of Friday, until Tracy finished work in the afternoon, then we would spend the rest of Friday together and all of Saturday and fly back together on Sunday.

I was all for this, and excited, and Tracy told me she was also very excited about this, so we decided to bring this up to Stef.  When we brought this up to Stef, she was also very excited about it, which made it more exciting for us.

So the big day arrives.  My birthday.  I finished work early, and headed home to do the last minute things I needed to do before I headed to the airport.  At about four o'clock, I head out for the airport.  On the way there, I met Stef, and we went to the airport together.  While we waiting for our flight, we had shared a couple of jogs of beer and she gave me a lovely birthday card.

Next up was flight to Hong Kong.  It's not a long flight, only about two and a half hours.  Once we got going, I started watching the movie Papillon (2017).  It was a really good movie, but I didn't have time to watch the whole movie, but I got to watch the last part of it on the way back.

We arrived in Hong Kong at about 10:30, and made it to the trains before they stopped running, we eventually made it to the area of our hotel, then we had to find our hotel.  LOL.  Quite an interesting journey at that time of night, but it was fun walking around Hong Kong at that time of night.

When we got up on Friday morning, we headed out to find breakfast.  We walked around Hong Kong for a bit, enjoying the city for my first tie, taking some pictures of interesting things that I saw.  We finally found a place for breakfast and had a really good breakfast.  After breakfast, Stef and I decided to walk around Hong Kong some more so she could show me around Hong Kong as it was my first time.  We saw some really interesting shaped/styled buildings.  There was this one that looked like it would topple over if there was a strong wind.

I also saw this building that looked like it was made of puzzle pieces, which was really cool.

 And next to this building was a gold building.

In our wanderings, Stef took me to Hong Kong Park which has some really cool things.  In the outdoors bit, it had some ponds with waterfalls, but then they also had this conservatory in the park.  In side this conservatory, they had some really cool things and a few funny things.  They had a few different rooms areas.  One of the areas was the arid area, and they had these funny little statues in there, which I had to take pictures of, you can find those in the Hong Kong 2019 Gallery.  Outside, we got a closer look at the ponds and waterfalls, and they flowed from one pond to another.  At the lower ponds, they had koi fish and so many turtles.

After we finished at the the Hong Kong Park, we wandered around Hong Kong a little bit, looking for a bank so I could change money from Thai Baht to Hong Kong Dollars.  All the banks we went to wouldn't exchange the money for me unless I had an account with them.  We did eventually find a currency exchange so I could change my money. 

It was about this time that Tracy messaged us to let us know that she had finished work and that she was going to go to the hotel that her work had booked her in, check out and meet us at our hotel, so Stef and I hopped onto the tram and headed back to the hotel.  One of the cool things about the trams in Hong Kong is that they look so old.  It's like thrown back about 40 years or so.  Once we got back to the hotel and met up with Tracy, we brought her suitcase up to the room and headed out.

There was a "Christmas" fair that was going on, but it had been extended to Chinese New Years, so it was still going on when we got there, so we decided to go and check it out.  The fair was situated near the ferris wheel that Hong Kong has which is like the London Eye, the only difference is, it isn't big enough for you to stand up in and you are supposed to remain seated for the whole ride.  I took quite a few pictures from the ferris wheel that you can find in the photo gallery for this blog post.

After the ferris wheel ride, we decided that since we are at a fair, we needed to get hotdogs and beer, so we found a stand where we could get hotdogs and a different stand where we could get beer.  The bad thing was, we needed to buy tokens to get the beer and the hotdogs, so we went and bought tokens and had beer and hotdogs.  Well, Stef and I had beer, Tracy and a soda.  

After this, we had some extra tokens so we wandered around looking for things to spend our tokens on.  We found one of the rides, I think it was called White Water Rafting or something like that.  Each boat had four (4) seats, which was perfect for us.  It was a lot of fun.  After that, we decided to head off to get dinner. 

We decided to have dinner at this Brussels restaurant that mussels.  It was my first time having mussels.  I decided to go with a spicy one that had chorizo sausage, and they were delicious.  Then we headed back to the hotel.

For Saturday, we decided that we wanted to head over to Kowloon.  To do that, we had to head across Victoria Harbor, so we decided to take the Star Ferry.  I don't know if you know the movie Chungking Express, but it's a movie about this place in Kowloon that is like this apartment complex, with everything you need just in there.  It's actually a really good movie, so it was pretty cool to see the real place.

While we were in Kowloon, we wanted to check out a couple of sex shops.  I've been to a few in the States, and a few in the UK, so I thought it would be interesting to see what one was like in Hong Kong.  It was packed full of things, and not as spacious as the ones I've been to in the States or in the UK but it was pretty cool.  So many different things.

After the first shop, we stopped and had lunch, then off to a stationary shop.  Can't pass up a good stationary shop and this was supposed to be one of the best in Hong Kong.  Wow!  Did that have some stuff.  Everything you can imagine stationary wise, for art, Legos, teaching, for learning, games, pens, you name it, it had it!  It was huge.  Like seven (7) floors.  Incredible!  I ended up buying Tracy her birthday gift there.  

Next up, we decided to find what was a really highly rated shop in Hong Kong, but on the way I saw this, which has lots of rope and lots of bamboo, oh the things I could do with this!   Once we found the shop, it was in a little mall, but it wasn't really that great, but we did see another one, and that was a bit better.

Once we were finished there, we hopped on the underground and headed back across the harbor to head up to the Peak and have dinner.  We had made a booking through the hotel so we needed to get back.  We hopped into a taxi and he took us up the Peak.  We were a little later than we wanted to be, so we didn't get to explore the Peak very much, but we the view of the night skyline of Hong Kong with the mountains overhead was just incredible!  Then we went to the Peak Restaurant.  I decided to have a steak sandwich that was delicious.  

Another great day in Hong Kong, so after dinner, we headed back to the hotel for the night.

Sadly, that was our last night in the hotel, and in the morning, we packed things up and headed for the subway to head to the airport.  For my first trip to Hong Kong, it was amazing and I have to thank both Tracy and Stef for an amazing birthday.

Always Remember: If there is some place that you really want to see, make sure to make the time to it.  You won't regret it.

Before I get too far, let me start off at the beginning.  I remember as a kid, back in the late 70s, way before there was digital photography, when you actually had to get your film developed to see what your pictures looked like, I got this little camera for my birthday.  It was a little instamatic, similar to the picture you see here on the left.  The film was in these cartridges like you see on the right. You had to open the back of the camera, insert the cartridge, close the back, and spin the dial until it stopped, then you could take your pictures.  You couldn't open the back of the camera until you used up all the film because it would ruin the pictures you already took.  I think I might have taken about five (5) rolls of pictures, which I don't think I ever got developed. I remember taking this camera on a school field trip to Fort Snelling, and I took maybe two (2) rolls of pictures while I was there.

In the early to mid 80s, my parents got a polaroid, similar to the one on the right, but ours was all black, and I played with that a little bit, not really very much.  One of the things I loved about this camera is that the pictures didn't need to be developed and you could see the picture within minutes of taking the picture.  I thought this was the coolest things I'd ever seen.

It wasn't until about the mid 1990s that I used another camera, and that would have been some of the disposable cameras, like the one seen on the left.  One of the great things about this style of camera was that I didn't have to spend a lot of money on a camera.  I could just stop by one of the local convenience stores and pick one up as I needed, and when I was finished, I could just take it to the local developing center and have it developed in something like an hour.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I got a digital camera as a free gift when I ordered some coffee from a coffee company.  I ordered the coffee because I wanted the coffee beans and the grinder.  I didn't know I would get a digital camera with my coffee, so when I opened the coffee box, I was pretty happy and excited to see the digital camera.  There was no display, no zoom or anything special, just a basic point and shoot digital camera and you needed to plug it into your computer to get the images off of the camera.

I didn't really know a lot about taking pictures at this point, I just pointed the camera in the area and pressed the button.  I didn't think too much about it, like I said, I would just point and shoot.  It wasn't until I moved to Thailand and was with @hirondelle.  When hirondelle and I were getting ready to go to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, where hirondelle took most of the pictures, but I played around a little bit with the camera.  

It was during this time, that I kind of started getting pretty serious about taking pictures.  I didn't know a lot about taking pictures back then, so I would just point the camera and press the button.  In 2008 hirondelle and I did our first bike trip, I've written a whole blog post about this before, so I won't do that now, but on that trip I started playing around with our camera more, and I started pictures in what I call wonky angles, but photographers call Dutch angles, which is a picture that isn't exactly square, or at an angle.  Some people like this, some people don't.  hirondelle suggested not taking so many pictures like this, but she also told me about framing my pictures and about what I should look for when taking a picture.  From that day, I started looking at things differently.

In 2013, @icewlf came to visit us for the first time.  While he was here, we went and looked at a camera shop, and icewlf got me interested in taking pictures again.  So I took some of the things hirondelle taught me and icewlf added to that, so I started looking more and more at framing my pictures better and getting better angles and trying different things to highlight different things in the picture.  

My favorite picture that I took when hirondelle and I went to Krabi in October 2014, during my schools break, we went to Railay Bay West in Krabi, Thailand.  This was our second time going to Krabi.  One day, we were sitting down watching the sun set and I was shooting some pictures, trying to get some good sunset pictures, and I saw this couple standing on the beach being all lovely, and I wanted to try and capture them with the sunset and the sea, and the picture to the right is what I came up with.  

One of the things that I loved about this camera is that I could take panoramic pictures.  I could set the mode on the camera to panorama and then point at one side I wanted a panorama of, hit the button and move the camera while I took the picture.  You just had to make sure not to go too fast or too slow and to keep it in a straight light. Below are some of my attempts at doing this.

After this, I started playing around with hirondelle's Pentax Km DSLR camera.  I'd never played around with an SLR or a DSLR before, so this was like a huge learning curve.  It was a lot of fun learning, and I took some really good pictures.  This was the first time I was taking picture in RAW format.  Prior to using the Pentax, I could edit images and pictures in FireWorks, but now I needed to learn how to use Photoshop, this was another huge jump for me.  If I can find the pictures I took with this camera, I'll make sure to share them here.

Around this time, I started trying to take better pictures with the camera on my phone.  I started applying the principles that hirondelle taught me to my phone, and mixing in a few things that I had picked up from watching photographers like Fro Knows Photo, Some of these pictures turned out really good.

My next camera, the one I use now is a Nikon D5500.  I got this in 2016.  This is my first DSLR camera.  When I started taking pictures with this camera, I set the file type to jpeg, and then I started following a photographer that strongly suggested that people should show in raw format, so I started doing this.  When I started shooting in raw, I needed to learn Lightroom.  One of the problems with shooting in raw format is that the images take so long to edit.  I could easily take 100 or more pictures in just a few hours.  For example, when we went to Lincoln this past year and I got to meet hirondelle's friend, I took over 300 pictures during the day. This doesn't sound like a lot of pictures until you go to edit those pictures.  I can get lost in editing photos so easily, peaking and tweaking all the little things, and I can edit one picture four (4) different times in four (4) different ways.  I can see if I'm doing pictures professionally and getting paid to do these pictures, but these are just for fun, and I just don't have the time to edit these pictures that much, so starting this year, I've changed my Nikon to take JPEG Fine pictures.  I'm excited about this as I won't have to do as much editing of the pictures. Below is a gallery of some of the pictures I've taken with this camera.

I've also been trying to better pictures with my current phone, which is an iPhone 8+.  I've been really happy with a lot of the pictures I've been taking with my phone.  I've been more particular with what I'm shooting and trying to make sure I have it framed better.

Well, I think I've bored you enough with my photography talk.  I plan on taking more pictures this year, so let's see what happens.

Always Remember:  Always take the tie to do the things you love.

They asked me if I wanted to be involved with a new ice hockey league they were starting called the Siam Hockey League (SHL), and be their official podcaster.  All I had to do was let people know what was going on with the SHL and do a few interviews with the Player of the Game.  Well, I ended up enjoying being at the rink so much for the hockey that I happily did so much more for them.  I also go the bug to play again, so in 2017, when I went back to the US to visit my family, I decided to pick up some gear so I could start playing again.  I actually did a podcast about this as well:

Things have been going pretty good.  I've took on a bigger role with the SHL for the second season, which I enjoyed, and I was playing shinny (pickup hockey) every week that they had it.  I was invited to play in their Land of Smiles Old Timers tournament for the Flying Farangs.  What is really cool about this is that @hirondelle has been wanting me to play for the Flying Farangs since I moved to Thailand.  We did OK in the tournament, nothing big, but we didn't lose every game, and the team that won it, we did pretty good against them, so not too shabby. 

I was then invited to play in another tournament for the Flying Farangs in Pattaya, which was a 4-on-4 tournament.  That was a lot of fun.  We took second place in this tournament, and we ended up playing the best team in the tournament, the Pattaya Predators, in the last two games.  We beat them the first time we played them by getting into their head and controlling the game.  In the second game, they got into our heads and won the game.  Oh well.  There is always next year.

After this, I was invited to play with the Flying Farangs again, this time in a charity tournament to raise money for a player, from one of the local teams, that was injured in a motorcycle accident.  This tournament was six games spread over 2 weeks.  We won all but one game, which is a game we tied.  This was also a 4-on-4 tournament.  Their were only two bad things about this tournament.  (1) Was that it was so far out, (2) was the ice was really bad.  Very soft and very wet.  If you played in the first game, it wasn't so bad, but if you played in the second or third game, it was really wet.

Around the time of the charity tournament, the Bangkok Ice Hockey League (BIHL).  I was asked to play for a team called Bunteng which means "to have fun".  The BIHL is run kind of odd.  All the teams (this year there were 10, last year there were 12) are split into 2 divisions, chosen at random.  The teams in the individual divisions play against each other.  After this, the teams are reorganized into the divisions with the better teams in the top division, and the not so good teams put into the lower division.  The teams play the the teams in their respective divisions for the remainder of the regular season.  Then the teams are split into three divisions for the playoffs.  Last year, Bunteng took third place in Division 2.  This year, thought we didn't have a stealer season, we had an OK season.  We lost every game in the first portion of the season, won two games and tied one and lost one in the second half of the season, which put us into Division 1 going into the playoffs!  Now we lost both games in the playoffs and took third place, but that is a huge improvement from last season.  My goal for this season was that Bunteng didn't place worse than they did last season, which they didn't.  Now, I'm not saying this is because of me, but they didn't do worse because of me, so that makes me happy!  @hirondelle recorded every game she was in for, and you can fine them at Dom Dumais Does Hockey.  After the last game, the captain of Bunteng asked me to play on the team next season.  I don't know if I will be asked to play for any other team, but I think, because Bunteng took a chance on me, so I think I will stick with them.

Another big thing hat happened with me and hockey this past year was that the Flying Farangs decided they wanted to start traveling around the region again.  There was a tournament in Manilla, Philippines.  I was asked to play with the Flying Farangs again for this one, which I was more than happy to do!  We did OK in this tournament, but we didn't win any trophies.  We just had fun.

For me, one of the be big things about the Pattaya, Thailand Tournament and the Manilla, Philippines Tournament was that the coach had me playing forward in both of these tournament.  I'm not a forward, but it was a lot of fun.  In the Pattaya Tournament, I took a few face-offs, which was aa first for me.  I even won a few.  In the Philippines Tournament, we were playing on Olympic sized ice, which is bigger than North American ice, which was also a first me.

All in all, I've been having a lot of fun since I've come back to hockey, and I plan on playing for as long as I can now.

Always Remember: If you feel the bug to do something old or new, give it a go.  You just may love it!