One of the features of the nightlife along Sukhumvit Road is the appearance every night of small portable bars which serve up whiskey and beer into the wee hours of the morning.  Typically they appear on the odd-numbered side of the road between soi 5 and soi 19, as well as a large collection that set up nightly on the corner of Sukhumvit and Asok next to Soi Cowboy.

Down the street a short way, on the opposite side of the street, at the corner of Soi 22 and Sukhumvit Road used to be a pool hall called Flyers.  Flyers ceased operation a few months ago, and the wrecking crews came in and demolished the building about six weeks back, leaving a construction site about the size of a football field, surrounded by an 8-foot-high corrugated metal fence.

I’m not sure what is going to be built on the site, but given the limited size of the land and the amount of unoccupied office space in Asok at the moment, I’m guessing it will be an apartment or condo building.

Anyway, I noticed a new portable bar being set up on the sidewalk next to the construction site about a week ago.  What was notable was how early in the evening it was happening — it was right around sun-down.  I went past and didn’t think much about it.

On Sunday night I went out to meet an old friend — someone I used to work with and whom I hadn’t seen in nearly two years.  Another pal joined us and we had a little 3-person reunion of sorts.  It was pleasant, but not a late night.  Around 9:30 we said goodnight and headed our separate ways.

As I approached soi 22 I saw that there were 4 or 5 portable bars set up outside the construction site, each one staffed by three girls, but no customers.  I was already full of food & drink and unlikely to stop.  I passed each of the bars, but when I hit the last one I was impressed with how pretty the girl was that invited me to sit.

So I sat.

Her name was Kung, and on close inspection she turned out to be as pretty as I initially thought.  She was mid-20s and spoke quite good English.  In the course of the conversation she said that she recognized me because she had been working on the Asok corner for quite a long time and had seen me there drinking many times.

I didn’t stay sitting with Kung a long time on Sunday night… just two bottles of beer to finish the night.  The snuggler was up in the room watching TV so there was no thought of taking Kung home, though on a night when the room is unoccupied I can imagine that I’d be tempted to invite her up.  I will almost certainly be back soon looking to buy a drink for Kung.

But my work schedule is getting in the way a bit.  Starting next week I’ll be committed to waking up around 5:30 a.m. four days a week, and starting January I’ll be working a full day every Saturday starting at 9 a.m.  This will limit my ability to play late into the evening.  Even this week I’ve got two early starts, so I find myself “scheduling” the girls and it’s a bit tough to prioritize them.

I have a movie date on Wednesday night that should end up as a sleepover. I’m pretty happy about that.  I haven’t seen this particular girl in almost a month and she’s one of my favorites.

I spent some time with a different girl last night whom I’ve met before but never talked to much, and I wanted to invite her out later this week thinking that if I can get her out drinking she’d probably come home with me.  Unfortunately, with my schedule, the first night that is any good is Friday.  I made arrangements with her to go out to listen to music on Friday, but I won’t be home from work until nearly 10 p.m. so it’ll be a late start.  I’m not sure how things will go with her, but she’s very pretty and speaks good English, so she should be worth the effort.

Which brings me back to Kung at the outdoor bar.  Another pretty girl who speaks good English.   I’d like to spend some time chatting her up and maybe bringing her home for a short time or long time, but between work, the snuggler and a couple of other dates on the calendar, I’m not sure when I can squeeze her.

It may be that I never get around to seeing her again.

That happens a lot in Bangkok.  I’ll spot a bar girl that looks hot, but circumstances aren’t right for taking her home that day.  I make a note to go back and see her next time.

I rarely ever get back around to them.  There’s always another beautiful girl that shows up on a night when it is convenient, and the one I meant to go back and pick up later slips down the priority list till she gets forgotten.

About 6 weeks ago I spotted a dancer at Shark Bar that looked great to me.  It wasn’t a good night to barfine her, but I made a mental note to see her again.  I’ve actually gone back to Shark twice since then and looked for her both times, but no luck.

But if that’s my biggest problem, I figure life’s okay.

I almost went to Pattaya.

See, I went to an annual work party last night.  Free food, free beer & whiskey, lots and lots of Thai office girls; plenty of reason to show up.  I spent an hour and a half eating, drinking draft beer and chatting with some friends.  There were probably 200 people at the party.

One of my buddies was on his second whiskey-soda of the night around 8:30 p.m. and he said to me, “I was thinking it might be fun to go to Pattaya tonight.  What do you think?”

Well, my first thought was that I was having a decent time drinking free beer, and that Pattaya was two hours away.  Then I thought about what would happen at the party in about an hour.  The Thais staff would start handing out prizes, telling jokes and singing karaoke.

Suddenly a two hour drive to Sin City sounded like a good idea.

“Sure” I said.  “Let’s go.”

I thought we’d just hop in the car and go.  Hell, it was 8:30, we’d arrive around 10:30 and have a good few hours.  My buddy, though, had other ideas.  He wanted to go home and change clothes.

“What for?” I asked.  “We’re coming back tomorrow at lunch time, right? I’m fine in the shirt and pants I’m wearing.”

But he wouldn’t be budged on this point.

He is always like this.  Every time he goes out after work he can’t bring himself to go to a bar or club in his work clothes… says he feels “uncomfortable”.

I tried again, pointing out that we were just gonna go, drink, maybe bang a bar girl (in which case no jammies would be needed) then wake up and come back home tomorrow.

No dice.  He has two sets of clothes (work and play) and he was in the wrong set.

Okay, we’ll do it your way.  Then lets get going now, I said.

On the way towards the door we got caught up in some conversation with people that couldn’t be ignored.  We slipped away around 9:00 just as two Thai staff grabbed microphones and started handing out door prizes.  I hope they didn’t call my number, but karaoke would be just minutes away.   I’d spent two hours at the party. It was clearly the right time to make a getaway.

We started walking in the direction we wanted to go, expecting at any moment to find motorcycle taxis.  We walked for ten minutes before we finally decided to just grab a regular cab.  No idea what the people on that soi do without the boys in the orange vests, but there wasn’t a single motorbike to be found.

We arrived at the MRT station before 9:30.  My pal was gonna go get his car, go home and change clothes.  I was gonna take the train home, drop my briefcase, change and meet him in an hour.

So we had a 10:30 getaway plan.  Just enough time.

While I was on the train heading home, my pal called me.  He said that he’d been thinking about the timing, and he figured it was too late to go down.  We’d be catching the end-of-the-night dregs and it wouldn’t be fun.

I agreed, sighing and thinking of the free beer I could have been drinking, and the office girls I could have been making a fool of myself with.

Okay.

As we were ending the phone call he offered up the suggestion that we could still do Cowboy.

I was about to get off the train at Sukhumvit so that worked for me.  He was still gonna go home and change — can’t get laid in office clothes I guess – - and he’d still see me in about an hour.

In a surprise move, I waited for him at Country Road, sipping on some beer and listening to the band.  The only girl I was interested in spending time with already had a customer, so I sat alone for an hour with boredom setting in.  At 10:30 my mate arrived.

I had suggested that we go to a different bar tonight, saying that we always go to the same three places.  He was a bit suspicious of that thought, but agreed.

“But can we go to Rawhide first?” he asked.

This is one of the three bars we always go to.

“Sure” I said.

We went into Rawhide and the girls were gratifyingly naked.  I saw one of my favorite dancers who usually gives me a big smile and comes to sit with me when I’m there.  Unfortunately, she’d gotten irritated with my buddy in the past.  She saw me and started to smile, then spotted him sitting with me and scowled instead.

Great.

We sat for about 20 minutes.  He pointed out his favorite dancer onstage… cute enough but way too Japanese-looking for my tastes.  She actually had pink nipples… a bit different here in Thailand.

I was starting to get a bit twitchy… the lineup has been pretty consistent at Rawhide for a long time.  I knew every mole and birthmark on every dancer in the place and there was nothing and no one different than my last 15 visits here.  The boredom that had started to set in at Country Road was returning with avengance.

I leaned over and asked my pal, “Why did you want to come here, exactly?”

He pointed at the girl with the pink nipples and said that he wanted to see her.

Well, I said, you’ve seen her now.  Our drinks are empty.  Can we go?

No.  It seemed that by “see” he meant ‘barfine’.

Okay.  So can you barfine her, and I’ll go?

No, he wanted to barfine her, then take her out later.  After he paid the barfine we could go out together to another bar, then he’d come back later to get her when we were done.

Great.  Good Plan.  The only thing missing is the act of you actually barfining her.  Why don’t you do that now, and we can get the fuck out of here.

No.  That wasn’t the plan.  Apparently he has some ritualistic need to talk to her before paying the barfine, in spite of the fact that he has sex with this girl several times per month.  She was onstage dancing.  He’d already communicated with her in universal sign language and she had smiled and agreed.  I’d seen that.  Why he had to actually talk to her I have no idea.

Anyway, while he and I were debating the issue of the timing of his barfine, another customer called over the fat mamasan and pointed at pink-nipples.

Christ!

I can’t stand to think of the thirty or forty minutes that followed, and I couldn’t possibly bring myself to give a blow-by-blow description.  The girl finished her set, and when she left the stage the mamasan took her to the other customer.  My pal was cut.

He wouldn’t leave Rawhide, though, even on my suggestion that we go out and come back to barfine her in two hours.  So we waited while the other customer did a “body shot” of tequila, licking the salt off of those pink nipples and sucking the lime out of her mouth.

Finally he left.  She landed at our table.  My pal entered into intense negotiations with her.  She didn’t want to go out with him late, but she would go short time right away, no options, no discussion.  He agreed.

So, it must have been around 11:30.  I’d sat around waiting for him for 90 minutes and now he was gonna go fuck this girl in the short time hotel.  I had two choices… go home or go to a bar alone.  It was a tough choice.

I decided to hang out a bit.  My pal said he’d call me and re-join me when he was done.

I walked up and down the soi looking for inspiration.  There was one really cute girl outside of 5 Star that I’d seen earlier in the week, and I almost went in there, but at the last minute something in the back of my mind said that she wasn’t the girl for tonight.  I figured I’d follow my gut so I went on by.

Two trips up and down the soi didn’t make up my mind, so I decided to go back to Moonshine Joint where I’d had a bit of fun the other night and see if I could be a bit more successful in my quest for sex tonight.

Walking in and taking a seat in the back, up on the cushioned benches, I was gratified to see lots of lewd activity going on.  In addition to the two bikini’d dancers onstage, one man had his pants to his knees, with a large bargirl barebottomed and backed against him while two other girls massaged various parts of his body.  It wasn’t completely clear whether he was penetrating the bare bottomed girl or just enjoying rubbing himself against her, but it was quite a scene.

The dancers wear loose silk robes when they’re not dancing.  One guy had two dancers flanking him.  They had their robes open and were holding them around him like a pair of curtains, shielding him from view and creating some privacy while a third girl presumably helped him get his end away.  He finished just minutes after I arrived.

I received surprisingly little attention.  Most of the girls were occupied, but I expected some level of attention beyond being served a bottle of beer.

I got none.

Finally, after ten minutes or so a girl came over and french-kissed me.  That was nice.  She said that she was busy with a customer but she’d come back soon.  I liked that attitude.  I said I’d wait.

I spent the time watching the music videos on the large screen TV mounted in the back of the bar.  I had a prime viewing spot, and I have to say that I was really enjoying the selection of music.

I don’t watch music videos normally, so, even though the songs being played were very popular and the videos very well known to “normal” people, it was a treat for me to see them.  The time passed quickly.

True to her word, ten minutes later the french-kiss girl slid in beside me.  We exchanged pleasantries.

I bought her a drink and she cuddled next to me.  For my part, my attention stayed on the videos.  I didn’t really need to ask one more bar girl which province she was from, how old she was or how long she’d been living in Bangkok.  I figured I’d watch the videos and soon enough her  hand would be busy with my tackle.  We could go from there.

Surprisingly, though, a few minutes passed and there was no overt movement from french-kiss girl towards my manhood.

I looked down at her form cuddled against me and realized that she was asleep.  Poor girl… must have been a tough week.

I let her sleep and enjoyed the videos until my beer was empty.

I might have just ordered another beer and let her sleep, but I needed to pee.

When I came back from the toilet I paid my bill.  She walked me to the front, apologizing and inviting me to return tomorrow.  I smiled and told her, genuinely, not to worry.

She went back inside and I went into Jungle Jims next door.  I believe it is the same business model and the same owner, though I can’t swear to it.  I figured that there was still time to get some hands on attention from a cute girl.

I sat down.  I attracted immediate attention from three females.

One of them was, indeed, a cute young dancer.  One was  a gruesome fat woman and the other was just way past her use-by date, being 40-ish and sturdy, but thankfully the two that weren’t young and cute were fully clothed.

I figured I’d give my attention to young and cute.

I was getting massage on my arm and legs, but thankfully old & gruesome weren’t grabbing my tackle.  Young & cute also seemed to be a bit shy, but that was okay.  I engaged her in light conversation, mostly in Thai.

Gruesome finally left.

Then the problem hit.  Young & cute had to “go dancing”.

That left me with “old” massaging my arm.

Young & cute had been gone about 30 seconds when “old” asked me for a drink.

My reply was curt: no.

I was left alone.

Well, this wasn’t quite what I’d planned for.

I looked at my phone.  I had a missed call from my pal who had gone off to fuck the dancer with pink nipples.  I guess he was finished now.

I tried to call back, but there was no reception inside the bar.  I stood up and walked towards the front door to try to call him back, raising a few worried looks from the staff, until they saw my briefcase still sitting on the bench next to my nearly-empty beer.

I went all the way out to the street before I could get service.

I called my pal.  He was in his car on the way home, saying he’d called me several times but my phone was off.

I explained about the reception.  He said that he hadn’t gone far… he’d try to turn around and come back, but the traffic didn’t make that look promising.  I wasn’t gonna hold my breath.  I told him where I was and went back inside.

I figured I’d hang out till young & cute finished dancing, then focus on her.

In the meantime I looked around the bar.  There were two other dancers who looked better than young&cute.  One of them was a tight-bodied girl wearing big hoop earrings.  She looked to be very popular with two different sets of customers who looked to be regulars.  That wasn’t gonna work for me.

But the girl that looked the best to me was a soft, innocent looking girl with shiny hair who wasn’t dancing and wasn’t with any customers.  Normally that would have painted a giant red target on her in my mind, but she was busy sending SMS messages back & forth with somebody and not at all involved in the here & now of working in the bar.

So I just decided to relax and wait for young & cute.

This is where mamasans are problems.

While I was hanging out, I was, of course, watching the girls walk back & forth through the bar.

One small tart of a dancer had to use the toilet or something, and  I watched her as she did.  She was an average looking girl with nothing special about her, but she was a 20-year-old girl in a bikini so I watched her walk past.

When she returned from the back, the mamasan, who’d spied me watching her as she strolled by, grabbed her and sat her next to me.

The little girl was clearly scared of me.  I’m large, aging, and I have a menacing look to my face when I’m not smiling.  I was tired and after leaving my free beer, not going to Pattaya, waiting ninety minutes for my mate to barfine the girl with pink nipples, having my girl at the last bar fall asleep and then having to say “no” to a drink for the old broad while young & cute went dancing, and missing the phone call from my buddy I was downright glowering. This wasn’t the way I’d imagined the night going at all.

The scared girl sat because she’d been told to sit.

I was in a mood.  I ignored her.

After a while she went away.

When young & cute finished dancing she came and sat with me.  This was better.  Things were looking up.

But the stupid mamasan spoke to her and told her to leave me alone.  Before I could say a word young & cute had jumped up and scampered away to be replaced by the scared girl for the second time.

I could have set it right, but frankly, I just didn’t care enough to bother.  I called for my check, paid my bill and left.

Without a doubt I can say that this was the right time to go home.   I’m absolutely sure of it.

I went to Five Star.

The normal band was playing but they’d been slightly re-constituted.  They had two Asian customers playing with them.  I thought they were Japanese till I heard one of them speaking Thai later.

I sat and enjoyed the music.   It’s been a long time since I’ve visited Five Star, and the music improved my mood considerably.

I’d sucked down only a single beer when the police stuck their heads in the door and the music stopped in the middle of the song.

Okay.  NOW  I should go home.

I went to the outdoor bars on Asok Road.

I didn’t stay long.  One beer for me and one for a nondescript bar girl.  The highlight was a large Dutch fellow who was chatting up a couple of girls.  He wasn’t having the standard bar conversation however… he was entertaining himself with jokes and wordplay that the girls didn’t understand but had me chuckling under my breath.

Eventually I spoke to him or he spoke to me… I don’t remember which.  We chatted amiably for a while before the cops came by and told the ladies to pack up the bar.  I paid my bill and headed home.  I guess it was around 4 a.m.

I thought about writing a blog, but realized that I was too tired and too full of beer to do it.  I put the computer away and went to sleep.

At 1 pm my phone rang, waking me up to a ripping hangover.  It was my pal from last night.  The one who had suggested we leave the party.  The one who had taken me to Rawhide then  barfined the girl with the pink nipples.

Whaddaya say, he asked.  Do you wanna go to Pattaya this afternoon?  We can get an early start and have a good night out.  He was cheerful.

My head was pounding.  I went to sit on the toilet as I pondered the offer.  I ummed and awwed as I considered it.  I vascillated, first saying yes, then no.

Finally I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea.  Last night it sounded like an adventure.  Today it sounded like a chore.

Okay, he said, clearly disappointed.  If you change your mind in the next hour or so, give me a call.

I took two painkillers and cooked some spaghetti instead.

So, anyway, as I was saying — I almost went to Pattaya last night….

I’d never before been to the 4th floor of the Amarin Plaza (a small upscale looking shopping center that links to Chit Lom BTS station via the skywalk), but last night I was talking with my pal Ash and he said that he’d just bought a bunch of books at a shop there.

The way he described it, it sounded almost like it fell into the “too good to be true” category, but I know and trust Ash so I went to look for some books.

It turns out that the shop is an outlet for Asia Books.  It’s  a fairly large shop, and there were thousands of mostly soft cover books in the shop.

Ash had said that the books were in a bit of disarray, and I had visions of large tables with books piled haphazardly, but it wasn’t quite that bad.  There were, in fact, three tables that fit that discription fairly well, but the vast majority of books were on bookshelves, just like you’d find them in any normal bookstore except that there was no discernible order to how they’d been shelved.

They certainly weren’t in alphabetical order by author, though there was some effort to put business books in one area, travel books in another, and everything else in on the rest of the shelves.

Ash had suggested that I’d need about an hour to go through, find and select books that I wanted to buy.

I’d say that was a fair estimate.  In fact, I lost patience and chose an armload of books in about 35 minutes.

Ash had said that the price of the books was 40 baht each, regardless of the size, shape or title.  He also said that there was a special deal — buy 10 get 10 free.  Twenty books for 400 baht… effectively 20 baht per book.

When  I entered the shop I saw the large signs advertising the 40 baht price.  So far so good.

But even though I read the signs carefully I could find no mention of the buy ten-get ten special.

I browsed around collecting titles.  There were certainly a number of good books here, though choosing ten (or twenty?) really good books might be a challenge.  The collection was dominated by contemporary fiction (airplane novels) and had more than a fair share of Bangkok novels, with Dean Barrett being prominent.  In fact, I spotted about 100 copies of a large full color coffee table book titled (I think) Women of Thailand by Mr. Barrett.

I picked up a copy and flipped though it.  I’ve been in enough boardroom meetings to know how bad decisions get made… how someone can convince a group of sober thinking people that it’s actually a good idea and get them to sign up to it.  I think the Women of Thailand book was one of those ideas that probably sounded okay sitting round the table, but really didn’t work in the final execution.
It looked rather like Dean couldn’t content himself with making a photo album with his snapshots; instead he had them printed up and bound to be shared with all his mates.  Even at twenty baht I couldn’t bring myself to buy it (though I did grab one of his novels, Murder in China Red).

I had about seven books under my arm.  I had decided to get ten books and take them to the counter.  Perhaps the cashier would tell me about the buy 10-get 10 when she was ringing me up.

Then I saw it.

A single A4-sized piece of paper that had been printed off on a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer advertising the buy10get10 promotion.

Cool.  I walked around the store quickly scooping up another thirteen books.

At this price I was willing to take some chances.  I bought some books because I recognized the author’s name.  I grabbed some because they had a lot of pages and would keep me busy reading for several days.  One or two made the cut because they actually sounded interesting.

A book titled Napoleon says on the back cover:

Max Gallo brilliantly re-creates the most thrilling and turbulent five years of the Little Corporal’s reign.

I mean, really!   “Brilliance” for just twenty baht!

Ruth Rendell made the cut with a novel called A Sight For Sore Eyes with the words ‘Her New Bestseller” blazoned across the front.  I’ve always wondered how they know at the time of printing that a book is a new bestseller, but there must be a way because lots of books seem to make the claim.

Having enjoyed a couple of David Baldacci novels I grabbed an innocuous looking paperback with a light blue cover called The Christmas Train.

Something called The Fallon Blood appeared, when I read the summary, to be set during the American Civil War.  A closer look when I arrived home shows that it is actually during the American Revolution, which I find less interesting, but again, for twenty baht….

Speaking of blood; I bypassed all of the Ann Rice novels on offer, but if you like her writing then you’ll find a small selection of her later novels at the shop.

In addition to the Dean Barrett novel I grabbed a fiction book by Jake Needham called Tea Money, and a book titled Thai Gold by an author named Jason Schoonover, all of which are set in Thailand.

I’d heard the name John Sandford before, though I’d never read one of his books.  I bought his novel Naked Prey.

I grabbed two books by Stephen Coonts and a novel by Dick Francis.

Among the books I looked at but didn’t buy were several books on Thai culture and doing business in Thailand.  I looked inside each of them, and except for one interesting-looking true account of a long journey by boat down a Thai river, they all looked like primers for the uninitiated.

I thought about the Zane Grey novel Riders of the Purple Sage, but after 20 seconds or so of indecision I returned it to the shelf.

I finally walked up to the cashier counter with both arms loaded with books.  It was at this point that the cashier asked me if I wanted a basket.

D’uh!

I declined, seeing as how I’d just deposited the books I’d been carrying around for half an hour on the counter for purchase.

I was gratified when I was handed two large shopping bags weighing perhaps 5 kilos and asked for 400 baht payment.

Cool.

The signage in the shop announced the dates 1 December to 11 December repeatedly.

I don’t know if the 40 baht price is standard or just  a short time special.  Likewise the buy 10 get 10 free bonus.  It may be that it lasts only another three days.

Feel free to rush on down to the 4th floor of Amarin Plaza and grab your own armload of books — heck, you might even want to use a basket.

At 20 baht each, how far wrong can you go?

There are some English words that it seems every Thai person knows.  Many of them are not surprising (computer, fax, mobile phone) but some of them are.

For example, I once wrote on the blog that a Thai girl told me that she knew she wasn’t my “spec” and a commenter queried whether she had actually used that word.  Indeed, “spec” is a commonly used English word here in Thailand.

Another word that was a bit unexpected was “salary” which most Thais seem to be familiar with, though if I pronounce it with my American accent (two syllables, stress on the first) Thais don’t understand me.  I have to pronounce it the Thai way (sa-la-REE).

One word that surprised me when I first heard Thais using it was “overtime”, but they know the word as well as the abbreviation, OT, and it gets used freely here.

The snuggler is a very hard worker with ambitious career goals, and she often works very hard.  She takes OT whenever she can get it, and she worked a lot of OT last week.  This is good for me since it gives me a chance to go out and party without creating any unnecessary stress in my life.

But things changed a bit with the arrival of the three-day holiday weekend.  She not only took the Monday holiday, she took Tuesday as well, making it a four-day weekend for her.

About a month ago I had invited another girl to go to a music concert on Sunday night, the 6th.  We talked about it and agreed, but I haven’t seen that girl for two or three weeks now.

In the middle of last week the snuggler said she wanted to go to a movie on Sunday night.  I agreed.

Ah, yes.  You see what happened.  I forgot about the music date.

The snuggler and I went to the movies in the afternoon.  By then I remembered the concert, but I had committed to the movie and I didn’t want to cancel.  Because the movie was an afternoon thing I could have actually still gone to the concert in the evening.

But the snuggler was planning on sleeping at my place on Sunday night, and  I hadn’t heard from the other girl in a couple of weeks.   I thought she might have actually forgotten about the concert.

Although I wanted to see the concert, I figured it was best not to create a problem where none existed.

By late afternoon it occurred to me that perhaps I should invite the snuggler to the concert.  That was  a good plan.

After the movie ended she went to the toilet.  I figured  I’d ask her about the concert when she came out.

Then the phone rang.  It was the other girl… the one I’d invited to the concert.

I guess she hadn’t forgotten.

A moment of indecision.  Then the phone stopped ringing.

Hmmm…..

I changed it to silent as the snuggler was returning from the toilet, just in case, but the other girl never called back.

I considered the possibility that she might still go to the concert without me, so I scrapped the thought of inviting the snuggler, and we simply went home to my place for the evening.

Possibly because I was feeling a bit like a pussy as a result of missing a concert I really wanted to see, I went to dinner with two (male) friends on Monday night and left the snuggler at home, though I could have invited her along.

Me Tarzan, you Jane.

Yeah, right.

She looked mildly disappointed that I was leaving her at my place alone while I went to dinner, but she didn’t complain.  Likewise, although I came back an hour later than I had said to expect me, she didn’t give me a cross word or a cross look.  She was downright affectionate on my return in fact.

The Sunday thing was the first time I let the snuggler put a crimp in my preferred schedule.  I really did want to see that concert and I wanted to see that girl.  Maybe it says something that I chose to stay home with the snuggler instead.

I hadn’t realized that she had planned Tuesday off, and that might have created a problem, but I hadn’t made any other plans for the evening so things were okay.

She did have to go back to work today (Wednesday).  I, on the other hand, have almost a day off.  This week has two official holidays and very few people want to do any work; my day consists of  a short meeting in the late afternoon and a year-end (Christmas) party in the evening.  (Here in Thailand most business parties are billed as year-end celebrations, but they usually include karaoke, whiskey, and often weave in a Christmas component as well… one peculiarity of this Buddhist country).

But normal I work early on Wednesdays, so my (stalker) phone has a regular alarm set at 5:30 a.m.

It rang this morning.  I got up and turned it off.

Instead of rolling over and sleeping till noon, I woke up and started doing some work on my computer.  When I finished I started playing backgammon against my computer.

At 7 a.m. the snuggler rolled over, peeled her eyelids back and looked at me.

Tham arai? she asked.

I showed her the game board on my computer screen.

In English: “Why did you set you alarm to get up early and play computer games?“

I explained that the alarm was set to go off every Wednesday at the same time, and that I hadn’t planned to wake up, but that I simply couldn’t go back to sleep.

She rolled her eyes.  Though she didn’t say it, I could hear her thinking: “crazy farang!”

She showered and dressed.  It was cold this morning — in fact it’s approaching noon now and it’s still chilly — and she came out of the shower shivering in her towel.  She curled up against me and I asked her why she hadn’t used hot water.

“The (breaker) switch was off” she said, pointing to the big black switch on the wall.

I routinely turn it off when I’m not taking a shower.  I asked her why she hadn’t turned it on.  If she answered I didn’t understand her.  She just snuggled in tighter against me in an effort to get warm.

Around 7:30 she left for work. I suddenly remembered events from yesterday.  When I went to work on Tuesday she went to meet friends to go shopping.  At the train station we had established that she would be back before me, so I had given her my key and the security card to the building.  It occurred to me now that she never gave them back.

“Hey!” I called down the hall to her as she walked towards the lift, “where is my key and my security card?”

She blushed and ran back to the room, fishing in her bag till she found them.  “Sorry” she muttered.  A quick kiss on my cheek and she was off to work.

I’m not sure when she plans to come back.  I often go 5 o 6 days at a time without seeing her. I’m betting that if I hadn’t had the company party tonight she would have been back for dinner — there’s one good thing to be said for karaoke I guess.

Because I probably need to call concert-girl and make up for not taking her.

Also, my not-so-crazy-ex-girlfriend owes me a few thousand baht (she called me last month saying that she couldn’t pay rent, blah, blah, blah).  She had promised to come to my room and pay me back last week, but when I called her she told me she needed another week.  I’d love to get the cash from her before I go away on holiday.

But what I’d really like to do is get her to come see me to repay the money and spend the night with me to pay the interest, which I figure is a good chance.  These sorts of plans, though, require that the snuggler stay gone for a few days.

We’ll see what happens.

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