Out door cooking

Cooking outdoors is a big part of Thai cooking, thats why many ex pat homes have 2 kitchens, one for the western tastes (hello) and one for the Thai's and their chilli mad cooking (have you met my wife). So even though we have a small kitchen here, at the rental house, we realised we needed to do more with our outside terrace, so we got some out door cooking stuff. Need to get some charcoal and gas/fittings.. They didn't come with them...strange.. But soon we can cook all the thai food we need without gassing the termites.

Ahthankyew

Did we? Actually?

Find a perfect forever home??? Wellll maybe, its certainly very close.. Jirawan and I went to go look at a house in Saraphi which to me seems like a more rural area than we are now but actually quite close to the local markets and a short car/scooter ride into town.
We saw a 4 bed house, partially furnished and part of a new area being developed, so more houses are going to be built next/opposite it.

The house itself ticks almost all our boxes, the space itself is fractionally less than we want, but not that much less.. And the price is 3.5M baht, which is about 100K... 100K for a 4 bed house.. its pretty awesome.. and gives us plenty of residual house sale funds to live off quite nicely until pensions pay out. We'd have to spend 1M or so getting an outside kitchen (Thai style) added, air con and fully furnished but thats still well within our max budget.. even below our mid budget.

So we're excited but torn.. Its too soon really to buy a house we still have to keep the rental on this place till Oct,  and there's that tiny niggle that its might be fractionally too small... (4 beds..are you insane.... no theres's still a matter of storage and stuff to consider).

So while we "could" put a bid in now, we are going to wait, since the builder informs us they will start another house next to that one in the next few months, ready around July/Aug... Now that fits in with our timeline for a new house.. and it will be fractionally bigger, not massive but fractionally.

So we are thinking this might be the approach we will take, we will also be allowed to make some tweaks to the build to accomodate our slightly odd needs,  lots of power in the office, network connections, a pantry, a western style kitchen and a purpose built Thai kitchen, and a larget balcony to sit and have drinks watching the sun go down.

We will see what transpires, but if the quality of this build can be maintained with just a smidgen more space without a massive price hike.. we may have found the perfect home... watch this space.

In the meantime I've been on a comforts of home hunt, and have discovered a pentiful supply of Pies, Bacon, HP sauce and huge Ribeye steaks... The freezer is groaning a bit under the weight of it all. but for easy 1/3 the cost of what it would be in NL I have steaks, pies, bacon, stewing meat, mince aplenty...oh and Cadbury's :D This will last months.

I am starting to enjoy myself a bit now too, there's been a sense of not quite knowing what to do with my days, but its getting easier.. I get up, when I wake up, not before, do a bit of coding work on the book stuff, check the forms, not much activity still, then we decide what we plan to do today... and we do it... no stress... its great.

Ahthankyew

A sense of purpose....

Yeahhhh that... its missing.. I am certainly enjoying getting up without alarm clocks, but my days don't currently have a massive sense of purpose. I have some support work to finish on my Book website, which is proving problematic as my nice new Mini PC while a very solid bit of kit, isn't quite up to the job of doing video edits... dammit, more money needed on a new PC soon.

But overall, yeah... I am finding the lack of purpose to be quite a factor.. As I get fewer and fewer emails from students (basically none) asking for help I find my need to check up on them, also reducing..

Its bascially called letting go...that sense of responsibility and need to help, no longer has a purpose in our new life and it is...honestly a bit scary.

The Book website needs to be my prime focus for at least the next month or so, starting to get readers contacting me... so I suspect once I get enough of them asking for help I will again have some purpose.. But overall..its quiet....too quiet :D

Ahthankyew

Last of the purchases?

Yeah I think I am getting a little too shopee happy. Its a great service and no doubt that things are quite a bit cheaper here than in NL but I need to start cutting back. A few hundred/thousand saved is still a few hundred spent.

But I am feeling good about my last, and not very expensive purchase, a new split slanted keyboard.. It does feel a lot less sensitive and less prone to random accidental key presses than the other I had.  

Theres something reassuring about a full size keyboard where you can press one button to print screen/calculator and scroll lock... much nicer, it doesn't have the reassuring click but it works nice.

Also my 2nd last purchase was a stream dock to help control some of my video recording and editing, I bought the really nice Elgato prompter from Amazon last week and it arrived a few days ago, awesome ... But the dock lets me contol the OBS display with 1 button presses instead of lots of clicking and ticking.

But that needs to be it... enough spending on things I don't need now, all the main things I use for coding/recording and music making are now replaced and in some cases enhanced. Time to take care of the pennies.

Ahthankyew

Funds transferred and more purchases

And with my nice new bank account in place, I managed to transfer funds from euros to baht so the required 400K baht visa funds are now in place 

Still only one account though and not an interest bearing account as far as I can tell but for now that's ok.
Get the visa extension and we can then go to the bank and ask for something we can lock those funds into rather than have them in a general non interest account. Since we basically have to keep 400K baht in that account at all times to allow us to continue to extend the visa each year, it's better to lock it away in a long term savings account and have it make a bit of money. 

Though interest rates here are very low....and... worryingly as far as I can tell, savings with interest are only available to Thais, at least with the options I've been presented.. But we'll see. 

Having that account and card and ability to use my phone to pay is a big factor for buying things here. We do still have a couple of large purchase we want to make. Some household things, and a Scooter to get around when the car is in use, for example. 

But even every day things like Grab need that thai based money. The Revolut card is awesome for paying for things, but it's not accepted everywhere.. and of course there's costs when you turn euros into baht even on their internal accounts. 

The sooner overall we have most of our money transferred the better, but right now we are making some sweet interest in the EU which is offsetting some of those transfer costs, so we'll delay the transfer of the house purchase money as long as we can. 

The Chippy, I reported on in October has moved premises and I thought I would give it another go... and...well... same problem, amazing chips, disappointing tasteless fish, couldn't even tell if it was Haddock or Cod. I guess it's just what it is, there's no North Atlantic fish markets here to hand so the fish they have is clearly frozen stock and it just loses a lot of its flavour over the shipping time. 

Pies are probably a better bet. I can't see me staying away but I can't see me being a weekly regular either. 

I'm in the process of ordering a stockpile of some superb Thai farmed beef though from an Aussie farmer in another Thai state who breeds Wagyu cattle, so getting me a load of steaks, stewing steak and mince to load up the freezer for nice meals. This will be pricey but...once a week, western cooking à la Brian will be on the menu at chez Beuken. I can restock every 3-4 months. 

And meet Sky, my one big pressie to myself... No its not GAS, I am not going on a spending spree of guitars, sadly my main guitars are stuck in Netherlands still, Our container assigned before Christmas was cancelled. So our goods are currently awaiting allocation to another container...Can't say I'm happy about this but  apparently it is not uncommon. So my guitars are in that shipment and may be a few more months away. So I needed to get a guitar to play.. Can't not have a guitar... I do have a fairly shitty ovation copy acoustic, but need an electric.. and here she is, a nice G&L Tribute, mid price strat copy, and I have to say I like this a lot. At least until Margarent and Goldie get here.

Now that I have a decent guitar to play I can put my gear back together, finally doing something with my Voicelive3ex I meant to do for years (why the fuck didn't you then...dozy) Put it all on 1 pedal board with a single plug. A cheap power brick under the board powers the VL3 and the HB wireless and it fits in 1 bag to transport.

I'm hoping to locate some musical peeps in the area, even though we can't perform in public here, try to get back into some kind of rehearsals....though not in a massive rush.  

My fingers are still a little painful after my December shower mishap, but slowly getting more flexible, playing guitar is helping. I have a black nail coming through on my middle finger which shows some internal bleeding took place, hmmm guess I was luckier than I thought.

Ahthankyew

Big Boy stuff

Feeling pretty happy with myself today, after a disaster on Wed, not making it to immigration on time, and a total waste of time at a couple of our local bank branches trying to open accounts, I was not a happy bunny at being unable to open an account.

Part of that was the fact that the tellers never talked to me, they spoke directly to Jirawan and I was totally out of the loop, which made it super hard for me to explain exactly what I wanted or to understand exactly why they were unable to do it. Some bizzare excuses were mentioned. I mean totally irrelevent documents including some which were pure fiction (Certificate of residence from the dutch embassy in bangkok????)

Anyway, the banks opened up today in the main shopping malls at least, and I went to town armed with my paperwork to try on my own.... then promptly forgot my paperwork which I left in the car as Jirawan drove off.... doh

Fortunately I just needed to get my online lease printed out which I did at the mall, they had a small print shop I just needed to send them the document and they printed...

And then I went to the bank.  I was told, with no real way to be sure it was true, that SCB was the easiest to work with but the queues were mad, so I went to KasikornThai which I was told with the same lack of certainty, had the best online app.. in English.. There was a big queue there too but I took a ticket and was about to sit down when my number was called...wow...There was a specific teller who's job was to open accounts and she was just finished. 
Sit down, explain I need an account for visa extension and heres my passport and TM.30 which were in my very manly shoulder baggagggge and I had my printed lease... she did a bit of reading, a bit of typing and, then proceeded to go through the process of opening my account, installing my app and setting up everything I needed.

In 15 mins or so, I had an account and app and a debit card... no stress.. 

Now... the fun part is getting money from NL to Thailand.... I can make international transfers, done it many times, but this time it decided right at the death to use an old card slot e-reader to verify the transfer.. Something I have never been asked to do before...and of course... I do have a card based e-reader.... but probably in a box sitting in a warehouse at Rotterdam harbor awaiting shipping.

Buggeration.

I was able however, with a bit of faffing to increase my card limit to send money to my Revolut card, then transfer that to Thai Baht in the cards dual currency account,  at a decent enough rate, then, send it to my account...which then flagged it as suss and asked me to verify...but thats fine, a wise precaution; I verified and a few mins later my funds are on the way. What a faff...

Now thats done, those funds need to stay in the account for 60 days, to allow me to qualify for the marriage visa which needs to have 400K baht in an account for said 60 days... basically they will have to stay there until Im 67 and claiming pension to prove I have enough money to bury me if I pop off or something.

So I've completed an important step to long term living here, getting the account and the money in (should be there by the 6th) in time for the 90 day cut off point to apply for the extension is done... just the paperwork for the visa to do now and I've hired an agent to do 95% of that for us.. 

One more tick on the todo list.

 

Ahthankyew

Home....office

Aside from a little cable tidying, my new office is up and running, yes I am missing a 4 port KVM and a 16 port network switch and a white board, but overall those are not bad issues, I no longer need 10 machines running at once, 2 maybe 3 is just fine. I have to not regret the things I left behind or threw away, everything is replacable if needed... just not sure its needed.

I bought most of the gear from Shopee or Temu so it was dirt cheap (the 2nd monitor was less than 50 euros and tbh you can feel that cheapness, but it works fine... and just as I said that the monitor sparked out for 1 second... I hope thats not a habit). A standing desk was something I had at work, I didn't use it often but I do find it stretches you out a bit to stand sometimes while working, so I took the chance to get one for less than 75euros....lol I mean... why not.

I also got some cheap as chips podcast lights on stands, which really do make a massive difference to the quality of video recordings I want to make for book readers and tutorials.

I had expected to spend a few grand on new gear, but I barely broke 750.... impressive.

So now things are in place its time to find the right time to do work...we need a bit more routine in our lifes. The Jetlag, combined with basic shopping/settling in has been rough, but its a new year so its time to try to make some new routines... not resolutions, they never work.. just a pattern of behaviour that will help us adjust to our new lives as unemployed layabouts :D..sorry retiree's.

The office is also my music room, and I've bought a few things there, which are included in the 750 or so including a cool cheap copy of my roland street cube amp.. This isn't quite complete though, need my electrics to arrive later this month, or next then I can noodle about a bit more (sore fingers permitting)

Yes.. I'm very very happy with my new home office/studio. I hope to be quietly productive here and get all those things I wanted to do done, y'know the things work got in the way of... :D

  

 

Ahthankyew