The last month has seen me slipping into something of a ritual, driven by the evil, time-sucking game that is Trade Nations.

My morning sit on the bog would be extended as I made a couple of hundred trades. During the day there would be regular checks on status, and my pre-bed shower would be delayed by end of day trading.

A stupid waste of time; but still rather fun as I developed my little village into what I decided would be a monster wool-making enterprise.

The game has the usual levelling-up mechanics that are a feature of so many games; and by the time I reached level 40 (out of 60) there was not much left to do apart from making more money and trading endlessly to eventually reach the highest level.

So this morning I thought a mental “sod it” and deleted the game from my iPad and iPhone (although it will fester on the game servers forever). Before I said goodbye I captured my magnificent sheep farm.

Took my truck for its service this morning. It only sees the garage every six months so I expect a sizeable bill, and I am not to be disappointed. Labour and parts (mainly oil) come to a staggeringly expensive 1,430 baht.

Driving it home, I do notice a difference. The ride feels a lot firmer than before. This could be because they have changed the compression and rebound on my Koni Racing Mono-Tube adjustable dampers. But unlikely, since I don’t actually have any Koni Racing Mono-Tube adjustable dampers; although I do have a couple of cart-springs. The other option is that they have put some air in the tyres; something I can’t be arsed to do myself in between services. At least that justified 30 baht of the bill.

Took she who must be obeyed out for breakfast, and on the way home she asked to stop at our local garden shop. She likes to gather supplies for our “garden”, which in reality is a small part of the balcony.

After some ferreting, she returned with two plants, a bag of soil and a packet of organic plant food, all for the not unreasonable price of 180 baht.

She was particularly pleased with the yellow plant which she informed me was a Hawaiian Habitas. Regular readers will be aware that she might spell it “Hibiscus”, but finds it easier to pronounce as “Habitas”, and as I find that most endearing, I am not going to try to correct it.

Anyway, after the flower shooting orgy of yesterday, the studio lights were still rigged up, so it seemed appropriate to point something at the Hawaiian Habitas and the other offering which is also a Habitas, but she was not sure of the name.

Visited a local market this evening and there were some ladies dancing away on top of a table; rather cute.

Spend the morning introducing a friend to the delights of Lightroom, surely the most competent and complete photo processing program on the planet.

I take him through the elegant cataloguing, keywording and search facilities, more than sufficient for me to ensure that I can gain easy access to any one of my more than 50,000 photos in my library, and where I can select, process and where necessary delete, more than 1,000 photos at a time after a heavy photo session.

He declares himself not really interested in that because he can already manage his images by keeping up to three copies and renaming them and fuck knows what else he does; but it sure as hell is not nearly as elegant as Lightroom. Anyway, I abandon further discussion on the cataloguing features and start on the develop module where he perks up and declares himself interested, whilst reminding me he can do pretty much all of this already, albeit using three or more ancient programs, none of which offer non-destructive editing I am sure.

Developing his images is not as good as it could be because he only shoots JPEG. When I suggest RAW might give him better photos, he complains about the file size. I refrain from pointing out that the 3 JPEGs of the same image that he maintains nowadays might be smaller than using a single RAW file and Lightroom; it’s just not worth it.

Get Lightroom installed on his laptop and send him away, doubting he will ever use it again.

After a frustrating morning, I spy a rather attractive plant on the balcony and decide to point various cameras at it:

First up is the Panasonic GF1 with a second-hand Yashica macro lens, total value of the gear; around 24,000 baht. Lovely, manual focus; easy to shoot.

This character can be found biking around our area most evenings.

During my previous life, I was lucky enough to be employed by a company that saw fit to relocate me to a different country every few years. Having stuck me in one particular place, they then gave me a job that required me to spend half my time visiting other assorted locations around the globe. They also gave me a decent enough salary such that I could spend my holidays in yet more countries that had not yet had the pleasure of stamping my passport.

In my defence, it was she who must be obeyed who wanted to go and see Final Destination 5. As expected, she spent half the movie with her head buried in my shoulder. Unexpectedly, I enjoyed myself enormously.

The premise of every Final Destination films is the same. The movie starts with some catastrophe, and a bunch of assorted people that you never really care about cheat death. Death is not happy and spends the remainder of the movie claiming back the lives, usually in an inventive and extremely gory manner.

Yesterday, I made a passing remark that Thais are pretty good at building roads; and it’s true. The Kingdom has many fine roads of excellent quality, often in places where you would not expect to find much more than a dirt track. It would appear, however, that that level of expertise does not extend to water based structures.

Pattaya is getting a marina. Or more precisely, a place where all the crappy speedboats that take tourists to Koh Larn, and sometimes bring them back without drowning them, can be parked up overnight; rather than dragging them out of the water and littering the roadside.

Here is the grand design:

Thappraya road; it’s been the biggest road construction mess in Pattaya, and it’s had some stiff competition.

The perceived problem was that the four lane dual carriageway was inadequate. With the inside lane being used for parking, that only left a single lane for traffic on each side. And so they embarked on a project to widen the road to three lanes on each side. The end result would be an inside lane for parking, a middle lane for double parking, and a single lane of moving traffic; so the effective increase in efficiency was nil.

I measured the length of road today, 5.5 kilometres. I am not sure of the exact start date, but that must equate to more than a year construction time per kilometre, surely a new low in a country which is actually rather good at laying new roads.

Of course, it is still not complete. They are still surfacing some patches, the central reservations look like shit, and there is assorted rubble lying around. But, you can start at one end and weave your way past parked cars all the way to the other, 5.5 kilometres of six lane highway.

Except, you can’t. It’s actually more like 5.45 kilometres of six lane highway and 50 metres of this: