Yesterday marked 11 years of marriage between me and Michele. I know! Mad eh ? I’m only 12. We were both just as surprised. Looking back it’s been surprisingly good and we find ourselves in a very comfortable position at the moment; it would be perfect if I could still be with the other people I love. Physics is a real bugger.

Making friends is as hard as we thought it would be over here but so far we’ve been pretty lucky. I keep ending up working with sound people – it really helps. Last week we had two people over for the evening – three if you include our excellent next-door-neighbour, Tim, who pops by occasionally. Back in the UK, once we’d both made it back to the billet, we rarely entertained. Not because we didn’t like having people over, we did! But more because we were far more into chilling out and going to sleep.

So, for our anniversary we decided to have an enjoyable day at the zoo. When the day arrived, it was so hot and humid we couldn’t face the ordeal of being outside – even at the zoo – and so we did something else that would involve air conditioning, nice food, and family. We went out with Helen, Michele’s mum, and Dot, Michele’s gran, to this excellent Vietnamese place called Pho Hoa. I can’t tell you how delicious, unusual, enormous, and healthy their food was; look at their site for details. Michele’s gran casually told us that she’s been going there for years with her Laos and Thai neighbours!
Have you ever had Taro bubble tea ? If not, I highly recommend it. OK, not so healthy, quite sweet, but the flavour will knock your socks off.

We drove home via Helen’s house where we pretended that I had agreed to do some work for Helen. In reality it was an excuse to give Michele a big box of present I’d ordered off one of teh Internets: a solar powered bird-bath and fountain.

The fountain didn’t look like it did in the “Silicon Solar” catalogue. In fact, it was fucked. We got it working, but, even then, the design has a major flaw: the water evaporates like the clappers until it runs dry and the pump breaks. I tried to complain to the company, but it wasn’t long before I realised they are widely regarded as being unreliable. In fact, I’d advise everyone to steer clear of SiliconSolar Inc. It would appear that SiliconSolar Inc have been accused of many other types of malfeasance in the past too. So, my advice is not to buy anything from Silicon Solar ever, because, in my opinion, SiliconSolar is run by a bunch of crooks. Hopefully you will never have to deal with Silicon Solar. Silicon Solar can, in my personal judgement, fuck right off.

Lesson: Always buy stuff on teh Internets with a credit card. Don’t use a debit card.

Later that night Michele and I trudged through the humid, rainy, jelly to a very nice local eatery and celebrated properly. The meal was, using my words at the time, “life changing”. In other words it was spectacularly good, as was the large serving of Oban ordered as a nightcap. All wrongs in the world were righted, and we went home to bed, happy and contented.