Author Archives: Stacker Stack

I am a farmkid, from the mid-West USA. My father has a horse farm still, he is one of the few who refuses to retire and live with the old people in the sunshine state Florida. I can’t even begin to express how much the children LOVE staying at grandpa’s house. This past summer they lived there while we worked our overtime, and they were out of school. We would go see them after work, and on the weekends have large meals. But the summer was not enough, yesterday Daniel asked if we could live at the farm…. ALL of us! HAHA

Well this year, since Dad, myself, and my younger brother’s families all have freezers, the farm is again operational….. Sort of. Dad bought two baby cows to raise for beef. We bought 20 chickens for their eggs. In the spring my brothers are going to buy 100-175 chickens to raise for meat. The garden this year was at the farm, and will be at the farm again next year. There is more reason now for the children to go. Dad has a tough time taking care of all the new animals as well as the horses by himself. Daniel is a great help to him when he is there, but Daniel is in school now so we drive there a few times a week now.

Last year the children were somewhat in awe as they insisted on helping us slaughter 75 chickens, to put into our freezers. There was nothing inhumane about the methods used, but they had never seen people kill animals intentionally before. My wife went on to teach them about the way she grew up. Even scaring the hell out of the children telling them that she ate the Kwai that they used to farm with one year.

The children were surprisingly eager to get the chickens for the eggs and even are looking forward to the next season’s chicken for the freezer. Everytime we go to the farm they are rushing to the chickens to gather the Kai Gai.

Not too much is shocking to them these days. Our refridgerator has so many vegatbles in it, it looks like a forest, I have to dig around to see the white walls on the sides. The vegetables are all Som or Kom to taste. Flavors that tend to repel any farang with such bitterness. Many I have yet to learn the name of. She eats eggplant raw before it is mature, in the USA you let the fruit mature before you eat it. Of course her papaya is never ripe, that one I knew about before we dated. There are always 10 different varieties of leaves in the icebox at all times. Nearly anything the farang would call a weed is something she likes!

We were driving in a state park in the mountains and she spotted something she liked, jumped from the car before it was even stopped. She ran to the side of the road and mountain grabbed a plant and plucked it out of the ground before anyone could stop her. Little did she know what she had just done would have given her 1 year in prison had she been caught. So what was the emergency? A FERN! She wanted a fern. My parents asked her why she wanted it when we got back to Ohio. She went on to explain to them her aunt who lives 45 minutes from us loves to eat it with that thing. That thing is what she calls a part of the cow we throw in the trash due to health risks….. The gall-bladder. She no longer eats it, sheis concerned over what is healthy and such, but her aunt still eats it often, seeping yellow cream and one of the most bitter things a person can ingest, not to mention the smelliest.

So I explain to my father what That Thing was. He asked a couple questions, and asked her if she liked it. Then looked at me and said in all seriousness, “what do you feed the children?”. I still to this day think to myself, ‘my wife ate what!!??’.

I seen some almost valid points to cnotinue. The fact that I am not in Thailand I feel is very much hurting what I can offer. But the fact that my children as well as myself are learning Thai may help some. More that could be helpful is my wife. Knowing that many Thai people surely use this site to better their English I can relate some of my wife’s learning mile marker’s.

An update as to what all is going on. I have started or am attempting to start an internet radio station. I just basically got bored with all the lame Thai music on the other stations I used to listen to, so I decided to create a station with my own music. Info and updates are posted in the Thai Music forum here.

Just yesterday my wife was tring to read a commercial on the TV, it was about gardening and the text said, without our fertilizer your garden could get pretty ugly. She looked at me sooo perplexed. I asked her what was wrong. She proceeds to ask how flowers can be ugly and pretty at the same time. I explained that it did not mean beautiful and ugly at the same time, but rather pretty is often used as an adjective to mean something (or even exactly) close to the English word very. She was still very thrown by it.

You see that was something I could never really figure out about Thai. If there is a different meaning behind a word it is very distinguishable through the tone marks associated with the word. If it is not distinguishable the two meanings could not be confused by the context. Something English has severe issues with. I mean you look up a word such as home in the dictionary…wait i will..

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

42 entries found for home. The first 10 are listed below

42 entries for such a simple term. Now when the word home is used in a sentence, how is my wife to know which of the 42 meanings she should translate it to? TRY has 9 entries, GO has 49, SLEEP has 9, TEST has 55 entries. The wonder game of learning English can be far too much of a :head·ache
Pronunciation: ‘he-“dAk
Function: noun
1 : pain in the head
2 : a vexatious or baffling situation or problem
– head·achy

I would like to offer some ‘I’m sorry’s’ to those who have following my blogging.

I knew when I began what exactly I was going to do with this blog. It seems to have taken a turn and after putting some thiought into it, I have decided not to continue with it. There are so many methods of learning and not all plans will work the same for all people. Not being in Thailand there is not that much of a glimpse I can offer.

Considering my wife’s background it is not really fair to explain to everyone what I am learning, how I have learned what I do know and so on, because not everyone is in that situation. It really is not a fair way to learn Thai I guess.

I noticed, I have already begun to slip and describe the ways I am going about learning Thai. That in itself is what I find to be unfair. I am just as different as you all are, what I am doing probably will not work for any of you.

The blog’s are supposed to be kept along the subject of Thailand, well I was trying to do that. But considering all I am doing is learning the language, there is not much for me to contribute in this area. I can’t really write daily saying ” Today I read chapter 42 and learned that when you see a รร together it is pronounced as น”.

That is not what I intended when I signed up for this, but I am coming to the point that this is about all I can do. This would not be much of a contribution. It is merely a contribution of my thoughts and learning events/progress. Not truly a glimpse of Thailand. I truly believe with all my heart that the finest way to learn the Thai language is from the LearningThai web forum. There is input from so many people who have experienced so much more than myself, and one can never have too much information or guidance.

So I bid you all farewell, and again I thank those of you who were so regularly reading the blog. Most of you surely know I can always be found on the forum and even in the chatrooms fairly regularly. So if you would like to yell at me about something and complain about my strong opinions and stubborn attitude you know where to find me.

I found the letter kevin wrote to his teacher, don’t tell him I posted it or even read it. But for us it was very touching, and made us proud. As mentioned previously he is an honor student and has never missed a day of school in his life and he is nearly 15 years old.

Dear Mrs. &^&%^%&^%,
My name is Kevin &%(*(^*(^% and I just wanted to write to you so you could know more about me. i thnk the more information you and I share, will help us get to know each other better. I’m a freshman at the &^%^&%&^ High School and I enjoy being here, even though I have only been here for about 3 days. So far your on my list of favorite teachers because your a very nice person. I hope we don’t get too much homework in your class!

I was originally born in Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia and my family and I came to the US when I was about 3-4 years old. I’m fourteen and to this day I love being in America because it has many freedoms and opportunities around. My parents are now divorced, but both my parentshave found someone else that they care very much for. To be honest I ca’t speak my language, i know it sounds a bit silly, but it’s probably because I went to school early as a child and focused more on English than anything else.

My mother has developed good English skill and speaks English to me most of the time, but she also speaks her language to me and I can usually understand her. My best friends are Casey %$%$ and Ryan #!@#. Ryan is in the same class as me when I was in your room. This summer wasn’t very fun because of issues with friends and things like that. Ryan and I saw some movies most of the summer and that’s about it. Someday i hope to work with computers and if not that, I would like to become a chef and cook.

I came from !$%%!$$%@%^ Middle School by the way. So far my life is free from violence and drugs, I plan to stay this way all my life. People still get my last name wrong, but it doesn’t really bother me at all.

Well, thank you for your time. I hope I haven’t made you fall asleep or caused you to become bored from my letter. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in your classroom throughout this year!

Sincerely,
Kevin

AWWWWWWW!!!!!
The typos are his not mine 😉

I haven’t posted in a few days, been busy with life 😉

I did want to post a list of famous (sarcastic) quotes that I found on a Pattaya news website a while back. I thought they were really cute….

Thirteen famous predictions
by Barrie Kenyon

1. Computers in the future may weigh more than 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics 1949)
Man were these guys short-sighted.

2. We don’t like their sound and guitar music is on the way out. (Decca Recording Company rejecting the Beatles 1962)
To think, this is the greatest rock band prior to Silly Fools.

3. The abdomen, the chest and brain will always be off limits to surgeons. (Surgeon General to Queen Victoria 1873)
Said only 100 years ago, kinda frightening.

4. Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. (Professor of Economics Yale University 1929)
Month’sbefore the stock market crash that caused the great depression.

5. The advent of water tight compartments has all but removed the threat from mid ocean collisions. (White Star Line 1911)
HAHA!

6. The telephone has too many shortcomings and is unnecessary for companies with a full
complement of messenger boys. (Western Union Internal Memo 1876)
Was this guy ever fired you think?

7. Data processing is a fad that won’t last a year. (Editor of Business Books Prentice Hall Publishing 1957)
Quite an industry now, seems they may have been drinking.

8. I can assure you that our naval signals are immune to code breakers. (Admiral Donitz to the Japanese ambassador 1942)
Another one proven untrue in WWII.

9. But what is a microchip good for? (IBM Engineer 1968)
Coming from IBM??

10. Seriously to suggest salt and vinegar or beef flavored potato chips is like maintaining that bingo is here to stay. (Marketing Adviser to Smith’s Crisps 1969)
Salt and Vinegar is one of the hottest selling flavors of potato chips in the US, and people still play bingo weekly here.

11. Everything that can be invented has been invented. (Commissioner of US Office of Patents 1899)
Before the Airplane, Rockets, Computers, Velcro and Rollerblades. I mean how much do we even use from the 19th century? 5555

12. 640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates 1981)
My computer has 1,528,000 to his 640.

13. The threat of AIDS will have wiped out prostitution as we know it by the end of the century. (Public Health Professor on Larry King Live 1986).
So sad, the only one with a decent hint of truth. We could only wish it could have turned out that way.

I found the letter Kevin wrote to his teacher but he sitting behind me now, so I can’t pull it out and copy. He would just get shy and embarrased. So I will post it next Blog for sure!!!