Yes we have reached into the heavens and plucked an intertube of our very own from the sky.

Big dish eh? The newer ones are apparently smaller and apparently less powerfull. At least thats what the guy said. Could well be they’re just cheaper and he makes a little more off of the big one. Either way I’m happy. I’ve had to reset the connection a couple of times this-morning although I’m not sure it was necessary. At one point everything went dead and was all ready to start cursing the thing out. Until I noticed I had pulled the ethernet cord out of the back of the modem. Oops.

Everyone keeps telling us we have been extremely lucky with the weather so far. You get the feeling from them that the 40 days and 40 nights are right around the corner. The gulf put on the biggest storm yet this-morning. All last night we’d get bright flashes of light in the window and just the occasional faint, ominous, rumbling of thunder. I’m nursing a bit of a cold and it didn’t make it easy to sleep. I kept imagining commandoes landing on our long shallow bay overpowering the island in a first big to conquer Thailand. I actually had to reason with myself that even if there where a state with such interests (or if the southern seperatists grew in size by an order of magnitude) they would probably start with Bangkok or Chiang Mai. Or Phucket if they really wanted an island.

So thismorning I woke to a furious rain, the worst so far. It lasted a long time too, at least 10 minutes. I just can’t believe the transitive nature of rain here. It refuses to rain for more than 10 minutes at a time. No matter how cloudy or thundery or how hard or how lightly it rains. It _always_ peters out in just a few minutes. Which is a bit of a shame considering how nice this house is to be in when it rains.

The roof generates great noises in the rain and we aren’t really shielded from them by anything. House construction here is very different. They don’t need insulation of any kind!

Take our house: It is esentially one large piece of concrete. This actually took me a while to figure out. I had to go around knocking on all the walls to convince myself. If you stripped the paint, roof and windows it would look like one of those bombed out soviet era appartment buildings. Except in bungalo form.

When the satalite guys put the modem in they had to get the wires from the satalite to the living room so they just drilled two holes in the floor. I can see the ground outside through the holes in my living-room! The things you can get away with when it never drop below 25!