What's missing now?

We had been praying that someone would purchase the house next door to us which had been repossessed by the bank and vacant for over a year. Our prayers were answered and two weeks ago we saw work being done on the house. What we didn't expect is this. What's missing?

All the trees. Almost every single tree was cut down. Unfortunately I didn't have a 'before' picture but there were several huge trees in the front yard. All gone. Gone with it is the shade for our house and front yard.

We were pretty upset about it but what can we do?

Phenomenon at Conference

This strange phenomenon was seen at the end of our OMF Thailand Conference. The sun was surround by a darker sphere and what seemed like a rainbow was at the outer edge. Can anyone explain it? It was the strangest thing I have seen in some time.

Holiday pics 2

Riding Cousins

holiday pics

Cool Cousins

Aidan has no fear sometimes

These monkeys were quite tame taking food out of your hands, however, the next day one of the other guests got his finger bitten and had to go to the hospital for rabies shots (only 2 as he had 3 pre-exposure shots already - otherwise it would have been 5 shots!)

We are safely back in Lampang after driving nearly 1,000 km over 2 days. We are very tired but glad to be home. We now have a dining table (but no chairs) and a food cupboard.

Holiday by the beach

We are on holidays with Lisa's two brother's and their families at our mission's holiday guesthouse by the beach 4 hours south of Bangkok. It took us two days to get here (nearly 1,000km on the road one way) but it has definitely been worth the effort. The above picture really doesn't do the place justice. We are here for nearly two weeks, but the time is going so quickly. It has been great to see family and especially for the cousins to play together. However, it has reminded us of how much we miss not having family around most of the time.

Make shift arrangements

Our temporary dining table (no seat for me yet)

It has been over a week since we moved to Lampang and we are slowly sarting to settle in. That said, we still don't have a dining table (or chairs), lounge or anything in the lounge room for that matter. We have beds and a fridge (no stove) so we have enough to live in our house. We don't have a washing machine yet, so we are taking everything to laundry.

Buying virtually everything for the house has been really tiring work as we first have to find the shops selling the things we are looking for.

Moving Again

We're packing to move again! This will be our 4th move in 2 years. We are so looking forward to being able to settle down. We'll be glad to be moving away from Lopburi with the barking dogs which wake us up during the middle of the night or very early morning. We pray that at the place we move to we will be able to sleep through the night and that it won't be worse than what we have now.

Car Upgrade

From this ...

To this ...

We have upgraded our car as our old was was getting a bit tight especially for long road trips to and from Lampang. It is a about 5 years old, a 2003 Isuzu Adventure. It is a manual car (our first) and a disiel engine too. It means that we can take vistors in our car without having to take all our car seats out each time.

The house John West rejected in Lampang

We looked at about a dozen houses for rent in our recent trip to Lampang. This was the best of the lot. We really liked the house, but it was a bit too nice unfortunately. We do not know what group of people we will seek to reach in Lampang and a house like this may exclude all but the high class of Lampang. At 15,000 baht a month (AU$ 100 per week), it is very cheap by Australian standards. We eventually decided on a house which was 6,000 baht per month (AU$50 per week). Our house is in town, whereas this house was a bit out of town.
A very enticing aspect of the above house was that it had a club house with these pools and an air-conditioned gym! It would have been a very comfortable missionary life, but not to be for the moment.

Flooding in Lopburi

We returned in from Lampang (where we were looking for a house to rent) just in time. It starting raining heavily an hour or two later and when I looked out the window our car port was starting to flood. This is where our car was stationed before I moved it. Forunately, the water stopped rising enough so that it didn't come into the house. Our neighbours were not as fortunately and were mopping up the water from their living room. If we arrived several hours later, I'm not sure whether we would have been able to get to our house with the flooding.

Our house owner's motorcycle deep in water.