Grandmotherly Duties

Dateline: Chiang Mai - 10/29/08



I've definitely learned a lot about my wee granddaughter. She is quite the gymnist and if she does not get signed up for the Olympics in 2023 it will be a travesty to the American people. I have never seen a child climb more consistently, in more impossible maneuvers, with more determination or patience in spite of repeated failures.



She is extremely bright. OK, I've brought my flashcards with photos of "things and stuff" like apples and animals and we have school each day. (btw - I was always miffed as a child that some artist's intrepretation of what a bear or a car or a monkey should look like was in no way connected with my reality. Use of photographics takes out that artistic license that caused me not to get 100% on my revered papers in first and second grade. So, I say, "hooray" for photos.) We've gone through a series of about 70 cards that she can already pick out from the pack and, in some way, say the name of the object. She can spot an "O" in a mire of text, or an "S", and is working on "X". She "sort of" knows a number of colors. I've truly never seen the kind of attention span she exhibits at the age of 16 months. She is, indeed, bright.



She is very talented. I present the following video as evidence - and will expect your repeated votes on American Idol throughout her tenure there.

She is demanding. That same persistent quality that puts her in good stead in her scholarly duties and her extracurricular activities also applies to her quest to get exactly what she wants when she wants it. Nana and her continue in battles and skirmishes, but I do believe that she may be winning the war.

Other stuff: There are many similarities between the food that we can get at the local "Tops" market (read - foreigner food) and the old Harris-Teeter back home. However, the varieties of food may change just slightly, to wit:

• Yogurt. We buy a good bit of yogurt in the 4-packs. Great varieties are - coconut (with small squares of soft coconut that look like gelled cornstarch); cereal - a favorite I had the unexpected opportunity to sample this morning supplementing the yogurt with bean halves, corn, and I forget what else.


• Potato Chips. Great taste from the folks that bring you all your salty snacks. Included is the porkburger flavor; the prawn, crab, and seaweed ... and I forget a number of the others.

We live next to a Chinese cemetery. So far no ghouls have threatened us. The graves are actually very distinctive from the front, and from the back the cemetery looks like hobbit-land, full of soft green-grass lumps.

The bathrooms here are generally outfitted with the usual stuff, but anything under 6 feet is generally ceramic - waterproof. Next to the western-style toilet is a rubber-hosed sprayer with about 3 feet of hose. This, we're told, is to be used for cleaning oneself, with toiletpaper used only to "dry". This comes in really handy when it's time to clean up the bathroom. Anything can be sprayed clean!

The election. Is it me - or is there more double-talk this year than in most, with candidates taking anything and everything out of context then twisting it into a new "reality".

Smells. These run the gamut. In the countryside, the smells are more "organic". Chickens smell like chickens, pigfarms like pigs, and the flowering trees and bushes embue the air with their special fragrances. In the urban markets the smells change foot by foot, from sewer gas to three-day-old fish, to squid with no smell at all, to the fragrance of eastern spices, the aroma of chicken or pork cooking over charcoal brazziers started with wood ( a smell I identify with my days in Afghanistan).

Well --- that's about all there is to post today from the other side of the clock. More later.