Cold Steel Tanto

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I have always tried to go with the “fast and light” ethos – in Boy Scouts, in the military, in hiking, and in backpacking and climbing. Strip all excess weight from pockets and packs. Cut every once. Especially in this heat, I don’t want anything that is not needed weighing me down when I go out on foot.
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I have a great daypack here, a North Face “Recon.” I like it because it has enough compression straps to tighten it down into a very small capacity pack – and small packs do not temp you to fill them up with a lot of junk. “Simplify, simplify”, said Thoreau (and Yvon Chouinard). In a pinch, the Recon will expand to hold a respectable amount of extra stuff, and I only started using it as a bigger capacity pack during the floods when I was foraging for food. Since then, I have been regularly expanding it on food runs and shopping trips to bookstores. A great versatile pack.
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And yet I have been wondering why this pack always feels so heavy when I am starting off from home with it empty. I go through the pockets again and again, dumping out any extra pens and paper, loose change, paperbacks, small flashlights, etc. Even though it is heavy-duty North Face construction, it still felt too heavy for their designers’ proven mountaineering roots. It didn’t make sense.
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So I was astounded recently when for some reason I dug deep into the very bottom of the pack’s padded computer sleeve, which I only use once or twice a year. What is this at the very bottom? It was something I’d been searching for ever since the flooding in October, something I thought was lost downstairs when the water was knee-deep. There, wrapped in padding at the bottom of the sleeve, was my heavy knife, my Cold Steel 7-inch Tanto blade (a Magnum Tanto II) in a thick leather sheath. I had always kept it under my pillow, but I must have put it there in the bottom of the pack when I was packing “bale-out” bags in case the floods forced us to move out, and then I forgot about where I had put it.
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Not only is this a very thick and heavy blade – much too heavy to carry around every day – but it is most probably very illegal here. I got it for home defense use only, because 7-inch blades (like the USMC’s traditional K-Bar) are combat knives with their deep penetration. Damn! I’m glad I didn’t try to visit the embassy with it.
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-Zenwind.
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Hardware Meltdown. Offline

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Sometimes I hate being right in my predictions. The terrible heat seems to have killed my computer, so I have no regular access to the internet.
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-Zenwind.
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Too Hot to Compute

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Our winter here is over, and we have gone straight into the Hot Season. Brutal temperatures and humidity. I am afraid to have my computer running for very long because I think the heat might kill it. So my postings here will be sporadic and usually made up of pieces of draft material that I never finished. I am not spending much time researching online or trying to polish my writing.
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One of the reasons we are feeling the heat more than usual is that we now live in an upstairs room that heats up quickly. Before the floods we lived downstairs in a tiled room without windows, and it stayed relatively cooler there. Moving back down there is not a good idea since it was flooded for three weeks and that dampness will never leave.
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One of our dreams is to someday have the house re-wired with a good, safe, grounded system. Then we could install air conditioning. Until then, it is Sweat City.
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-Zenwind.
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Giordano Bruno Day

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17 February: On this date in 1600 C.E. the great philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for having theologically incorrect theories on god, the universe and everything. Among the many ideas that got him into trouble, he taught that the Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the Sun, the Sun itself being just one of many other stars in the universe. Imagine that. His sarcasm did not help his cause, and he never suffered fools. But the fools burned him.
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-Zenwind.
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Valentine’s Day

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14 February: It is my 62nd birthday, and I still feel like an 18-year-old – except for the aches and pains. I went for a march in the midday sun and returned drenched in sweat and a bit sore. I must remember to stretch more carefully before going out.
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Listened to the radio play Richard Strauss’s Also Spake Zarathustra, which he wrote in homage to the philosophical genius of Friedrich Nietzsche. This music is known by many as the opening music in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey. That sure stirred up the heart of this old romantic!
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15 February: There has been yet another travel warning for Bangkok after a few explosions in town yesterday. As always, we are cautious and keep a low profile. This latest episode seemed to involve amateurs, as one of them blew his own legs off.
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Late afternoon: It just rained briefly, but not enough to bring coolness. It rained just enough to dampen everything so that, as the sun comes back out, steam rises. H-U-M-I-D-I-T-Y-!-!-!
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-Zenwind.
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End of January Note

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31 January: Today we took a trip to the Immigration office north of Bangkok for my routine 90-day check-in. This rather newer office was completely flooded and closed back in early November, and we had to go into Bangkok to the old office that was temporarily taking check-ins. So it had been half a year since we ventured north. Along the way we could see high-water marks from the flood, looking like dirty bathtub rings. The flood waters had been very high, and I’m still astonished at the wide-reaching devastation; that was a lot of water.
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I have not been online much because I have been reading. I just finished reading The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson (Part 1, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Part 2, The Girl Who Played with Fire; and Part 3, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest). Over 2,100 pages total. What a great story!
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The plan this evening is to get a lot of sleep and visit bookstores tomorrow.
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-Zenwind.
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Word of Caution

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13 January: Friday the 13th. We have received a warning of possible dangers in the near future to Westerners who are in-country. The local government's efforts will probably be face-saving moves to down-grade the possible threats in order to not damage the tourist industry, so the best source of news is the embassy's announcements. They advise caution and keeping a low profile. Good advice.
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-Zenwind.
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January Note

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9 January: We have been enjoying our winter weather -- the only comfortable time of the year here. Temperatures are in the high 80s or low 90s F. during the day and the low 70s at night. The direct sunlight is hot, but the humidity is much lower than most of the year.
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-Zenwind.
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Winter

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27 December: Am I still on the same planet? (You don't know how many former high school teachers, classmates and fellow citizens have asked that exact same question of me for my entire life -- in slightly different contexts of course.) Writing in this date of late December is a shock, because in this time of year I was usually ice skating, x-c skiing or ice climbing, yet here I am turning on the fan and lighting mosquito coils for the doorways. It is a latitude-leap, a climate-warp.
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However, last night really was cold. I turned the fan off before midnight. In our winter I sleep with long pj bottoms and a hooded top, with a blanket to cover my bare feet if the fan is too cool. But it was cold -- down to about 60*F -- a Two Cat Night, requiring two cats huddled around one's feet to stay warm. Taking a shower this morning without hot water was a real wake-up call. (We have never had any heating system for the house nor any hot water system.)
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Today we took a trip through insane Bangkok traffic to visit a shopping mall. We walked a bit before getting a taxi, but it was an air-conditioned ride to the a/c mall and theater. An a/c taxi back home at sunset; back into swim trunks and flip-flops after turning on the fan; I didn't sweat once today, and that is very unusual.
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I just read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larsson, and I could not put it down until finished. The film, in its English language version, will be in our theaters soon, so I wanted to read it first. It is a dark story and a bit edgy and twitchy, so it's not for everyone. Delicious. The DVDs of the original Swedish films of the trilogy are available here, so I will later view them.
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The day after finishing the above book I started reading Dan Simmons' Flashback (2011). I love anything Simmons writes, and so far I'm not disappointed.
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-Zenwind.
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St. Stephen's Day and the Wren

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26 December: St. Stephen's Day. Hmm... I didn't know that our cats were Irish. But it appears that one or more of them have observed the ancient St. Stephen's Day tradition by killing a wren (or another species of bird).
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This morning before Tuk went to work I was out on the open area on our second floor, and I saw some bird feathers. Not wishing to ruin Tuk's day by telling her of this evidence of a possible murder, I said nothing. She doesn't like it when the cats commit such "sins" because it will tarnish their karma and not bode well for their future re-births here in samsara. My reasoning that it is just a natural feline instinct does not impress her.
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After she left I had a closer look. There were many more feathers than I had originally thought under the table -- sure proof of a bird's murder -- and I swept them up and disposed of the forensic evidence.
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"The wren, the wren, the king of all birds,
St. Stephen's Day was caught in the furze...."
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-Zenwind.
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