helitool

Don't know about the ginger beer, but the best deodorant in the world is Alum! They sell it in the markets in rock form (about the size of your fist). Wet it and rub it in your arm pits after showering. It is odorless very effective and lasts all day until you shower again. Also costs next to nothing. Everyone in Thailand used it 25 years ago but most have now succumbed to TV advertising and use commercial products instead.

I will be brief...... is anyone aware of whether or not the Thai Military runs any surplus auctions? A friend of mine owns an army disposal shop in Australia and asked me. I said I would find out for him. Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

In 2001 the Thai military sold about 350 M715 and M601 Dodge and jeep 4x4 trucks (left over from Vietnam located in Issan. That is the only sale of military hardware I know of.

I brought 5 saxes as well as a collection of fiddles, mandolins, guitars and banjos over with me so if you need a senile old fart who normaly plays Irish and American trad I'm in.

Cheers, Ray

This occures with most food products that are made from grains. Flour and breakfast cereals in prticular. It most often happens when the shelf life of the product is exceded giving the insect eegs time to hatch. Check the sell by dates to make sure that the product has not been sitting on the store shelf for many months.

Thanks helitool, it was your posting that I remembered and was looking for. Will try to take this further now.

By the way, how you feeling these days ????

I feel better than I have in years! It is amazing how a medical condition can cause your physical performance to slowly deteriorate and you don't notice it until the problem is removed. You needn't worry about the procedure, it is completely painless and installing the stent takes about one hour. The hardest part is watching it all on the monitor in real time!

We are having a terrible time finding decent tapping lubricant for our CNC milling machines such as Castrol Molly-dee. Also does anyone have a source for quality spiral point taps in inch sizes rather than metric?

"And a melting iceberg does of course already displace a similar volume of sea water, so it will have no effect, when it melts."

Actually the ice they are woried about covers the land portion of the arctic and is not submerged in water so if it melted it would raise the ocean level about 50cm or so. not much but enough to remove BKK and many other coastal areas from the livability equation.

I shipped a total of about 30 musical instruments over in our container Mandolins, fiddles, German archtop guitars from the 60's etc. all made it in great condition. My hydrometers indicate a humidity of 60-80% here in CM which is ideal for wood instruments. I also brought a norwegian hardanger fiddle over in my checked luggage with no problems from either customs or temperature extreams during the flight.

Here is a link to the post about my angyeoplasty and stent installation at Suan Dok hospital by Dr. Taniwat. Excellent Dr. who speaks english very well. Message me if you need further info.

http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/index.php?sh...43&hl=heart

I weighed 102 kgs when I arrived here 3 months ago and am now down to 92. Exercise is the most important factor. Your body is hard wired for living during the last ice age when a nice layer of fat provided both warmth and nourishment. If you really want to know if you are loosing weight or not get some Ketosticks from the local pharmacy. Diabetics use them to measure the amount of ketones in their urine. Ketones are a byproduct of converting fat to glucose. If you pi$$ on one of these strips and it doesn’t change color then you are not loosing any weight, I don’t care how hungry you feel.

BTW one cup of sticky rice has 190 calories whereas jasmine rice has 270 per cup. I know it is counter intuitive but you are better of eating “sweet rice” rather than the regular type.

I do not eat after 7 pm and then the first thing that I do next morning is 40-60 mins on our Octaine Q37e elliptical machine which burns 700-1200 calories. I then wait at least 2 hours prior to eating anything which forces fat conversion to glucose. You have to eliminate all sugar from your diet as it is turned into glucose immediately, this then allows your body to store away any additional carbohydrates that you have taken in as fat rather than using them as fuel.

As long as we are on the subject of anoying birds, does anyone know the name of the one that sounds like a metronome (tok, tok, tok, tok) about one second between toks. There never seems to be more than one in a given area. At first I thought it was some kind of musical instrument (two sticks being beat together) but everyone says it is a bird!

I and my wife went for checkups at the small hospital that used to be called "mother and Child hospital" and is still used for most of the baby deliveries in the area. It is near Kampaengdin rd. and the radio station. We arrived at 9:00 am and had 90% of our results by 11:00. The blood tests for prostate and colon cancer take a week to get the results for. We had a great time talking to the staff and I highly recommend them. My cost for everything imaginable as well as a chest x-ray was about B1700. Did not remember to check their english abilities, but if you don't speak Thai well they probably could round up someone to help you through the process. Friday is the best day to go (nothing to eat OR drink after 12 midnight) night before going in.

Good report , more importantly how do you feel?

I feel far better than I have for many months, thank you for your concern.

At no time during my stay did I experiance any pain other than needle pricks from injections. They injected xylocaine into the artery to deaden the feeling of the catheter being pushed through the blood vessel. I felt no pain during or after the procedure. I am driving my sister-in-law nuts by running up and down stairs and in general acting normal instead of lying in bed for a week to "recover".

The doctor said that it is ok to execise all I want but that I should wait 3 days to make sure the 2.5 milimeter hole made by the catheter in my femoral artery has closed up and won't start bleeding. Several months prior to this I had noticed my blood pressure and pulse rate going up slightly above what it normaly is. This may have been my heart trying to force more blood down the small coranary artery that was restricted. My heart rate is now 65 and BP is 120/90. Also I am 59.

I and my wife arrived here in CM about two months ago along with my machine shop in one 20 foot container and our personal positions in another 40 foot container. I immediately started helping my brother-in-law (who is also a machinist) set up the equipment in his shop and teach him how to use it. After about a month of this I started feeling a pressure like someone squeezing the left side of my chest when I exerted myself and told my wife that at some point I should see a doctor. So we scheduled a visit to see Dr. Tanawat at 4:00 pm Saturday at Suandawk Hospital. He told me it sounded like angina and scheduled me for a stress ECG on Sunday afternoon.

We went back to my B-in-laws house where we are staying until our house in San Sai is finished. I walked up stairs and the angina started up and would not stop. So I threw half a dozen aspirin in my mouth and chewed them up as I went back down stairs and told my brother to get me back to the hospital. This he did in record time. Be time the time we arrived the aspirin had thinned my blood enough that the pain had subsided. They wheeled me up to the 13th floor to see Dr. Tanawat who put me on an ECG and injected me with blood thinner. He then suggested that I should remain in the hospital until Sunday afternoon when he would do an angiogram.

Sunday at 1:00 they tossed me into a Giant contraption that looked like an operating table from Star Wars. The doctor inserted a catheter into my right femoral artery and pushed it up to my heart and injected florescent die so that we could see where the constriction was. Since no general anesthetic is given I was able to watch the entire procedure being done on the same monitor that the doctor was using.

As soon as he found the location of the blockage he asked me if I wanted him to install a stent at that time and if so did I want the drug coated type or the conventional type. I chose the coated stent and after he consulted with the assisting doctor concerning the proper size to use he went ahead with the installation. All of this took about 1 hour. I was then taken to the ICU until 3:00 pm Sunday afternoon when I was released.

The Suandawk medical system as well as the personnel gets an 11 out of a possible 10 points on this one. Everyone I dealt with was fast, efficient friendly and professional. I received better care than I would have in the US at 10% of the price.

Here is a copy of the bill I paid so you can get an idea of what medical costs are here in CM

Inpatient Medication 5079

Home Medication 461

Stent 85501 (pricey 1gram of steel)

Laboratory 1390

Angiogram and special diagnostics 56100

General Medical equipment 700

Operating Theater 16550

Nursing 3700

Medical supplies 100

Initial patient evaluation 400

Subsequent inpatient care 200

Discharge day care 200

Physicians fee 15000

Room charges (private + ICU 1900

Other charges 115

Total 187,446 about $us 5,500

Oh, Yes and 5 kilos of lynches (gift by sister to ICU personnel) 350

Thanks, Rimmer I will check into the Q-blocks as well. One of the main reasons to go with a continuous cast in place wall is the earthquake resistance it provides.

Cheers, Ray

My wife and I arrived in CM a month ago and will be designing a house shortly. I would like to use ICF wall construction if possible as it provides excellent insulation and allows the walls to be constructed in about one day (OK, one week in thai time).

Does anyone know of a supplier in LOS? If you are not familiar with this form of construction a link is provided below for a time lapse video of a house wall being constructed in 10 hours.

http://www.quadlock.com/insulated_concrete..._time_lapse.htm

The brand we use is "Handel". It has a black handle and a red rim with white lightning bolt in the middle of the grid, and a flashlight in the end of the handle. Never a problem with any of them the recharge just fine. It sounds like about 100,000 volts jumping a gap when a bug hits it. Never have been able to find the remains of anything that hits it!

Don't know how reliable the following info is as I do not have time to checkout the source.

US Government Forces E-gold Redemptions - Seizes Gold

By MoneyNet Producer | Published 05/11/2007 | Daily News Cast | Unrated

MoneyNet Producer

View all articles by MoneyNet Producer US Government Forces E-gold Redemptions - Seizes Gold

This article is Copyright 2007. You may re-publish for free it if left intact and only if you give credit with weblink back to http://www.moneynetnews.com

===

In an unprecedented move on or just before Wednesday May 9th, 2007, the United States of America has forced Omnipay et al E-gold to redeem all the gold backing the 58 previously frozen accounts owned by e-gold, 1mdc, icegold and a handful of other exchangers and customers to be liquidated effective immediately to a us dollar account owned by the federal government.

According to the reduction in the gold bar list, the bar count

has dropped by 48 bars of approximately 400 oz each between May 3, and May 9.

This redemption totals USD $11.357 Million.

Date Gold Grams ($ Value)

03-05-07 3,489,436 77.015 Million

09-05-07 2,974,871 65.668 Milllion

Gold Bars value Sold: USD 11.357 Million

MoneyNetNews has learned from a reliable source that e-gold has been ordered

to hand over a fresh copy of the customer database when the redemption

is completed.

MoneyNetNews cannot confirm if all of the 48 bars redeemed account for

the forfeiture action of the United States. It is possible that a part

of this activity can be accounted for by increased volatility in e-gold's

general market.

Not only was E-gold / Omnipay ordered to convert gold (and silver) holdings

in the seized accounts into US Dollars, but that included their own

(Omnipay's, and E-gold's) frozen (seized) accounts. This will ultimately

result is great losses of value over time even if the victims of the seizures

are found to be innocent due to the in progress bull market in gold and bear

market in US Dollars.

The seizure order appears to be unrelated to the criminal case in progress

against E-gold and OmniPay in that the seizure of the accounts by the government

was done under a (separate) civil case, for which the Government has yet to file

anything.

By doing so, the government was able to seize accounts without having

to reveal anything to the owners of the accounts themselves. By law,

the government has 30, and possibly up to 90 days to file a complaint.

Until the government civil filing is done, none of the victims of the seizures

can possibly do anything to defend themselves, not even obtain information as

to why their accounts have been seized, or what they would have done wrong.

None of the victims of the account seizures have been advised of anything

officially at this time.

The problem most people have with doing tones is that westerners speak monotonal languages and can get by with using the set of muscles that streach the vocal chords to raise voice pitch. However when speaking a tonal language such as Thai these muscles do not respond fast enough. There is another set of muscles that shorten the vocal chords to raise pitch these are the ones that are needed to produce the Thai tones properly and quickly enough. These are the same muscles that singers use for producing higher pitched notes.

Another possibility is to transfer your funds to Siam Commercial Bank and get a debit card tied to that account. According to the person who opened my account for me I would be able to transfer $5,000 per day from that account to any bank in the world. I haven't tried it myself, but its a thought. Also Bangkok bank has branches in other countries. What about transfering to one of their brances in UK etc. Also how much cash in dollars are you allowed to carry out of Thailand and into another country? I do not like BBB bank as they never seem to be very interested in helping their customers wereas SCB's main branch here in CM falls over themselves to make my life easier.

When we made the move to Thailand my wife loaded HER “drill press, table saws, router table, and all “her” other shop equipment in addition to our (her) household goods.

I wanted to also bring my “her” golf cart but our shipping company thought that would be too much. I was very tempted to install a reel style lawn mower to the cart and call the package “my wife’s riding lawn mower”

Jim

So, tell me Jim did you get away with it or are you emailing from Bang Kwang prison

Ray

Thanks for the reply, I have pretty much come to the same conclusion. I have retired and the machinery is being sent to my brother in law in CM who is a machinist and will take over the manufacturing of the products I used to make.

The baby on board signs were originaly intended to let emergency rescue people know that a very small person was somewhere in the vehicle should the parents both be unconsious after a wreck. There were some accidents were when the parents came to in the hospital and started asking how their baby was, the fire department had to rush back to the wreck and dig the dead body of the baby out of the glove box etc. The general public misinterpreted the purpose of the signs.

This monday I loaded my machine shop into a 20' container and sent it off to CM. The problem I have is that several smaller pieces of equipment would not fit in the machinery container. We will be shipping a 40' container of household items over which will be duty free (my wife is Thai). Is it posible to load the hydraulic press, metal cutting band saw etc. In with the personal stuff and not have customs go ballistic. I would of course itemize the non-personal items on the invoice and pay duty on them. If it is going to cause problems I will buy these items in Thialand. Anyone had any experience with this sort of scenario?

Interesting reading!

wallstreetwindow.com/usdollar.htm?gclid=CIKw9rfG_YkCFQtkYQod4kteNA