Time is Money - NOT

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A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours. – J.B. Priestley

The following is from an editorial, “Time Out of Mind” written by Stefan Klein

Benjamin Franklin said that “time is money.” He meant this only as a gentle reminder not to “sit idle” for half the day. He might be dismayed if he could see how literally, and self-destructively, we take his metaphor today. Our society is obsessed as never before with making every single minute count. People even apply the language of banking: We speak of “having” and “saving” and “investing” and “wasting” [time].
One in three Americans feels rushed all the time, according to one survey. Even the cleverest use of time-management techniques is powerless to augment the sum of minutes in our life (some 52 million, optimistically assuming a life expectancy of 100 years), so we squeeze as much as we can into each one.

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.
Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

I tried to find a photo of Jim napping - he doesn't - or in a hammock somewhere, but this is the closest I could come to a stress-free photo. Oh, P.S. This is NOT our guesthouse.

Mantra: I'm in exactly the right place; this is exactly the right thing to do; this is the exact right way to feel.

Entrepreneurs in Chiang Mai

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We encounter many successful small business operators in our daily life here. One such business is sewing and repairing clothes, backpacks, shoes, etc. They usually operate out of their homes but also set up shop daily on the sidewalks. These sewing machines may be old-fashioned but they work perfectly well and do not require electricity.


















Another small successful business is running your own laundry. You can smell fresh laundry drying wherever you go in the old city. Few Thais use a clothes dryer. Solar energy is the way to go in the tropics.
















It's winter time here and the temps range from 60s at night to low 80s during the day. Perfect weather for us, but cold for Thais who bundle up with hats, coats and gloves. They also dress their dogs and cats in sweaters until weather starts to warm up again in a month or so.





Books I've read this winter - all good

I've had lots of down time, especially since my little accident, so have been reading a fair amount. Time to get back to studying Thai language.

Funny in Farsi - A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas, finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor

At Home - A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. Among a million other things, I learned that the common North American bat eats 600 mosquitoes/hour. That a pillow used for 6 years will have 1/10th of its weight made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites and mite dung. And that in the early 1800s, it was fashionable (in England) to have a live-in hermit on your estate. One man in Surrey "signed a contract to live 7 years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence for £ 100, but was fired after 3 weeks when he was spotted drinking in a pub."

War Trash by Ha Jin about the experience of Chinese soldiers held in U.S. POW camps during the Korean War.

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

A Year in Green Tea and Tuk-Tuks - My Unlikely adventure creating an organic farm in Sri-Lanka by BBC journalist and environmentalist Rory Spowers

Excerpt from last title:
"Looking at the scale and speed of the development on [Barbados] – the brash, almost vulgar opulence of the new hotels, the huge scars on the landscape where natural habitats had been cleared for yet another golf course, coral limestone excavated to build yet another sumptuous villa (only to be occupied by the owner once a year) – I began to reflect on the nature of wealth itself. Despite the material trappings, I wondered just how much better off the country was than 40 years ago.

Sure, most people were no longer toiling in the fields, or living in cramped wooden chattel houses. They were sitting in air-conditioned cars and concrete office cubicles, breathing recycled polluted air, working at the their computers, incubating road rage, suffering from soaring rates of cancer and adult onset diabetes from nitrate and pesticide run-off in the water and learning how to cope with stress, that peculiar modern phenomenon which technology and progress seem to have accentuated rather than diminished.

We had decided to move lock, stock and barrel, liberating ourselves once and for all from that lurking sense of responsibility for and ownership and storage of all that lay back home – be it house, or merely stored possessions rotting in some warehouse. The levels of stress had begun to ratchet up."


Pickup Trucks


The Thai people are very resourceful and, in an apparent effort to save time and money, they load their trucks as full as they possibly can. The down side of this is that because traffic laws are rarely enforced, the overloading can lead to unfortunate accidents.



Photo by Richard Barrow, July 5,2013. "Thai pick-up trucks can carry the most in the world."


Photo by Bao-Bao on khun baobao. blogspot .com

Photo by Jim Rowe



Our room for the winter in Chiang Mai


Jim found us a great place this year at a very reasonable price. The places we've booked monthly in previous years were all full as was every other place we looked at, mostly due to the new influx of Chinese tourists. A huge comedy hit was released last year in China, “Lost in Thailand,” and has made Chiang Mai the hottest destination for Mainland China. The film has become the highest-grossing Chinese film ever.



Outside patio area, my "office."


Jim's "office" inside.


Seating area - a first!


King-size bed, quite common.


Kitchen area - another first!









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Baan Phor Liang Meun Thai Plant Garden


We have been exploring the area around our new guesthouse. We're only a few blocks from where we've stayed the last few years but it's opened up a whole new neighborhood with different street food options, restaurants, temples, and mom-and-pop shops where we can buy milk, beer, soap and non-food items.

Jim ran across a special place hidden away filled with splendid terra-cotta earthenware. The artist sculpts using the local clay, known as Thailand’s thickest clay. Passionate about art, Mr. Suttiphong has created numerous retrospective sculptures, resulting in Baan Phor Liang Meun Thai Plant Garden, an earthenware gallery in the old city. His works cover a wide range of styles such as Lanna, Thai, Hariphunchai, and Khmer and include wall hangings, bas-reliefs, high-reliefs, lanterns and archways. Here are some photos I took about six years when I stumbled on to the same place.