Welcome to "Sunday Summary" in which I try to summarize the week that came before. This is the 84th installment, covering the week ending today, the 31st of March 2024. Each week, we link up with The Sunday Salon, hosted at ReaderBuzz, and S…
Welcome to "Sunday Summary" in which I try to summarize the week that came before. This is the 84th installment, covering the week ending today, the 31st of March 2024.
Each week, we link up with The Sunday Salon, hosted at ReaderBuzz, and Sunday Post at Caffeinated Reviewer. Check out their posts and the links to see what other book bloggers have been up to in the last week.
Well, I was wrong. There are a couple CUTE KIDS photos in here. Not too far down from this point. . .
This felt like an excruciatingly long week, particularly since I didn't really do all that much. In fact, most of it is a blur. Usually, going through photos and journal entries will help to jog my memory but I took very few photos this week, not even a single selfie. This is why this week's thumbnail is an illustration of somebody reading on the beach. It certainly isn't me!
Most of my photos during the week are photos of items I purchased online so that I could write reviews of them on the Lazada app. This is the Asian version of Amazon.com but with much better prices. It's where I obtained items such as my Bullet Journals, Gratitude Journal, Sakura Micron Fineliner pens, and Zebra Mildliner markers amongst so much more.
Lately, I have had a bit of bad luck with Lazada order fulfillment such as them sending me a pink Hello Kitty tablet cover when I ordered dark green and a black raincoat with rain pants when I had ticked "orange". I got a replacement and refund for the former but decided not to complain on the latter. The items fit and that is what matters to me most as our monsoons will begin soon (we hope!).
My "big project" of the week was to visit the town of Patong up the coast as the Cunard liner Queen Mary 2 was due to visit on her world cruise. I have been interested in passenger liners since I was quite young and I fondly remember several childhood visits to the old RMS Queen Mary which has been moored in Long Beach, California, since 1971. I believe I have gone to see the QM2 on two previous occasions, both times getting a rather close view of this last of the grand ocean liners.
I spotted her sailing offshore near my home early that morning and I could see the ship from the bus most of the journey north, arriving at Patong just as the Queen Mary 2 changed course and pointed her bow towards the beach. Unfortunately, she set anchor very far from the shore and I just could not get a clear photo. I NEED a REAL camera (and my mobile phone is truly on its last legs).
I ended up heading back home after just 90 minutes due to my frustration -- not only at not being able to take a decent photo of the ship but also due to the huge number of people sitting in clusters on the beach completely drunk. Some were passed out and there was even a party band playing music. It really seemed odd and disconcerting at 6:00 on a Wednesday morning but that is Patong in a nutshell. I really try to avoid the town at all costs. Not only did I leave discouraged, but I had my wallet pick-pocketed en route to the bus stop and had another bout with (I believe) food poisoning once I returned to Kata. Not a good day at all!
Much better was Thursday when I journeyed to Phuket Town in order to sign some paperwork at my school. Eight of my former students were there taking the summer course, as was Kru May. It was great seeing them all again The summer classes will finish on April 11 and then the new school year will start on 16 May with the foreign teacher due to report a week before that. When I was trying to leave, several of the children grabbed a hold of my legs in an effort to prevent me from going. Either that, or they just wanted a ride across the floor!
I felt good spending a short amount of time in my classroom -- friendly people, and Arctic cold air-conditioning -- and am considering finding an excuse to go and "work" in the classroom one or two days before the end of the course. It would be nice to sit at my desk (in the very comfortable chair) and not sweat while writing out blog entries or doing BuJo layouts. Add in cute kids and it is very tempting. As far as I know, I will return to K1/9 IEP for the new school year starting in May but in this country, you are never certain of future assignments until it actually happens.
After visiting the school, I had planned to eat at a nearby restaurant which I used to frequent but it was completely boarded up. In fact, the entire shopping center surrounding it looked like something out of a dystopian thriller movie, after the nuclear strikes. It was sad, really, to see yet another completely blighted section of Phuket Town. I ended up skipping lunch altogether and took a shortcut back to the bus station. I was pleased to see this mural, at least, is still there.
I spent much of Friday and Saturday trying to rearrange a bit of shelving and remove some of the clutter in my apartment. My usual at-home "workstation" has been a tray table sitting on my bed. My laptop sits on that and I use it for all of my reading, blogging, video watching, etc. When I worked on my bullet journal, I would lay at the food of the bed. A couple of days, I decided to clear the makeup desk (it's usually stacked with school materials) and use that for working on the BuJo. That precipitated a flurry of moving things around (and discarding a fair amount of stuff). Today, I am sitting at the desk balanced on my little plastic stool, writing this Sunday Summary. I will search later for a better chair as this is really uncomfortable!
Going into the new week (and month!), I really hope that I can get back on track with my 10K Steps Challenge. I only managed to hit that number twice during this week. In fact, I avoided walking altogether for a few days following the terrorist attack on the Crocus Music Hall in Moscow. Portions of the huge Russian population here became quite agitated and one evening I saw a number of them being quite a bit more belligerent than usual particularly towards local shop owners. Not only that, but I saw several shopkeepers respond in kind (I think they may have been Nepalese rather than Thai). Still, it was a scary situation. I have not been to the beach road since; hopefully, things have calmed somewhat.
I am doing well with my other challenges (particularly the Read 100 Pages one, as you will see in a bit) and am even planning to start a new one -- just 30 days this time -- starting tomorrow.
I have now completed 24 books out of the 98 I pledged for 2024. However, there were two books on my March TBR that I could not finish (one I didn't even start). Those will carry over to my April TBR and I will try to pick a few shorter books to read in the new month. Up until a couple of days ago, I had deemed House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday as my favorite for March but that has been supplanted by Steve Berry's The Atlas Maneuver. Not only was this latest Cotton Malone thriller downright F-U-N but I learned a lot while reading it. I now understand bit coin and blockchains and discovered the Japanese were as ruthless as the Nazis in confiscating war booty. I came away with three additional books to add to my reading list -- two mentioned in the story and one providing more information on the key plot device.
I really enjoyed putting together this week's 5 On My TBR. It was a freebie in honor of the meme's fourth anniversary so I highlighted five books that I recently added to my collection. Of these, I have already finished one and put three others onto my April TBR! I used one of those books as my choice for Tuesday Intros #41. As I was planning to go see the QM2 early Wednesday morning (and thought I would stay in Patong a bit longer than I actually did), I wrote this week's WWW Wednesdays in advance and scheduled it for automatic publication that morning. I was going to write installments of Time Travel Thursday and Let's Talk Bookish but was not really in a blogging mood either day.
I received my printed Gratitude Journal a few days ago and will start it tomorrow, the 1st of April. Each page has a motivational quote and a series of prompts which I think is ideal for me. There is also a weekly challenge to complete but those are printed on every sixth page. So, I guess I have to choose one day each week NOT to show thanks. Strange.
The start of writing my Morning Pages has been delayed a bit as I await a new notebook. I had ordered a pair of A5-sized notebooks to match my other journals, etc. but then read Julia Cameron's The Miracle of Morning Pages in which she gives compelling arguments against using anything smaller than 8.5 x 11-inch paper. In Asia, we have A4 which is pretty close so that is what I ordered. The new notebook should be delivered tomorrow or Tuesday; I will use the A5 notebooks to write notes and lesson plans for the new school year.
I am satisfied that the "24 24's for 2024" section in my Bullet Journal is starting to fill up. When it comes time to create my Volume 2 notebook next month, I will definitely include a revamped version of it, changing a few of the categories and giving it a nicer look with boxes rather than dots. My dots meander as I cannot always see the dots printed on the pages in this notebook.
I experimented with a slightly new style for my weekly spread with my icons for steps walked, pages read, money spent, space to record my go to sleep and wake up times, even a space to record a week-ending reflection. As I am coming close to the end of this notebook, I am again keeping most of the dailies to a half-page each
While my March pages includes a calendar, I decided not to do one for April. The weekly layouts serves the same purpose and I rarely, if ever, return to the full month calendar once I make it. In fact, I never use the Future Log calendars either so I may scrap that when I create my next journal. Most of my other monthly pages have become fairly standard -- Financials, Sleep Log, Habit Tracker, Reading Log, Blog Log, Site Edits, and new in March, a Food Log. I might tweak portions of them from month to month but the basic design remains the same.
My April cover page layout is one I am extremely proud of. From my first thoughts about it, I knew I did not want to go with the "usual" April theme of Spring flowers but to do something regarding the most famous of all Thai holidays, Songkran. This is the one that most people outside of Thailand see as just a giant water fight that occurs from April 13-15 but there is much more to it than that. It is the Thai New Year and, traditionally, small amounts of fragrant water is sprinkled onto the hands of elders and children.
It is the water fight aspect -- with roving hordes of people armed with super-soaker water cannons spray water at any and all passing within range -- that garnered recognition from the UNESCO World Heritage folks. Effective in 2024, Songkran is listed as a "intangible cultural heritage of humanity". As a result, the Thai government has declared the World Songkran Festival to occur from April 1-21. Fortunately, that DOES NOT mean that water fights will last the entire three weeks. They will be limited -- as usual -- to the 13th in most places and some extending a few days beyond that. Good news as many foreign expats tend to avoid going outside when the event is in full force. Myself, I do not mind getting soaked with ice cold water during an extremely hot period of the year but I do dread the paste that younger people like to smear on victims' faces (it ruins clothes, for one thing).
After finding inspiration through some graphic clipart portraying aspects of Songkran, I sketched out a rough idea in one of my school notebooks. Thursday, I started penciling this into my BuJo and added ink and color over the next two days. The quote is something I am quite proud of; all of my monthly cover pages have included a different quote from To Kill A Mockingbird and I knew I wanted a summertime quote for Thailand's most "summery" month. I had the idea for the frame long before I had the quote, a pool of water from various Songkran water sources. I also like the drawing of the boy and girl wearing traditional garb often known here as chut thai (ชุดไทย). However, instead of having them hold the traditional pressed tin water bowls, I have armed each with a water gun.
Although pink is my "official" color for April, I plan to make most of the headers using the multi-color style I used on the cover page. That isn't easy to do as I only have a few Mildliners -- my favorite color markers. (perhaps it is time to order a few more). In fact, I want to try and make most of the pages for this month as colorful as possible. This is reflected in yet another stab at my Holiday Routines page (although I am certainly NOT following that at the moment!). I still need to create the April Blog Log, Site Updates page, and probably another Food Log before I do the spread for Week 13.
Now that I am using my desk to work on my Bullet Journal and blogging, I hope I become a bit more productive on both. The lighting is definitely better than when I would sit (or lay) on my bed working. All of my journalling supplies are now readily at hand (I used to have to walk over to retrieve a particular pen or sticker, etc. if I hadn't planned ahead). All I need now is a comfortable chair; the stool I was using (the plastic collapsible kind) broke while I was midway through this "Sunday Summary" and I finished -- once again -- using the tray table on the bed. <Sigh>
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