A week of rainy season in Isaan (Friday)

Despite the Duvels, we both wake up fresh and cheerful at the same time. Happy mood too, it was fun yesterday. Only, there is no electricity. Hello, is that already from seven o'clock last night? Apparently not, the first customer in the shop tells us that the power was back around ten o'clock last night. But no one knows when it fell out again. The people here don't really lack electricity.

They hardly care about refrigerators, they only contain drinks and the occasional vegetables, otherwise they do everything fresh. They could only miss the water pump. But everyone has a barrel of water here, nobody wants a real shower or other more luxurious stuff like flushable toilets. They also always have water in their outdoor kitchens for cooking and washing up. It's only the few, in their eyes, rich stinkers like us who suffer. And so no one will quickly give a call to society when there is a power outage, we learn. Because De Inquisitor is very tired of that powerlessness and summoned sweetheart to telephone herself. They fall out of the blue at the electricity company. Why no electricity? A work crew came to recover early this morning? We'll check! So they didn't even know that the electricity had gone out again….

Everything gets used to, and instead of continuing to whine, De Inquisitor does some gardening, weeding, that comes up en masse and quickly with all that wetness. Immediately some 'dirty corners', of those places that you hardly ever pay attention to, also clean up a bit. Clearing the driveway of the fallen leaves, neighbor poa Sid has two very old trees there, he had already asked if he should remove them (yes, there are also rules in Isaan regarding good neighbourliness) but neither the love nor De want that Inquisitor. Those trees are cozy and provide shade. Plus we enjoy the fruits that are on the overhanging branches for us.

Strangely enough, it is sweetheart who suffers from the umpteenth power outage. She worries about her freezer in the shop, filled with ice creams. The batteries of her two telephone calls are empty, a disaster for her because the family elsewhere in the country cannot be reached now. She can't go in the fridge at home, there is a ban on opening it, set up a few weeks ago by De Inquisitor during a power failure, during which the supply was interrupted for twenty hours straight. There's too much 'western goodies' in the freezer! It is now almost twelve o'clock in the afternoon and she wants to take a shower, soon she has an appointment for the daughter to go to the dentist. In protest, she closes the shop and hangs a large sign: “closed due to no electricity”. She wants the villagers to talk about it, to complain to society.

Moreover, very exceptionally, she calls back spontaneously: they are checking the cables is the report. They are old, they suspect that they are the cause of the constant failure in rainy weather. And they start from the distribution box in the town to get to the village. Boy, The Inquisitor thinks, that's about seven kilometers, just to our village, and there are five villages that are affected by it. The sweet should then take a shower with her brother. Primitive Isan and on return she is grumbling. Why doesn't her brother put a cement floor there!? Why not occupy the walls!? Why not move that squat toilet to the side, it's now in the middle of that little cage, you can barely move!? Why not hang a decent clean shelf and drill up a decent mirror?! The Inquisitor enjoys it, sweetheart has become very accustomed to the more Western comfort. But when he reports that, he gets hit and miss. “I can easily go back to living like this, you can't!”. She has come in a bad mood.

Because she has to pick up her daughter at the school and then to the hospital. With the moped, and there's rain in the air. The Inquisitor had previously reported that he did not want to go. Don't feel like sitting in that hospital doing nothing. And quite pleasant, shop closed, so he doesn't have to pay for it. Once on the road, connecting the laptop to larger speakers, playing music loudly, while hoping that the battery of the thing will last long enough.

And ramble on. Trying to close off the dogs' escape routes. They dug holes under the fence and simply nibbled away the too fine steel wire of the side gate so that they can get through. Once ready, The Inquisitor decides to test it and lets the dogs out of their pen. In doing so, forgetting that cat Toulouse, the wayward tomcat, is still outside. It has to run, jump, growl and claw for its life once they have discovered it. The Inquisitor hardly gets the dogs under control and only when cat Toulouse gets on the roof of the pick-up can he put the three savages back in their pen. Cat Toulouse will continue to recover on the sofa upstairs in the living room for the rest of the day.

, three o'clock in the afternoon, there is power again. Whereupon The Inquisitor settles down on the open terrace and starts using the internet with a charging mobile phone. In the meantime, can he keep an eye on the dogs and see if there are still escape possibilities? And behold, the love has put something on Facebook. With a photo. Pastry, coffee, and the message that she is relaxing. How? She went to the dentist with the daughter, didn't she? Has sweetheart finally done what The Inquisitor has wanted for a long time: teaching the fourteen-year-old daughter to become more independent. It is a treatment in five times, this is the third time. Daughter knows what to do. And her wife instructed her to phone her when she was ready, she herself went to a coffee shop to relax a bit, she reports De Inquisitor. Well done!

Around four o'clock both come home, reopen shop. The Inquisitor takes a nice shower (the dogs won't get out of the garden for the time being, so they don't have to go in their pen during the day) and then go 'watch customers' as he calls it. They ask whether De Inquisitor is going out, he has chosen a bit of neat clothing, they are not used to that from him so during the week. Sak and Ut try to get beer loose, they can't, there is still Duvel in De Inquisitor's body, no alcohol today.

And then 'Farmer Janus' comes along. His name sounds like , The Inquisitor never comes out and calls him that. With his herd of fifteen . For some reason the fields opposite the shop have not yet been worked and are full of grass, just about everyone in the area lets their animals graze there. But farmer Janus and his buffaloes make an unexpected sanitary stop. Just in front of the store. At least five at a time. Hilarity, and stink. But De Inquisitor doesn't care, quickly get shovel and wheelbarrow and scoop up the manure is the message! Parking lot clean again, the smell gone, and free good manure to enrich the compost heap.

But those present find that extremely funny. A farang, not averse to excrement. And then in those good clothes! Love does not stop laughing, puns with 'manure', 'farang', 'lung Rudi' and other funny things keep coming. Well, you should be able to undergo that, Isaan humour.

Afterwards, in bed, it sweetly reports that she is quite proud of her farang. Let people talk about it: a farang that does well in Isaan, that is normal, never causes problems. She thinks that's fantastic. For De Inquisitor a reason to be extra nice to her.

To be continued