Category: Thailand

Suan Ta San Yesterday I planed to take a motorcycle ride to the Cho waterfall since the sun was covered in clouds, preventing some kind of severe sunburn from the long half hour motorcycle ride. When I got to the fork in the road about 25 km later I couldn’t see a sign for the waterfall so I decided to go towards the cliff Straight ahead since waterfalls tend to fall, and falling often happens from higher places to lower places.  

I kept going up there Hillside Road until, on the left, I saw this big huge pillar sticking out of a series of surrounding what looked like sulfur Spring pools. I drove up a little further and a small sign said in English 10 Baht to enter. I have been to sulfur Springs before in northern Thailand and they tend to be places where family go to, if they’re not too hot, put their feet in the hot sulfur water. If they are too hot they have eggs you can dip in the sulfur water to get hot spring eggs Boiled right in front of you.  But my goal was to go to the waterfall so I headed up the hill.

On the right there were a series of signs and what looked like a fairly substantial dirt road entrance, obviously a tourist attraction. So I drove in the dirt road and came to a parking area with quite a few motorcycles and cars parked. This was definitely a tourist attraction. After getting off my motorcycle I walked up towards the entrance and was instructed to sign in which was obviously part of the COVID-19 contact tracing program and then I paid the 20 Baht entrance fee.

I was expecting to see a waterfall since I asked the person if there was a waterfall there and he said if you go down to the left you can see it. Well I went down to the left and there was no waterfall. But there were a lot of platforms placed out on stanchions into the shallow stream. People sat down on the platforms and had their feet in the water. So I took off my sandals, stepped on the platform and went to a place where I could sit down and dangle my feet in the water which was very cool and refreshing.

I was thinking the object of the platforms was to enable dangling feet in the water and that was it. So I was moving my feet in the water and several people were looking at me and smiling. This made me wonder if they were smiling because I was a foreigner, or because they wanted to talk to me and we’re a little bit shy, or if I had some blood on my shirt from the mass murder the night before.  sorry, that’s my dark humor side coming out.  A couple of times I felt something touching my feet and I thought it was maybe some sticks or some thing moving in the water as I was swishing my feet back-and-forth. But then the touching increased in different areas on the feet and I looked down and I found fish nibbling at my feet.

I know fish eats parasites on larger fish but I wasn’t really thinking everybody dangling feet had this many parasites that fish would want to dine out so consistently.  As I kept my feet from moving, more and more fish came and were nibbling on my feet which was very ticklish. They might’ve been eating the dead skin, bacteria or just decided this was a potential food source. I don’t know. I have to check into that.  If you find some thing on fish nibbling on human skin let me know.

This place is called Suan Ta San. I highly recommend going there for the experience. A lot of families and couples go there and just seem to enjoy.

On the 30 minute motorcycle ride back to my bungalow it started to rain so I stopped to buy a Coke and wait for the rain to come down like cats and dogs and then subside.  The owner of the shop was trying to carry on a conversation with me.  I asked Where are the waterfall was and he explain that what they called a waterfall is religious now water running and not falling. So I did make it to the waterfall. He then asked me where I was from, which is always the first question when you’re traveling, and how long I have been in this area. The question about how long you have been in the area is very typical now with COVID-19. If you have been there for more then a couple weeks he develops a trust that you probably don’t have the virus. If you have been there a month you are obviously “clean“. Ever since 1985 when I visited Paris, my answer to the question, “where are you from?“ Is always “Japan“.  There are a few reasons for this. The first one is simple. I have spent more years in Japan than any country and my home was most often in Japan. And I most recently came from Japan. The second reason is it’s a good way to strike up a conversation. They look at your face and they invariably say, “Funny, you don’t look Japanese“. That starts up a conversation. And I love conversations.  It’s the best way to get to know people. As for the quote on what they say, I embellished it slightly, influence from a Jewish joke I love.  The third reason I respond I am from Japan is particular to Paris. As a good friend from France tells me they have two countries; Paris and France. In Paris saying you are from the US or asking if they speak English will get you very often the kind of response you don’t want. After two frustrating days of feeling rejected I found by saying I am from Japan sparks interest and gets a conversation or process going. So always remember, be interesting!  

When many people think “massage in Thailand“ their mind wanders in a certain direction that I will attempt to correct. 

The well-known center for what we call Thai massage is at Wat Po in Bangkok. Their whole focus is maintaining, preserving and developing traditional massage methods.  When you meet some professional Thai masseuse, and also some non-Thai, you will often hear them mention studying at Wat Po. 

While there are different techniques for massage I will boil it down into the two basic groups, relaxing massage and medical massage. When you come to Thailand as a tourist you will definitely see here and there shops and places on the beach where people have a table and advertise massage for 150 to 300 baht an hour (31 Baht=US$1]. That is relaxing massage.  Very often you can ask them to concentrate on a certain part of the body that concerns you while some places focus only on foot massage.  I often recommend people just get a general full body massage and then find places causing tension or pain and  concentrate on those areas on the next visit. 

The second kind is medical massage. These people do things Western medicine practitioners often pass off to these people.  Most Western medicine focuses on knives and pills.  Of course that’s a gross exaggeration since everyone knows many hospitals have rehabilitation centers that work on different things so in some sense I almost feel like I want to contradict myself but not really. Those hospitals focus on the two things I mentioned and then derivatives that came from either a simulation from other countries and customs and traditions or some evolution from knives and pills. 

What traditional medical massage in Thailand does is focus on medical problems.   Most people have heard of the ancient Chinese practice of acupuncture and many explanations associated with meridians and esoteric connections in the body and life and nature. But we all know the answer to everything is 42.  If you don’t know that you haven’t read “the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy“.

I have had some extensive experience with medical massage and acupuncture to fix things but I don’t really want to go too much into acupuncture right now. I will try to sideswipe it by suggesting some commonalities between the two.  And for a more extensive explanation the two cannot be separated.  The basic, simple concepts are that nerves and tendons and muscles and bones interact.  That’s basically it. If you hear more esoteric explanations then that’s fine. But if you just take this simple concept you will find it is more than sufficient to explain why the results of medical Thai massage is so effective.

Very often the pain or discomfort comes from nerve, muscle or tendon issues. Those actually can be fairly easily treated with medical massage.  Small and big problems can occur when tendons work their way out of place. When you move they are stretched too far and cause pulling on the nerves and cause pain. The same thing can be said for muscles. And the same thing can be said for nerves. If a nerve happens to wind up in the wrong part of the body or the wrong part of the muscle, somewhere it can pinch or be stretched too far, it will cause pain.  

What medical massage does is try to find what is out of whack with one of these three things and try to get it back in a place where it’s not causing strain and pain.  So the key is to find someone who can identify the problem and then fix it.  That sounds pretty simple but it’s difficult to find those people.  I have two experiences with people who focus on the medical aspects of massage. The first one comes from a nerve in my back, probably the sciatic nerve, being kicked out of place from sleeping on a moving boat overnight without a mattress.  I know that’s the problem because I met someone else who was also a scuba diving instructor, did the same thing and had the same problem. The nerve then connects with other nerves that go down the leg, some thing winds up getting out of place and the nerve gets pulled or sometimes gets pinched so feeling disappears or is reduced. It can also cause tendon and muscle pain that can be so excruciating you would never be able to sleep.  The problem caused my leg to feel like it disappeared sometimes and I would just fall down because there’s no more feeling in my leg; no control. Then it morphed into severe pain so I couldn’t sleep. And for about five or six years, maybe seven, I was not really able to run. It caused some disruption in my back muscles that didn’t allow my legs to work quickly 

A friend in Phuket (Thailand) introduced me to a well-known local massage family, three generations. I went there before the rush of people, found a lot of old hotel gowns around a fairly unclean massage area. People explain that hospitals have patients there who could not be treated with Western medicine.  The third generation fellow came out and without asking me where the problem was he just started in and it was the most painful one hour I have ever had in my life. He went deep into the muscles and into the tendons massaging the nerves the muscles and tendons themselves.  If this happened in the  United States my US masseuse friend explained it would’ve wound up as a lawsuit.  Torture is also illegal (unless…. OK this is not a political diatribe).  throughout the massage I was not crying but I was definitely wincing and making noises indicating how painful it was. There were several people around me waiting for their turn and they were giggling every time my voice created a sign of pain.  Part of this is due to cultural reactions but I find also Thai people do not complain as much about pain or scream as much about it as people in the states.  When my half hour was finished my whole body was in total pain.  The fee was “up to youl”.  It was what you wanted to pay or what you could afford.  I made it back to my place went to sleep and woke up early the next morning.  But the next day there was absolutely no pain anywhere in my body and the general discomfort in my back and leg was very much gone.  I went back three days later for another treatment, just as painful, and that cured the problem.   But while I say “Cure“ I meant took care of the constant leg pain problem. I still have the nerve problem in my back so if I stand in one place too long my back pain starts in. And when I’m standing up on a moving train or bus the pain starts in and just keeps getting worse so I have to sit down. But I take care of that myself when I can by going in a pool or in the ocean and using my legs to kick like hell and exercise those back muscles to keep the nerve pretty much where it should be. Anyway that is what I think I am doing and what I think is happening as a result of the exercise even though I can’t see inside and I have not had somebody tell me that’s exactly what’s going on but it works so I do it.

The second experience I have with medical massage in Thailand is what I’m going through now. I spent about six months when I was in Japan reaching for something while watching TV with my hand going sideways to a table that was lower than the chair. I think what happened is the tendon got stretched out of place and when I move my arm in a certain direction the tendon was pulled too tight and pain kept me from extensive use of my arm.  The girl who is working on that now graduated, of course, from Wat Po and while it hasn’t been completely fixed it is getting better.  I have had about 10 treatments on it so far but that area is very complicated. Those nerves, muscles and tendons connect all the way from the fingers through the arm up into the shoulder into the neck and back. Well the shoulder is the connecting point and tends to receive most of the pain.   The neck and back and arms need to be worked on to get those muscles and tendons into the right places and working together the way they should, not pulling on each other.

OK, so this is a very simple explanation of the two types of massage in Thailand. I highly recommend staying away from pain pills if you can and finding somebody to figure out what is causing the pain and be very accurate about it. If that can’t be done how are you going to know whether it’s something that can be worked on through massage or some thing that needs to be taken care of another way? From experience and getting various problems fixed, some explained here, and others including whiplash, I have found very often non-intrusive procedures such as massage can take care of problems when you really don’t need a machine to pull your neck apart or someone to pull out the knife or pills. Most doctors you go to will recommend curing problems through their specialty. Good doctors will recommend what they think will be the best treatment. Make sure you get a proper diagnosis first.

Here is an interesting BBC article. http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200707-the-birthplace-of-traditional-thai-massage?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2F

Now quite a few restaurants are open and so the need to scrounge around for various interesting sources of food is not that necessary. But even until two weeks ago I was learning where to go to buy things that were not junk food and could be either eaten the way they are or mixed together to create something different and delicious.

I am not a cook by any means but I learned to do many of the basics mostly to be able to eat the flavors I like when I want and also as medicine. This short blurb will just focus on what I made last night. I’m working on a overall perspective of food in Thailand, not too long, and should have it finished in a week or so. I think that blog will be very helpful all around the world, not just in Thailand.

In the photo you will see what I bought and created.  Half the rice from the night before was left over since I try not to eat that much every day due to my fairly strict diet.  I might mention here that in general Thai food is not fattening compared to some other foods but it’s pretty easy not to gain weight or to lose weight if you eat the way other people eat here. In the last three months I lost 7 kg (15.5 lbs). That is due to my diet, eating just a yogurt in the morning and then one meal in the evening and also an unusual amount of exercise, swimming in the ocean twice a day, and the healthfulness of Thai food. 

On the right you will see the grilled pork sticks which are grilled in slightly sweet seasoning and below the pork you see the spring rolls made of vegetables and noodles. Those were just purchased and reheated in the microwave.  The sauce for the grilled pork sticks is right above the bowl. It is a very spicy sauce something that would be considered mildly spicy here but which most non-spicy people might find difficult to eat without somehow diluting.  The sauce for the spring rolls is directly above the plate with the spring rolls, the typical sweet pepper sauce you find in the grocery stores. I find that the over sweetening in that sauce needs to be balanced with some pepper sauce like sriracha which I added to give it more of the spicy taste which I like.

Anybody who uses a microwave knows that most microwave cooking will leave food damp and not crispy. That’s because all it does is heat the water molecules. It doesn’t dry out contents like an oven does.  But I haven’t found it a big enough problem to try and figure out a way to work around that with no access to an oven.  So the spring rolls wind up a little bit mushy but maintain their taste very well so I don’t think too much about it.  And it’s easier to cut the spring rolls so they don’t fall apart when they’re mushy instead of very crispy. When they’re crispy and then cut into pieces improperly they tend to just completely fall apart.

Now I get to the main stuff in the bowl. I had some rice left over from the night before and bought some coconut milk which is a good additive especially when adding spices in Thai food.  Then I chopped up and threw in some rice/raw pork fermented sour sausage (NAEM). I like that because it has a sour taste and they often put peppers in them so it adds some spice.  But that’s not enough spice for me so I added some chili sauce which is very much like a Sriracha base but it has a slight tinge of sugar.  That’s it.  I enjoyed the combination of little things reheated and leftovers made into something with the tastes I like.

Listen to this but get ready to plug your ears. I don’t know what kind of bug or animal created this sound but this morning in Khanom it decided to really BUG me, almost had to plug my ears it was so irritating!

Covid 19 caution had most popular beaches closed. Those in high risk provinces were under close scrutiny while in less risky places like this province, Nakon Si Tamarat, have remained open though all services were suspended and the countrywide lockdown reduced beach going numbers to almost zero. 

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1930864/beachgoers-put-mayor-on-alert

Since the “ban” on beach going did not affect me i was in the water twice a day as i am also today and will be until i am able to get back home to Japan. 

The beaches mentioned in the article are target weekend spots for people from a large city, Bangkok, so no surprise the numbers exploded. But beaches in distant areas, here and Phuket, are not really for the big city weekend crowds, they are for more scarce local province people and longer stay tourists and they are either fewer in numbers, non weekday visitors or, in the case of foreign tourists, travelers not allowed into Thailand yet in any significant numbers. 

If you plan a beach visit try the Thai preferred places. They will be quite an interesting mix of people. Definitely avoid beaches favored by Chinese tourists. China tour groups have no problem booking people to beaches in numbers that don’t allow even enough space to sit. This was true of the beach near Phi Phi island where the movie “The Beach” was filmed staring Leonardo De Caprio. So, remember, “Life is a Beach!”

By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.

When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.  

Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air.   My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email. 

I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work. 

I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.

So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions.  It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles.  So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power.  In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses.  It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning. 

My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.  

During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings.  One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero.  So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging.  Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.

So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it.  And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device.  So that’s about “batteries in paradise“.   HAVE A NICE DAY!

in Paradise. By now you might be getting a glimpse of my tactics. I try to draw you into the subject and then once I have you captured I go through the story, whatever it is. Today I’m going to explain what I mean by “batteries in paradise“.

When you travel abroad you need to take a variety of electronic devices to do this that and the other even if it’s just some odd piece of equipment. For me, having been in the computer business for more than 45 years I just can’t get away from computing devices. Currently with me I have my iPhone, my iPad Mini 4 and my MacBook Air. All of them run on batteries.  

Previously I never had a habit of just sitting down and consuming a lot of information someplace where I didn’t have my large screen and computer attached to it. Now that happens to be a MacBook Air.   My luxurious suite room ($18/day -eat your heart out) has a TV with an HDMI port so I just plug my computer into that but it isn’t the kind of sitting situation where I can comfortably use a keyboard and a mouse so I prefer to sit outside in my private patio, drink some coffee and for the first time in years use my 3 year old iPad Mini 4 to consume information and to use on various applications to do this that and the other, especially email. 

I use my MacBook Air for heavier computing such as the development of our family digital museum, extensive emails with attachments, complicated document creation, watching videos and online material in the evening, and doing some fairly extensive financial work. 

I thought my iPhone XS would be useful mostly during the commute, which it was, but now it seems to be the most convenient device to do financial transactions and a few other various jobs such as international Skype calls.

So now I wind up charging my phone only once every two days since I don’t use it as much. My iPad fulfills most of my morning news consumption and simple data transactions.  It works fine with dictation which helps a lot since typing on these smaller digital devices is time-consuming and not really good for the tendons and muscles.  So this iPad needs to be charged up at least once a day. I even have an extra fairly high powered external battery to pump it up while I’m working if I need extra power.  In the morning sitting outside without the air conditioner is very comfortable and a lot better on my sinuses.  It’s warm outside but when you get used to the heat and the humidity it’s often more comfortable sitting outside and bearing the heat rather than going in and out of air-conditioning. 

My MIT colleagues and students bought me an extra smaller battery which I use to power the iPhone when I need to inside or outside.  

During thunderstorms, which happen now about every third day, it is wise to unplug my laptop. Trust me! Bad things can happen especially in Thailand where there is no ground ( Earth) used in most small buildings.  One thing to note about the HDMI external monitor is some thing I found after I got the MacBook air and had it constantly plugged into the external monitor. Even with your monitor off it drains the battery if it’s connected to the MacBook Air. I couldn’t figure out why it was very very difficult and time-consuming to get the MacBook Air to start up. I found each time the battery was zero.  So don’t leave your external monitor, especially HDMI connection, plugged into a laptop if the laptop is not also plugged in for charging.  Oh, I didn’t mention just before the battery drained in the laptop because I didn’t have it plugged into a power outlet while I had the HDMI cable attached.

So if you’re traveling extensively I highly recommend making sure you have your devices charged up by the morning and also have some kind of portable battery to carry with you during the day. There are probably many times you will run out of battery power especially the way some of the devices react to touch even if they’re in a backpack, turning on and off, executing applications even when you haven’t touched it.  And when that one photo or sound you want to record comes into view or into hearing distance you don’t want to have a dead mobile device.  So that’s about “batteries in paradise“.   HAVE A NICE DAY!

The word hyperbole is from two Greek words.  HUPÉR (above) + BÁLLŌ (I throw). So let me do a little throwing above. 

When you learn to scuba dive a very important principle is from Archimedes, supposedly, the law of buoyancy.  The key is weight.  If the weight of the water which is displaced by some object is heavier than the weight of the object then the object will float and we say it is positively buoyant. My additional rule is a very simple one. Humans are basically fish. How do I know that? We are basically neutrally buoyant, which means if we breathe out we will sink and if we breathe in we will float. But as we get older that can change.

When I was 62 kg all the way through high school until I was about 48 I was neutrally buoyant, actually skinny.  But then I started eating Philippine food four times a day, lots of adobo which is half pork fat. So I wound up at between 78 and 84 kg. So what happens to all of that pork fat and a certain kind of way we tend to gain weight as we get older?  It turns into filler throughout the muscle which we call fat.  That is lighter than, less dense then, our general muscle tissue so that tends to change our buoyancy. 

How do you survive on the ocean and on the beach?  when I was a kid going to the beach our father taught us kids a very simple principle. If you hold your breath and let your body float on the top of the water with almost none of your body under the surface you will float and the waves will bring you into shore  That is almost always true with a few exceptions.  That rule saved me from drowning at Sandy Beach in Hawaii number of years ago. It took two hours to get back to the beach after I was completely worn out from fighting the current. But I remembered what my father taught me when I was a kid, I floated on the top of the waves and eventually made it to shore. The art of the save was in spending most of my time with air in my lungs so I would float. At that time I was 62 kg and if I had let the air out of my lungs I would have sunk.  

Before I came back to Thailand a few months ago I was 84 kg. Through exercise and diet I’ve gotten down to 77 kg.  But even with that diet it would be very difficult for me to die in the ocean. If I let all the air out of my lungs I still float due to the fat in my body being more buoyant than the water it displaces. The problem is when I go diving I have to put on more weights to get me back to neutral buoyancy than I did when I was 62 kg back in the 1990s.

So the moral of the story is if you diet too much and get back to your neutral buoyancy state you could risk death in the ocean.  Hyperbole?  Maybe, maybe not.

By now you know I’m stuck in southern Thailand. In this case “stuck“ seems like a very enjoyable interpretation.  One friend in Hawaii yesterday told me Japan might allow me back in soon. I responded, “I hope not“.  

I set my daily schedule basically by jellyfish. The second determination is weather. The only thing I have scheduled every day is going to the beach and getting some exercise in the ocean.  The jellyfish start to come in at about 5:45 in the evening so I try to get to the beach at about 5:15 to get a half hour swim.  The second constraint is whether or not it’s cloudy. If it’s cloudy I can go down to the beach anytime and not get sunburned. And after about 5:15 the sun starts below the palm trees and I don’t wind up getting too much sun.  

Two days ago there was absolutely no wind and the ocean was so calm and glass like, some thing I have very rarely seen in my five years on the ocean.  you could get your eye right down just above the water line and see all the way along the water to the beach 5 km away.  That is a real zero situation to do body surfing in but there are many different kinds of swimming.

Four days ago it rained very hard at the beach and produced a very interesting and beautiful effect on the water. The drops falling on the water bounce off and project silver pillars, millions of them, a short distance into the air producing over a long distance a very deep fog like Haze. And there is some thing especially fun about having rain pouring down on you which is cooler than the ocean water.  The ocean water here near the shore is about 82°F (28°C).  The inclines are only a degree or two lower. 

Here I think it’s a good idea to tell you I hate swimming pools.  The chlorine and the other things that come from humans, deposited it in the water, are very bad for humans.  On top of that so many people expect swimmers to go in a straight line. I never learned to do swimming in a straight line. Well, I guess I did at the community swimming pool when I was just a kid. But almost all my swimming has been in the ocean, copying the swimming techniques of the otters and seals. That is not exactly straight line, competition swimming.  Oh, i just remembered getting suspended from the pool for short periods of time for swimming like a seal.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get enough wind so we can get some kind of waves. The beach here in Khanom is a very shallow and gradual slope so it doesn’t really produce the large, close to the beach waves you see in Hawaii, La Jolla or other beaches where the shore slope is greater. So for body surfing this is not really a great beach. However, given the right circumstances it can produce large enough waves to just enjoy and have fun with and get washed up on the beach.  

Some people talk about techniques to body surfing. I am not sure i know the formal “techniques”. I just DO IT. What I enjoy is finding the right technique to place the body given a certain wave. It’s not all successes.  

I look at body surfing as an analogy to life and how to live. Most of it is about where you are, position and what the circumstances are, the wave.  You are in a certain position that is not easily and rapidly changeable.  The water is the most massive thing on earth that controls you. If you think you control the water you will die.  It is important to find the right position for your kind of body surfing. On top of that you have the choice of wave to avoid. You can either duck under and avoid it totally, you can smash headfirst into the middle of it, or you can let it smash you and roll you into the beach.  Those are decisions you need to make fairly quickly.  But also given a certain wave there are different body stances. You can put your arm out and try to position yourself to the top of the wave and sort of surf it in. You can try to catch it in the middle and ride it until it breaks, giving you a little bit more pressure towards the shore. You can start at the bottom, go sideways and decide to go under it and skip it or to let it propel you to the top by itself. But even if you go to the top of the wave if it curls too soon it can curl you and smash you down on the beach. It’s about position, decision making and timing. That’s how I see life.  So for me, going into the ocean is life. When I was a little kid we would go to La Jolla to visit our grandparents and uncles and aunts. They lived just one street up from the beach and we accessed the beach through a public walkway going down to what we called “whispering Sands“. The sand squeaked under our feet as we walked and that’s why we called it “ whispering Sands“.  It’s way south of the Cove.  

Every time I got to the beach I had this crazy feeling, very physical. There was a rope connecting me and the ocean and the ocean was pulling me in.   There was no way when I went to the beach I couldn’t resist going in. The pull was way too strong. Even if I had to strip down to my underpants I would still go in.  But I learned at an early age respect for the ocean is the most important thing. It is similar to the respect we need to have for life. If you don’t respect the ocean and understand it you will die.  I have come close to death in the ocean several times. Once was not my doing but the other time was due to a lack of respect, and the mistake was almost fatal. 

That’s all folks!

I have to admit I’ve used a little bit of hyperbole here. What you see in this video is not really gigantic ants, something you might envision from the title, The title I imagined from my childhood similar to “the revenge of the cyclops“ (I don’t think that was a real movie though I do remember the cyclops movie). But they can be very dangerous nonetheless. 

Back in the 1990s I bought a Samsung laptop, one of their first, which was really very subpar. No, wait, that’s not the right computer. Delete that from your memory. I put together a desktop in about 1994 with an inexpensive keyboard. One day Some of the keys on the keyboard were not working. I looked around and I saw a constant trail of ants going, where I thought was under the keyboard but was actually a constant stream going inside the keyboard. I took the keyboard apart and I found these itsy-bitsy, teeny weenie pieces of silicon all stacked up close to where the ants were coming inside the keyboard. Those keyboards had a silicone pad underneath the keys that would create the travel distance and “pop back“ function for the key so it would go back into the up position after pushing down.  The ants had broken off little tiny pieces of silicon and decided they were important to take back to the nest and I guess before they could get them all out of the keyboard they decided to do a stocking up next to the entrance/exit for another group of ants to take back to the nest. I was guessing they had divided up the jobs between the ants. One would break off little silicone pieces and take them back to stack up near the keyboard exit and the other group would carry the little pieces back to the nest. When I looked closely I saw the stream of ants leaving the keyboard actually had very small tiny pieces of silicone meant for the nest. 

So this is where the nomen “monster“ comes from. Last week I had taken my MacBook air outside to work on the patio table and then returned it back inside the room. Later in the evening I noticed ants going in and out the USB-C port and imagined the worst, a repeat of 1994 and the attempted total destruction of my computer. That’s when I went to get this little green poison thing to put by the computer. It worked.

Some of you may think this is a very cruel way to deal with ants but I can assure you, according to the computer world, it was life or death,  it was them for me.