Just when Sudafed wasn’t working and I thought my head was going to fill completely with snot and drown whatever’s left of my brain, Stu tells me that they sell menthol inhalers at 7-11.

Problem solved. At least, I can sort of breathe and I don’t feel all dizzy anymore.

Also: rainy season has arrived. The weather’s been building up to it, getting wetter, but this morning there’s Serious Rain, and there was thunder somewhere in the offing. I went out on the balcony and stood in the downpour just for the thrill of getting cold and wet. I don’t know if the weather change has anything to do with my head feeling better.

I love the rain here. It cools the air, and drowns out all the mechanical noise of air conditioners and water pumps. I don’t care how loud it is — I can always sleep and work with a background of rain. All the plants look like they’re going “booyah!” I need to find sunnier spots for two or three of them, though — which might mean outside on the pavement, though I’ll try the roofspace first.

Descended this morning into a smog that I would call gruesome even by Bangkok standards. Have a headache and a runny arse and a generally queasy and dizzy feeling. Not sure if this is from plane food, exposure to children while in Melbourne, or a delayed effect of the day before yesterday. When I look down at the keyboard I feel as though I’m on a boat. All the plants are still alive, and one has been entwined through the front security grille while I was away. The arrangement seems to be agreeing with it, though it appears to be much more iterested in growing very very long than in making flowers, so I’ll have to try to get some ‘make flowers’ fertiliser. The neighbours are still renovating. I think I might go to bed. Or to the loo. Or both. But not at the same time. Or throw up, which is starting to look like another likely option. So many choices!

It’s confirmed, I asked a neighbour and the shrine at the end of the street is for the god of the local land, who brings happiness and good luck to the households on her turf. The neighbour referred to the god as “she”, so maybe Chinese land deities are female? I’ll try to find out. This woman’s English was pretty good, so unless I learn otherwise I’ll assume the god is a lady.

The weather’s been weird. The forecast for today until Wednesday is unbelievable for summer: 16-22, 17-21, 18-24. Those would be cold days even in winter. On Thursday it’s meant to get back to 33. I’ve had flu. I thought I’d beaten it, but it has ideas about coming back as a chest infection. I’m trying to make that not happen, but I’ve already hoicked up some fine celadon-green gunge this morning and my ribs hurt. On the other hand, I feel a lot more at home here when the weather’s cold and dry. It’s surprising what a difference it makes!

Last night I dreamed I was eating chips made of magic mushrooms that would cause, among other effects, hallucinations of cane furniture. And sure enough, they did. I hallucinated a white cane chair in my dream.

I was listening to so much music yesterday that when I lay down in bed all the songs I’d been listening to seemed to spawn new songs in my head, which was fun. On the subject of songs, the other night Stu heard Metallica lyrics at 4 a.m. No music, just the lyrics, apparently sung well, as if someone was playing the album but somehow only the voice was audible. Strange, as is the fact that I’m about to slouch out in a coat and scarf to buy cough medicine. I don’t even know why I have a scarf in my wardrobe here. I must have bought it as a souvenir somewhere.

Some time later: well, the medicine did nothing, but an asthma spray produced results. And not green, either, which is encouraging. My mystery plant has a mystery fruit, and I’m craving pizza. Horse guy has gone to the foundry to be turned into hard wax that I can fiddle with a bit before casting in metal, and I’ve got five or six other figures sitting around in various states of incompletion. They’re all smaller than horse guy, as I want to try to sell my work, and smaller and thus cheaper seems the intelligent way to go.

It’s cold out there. It’s almost cold in here. I keep sneezing. The frangipani looks sulky. I wish I wasn’t sick, so that I could go out again and frisk around in the unwontedly fresh air, which is the colour of the aspic my cat’s sardines used to be in.

ETA: Well, I think I avoided the chest infection. But I’ve got a disgusting cold and it’s too late in the day to take the magic sinus blaster. To quote the ever-quotable Withnail, I feel like a pig shat in my head. I should stop pretending that by sitting here I’m going to eventually, by some natural progression of events, start doing some work. I shall stop complaining and slink off to curl up with Kindle and cuppa, with a spare cup for spitting in, and hopefully I can manage not to confuse them. Either that or sit here like a scallop watching highlights from 80s movies.

Because you asked for more!

It’s one of those quiet sleepy mornings. No weather dramas, and a little on the cool side. Summer so far has had less bite than usual. There’s an ancient, comfortable smell in the air: charcoal burning in a pot. Sometimes the morning air smells of incense, as there’s a little shrine at the end of the street. The shrine is red with gold Chinese writing outside and in (except us and another Westerner, everyone in the street seems to be Chinese, whether Chinese-Thai or recently arrived), an incense pot, a vase of bamboo, and cups for offerings. It’s also decorated with pretty little gilded paper objects, and peacock feathers. I had been assuming that the shrine was for ancestors and departed loved ones, but I’ve read that the similar shrines you see in houses represent the god who controls the land the house was built on, so perhaps the one in the street stands for the whole street’s divine landlord. I’ve seen a few of these little closed lanes, each with its shrine — they’re like little communities, and I think they used to always have gates. Some still have the gates; ours just has the posts left. There’s still a lot I don’t know about how people live, and used to live, here. So far I’ve been too shy to bother the neighbours with questions, but I really shouldn’t be, as the neighbours are quite talkative, especially the old ladies who seem to make up half the population of the street.

The market by the skytrain station is busy. Food, clothes, jewellery, knick-knacks. A lady comes down the pavement pushing a trolley with a box on it. On the trolley and in the box are three small dogs and a cat. One or two of the dogs are in coats, and the cat, standing on its hind legs next to a dog in the box, is resplendent in a knitted leotard and a strand of pearls. Its expression seems weary and bewildered, as if in its head is the thought that reincarnating as a pet cat seemed like a good idea at the time, and it can’t understand why things went so wrong. But maybe I’m projecting incorrectly and the cat’s demeanour is merely one of aristocratic ennui.

Unrelated quote of the day: “One does not simply headbang into Mordor.”

The sky’s the colour of a TV tuned to a dead channel and covered in more sawdust than a saloon floor (well, you’d need more sawdust than that to cover the sky, wouldn’t you?). Suddenly the stagnant hot-season air gets off its sweaty arse and starts to move. I’m wide awake because some depraved individual decided that 4.30 in the morning was an appropriate time to use a power tool, and I didn’t get back to sleep. Warm wind, humid like a dog’s breath, rips the frangipani blossoms off and throws them at the neighbours. It rips blossoms off the neighbours’ plants and throws them at us. Plik, plik, tender vanguard of rain. Then it’s time to get indoors as the sawdust washes off and the rain falls like watery rocks and the thunder bangs pan-lids in the sky. Up on the roof-space for about 20 seconds to feel the cool mist of the rain blowing over the balcony before fear of lightning drives me indoors again. I don’t know what happens if you’re under a tin roof with metal supports when lightning strikes — maybe you just see all the metal light up — but I don’t want to find out. Expecting the power to have gone off by now, but it hasn’t. (Why couldn’t it have gone off at 4.30?)

6.30 and the sun is up somewhere out there. The clouds are eau-de-nil and the lightning’s pink. I check the balcony to make sure the dranpipe isn’t clogged, but it seems to be fine. Open the balcony door, since I don’t think mosquitos are going to be flying through this. The rain blows past the window, rippling like the coat of some ghostly grey beast. Outside again. Nope, there’s an insect hovering under the eves. Shut the door. At least the windows have fly wire. Water droplets slide down the pergola on a conveyor belt. The light is cyan, like someone fiddled with the colour balance.

The storm’s moved on. I’m going up on the roof to take the air. It’s only supposed to hit 30 today, but it’s already 29, so not sure about that forecast. But we had a weird cold snap a week ago — found myself wearing a jacket and socks.

And the air is good. More pink lightning, a spiky curl that looks like one of these. But distant. Birds and neighbours emerge. Looking down onto the balcony below, I see that one of my mystery plants is getting flowers again. Here’s a photo in case anyone knows what it is:

Then there’s this one — the flowers aren’t showy, but they smell divine:

And the frangipani still has plenty of blossom left. Pink, yellow and white flowers — very pretty. The rain’s a steady patter, the light’s a lovely frail green, and there’s a medium-sized cockroach on the wall. I’ve never seen one that size before, only little or huge. Maybe it’s a baby huge one. In any case, it’s above the termite tunnel, so I’m leaving it there unmolested in case it’s a special cockroach sent by God to destroy the termites.

Someone told me recently that the blue flower growing on the balcony is edible and you can make tea with it. My acquaintance said the tea is medicinal, and when I didn’t understand what kind of medicine (my Thai is still crap), drew a line down the centre of her body a few times. I’ve seen yoghurt and slimming product ads with an arrow doing the same thing, so my guess was that either the tea is good for digestion in general, or else a laxative. Anyway, I didn’t have to go out that day, so I decided to make the flower tea. After rinsing three flowers, I poured hot water on them and watched the blue colour seep off the petals and fill the water until it was approximately the colour of Windex.

Then I drank it. It tasted quite pleasant. And I didn’t get diarrhea. But I did get a bit lightheaded and headachey for a short while, and found myself giggling. I made the tea the next day with two flowers, and got the minor head symptoms, but not the giggles.

Of course, I’m tempted to make the tea with a whole lot of flowers, take an aspirin beforehand, and see what happens. (This is a hypothetical temptation, really, since most of the flowers are out of my reach. Probably just as well.)

It’s cool (23C, maybe less when I went out an hour ago) and rainy this morning. People are walking around in long sleeves, even jumpers and scarves. If I was in Australia I’d probably be in long sleeves and jeans, but here I still went out in shorts and a singlet. Really cool, fresh-feeling weather is too rare to not enjoy to the full!

I got my hair cut yesterday. I’m growing out the layers I got a couple of years ago. My hair looks nice with layers, but since I nearly always have to tie it up or back for comfort’s sake, there isn’t much point in having them. In retrospect, I asked the hairdresser to cut it too short — there’s only just enough for a mini-tufty ponytail — but now I’ve got a good idea of what I’d look like with actual short hair, which I was thinking of going for, maybe — and I can see that I probably look better with it long enough to go up, so in the long run I might have saved myself some angst. (Although “up” and “short’ probably look similar from the front, they look different from other angles, and I like the way “up” looks…) Anyway, this year I’ll get to revisit myself with simple one-length hair and see if I like it. If I don’t, I can always get layers again.

I’ve finally got a first draft of the tea master story. Rough first draft, though — some scenes are more like scribbly sketches, and I realised as I was finishing it up that I’ll have to alter a couple of plot points, which will affect just about every scene. This story has had me on the ropes so many times! It’s on the plotty side for its length, and it has what I think of as “machinery” (magic or science or metaphysics or whatever — stuff that isn’t to do with human relations). It’s the world of The Etched City, so things are fluid and surreal and affected by states of mind — or the world is a state of mind — but in this particular story there’s a system that exists within that fluidity (or some people think it exists, anyway), so there’s that to fit in; and all the characters have backstory, and they don’t know one another beforehand, and POV moves around, and there’s a personal theme and a related social theme that possibly gets short shrift (on the other hand, I don’t want to hammer it), and then there’s the actual writing, which I don’t want to be swamped by plot and machinery, and etc.. Perhaps it should be a novel, but I’m not sure that it has any reason to be a novel — though I’d quite like to come up with a way to turn it into one — but for now I want to write it as a novella and see what happens.

Anyway, today I’m going to paint apples — as in, paint a picture of apples, having bought two apples of different size and character for the purpose. I know, there’s exotic tropical fruit around and I choose apples, but I have a tendency to try to run before I can walk, so this time I’m keeping it simple!

I haven’t posted anything about Bangkok for a while. Since it was a nice breezy morning, I thought I’d go out early and take pictures on the main road.

A little restaurant, open for breakfast. It wasn’t that dark, either; the light was just a bit low for the camera.

I like the building in the middle –

Two creatures with silver skins…

The Robot Building!

The quite imposing Empire Tower…

I will survive…

Woo hoo! Just heard one of the big shopping malls near us is building an ice rink. There’s a rink at a mall further away, but it’s a tiny wee thing. The promoters of the new one are calling it, in advance, “the world’s most exciting ice rink”, which could mean all sorts of things — tunnels, ramps, stairs — trapdoors that open randomly in the ice and drop you into boiling oil and acid — roving zambonis armed with razor-sharp rotating blades, chainsaws, flame throwers, tactical nukes, etc. — but what I hope it means is that whatever else it may be, it’ll be a full size rink. I used to be a pretty keen skater when I was a teen, and it would be great to have a local place to skate properly. Of course, a rink the size of a bedsitter with a couple of hundred people on it could be exciting in its own way…

It’s supposed to open in September.

As a rule I don’t do Engrish posts (glass houses, stones!) but I couldn’t leave this at home in a drawer — and what is it about police phones/booths and time travel?