Seen off Naklua this afternoon:

An afternoon excursion to the taste-free capital of Pattaya (and that’s saying something), the Saha Farms complex. I have been there before, but I was pretty sure that Ian of PattayaDaze would love the place; and indeed he did; whatch out for his offerings in due course.

As for me, it was the first time to try out my Olympus 45mm in anger; and it proved to be an excellent performer. All the shots below were taken wide open at F1.8. The bokeh (the effect the lens has when it renders the out of focus background) at that aperture is really pleasing. Great lens, shame about the subject matter. Still, Ian is always amusing company and further outings are planned.

Am I aware that my contributions to this organ have been somewhat lacking over the past couple of weeks (Months? Years?). This can be ascribed to laziness, inertia and a lack of subject matter; but it is also due to the fact that my wife is stuck in Bangkok and I spend too much of my time watching flood updates on Twitter.

The good news is that she who must be obeyed has agreed with her employer that there is no point in her continuing her training in Bangkok, as many of those she is meant to be working with are already away trying to safeguard their homes. I am off to Bangkok tomorrow, will be looking for some flood related snaps in the afternoon and then on Friday there is the wedding of a very good Thai friend of mine; provided that the Dusit Thani is not underwater. On Saturday we will return to Pattaya and life will return to a less stressful level and I can perhaps give this blog thingie a bit more attention.

She who must be obeyed’s new employer deigned to give her a day off and she duly arrived home on Sunday evening and embarked on an extended session of cat cuddling. I got a hug too, so that was nice.

Very good to have her home and we spent a pleasant Monday hanging out together. But there are still two weeks of Bangkok familiarisation to go, unless the adventure is cut short by massive flooding which is looking increasingly possible.

Been a while since a company called Lytro announced they were going to produce a light field camera.

Naturally, I signed up to hear the latest news, and this week they sent me an email inviting me to pre-order the camera which will be available early next year. All I needed was a spare $399 and to live in the USA. As I didn’t satisfy either of those requirements, I ignored their offer; but it does look a very different sort of camera.

My recent successful visit to a dentist convinced me that I might have to courage to return for a teeth-cleaning procedure, something that had had me squirming in agony when I last tried it, about nine years ago in Bangkok.

And so it was I found myself back in Doctor Bee’s torture chair again a couple of days ago. It took her an hour and she did a lot of singing, but it didn’t hurt at all and I felt very pleased with myself once she had finished. So pleased in fact that I decided to stay there another hour and have my teeth whitened.

I am not a happy man.

She who must be obeyed is still in Bangkok and I wish she wasn’t. The slow-moving tsunami that is the several zillion cubic metres of water descending on the city is going to overrun the capital at some point; the only questions are when and how deep. Meantime, life goes on as normal and my wife is expected to report for work daily.

She has two weeks left of her familiarisation and during that time either nothing will happen, or she will be stuck in an apartment with two metres of water outside the door, or, most likely, something in between. She has been preparing for being stranded by storing four pots of noodles and a few bottles of water; enough for two days at the outside.

It was Spacefruit who first introduced me to the lens porn that is an Angenieux lens, a French company whose lenses took the first photos on the moon. In due course I bought the same model lens as Spacefruit and it takes weird but interesting photos.

If you buy a lens nowadays, it comes in a cardboard box, if you are lucky. But in the good old days, Angenieux supplied their lenses in beautiful red boxes. My copy arrived in bubble-wrap, the box having long since disintegrated; but Spacefruit received his in an original box, albeit one that was close to death.

Spacefruit has many talents, not least of which is having a fine taste in commissioning photo books from a brilliant photographer (that would be me); and another is that he knows little men in Chinatown that can replicate pretty much anything.

Which is how it came to pass that he kindly presented me with this alternative to bubble wrap:

My attempts to live within budget are destroyed by the arrival of my credit card bill. It always contains stuff that I had conveniently forgotten about, and the myriad of minor items often add up to a surprisingly large slice of my pension.

My credit card company imagines that it is encouraging me to spend money on the card by offering points for every purchase. In reality, these points are of no interest; you would have to buy a BMW on the card before the points would be enough to buy a rice cooker, and we already have a rice cooker (quite fancy the BMW though). But they are of great interest to my wife, who loves to browse the catalogue every year or so and order stuff we don’t need. Failing that, we exchange the points for vouchers from Central which she can then spend on crucial cosmetics.

Last year I wrote a rather snide piece about a development called The Koral. The post received a number of comments from mugs smart investors who had put down their hard earned money as a deposit.

Eighteen months on, I thought I would go and have a look at construction progress, I reckoned it must be almost complete by now and the lucky investors would be checking out their sea views.

Unfortunately, the front of the development is obscured by the sales office which I assume is a temporary structure: