Pain and Profits

I apologize in advance for the long post. It´s been a long few days of limited and sometimes non existent internet connections here. The rain storms have been tremendous, and even the electricity has been going in and out. The last big power failure on saturday sent something haywire in the computer I have been using at home here, and I just finally fixed the problem today. As mentioned before in a previous post, it´s a tiny little netbook runnng a Linux operating system in Spanish of all things. Not an easy one to troubleshoot and get running again, but I managed to get it done.

Work last week was productive despite the hardships. I have managed to add another 4,000 Thai Baht (about $130 US dollars) to the legal defense fund through hard work and thrifty living. That´s nearly a month´s salary for most Thai people, and I did it in a week´s time. Respectable even by local standards. For anyone that doesn´t know, I have added a page for the fund on the top menu bar so that you can track my progress. My goal is to get through this current crisis with limited jail time and get back to legal working status wherever that might be.

As an additional sacrifice, I have also sold the only thing of monetary value that I own. Some readers may remember when I was gifted my bicycle by a nice Dutch girl before she went back to Holland last year. The front wheel had been in a bad accident, but with a little work I was able to fix it up. I put a good many miles on it over the past year, but I still have my two feet, so the wheels were a luxury and had to go. Final sale price 1,500 THB (that´s about $45 USD ).

This weeks major annoyance so far was a bit unexpected but troubling none the less. I will try to give a bit of a ¨back story¨. About last winter, a good friend of mine asked me to dinner. His sister in law cooked ¨steak¨ for us, but what they call beef here is closer to buffalo. She might as well have cut my steak off a nearby rubber tree. Tough as heck and even harder to eat. The end result was getting a strand stuck inbetween two of my molars that caused me a great deal of pain for quite some time. Not long after that was my infamous street brawl back in January. The little Burmese guy that finally managed to land a good punch on me did a huge favor!! The piece of rubber (steak) finally was jarred loose from my jaw, but so were a portion of the two teeth surrounding it. The pain went away for a good few months, but is back again. I went on Sunday to a local dentist for a consult. He told me that it was extremely infected and attempting to pull it would risk blood poisoning and even death. Unable to do anything at the moment, he prescribed antibiotics and Ibuprofin, and told me to come back in three days when the swelling goes down. Total out of pocket for the office visit, exam and meds: $6.00. Now I´ll have to decide between a $15 ¨yank it¨ and hope for the best, or a much more costly root canal as suggested by the dentist to eliminate any future issues. Not fun either way, but then again neither is the way I feel now.

CASE NOTES AND EVENTS

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Well that´s certainly not all, but this post has become long enough. I´ll have some shorter posts up in the next few days.

As always,
Take care everyone.