Reno Wedding

Shortest on record. The electrician turned up an hour and 45 minutes late, and I hadn't slept well. Still, the traffic... Jolly fat bloke, brought a worker along the same lines, and they took down the lamps and fan as directed and drove them over to the house.

Where when I joined them we sought a new location for the circuit breaker, which doesn't at all have to sit where Nice wanted it and may as well go to the right of the door, where it's out of the way. Fine. Then he quoted me 20,000 baht. Now the whole house here cost me 18,000 to wire from top to bottom, breaker, all new cables, the lot. In the new place the cables are perfectly usable, he'd just need to add a couple and move others around (even Nice only wanted 4,000). But some people see a white man and they have their thoughts, that's only natural, and some jobs aren't worth getting out of bed for either; I'm the same, I price myself out of unpleasant chores. So I asked what the fee for the day's work might be, and he said 1,000 baht. Handed them over, 'end of.' The electrical shop at the end of the street, where they may be getting tired of me, later gave me the number for another one.

Nek, on the other hand, was busy building the walls upstairs -- well: he sits, they build, but without him they wouldn't -- and later took down the scaffolding for the counter, which is now a handsome free-standing structure:

Or maybe not handsome, but freestanding anyway. He's even proposing to work on Sunday. The mooncalf proved to be a quietly amusing person, proudly lugging four of the lightweight (but still heavy and unwieldy) bricks up two flights of stairs like a highly evolved beast of burden, and the knotty man seems a friendly, wry kind of cove. I'll be eating my words for a while yet, day to day.