ChairWoman Meow is still unsure about the construction of our new home and all the new people temporarily living on our land.
🐈⬛ The Unwilling Vegan
ChairWoman Meow knows we have very few things in our vegan household that she considers tasty, but she will tolerate boiled corn, seaweed, and chips when she's too lazy to hunt, the weather is bad, or she's just returned from an unsuccessful hunting expedition. On this day she returned from an unsuccessful hunt and asked for some chips in her language. Asking for chips means digging her claws into the side of my chair and letting out a loud MEOW!
Homeless Tuk-Tuk 🛺
With the upstairs shack now in shambles, my tuk-tuk no longer has a home and is roasting under the sun each day. It will probably be several weeks before enough of our house is complete enough for the tuk-tuk to be re-housed. It's a bummer the kids on are on their end of the year school break because we are kind of stuck here during all this construction, and both of my daughters have expressed their desire for a roadtrip.
👷 Construction & Food Prep 👩🍳
My wife likes to spend as much time as possible around the construction as possible, not only to keep a bit of an eye on things, but also because she cooks for them and they are all her family members that she rarely gets to see. Even though I have a bit of a construction and manual labor background back in the USA, here I rarely help because it's more important that I focus on Hive and keeping the money flowing so everyone can be paid. Also, things are done a bit differently in Cambodia in the world of construction, faster, less precise, and less pride in the work than I am used to.
A few times I tried to participate in the construction process, but because I am a foreigner and used to doing things very differently, they didn't seem very willing to accept my ideas and methods. I have lived here so long though that I realize Cambodians are reluctant to change and new methods, perhaps more than anywhere I have ever been, so I decided to allow them more freedom and less stress by stepping back and letting things happen. We've had to redo many things two or three times, kind of costly, but hey, there are downsides to living here, nowhere is Shangri-La.
Luckily or unluckily the shack's foundation (if you can call it that) was so poorly executed that it was easily destroyed with rebar and handheld hammers, not a single sledgehammer or jackhammer was needed. The shack's replacement will be a two story building and represent 80% of our life savings, so I do hope we get it right because I'm 40 years old and it took me my whole life to save an amount of money I can spend in two months on a modest house in Cambodia, life is nuts.
🦁 The Lion Watches The Valley
ChairWoman Meow has taken to living in the cabin quite well despite the loss of the wall meat she depended on in the other small house. What the cabin lacks in having edible things to be plucked off the walls, it has in spectacular views. Meow likes to dangerously perch on the handrail that has a 5 meter fall below and search for prey.
In my former mountaineering life I lived in outside a small town in Colorado that was home to the densest mountain lion population in North America, and almost any hike through the valleys or canyons would involve looking up and seeing a larger version of Meow staring down on you from a cliff face. The scariest part is when the mountain lion follows you and you recognize it on several different perches, obviously trying to identify your weaknesses. Although I haven't seen it yet, I have heard Meow leap from this handrail in pursuit of prey below, a death-defying jump. To be continued.....
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Return from 😼 Pensive ChairWoman Meow 👷 & Construction Begins On Our New Home 🧑🏭 to Justin Parke's Web3 Blog
