i have a blog?

I’ve spent the past five days in Lamplaimat working on the Barefoot MBA project. Originally the plan was to conduct two pilot sessions this week, but the decision was made to postpone the sessions for Monday and Tuesday of next week. The extra time will give us a chance to translate all the material and make sure everything is set. That being said, this week has been busy for Anita and Thin who are working on translating into Thai all of the documents that are already in English, and I’ve started working on the finishing touches like an introduction page, table of contents, and a concept note that can be used as informational material for PDA.

Anita has been great in helping me combine my efforts so that the work I’m doing for the project can also be used as my final report due at the end of the program. My goal is to finish all the work by next Thursday, and be able to enjoy a weekend in Laos and the last week in Bangkok. I’m a hopeless procrastinator so I’ve enlisted Anita to help me out and give me some discipline. I think staying here at the village center this weekend will keep me focused and distractions at a minimum.

To keep us entertained at night, Anita bought the first season of Brothers and Sisters, so we’ve been watching the DVDs for the past few nights. To give you an idea of how bored we are: we have already gotten into a routine of finishing up work around 6; coming back to our room; fixing something to eat; setting up my laptop on a vanity stool; and plopping down on our beds to watch some episodes. Neither of us had seen any episodes of Brothers and Sisters before this week. We only had one recommendation to go off from. Needless to say, if we had seen even one episode we would’ve never bothered to commit to the entire season, but it’s all we’ve got right now. In the beginning we kept watching, hoping it would get better and making excuses about how the actors “just need time to gel.” It’s kind of pathetic how we can sit and watch hours on end of bad acting and get a kick out of actors who cannot evoke emotion on their faces because they’ve had too much Botox injected into their foreheads.

We finished season one tonight. We’re going into town to get season two tomorrow.