A very odd day with nearly constant heavy thunderstorms (and lightning!) starting just before eight this morning and lasting until the afternoon. While we certainly need the rain with the resultant cooler temperatures, today’s storms caught everyone completely off-guard. True, it did rain a bit earlier in the week but those were our usual seasonal 15-minute showers with minimal wind gusts not the relentless barrage that started during our morning assembly and hammered the hallway-facing windows of the foreign teachers’ office.

It really was a great day to stay in the office and work on a few long-delayed (non-teaching) projects as I awaited completed exams to arrive from the various classrooms. I was finally informed just after two in the afternoon that the first batch of 50 M4 tests were ready for me to grade them. About half of those were failures as many students skipped most of the sections where writing an answer was required (my arguments that I teach Conversation rather than Reading & Writing fall on deaf ears and the students’ form of rebellion is to just ignore the questions). Those that were a bit more motivated to select an answer from the provided text-boxes were rewarded with rather high scores and I saw my first perfect marks for the entire term. Let’s hope that many of the M2’s and M3’s fall into the latter category.

Today’s photo is the only one I shot all day, taken shortly after starting my walk to work. The sunrise was quite brilliant but one road up from this one I could see a curtain of rain just to the east. I attempted a photo but the traffic light turned and I had to jump out of the way of the onslaught of speeding motorbikes approaching. Thus, I took this photo looking east on Thalang Road at the intersection with Thepkassatri Road. It is not nearly as dramatic as I had hoped but you can see the famous Sea Dragon to the left.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a bit dryer as I need to walk over to the Philatelic Museum after work to buy the new set of stamps for Thai Heritage & Conservation Day, usually one of my favorite annual issues. I will probably spend most of the morning once again working on a few projects while awaiting the delivery of my remaining 450+ exams. I have already spotted something within the school that I would like to try to capture for tomorrow’s Daily Phuket. We will have to wait and see if I can get the image I want….