Welcome to “Sunday Summary” in which I try to summarize the week that came before. This is the 170th installment, covering the week ending today, the 22nd of November 2025.
Each week, we link up with The Sunday Salon, hosted at ReaderBuzz, and Sunday Post at Caffeinated Reviewer. Check out their posts and the links to see what other book bloggers have been up to in the last week.
This week just seemed to fly right by. There was one class cancellation on Thursday morning — the first lesson was preempted by a ceremony honoring the late Queen Mother Sirikit — and another late Friday afternoon due to the first Parents’ Meeting. I taught my first Science lesson right after lunch on Wednesday which was a very rare (for me) “crash-and-burn”. The other lessons went very well and I quite enjoyed meeting the parents of my students at the end of the week. The heavy rain, and resultant flooding, continue.
The big news in Thailand this week is continued fallout from many changes that the Royal Thai Police’s Immigration Department has made recently, ending the decades long system of quick trips over the border to neighboring countries in order to reset certain visas. There has bee A LOT of abuse of the system in recent years so they are cracking down and the days of crossing by land (the least expensive option) are over.
With these latest crackdowns, rather than making a sweeping law, Thai Immigration has given each officer complete discretion so they decide who to let into the country and who to reject reentry. The expat group chats and online forums are now full of horror stories of people suddenly prevented from returning home; the worst was probably the couple who needed to do a quick visa run while waiting for paperwork to be finished on their proper visas and had left their young children with a babysitter. They could not return to retrieve their child!
The heavy rains and flooding continue in Phuket and most of southern Thailand with no relief in sight. Hat Yai — south of us — has been particularly hard hit with flooding. The prime minister was there yesterday, giving out food and other relief items while floating on a flatboat. I think the worst part are the explosions that occur when water reaches transformers and other electrical equipment. Or, it could be the huge snakes that come out of the water. There have long been instances of people finding cobras inside washing machines or toilets but now you are likely to see one just walking along the sidewalk during the storm.
Thankfully, I have settled into solid routines at school and it no longer seems overwhelming. I only teach three classes of around 35 students each — three English lessons per week in P5/2, seven English lessons in P5/3, and a total of nine lessons in P5/4 (my homeroom) — two each in Science and Math, the remainder in English. It is a fairly easy schedule with only four pairs of back-to-back classes. The students are all excellent and I find the classes to be a lot of fun in most cases, and completely manageable.
There are a couple of days on which I do not have early lessons; on Wednesdays, my first lesson starts at 11:00 while I do not teach until 12:50 on Thursdays, right after lunch. That gives me the entire morning (from around 7:30 onward) to work on lesson planning, materials creation, and generally keeping awake. This past week, I felt caught-up enough on school work that I did some blogging. That really did wonders for my state of mind.
My first-ever Science lesson was to be Tuesday morning and I was perhaps overly prepared for it. That was cancelled at the last minute, unfortunately, as the students had to attend a ceremony in the auditorium. I taught the second of the scheduled Science lessons Wednesday directly after lunch. I started off well enough but made a simple mistake in a diagram I drew on the whiteboard (an arrow was pointed the wrong direction). A couple of kids pointed that out and another kept asking questions that I had no clue of the answer. My voice went from extremely strong and loud to barely a whisper as I tried to get back on track. The end of the hour just faded into nothingness and I was grateful when it was over. I cannot remember any previous lesson in which I completely lost my confidence in the material and got to the point where I could not think at all! However, most of the students did not seem to notice anything was amiss. At least now I know which are the Science geeks. I hope I have better luck next time.
A nice change from my last several schools is that this one provides free lunches for teachers. We have our own section of pots and pans to dish our food out in the canteen and we can take as much as we like, even to the point of “takeaway” which I did just once last week. I had prepared a box on Friday, intending to have it for dinner. The spicy minced meat salad known as larb (click on the link for a recipe) was so tasty that I ate the entire large portion while sitting in the rear of my homeroom during the Chinese lesson. I thought about going back for more but the labyrinth of twisty stairs and hallways from the fifth floor to the canteen proved too daunting!
Meeting the parents Friday afternoon was an absolute joy. Most foreign teachers in the Thai government schools do not participate in these types of events at all. We all were required to attend Parents Nights when I worked at an international school from 2007 until 2010 but the next one I was asked to come to was at a kindergarten in 2022. Unfortunately, only one of the mothers could speak English at all — she translated my introduction to the others. The school I worked at earlier this year asked the parents to come to speak to their teachers towards the end of the term but none of the foreign teachers were invited. As far as I could tell, I was the only one invited for this week’s event.
I had to introduce myself in two out of my three classes (it was pouring rain at the time and the other was located across campus so I was told not to bother). I believe every student in my homeroom had at least one of their parents present — it was packed! I had conversations with a number of them during which they invariably told me how much their son or daughter enjoyed my classes. One told me that her daughter had never been so excited about a teacher before, saying she tells her everything she’s learned from me each day and she had never done that before! I really felt wonderful hearing such positive feedback. All of them seemed genuinely interested in me and supportive of my plans for the class. The other class — P5/3 — was more sparsely attended by parents and my time introducing myself was brief but still positive.
That afternoon I had to rush home in a torrential downpour to meet a delivery driver. The proof copy of my novel, Waves of Paradise, finally arrived in my hands following ten days “out for delivery” in Phuket. As soon as taking receipt of the package, I immediately noticed the problem: half of the address had been smudged by water droplets and there was no phone number. I do not know how they finally tracked me down — I took a call from the driver between lessons at school — but am happy they did.
Once inside my apartment, I set up my camera stand as I thought I would do a quick “unboxing video” to broadcast my excitement of receiving my first book. Well, it was a bit of a let down mainly because there was no dust jacket. I had submitted the artwork for that along with the formatted manuscript and was really looking forward to seeing that, perhaps more so than the actual bound book! I will send a message to the publisher later asking about this. I hope it doesn’t take another month-and-a-half to arrive as I need to check if it wraps the hardcover book properly, that all is in alignment and the jacket copy contains no errors. We are in the final stretch now, so I suppose I should be more patient about it.
At home, I have been trying to watch at least one series episode each evening usually while I eat my dinner. I just finished season 2 of Squid Game: The Challenge. This was the first time that the person I had wanted to win from much earlier in the season of any reality show I watch had actually been the winner. I think the last time I chose the winner early was probably Boston Rob’s first appearance on The Amazing Race many years ago! I just started season 2 of Watson; episode 1 was strong but I was a bit disappointed in episode 2 although I did shed a few tears at the end.
I did not listen to a lot of music this week but I downloaded and listened to the long-awaited Anthology 4 by The Beatles yesterday. I am in a bit of a Bowie mood today, listening to Stage — his live album from the 1978 tour — and the remastered version of Changesonebowie, first released in 1976 as I love his early singles much more than anything from Let’s Dance and beyond. This fall is shaping up to be a good one for Super Deluxe Editions with Springsteen’s Nebraska at the end of October and new boxes from The Rolling Stones, The Black Crowes, Prince, The Cranberries, and a few others in the last couple of weeks. Next month, the 50th anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd will be released. As I tag my music in a fairly unique way before adding them to my preferred player (MusicBee), I am developing quite a backlog of sounds to listen to. That’s something I have suffered from since the mid-1980s, I believe.
Yes I found time to read my daily 100+ pages but not much more than that most evenings. I finished Dune (Yay!) and The Medici Return has one or two days remaining, I think. I started to read Riley Sager’s latest thriller, With A Vengeance, a locked-room mystery of sorts set on a faded-luxury train travelling from Philadelphia to Chicago. Just today, while searching for Lee Childs’ latest Jack Reacher novel, I stumbled across Reacher: Stories Behind the Stories and began reading that as well.
This week, I also started reading Columbus On Himself by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. This is my very first Folio Society edition, finally arriving a couple of weeks ago following a long journey getting here. I think the biggest problem with my mail is not the distance involved but the delivery services here in Phuket. Waves of Paradise, as just one example, arrived on the island on November 10 yet it took them eleven days to find the address! The rain and flooding could be a factor, though, so I will not complain too much. Very nice to look at, the Columbus book is also quite interesting; I usually spend a half-hour or so with it each morning before heading to school (right after I write my Morning Pages).
Currently Reading
Recently Finished
I have to admit that this week’s installment for Nonfiction November was a bit of a cop-out since I had not read anything by a diverse author all year. I will definitely remedy that once I start putting together my 2026 TBR. Amazingly enough, I found time to write four posts this week between classes at school. I feel that the “Cancelling My Life” articles are still much too long as I am prone to fall down rabbit holes when putting them together. They are fun for me but I still worry about the amount of time they take, much like the “Sunday Summary” each week.
I have become adept at clearing out all other tasks before sitting down to try and recap the week. It is not as easy to do so for most weekday posts as I am at school from 07:00 until nearly 18:00 each day, Monday through Friday. I worry about trying to put together my annual Christmas stamps posts this year — I was aiming to publish an overview on November 25, a month before the holiday, but at this point I think I will delay for another week or two. Next weekend will see the final part of the Nonfiction November series, listing those books I have added to my TBR based on other participants’ articles this month. I will also publish my December TBR which looks to start off with at least two, maybe three, carry-overs from November.
Recently Published
- Cancelling My Life No. 20 – Dec. 02, 1965
- First Chapter, First Paragraph: Tuesday Intros #126 – What Moves the Dead
- Cancelling My Life No. 19 – Dec. 01, 1965
- December 2025 TBR
- Cancelling My Life No. 18 – Nov. 30, 1965
- The Sunday Summary #171
I gave up on my Bullet Journal this week! It has been three days since I last did anything in it as making layouts and updating them each morning was starting to feel too much like work. I have been making the same layouts for months now and it had become just another part of my daily routine rather than joyful bursts of creativity. So, I have set aside my notebook for the time being; I may return to it at some point but with each passing day, I feel a bit more relief at having made that decision.
Instead, I have started to create a Bullet Journal of sorts in Craft, the personal knowledge management (PKM) app that I use now. I was an early adopter of Microsoft’s OneNote, first using it around mid-2004. One of the oldest notebooks I still have deals with a trip I took to Boulder, Colorado, to see the British band Marillion play a show at the Fox Theatre that September, A year later, they invited me to London to celebrate my 40th birthday at their tour-ending concert (that was quite the month as I also saw U2’s tour-ending show in Portland, Oregon, and was in Phuket by Christmas, all detailed in OneNote). It had become too unwieldy for me several years ago so I experimented with a variety of different programs including Evernote, Notion, Joplin, Capacities, and Obsidian.
I like Craft because it looks nice. It can be very colorful which I like, reflective of what I was trying to do with my physical Bullet Journal. The app does have a few limitations (as does each of the others I have tinkered with) but I have been able to find work-arounds for most of those. Trying to build a digital version of my monthly and daily logs as well as a few of my most useful trackers in Craft occupied a good portion of my Saturday; I am quite pleased with what I am creating now and the spark keeps me moving forward.
I have not taken many photos of my students yet. I simply don’t feel as comfortable snapping photos as I did when I taught the kindergarteners. Then, it was actually part of our “duty” to record their development at both study and play with a myriad of photos taken during every single activity. We needed to record each and every student as parents would complain if their child’s photos were NOT added to the albums in the class LINE group or onto the school’s Facebook page. I do consider their privacy as well, particularly as they are older so, for now, most of the few photos I take are from behind.
Examples of student artwork, illustrations for their “About Me” essays:
See you next week!
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