Gorgeous darling...

Yesterday it was sexy grannies, today it’s sexy farmers. Yes….I am a sexy rubber farmer! Tell me you’re not just mildly attracted to me in these figure hugging, curve enhancing clothes. The trees can barely control themselves (ok, so it's me trying to jump the tree!)...ladies beware, J is already taken, control yourselves!

As you can see, I’m a rubber tree farmer amongst a dozen other incarnations in my village life. My life feels so surreal sometimes! I’m sure both J and my parents are endlessly proud that their son, who has a law degree, and their daughter who has a science degree have ended up cutting rubber trees! The thing is, we have our business at home which is all types of officey stuff and internet that has become quite popular, but it’s only popular in after school hours so we have all this time in the mornings to fill in.

After living here for about a year and only having the biz at home we were feeling very house bound and needing to do something outside. We asked the folks for one of their gardens (they have 12) so we could earn a bit more cash and get outside a bit more..did not go down well with the folks. Thais are really big on “show”…they were thinking how it would look for their highly educated son and farang wife to be lowly gardeners. J and I couldn’t give a shite about show, obviously…anyhoo, a couple of months of them discussing it with thousands of family members (who all thought it was a great idea), they finally conceded to give us the plantation.

So, we do this about 5 days a week – get up at 6am, go to the garden (where we see this beautiful view on the way), cut the trees for around an hour, come home, do whatever for 2 hours while the trees are draining, go back to collect the rubber water (J's pic), come back home to mix the rubber water with a setting chemical (in the trays pic), then wait another hour for it to set and finally squish the blocks of rubber with your feet and then put it through the machines (J's dad in the pic) to make flat sheets. All up, it’s only about an hour and half work, that doesn’t feel like work because we’re outside in amongst all the beautiful trees at sunrise listening to all the birds.

I love it! All the locals find it completely hilarious that I cut rubber! I really found it to be quite the bonding agent (!) with the locals too because they just didn't know how to take such a foreign object (me!) but when they saw me get out there and work, everyone instantly loved me (head swell stopping now)!