Daily Report: Great Chats

It was another crappy, drizzly, cold day today in The Jungle. I'm not sure how or why, but even though Mindanao is about 1,000 miles farther South than my old home of Pattaya, the temperature here is always cool(er), which — despite the rain — is very nice. Also, the number of days with blue skies here in Mindanao is ten times what it is in Pattaya (which averaged about 20 cloudless skies per year). Mindanao has the tropical weather that people from New York dream about (both good and bad)... not the oppressive heat and matte white skies of Pattaya.

Enough about the weather.

It was out to Spooks tonight. Epril hung out with all of her friends. Jenelyn Meredith and her younger sister, Bing, were there. (We invited them along, figuring that they'd want some time out of the house while Warren is in Australia.) Genelyn was also there... Happy birthday to her.

I wound up first chatting with Ted Trenholme. He and the Stirms had a bit of a falling out over the sale of Randy Stirm's old boat and truck and the possession of some golf clubs.

Basically, in deal #1, Ted loaned the Stirms 130,000 pisos, getting a lien against their boat. Then the Stirms put the boat up for sale for price X. When Ted offered to buy the boat, the Stirms told him the price was X + 70,000. Then Cherry Stirm told Ted that they were going to sell the boat to somebody in Cebu and not pay back Ted the money they owed him if he didn't buy the boat at that price. Since Ted did actually want the boat and was going to lose either some or all of the money that he loaned the Stirms regardless, he went ahead and paid.

In deal #2, Ted agreed to sell Randy's multicab for him. He gave Randy 60,000 pisos, and agreed to give Randy any extra money that he made off the sale. At roughly the same time Ted was getting ready to pick up the boat he had bought, Cherry Stirm accused Ted of having sold the multicab already, and tried to have Ted's boat held until that money was given to them. Ted had to race down and save his boat from being taken away by Cherry's friends.

Eventually, Ted did sell the multicab for a profit, but was pissed off enough at everything he had been through that he decided to keep the 30,000 pisos he had made.

Regarding the golf clubs that Randy gave to Ted to hold on to... well, as they say in Thailand: Som Nom Na.) What I did find much more interesting was that Ted hired the captain of Randy's boat when he bought it, and that captain claimed that the entire famous boat incident up in Gingoog started when the Navy boarded the Stirm's ship, inspected it and found some safety infringements, asked for a 500 piso tip to forgo any further official action, and Cherry Stirm, Randy's wife, told the Navy she wasn't going to pay. The rest, as they say, is History.

Next, I chatted with Danny Lawson, who took over Tony's partnership in Kingston Lodge, a local hotel near Xavier Estates that caters largely to foreigners. What a jovial and interesting guy he is! He also runs a catering business in Afghanistan, feeding the civilian contractors there. There was also a pleasant British fellow named Chris, who reminds me a bit of my best friend Stan. He claimed I was the first American he had met that he could get along with. (He's so nice though, that I suspect he says that to every American he meets.)

After Spooks, Epril and I joined Danny and his wife Daisy, Jenelyn and Bing, and Jneth, and we all went out to Star/Zax for dancing.

Finally, at about 11:00, our new driver, Chris, drove us back to Jasaan. (He's a taxi driver who will always charge us 500 pisos to go from Cagayan de Oro to Jasaan. We call him and he'll come and wait for us outside until we're ready to go.)