MontanaRon

An English teacher's blog about his travels and his digital art.

Term Break

August 12, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m sitting at home on a Monday morning, listening to the rain patter down, but there are no Monday blues here. We’re at the start of a month-long break between the second and third terms at Vientiane College, a break which started last Wednesday and continues through September 11th. I don’t have any specific plans for the time off, but I’ll probably pop over to Nong Khai in Thailand for at least a few days of shopping and relaxing. I also want to make a few videos of some places just down the road from my house, namely Buddha Park (Wat Xieng Khouane Luang) and the Lao National Ethnic Cultural Park. I was going to visit those areas today, but with the current rainfall, I’ll save those visits for another day. I also need to see (no pun intended) an ophthalmologist to get my eyes checked and to get a new pair of glasses. The temple pieces have broken on the pair I have now and are being held on with short bent pieces of a paper clip running through the screw holes. Looks weird, but works and I only wear them when I’m on my motorbike.

The rain is fairly gentle right now, but it was coming down more heavily a while ago. When it’s really pouring, I have to keep an eye on the ceiling in the bedroom because it drips occasionally, though not too often, maybe once or twice during the rainy season. I have to remember to get the landlord to do some repairs, though he’s often out of town.

That’s it for now, so enjoy your Monday wherever you are. More later.

Island Life in Vientiane?

July 3, 2024 /

Actually, no, I’m not living on an island in the middle of the Mekong River near Vientiane. But, right now my house is surrounded by water on all sides so it feels like I’m on an island. Due to lengthy and moderately heavy rainfall lately, the small ponds on either side of the house, the back area, and the front yard are flooded this morning. Even if it stops raining for a few days, it will make trying to walk or to go jogging in the morning impossible without getting my shoes completely soaked. One solution I have is to wrap plastic bags around my feet, holding the bags on with rubber bands, and walking the short distance to ground that’s a bit higher up, then taking the bags off, going jogging or speed walking, and putting the bags back on when I return to the house. I’ll probably need to give this a try tomorrow morning, if it’s not raining.

The yard usually floods most years in late July and August, but this is about the earliest that it’s been underwater since I’ve lived here. Is that a foreshadowing of a heavier-than-usual rainy season later on? I’ll see, I suppose. I’ll keep posting as the rains increase (or decrease). More later from the island.

Dancing Bowling Pins

March 26, 2024 /

I just added a short to my Youtube channel. You can check it out at https://youtube.com/embed/G8dZeZdFzZ4?si=L3INUQ2DPY_6Po9I

It’s a video about dancing bowling pins, kind of. I recorded this way back in 2007 at Ocean Bowl at Patong Beach in Phuket, Thailand. These are weird-looking pinsetters that are STILL made by the Brunswick Corporation. They’re called Boost machines. You can check them out here.

Enjoy.

Thai Trip Report Part 3

March 14, 2024 /

Delay after delay after delay, but, finally, here is the final part of my Thai Trip Report, where I spent some time in Bangkok and Nongkhai. There isn’t much to report about Bangkok, so the video doesn’t contain that much about the City of Angels. [EDIT: I removed it as a matter of fact.] However, the Nongkhai section is a bit longer. I always try to spend some time there on a Saturday since there is a street fair every Saturday, weather permitting. So, here’s the vid. Enjoy!

[Edit: I removed the original video I had posted and replaced it with this shorter version. I took out the Bangkok section because it didn’t add much to the video and I reduced parts of the street fair at night and the kids’ dance practice.]

Laos Food Festival 2024

February 16, 2024 /

The annual Laos Food Festival was held in Vientiane from January 23rd to the 27th. I usually try to go on the Saturday date after classes at Vientiane College. Here’s some more about the festival from the Vientiane Times:

“The festival runs for five days from January 23 to 27, with stalls open from 9am to 10pm each day. There are 180 stalls, including 165 offering various types of Lao food, from regional specialties to traditional dishes and desserts, and 15 stalls selling handicrafts.
There will also be live performances, demonstrations of Lao sweet making, a talk on small business management and marketing, a fruit carving contest, and a Lao dessert sale, among other activities.
This is one of the most popular events on Laos’ social calendar and is sure to attract a large number of visitors, especially as it is taking place during the Asean Tourism Forum in Vientiane this week.”

Because I only attended the event on Saturday afternoon, I didn’t get to see any of live performances or other activities. Here’s a video I put together of the event.

(Note: I’m quite new at making quality videos, like for Youtube, so this one probably seems amateurish. I will get better as I post more vids. My video editor is DaVinci Resolve 18.6, which I’m also new to using. Will get better at using it, too!)

Digital Art – Fish Tale

February 2, 2024 /

It’s been quite awhile since my last digital art post, so here’s a new one. I’m calling it “Fish Tale,” though it could also be titled “The One That Got Away.” It’s a whimsical piece that didn’t take all that long to put together over the last three days when I could make time for it. As always, compositions are a lot of fun to work on; otherwise, why do them?

For each new piece I create and post on here, I’m going to give a rundown of what I did to create it. First of all there are six images in the composition. The main image and the sailboat are from a couple of photos I took in the Dominican Republic way back in 2006-2008, and the five fish and whale images were generated in Midjourney. There are about 20 layers in the work, so there wasn’t a lot involved; it’s almost like a finger exercise. Other than the image layers, there were adjustment layers for saturation, blurring, exposure and for the speech bubble. There are also a couple of texture layers from the various art courses I’m a member of. I put the whole thing together, merged the layers and ran the final piece through Topaz Labs 2 to create the Artistic Impression look.

I’m going to call this one finished for now, but I might tweak it a bit and perhaps run it through Photoshop again with a cartoon template or action that I have laying around somewhere. It is best viewed at a large scale; just click on it a few times. So, it was fun making this and I hope to create some more elaborate pieces in the very near future. I’ll put them here, of course.

Thai Trip Report Part 2

January 26, 2024 /

We made our way to Patong Beach on Phuket Island, where we stayed at the Holiday Inn Express. It’s a decent hotel that is only a two-minute walk to the beach and some of the rooms have a nice view of the gardens. It’s moderately priced and the staff has always been very helpful and friendly. About the only negative aspect is the rather meager breakfast, but it’s free and will provide you with enough food to get your day started.

One of my favorite ways to start the morning after breakfast was to take a walk along the beach. There aren’t a lot of people out at this time, so it’s quite peaceful. However, the beach lounge chair vendors are setting out their chairs to get ready for the crowds of sun worshippers who will arrive a bit later in the morning.

Directly behind the area where we spent the afternoon and early evening at the beach is the Kudo Hotel, which attracts a mostly younger crowd to its outside lounging area that has a swimming pool. One of the reasons for the age of the clientele might be that at the front of the hotel is the Daily Dose, a coffee shop that also sells cannabis, I believe. So, you can lounge by the pool, toke up with a hookah, and enjoy the nightly entertainment that the hotel provides. (Watch the video below)

Nai likes to sleep until the early afternoon, so he might miss out on some interesting events. One morning, after walking the beach, I went back to the hotel and came upon some folks from what I think is a middle school that’s right across the street. It appeared that there were administrators, teachers and students, including a student band, walking and marching down the road away from the beach, going to one of the main roads in town. They eventually ended up at what looked like a temple area. There’s a short clip of them on the video below, and I made another video of the entire procession that you can also view below.

Overall it was another enjoyable five-day stay at Patong beach and I’m sure we’ll go back again at a future date. Enjoy the videos.

Phuket video:

Patong Middle School Procession

Thai Trip Report part 1

January 11, 2024 /

I recently had a two-week vacation in Thailand, so I’m going to do a few posts about that trip. My friend Nai and I spent some time at Patong Beach in Phuket, a few nights in Bangkok and a few more days in Nongkhai. This first part will be about two airports where I had a chance to take some videos. You can see the video I made at the end of this post.

The first airport was Udon Thani Airport. Udon is a city of about 400,000 people, so it’s not exceptionally large and doesn’t have a huge airport. The inside of the airport, like the departure area and the boarding gates, is clean, modern and comfortable, but it doesn’t have that many food and beverage options. Nai and I spent the night in Nongkhai, which is right across the border from Laos. Because we had an early flight from Udon to Bangkok, we took an early (6:30 a.m.) taxi to Udon, which costs 800 Thai baht, if memory serves me correctly.

From Udon Thani, we flew into Bangkok’s Don Meuang International Airport, which serves mainly as a domestic flight center. It used to be the only international airport in Bangkok, but with the opening of Suvarnabhumi Airport in 2006, it was relegated to a secondary role. This airport used to be in terrible shape, but with an upgrade, the interior is now very attractive, and, in a lot of ways, I think it has a much nicer ambience than Suvarnabhumi, though I haven’t been to the big airport since 2019.

One complaint I have about Don Meuang is that upon arrival, it seems that debarking passengers always have to take a shuttle bus to get to the arrivals area and the bus takes around seven minutes (I timed it) to travel from the plane to the terminal. Perhaps a minor hassle, but I like to step off a plane directly into the terminal.

So, here’s the video of the two airports. I’ll continue with my trip report in the next post, soon I hope.

New Painting Software–Rebelle 7

November 28, 2023 /

The only digital painting I’ve done has been in Photoshop and, for various reasons, I found it rather clunky, but usable. However, as a Black Friday deal, the folks at Escape Motions put their award-winning digital painting software, Rebelle, on sale as a pre-purchase for $29.99 for the Pro version. (Standard version is $19.99) This is a great deal because the normal price is $149.99, so I went ahead and got the Pro version, which will be released on December 14th.

I’m stoked because I downloaded the trial version of Rebelle 6 and I’ve been playing around with it. I’ve barely scratched the surface, but it’s awesome. The budding painter in me can paint with ink, pencil, pastels, water colors, gouache, and many more on various types of canvas, including cotton, gesso, wood veneer, and Washi, among others. I can foresee that my free time is going to be taken up by learning to use this amazing product.

From the Escape Motions website:

Rebelle is the award-winning, hyper-realistic painting software with phenomenal oils, acrylics, watercolors, and other wet and dry media. Paint pigments color mixing, oil thickness, watercolor diffusion, and NanoPixel technology, convincingly mimic the way natural media interact with the canvas and itself.

If you hurry, you can get the pre-purchase deal now, but it ends on November 30th.

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