Too Much of a Good Thing

If you find honey, eat just enough--
     too much of it, and you will vomit.
Proverbs 25:16 (NIV)


Our house is surrounded by rice paddies.  However, over time, some of these rice paddies have been filled in in order to put up houses and commercial buildings.

If Thailand has any kind of grading ordinance, it is not evident.  People fill in land as they please; where the water drains off to is not their concern.

Our house sits on such a fill area, and immediately to the east is a rice paddy--or at least it used to be a rice paddy.  However, so many areas have now been filled, the water that falls on this part of town all seems to go into that field, and the water cannot get out at a reasonable rate.  So now, it is actually too wet for rice.

The owner spent a lot of effort planting rice this year.

When he was done planting, the paddy looked pretty good.  But notice the red colors in the foreground--that is from runoff from the field on the other side of our house.  The water runs down the road in front of our house and into the paddy.

At this point, the paddy should look like this nearby one.

However, after a slow-moving monsoon system came through, all the rice has died and now we have this nice pond beside our house.

While paddy rice needs lots of water, there is a limit to  how much it can take.  As hard as it is to fathom, even rice paddies can be too wet!

There is s flip side to this, at least for me.

One of the nice things about having this pond next to our house is the evening and nighttime sounds from the frogs and other creatures.  It kind of reminds me of growing up with a pond in our backyard.    While some may consider the noise annoying, for me it is like a constant lullaby throughout the night.

I recorded some of the sounds this past week.  (I recorded the audio while standing in the house.)  I added the audio to some wetland pictures from Thailand--the types of places you might expect to hear these sounds.  The first part of the video is the evening sounds.  At some point in the night, the composition changes.  The second part of the video has those early morning sounds.

For more about these wet areas where frogs live, view my blog Nong.