Thongvanh [dot] com

I have finally started to learn to read and write Lao about a week ago using the language files http://www.fsi-language-courses.org. Everyone else can try to learn these on their own too, but it may be difficult because they use some pretty technical linguistic terms. So, as I go through the lessons, I will be reinterpreting them using some easier-to-digest language here for the family, and anyone else who might be interested in learning to read or write Lao. We always talk about forgetting Lao, and this is a fun way to keep the language alive in the family. Hopefully, this will give the moms and dads a more organized and focused approach to teaching Lao literacy and a way to spend a bit of time with the kids practicing Lao. Let me know what you think of this idea with some comments and also let me know if have suggestions on how to improve the lessons! Now, the first lesson...

Happy father's day to all the Thongvanh fathers! Hope your father's day was great!

merry mother's day to all of the thongvanh mothers!

for the chinese new year, i took a vacation to thailand. i was there for three weeks. the weather was hot during the day, which was exactly what i needed, and cool in the evenings. first we went to go visit friends in chiangmai and got out to see some jungle. chiang mai is a nice nice city. very relaxed and lots of comforting things: good book stores, good coffee, friendly people, and good english language publications. lots of things that are real hard to come by here in china.

Well obviously there's a difference in the site. For anyone that cares I upgraded our site from Drupal 4.x to 6.x. The theme is a bit different but temporary.

The upgrade was because Drupal 6 give us some additional security features that actually make the site *easier* to use!

More info to come.

Thanks and sorry for the inconsistency-

okay, for everyone who didnt know, i went to europe for christmas vacation. i spent two weeks there. i spent new years in ljubljana with a bunch of friends that i made in china. we had people from germany, china, and serbia all getting back together! it was great to see them all again. for christmas, i went to venice for about three days. it was beautiful there, but a bit cold.

here are some links to pictures on picasaweb:

piran and bled, slovenia

venice, italy

here's a giant fish we had tonight, it was as big as Trevor! If you haven't already, check out France Christmas pictures on Chris' flickr!

(go to allison's flickr to see the fish)

Pictures of A-Cham and some deer he and his friends hunted are on my flickr, so click on Allison's Flickr to see them!

PS I tried to blogit! through flickr but I don't know what kind of blog this is... so I couldn't put in an end point etc. How do I put pictures like the boys' pumpkin pictures up?

We recently receive a large amount of comment spam. Sorry for the bad language that was on the website. Today I removed almost 2000 comments from the website that were spam.

If I'm accidentally removed a comment you made I'm sorry but it can't be recovered.

We will have to keep fighting comment spam so if you see something on here that should not be here please let me know.

Thanks-
thong