Getting settled in

Apologies all around for not keeping in touch, taking pictures, etc. but it is quite a task to get things in order as a foreigner in Thailand. I have rented a house near my school and across the street from a mountain full of monkeys. Their behavior is comparable to thunderstorms; sometimes the skies are clear and there are no monkeys while other days they can be all around, drinking leftover cokes on the street curb, or performing acrobatics on the powerlines. My local monkeys are much more relaxed and peaceful than the ones at school. School monkeys are on the hunt for junkfood left by children, shot at with pellet guns by the gardeners, and chairs get thrown at them if they enter our classrooms. My first class of my first day started with a monkey in the room, but I told him I needed the room and he left. Others have been more combative.
My domestic fauna consists of ants that taste a little too strongly of formic acid to be pleasant, lazy house geckos, a giant spider I haven't bothered to identify or evict, and a few of the biggest cockroaches I've seen outside of the Bahamas and South Carolina. At least the roaches are not big or numerous enough that I can hear them scuttle around like I did in Eluthera.
The house has character and needs a little work, but it should give me something to do. I've already gotten to know the nice ladies at the hardware store, just down the road. If my dad were here, he would have plenty of jobs to work on between my house and little yard, but he would be quite frustrated at the lack of foresight in Thai construction, and he would immediately start putting in new electrical outlets (some rooms only have one). Funny side note, the most ingenious engineering I've seen in Thailand lies in the electrical outlets that are designed to fit American and Korean type plugs. Brilliant idea, but in practice it makes nothing fit right and there are some pretty sizeable sparks that fly out sometime. I think someone told me electric shock is the second most prevalent cause of death here.
I bought a refrigerator recently and am on my way to being properly domestic. Part of that will also be figuring out the local produce. Aside from learning new names, there are fruits and vegetables here I've never even heard of. I had something the other day that seemed to be a cross between eggplant and tomato.
I have not taken many pictures, despite trips to the beaches, a national park, pineapple farm, Cambodia and Bangkok, but I will fix that soon.