It’s been a couple of days since my last post, “My Workaholic Wife,” when someone asked if I’d gotten married again. Not formally. Not yet, anyway. But it might as well be. I’ve no intention of going anywhere. I’m well situated here on this rural Thailand homestead—crazy life out in the country. It’s a fulfilling, heartwarming experience on a daily basis. Everybody’s nice. There’s no talk of politics, no antagonism, no fretting over what’s going on in the world.

You see people just living their workaday lives, sunup to sundown, working hard. They don’t have a lot of money they could throw around. But I often say Americans are much richer and also much less happy. I hold that to be true because I see it all the time. Most Thais have their basic needs met. Many have decent houses they built themselves, no mortgage because they built it bit by bit over time. Plenty have cars and trucks now, and they all have motorbikes to scoot around on.

It comes back to what people have said forever: money only buys happiness up to the point where basic needs are met—shelter, food, that sort of thing. Beyond that, more money doesn’t mean more happiness. It’s fine to have money. Nice, even. Nice to travel and do all the other stuff. But I see real value in keeping things simple. In my case, that means staying off social media a lot now. I just don’t care to see it. It’s not really the stories in the news that get to me. It’s how people get so worked up about it on both sides, as though anyone gives a shit about their opinion or that they could affect any change or influence anything whatsoever.

That said, I’m liking this new rhythm. Three or four times a day I look around or walk around, something catches my eye or interest, and I shoot a quick 30-second to two-minute video, post it on X. I don’t say much in the clips themselves. That’s what these roundups are for—now I can lay out the context, what the video’s really about, all the details in writing. One of them below is my workaholic wife climbing a damn tree to trim it. Plenty of other stuff going on too. Let’s get to it.

– I’ve been coming to this area for about two years now, on a number of trips. I think the first one was back in June a couple years ago. Now I live here full-time. One of the very cool features is this public area called Big Tree, on account of this enormous old growth tree right in the middle of it. The trunk at the base has got to be something like ten feet in diameter. Huge thing, with massive branches and all the rest. It’s basically the center of the neighborhood, with events, little shops, food stands, the works. Right on the lake, too, so you’ve got the party barges you can rent out, get catering done, head out on the water, all that.

At any rate, some months back a big branch came down. Nobody got hurt, far as I know, but it took out some of the little shops. So they decided to just trim the whole thing down to what’s now a stump, maybe ten meters high at the base. No idea if it’ll grow back or not.

The gal managed to get her hands on a nice load of that wood, though—beautiful stuff, proper old growth hardwood. Don’t know exactly what kind. She picked it up for something like four hundred bucks. We’ve been using it to build furniture. Got a bed done and a wardrobe nearly done, and a desk for me is next. Here’s a little video on that.

– There are two elements to living out here. One is temporary and the other is just the environment.

The temporary one, for the time being, is the lack of certain creature comforts. For instance, we don’t even have the new bedroom finished yet, though it’s really nice and I’ll have air conditioning in there within a couple of days. The bed has already been fabricated. I also have my cold dip in the bathroom, which functions as an enormous permanent bathtub. You’ll see it in one of the other videos. There are other missing comforts, but they get sorted out over time.

The other element is environmental. Everybody knows about the tropical heat and humidity, but there’s also some seasonality to it. Right now is the rainy season, the monsoon season, and that can be a little brutal because it introduces a lot of bug life. That’s partly what this video is about—how to help yourself with that.

Otherwise, there’s just stuff you’ve got to get used to. Even riding or driving around on your car or motorbike, there are thousands of wild chickens. You know, why did the chicken cross the road? It’s like they have to cross right as you’re coming up on them. Same with the dogs, the soi dogs. Some of them are fine. A couple are on the wilder side, but they also tend to pick a home they’re part of and get adopted. We have a couple of them across the street—I think I’ve got a video about that below as well.

Here’s some bug control.

– There’s definitely what some would consider a feral dog problem here in Thailand. It’s pretty widespread, even in urban areas. They’re colloquially referred to as soi dogs, and soi is basically the Thai word for street. So you get the picture: street dogs.

Out in the country, they tend to stick around one place that’s effectively home. It’s a loose sort of adoption that just sort of happens. In urban areas they can be a bit unruly, still hanging around the same spots but turning into a real nuisance—sometimes outright problematic when they attack people in packs. That happens. There are always a few people trying to rescue them, and plenty of calls to round them up and euthanize the lot, but nothing ever changes.

Out here in the country it isn’t much of a problem. They belong to somebody, or at least loosely so. We’ve got a couple across the street that hang around here and do a fair job of guarding the place. Before we had the wall up, they’d chase off all the wild chickens. So here’s Mina.

– I’m always joking with the Thai gals about the jeans they buy that have tears and cuts.

– Here’s a sort of mini tour of the property. Since it’s 4 minutes, it speaks for itself.

– She’s a crazy workaholic. I found her 70-something, frail-looking mom up in a mango tree the other day, harvesting fruit. Whenever I offer to help, she says “no, you will break the tree.”

– Meet our resident tokay gecko buddy.

Tokay geckos are ubiquitous here in Thailand. They’re everywhere I’ve been in the country. These lizards are nocturnal, shy, and reclusive, but also fiercely territorial. That means they tend to stake out the same spot and stick to it night after night. Come evening, they start sounding off—every hour or so, sometimes more. It begins with something that could pass for a bird call, then shifts into their signature racket: tokay, tokay, tokay, tokay. Usually four to six repetitions, with the last one trailing off.

To my ear, though, it never quite lands as “tokay.” It sounds a hell of a lot more like “pussy.” So what I actually hear is pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy. Seems fitting for Thailand.

– One of the things I’ve been talking about everywhere is how I’ve embraced this sort of sun-up to sundown schedule, especially this time of year. As I’ve said before, being this close to the equator means the length of the days doesn’t vary all that much. The shortest to the longest day shifts by only an hour or so either way. For all intents and purposes, it’s basically twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night, give or take an hour.

Right now we’re just heading into June. By about five in the morning you start to get the slightest hint of light. By five-fifteen it’s full-on twilight, and by five-thirty it’s pretty much broad daylight. I’m not exactly sure when sunrise hits, but you’ve got plenty of usable light well before that. That’s typically when I head out on the motorbike, and the whole countryside is already teeming with activity. Little barbecue stands are going full tilt, grilling up chicken, pork, chicken livers, and now and then a few oddities like frogs.

And that’s how I got my breakfast this morning. You can roll up and get something like that at five-thirty in the morning without any fuss.

And that will do it for this time.