Active Living and Travel
Making Southern American Chicken Fried Steak and Gravy in Rural Thailand
This one requires a bit of an interlude or introduction. The video and transcript below are all about making the food—the chicken fried steak—but not much on how you do a proper gravy or sauce. That’s what I have to address here to fill in some blanks. You need a proper gravy or sauce, and…
Read MoreNo Money No Honey
Copilot seems to be my go-to for images where it seems to discern my attitude and gets it right the first time. The prompt: There’s a well-known saying surrounding the SE Asia girl bar scenes: no money no honey. Make me a fun and fanciful image, wide landscape for a blog post header image envisioning…
Read MoreThink back. How useful has Rubber been in your life? Think way back.
Little did I know—or care, frankly—but I’ve lived amongst rubber tree groves for years in various places, and I’m well acquainted with how the stuff is processed. Curiously enough, and I love curious people, the rubber tree sap flows out as that white goo you see in the title picture. It only flows in the…
Read MoreExterior Design: Crazy Fun or Rastafarian?
Well, my last post, arguing that what the world needs now is war—sweet war—in my judgment, fell on completely deaf ears. I got no signals whatsoever that it was well received. Just one stupid comment on it from some moron who thinks Catholicism is a cult. I know that kind of idiocy from way back…
Read MoreMen Building Stuff Undercuts Feminism and Males in Name Only (MINOs)
Males In Name Only = MINOs. Time for another video from me, with a subsequent blog post with the transcription of this video. I’m going to take you on a little tour. The theme is building. Build! Okay, let’s go. This is a property in northeastern Thailand, Mukdahan Province to be exact, and this is…
Read MoreThe Funny Hate Mail I Get
I live in this funny space in my life where I’m really happy, really content, and really satisfied: 65 years old, living in rural northeastern Thailand with a really great gal. It’s been interesting to experience that unfold. I’ve always received some degree of hate mail or hate comments. On my blog, those are typically…
Read MorePotato Breakthrough
This is a cooking-video post, which I haven’t done in quite a while. At just over 16 minutes, it may be a little long, but I made it that way for a reason. Recently, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the potatoes Thailand produces—what I call Thai potatoes. They’re yellow-fleshed potatoes, but…
Read MoreHow Do You Build In A Foreign Country Like I Do?
Greetings from my plastic Adirondack chair overlooking the front yard. This video is going to be—I honestly don’t even know what it’s going to be. But let’s get started. August is historically, by far, the rainiest month in this region of Thailand. We just hit September 1st or 2nd, so we’ve gone over the hump.…
Read MoreSquats: From Dr Oz to Me
I feel like I owe you a post. It’s been a while. I’ve been out here in rural Thailand, doing all sorts of things. If you want to follow the blow-by-blow, the best places are my X feed and my YouTube channel. What I have for you today is something that’s already up on both…
Read More“You’ll pee off the patio.” Yes, I will.
Many have laughed already, so I have a duty to let you laugh too. X or YouTube. Your choice. In other news, did you know that if you’re an American and come to Asia…meet a woman and legally marry her, it will take you 2 years of State Department hoops to get a visa to…
Read MorePhotos of Rural Thai Homesteading
Mostly what I’ve done over the last few months, as I’ve been working daily on building out what I loosely call a homestead here in rural Thailand, is shoot short little videos. I typically upload them to X and YouTube, but I’m not trying to make a splash on either channel. This blog remains my…
Read MoreAmericans Can Feel Great, Again
Don’t you just love the livery of the new Air Force 1 747? Boeing is so goddamn pathetic now they can’t deliver new presidential jets in years upon years upon years. This shit goes back to Trump’s first term over six years ago, and the planes still haven’t been delivered. Meanwhile, Qatar—an Arab nation—gifted President…
Read MoreSteel, Glass, Wood, and Ice
It’s taken me a few days to figure out how to frame this post. It’s about what I’m actually doing on my own out here in rural Thailand. The header image pretty much shows where we’re at right now with the man cave build, sitting on top of the concrete-block structure that’s going to be…
Read MoreReporting Back From Thailand: From Squalor to Luxury, Part V
We’re so busy and tired. Every day. Sunup (05:15) to sundown + is how we live out here in rural NE Thailand. Every day, I’m up beteen 04:00 – 05:00. I like the dawn coming on. I feel substantially alive and well. Honestly, there is too much going on to document even close to everything.…
Read MoreFrom Squalor to Luxury Part IV
I’ll just put it to you straight. I was fucking perturbed and outraged by a comment on one of my videos from some stupid fucking fake doctor, Dr. Gary Moore of San Antonio—a chiropractor, not a doctor. This guy has been pestering the hell out of me for the entire six and a half years…
Read MoreFrom Squalor to Luxury Part III
I’ll skip the AI-generated image this time and just put this up on a lark. A surprise showed up yesterday here in Thailand. A truck rolled in with a literal ton—probably more—of metal framing material to kick off the the second story going on the small house that’ll serve as office and man cave. My…
Read MoreSqualor to Luxury Part II
It’s the 2nd installment. Here was the 1st. Of course, that’s an AI image. In this case, I canned the Grok image generation. I don’t care for Grok Imagine that much anyway, so I used another AI, and it immediately got me what I was looking for to capture the idea of the post. I…
Read MoreFrom Squalor to Luxury
Yeah, that’s been a lot of my life for weeks now—going on two months. I’ve abided and sustained because I have this vision of a great tropical homestead, and I’m doing what it takes to make that happen. So I sit there and think and write and interact, but underneath it all I’m thinking about…
Read MoreCarving Out A Cool Life
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,…
Read MoreMy Workaholic Wife
I’ll get to the theme of this post in due time, but first I wanted to lay out my evolving thoughts on how I think, work, and write. In my last post I touched on this sun-up-to-sundown way of living. It doesn’t mean you can’t stay up and party some nights. It’s simply your baseline.…...