Active Living and Travel

Well, this post has been a while in coming. I guess it’s been close to a week now since I pulled up stakes from Pattaya, Thailand, and moved out into rural Thailand once again. But this time it’s very different from when I did rural in the COVID clusterfuck of 2020. Very, very different. I’ll…

So that’s my immediate future, and with any luck and goodwill, for years to come. Life is very happy now. If not singularly focused, it’s pretty narrow. The red circle is the homestead. The yellow circle is the village with the fresh markets (huge). The green circle is where virtually all of Far’s family live.…

Believe it or not, that’s actually Thai beef—a ribeye for about 5 bucks. 330 grams. Plenty substantial. Some might think I overcooked it, but I like ribeye more medium, fat melted. I see no virtue in unmelted marbling. I also finish it in a pat of butter for even more fat juice. So this is…

Greetings From Northeast Rural Thailand Hey there, greetings from Northeast rural Thailand, and I’m coming to you with something that’s just all to the good. My last post was a real downer about a health crisis—which you can read if you haven’t already—and I’m gonna save anything more on that for a subsequent update that…

I’m dictating this shit because my fingers are still too uncoordinated to type it out properly—some residual motor control bullshit from the ordeal. But I need to get this story out now; it’s been brewing for three days, and it’s one hell of a strange confluence of events. Right now, I’m up in Mukdahan province…

Nope. Not dead. Gonna happen some day. Not yet. My 88-year-old dad finally called me a week or so ago to check up on me. Do you get the humor in that? The 88-year-old dad calls his 65-year-old son to check up. So, here’s the story: I gradually got bored out of my skull with…

If you’re old enough, remember that hippie saying from the 60s? “Far out.” … Turns out my gal whose given first name is “Amporn,” goes by the nickname of Far (pronounced ‘fah’). Nearly all Thais go by nicknames. Na, Nat, Tum, A, Num, Pon, and the list goes on…and that’s only the gals. My fav…

So, my blogging habits have been chugging along now for damn near 25 years—started in 2003, so call it 24 if you want to be a pedant about it. But my problem in these last few years has been this nagging sense of a paradigm shift. What I mean is, shit just ain’t the same…

A sad day yesterday. Far and I spent the early morning freezing our asses off in northern Thailand with a northern wind from all the bad places up north. Fuck the north. The wind eased up. In between hauling armloads of pruned branch debris from trees, I sought refuge on the tailgate of my pickup…

I’ll get to that story at the end. OK, so here’s what went down. A few weeks back, I snagged myself a diesel pickup truck, and then I figured, why the hell not? I loaded up with my Thai girlfriend, one of her sons, and his pregnant girlfriend, and we hit the road for a…

As I continue to recover from my respiratory infection (whatever it was), now off OTCs entirely, I thought I would do a fun post about steaks. I credit my mom and dad for the introduction, sometime in the latter 1970s in Reno, Nevada. The Sizzler brand of steakhouse showed up, I believe, sometime in the…

A couple of days ago, on Saturday, I was chatting with my Thai girlfriend, Far, about her son, Timmy, who’s 14 and a total character. He’s half-English, half-Thai, the product of a fleeting romance about 20 years ago in her village up in Mukdahan province. Some English guy in the clothing import-export business was visiting…