A bear knocked down an oak tree right outside the kitchen window last night. It was trying to get at a bird feeder full of seed. Yeah, the tree was pretty much dead and its roots weren’t providing much structural support, but still.

This is on top of the fact that there are almost always one or two wild turkeys hunting for bugs below the deck to the west (sometimes a parade of two dozen or more will mosey on through), and on my first bike outing I noted both coyote and bear scat within 200 yards of the house.

Welcome to the boonies, population: me.

I don’t recall having much trouble while backpacking above 10,000 ft last August, but Nevada City’s modest elevation was killing me today when I pulled my bike out of storage and took it for a ten mile spin. It might have been due in part to the head cold I just put behind me, but damn were my lungs on fire. Back at it tomorrow, though—I’ve been craving pedal action like a suburban dropout craves Tina, and I’ll take what I can get.

Despite the punishing jet lag, I had a blast dilly-dallying in SF for a couple nights after my return flight from Auckland. Within two hours of running the gauntlet at customs I was drinking noon-time beers with Kevin and the lil’ bro at their place of employ, and things only got better from there. Still on the To Do list: many return trips to Latin America Club, playing with Troy’s new fixie, drinking the Rambow boys under the table, and hopefully a house party or two with Mac’s new co-workers.

The return to my home town has been a bit surreal thus far, but there are a couple of exciting things coming up that should prove thoroughly engaging. Meanwhile, I’m like a walking blizzard as the too-good-to-be-true tan flees my body with traitorous assistance from the dry mountain air.

Thailand is still percolating. Bear with me.

My cat’s breath smells like two turds fucking.

I tore the last 80 unread pages off the weighty sled that is Anna Karenina the morning I flew to BKK from AKL and finished it in the air. The ending was satisfying only in that it meant I could stop caring. Here are the reviews I penned in my head as I tried to nod off on the plane:

Dostoyevsky: The only women who will put up with a mentally-overwrought emo twit are whores, and God is rad.

Tolstoy: Bitches be craaaaaazy. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t stop ‘em from cheating on you. Also, God is rad.

Fairly relevant, if you ask me.

I’m back in Auckland now, and I depart for SF tomorrow. I should have written about Thailand, but the country, the city, the people, the beaches and everything else seem beyond description. I’ll try breaking the trip into discrete portions and tackling it piece by piece. But not tonight. Later.

Bangkok is amazing. Stinky, swealteringly hot, smoggy, loud, filthy, and amazing. Lunch was delicious and cost less than $1.00. I just got measured for some dress shirts and slacks and we’re off to dinner now, to be followed by the night market. Flying to Krabi in the morning.

Did I mention it’s hot here? My eyeballs are sweating. My teeth are sweating.

I’m in a delightfully modern two-story suite outside New Plymouth tonight, and the king-sized bed waiting for me upstairs is almost a foreign concept at this point. It has been ages since I’ve slept on anything larger than a twin, and not having my feet hang off the mattress edge will be a welcome luxury.

I most recently dallied in Wellington after saying goodbye to the south island and ferrying back over Cook Straight. My last couple nights have been spent in a room shared with five other travelers, some of whom hailed from countries that shun deodorant. Despite its 300 busy beds, the YHA Wellington hostel was surprisingly efficient and clean, and I certainly can’t blame the establishment for the hygiene of my roommates. Within hours of checking in I found myself drinking a couple English blokes and a pair of Welsh girls under the table, and I won a complimentary Guinness t-shirt for my efforts. The next day’s wind gusts were strong enough to cause me and my fellow pedestrians to lurch about unpredictably as we walked—the “Windy Welly” moniker is well-deserved.

After speeding too quickly through the books I hauled across the Pacific, and being too thrifty to restock with overpriced fluff (outrageously, trade paperbacks are NZ$20-30 and every second-hand bookstore I sought out was picked clean of all but usual Danielle Steele garbage), I decided to purchase a couple meatier novels that could give me more bang for the buck. In other words, I bought discounted classics with an eye towards maximizing reading hours per dollar spent. I ended up with 1400 pages of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (for NZ$25), and holy shit I can’t wait to wallow in some gratuitous laser-titty sex alien holodeck DNA-splicing spaceship moon-jewels crypto-jizz while my poor neurons work to forget that 19th century Russia ever existed.

Briefly, some other highlights that have transpired since I last posted: turned 25 in Invercargill, NZ’s southern-most city; bungy jumped from the Karawau Bridge 143 feet into the brilliant, turquoise river below; visited two glaciers in as many days; woke up and watched thirty-odd dolphins playfully cruise up the coast across the street from the night’s modest lodgings in Kaikoura; and ate for dinner a wild pig which had been shot in the expansive, grassy valley behind our motel in Blenheim.

Now to succumb to sleep while the river below fills my head with soothing white noise. Six days ’til Thailand. Six days ’til 50 cent beers, exquisite $4 meals, depraved ping pong shows, malaria medication, unbelievable waterfalls, even dirtier eurotrash backpackers, and drinking buddies who can sympathize with my unspeakably strong burrito cravings.