My mind is scattered in a million different directions, I have so much to do and so little time to do it in (not like I have any less time than anyone else, but you get the gist…)

I’m officially outta here in just 29 days… Here being the good old US of A, on to my travels throughout Southeast Asia, with stops in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. I don’t really have any more plans besides that except that I want to make this trip count. A big juicy chunk of time – 5 whole months of waking up and experiencing truly new and novel settings and characters.

5 Months time, equating to about 145 anti-malarial pills (the not-so-hallucinogenic kind), prescribed to me today as I began my battery of vaccines, reading like an alphabet soup of insidious, tropics-borne diseases–Hep A, B, shots for TDP (that’s Tetanus, Diphtheria, Pertussis), an oral vaccine for typhoid, and the very icky-sounding and rather painful vaccine for JE (that’s Japanese Encephalitis). Actually, painful is way too bland a description for that last one, it felt like being injected by radioactive goo and having the flesh and muscles slowly melt and collapse from the inside (at least, I assume that my description is fairly accurate?).  Unfortunately, nearly all of these are going to require some kind of follow-up shots over the next few months, and I’m in it now for the long haul.

Today was definitely a day for ice cream.

And since I’ve packed and repacked the backpack a couple of times, I think it’s time for me to repack it one last time and get that errand off my list.

SO MUCH TO DO!

And I’m looking forward to all of it. ‘Cept for the remaining shots. Those suck.