Eve, below, might still be around after a global collapse, though her batteries would have run down.

May 15, 2006—She can hold a conversation, make eye contact [uh huh], and express joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. These school-age tots seem to be making friends with EveR-1, a female android that made her debut this month in South Korea. The robot was built by Baeg Moon-hong, a senior researcher with the Division for Applied Robot Technology at the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH). Fifteen motors underneath her silicon skin allow her to express a limited range of emotions, and a 400-word vocabulary enables her to hold a simple conversation.The android weighs 110 pounds (50 kilograms) and would stand 5 feet, 3 inches (160 centimeters) tall—if she could stand. EveR-1 can move her arms and hands, but her lower half is immobile.KITECH scientists are now working on EveR-2, which they say will have improved vision, a wider range of facial expressions, and the ability to stand and move all four limbs.

wake-drink-fake drink-drink-sleep

hooooo, ha, hooooow, aaaaaaaaaaaaaa, my liver.

I just returned home from three days of debauched, bachelor party-type boozing, and I feel like a 100 bucks. My brother's bachelor party was a complete success. Rain drizzled almost non-stop, but we persevered and managed to stay high on a PBR drunk for two solid days. Much of our time during the party was spent chopping wood out in the forest in order to sustain the totally necessary magnificient massive bonfire. When the keg ran out last night the boys took it into their brains that the only logical use of the shell would be to use it for a keg-tossing contest. I awoke this morning and the keg, which I had purchased days before, was laying in the middle of the fire with gaping axe-wounds and rock-dents all round, it'll be a hard one to return.

Anyway, the party was a lot of fun and my mind and body will need countless hours of rehabilitation over the next few weeks. I feel totally exhausted and filthy. Collin

2 + 2 = 5?

Good day.

Oh, here I am, back to my old ways in Missoula, Montana. The plane ride from Wanaka to Missoula was long and arduous and my armpits were a little too moist for comfort. I was too tired to read and I wasn't comfortable enough to sleep, so I spent much of my time on the planes curled up in an uncomfortable position pretending to myself that I was going to drift off to La-La land any second. I got home and I felt like a wreck, but my parents soon revived my spirits and poured out a nice tall glass of wine to relax to. Ahhhhhhh, it is nice to be home.

My schedule for the last couple days has been; coffee, computer, coffee, run, coffee, computer again, read, tea, music, sleep. Not a bad schedule to readjust to life here in Montana, but unfortunately it will not last long, for tomorrow I start work at the Bakery, the same one I was at when I left this town 'round 7 months ago. It'll be quite a switch to go straight into a job which entails massive amounts of customer contact, I hope I can still formulate sentences with my mouth.

It has been great to hang out with my dogs for the last couple days. They are pretty weird, indeed. This morning they awoke me at 530am and demanded that I get out of bed in order to feed them. My dog, Mazie, goes absolutely bonkers in the morning when she knows she is about to get some food. She was spinning circles in a quick-dizzying fashion, while at the same time jumping and clawing my legs, while I stumbled around attempting to get the sleep out of my eyes. It may have been a bit too much excitement straight out of bed so early in the morn, but that is the way it works with the piglets.

The weather here has been totally out of sight. My body was gearing up for winter while I was in NZ, but now I have been thrust directly back to spring, and it looks like it is going to be a bloody gorgeous one.

Collin/

I had to leave the country Though there was some nice folks there

Howdy there Part'na. Today in Wanaka the air is crisp and clean and smells of the forthcoming winter. The sky is perfectly blue and there is snow on the mountains across the lake. I spent the vast majority of the early morning cleaning my car and packing my bags parked down by the waterfront. My car has developed some new problems and I'm afraid I probably won't get any money for it. The muffler has detached itself from the body of the car and the engine roar can be heard for miles around. Oh well, a loss of a few hundred dollars for a car that carried me damn near 7,000 miles. I'll give little brownie to a friend of mine and hope that he takes care of her for the remainder of her life. I proposed that I would like to see her go out in a blaze of glory (perhaps, when she is on her death-bed, you could drive her off a massive cliff, is that too much to ask?). Tomorrow it is AIRPORTS...I bought "for whom the bell tolls" by Hemingway...Hopefully it'll satisfy me for the 30 hours I have to spent getting from here to home. Well, it has been a good time.
Clean up the air and treat the animals fair, collin

All my fingers ran off and I just couldn't follow them

oh, the day has been drizzling off and on for hours on end. The sky will open up with a patch of sunlight or blue and I will begin to get my hopes up, but quickly enough the rain comes and my hood goes back on. I've spent the last three days in ChristChurch doing this and that, the chores of a person travelling. Today I finished it all up and had the whole day to do whatever happened to catch me. I ended up spending most of my day in bookstores purusing the stock while fantasizing about novels I am going to purchase, read, and put on the shelf when I am back in Montana. My travel amigo and tramping partner, Martin, left this morning for good. He's off to do some work on an organic farm up north before he heads off to spend a month in Thailand. It was a sort of sad farewell, a farewell to new zealand in an odd way. Martin has, at work or on the trail, been around me in some sort of fashion for the last 4 months. He's one of a handful of people here in New Zealand that I have spent more than a fleeting moment with. Today I thought about what it'll be like to arrive in the fair city of Missoula, Montana in less than 5 days. I can picture it all absolutely perfectly. Missoula is sooooo engrained in my being that it is almost as if I have assumed the identity of that place. Collin "missoula" Pruitt. It'll be comfortable to be back home with the ability to devote my time to something else besides mainting my funds for travel. Although backpacking new zealand has been a true pleasure it has also been sort of exhausting in a distincitve sort of manner. It's hard to live out of a backpack and meet new people every single day in and out, at least for me it is. I'm not saying I'll never do it again or disliked it, but I am saying that I would like a little bit of relief, maybe a room for myself, even if it is in my parents house. HA!

Tsk Tsk Dear Boy

Yoweeee
Less than a week left in New Zealand and each day I find myself wondering where the time went. I'm ready to head home though, I think. I've had some great experiences here and I've met some incredible individuals, but I feel like my time is up, on to the next thing. Martin and I just got out of yet another hike, this time we had hot springs to soak in, and that was a bonus. I'm driving for a few more days up the west coast and then I head back to Wanaka and kiss the sweet soil under my feet and say, "au revoir!".....or something like that.

Golly,
This last trip I took with 3 of my friends was just spectacularly bodacious. We hiked up to a pass called, "gillespie Pass", on what might have been one of the most perfectly blue and sun-shine soaked days of my life. Snow capped all the surrounding peaks and the views down into the valleys on either side were at the very least dramatic. We also hiked up to a glacial lake on one our planned side-trips. That was also un-real, but time on the internet here is very expensive and I am but a poor boy. Today we flew out of the trip via a small plane that touched down on a minute airstrip in one of the valleys. The flight cost 35 dollars..Cheap As! Now Martin and I are off to spend two nights hiking around and soaking in hot springs on the west coast of the south island near a little place called, "Welcome flat". The days are flying by now.....Golly.

AS AN AM

Wheeeww.
I've been doing a lot of hiking lately and that has been spectacular, but yesterday, when I arrived back in Wanaka, the S hit the F, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Paul, my x-flatmate, kicked me out of the house in a crazy screaming rage. Man O Man...I was pretty darn close to hitting that fool when he was screaming inches away from my face with a frantic hungry look in his eyes.. I don't understand the whole situation. I reckon I was a scapegoat of some sort for his inner angst or whatever. The door slammed millimeters behind my head and I could hear it bolt and lock while he continued to curse my name. Oh well, moving on, I leave tomorrow for another bout of hiking. Two more back-packing trips and then my time here in NZ will be finished. I'll be back in Missoula on the 18th of may and I will probably be working by the next week. It'll be cinteresting to have such a dramatic change in life, maybe it'll keep me on my toes.
Collin