We had instantly fallen in love with the 10th floor Penang condo! We were now thrilled to have arrived back at it a couple of days earlier, and it had begun to feel like a second home to us. It was May 2023 and our third stay there, all in a little over a year, since Malaysia's harsh COVID restrictions had finally been relaxed in the spring of 2022.

"Why El Salvador?", the surprisingly friendly U.S. immigration officer at Vancouver's airport asked us. "The chance to not get murdered, their homicide rate is down 98 percent!", I replied. Actually, we had been interested in it in theory since a spectacular brief high above fly-over of some of its volcanoes on departing Nicaragua in 2015.

This past January, right around the time when Canada’s tobacco settlement was being finalized, our country held its sadly necessary 49th annual aspirationally-named National Non-Smoking Week. Back in 1964, when the US Surgeon General, Luther Terry, released his report making crystal-clear the immense dangers of smoking, his intent was that the findings would lead to the end of the tobacco industry.

Conquering the Lands of the Conquerors   https://www.flickr.com/photos/stuvan/albums/72177720329870633/with/54873588178 In the year 1066, William could not even have conceived of it. In the early 1800s, Napoleon would have thought it impossible. But then, neither of them lived in the 21st century. We have just finished circumnavigating the globe in sixty-eight days, highlighted by visits to both of their homelands, with Normandy, Brittany, and Corsica being our principal des

flickr photo link We have just finished an expectation-exceeding week in the Maldives, as our side trip from a two-month post-retirement relaxed stay in Penang. The Islamic Republic of the Maldives, southwest of Sri Lanka, consists of 1,196 islands—most uninhabited—comprising 26 island groups (atolls) spanning a north-south orientation of just under 1,000 km, but with a total landmass of only 298 km² (Asia's lowest). The islands, all less than 8 km long, are made from coral

"We just sold our 1996 Volvo for $1700! We had bought it in 2010 for $2200- so that means we paid only $500 for our car for fourteen and a half years!", my wife boasted in a WhatsApp text to her siblings. Minutes later I was doing the same to my parents. I guess that makes us both cheapskates. In his "Guess How Much" racial financial stereotyping routine, Jimmy Yang states "Asian people love to brag about how little money we spent on something...because the art is in the savi