WE'RE BACK IN HONOLULU

But first: MOSCOW/WASHINGTON/KYIV >> President Donald Trump said today that Russia and Ukraine “will immediately start negotiations” toward a ceasefire and an end to their three-year-old war, speaking after he held a call with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Photos and a video about our departure from Vancouver on Air Canada.

Air Canada Lounge cuisine of soup with beer, Bloody Mary, Johnny Walker Black Label on rocks and sparkling rosé.

Our plane, showing snow still on Vancouver mountain on May 18.

Airline meal.

Final view of Canada.

This is a weird photo of our plane right over Diamond Head.

Returned home at 9:15PM. Walked 3641 steps.

Great night sleep. So anyway, our 33-day trip was wonderful.

We went to the Osaka Expo twice.

Amazingly enough, we won the lottery on both days, for we got to use their motor scooter each day. FREE!!! Four for four. The odds of this happening had to be 100 to one for this to occur.
We still walked a lot, for we had to park the scooter in certain locations, and walk to the pavilions. However, if we had had to walk where we went, my pedometer would have showed more than 20,000 steps, or more than 10 miles, each day.
The expo itself was like all of those I've been to in the past. Great architecture, international mix of cuisine, lot of general excitement and so forth.
Will I be able to get to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for Expo 2030?

Top candidates for 2035 appear to be Berlin, Cairo and Busan. Looks like Busan will again be disappointed, for there is a tendency to move these sites around the world, and the last European expo was Milan in 2015. Of course, I was there.

We then caught the Oceania Riviera for a 19-day cruise from Yokohama to Vancouver.

We toured Hakodate and Otaru/Sapporo.
But then we got to the month of May, and the cruise entered cold and mostly wet weather. The seas, though, never got dangerous.
The food was early on outstanding. Then the bane of long tours. The cuisine becomes cafeteria food. Made us appreciate what is served at 15 Craigside.
Crossed the International Date Line on May 3, and had two May 3s, back to back.

One meal featured an unagi bowl station, the best one dish they had on this cruise. There was also a sushi/sashimi bar.

My May 4 posting was entitled, HOW THE USA GOT GREAT.

1789, the size of the USA was 864,746 square miles.
We than mostly acquired, but also kind of stole, territories that got us up to 3,531,905 square miles, part of this being the Alaska purchase in 1867 for $7.2 million from Russia. James Polk was president for much of this period.
Now I understand why Donald Trump wants to add Canada and Greenland, for doing so would more than double our land area to 8,226,286 square miles, making us the largest country in the world....to Russia's 6,601,668 square miles.

A highlight was the Hudson Glacier.

Incidentally, that blue area at the front of our ship was like our own private veranda, for this portion was open to passengers for only few hours that day only. Our stateroom was up front, so we could see both starboard and port sides all the time. If we ever again go on a cruise, we will attempt to get a similar cabin.

On May 13 I had an in-depth update on deep seabed mining, a controversial subject with potentially important international and resource implications. I once was an authority on the subject. Hawaii is virtually next door to the most promising site, the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone.

Then we finally arrived in Vancouver. Our hotel, the Marriott Pinnacle is a 5-minute walk from Canada Place, the fourth largest cruise port in the world. We took the Big Red Bus three times around Vancouver, and had three restaurant lunches. That's about all we did in five days. I'm at the stage where I enjoy doing nothing much. The lunches were really outstanding.

Today, went to my toe-nail cutting doctor, shopped at Marukai, and am looking forward to a comfortable life of security and comfort at 15 Craigside.

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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