If given a choice to live wherever I would want for the rest of my life, it would be where I am at 15 Craigside.  I'm at the stage of my life now where I would prefer to luxuriate in the security and comfort of this seniors' residence than travel.  On the other hand, we do depart Honolulu tomorrow for two months of adventure in the Orient, including two cruises.  But I'll miss the following. Well, I hate injections, but a pharmacy comes to our building to vaccinate the residents. This advantage is further aided by the clinic checking our vitals later that day and the next. Activities galore, perhaps a dozen a day, mostly exercise classes to improve balance and strength, etc.  However, various tea times, wine downs and cocktail hours. We have regular karaoke sessions.  The following featuring fabulous karaoke DJ Doug Oshiro.   We are served three meals a day, but I rarely actually eat in the dining room.  I like to enhance the provided dishes, so i...

 I'll get to more COVID-19 details tomorrow, but here is something from the AP: German Man Caught Trying to Get 90th COVID-19 Shot A 60-year-old man was caught at a vaccination center in Eilenburg in Saxony after trying to get jabbed for the second day in a row. The man, who was carrying several blank vaccination cards, allegedly received around 90 shots at vaccination centers across the state over a period of months. Police say he has been selling forged vaccination cards with real vaccine batch numbers to anti-vaxxers who crave the Covid passports that make access to public life in Germany much easier. It was not immediately clear what impact the 90 jabs — from different brands — had on the man’s health.   (Source:   AP ) On a slightly more serious note, China has totally locked down its largest city of Shanghai of 26 million. The country has jumped to 13,000 new cases, but this compares to 19K in the USA and 127K in South Korea, which is continuing to remove restrictio...

It has been 16 months since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  Give the Trump Administration a gold star for rushing development of the those vaccines, although, as I reported earlier,   the previous two pandemics also delivered vaccines in four months .  Can you imagine how many more than 4 million would have died if these current Delta and Delta Plus variants were the first to infect humans? The  countries suffering the most deaths  are the U.S. ( 622,821 ), Brazil ( 532,949 ) and India ( 408,0 72).  You'd never guess it, but Mexico is #4 with 234,675 deaths.  #5?  Peru with 194,249. About Mexico, clearly, they are underreporting cases because their mortality rate is 9%.  The world figure is 2%.  Thus, instead of 2.5 million cases, Mexico most probably has had 12 million cases, raising them from #15 to #4 in the world. There is something important about freedom and our personal rights, but I continue to be dismayed by the Biden's...

  From the   New York Times   this morning: There is a political angle to these trends, of course. The places with the lowest vaccination rates tend to be heavily Republican. In an average U.S. county that voted for Donald Trump, only 34 percent of people are fully vaccinated, according to New York Times data. In an average country that voted for Joe Biden, the share is 45 percent (and the share that has received at least one shot is higher) . Remember  Polar Vortex , a term that was tossed about when it got abnormally cold?  Well, there is a new one for today:  Heat Dome.  Or, better yet,  Millennium Heat Dome , for what is happening in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is ten times worse than a 100-year storm, a designation applied when something really bad occurs from Mother Nature. It was terrible this weekend, and could get worse today.  Yesterday,  Lytton BC reached 116 F .   Canada today might become the hottest...