While love and happiness prevail, my mind nevertheless wanders and wonders a lot.  I see homeless people and realize that with only a wrong decision or two, that could have been me.   I have been lucky,  Very lucky. I consider my life to be a success.  Of the  117 billion born , surely I rank in the top one-tenth of one percent.  In other words I am among the best 11.7 million  Homo sapiens  who ever lived.  I'm tempted to improve this by another order of magnitude to 1.17 million, for it has only been in the past century that life became tolerable for most, but all this analysis is meaningless, for what is success? In this thoughtful mood, I looked back on certain points in my life and wondered where I would be today if I made another decision.   A big one was, which college? As a junior at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was only an above-average student, with no athletic talent and little social skills. Then my life changed.  My blog describes this all. I did not bother to ap

 First, some latest information about COVID-19: Sweden now recommends a  second booster shot for people who are 80 and over . New York City has a vaccination mandate.  They just  fired 1430 employees  for not complying.  That turned out to be 0.4% of the 400,000 work force. About the Beijing Winter Olympics: Eileen Gu  of San Francisco, but representing China, won a silver medal in freeski slopestyle. Mikaela Schffrin  finished 18th in the women's downhill.  But she competed. Germany  won gold, silver and bronze medals in the two-man bobsled. Looks like 15-year old Russian figure skater  Kamila Valieva  ( right ) will be allowed to continue competing, and seems likely to gain a second gold on Thursday.  Something to do with being a minor and thus a "protected person."  Very troublesome decision, for Russia is already on probation for a variety of doping tests.  A little known heart medication, trimetazidine, is at the heart of the issue.  Very confusing judgement call whi

First, Happy Birthday Pat.  I still have not settled on my celebratory feast.   Today is Labor Day, and as is traditional for most holidays, I sometimes provide some background.  Here is one posting from  4 September 2017 , and at the bottom is mention of an early stage of Hurricane Irma.  She went on to become a Category 5 and caused $77 billion in damages in the Caribbean and Florida.  Incidentally, off the Carolinas right now is  Hurricane Larry  at 125 MPH.  Fortunately, he is aware of our Delta variant surge of cases and has decided not to visit the USA.  Borrowed from that article of four years ago is some wisdom from Garfield, which pretty much describes my weekend. Today I continue describing my life, but can send you to a series of 15 postings I had more than seven years ago, describing my life in chronological transitions: Part 1:  Overview and Early Youth . #2       Entering kindergarten :  traumatic. #3      Entering intermediate school :   diffficult. #4     Entering high