My Sundays are usually devoted to something spiritual, and sometimes personal.  About the latter topic, in May of 2014 I began a 15-part series on my life transitions.    Part 1   dealt with an overview and my early youth, while  Part 15E  a couple months later was on the afterlife. Transitions  6  and 7 caught my attention, so today, I'll focus on one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1958, off I flew to Los Angeles.  This was the first time I had left Hawaii, and this was perhaps my most monumental transition: I was fortunate that my older brother was a structural engineer with the Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory (NCEL) at Port Hueneme, California.  He got me a slot as a draftsman there and I also stayed with he and his family the whole summer ( and repeated this two more times, with the summer between my junior and senior years in Hilo, Hawaii with C. Brewer--where the   little league baseball team   pla...

We are at-sea on the Norwegian Encore, and nothing much is happening on the ship worthy of mentioning.  So I will shift to something I have on my list of what to post if there is nothing particularly newsworthy.  I've been a faculty member of the University of Hawaii for over 50 years.  If my life on campus is a good indicator, I could say that getting the equivalent of a PhD and making a living as a professor or researcher at any college is as good as it can get.  Well, becoming a billionaire should be better, but I'm not complaining. Yet, we are all made differently with unique talents, or lack of them.  Some will get better educated through family pressure and finances.  Others will not have those opportunities.  Then, there or those who will be driven by sheer will and resolution.  Many have interests toward art, avocation, trade and lifestyles that don't require a college degree. To begin, at least get a high school degree, for those that don...

Last week for nostalgia Tuesday I presented a storyboard for   MY LIFE .  Today, I will complete it.  Note that the title has been adjusted, and will involuntarily someday need a finalization, as I have suggested. MY LIFE:  I'm not into anything like astrology, but the following sounds about right for me. I will be 84 this year.  I was born in 1940, and I have noticed that I had a challenging first half of my life, scrambling to keep up and lucky to attain what I accomplished.  Hmmm...how do I get rid of all those  I s?  Life got better from the age of 42, and has continued to improve to today. Started great, actually, for here is one calculation that the odds of me being born was 1 in 400,000,000,000,000, or 4 times 10 to the 14th power. But that was from Instagram, not a credible source.   Science Alert  uses that beginning analysis and goes on to say that the real odds of anyone being born is  1 in 10 to the 2,685,000th powe...