My daughter lives in Beverly Hills, California and we share photographs of our respective abodes. I had sent her a recent picture of Spring…

Christl and I went on a search for palm trees, beach sand, and swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. We found all of these and much more on a recent ten-day trip to Sanibel Island and St. Petersburg, Florida. It was bitter-sweet visit because the last time we visited Florida…

It was devastating to see the news coverage of the underwater volcano eruption on Nuku’alofa. Twenty two years ago, I was sailing as a crew member on one of the thirty-six sailboats of the Millennium Odyssee around-the-world rally in celebration of the approaching 21st Century. …

We are not restaurant goers. On Sundays we make an exception, and go to the San Francisco Coffee Company for coffee and Butter Brezen. The rest of the week we eat simple and healthy. For the start of the day we have two coffee maker for breakfast: an espresso maker…

Seventeen years ago I received the following message on “Pocketmail” (now an extinct email address using public telephones) from Guido Westerwelle (now deceased) the former leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) now led by Christian Lindner. Sixteen years later, Angela Merkel is stepping down from the Chancellorship. Over the…

Shortly before starting my second winter season in Bavaria, a new coffee shop opened up, smack dab in the middle, of the village [pardon my Urban Dictionary English talk]. I can see the coffee shop right from my corner office window, a block away. It reminds me of the decade…

I began appreciating the hundreds of years that went into the making of our village in the State of Bavaria during the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic and restrictions on travelling. From my third-floor corner office window, I stared down at remnants of a wall and a moat surrounding the…

The German poet Heinrich Heine was quoted in the nineteenth century, “Our summer is just a winter painted green, even the sun has to wear a flannel jacket with us if it doesn’t want to catch a cold.” I’ve been wearing an old moth-eaten Army-Navy sweater for months waiting for…

This past winter and spring seasons, Christl and I followed a white swan family, also called Mute Swans, through egg laying, to little cygnets, and on to full-grown adulthood. The cygnets then left their parents, as children are want to do, and mother and father swan went about their business…