I AM STILL PEAKING

A little more than month ago, on Day 2 of the Great Tohoku Cataclysm, as I was about to fly into Narita (Tokyo airport), I surmised that I had reached the peak of my life.  Well, I was wrong.  This is Day 35 of the Great Tohoku Disaster, I'm back home, and I just had the my best dinner of my life.

First, I walked nine holes with my colleagues at the Ala Wai Golf Course:  Kwok Ho (he was chairman of a department in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii, and I think was, a very long time ago, a developmental member of the Chinese Olympic basketball team), his wife Cathy, and Ed Cheng (past chairman of the Civil Engineering Department).  My first attempt at golf in two months was a perfect drive past those two coconut trees, so that my next shot was a nine iron to the green.  Well, the rest of the game was not worthy of reportage.

I returned home to take a bath with various potions collected on my recent trip with a Stanford Alumni Chardonnay.  I then went up to my roof to be greeted by smiling friends:

including the Hawaii State flower, which is a yellow hibiscus.

I then, barbequed a Costo blue plate rib eye:

watching the sunset over Honolulu:

The evening ended with:

The cigar is a Ghurka congnac crystal:

which I had been saving for a very long time.  Just opening it was a challenge.  I also had a Yoichi 20 year old single malt, which at the latest world tasting, was selected as the #1 scotch, beating anything from Scotland:

and a Stanford Alumni Chardonnay:

My life, apparently, is still peaking, for tomorrow I golf with friends at Coral Creek, to be followed on Saturday, with my regular group at the Ala Wai Golf course.  I have good reason to believe that the best is yet to come, for soon, I then move on to the Kenji Sumida golf safari to Nevada and Utah, where David Block, former director of the Florida Solar Energy Center, will join us.  While I suffer, truly, with the memory of Japan and Tohuku, life must go on.

Tom Burnett sent me a weather pattern that looks ominous if I was still in Tokyo.  Considering the nuclear accident level 7 at Fukushima, as I said before, I'm glad to be home.

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