#171 A Hiatus from travel

Reporting from Clark, Philippines. I have been home for about two weeks now. And, as I have said elsewhere, I am exhausted from traveling. It feels so good simply to be in a place that over the years has become extremely comfortable for me. I have to admit, I don’t like the Philippines very much, principally because I have been involved in businesses here. And one becomes burned out by the corruption and the inefficiency. The same happened to me when I was living in Thailand and attempted to start a business. Thailand, when one simply lives there, without being involved in any of the local drama, is wonderful. However, since the businesses that I am involved with are actually here in the Philippines, it is unlikely that I will ever be able to disentangle the country from the businesses. But I do love this house. And, it is possible, that even if I’m not involved in the businesses, I would probably still maintain this residence anyway. It is a beautiful house and right next to an airport.

I am, for the first time in my life, contemplating the purchase of a condominium. In Thailand. In Pattaya. There is an area of town I have always liked, and if I ever lived there then I would’ve chosen to try to find a house in that area. And, pure serendipity, a friend of mine had another friend who is looking to sell his condo in almost the exact location that I would like to live. So, my next trip to Thailand, I plan to look at this and see whether the purchasing said condominium is a viable alternative for me. In fact it is kind of on the other side of the hill from the sign below.

Very good news. I don’t actually have it in my hands yet, but I expect that my St. Kitts and Nevis passport should be with me within the next 4 to 5 weeks. Just two weeks ago, I received word that they had approved the application, I then wire transferred the money, got verification they received it, and am waiting for what they call “due diligence”. It is difficult to describe exactly how I feel about this. I have been working on this for so long and to finally get at least the first one … A great sense of relief? Yes. Now, no matter what happens with the United States, I at least have one backup passport. Being the rational scientist I am, there is no connection between getting this passport and the Argentinian one, but on a visceral level, I am hoping to get good news about the Argentinian passport within the next few weeks as well. 😊

I am continuing to experiment on various health regimens. I have gone back to following intermittent fasting regularly. I am kicking myself a little bit, because, the book that I wrote about before, “The Great Cholesterol Myth”, already addressed some of the issues I have. High cholesterol and high uric acid. I am taking drugs to control both of those, but at the same time I am making yet another attempt to reduce my intake of processed carbohydrates attempt to control those biomarkers naturally.

I am also tackling, belatedly, a reorganization of all the files on my computer. With files dating back as far as the mid-90s, I have hundreds of thousands of files. Naturally, I will probably never need 98% of them. However, I am attempting to both organize them, as well as implement cloud storage on Dropbox and OneDrive in terms of keeping them accessible from anywhere, as well as secure. As is to be expected, the encryption implementation is the toughest. The product I was using, BoxCryptor, a really excellent product from a German company called Secomba Gmbh, got bought by Dropbox. Unfortunately, neither Secomba nor Dropbox itself has any information about what they are planning to do with BoxCryptor. Not wanting to get caught with a bunch of my personal files encrypted using software that is no longer supported, I spent an inordinate amount of time getting them pulled out of that system and now I’m examining other alternatives.

BTW, just to explain this, cloud services such as Dropbox and OneDrive, do in fact have the files encrypted upon their servers. However, they retain the encryption keys and that is not suitable if you really want to keep your file secure. You need an in-place encryption package so that the files that are sent out to those cloud storage services are in fact encrypted with keys you control. So even if the servers are hacked, or what is more likely, accessed by a government via a subpoena, then your encryption will not allow them to be read by 3rd parties.

I am trying to continue to study languages, French and Spanish at the moment. I found a new product. LingQ. I’m trying it. We’ll see. I also have heard about a methodology called extensive reading. Extensive reading means simply reading books in the target language at your level fairly rapidly. The idea is a lot of reading rather than intensive reading. Intensive reading, by the way, is where one analyzes the text while reading, and study specific grammatical structures, or vocabulary at the same time. Extensive reading is reading at a level where you’re probably getting between 95 to 90% of the vocabulary and you are simply reading for enjoyment. The key here, for me, is to find what they call “compelling” reading material. I have been finding that hard. But I have found six or eight books in Spanish, and a similar number in French, so I will try. Supposedly, doing this for a few months can drastically improve your conversational ability.

The other thing related to language learning that I have had a “duh” moment about, is listening skills. Steve Kaufman, a polyglot who speaks over 20 languages, and is the LingQ founder, has several videos where he talks very specifically about the need to have listening skills before anything else. And I totally agree. I can speak, read, and write French, Spanish, and Turkish. But my listening capability is bad. I have always blamed this on my hearing. But what if there is a way to overcome that? I am going to try it. I will work on listening and combining it with extensive reading. And I will try to work around my hearing issues by using good quality headphones or ear buds.

My plans for this year are decidedly up in the air. Rather than going back to Thailand, I don’t want to do anymore travel to South America except to go pick up my Argentinian passport. If you look at my travel since May 2021 now you understand perhaps why I am a little burned down travel.

May – August 2021: US -> Turkey -> Bulgaria -> Turkey -> US

September – November 2021: US -> Costa Rica -> Panama -> Colombia -> US

December 2021: US -> Colombia

January 2022: Colombia -> US [COVID]

February – March 2022: US -> Bulgaria

March – June 2022: Bulgaria -> Philippines -> Thailand -> Philippines -> Colombia -> Argentina -> Philippines

June – December 2022: Philippines -> Argentina -> Philippines -> Thailand -> Philippines -> Thailand -> Vietnam

January 2023: Vietnam -> Thailand -> Philippines

No wonder I’m tired.

Okay. That is it for now. 😊