Tigris

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I read Blood Meridian first

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Impressive, if I'd started with Blood Meridian I may never have read another. But I'm a huge Cormac fan. Read them all, even the early ones like The Orchard Keeper and Suttree which might be my favorite of his.

Linda Ronstadt could do it all.

Emmylou Harris has my favorite voice.

Nope, but in 19823 at the Centroplex. Great show.

J. Geils was at the Assembly Center shortly after and was outstanding.

Those were the last two decent concerts at the Assembly for a while.

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I think the bottom is behind us

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That's the way it usually happens.

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they will soon reach the point of military collapse

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The thing is that you've been saying this for at least 2 years. Define "soon" please. I think you understand a Russian attack up the Fulda Gap, but to be honest I don't think you have a grasp of the current battlefront.

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the most important thing I learned is that I didn't want to work at a plant

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The funny thing is that's where I always wanted to work. Where the rubber meets the road. To each their own. I still love to get into a plant when I can for work. Everything there is real.

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When a botfly lays eggs on your skin and the larvae grows inside you. They have some videos but here is a picture showing the extraction.

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It's really not all that rare in central america/tropical south america. A friend who is a bird guide and lives in Costa Rica has had 3 botflies. When we were in Guyana we watched as a local guide had 3 of them cut out by his buddies, I think he's had at least a dozen. They were not anywhere as large as the one in your photo, but the idea is creepy. My Costa Rica friend nearly died from dengue fever last year (his second time). And an Australian guide friend nearly died from Malaria after a trip to New Guinea. There are a lot of nasty diseases outside the US. None of them scare me as much as some of the ones mentioned in this thread.

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Kalingrsd wss German until WWII. Russia took it over as a result, moved Germans out and brought hundreds of thousand Russians in.

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Same thing they did to Crimea. It was mostly a land of ethnic Tatars. Stalin shipped them out and the ethnic Russians in. Stalin was very effective in his ethnic cleansing of Kaliningrad and Crimea (and to a lesser extent Ukraine with his Holodomor progrom). "Returning" Crimea to Ukraine has always been dubious, but I do think it should become the Tatar homeland again with a right of return of all Tatars displaced (many who live in Turkey and influence Turkish policy).

Twice.

Hiking high in the mountains, an older gentleman (78) keeled over with a heart attack. He'd been having heart problems before the trip and knew it was a risk but refused to take it easy, it just wasn't his nature. We tried CPR for a half hour before the professionals arrived but it did no good. Heart attack is not as peaceful a way to go as I had thought.

Holding a close relative's hand at the hospital when it was their time. They really were gone already, it was mostly peaceful.

Subaru Outback? Did you sleep in the back of the car as well as in the tent shown in your photo? I'm planning to do a major road trip later this year in an Outback and one reason I bought it was that the back bed is long enough to lay flat and sleep in. I've done it before and it really simplifies things, though I'll probably take a tent too. Probably I'll add a hitch and use a hitch based cargo carrier/bag. Ultimately I may get something larger like a van or truck camper, but before that I want to try a bare bones road trip. I've used a VW camper van in the past and liked it aside from the mechanical problems; definitely don't want a full sized RV, and could possibly be happy with just an Outback and want to start there this time around.