@QMS
Thanks for the info on Interstates back east.
I lived in Georgia for a year or so and all I knew was I-75. I thought it "carried ya" all the way to New York, as the locals would say.
I had AT&T on a flip phone back then and service was atrocious.
And showing my age here, was born in West Virginia before there were Interstates. Everything was Route 66 or Hiway 41. And Ohio State Patrol carnage films when you wanted out of a speeding ticket.
LOL

The major north-south route on the east coast is I-95. I have no idea what wifi coverage
is like along it. On the other hand, I-75 starts (or ends) in southern central FL and shoots
all the way up to northern Michigan thru Toledo and Destroyit.

Hope the trip was worth it!

@soryang
Russian or Chinese was looked at. But I'm getting too old to visit or move there.
China and Korea are ancient civilizations whose languages have remained cultural icons.
Just getting past the hundreds of characters and committing them to memory would be a feat in itself.
Maybe I can travel there someday with Yandex riding shotgun.
I once read a Greek book (translated) of plays by Aristophanes from the year 450 BC. The plotlines of today seem to have been taken from him. The comedy is just as funny and the subject matter is surprisingly relevant today.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Thank for stopping by.

I traveled overseas a fair amount when I was young, mostly on the cheap, largely courtesy of Uncle Sam. Later in life after I gave up on a "career," I traveled over the road for ten years driving a big rig in the US. For these reasons I not real fond of traveling, or maybe I just exhausted myself adapting to travel. (How many times have I driven up and down 1-75 or I-95? Hundreds? Thousands?) I've been told that's not traveling. Gee I wonder why the USN has trouble recruiting. (That's not a real cruise!)

Ms. So is still a big international traveler. She's always watching the travelogues when she's home and taking notes for the next trip. After years of traveling here and there, I appreciate staying in one place. Prophetically, one of my longtime neighbors once said sometime before the last flood, "I'm not leaving my home even if it falls down around me."

While Ms. So was overseas I got the bug to look at the basic HSKs again, which lead me on a journey of a sort. I just want to try to read it, I'll never be able to speak or understand it, listening. I listened to various learning theories about studying Chinese from the online linguists. I've been kind of just browsing around. I like to translate Korean popular songs, so when I was looking at some China dynastic overview history lesson (in English of course), I learned one of the Chinese classics is known as the book of songs. I'm just scratching the surface of a couple of poems mostly with the help of a youtube channel Dr. Gao's classroom. The first one, very rudimentary by Li Bai (8th Century) that Chinese children learn in grade school and can recite by heart is this-

Merry Christmas 聖誕節快樂

성탄절 와 새해를 즐겁게 보내기를 기원합니다 Wishing you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Thanks for OT SOE!

@humphrey
at Karlof1's substack ( https://karlof1.substack.com/p/putin-meets-with-heads-of-state-duma ) where he meets with the heads of opposition parties, of which there are five main ones, to discuss the past and future priorities of the country.
All were in full support of what he has accomplished and praise his commitment to mother Russia and her people.
None have chosen to challenge him in the coming election.
All of them have recognized the existential threat to their sovereignty posed by the West and have committed themselves and their parties to united support.
As I have posted before, our children are our most valuable asset.
Putin has seen that vision also. He has committed a high priority to children's education, health, and the true history of Russia.
He and the heads of opposition parties all see this as a form of National Defense.
Unlike here, where garlic from China is a national threat.
Thanks for the post, humphrey.

hopefully you are refreshed and ready for what comes next.

Genocide Joe seems to have a problem.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4367713-biden-losing-ground-democr...

President Biden needs to change his campaign messaging as he is “losing ground” every month, one Democratic pollster said.

Stanley Greenberg said Monday in an interview on CNN’s “Inside Politics” that Biden’s campaign needs to focus on telling voters how he plans to deal with rising inflation, holding large companies accountable and how they will address “profiteering” among politicians.

Despite some recent positive indicators about the economy, Greenberg said the only thing that matters among voters is how many months they have “struggled to deal with inflation.” This comes as a recent poll found more than half of voters feel worse off personally during Biden’s presidency.

“They are losing ground every month,” Greenberg told CNN’s Jim Acosta.

Biden’s approval rating hit a record low Monday, with 34 percent saying they approve of his job in the White House in a Monmouth University poll. Greenberg said Biden needs to appeal to Americans o are dealing with inflation to help regain support.

“What the president currently is doing, is still talking about progress,” he said. “And you can’t talk about progress when three-quarters of the country think we’re on the wrong track. So you have to stop on the notion that we’re making progress. You have to get where people are, and where they are is on the rising prices.”