Note: (This above title quote actually makes sense now because it takes around 7 hours to fly from Bangkok to Narito Airport in Japan near Tokyo. Then it takes 11 or 12 hours to get to San Francisco from Japan end note:
Out of the 5 of us 4 of us had Giardia and I think my case and my son's case who was 10 years old then were the worst. I have never been skinnier than when I returned from Asia on March 26th 1986.
I have some notes likely I made either at home or at the CDF Fire Lookout which I did for one more summer from I think May through October of 1986. I did this mostly because of the amazing healthcare benefits of working for CDF through California state Government then. At that point they hadn't switched to Satellite tracking of fires yet and still relied on human beings to be there watching for smoke to spot fires from lookouts to direct planes and Fire Engines to fire before they became more serious or complete disasters. I'm not sure one of the lookouts on Chalone Peak survived lightning strikes though because the insulated thing you were supposed to stand or sit on while your lookout was being struck with lightning she wasn't standing or sitting on when her lookout was hit. So, I'm not entirely sure whether or not she survived these lightning strikes. However, I tend to take lightning strikes pretty seriously because I am a trained electrician by my father from age 10 to 17 summers and weekends so the power of a lightning bolt I take very seriously hitting my lookout then as a direct result of being shocked literally hundreds or thousands of times by voltages from 12 volts to 110 volts to 220 volts. And 220 volts is debatable whether you can survive that. and if you are standing in water when you are hit with 110 volts you likely are dead too.
So, anyway when lightning was striking near my lookout I got on the insulated thing they had for us so we wouldn't die and I guess this other lady lookout didn't and I heard the fire engine going up the Chalone peak to rescue her. However, because I never heard from her again on the radio it might mean she was either dead or incapacitated permanently by that lightning strike.
Here is something I wrote around May 27th 1986 when I was interested in Learning Tibetan. However, over time I realized while I was raising a family of mostly teenagers then this wasn't a practical thing to do like it might have been while I was going to college and still single 10 or 15 years before.
May 27th 1986
Notes on Tibetan:
There are 30 consonents and 5 vowels.
In words each letter is one syllable (most of the time)
For example, Ka pin da ka is four syllables which is a type of Bird
little squiggles of different kinds are added to the basic letters to change the sound or meaning or both.
Sometimes letters are placed on top of each other to make different sounds.
Here are 30 consonants and 5 vowels
1. Ka 17. Tsa
2. Kha 18. Tsha
3 Ga 19, dsa
4. Na 20, wa
5. ca. 21. Sha
6. cha 22. Za
7. ja 23. Ha
8. na 24. ya
9 Ta 25. Ra
10. tha 26. La
11. da 27. Ca
12. na 28. SA
13. Pa 29. Ha
14. pha 30. a
15 ba
16. ma
The Vowels were harder for me to make sense of:
1. a
2. i
3. u
4 I couldn't make full sense of this vowel
5. o
However, this language is not Latin or Germanic Based like we are used to in the U.S.
