Yesterday and the day before I had some major computer problems as I tried to set up a new configuration with a new desktop. Some hardware just wouldn’t work and that problem was made worse by a refusal to connect to the wi-fi. The result: I couldn’t post anything the last two days.
Category: Daily Life in the USA
Here and There, Then and Now
After 42 years in Asia, I returned home to Kentucky. But it isn’t the home I left. Things I saw THEN are different NOW. Life HERE is different from life THERE. Here is another sample of the differences.
THEN
When I left the US in the early 1980s, everyone on the TV commercials spoke “Murican”.
NOW
Now it seems it’s almost the norm to have an accented English for the voices.
Kentucy Posts
Here are two Kentucky-related posts for today.
Story #2
They followed me home!
Today I had to take my Trek e-bike to the shop where I bought it to have an ordered part installed. On the shop floor were these three boxes with newly arrived Trek bikes to be sold.
Notice what the labels on the box ends say: “Made in Cambodia”! My bike was also made in Cambodia where bicycles are becoming a major export.
Here and There, Then and Now
After returning from 40 years in India, Hong Kong, and Cambodia, I have found many parts of daily life in the US quite a contrast to similar life experiences abroad. I will be listing some of the samples of life Here and There and also Then and Now.
One difference I notice most often is the time of sunset in Louisville compared to sunset in Phnom Penh. Phnom Penh’s latitude is 11º, near the equator, and in the tropics the sun sets early and quickly, without much dusk. Usually Phnom Penh was dark by 7:00 PM.
Louisville is latitude 38º and here sunset is after 9:00 PM and darkness about 9:45 PM or later. I keep getting surprised when I look out the window at night and realize it’s after 9:00 o’clock and the sun is still up!
Once again…
When I got on my bike yesterday, I found the left brake lever just flopping loosely. A hinge pin was missing on the caliper. Today I took the bike to the shop that sold it. They looked for a replacement part in their junk box but didn’t have one and will have to order it. To give me back my front brake, the tech put a bolt in the in hole and tightened it with a set screw and that will hold till they get the proper part.
Remember your Latin?
Happy semiquincentennial anniversary!
America and God?
O God who loves us, on this Independence Day, we pause to thank You for the blessings of liberty, peace, and the pursuit of happiness. We honor the sacrifices of those who secure our freedoms and protect our lives, and we ask that You watch over them.
Guide our nation’s leaders with wisdom and compassion. Heal our divisions, and help us to build a society rooted in justice, unity, and mutual respect for all people. May we use our freedom to serve one another and strive for the common good.
Juneteenth
The challenge continues
Some excerpts from an article by Kelly Brown Douglas, Stephanie Spellers, and Winnie Varghese in Religious News Service (June 18, 2026):
At the time of Juneteenth in 1865, “Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor General Order No. 3 [announcing slaves were free] was yet true. Both ushered in a new reality of “unfreedom.” Both expressed the enduring tension within the American freedom experiment itself: the gap between our proclaimed ideals and our lived realities.”
In our experience today, “The story of freedom is unfinished in a nation that pledges “liberty and justice for all,” while it systematically advances policies, practices and ideologies that diminish human dignity.”
“Here is what we know: Freedom is not an achievement to be declared and celebrated once and for all. The work of freedom is perpetually unfinished because the forces that threaten it continually take new forms, as we see today in restrictions on voting rights, challenges to citizenship and the denial of due process to immigrants.”