Every time I make a blog entry I have about a thousand excuses why I did not do so earlier. So now I decided to stop this nonsense - by now you know anyway that I always have another excuse!!!

Now it is very close to Xmas and I am busy baking my Swiss Xmas cookies for all my friends but while they are baking in the oven, I am trying to send you my

VERY BEST WISHES FOR A VERY HAPPY XMAS AND
A GOOD NEW YEAR!

I hope you will have a very nice holiday season. For me it has already started not only with baking cookies but all kinds of parties and get togethers. It is a beautiful end of a very good year.

As I told you in my last update, I have got involved here with some efforts to replicate the On Lok/Pace program - depending on the sponsors it has different names: Singapace and Spice!! It was kind of a long haul since I got here in August of 2009 but I now see some real efforts to fund and start these programs.

In November I took a group of people, from the organization I am closely associated with, for a visit to On Lok in San Francisco and the Pace project in Portland Or. It was a very successful effort and for me personally it also gave me an opportunity to visit with old friends. One of the nicest events was a get together with some of the old employees at On Lok whom I still worked with. To my surprise there are still 76 of them active in the program! I am attaching a small slideshow one of "my" old On Lok drivers, Robert Wong, prepared.

Now I am "on vacation" till the beginning of the year when we will try to start preparing to open the first Day Health Center at Hua Mei on April 1, 2011. Interestingly enough this is just about 38 years after we opened our first one in the old burned out bar on Broadway in San Francisco! I hope it will last as long!

Beside all that I am enjoying my new hobby of painting. Thought I would be able to paint a Xmas card for you but baking Xmas cookies for my local friends had to be a priority, so I just added one of my trials.

For the time being I am pretty sedentary but still hope to visit either Laos or Myanmar sometimes later in the year. So expect another slide show when that happens. Though when I have time I hope to do one on Singapore whose charm is often not known.

For today all the best!