This page contains longer, titled posts that I have made to my blog, so as to more easily separate them from other posts that I make here. If you would like to subscribe to the feed for this page, point your RSS reader here.
I have just gone searching back through my blog. It seems that I have written about migraines on a number of occasions. There is probably a reason for that - I get migraines with irregular frequency.
I have another migraine right now.
This migraine has come two weeks after the last one cleared, and that one lasted four days. I have no idea what caused this one. In fact I don’t have any idea what have caused any of the migraines that I have had since I was in my mid-teens.
I love this recent post by Alexandra Wolfe about Time. Profound and special.
It’s also a worthwhile reflection when all around you feels stuck or not going well - in time it will all turn to dust, it will all be a distant memory.
Anyway, Alex’s post felt all the more pertinent to me as I had just returned from a visit to the island of O’ahu. In the Hawai’i island chain, O’ahu is older than Maui.
I was sitting writing a post yesterday when one of my grandson’s showed up. He asked if he could do some typing - I was using the portable keyboard that bought for my iPhone a year ago. So I passed the keyboard over to him and he started running his fingers across the keyboard.
Here’s a section of what he wrote. If you look carefully you can see his name.
The migraine might not have gone, but acupuncture worked wonders yesterday. I felt like a pin cushion as I lay on the therapy table. Some of the needles were for the migraine, others for other disparate murmurings that my acupuncturist could detect in my pulses.
Needles were placed in my ear. These were for the migraine I was told. When one went in I almost left the table. With an apology, my acupuncturist rarely hits a point that hurts that much, he tried again.
I just watched this interview with Pete Townsend by Steven Colbert on The Late Show. I was watching something unrelated on YouTube, noticed this interview in the list of videos to the right and decided to click on it. I honestly didn’t expect to get very far with it, I’m on my way to bed, but I found the conversation fascinating.
Pete Townsend is 80 years old, he says so in the interview, and just has so much to share from his 50 years in the music business…and life.
I don’t know where this post will go? I am writing with a migraine. My head is telling me to rest, to get away from the screen. However it is raining outside, no one is around and I had a full and emotional weekend and feel that I want to just get some words out. I have ideas of what those words might cover and those ideas are all vying for my attention so I don’t think any one subject will arise front and center, and some will probably not even make an appearance here. It’s almost as though I have to get the mess out before anything else can make its presence felt.
I’m returning here to the subject of RSS Readers mainly because I wrote about them a year ago here and here and I feel as though those posts are now misleading of the the landscape that I now reside in. Not completely, but some clarification could be needed…should you be interested!
One thing that our increasingly wet weather has produced is a lot of snails. They are everywhere…outside, that is. I don’t think that I have ever seen so many here?
If I am walking around outside I have to watch where I am putting my feet, especially at night when they are most active. There is nothing worse than that crunch as I step one, sadly ending another life.
Driving from the north east of the island, The Bunker is visible from a distance. If you are aware of what the last painting looked like, you’ll notice any changes as you approach the field from the east. This morning I did notice a difference, though found it hard to believe given that it was updated only a couple of days ago. I was early and had time, so I pulled over to jump the fence and walk over to the building.
Last week’s busyness and frustration saw me not posting any rainbow photos. That does not mean that there were none, as there most certainly were. I captured a number of them and am now posting them here in order to catch up.
Well this all started with David over at Forking Mad back in April 2025. Since then a few others have jumped in, take a look at the Community Echoes at the end of this post.
Now, less than a week before November in the same year, and I have caught up with the questions and decided to give them a go.
I noticed a new face to The Bunker as I drove by yesterday, but time did not allow me to stop, clamber over the gate, walk across the field and take a photo. So passing that way this morning, and having time to do all of the above…I did so!
I spent today making a few cosmetic changes to my website.
For the most part longer posts to my blog are headed with a title. This isn’t always true. There are a couple of longer posts which are without a title, but it is true enough for that to be a guiding light for how to find a longer post here. Thinking that some visitors might prefer to go straight to longer posts, or at least have a doorway that leads directly to them, I have added a new menu item to the navigation bar, Longer Reads.
The 98th Maui County Fair ran for four days, ending on Sunday October 5th. This was the first County Fair since COVID, and from what I have heard and experienced was packed from the day that it opened. I’ve read it reported that 30,000 people were in attendance on some days (every day?). Waiting for rides at times, especially going into the weekend evenings, was 45 minutes to an hour.
With a dose of curiosity I recently asked Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT the following question,
“Can you please look at the website www.crossingthethreshold.net and tell me what sort of person you think David Johnson is?"
When I make use of AI, ChatGPT has been the platform that I go to. Why? Probably because as far as I am aware it was the first to appear for mainstream use, I started tinkering with it and over time have got used to its idiosyncrasies.
I have just read BinaryDigit’s Trying to Blog More Often. This was responded to in turn by,
Robert Birming and his post, Write whatever whenever, Sylvia and her post, Blogging for joy’s sake, and Alexandra and her post, For the love of the written word. There are possibly others out there as well? Do let me know if you are one.
Why do I blog? I find it hard to put my finger on one solid reason,
This will probably sound eternally ungrateful to those who would love some good weather, but I am getting fed up with these days of clear blue skies and hot sun! We are in the second week of October for goodness sake. Autumn is here. Where is the rain? In the past this has been a time to start dropping into the rainy season. Maybe not everyday, but at least enough rain to keep the world around us green…and to spice up the weather….
I know that it is easy to exaggerate the severity of events, but a bush fire here on north shore of Maui this afternoon has set phones buzzing with alerts, road closures and stores closing in the town of Paia. I have been nowhere near that area today, so cannot speak to what is exactly happening on the ground (though friends live and work nearby). However, I can see smoke rising over the hills to the west. The town of Paia, which is just north of the fire, is only twenty minutes drive away.
Reading this recent story by Robert Birming reminded me of a story from when I was in my teens and going to school in England.
I use to cycle to school, enjoying the freedom it gave me, being able to dodge in and out of the traffic as the cars sat waiting at junctions and roundabouts during the early morning rush hour.
I remember one day passing one of the school’s physical education teachers who was walking to work.
If I am walking around a museum, you will probably find me quietly taking in what I am looking at. If I am walking through or looking out on a landscape or wilderness, I will no doubt be doing that in silence. Just taking in what that scene is saying to me, how I am seeing it, how it is moving me. I don’t need in that moment to create an external commentary on what I am looking at.
Browsing a thread on Mastodon this morning I learnt that it is not possible to remotely deauthorize a Kobo eReader. That came as a shock to me. This is not a good situation if you have had your Kobo eReader stolen, as was the case with the original poster of the thread that I was reading, or you loose it.
Last night I was sitting reading a book on my Kobo Libra H2O, when notification of an update for the eReader popped up. Earlier this year Pocket, the read later service, announced that it was being discontinued. Pocket was integrated with Kobo devices so that web pages could be read later on Kobo. Although I am not a heavy user of read later tools - I tend to collect rather than read - I did appreciate being able to keep a handful of articles so that I could read them at the end of the day through my Kobo screen rather than on my Apple devices.
Saturday evening I went to the wedding of a man who sits in my men’s group. We celebrated on the slopes of Haleakala as the sun set, looking across the island to the cloud covered West Maui Mountains, and across the Pacific to the island of Lanai.
On Sunday afternoon we went to a Celebration of Life ceremony for a dear friend who passed away quite suddenly. Many, many family and friends came to share in honour the recently departed, sharing stories of her life late into the night.
There’s a quote that I like, so much so that I wouldn’t be surprised if I have used it elsewhere on my blog. It comes from the book Danziger’s Travels. The quote comes from the closing pages of the book. The author, Nick Danziger, has just returned from an extraordinary 18 month journey across Asia, following the Silk Road. He is sitting in his parents' home in Southern England, writing his book and reflecting on his trip.
I learnt to drive in the UK on a manual, stick shift car, and drove manual cars until I was in my forties. Then I moved to the United States and started driving automatic cars (and on the other side of the road).
For the last two and a half months I have been in Europe driving manual cars again. Cost considerations took us down that route when we were looking to lease a car.