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 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.
I, we (my fellow passengers) are flying at 36,000ft on a flight from New York’s JFK to Honolulu in Hawaii. The flight time is 9 hours and 51 minutes. Add onto that the 3½ hours that we spent on the tarmac at JFK due to a technical problem. We are currently about 3¼ hours into the flight. In that time I have had something to eat, watched a little on the inflight entertainment (never something that I spend much time with), and slept.
I can take a lot of photographs, probably more when I am on the move than when I am at home, but I notice that I have a tendency to do little with them. Occasionally I’ll go back and look through them, maybe edit one or two, but otherwise they just sit there.
What might I do with them? Thoughts that come to mind include,
share them with family and friends.
Joana Macy has died at the age of 96. I found out this morning while browsing my RSS feeds and a post on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
Discovering Macy’s work around 25 years ago had a profound effect on me. She tied together for me my Buddhist practice and concern for the environmental crises, taking me into the world of Deep Ecology, a body of thought that was missing from my life, but started to tie up some loose ends and deepen my reflection.
Two weeks ago I had no idea who Benjamin Clementine was, though I had unknowingly listened to a track of his used by Apple in their opening credits to The Morning Show.
Walking through the old Jewish Quarter of Seville last week the narrow streets were a relief from the baking sun above. While still hot, the narrowness of the streets did not allow the sun in and the perennial shade kept an element of the heat at bay.
When I first arrived in Portugal, specifically the Alentejo countryside, I wondered why all the houses were shuttered in the middle of the day? Why close your windows and shut out a beautiful sunny day? And anyway, it must feel so claustrophobic? “Let the light in, enjoy the sun," says the know all visitor. There’s plenty of time to close windows at night. “I’m going to leave them open."
Some music seems to allow me to see past what I perceive to be all the blocks in my life, all the limitations, all those invisible and maybe not so invisible barriers preventing me from moving forward. I hear a specific piece of music and doors and windows are suddenly flung open. The grime is cleared from my foggy mind and I see before me a world of possibilities where there were none before.
Our neighbours from Maui stopped by over lunch two days ago to visit us in Alcácer do Sal. They had been up north in Ericeira visiting their daughter’s family and were heading to the Algarve for a long weekend. Their visit was all too brief, but in their favour they managed to get lost coming into town, which negated us having to take them around town - they did the self-guided tour!
I’ve probably made reference to this before on my blog:
When I get a job done that I have put off, I wonder why I put it off in the first place?
What was I thinking? With the job done I find myself sitting in the satisfaction of having completed something. If I have done it well, there is added icing on the cake. There is also not the added weight of jobs looming over me - and inevitably that weight increasing as more jobs are put off.
I have had a productive month or so on the Do It Yourself front. I have,
Installed a new AC filter; Installed some outside lights; Installed a new light switch; And yesterday repaired our washing machine. I probably took longer with those jobs than a professional, but for me there is just the satisfaction of getting a job done without making that call and scheduling a time for someone to come round.
Well, this I learnt (I prefer the full English to the shorthands, TIL, though they have their place in a quick text) today. Hawai’i’s coral reefs are protected from storm damage by an insurance policy.
It has been a while, but The Bunker has undergone some minor updates. Or maybe it is some ”edits” to what was already there? Certainly not a full blown new mural.