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.
There is an entrance around the back of the Bunker that lets one peer inside. It is possible to go inside, but that involves climbing over a railing, and for now I decided to make do with looking in.
Last night I was happy to find this photograph of the Bunker from a few years back. Yet another capture of this small building to fill in its changing faces.
While I have known others to do so and have read about others’ processes for finding theirs, I have never had a word that can inform me and be a beacon as I move through a year. The idea of having a word has sparked a curiosity in me, but finding that word has never come naturally to me, and I have not given myself time to the processes that people have used in finding their word and have kindly shared with me.
With 2024 drawing to a close, only 7 more hours left here in Hawaii, I thought that I would review the first year, first month actually of The Bunker project. Only a couple of new murals have been added since I started this project at the beginning of December, so most of this first batch of paintings are Bunker murals that I just happened to have captured over recent years.
Yesterday evening a group of us went up to Polipoli Spring State Recreation Area for sunset and a picnic. The views were spectacular, looking across the Valley Isle to the West Maui Mountains, with Lana’i in the distance.
This photograph is of the ocean facing side of the bunker. If anything happens here related to art, it is usually random graffiti. However, I took this photo because of the cow and her calf sitting in the shade of the building.
I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on Christmas Eve afternoon, as I do each year. I say ”each year,” though it is a fairly new tradition for me, perhaps stretching back to a few years before the COVID outbreak. I find that this short animation touches the Christmas spirit on so many levels. Whatever your experience of Christmas, I think that you will find it within this annual tradition.
When I went back to the cliffs to see the waves the day after the last posting, someone had defaced or graffitied over the image from the day before. So I thought to include that update here, as well as a photo giving another perspective of the location of the bunker. Here you see people out watching the big swell that was breaking that day. In the distance are the lowlands of the West Maui Mountains, as well as the island of Moloka’i.
Another double billing of the bunker. Aside from the front facing, main painting, some graffiti had also been added to the side, so I decided to share that as well.
I posted a photo of this smiley face on the bunker before I started The Bunker series, and so I decided to
post two more angles of the building on that day.
I was going to post this yesterday evening, but after starting to write on our return I was just too tired to finish it. So I’m completing it on the day after. I’ll leave the post in the tense fitting of my initial draft.
In going back through my photographs I found this distant view of the bunker. Although the artwork is not clear, it can be seen if you zoom in. I also like how this photo gives another perspective on where the bunker sits.
After mentioning some of my hitchhiking experiences in earlier posts, I came across this article by Hilary Bradt in The Guardian. In it she talks about her own hitchhiking experiences. At the age of eighty two she has been hitchhiking every decade of her adult life.
While the mind can very easily go to possible dangers of standing beside the road waiting from a lift from a stranger, especially for a loan woman, or for that matter the dangers of picking up a complete stranger, I would argue that such incidents rarely happen.
I’m talking here of my online life.
Over the years I have tried various Read Later services, in the process building up a veritable library of articles that I don’t have time to read right now and so will put aside, neatly categorized, ready to be read later. In time that list gets too long despite my best attempts at working through the articles, so I declare bankruptcy and delete everything or prune the articles, keeping those that I must have and to…read later.
On the north shore of the Hawaii island of Maui, in the middle of a field that sits on the edge of cliffs dropping down into the waters of the Pacific Ocean, sits a small rectangular brick building that I call The Bunker. I have no idea of its original usage. Whatever that was, it now sits empty and its walls have become a canvas for unknown artists, at least unknown to me.
Our next door neighbours have a field of probably two acres that is very overgrown. As an example of how overgrown it is, the field is also home to a cow and two sheep. There are times when it is not possible to see them. In fact unless they are walking by the hedge bordering our house, we don’t see them.
Initially there were two white sheep and a cow. The sheep stuck together and the cow became a bit of a loner.
I was not one of those people, but with this year approaching its end and with some revisiting the status of their defaults from last year, I thought that I would right that wrong. So here are my App Defaults.
We have been going through a very dry spell on Maui. Being winter, the weather has been lovely to experience. Cool mornings, warm days, clear skies, no wind. There’s a little nip to a breeze and a reminder of the season when I step into the shade. Last night it broke.
I woke up in the early hours and through the open windows heard a sound outside that sounded vaguely familiar.
Hanging pictures is not my forte. They usually end up too low, too high or lopsided. That along with the copious, probably visible marks on the wall as I try and measure where to place the picture and too many holes as I make up for afore mentioned mistakes, usually sees my wife going in search of someone else if something needs hanging on a wall in our house.
All of this left us in a quandary over a picture that had been lying around our Alcácer house for good while.
Well things change.
Back in July I shared how after six months using Kagi search, I didn’t feel that the benefits over my previous search engine of choice, DuckDuckGo, were sufficient to justify carrying on paying for Kagi.
In the last couple of weeks I have reversed that decision and am now back using Kagi as my primary search engine.
Why the flip flopping?
DuckDuckGo, for all of its privacy features, felt to me as though more ads were creeping in to the search results.
“I have never lost a bag,” I proudly and gratefully told my wife as we shuttled from one terminal to another while in transit at Heathrow Airport. We were on a bus, zigzagging around buildings and aircraft, occasionally disappearing underground. Nearing our destination we passed some open doors giving us a glimpse into the maze of conveyor belts which carry passengers’ luggage to and from the aircraft. I’m like a kid in a candy store at airports.
Process Zero is a feature of the iPhone camera app Halide. My understanding of Process Zero is that it removes the processing that Apple apply to the photos that iPhones take. The result of Process Zero has been described as more film like, unprocessed.
This morning I sat in our living room drinking my coffee, reading the news. Occasionally I would look up and sit silently, looking out of the window at day’s emerging light.