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.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
If there is a movie buff in the family, it is my wife. I enjoy watching a good film, but my wife, loves movies and the movie industry. So when she heard that the Tribeca Film Festival would be holding a two day event in Lisbon while we were in Portugal, it became an immediate fixture on our calendar. Yesterday - Friday, 18th October - was to be the day that we attended.
Thursday, September 19, 2024
I have found copies of old blog posts on my computer from an earlier incarnation of my website. This one was from I know not when, but will guess around 2010. I have edited the post lightly to provide link references and clarification where appropriate. While in New York last week for Thanksgiving and a host of other family events I visited the wonderful Rubin Museum (which sadly on October 6th, 2024 will close and move to a “global museum model.
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Sometime in the last month I published my 3,000th post to this blog. When I hit publish on this post, it will be the 3,094th. That feels like a big number to me. Perhaps for some, they left that number in the dust a long time ago? But for me this feels like a lot. My blog started back in March of 2014. I have some posts sitting on my computer from an earlier incarnation of the site.
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Last night my wife and I took our grandchildren to see the movie My Penguin Friend. Set in Brazil, it is based on the true story of an old man who saved a South American Magellanic penguin that he found washed up on a beach, almost dead and covered in oil. The man cleaned the penguin and nursed him back to health, the penguin only leaving 11 months later when a fresh plumage had grown.
Monday, August 19, 2024
I have an iPhone 13 Mini. Sometimes when I am traveling, perhaps on a flight to Europe, I like to be able to write. This can happen in my journal, and sometimes I want to write something electronically, perhaps for use when I land. I don’t own an iPad and I might not want to reach up to get my bag down to write on my MacBook Air. In such situations I reach for my Mini.
Monday, July 22, 2024
Monday 22nd July, 2024 Dear Friends, I don’t think that I am in the business of looking after dogs anymore, at least not puppies. Please don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. However, my step-daughter who has a young French Bulldog has gone away with her family for a week, and my wife and I are looking after the puppy. He is sweet, but a lot of work and messy. Give him a few more years when he is happy with just a walk, doesn’t eat or drink sending everything everywhere, and doesn’t bring the outside in.
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
I’ve been using Kagi Search for about six months now. I am on the lowest tier of the paid plans which allow me 300 searches a month. It turns out that that is quite enough for me. I have never hit that limit. What I don’t know is if I need Kagi? Or perhaps to be more specific, if I should pay for search? I do like Kagi. It generates its own results.
Monday, July 15, 2024
Monday 15th July, 2024 Dear Friends, I’ll start this newsletter with a subject that the British are well known for talking about - the weather. Our return to Maui has greeted us with a lot of wet weather. Normally here summer is the dry season and winter is the wet season. However in our little corner of the island the weather has been very wet. That is very welcome if unseasonal.
Sunday, July 14, 2024
I was introduced to the idea of speaking in ‘I’ statements when I first started sitting with a men’s group back in 2015. The idea behind this simple suggestion is that I take responsibility for my feelings. So for example, if a driver cuts in front of me, making me angry, later when I am sharing the story with someone instead of me talking about how stupid and irresponsible the driver was, I say something like, “I felt angry and annoyed when the car cut in front of me.
Friday, July 12, 2024
Testing my Tot to Micro.blog Shortcut to see if it works when I want to add a Title to the post. This post doesn’t need a title…but hey, I can test the title addition if I don’t try and add a title! 😝
Monday, July 8, 2024
Monday 8th July, 2024 Dear Friends, Greetings from Maui. I pressed pause on this newsletter last week. I had returned to Maui a handful of days beforehand, and a combination of the travel and jet lag meant that I was exhausted, my body clock was all over the place and I had not shared much on my blog. So for those reasons I decided to give myself a break for a week.
Sunday, July 7, 2024
While going through my mixed up and messily catalogued, that is a very generous term, slides, I came across these two images of the Taj Mahal. I am pretty sure that I have some more, but the state of my slide storage means that I am unlikely to come across them in a hurry, chance discoveries aside. So I scanned in what I had found with my rudimentary equipment and am sharing them here.
Friday, July 5, 2024
This story started as an exploration of the speed of travel, but I decided that there was a story within that just about my traversing of the Khunjerab Pass. The Pass is closed for a part of the year simply because of snow, it sits at 4,693 meters (15,397 feet), and for the rest of the year is at the whim of politics. I made the journey in 1989, only a few months after the student protests in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent Chinese government crackdown.
Tuesday, July 2, 2024
Now there is a click bait title if ever there was one. However I am guessing that what I am going to write about below is something that anyone who has traveled can relate to in some shape or form (please excuse the uncomfortable imagery).I have even heard the Dalai Lama in a public talk make reference to his own personal experience with disturbed bowl movements. I am of course referring to one’s pooping cycle being interrupted and pushed off course by traveling long distances.
Monday, June 24, 2024
Monday 24 June, 2024 Dear Friends, Welcome to my newsletter coming to you from Barcelona. Last night was noise, noise, noise as Barcelona celebrated the Summer Solstice. I am writing this at eight o’clock on Monday morning and the fireworks only stopped going off a couple of hours ago. After almost three months in Europe, I’ll be starting my journey back to Maui on Wednesday. I’ll be sad to leave.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Monday 17th June, 2024 Dear Friends, This one will be brief. My wife and I left Portugal yesterday and are making our way across Spain to Barcelona where we fly back to Hawaii. I hope to pull over during our journey tomorrow to add this to the newsletter - it’s just how the newsletter system works that I use. I have a window to add this initial letter. I’m sitting here in Madrid with a bunch of mixed emotions, reflecting on the last two and a half months which all started in Bristol, England with my mother’s 90th birthday party.
Sunday, June 9, 2024
Monday June 10, 2024 Dear Friends, I write this on Portugal Day, a national holiday, celebrated every 10th June. I did not know what Portugal Day actually celebrated and so I headed over to Wikipedia. According to the Free Encyclopedia’s entry for Portugal Day, It commemorates the death on 10 June 1580 of Luís de Camões, a poet and national literary icon. Wikipedia’s page for Luís de Camões states that,
Saturday, June 8, 2024
This story share by Robert Rackley on his blog Canned Dragons reminded me of a story that I heard about a Tibetan Buddhist nun. A friend of mine, herself a Buddhist nun at the time, was studying at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala in Northern India. I’ll call my friend Ani-la, meaning nun in Tibetan. A friend came to visit Ani-la. Ani-la took her friend on a walk around the Institute and Dharamsala, showing her North Indian home.
Saturday, June 8, 2024
I have long loved rail travel. Sitting in a carriage, watching life go by. Gratefully allowing others to take the strain of the transportation logistics. Perhaps striking up conversation with a fellow traveler, or more likely than not sitting quietly reading, writing, watching, sleeping. When I got older and threw a backpack on my back railway stations took on another significance for me. That of unknown adventure. Yes, I might have had a ticket in my hand stating an intended destination, but as I looked out at the train tracks disappearing into the distance from the station platform I had a sense of unknown adventure ahead.
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Monday June 3, 2024 Dear Friends, Welcome to the first newsletter of June 2024. Today’s letter will probably be brief (I say probably because I am still writing it!) as we are on the road for a couple of days. This time exploring the eastern Algarve - quieter (in terms of the tourism impact) and more nature. We arrived here yesterday and have been greeted with vast expanses of beach, mud flats, small boats (mainly fishing, a few pleasure), oyster farms, and grasslands.
Sunday, May 26, 2024
Monday May 27, 2024 Dear Friends, It’s early morning here in Alentejo, the region of Portugal that our house is in. Outside feels fresh and cool, but that won’t last for long. After some cooler weather last week, summer appears to have arrived in Portugal and the days are heating up. Clear skies and sun. I have said it elsewhere, but there is a quality to the light here that I have not seen elsewhere.
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Monday May 20, 2024 Dear Friends, Well I am getting this letter written by the hair of my chinny, chin, chin! We have family staying with us right now and have been busy entertaining, driving them around, showing them the Portugal that we know so far. I am aware of life, business that is passing me by at the moment and will need to be taken care of on their departure tomorrow, and at the same time I am trying to track what needs to be done while they are here.
Thursday, May 16, 2024
Two boys playing cricket just off the Karakoram Highway While traveling the Karakoram Highway through Pakistan I stopped in Passu for three nights. My memory of Passu in July of 1989 was it just being made up of a small collection of houses. Nothing else. One of those was the guest house that I stayed in. This was run by a lovely man who use to be in the Pakistan army.
Sunday, May 12, 2024
Monday May 13, 2024 Dear Friends, Greetings from an overcast Alcácer do Sal. The weather has been beautiful this last week. Very hot in fact. It is cooling down this week as the overcast weather might suggest. The fields around Alcácer have been ploughed and in preparation for this year’s rice crop. Some of the fields have already been flooded. We are expecting to see the fresh green shoots soon. We have also been warned that during the rice season the mosquitoes come out in swarms around dusk.
Sunday, May 12, 2024
We visited the town of Odeceixe just over a week ago. I was tasked with finding the destination for the day, somewhere where we had not visited and not far or on the coast. So I picked Odeceixe at random. At first glance there appeared nothing special or unique about the town. When we arrived it seemed very quiet. Situated about 3km from the coast there were few people around. We skirted the edge of town, and after two hours of driving I parked by what looked like some fields on one side which stretched to the coast, although out of view.
Friday, May 10, 2024
My wife and I were in Lisbon yesterday and met up with an old Portland friend who had been living Portugal for eight years. After lunch she took us to an art exhibition at the Estrela Basilica, by a young Ukrainian artist, Veronika Blizniuchenko. It is not an easily found exhibition, situated as it is in the former convent behind the Basilica. While visiting the Basilica, Bluzniuchenko noticed the convent from its rooftop gallery.
Sunday, May 5, 2024
Monday May 6, 2024 Dear Friends, I realized this morning that I have been on the road now for five weeks. The time has flown by and so far it has not felt as disruptive as I thought that it might. Maybe because the time has been spent at home in Bristol, with my mother, and now another home here in Portugal. I don’t have all my accruements with me, and I miss not being able to reach for some books at times, but I also find myself quite content here.
Monday, April 29, 2024
Monday April 29, 2024 Dear Friends, I have an early start tomorrow (today), driving to just west of Lisbon, and so I’m writing this letter late at night. This first week in Portugal has seen the temperatures drop from the high 20°C when I arrived, to topping out now in the high teens. Though the wind has been cold, the sun has been shining for which I am grateful. There is a quality to the light here that we do not get in Hawaii.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Close up of a beach. This is a short story. As I go back through the slides of my travels, I am interested in what caught my eye. What I was seeing while I was on the road. One way I look at this is what my heart was drawn to, what interested me, what moved me. This slide could be from anywhere, at least from any beach in the world.
Sunday, April 21, 2024
Monday April 22, 2024 Olá Friends, This letter is coming to you from Portugal. I arrived here from England two days ago. I had a good time back home but as always found it hard to leave. Hard to leave the UK, hard to leave my mother, hard to leave familiar surroundings and places that hold memories…but life moves on and I had to get down to Portugal ahead of my wife’s arrival this coming week.