🏝️ Island life. The power went down an hour ago, taking the internet with it. And where we live, the cell signal can be weak. It is improving, but we couldn’t get by without WiFi calling. There is no clear indication when the power will be back on, so it is probably an early night tonight.
Turn the volume up and listen to the bees busy at work this morning.
Monday 15th July, 2024 Newsletter letter
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. Outside all is green and tropically lush. There is still time for the weather to dry up, though. August and September can be a hot months. We’ll see.
We have been back from Portugal now for two weeks. Both my wife and I are still missing the country, our time there, the new connections that we made, the culture, the people. I spoke last week about the culture shock that I have felt since returning. I still think that I will write about it, but for now I am pleased that I have just allowed the feeling to sit within me and not just react to it and allowed it to take me over. With time, that sense of scratchiness within me as I transition to being back home has diminished. I now feel in a better space to hold both. Allowance, acceptance and gratitude.
This last week has seen another fire on the island. This one was Upcountry and not far from the scene of one of the fires from last year. Over 500 acres have been burnt. People who had to evacuate or lost homes last year were left with uncertainty for a few days. Thankfully there were no evacuations and the fire is slowly being contained.
A few of the short posts this week are tech related. I wanted to try and automate some of the processes on my Mac and iPhone, in part as a fun exercise for myself. The Apple operating systems allow that to a degree. My background is in computer programming. I taught myself to program back in the day when desk top computers were first emerging. I was your teenage geek, sitting at my parents' dining room table tapping away on a Commodore Pet that my Uncle had lent me from his office. While I am way out of practice with modern day computing languages and web design, my interest in the subject has never left me. Apple’s Shortcut tools offer a programming like environment and I enjoy the challenge of trying to manifest what I would like my devices to do. I used my blog to test how I was getting on as I worked on the automations, and never deleted the posts. So now you can follow along…
Thank you, as always, for reading.
David.
Looking across to the West Maui Mountains from the Pukalani Community Center as I sat having a bite to eat on Thursday evening.
Speaking in ‘I’ Statements
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. I felt scared that he might have caused a crash.” I own my feelings around the situation. (On a read through here, I caught myself out for typing, “You own your feelings…”. Not an incorrect statement, but it felt out of spirit with the topic.)
I find myself catching myself not using I statements in my own writing and blog posts. Modern colloquialisms creep in, and I will drop an ‘I’. The context is not wrong, the post still makes sense because it is an understood way of speaking that is sneaking into my writing. Now there might be a place for a particular way of expressing oneself, and so an ‘I’ is dropped, but I personally think that a lazy way of expression can in time help me step away from owning how I feel.
Maybe I feel embarrassed or shame around feeling a certain way, and a form of expression can give me a way out. A way out of not having to own my feelings or to push them aside for now.
So going forward I would like to make a pledge to speak in I statements here on my blog. If I don’t, please point it out to me.
👁️ I was sat watching a movie last night and started getting a migraine aura. Within ten minutes the aura was interfering with my view of the screen.
The aura cleared and I waited for the pain of the headache. It did not come to much. I thought that maybe this time I am going to get off lightly.
This morning I have woken up to the dull thud of a migraine. Not the worst, but still making life uncomfortable. I’ve taken a tablet to try and take the edge off of the pain….that and a little more caffeine this morning. I have never found anything to completely remove these.
This migraine will probably be my companion for the next three days. That is the norm for me.
I think that all looks good with the Shortcut. I realized that there was one error that had me banging my head against the wall, but I think that that is fixed. So testing this Shortcut one more time…and I hope that that is it for now. 🤞🤞🤞
If a post had no category was not working properly, and so testing again.
OK, I have to do one other test. Will the Shortcut work and post to Micro.blog if I choose not to add a title?
Testing Title addition from a Shortcut
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! 😝
The weather cleared this morning and the fire burning on the side of Haleakala is clearly visible. The good news is that forward progress of the fire has been halted, it is 50% contained, the size of the fire has been downgraded to 355 acres, and there have been no evacuation orders.
🌄 It’s feeling warm before the sun is up. A warning of what is coming today? At least the Trade Winds are blowing.
Grilling two evenings ago.
I feel very happy with myself today. I have managed to write a Shortcut which will publish to Micro.blog from Tot, allowing the selection of a category if relevant. The text of the short post is then saved as a text file. Writing, learning…from Tot.
🌧️ It has been a wet, wet, wet, wet day so far, and doesn’t look as though it is going to let up anytime soon. This is more like winter than summer.
Another fire on Maui, this time on Haleakala Crater Road, upcountry. There have been no evacuations so far though residents are encouraged to prepare for that potential. 500 acres last night, currently down to 420 acres. More information and updates here.
A second test of sending a post to my blog from The Iconfactory’s Tot app. This time trying with the Micropub API. If this works, a hat tip to Jarrod Blundy, @jarrod, for his Publish to Micro.blog shortcut which I lightly edited.
Testing sending a post to my blog from The Iconfactory’s Tot app.
Well I got the outside work done just in the nick of time. It looks as though we have rain for the rest of the day, though the weather forecast deems to differ. There are times when I really like a wet day or afternoon. It just feels right.
Monday 8th July, 2024 Newsletter letter
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.
The return to Maui after three months away I have found interesting to watch. The only expression that I can think to use is culture shock. I have tried to just let that feeling sit inside me, recognize its presence and try as best I can not to react to it. By that I mean that immediately upon landing and experiencing this uncomfortableness to being back here, I could have kicked back against my return. To call out, whether to myself or others, that which I was missing or favored from my time in Europe. I’ve tried to sit in my gratitude for what I have in my life, both here and in Europe…none of that escapes me…and see how these feelings develop over time with being back on island.
I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Visa issues see to that. So Maui is where I am based right now. I also always think that constantly speaking to one’s perceived preferences of one thing or place over another gets a little tiring to listen to after a while and doesn’t win me any friends. That and I deplete myself with my own infighting.
So for now I am just noticing this feeling in me, noticing it as a new companion and seeing where it takes me. It has lessened a little with time being back here, and I think as time goes on I’ll explore this more in a post to my blog.
At the end of this letter I have included one short post from my week off. The feelings shared in it have sat with me and so it felt appropriate to include it here.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
David.
19th June, 2024
Manuel Moreale’s recent post on Celebrating Failure resonated with me. I’ve read it a few times now.
You can ingest only so many success stories before starting to feel bad for not being one of them. It’s partly why social media mostly sucks. It’s performative. Everyone is showing the best parts of their lives while the shitty moments are kept private, away from public eyes.
At times I feel as though the online world shows so much of the celebratory fun and fireworks - holding a hand up to recognize that I get sucked into doing that. But perhaps sadly, life isn’t always about celebration. There is grind, suck and failure.
If I don’t share failure or struggle, some comes from wanting to keep things private, other comes from shame.