vacation

After two weeks of traveling, I’m ready to be somewhere, and the somewhere I am is home. It’s been a wonderful two weeks of vacation with family in Hawaii and Washington and parts in-between.

Where are you?

Lots to catch up on. I’ll start tomorrow. Well, maybe a little bit tonight.

My goal Thursday is to do NOTHING. I’m not sure it’s possible, but it’s the goal I’ve been saying out loud.

Is doing nothing possible? Is it possible for me? Possibly Office Space-style is what I was thinking, but I only thought of that when I typed out “doing nothing.”

I hope you’re all having a great day.

So we were in Hawaii last on Tuesday. Now it’s Friday and we’re in Washington state: Monroe. Here are some photos from the trip. When I say “some” I mean “three” and they may or not be representative.

Also, my phone is still broken (screen whited out) so twittering and flickring is down significantly. Sad about that a bit.

Yesterday we started out hot on the west coast of the island, and ended up rainy on the northeastern (Hana Road) coast. It was actually quite a nice day. We went and hiked up to Twin Falls, one of many waterfalls and swimming holes on Maui. We swam for a bit, and I even ended up jumping off the waterfall into the water below. It was only a little unsafe, but I was not hurt. I was asking if it was clear below, but I did end up narrowly missing a person below. I was extremely apologetic to the guy, but he was fine. Quite an adventure. The water was about 16 feet deep at the point where I jumped, and the drop was 40 feet deep. I was wearing Teva-style sandals and did touch the bottom as I dropped, but not that hard. I’d like to work out the physics of various weights and how far a jump into water you can do, and how deep the water needs to be.

This jump is not something I can recommend for everyone. But if we went again, I would do it again. It was a blast, and very refreshing. My aunt was disappointed that no photos captured this event.

Lots to think about from that experience. It’s rare I’m the most “daredevil” among a group of people. I don’t think I quite know how to reign myself in when I’m in that position. I need to be aware of my influence in such situations, and moderate the advice I give, to, say, my younger cousins. I think, strangely, I was acting very much as my father would, and did, pushing at the limits of my own physical capabilities to do what, make a point? Make sure everyone has a good time? Push on people to take interesting risks about which stories can be told? I can’t speak for my father, but I think at that leading edge of adrenaline, I make different decisions. In retrospect, I find it fascinating psychologically. One of the things I’ve gotten adept at in the past 4 years is “pop the hood” on my psyche and look in and see how I tick. It’s rare that I can’t immediately see where my motivations come from. Yesterday is a data point I’ll be thinking about for a while.

Oh, and here are the three photos, taken in the space of about 20 minutes as we drove from Lahaina on the way to Twin Falls.

So we return to “the mainland” or “The States” on Tuesday. We’re running out of tropical paradise, but that is fine, this has been a lovely trip altogether. Enjoyable and family and chill. Next week will be a trip to Washington state with even more family and I hope just as much chill time, though after the requisite stressful travel time (driving, not flying though).

My phone is on the fritz, but only the display—I seem to have lost all contrast, so everything is a semi-uniform white, extremely light gray (perhaps #dedede, to you HTML nerds), and an occasional black that’s really a dark gray. So photos and twittering have been rebelling. It’s as though my phone has taken a vacation as well. Though really it just drives me to check Leah’s laptop slightly more often. Disconnect? No thanks. I like a trickle of news and updates from blogs and news and twitter.

I also did some deep-diving on my blog archives and found precisely when I was last in Hawaii—that would be July 2002, see: Hawai’i and Memories and Greetings from Maui and A Picture of Me From Waikoloa.

These were posts made from internet cafes I think. And the photo was posted after the vacation itself. At that time I was an oddball, sniffing around for WiFi, trying to check my email—my typical situation then was running a unix shell, sshing, or (augh!) telnetting into my hosting machine and running pine. Nowadays several in our party regularly check their email, even while vacationing. And posting to a blog? What the heck is that? At the time I was still using blogger.com for my posting, posting via FTP.

I think this is quite a cultural change in only 6 years that I was so unusual before, and now I’m a commonplace. People are more connected. It’s simply the way things are.

So today I think we’re going to be going to a local waterfall, a little hike. Otherwise trying to enjoy a Sabbath, resting as much as we can stand.

Here are two photos from the other day, when my phone was working properly:

Totally sublime moments from the trip from the airport Tuesday.

Despite the old posts that will be showing up some mornings, I’m actually here, on the 12th floor of a vacation spot on the Island of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, formerly the Sandwich Islands, and according to Wikipedia, “at about 1,860 miles from the nearest continent, the Hawaiian Island archipelago is the most isolated grouping of islands on Earth.”

So this where I’ll be for the week. The photo below is looking west southwest from our spot in Kahana on Maui. The island you see is Lanai.

A Picture Of Me From Waikoloa

Hawai’i and Memories
Well, this is a bit better. Since I last typed, I jumped off a 40 foot lava rock a few times, swam with 3 honest-to-goodness sea turtles, had some bagels and lox, flew from Maui to Hawai’i (the locals write it out that way. Hawaiian is not a written language, it’s about the sound, and the apostrophe better approximates the pronunciation). I’ve sent a bunch of postcards (apologies to anyone I’ve missed); did some watercolors; lots of snorkling; lots of swimming; walking, and yes, more.

I’m reading the out-of-print A Woman On Paper, a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. She’s a fascinating woman, as illuminated through letters and images and especially her relationship with the author, Anita Pollitzer. One thing in particular I thought fascinating was that when she was a young girl, and doing portraits of people, often she would destroy what she made soon after making them because she said she did not want them floating around to haunt her. I like that notion – of making a piece of art, then destroying. I think of some native arts where at the completion of the art, you destroy it. Sand painting I think of first. And I also think of the part in the film (also a book, but I know the movie) A River Runs Through It—the father has the boys write a theme, he reads it, and then tells them to throw it away. That dedication to craft, coupled with the destruction of it, I find really interesting. In web design much of what I do is designed to be permanent. Jakob Nielsen says that web pages must live forever. But I think of William Gibson’s Agrippa, which was created in 1992, and was far too expensive for one such as I to buy. It was designed to be read once. Then it would be destroyed. Of course, now, the text is widely available.

The internet remembers. It has a long memory. Whether that is the usenet archives or the internet archive. The net remembers forever. If it appears as bits, someone can remember it. Memory, of course, is very much the topic of much Cyberpunk fiction. Blade Runner. Johnny Mnemonic. We Can Remember It for You Wholesale / Total Recall. Robocop.

And memory is, in the end all we have.

Now I will go make more memories in the water.

Onward.

Greetings from Maui
I’m sitting in a rather lame internet kiosk which seems to only want to show me 50 of my email messages (typically I get 75 messages a day between lists and spam and mail I like). Given I’ve been gone 3 days, well, it adds up.

Today was awesome. Went snorkling off Lanai on a charter pontoon boat. Very wonderful time. I’m getting a lot of sun, but am staying practical enough that the sunblock is being used. No burn so far, thankfully.

The thing that stands out is the blueness of the water. The water is clear to an extreme. Many wonderful fish to see, and luminous coral to look at. My favorite fish (how touristy is that?) is clearly the Parrot Fish. Well, the male Parrot fish. They have amazing coloration. My words can’t do them justice.

My three bucks are winding up. Better go ahead and post. May post more. Sorry for being incommunicado.