Reflections from the week by David Johnson. A letter head for my weekly newsletter. Black writing on a blue background with a drawing of a tree to the left

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.