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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Monday April 15, 2024 Dear Friends,
Being home, being back in Britain, always fills my time. Whether that is sitting talking with my mum, catching up with friends (on the phone and in person), or going for walks. Routine is not so present in my life and I find that with that my writing diminishes. I want to write, but find myself either too tired to concentrate or in need to wind down from the last social activity.
Monday April 8th, 2024 Dear Friends,
Well the weeks feel as though they are creeping up on me quicker. Though this one could well be because I have had a lot going on.
I am writing to you from the opposite side of the world. I have returned solo to England for my mother’s 90th birthday celebrations and am spending a couple of weeks here to catch up with friends and also some work as well.
Monday April 1st, 2024 Dear Readers,
I had to laugh this morning. It’s related to the post that I put out yesterday around busyness (see it below). I had been trying to slow myself down, to be focused and get done what needed to be done, but obviously it was not working. I forgot that this newsletter was going out today.
That’s humbling and at the same time an opportunity to try that little bit harder and see where I can improve.
Monday March 25, 2024 Hello and welcome to another weekly roundup of posts to my blog.
This has been a wet winter and as such some outside jobs that needed to be done in the garden have been sitting, waiting for the weather to clear up. Seasons here in Hawaii don’t have as clear a delineation as more northerly latitudes, but there is a definite change in weather patterns. In the part of Maui where I live the weather becomes wetter, and although the day time temperatures can reach the high 70F(21C), mornings and evenings are cold and the trade winds that blow through the islands can be chilly.
Monday March 18, 2024 Hello there. It is David Johnson here with a weekly roundup of posts to my blog.
It has been a wet week here on Maui, especially in the area of the north shore where I live. This region is one of the wetter parts of the island, but even so this week saw more low cloud and persistent drizzle than we normally have. I love the moody weather, probably because of growing up in England, and anyway sun is not in short supply here on Maui - the change is welcome.
Monday March 11, 2024 This week has felt like a real mixed bag - work being done on the house, a visit to the doctor - both of which have follows this coming week….And then for my wife’s birthday we spent a night on the island of Oahu, in Honolulu. The Hawaii equivalent of a visit to the big city. Maybe by some world cities standards Honolulu is a baby, but for me coming from rural Maui the island metropolis is a visual and aural stimulant.
Monday March 4, 2024 Well it has been a long while since I sent out a newsletter to subscribers. The pause was initially caused by an illness last summer when I got pneumonia while visiting Portugal. Then that pause turned into a larger gap.
I am now remedying this omission but with a slightly different frequency.
Previously I sent out the newsletter on the first of each month with a hand curated selection of posts that I had made to my blog that month.
August 2023 Well after a run of 14 newsletters, the last one being at the end of April this year, I have not sent a newsletter for three months now. April and May found my wife and I in Portugal, based in Alcácer do Sal where we have a town house. At some point during our two month stay I became unwell. Initially it appeared to be hay fever, allergies which I escape here in Hawai’i.
April 2023 I write this at the end of April in a small church square, Largo de São Mamede, on the edge of the Príncipe Real area of Lisbon. Tomorrow will be the end of our forth week in Portugal, the longest period of time that I have spent in this country, and we still have five and a half weeks to go.
This has been a busy month, time spent working on the house.
March 2023 Hello and welcome to the March 2023 newsletter. I am hoping that I can get this months’ newsletter out on time. Time will be a crunch. Because of how Micro.blog, the host for my blog and newsletter, is structured, I will have a small window of opportunity to do the final editing and add this letter before jumping on a airplane to San Francisco. I shall probably be doing that editing sitting at the departure gate at Maui airport.
February 2023 Welcome to my February 2023 newsletter. This month has been dominated for me by travel to Europe. A solo journey made up of two parts. First I stopped for a week in England to visit my mother. From there I travelled down to Portugal for two weeks.
Nothing specific was planned for the England leg of the trip. I simply spent some quality time with my mother, did some odd jobs for her around her apartment, and allowed myself to rest and get over jet lag which I find can hit me pretty hard when I travel east to Europe.
January 2023 I start this newsletter at an airport hotel on the edge of San Francisco airport, and continue it at 41,000 ft (12,496.8 m) as the aircraft approaches the west coast of Ireland. London in a little under an hour and a half. I’m guessing that I will finish this letter in the middle of the night in England while dealing with the disorientation of jet lag.
Hello, and welcome to my January 2023 newsletter.
December 2022 I write this as 2022 draws to a close. While I don’t usually stay up to see the New Year in tonight, weather permitting, I plan to light a fire outside and sit around it with some family and friends to welcome in 2023 . . . or at least stay up for a while into the night.
This last month has been filled with the Holiday season for me.
November 2022 Hello and welcome to the November 2022 edition of my newsletter. I write this sitting outside at dusk. I look out on the shadows of the night, as lights from distant houses break the darkness. It’s still. Very still. The wind of last week, and that which helps to keep these islands cool, has blown itself out. I sit listening to the crickets, to a distant dog bark, occasional traffic on the nearby highway (a two lane road running the length of Maui’s north east shore).
October 2022 Hello and welcome to my October 2022 newsletter. I am writing this at the end of a long visit to Europe. I’ll be starting my journey home as this newsletter goes out. Most of the posts that I have shared here come from the journey of the last six weeks.
My wife and I left Maui in the closing days of September and now November is just beginning. As I was putting together the newsletter, even finding time on this trip to do that has been a challenge, looking back through my blog I was amazed at the ground that we have covered, both literally and figuratively.
September 2022 Hello and welcome to my September 2022 newsletter.
I am back in the UK visiting family, staying with my mother. Last night my sister and her husband flew in from New Zealand. Distractions are at a maximum. I’m grabbing some early morning hours to pen these words.
I was going to say that two things have marked this month for me - post COVID symptoms and then this trip to England and onto to Europe for a family wedding.
August 2022 Hello Friend,
Well if one thing could define August to me, it would be COVID. After, how long is it, two and half years since the initial breakout? After watching COVID travel around the world. Following Maui become so quiet with no visitors allowed in. Watching the vaccines being rolled out, and tensions rise as debates raged about when to ease a particular restriction or let life return to normal (will that ever be possible?