Traveler's Tales Archives - Page 2 of 3

October 3, 2022

“Well, I’m back,” he said.

It’s Monday! And as promised, The Wife and I are back from our too-brief (aren’t they all?) weekend getaway. After the general shit-show that was Summer 2022 for us, we really needed a nice getaway. And that’s exactly what we had. The focus was the Ithaca Apple Festival, with a few stops here and there along the way.

I really love Ithaca. It’s by far my favorite place in New York State thus far in my life.

I always plan on taking a lot more photos in Ithaca than I do! It’s weird, really. I just get caught up in people-watching and looking at all the wonderful stuff that I don’t get my phone or my camera out much.

Now, Taughannock Falls? That’s where I take a bunch of pictures. Here are a few from this year.

Lots of raptors on the wing at the falls. I assume these are turkey vultures, which are amazing to watch in themselves in places with high cliffs, like here and at Letchworth.

A lovely couple! Hopefully next year we can walk the ravine trail below and finally see the falls from below. The Wife’s surgically-repaired ankle isn’t quite up to that yet, but we’ll get there!

We stop at Taughannock Falls every year. It just doesn’t seem right to visit Ithaca without stopping here. There’s something about all the streams and water and waterfalls and rocky gorges and deep verdant forests in this region that add up to it being my spiritual home.

Starting now, of course, there’s also a bittersweet quality to this place. We brought Cane here several times, while on our winter winery trip. I’d like to think that he had some hand in making this year’s visit almost perfect, with the beginnings of the autumnal crisp in the air and the perfect golden light.

We also stopped at a winery that had a great view! The wines weren’t to our taste, but the view sure was. (Nothing wrong with their wine; they specialize in dry wines, and we generally prefer the other end of that spectrum, being more into fruity and vibrant and sometimes outright sweet.)

Part of the magic of the Finger Lakes is that from atop the ridges you can see for miles and miles, and in many spots you can’t see the deep lake that lies between you and there.

On Sunday we set out for home, with a couple stops along the way, including the Barnes&Noble in Pittsford. This is the most beautiful B&N that I have ever seen:

What a store! An employee asked me at one point if I needed help finding anything, and I laughed and replied, “No, I need help NOT finding things!” Good thing I only go to this store once a year, really.

Of course, we ate very well on this little trip. We always plan our meals, partly because when we’re traveling we want to eat well, but also because The Wife is celiac which always requires some extra planning. Luckily we’ve found a bunch of places all throughout the region that have gluten-free offerings…though sadly, one of our favorites, is closing for good in a few weeks. Ithaca’s Waffle Frolic has been a beloved stop of ours for almost as long as we’ve been going to Ithaca at all, but the owners have decided to move on. We’ll find other options, but a special shout-out to all the times we stopped there for fried chicken and waffles! I remember when I first heard of that combo and thought it was the weirdest thing ever, until we tried it at Waffle Frolic and…suddenly, we got it.

I think this winter I’m going to have to figure out my own version of it.

I won’t subject you to pictures of all the food we had, but just a couple things:

That’s a Cuban sandwich from the Broadway Deli right here in Lancaster, NY. We love to start our road-trips east with a stop here for lunch, before we exit the 716. They have a wonderful sandwich menu, and yet somehow they’re never mentioned in local “Best Sandwich in Buffalo” rankings! They’ve got my vote, though.

We also love getting breakfast on Sunday morning at a place in Pittsford called Simply Crepes. (There are several locations around Greater Rochester, by the way.) They have a terrific menu, lots of GF options, and…well, if you’re looking for hearty-and-filling-and-not-exactly-healthy in your breakfast (and you absolutely should look for those things in a breakfast, maybe not all the time, but once in a while), you should look no farther. Here is my “Crepe Madame”, a crepe loaded with cheese and ham and smothered with white sauce and topped with a fried egg and served with two pools of bacon jam:

Ate this around 10am. I was not hungry again until dinner.

I really love places like Simply Crepes. There’s something about local breakfast joints (they’re not just a breakfast joint, to be fair), the kind of place where you go on a cold fall morning to cup your hands around the coffee mug before the food comes. It’s the kind of place that fills up first with kind-of bleary-eyed people mostly clad in soft flannels and their hair in messy buns, the kind of crowd that you can watch wake up as they drink their coffee and eat their breakfasts. The mood shifts later on, once the post-church “Sunday Best” people start showing up. The new mood then isn’t bad, per se, but it’s more formal and less patient.

Simply Crepes is located in Schoen Place in Pittsford, which is an old industry and trade center right on the Erie Canal. I imagine barges laden with goods used to arrive here, or empty barges arrived to be laden with goods; there’s a grain elevator down the street that has been converted to office space. The area has a terrific vibe that I think Buffalo is trying to capture with its inner harbor area.

I think that my favorite New York region, after the Finger Lakes and Buffalo Niagara, is the Erie Canal corridor and the old rail corridor that runs sometimes alongside the Canal and at other times ten to twenty miles south of it. All those old towns along the Canal and the once great railroads have such wonderful age and character to them, with a sense of weathered history connecting all of it. You can see plainly that in a lot of these towns the boom-times are long over, but you can also see that the people still there are working hard to keep their towns stubbornly alive. Yes, there are a lot of empty buildings in states of decay, but there are also lots of said old buildings with obvious work going on and “Coming Soon!” signs in the windows, announcing new businesses. There are a lot of people who are unwilling to give up on New York, and I salute them, each and every one.

Let’s see, what else? I got a little writing done this weekend, in the hotel room. Not much, but a little. As long as the words keep trickling, it’s fine.

Also, it was a great weekend for my new fashion concept of the last year or two, the “Renfest Cottagecore” thing I’ve been working on.

There were a lot of people in Ithaca wearing overalls, so I can honestly say that they’re finally back! Their banishment during the 2000s and quite a bit of the 10s made for a “lonely soldier assigned to a solitary remote outpost” feel for me during a lot of that period. I hope they stick around now that they’ve recovered from their banishment during that mostly-ugly era of form-fitting, show-every-curve period of fashion that was really pretty unpleasant.

At the bookstore. Maybe a future author pic!

The Universe actually gave me some direct confirmation of my fashion concept yesterday: an employee at Trader Joe’s complimented my shirt, and then, half an hour later, an employee at Barnes&Noble said, “I love your overalls!”

It’s the little things, isn’t it?

Anyway, we’re home now. I’m not back to work for a few days–I always make my autumn vacation a good long one–but we’re home. Back to a bit of normal life, some of which we actually missed. Which things would those be? Well….

“Well, I’m back,” indeed!

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January 14, 2022

Rainbows, Moonbows, Sunsets, and the Stars: Adventures beneath the Hawaiian sky

So much of one’s time in Hawaii is spent looking up, or out. Up to the sky, or out to where the sky meets the sea.

And there’s a rainbow almost every day.

In Buffalo, I might get to see a rainbow three or four times a year. In Hawaii, there were rainbows almost every day. I’d get up, make coffee, go to the balcony to greet the morning, look to the right (west) to the rain clouds descending (and breaking up) from the mountains, and…rainbows.

And then there were the sunsets, and the lingering light once the sun was down:

On this trip, the planets got into the act. Here, from top to bottom, are Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus:

One morning I was awake quite early, so I got up at 6:00am…just in time to see Orion setting. Orion is a winter constellation, which I associate with the colder times of year…which of course this is, even in Hawaii, though it doesn’t seem like it.

The most magical skyward sight of all, though, was something I’d never seen before, something I don’t even think I knew was possible until late one night, on a drizzly evening, The Wife and I both saw it at the same time: a moonbow. Though we didn’t see much of the moon on our trip, because we were mostly facing south so its path through the Hawaiian sky was mostly behind us and out of view from our south-facing balcony, there was a full moon while we were there, and on that night its light was bright enough to shine through the water droplets in the air. The result was this:

Hawaii is quite a place for those of us who find magic in the sky….

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January 12, 2022January 9, 2022

“I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right”: A MAGNUM geek visits Paradise

Longtime readers may remember that I was a big fan of the show Magnum PI back in the day. That is, the original show, the one that ran in the 1980s, and not the new reboot show that is running, well, now. (Nothing against the current incarnation, which I’ve watched a couple of times; it seems like a perfectly acceptable procedural show, but it’s never going to replace the original for me.) Being in Hawaii, where Magnum was set, gave me a chance to see some familiar locations from the show up close.

The biggest draw for an old Magnum fan would almost certainly have been the old estate that on the show doubled as “Robin’s Nest”, the Hawaii estate of the famed novelist Robin Masters, for whom Thomas Magnum and the estate’s major domo, Jonathan Quayle Higgins, worked. This estate was on the eastern shore of Oahu, and we did drive past where it was…but note the past tense there. Sadly, the location–in real life, the Anderson Estate–was demolished a couple of years ago after a long period of neglect. However, we did stop at a beach park a mile or so down the road from where the Anderson Estate once stood, and I took this photo of Manana Island, which is now a bird sanctuary:

You could often see that island in the distance when Magnum was swimming in Mr. Masters’s tidal pool.

Along the same shore, to the south (we drove by this first, actually), we stopped at an overlook with a stunning view. (Overlooks with stunning views are rather a thing in Hawaii!) Here’s a bit of that view, isolated:

That little island with the building on it, connected by bridge to Oahu, is the Makai Research Pier, belonging to Makai Ocean Engineering, a company that works on oceanic tech like sea cables and that sort of thing. That pier doubled, on Magnum PI, as the headquarters for Island Hoppers, the helicopter excursion business run by Magnum’s buddy, Theodore Calvin (TC).

I didn’t realize this at the time, but the lookout where I took that photo, Makapu’u Lookout, is on the same cliffs that become Makapu’u Point, a bit farther to the east. We briefly stopped there but realized that the hiking trail was much longer and more strenuous than we really felt up to that day, so we didn’t go…but it ends at Makapu’u Lighthouse:

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrew_wertheimer/32922164913/

Fans of Magnum will remember this lighthouse for one of the series’s most surprising, and unnerving, episode endings. In the episode “Faith and Beggorah”, there’s a subplot where Magnum is supposed to be investigating if a boxer’s wife is cheating on him. In the episode’s final scene, Rick and TC are watching from a distance as the wife and her putative boyfriend-on-the-side are at this lighthouse–but they are arguing constantly. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but Rick is bored because they can’t prove that she’s cheating on the husband if all they ever see her doing is yelling at the boyfriend. Rick is watching through a telescopic camera lens, while TC is lazily dozing off to the side. TC says “Oh, just keep watching, maybe something interesting will happen”…and at that moment, the boyfriend picks the woman up and tosses her off the lighthouse and down the cliffs. Yikes!

Anyway.

Then there’s this place, the War Memorial Natatorium in Waikiki. This was right down the street from our resort, and yet, I never walked down to get a closer look, alas! Next time, I swear! (Unless it gets torn down, which is apparently a possibility as this location has been an ongoing preservation struggle for a while.)

Built to honor the veterans and fallen of World War I, the Natatorium is not unlike all the various “War Memorial Stadiums” built across America, except that this one is a salt-water swimming pool. It has been closed for decades and is, as noted, an ongoing subject of debate between preservation and demolition. On Magnum, it featured prominently during the climax of an episode titled “Death and Taxes”, where a serial killer forms a fixation on Magnum, for some reason that the episode leaves unstated (to creepy effect).

Some places I did not get pictures of include the Iolani Palace, used often on the show as the location for various government agencies (such as when Magnum had dealings with the local PD)–

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/aa4on/14396166855

Also Honolulu’s Chinatown, which we passed through twice, once by car and once on the bus. This area served as location for when Magnum PI did stories set in the “seedier” part of town, such as the show’s fictional Vietnamese neighborhood, “Little Saigon”.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/81454274@N07/14058078021

There’s something exciting about seeing places you only know through movies and television, isn’t there? This is not a Magnum location, but it is one of the most famous locations in movie history, thanks to a very steamy scene between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity:

And I didn’t get into any places where Elvis Presley filmed at all, I’m sorry to say. We did go to Pearl Harbor, though, and Elvis Presley was a major contributor that fundraising for the Arizona Memorial back in 1961.

It’s also always interesting to note how much poetic and cinematic license play into how movie and teevee locations work! There’s a Magnum PI episode from late in the show’s run where everyone is after a literal buried treasure, and after some tromping through the wilderness they all end up jumping off a cliff into a pool with a waterfall in order to grab some of the money that has ended up floating there. (I don’t remember the particulars.) I looked this up, figuring it to be located someplace deep in the island’s mountainous interior, but…not so! It turns out that if you stand on that exact spot, in no direction are you more than a couple hundred feet from a parking lot or a four-lane highway.

Anyway, folks, be careful when arranging your vacations, because if the place you’re going is where filming took place for a movie or show a member of your party is a big fan of, you’re going to hear about it. A lot.

Even if the place that person sees has nothing to do with the movie or show being mentioned, like this revolving restaurant in Waikiki. Doesn’t it look a bit like Piz Gloria, the mountaintop lair of Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service???

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January 10, 2022January 9, 2022

Hawaiian adventures

Our trip to Hawaii was…amazing. Just amazing. In fact, it was quite nearly perfect.

My mother dreamed all her life of going to Hawaii, and at some point after she had safely seen her two children off to lives of their own, she put her foot down, announcing to my father that they were going. This was sometime in the 1990s. Since then, she has gone to Hawaii something like a dozen times. For this last visit, she treated my family and I to going along with her, as part of her celebration for having turned 80 this past August.

If I count this Hawaii trip as a gift, and I do, it might well be the greatest gift I’ve ever received. This would probably blow the mind of my second-grade self (that’s the year I got an electric train), but seriously, this trip was a gift that to be surpassed would probably have to be along the lines of someone giving me their kidney.

For various reasons, I’d never really thought about going to Hawaii myself. It was a place that I knew about, but didn’t really hold out a great deal of hope for visiting personally. Now, all I can think about is going back.

I’m not going to wax poetic at length here about that trip (though I will have a few more posts about it, focusing on a couple of specific things), but if you’re curious, you can see a lot of what we saw via my Flickr albums. I’ve organized just about every picture I took in Hawaii into these albums. I haven’t gone through and captioned every photo, but I’ve done a lot of them.

Hawaii 2021: This album was going to be my “All the Hawaii” photos album, but then I realized that I needed to split them up more, so this one ended up incomplete. (I put all of the selfies and photos of The Wife and I in this album, though!)
Hawaii 2021, Food and Drink: Self-explanatory. I have never eaten so well on a trip as I did on this trip. I have also not imbibed so well as I did on this trip, which is quite a thing given that we live near one of the United States’s great wine regions. (Food will probably be a post of its own, but meantime, here are pics.)
At the Byodo-In Temple: I took a bunch of pictures in this one place, so it gets its own album.
Pearl Harbor: Another location-specific album. We did not get to go to the USS Arizona Memorial, due to damage to the docks (Oahu was hit by a big storm the week before we got there), but Pearl Harbor is still a deeply moving place to visit.
Sunsets and Rainbows: Self-explanatory. See this post for meditation on a theme.
Candids and Streetscapes: Photos of people and places. I love people-watching, and Waikiki is a fantastic place to do so.
Landscapes, Seascapes, and all the rest: This is the biggest album, encapsulating just about all of my “Oh WOW LOOK AT THAT!!!” moments throughout the trip. Even my crappy photos looked good!

Enjoy!

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December 27, 2021December 27, 2021

“And I’m so worried about the baggage retrieval system they’ve got at Heathrow”

UPDATED and CLARIFIED below!

So, the trip home from Hawaii was supposed to go like this:

December 23: Board plane at HNL, about 12:30pm.
Arrive LAX, around 8:00pm.
Depart LAX for DTW (Detroit), around 12:00am.
Arrive DTW, around 6:00am.
Depart DTW for BUF, around 12:00pm.
Pick up luggage and come home, December 24.

The trip home from Hawaii actually went like this:

December 23: Boarded plane at HML, around noon or so.
After circling LAX a time or two because of bad weather and enduring twenty minutes of nothing but turbulence, landed at LAX around 9:30pm.
Took phone off Airplane Mode to check next flight for DTW. Learn that DTW flight is delayed seven hours to 7:00am.
Attempt to rebook, but after two hours in the help line, no dice. Somehow we managed to get food before everything closed at LAX terminal, whereupon we settled in for an overnight stay right there.
Tried sleeping on floor. This was not successful, due to comfort (it was the floor!) and ambient noise: floor-cleaner machines, a guy vacuuming the carpet around us, deliveries of pallets of food for shops and airport restaurants, constant announcements (“DO NOT ACCEPT ITEMS FROM UNKNOWN PERSONS”, “IT IS ILLEGAL TO SMOKE IN THE AIRPORT”).
At 6:00am, proceed to gate to hopefully board 7:00am flight to DTW.
7:00am flight to DTW is canceled.
Much vexation, annoyance, and panicked texting with my travel genius sister who is at home in Buffalo awaiting us. Somehow she gets us rebooked onto 7:15am flight from LAX to JFK, and then a 4:00pm flight from JFK to BUF.
We learn that Delta is cancelling hundreds of flights on Christmas Eve due to staffing, Omicron, and other frustrations. We board flight, depart for JFK. (A shout-out here to the Delta reps at LAX as all of this was unfolding. They were really put on the spot, dealing with a lot of shit from a lot of people, and at least for my party, they were genuinely helpful as we worked in a very tight timeframe to ensure that we were all going to be able to get home. One poor Delta worker didn’t even get to take her heavy winter coat off before she was plunged into trying to get a boarding pass printed for my mother. I don’t have an informed opinion of Delta’s mass of flight cancellations, but I honestly cannot complain about how their reps on the ground dealt with what has to be the worst timing for such things.)
I eat a breakfast sandwich we bought at LAX before departing, then I briefly consider watching one of the dozen movies I loaded onto my tablet before I crash and proceed to spend probably eighty percent of that 4.5 hour flight sleeping.
Arrive JFK, with no issues. This flight was actually comfortable, and I got to move to the three-seat row where The Wife was sitting, and the middle seat was unoccupied, so we had room. Zzzzzzz.
Now, it’s 3:00pm and we have an hour until our BUF flight leaves. As we land I consult the World Clock on my phone, where I had a clock on Hawaii time and one on NY time; at this time I determine that twenty-four hours have elapsed since our departure from our hotel room, thus starting our journey home. We have to move our asses from something like Gate 25 to Gate 55. We literally had to walk thirty gates. Moving walkways cut this by maybe, a minute or two. We arrive at the gate just as the flight to BUF is to start boarding.
We board. At this point we know it’s a total crapshoot as to whether our luggage is gonna make it to BUF with us.
JFK to BUF flight is uneventful and short. I have a ton of legroom because I’m in the row with the emergency door, which I have already promised the flight attendant that I can handle opening if necessary.
Arrive BUF around 6:00pm. We’ve now been traveling twenty-seven hours. My brain is barely flickering. You know what’s not flickering? Any hope of…
…our luggage having arrived. It does not. We note the empty bag carousel, we glance at the Delta Airlines Baggage Office, which is closed and dark. A sign on the door reads “If we’re closed, go talk to a ticketing agent.” But it’s late in the day, and as there are no more departing Delta flights from BUF that night, ticketing agents are gone. We decide to go home and live to fight another day as far as the luggage goes. There’s nothing we can’t live without in any of our bags, though a number of Christmas gifts are in them so those will be gifted late.
Now it’s Christmas Day. I tweet at Delta to ask about how tracking down delayed baggage works: their system requires a “File Reference Number” which they say to get from a rep at the airport, and I’m thinking, “I gotta go to the airport just to talk to someone about maybe getting my bags?!” Luckily, a Delta social media person sees my tweet and IMs me. We chat back and forth for a bit, the Delta folks give me the File Reference Number and take my info so they can deliver our luggage to our home once it’s back in BUF, and they’re generally very helpful about it. I can’t complain about this at all.
Now it’s the 26th, and I check the tracking on our luggage. Each bag is “Rebooked for Rush Priority” for delivery today, being routed from JFK-DTW-BUF. I’m sure this schedule makes sense in Airline World (maybe that itenerary gets our bags home earliest, maybe the earliest JFK-BUF direct flight has no room for four bags, maybe maybe maybe.
I’m scheduling this post for Monday morning and will update or change it as events regarding our luggage warrant. (UPDATE: roughly 10:30am this morning, a courier from Delta delivered our luggage. Huzzah! So ends our trip. We have now unpacked and verified that nothing is broken, nothing is lost, and that all’s well.)

I’ll have more posts to come about our Hawaiian adventure, because it was an absolute delight with only two minor hiccups during the trip. For now, I’m still trying to get my brain back in the right time zone…and as this is posting, I’m back to work. Sigh. (You really do get to a point where vacation is less a refreshing for work and more a tantalizing taste of a retirement that is too far away….)

Here’s New York City (mainly Manhattan) from the air.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where the title of this post comes from, here you go.

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December 21, 2021

Cloudy Days in Paradise

Blue, green, or gray, the sea is still the sea

Only two days remain in our Hawaiian adventure. This morning we woke up for the first time to cloudy skies. Since gray skies tend to be the norm for Buffalo in winter–a season that I find beautiful in many ways, in ways that incorporate the gray skies, even though I have to admit that the gray gets to be too much at times–this almost feels like Hawaii is trying to prepare us for our return home.

Nice try, Paradise, but I’m not ready. Nine full days here will turn out to be many things, almost all of them wonderful, but they will not be ‘enough’.

I’m already thinking of how to return….

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December 20, 2021December 21, 2021

Writing (and a cheeseburger) in Paradise

To justify the Jimmy Buffet reference, here’s the cheeseburger I had the other night.

Thanks, Maui Brewing Company! To paraphrase Mr. Samuel L. Jackson, “Mmmm! This WAS a tasty burger!”

And here I am, writing.

It turns out that Hawaii is not a cure for RBF, sadly….

Both of these things happened in Paradise.

Some writers are insistent about doing their work in their preferred environments–their home offices or libraries–but I’ve always been able to write just about anywhere I can plunk down with my computer for a while. I actually like having a bit of hubbub around me, and when I write at home I don’t like it to be too quiet: I’ll almost always have music going, and nowadays there is the wonderful world of soundscape videos on YouTube where you can actually pick some ambient sound to play in the background while you do stuff.

Of course, for ambient writing noise you can’t really beat the cries of sea birds, the lapping of the waves, and the voices of happy people on Hawaiian holiday.

I didn’t bring my laptop on this vacation because I just didn’t want to be that encumbered, which means a forced two-week break from drafting Forgotten Stars V: Spacecapades (not the actual title). I draft the new novels in Scrivener, and the laptop is the only device I have that can run Scrivener (until they come up with an Android version, that is), so for now, that book is out. I suppose I could write new material for that book in Google Docs and import it after the fact, but the formatting would be all screwed up and I don’t have the book in Google Docs to begin with. Plus, it’s my experience that at the lengths of book I tend to write, Google Docs tends to bog down.

So, what am I working on? I’m making a pass through an older manuscript that I haven’t looked at in a while: the supernatural thriller about a haunted kayaking expedition, that I had once dubbed Deliverance, eh? (Deliverance being an obvious reference to a canoe trip gone bad, and the eh? because the story takes place in Canada.) As part of my “Release a book every year” plan for as long as I can manage to pull that level of production off, this one’s set to be my 2022 release.

This book is definitely on the short side, for me: it tips the scales at roughly 85,000 words. Even so I can tell that this length makes Google Docs a bit sluggish. But the good part is that I don’t need my laptop for this! Using Google Docs for shorter work is a big reason why, last time I was in the market for a new tablet, I bought one with a Bluetooth keyboard:

It is a challenge scaling one’s position to a smaller keyboard, and at times I miss the keypad, and I have to remind myself that mouse functionality isn’t there. As always, overalls are the best uniform for writing.

(Those are older pics, by the way.)

I’m enjoying using this tablet a great deal! It’s a Samsung Galaxy Tab A, which I bought about a year and a half ago. Samsung devices do have their quirks, but I like the ecosystem and the easy connectivity of devices, and I love the cameras on their phones, so a Samsung fan I remain. (In fact, my next laptop will likely be a Samsung too! This after what will likely have been fifteen years as a Dell user.) Typing with the Blluetooth keyboard is a breeze, and blogging-on-the-go is very easy. I do have the WordPress app installed, but I prefer to use the actual site in my browser; a while back WordPress updated to a new content-management system that uses something called “blocks”, and I find it generally confusing to use so I’ve got a plug-in installed on the main WordPress site that lets me use the old interface. I can use the app, and I do on occasion, but I prefer this way of doing things.

Oddly, when I was still on Byzantium’s Shores, I had to use the Blogger site in the browser too, as opposed to the Blogger app, for a completely different reason: for whatever rationale the engineers chose, the Blogger app will only render in portrait mode, which makes blogging on the app while using the keyboard (and therefore landscape orientation) nearly impossible. This is likely under the assumption that the Blogger app would be used more on phones than tablets, but even so! Bluetooth keyboards are not that uncommon a tool, and and design choice that makes use more difficult is a bad choice indeed. I believe there are workarounds–maybe third-party apps that force reorientation–but I don’t want or need more stuff cluttering up my gizmos just so I can do the work I want to do. Of course, it’s not even an issue anymore since I’ve left Blogger behind, but still!

I know that the tech gods really want to get to a point where full-sized laptops are a thing of the past, but I wonder if they’re not slowly giving up on that dream and are instead blurring the line more and more between old-school laptop and tablet, with touchscreens that fold all the way around and the like. I’ll probably get to experience that myself with my next laptop (which will likely come sometime next year), but for now I don’t mind having multiple devices for different tasks. This tablet suits me nicely for smaller needs, and also for travel. And who knows? Now that I’m being bitten by the travel bug….

And as always, one doesn’t even need a nifty electronic device to get some work done! I may not be directly drafting Forgotten Stars V while on this trip, but I am getting some plotting done the old-fashioned way:

Oh, and the actual title of Deliverance, eh? is–tentatively–The Jaws of Cerberus. The more you know!

And now, I wrap this up because as I write this I have to catch a bus to make a boat ride. It’s a tough life, I tell you!

I’m not saying this is my ideal writing set-up, but it is, as the kids say, “In the conversation”.

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December 18, 2021December 21, 2021

The sea and the sky above it

“It’s hard to tell the difference between sea and sky, between voyager and sea. Between reality and the workings of the heart.” –Haruki Murakami

I wrote the other day about the somewhat overwhelming nature of the sea here in Hawaii. Over the days since, I have come to realize that the sky is every bit as overwhelming here.

And like the sea, the sky is astonishing here no matter what time of day. This city gleams with brilliant light, but as you stand on the street in front of our hotel at night, you see the brilliant light on one side…and the ink-black dome of the sky on the other. Occasionally in the dark will be broken by the flashing lights of an airplane or helicopter. The moon’s path does not bring it into view from our balcony–a shame that, as there is a full moon very soon–and I haven’t been able to make out many stars.

But the other morning I was up at 5am–sleep comes easier, but my body still thought it was mid-morning–and I went out on the balcony to read and to write and to think and listen to the waves and the birds in the banyan tree and the occasional cars. I looked eastward–southeast, actually–and spotted a couple of stars, and then a few more. And then I knew.

The Hunter.

Orion the Hunter was setting, and the bright star off to the left was Sirius, brightest star in our sky, at home in its own constellation, Canus Major.

Orion has always been my favorite constellation, for many reasons. It’s a big part of why I love the winter sky more than the summer one, and to see it for the first time this winter, while here on this journey, was an unexpected gift.

Orion the Hunter, over Honolulu and the South Pacific.

You’re looking good, Orion! Soon I’ll see you in your normal setting soon…but not too soon. I’m not quite done here.

As for the sky at other times, well…oh, this place.

“I want you to live forever, underneath a sky so blue….” (“Live Forever”, Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors)

For a bigger resolution of that last one, go here. I’m slowly getting a lot of my photos from here organized on Flickr, but bear with me as content management isn’t exactly high on my priority list on this vacation!

More later!

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December 14, 2021December 21, 2021

“I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams”

It is, Red. It is.

I didn’t want to blog about this until we were at the very least on the plane (I felt like I was jinxing it by even pre-scheduling a Daily Dose of Christmas post obliquely referring to it!) but…we are in Hawaii.

Specifically, Oahu. More specifically, Waikiki.

Strange thing about Hawaii…it’s never been a place I’ve really even dreamed about visiting, because for many years it just didn’t even feel like a possibility. And even this trip owes everything to someone else’s good graces (Thanks, Mom!). But…well, it’s just a place, isn’t it? It’s a place where people live and work and do stuff. They just do it in the shadows of lushly green mountains and by the side of a wide blue sea.

Just a place.

But what a place!

I mean…come on now.

And then there’s the sea.

Have you ever wondered why the word sea is so much more packed with poetry and romance than the word ocean? Maybe it’s because the sea is a much more primal concept, a more basic one. I know that mariners think of the Great Lakes as seas in their own right. Oceans are specific things. But on this particular morning, I find myself remembering one of my favorite quotes (which I should probably track down at some point in its actual context):

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. (Isak Dinesen)

Well, like many others, I’ve had sweat and tears in damned good measure. Let’s give the sea a try, shall we?

For someone who loves water, who can’t fathom the idea of living in a place where water is a scarcity (Phoenix? Vegas? Never!), there’s still something about the sea that overwhelms my brain on a primal level. My whole life has been spent near water, but I think of streams in a wood, waterfalls, bubbling small pools, swimming holes, rivers, lakes, ponds, whitewater rapids. The sea, though, is something else. You come to the sea and you realize that eventually, on this world of ours, eventually all the water comes back to the sea.

Anyway, those are my somewhat jet-lagged and under-caffeinated thoughts on this, the first morning I’ve awoken to pink clouds over a darkened sea where people are already surfing. Now, we’re gonna try to find some coffee and get our rental car and see what a Hawaiian grocery store is like. As one does.

Further dispatches as events warrant!

(And the Daily Dose of Christmas is prescheduled for every day until the 25th, so we have that going for us, at least!)

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December 6, 2015October 3, 2021

Black Friday in New York

Continuing the adventures in New York City! On Black Friday, we didn’t do much by the way of shopping until late. First up was one of two things that had been on my Must-Do list: Visit the Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium. This was indulging the Little Kid Space Nerd in me, I fully admit! And imagine what flitted through my heart when we walked in and saw the Hayden Sphere looming above:

Such a fascinating place — all the displays about things that I’ve been interested in for almost literally as long as I can remember.

Fascinatingly, those planet models are to scale: If the Hayden Sphere is the size of the sun, then that’s how big the planets are. There’s another series of walking displays around the lower perimeter, showing the size of increasingly tiny things: If the Hayden Sphere is the size of a single raindrop, then this is how big a common cold virus is — that sort of thing. This whole place was amazing.

The upper portion of the sphere itself is the Planetarium, where we saw a show about dark energy, narrated by Neil DeGrasse Tyson himself. I could sit through a dozen planetarium shows in one day, to be quite honest. It was our great luck that the Planetarium had just reopened after several months downtime for refitting: the dome was rebuilt to make the seams between the sections almost invisible, and the seats and projection systems were upgraded. To my surprise, there was no Big Bug-Eyed Projector sitting in the middle of the planetarium, which is a traditional fixture of such places (this kind of thing, if you’re wondering what I’m talking about). Projection seems to be handled from a series of projectors along the boundaries of the planetarium. The show was amazing and very well-done. There’s another theater in the lower half of the Sphere, but we didn’t attend that one. Instead we moved on to the rest of the museum.

Much of the museum is dedicated to the kinds of taxidermy-based diorama displays that I’m sure we all remember from our youths. This museum’s dioramas are some of the best I’ve ever seen, but in all honesty, a little of that kind of thing tends to go a long way with me. There were still some cool things to see, though.

We spent some time in the Hall of Gems and Minerals, because rocks are cool, dammit.

Hall of Gems and Minerals, Museum of Natural History

That last is pretty fascinating: it’s a piece of a much larger meteorite, about the size of a small car — and it weighs 34 tons. That blew my mind. The signage illustrates the engineering problems they faced just displaying the thing in the Museum: it sits on support posts that extend down through the basement floor all the way to bedrock.

After the museum, it was time for another touristy stop: Rockefeller Center.

And that place is every bit as gorgeous as it looks on teevee and in the pictures.

Watching people skate at Rockefeller Center is one of the most unexpectedly wonderful things that we saw on this trip. It was just…sheer, beautiful happiness, from the family that was skating together…

…to the young woman in the wonderful scarf who couldn’t let go of the rail.

After Rockefeller Center, it was off to find dinner. We wound up at a burger joint called 5 Napkin, where we had a terrific meal in a dining room made up to look like an old meat market:

And then, where else to go on a Friday Night in New York City than…TIMES SQUARE!!!

The coolest thing was that everywhere we went that day, nobody was pushy, nobody was in a bad mood. It was as if the thousands of people in our company were all just…happy. Even in Times Square, there was no shoving, no rancor…everybody was relaxed and having a good time. Everybody was. I’ve no idea if it’s always that way or if was just a function of the season (and the presence of cops everywhere), but this entire trip was almost entirely free of anxiety.

So ended our third night in New York City. Two nights remained….