June 28, 2019
Ah, Hawaii is truly paradise, and we’ve been enjoying both our surroundings and life on land tremendously. Weekly breakfasts overlooking the ocean at Huggo’s, near-daily walks to town for lunch, Uber trips to the grocery store, a couple of car-rental day trips to explore Hawaii’s west coast, and evenings spent at the pool and Jacuzzi enjoying the glorious sunsets have filled much of our time.
But it hasn’t been all play and no work, not by a long shot.
For anyone unfamiliar with this blog, Google quit supporting the program we used to create many of our older photo galleries. As a result, hundreds of those galleries pretty much vanished overnight last April. We knew this was coming and had retrieved the building blocks so we could restore the blog when we got a chance, but due to a failure on Picasa’s part, we weren’t as prepared as we hoped. In the end, rebuilding and placing those galleries was a massive job.
Since we were already planning to take the season off from cruising, this turned out to be fortuitous timing. When we’re cruising, the daily routine does not include hours a day for optional projects. The things that aren’t optional such as boat maintenance and repair, research, buying and preparing food, housekeeping, errands, and travel and exploration (the reason we’re doing this) all take precedence. Then there is the work we enjoy doing such as keeping up this blog–plus I keep a journal so I have memories to put in the blog–and things like socializing, helping friends with their boat and cruising issues, and taking time off for our own entertainment (TV shows, reading, and decompressing with computer solitaire breaks) that also take up time. There is no time left for a massive project with the level of work needed to fix our blog.
This is where Hawaii came to the rescue. Since we’ve spent a lot of time here in the past, we haven’t felt the need to do much sightseeing (although those two day trips were a lot of fun). And with it having been a hotter-than-usual June in Kona, we don’t feel guilty spending much of the day indoors with air conditioning. Rich has a work project he needs to do, but he’s set that aside to help fix our blog.
Thus, while it may seem like we’ve been taking a break from our blog, it’s just the opposite: we’ve been working on it almost daily, sometimes for hours a day, during the past three weeks. Finally, we’re pretty much done. The galleries are back, although the photos within them are more random, so I’ll start working to put them in better order. I’ll also check the blog for any holes, although I think we got everything. Also we’ve made some tweaks and improvements, such as Rich adding a Navigation segment to the Cruising Information Pages. Meanwhile, we’ve certainly earned our celebration Mai Tais!
I’ll continue to work adjusting the photo galleries, but I’ll also start putting in those posts I promised about places we kept our boat in South Island, New Zealand. Then I’ll pick up where I left off with my Fiji posts. In the words of Jack Lord: “Be there; aloha!”–Cyndi
