Taking a peek at home

Some folks are concerned about acknowledging on social media that they are not in their homes. Obviously, if you write a travel blog, you ignore this advice. This does not mean I ignore home security. With a cabin and a home, I have to leave one location without a presence even when I am not traveling

Technology is part of many things we do so we have made use of security systems that allow us the ability to any activity on our properties. The video system sends a notification if motion is detected and records video that is stored by the company for later review. Our system seems to be very sensitive and is flexible in the options it provides.

Home soon.

SloMo art

I enjoy technology and experimenting. With images and video, I use technology to make up for a lack of artistic talent. Mostly, I try a lot of things and see what works. I discovered that I can take slow-motion video on my iPhone. How this might be used has not occurred to me before. SloMo provides a way to see things you often do not notice and the effect can be pretty cool.

Looper Live

For the size of the population of Kauai, there are many opportunities to listen to live music. There are farmers' markets most days and frequent art fairs. There is nearly always at least one musician present. Many of the bars and restaurants also often have performers.

We became fans of a young violinist we saw several times. Kimberly McDonough plays the electric violin. If I was a musician trying to make performing my career, I probably would not choose to start on Kauai and not with the electric violin. It works for her. There are plenty of opportunities to play, but who would ever see you. I guess with the Internet and YouTube there is always hope.

I see that Kimberly has 10,000+ YouTube subscribers. Most of her content consists of covers, but she has started to put some of her own material on iTunes. Her work is certainly worth a listen - rock violin, classical - pretty much anything.

One of the more interesting things she does when performing is to use a looper in real time. Loops are common in popular music, but watching someone create multiple loops and then build them into a song in real time was impressive. I have embedded an example of what this looks like with the YouTube at the bottom of this post.

Artist or botanist

Kauai is often referred to as the garden island. You would get no argument from me. The vegetation is dense and beautiful. I have many photos just of flowers.

I was thinking about whether posting pictures of interesting vegetation should be allowed. Just to have something useful to offer it would seem you should know the name of the plant and preferably provide something interesting about that plant before a blog post should be considered legal. The only thing I have actually learned about plants here is what ginger looks like and where it comes from. I guess I also know a little more about Taro, but I already knew a little so that probably does not count.

I decided I should be able to offer a flower photo from time to time legitimized as art. I am not certain that my photography rises to the level of artistic, but I am closer with these examples as an artist than as a botanist.

So, rather than post the basic beautiful flower pic, I will provide an occasional image that I think is interesting. Here are a couple images I collected along a path we walked today. These are not actually flowers (I think) - one is past the flowering stage and the second is just strange and I have no real idea which parts of the second one are a legitimate flower. I may be conpletely wrong on both counts, but what does an artist know?

Big Waves

Kauai has surfers and big waves. The waves are not always big, but they have been for the past few days. Since I have been adding images to all of my posts, I have several photos I took at Poipu beach that show what this has looked like for the past several days. I suppose most middle school kids understand the relationship between the weather experienced and the waves, but there seems no rhyme nor reason to me.