Hawaii

I am in Paradise...

I arrived in Honolulu late Thursday night... found my hotel at Waikiki amid the tiki torches and checked in...

Yesterday I got up early and braved the traffic on the H-1 highway headed north to Ewa and the Hawaiian Railway Society museum... and spent the day with parlor car 64... she is in pretty good shape for 110 years. Surprisingly good shape... She is a pretty car with really nice wood work...

I spent my time underneath poking a pocket knife into wooden beams, checking iron rods and generally getting dirty. Had a beer and dinner with my hosts them made my way back to Waikiki and my hotel... so as of last night I had been in Waikiki for 24 hours and hadn't seen the beach or ocean... This am I got up early, and based upon yesterday's inspection started the preservation report... then I took a walk on the beach... Its now about 9:00 and I will once again head west away from Waikiki to Ewa, and the railroad project...

Next trip looming

Two days from now I fly away… to Hawaii… It is not just a pleasure trip (but it will be a pleasure) but instead, a working trip… I will be doing a preservation study for a railroad car, a Hawaiian railroad car.

I will be studying a single car, making suggestions on how she should be preserved… It is a process that I am comfortable with…

But the car (the railroad car) is owned, preserved, operated by a group, a preservation group who I don’t know… Preservation groups, particularly volunteer based groups have thoughts, directions, and ideas… and those ideas and such must be taken into account…

Of course, while there I will be tourist… a searcher… a visitor… This is my second trip to the Islands... the first time I flew into Honolulu, then flew to Kauai to explore. Explore the Grove Farm and Missionary houses at Princeville, Boone’s railroad, and whatever I found interesting… Several days later I flew back, then joined my son on his destroyer, for a tiger cruise back to Everett. I spent a night in ships berthing at dock in Pearl, visited the Arizona the next day, then we sailed west. This time I will explore Honolulu and Oahu.

In preparation, I have been scanning slides… slides of restoration work… for a presentation while in Hawaii. It is tedious… it takes 3-4 minutes for each slide… I need to scan a little over 200 slides… so over 10 hours… I probably will use less than 30 in my presentation… I just don’t know which 30 slides… The scanning comes as I find myself abandoning slides, slide projectors and silver as a photographic method. I am not the only one… Only last month the last Kodachrome processing machine was turned off… Instead of Kodachome we have jpg’s… instead of a carousel we have a laptop… the world moves on.

The upside to the scanning process is the memories I am finding as I look through the slides.

National Hat Day

Apparently, today, January 15^th is “National Hat Day”….

As a blog which who’s name includes a reference to headwear, written by someone who frequently wears a hat, (I have a bunch) it seems that it is appropriate to acknowledge the day… For we are all about the headwear… Members of my Rotary Club using me as an example have started a “bring back the hat” movement…

But the blog isn’t really about hats…

When it started, and I had to chose a name, I choose “Too Many Hats” as a reference to too much work, too many responsibilities… It wasn’t really about the hat… the hat was an accessory… At the moment I started the blog, among my other job duties I had to attend a 3 day conference on recreation programs… (a really good conference, if ill-timed) while decorating the house… the house museum for Christmas events… many of the seminars I attended were about E-communication… Blogs, E-newsletters, social network sites… too many hats was about too many job responsibilities…

The blog (about Hats… remember, there is a blog about hats… or at least the name includes hats…) has morphed as I find my muse… mostly my muse has been travel… not hats, although hats appear often…

Christmas and family also inspire posts… particularly Christmas….

But today we talk about hats… After all, its National Hat Day

My current daily hat is an oil cloth fedora… I bought it at the San Gregorio General store during a Houston Jones concert… It was a replacement for a wool felt fedora purchased in Pisac Peru in March 2007… I left that hat in a cab in Buenos Aries a year ago… I miss that hat, but the new hat has grown on me… it has become the hat… except at work, where I ether wear a brown wool Peruvian bowler, a straw boater, or a black bowler…

For non work use, there is also a cheap white woven plastic cowboy hat… part of my uniform when volunteering for the San Jose Grand Prix… It has become my hat of choice on hikes and other hot days in the sun…

Maybe it is about hats…