All accounted for on this Feline Friday

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There’s only one photo here that needs an explanation.

The last photo. It shows Kali in one of her favorite places, the top of our car while parked in our garage. It’s Kali’s little quirk.

When she is in the house, Kali often lurks at the door that opens into the garage. For some reason, she just loves to go out there and spend time. She does an obligatory pass or two around the interior perimeter of the garage, and then lounges on the top of the car. The windshield is usually full of cat footprints. At certain times of day, sun comes in and she gets toasty warm. Other times, not so much. But she loves it nonetheless! She wants to come in at mealtimes, but otherwise I have to entice her back inside. Sometimes I have to turn to direct action and just pick her up and carry her back in.

She has been stuck out there for 5 or 6 hours on at least a couple of occasions, but it doesn’t seem to be a deterrent.

Kinikini started this garage routine. He was actually more insistent on getting out that Kali is now. But then I forgot he was in the garage a few times and he was trapped there for what was apparently an uncomfortable period. Now he rushes to the door, peeks out, but backs away and stays in the house. Kali, meanwhile, has assumed the mantle of escapee-in-chief.

Go figure!

Feline Friday: July 17, 2026

Another vintage memory restored: Somewhere near Whitman College c.1967

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I’m sure you’ll spot me immediately. I was a sophomore at Whitman College at the time the photo was taken during the Spring of 1967. Location-somewhere near the Whitman campus in Walla Walla, Washington. I can place it because I spent the next academic year at UH trying to build my grades and my confidence before returning to Whitman to graduate. By the time of my senior year, several people in this photo had graduated. So best guess–late Spring semester 1967.

The photo captures a group of Delts–members of Whitman’s Delta Rho chapter of Delta Tau Delta fraternity during a “kegger”–an outdoor gathering somewhere out in the countryside centered on a large keg of cold beer–in a “secret” location we all referred to as “Delt Island.”

The location was passed on each year to the few Delts who had cars and would be called on to ferry groups out to the island for these occasions. I recall that a man known as “Orville” would approach in his truck to check on our gatherings. A cold beer would be thrust into his hand as soon as he exited the truck. I doubt he was the owner, but he might have been. Or perhaps just an employee in charge of maintaining order. But, for whatever reason, the Delts were invited to party there. Must have been some history, which would have been interesting to know.

I suppose my grades for the first two years at Whitman might have been better of I had picked up books more regularly than I picked up beer mugs!

This photo was restored from the scan done years ago of an old B&W print from one of my stashes of photos. It was done by Google’s Gemini after ChatGPT refused to process the photo, saying that it could violate the company’s policies regarding teens and children. I tried to reassure ChatGPT that these were college friends, but to no avail. But Gemini processed the photo without delay.

Okay, to be honest, there are a lot of underage drinkers in this photo, including myself. But officialdom seemed to look the other way and ignore these common infractions. And we all thought it was perfectly normal. As I recall, I became a regular at the Green Lantern, a popular college hangout, before my 20th birthday. I think my claim of legal age had been vouched for by someone trusted by the management, and after that I just walked in and ordered another beer without being carded. I guess it was good for business, although beer cost almost nothing in those days. A dollor or two per large pitcher, as I recall.

The bold colors in this restored photo are unnaturally strong and bright. That’s really kind of a problem. But I’ll have to experiment with prompts that direct Gemini to tone them down in a reasonable manner.

Kahala at dawn, no dogs

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July 16, 2026. Waialae Beach Park.

Kahala at Dawn

I know that its time to start walking again, so I pushed out of the house this morning about 20 minutes before sunrise. Cane and camera in hand. A few small dog biscuits in my pocket, just in case.

Now I’m the old geezer in the park walking slowly with a cane across the uneven ground toward the ocean. The concrete walkway beckons, but I figure there’s more effort needed across the grass and dirt. Restoring some muscle mass will take effort. So I stay off the prepared path. I’m not alone. Several small multigenerational groups are out for family photo shoots, photographers visible in the mix.

Weather was beautiful. Clear, dry. I got my photos. Check for dogs, none sighted.

Turned around and walked home. So far, so good.

But I obviously have to walk this routinely for a week or more. Then I can graduate to the longer walk on the beach toward the hotel.

A Faded Memory Restored

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My mother’s car in front of our house in Kahala c. 1958 (restored by ChatGPT)

This is a two-part post. It’s about my mother’s car, but it’s also about the photo, and my success in using ChatGPT to restore the original color slide, which was seriously degraded after 60 years of poor storage conditions.

First, the car

Sometime in about the mid-1950s, my mother bought a car of her own. It was used, purchased from someone in the neighborhood. It provided her new mobility, and initially allowed her to drive my sister to school at Punahou in the mornings. A few years later, she would drop both of us at University lab school when Bonnie and I transferred there beginning in the fall of 1959.

My dad built a little lean-to addition to the side of the small carport without benefit of a permit. You can see that in the background on the left of this photo. You can see some other things as well. My parents had a number of coconut trees in their yard at this time. The shower trees along the street are already quite large. The are still there, older but trimmed so they don’t appear too much bigger. And the giant bird of paradise plant to the right of the front door was already full grown. It’s still there today producing blooms about 70 years later.

My mom named her car “Goliath.” It was an Austin, dated somewhere around 1950. It was a very dark green. I recall it was a 5-gear shifter on the floor. It’s turn signals were little orange “arms” that flipped out from the appropriate side of the car when to let other drivers know which way you were going to turn. I remember that it had a knob marked “Choke” on the dashboard which had to be pulled out in order to start the car, then slowly eased back to normal as the engine warmed up.

And it another issue. Its starter would “stick,” or at least that’s how my mother described it to us. So if the starter didn’t respond, the three of us-my mother, sister, Bonnie, and I-would dutifully open the doors, get out, each stand at one of the doors, and then jump up and down, rocking the car wildly until you would hear an audible click. That was the started unsticking. At that point, we would compose ourselves, get back in the car, and my mom would start the engine.

I’m pretty sure she had that car until around 1960 or 1962, when she bought a used Chevy Corvair from the mother of a classmate and friend of mine who lived down at the end of Kealaolu. I learned to drive on that Corvair. I remember both of these cars fondly.

The photo

I found the original image of Goliath in a box of my mother’s slides. The color was faded, and some kind of fungus had eaten away at the emulsion, leaving the basic image intact although very washed out, with orange splotches across the frame.

I uploaded a copy of the photo to ChatGPT and typed in a basic instruction: “Clean up this vintage photo, repairing damage and artifacts. Render in color.”

The result was dramatic, now with bold colors, although this first effort had obliterated the bold black letters on the mailbox that spelled out my dad’s name rather than the street address, an interesting sign of the times.

So I gave an additional instruction: “Please repeat the same process, but restore the lettering on the white mailbox visible just in front of the car. It spells out, in black letters, my father’s name: John M Lind”

And that did the trick. It doesn’t look totally correct, but I didn’t know how to phrase an instruction to tone down the lettering so that it looked weathered. Perhaps I’ll try again another time.