Category Archives: Personal

Calendars, Criminology, and San Francisco: A Busy Week!

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Forget the elections. I’ve been stressing about the calendars!

I’ve been bogged down for much of the past week or two in the process of combing through over 28,000 photographs I’ve taken this year to select the few dozen that will appear in my annual calendars.

The problem is that I procrastinated and should have gotten them done a month ago. Instead, they’ll returnd from the printer just in time for me to distribute during the holidays.

I’ve been making annual calendars for nearly 20 years. I’m not exactly sure when I started, but I found a mention of my cat calendars in 2008, and it didn’t sound like it was the first year.

Initially, as I recall, it was a way to feature what I thought were my best photos of the year. But before long, it was a fun holiday gift for our small circle of friends.

It started with the cats, but soon expanded to also feature the dogs that we met on our early morning walks, and gave copies to their people as holiday gifts. And, finally, I added a version featuring sunrise photos, first in Kaaawa and now in Kahala.

This year, I had to create two versions of the Kahala Morning Dogs calendar, because my list of favorite canine friends keeps growing, even though a few regulars moved away this year.

Here are summaries of the 2025 calendars, which were just finished and sent off for printing this morning.

Whew. Relief!

Just click to see larger versions.

Kahala Morning Dogs 2025

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MORE Kahala Morning Dogs 2025

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Our Kahala Cats 2025

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Kahala at Dawn 2025

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There is time pressure involved because, in just a couple of days, I’m accompanying Meda to the annual conference of the American Society of Criminology in San Francisco. She is a former president of ASC, but this will be the first time she’s attended since Covid prompted her to retire.

“Something’s happening,” she said

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I can’t believe it’s been 14 years since my dad died shortly before 2 a.m. on October 23, 2010.

He had been living in a nursing home since a day or two before Thanksgiving in 2008, after falling at home and being admitted to Queen’s Hospital for an assessment.

A month before his death, we knew he didn’t have long. This post originally appeared on September 27, 2010.

The telephone rang at home Saturday morning. It was my sister, Bonnie.

“Something’s happening.”

When Bonnie’s phone call came, I was still on my last cup of morning coffee. I had posted more scans of my dad’s old pictures earlier in the morning, including some of him in Aloha Week events that took place 60 years ago. After that, we had gone out on our regular daily walk down to the beach, paid our respects to dawn, and visited with the daily dogs along the way, then made the walk home where we had a spread of grapes, cottage cheese, a bowl of cereal, and coffee waiting.

Then came the phone call.

“Something’s happening.”

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Noted: Eight years gone

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My sister, Bonnie Pauahi Stevens, died on October 13, 2016.

Her death was in some ways harder to deal with than the death of my mother because it seemed so premature, as Bonnie was three years younger than I am now. Too soon to die, I thought then, and continue to feel now.

Life goes on, of course.

But I still feel her presence. “Her” mango tree, a Bombay Piri, which was planted at the time of her birth, continues to thrive in our backyard next to “my” tree, a larger Haden. Her genealogical files have proved an enduring resource, even if I don’t have all the skills to easily interpret them.

Bonnie’s passing didn’t leave me alone. I am fortunate to have found both a half-sister and half-brother who I never knew about when I was growing up with Bonnie, although I’m not accustomed to being the elder in the family. And picking up some of Bonnie’s interest in family history has introduced me to other cousins of various distances and generations, who continue to add depth to my appreciation of family roots.

Bonnie and Ian c. 1947

In any case, I didn’t want the day to pass without acknowledgment.