Mountains and Islands

It only cost $1200 to recover all my photos. A bargain at twice the price. Not! I also found my resume among the data saved from our crashed computer. That's something. It's nice not to have to rewrite it, although with my track record of late, maybe I should make a few revisions anyway. We also found a few of Ron's important client files on the recovery disk along with plenty of junk. Oh well. Live and learn. Turns out we had a little earthquake impact at our house after all. The other day, I went to add some chlorine to our water tank and noticed that it was less than a fifth full. Yikes. It hadn't rained hard in awhile, but it seemed unimaginable that we could have used up all that water so fast. We're talking 10,000 gallons! After some careful examination, we found the cause. The overflow pipe had moved out of alignment with the main input line, causing a leak at the joint where the two pipes meet. None of the rain had been making it's way to the tank. Inst...

Aloha! Yes, I'm trying to be cheery. I live in Hawai'i , after all. Still, I'm finding that paradise is not exempt from the headaches of the modern world. We got our hard drive and recovered data back late last week. That's both good news and bad news. I put everything back together and booted up the machine. Yay ! It works. Sort of. The hard drive has been returned to it's out-of-the-box state. That means that with the exception of Windows for some reason, all the software has to be set up anew. I found Microsoft Office asking me for a product key. Unfortunately, I no longer have it. Seems we lost our certificate of authenticity in the shuffle of moving. So I spent most of yesterday on the phone back and forth between Hewlett Packard, who built the machine and installed the software, and Microsoft, who made the software and issued the product key. Each insisted only the other could help. I learned that at HP, the sales/customer service folks are not connected to th...

I saw Jesus today. He was wearing a tie-die t-shirt and driving a Chevy Lumina van. He had lots of riders with him. Apostles, perhaps? Yes, this guy was definitely Jesus. He looked just like the photo my grandparents had hanging on their bedroom wall. The weather was beautiful. Most of the day, anyway. I spent several hours mowing the lawn. This afternoon, Hopps and I went to town. She had an appointment with vet for shots and a checkup. There were plenty of nice people at the vet clinic, not to mention a litter of cute puppies in for shots and a checkup too. Of course, Hopps is no puppy. At least, not chronologically. She still acts like a puppy, which is good for what the vet called a "geriatric girl." After our visit with Dr. Julie, we went to Queen Liluokalani Park for a nice stroll and plenty of good sniffies . On our way home, it began to dump buckets of rain. Now we're settled in, nice and dry for the night. Happy Thanksgiving! A hui hou. Aloha.

Here's a picture of the hibiscus I promised. It occurred to me just tonight that there's a camera card slot right on my printer that allows me to import photos to the PC. Duh! As I trudged up the road with the poochies at about 7:30 this morning, I became acutely aware that I was wearing only shorts, sneakers and a t-shirt. I was actually perspiring just a little. No long johns. No snow boots. No gloves. No fleece hat. No parka. Just shorts and a t-shirt. It's November. November is typically the rainiest month in these parts. It's been an unusually dry one this year, even though we've gotten enough drizzle to keep our water tank full and our grass soggy. The experts are attributing our "dry" weather to El Nino . I suspect that's what's caused all the flooding and nastiness in the Pacific Northwest recently. The past few days have been beautiful here, with plenty of sunshine, no vog and a few big puffy white clouds. Yes, this is the paradise I...

We had a tsunami warning this morning here in the islands. An 8.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan prompted the Pacific Tsunami Warning System to sound. We didn't actually hear the sirens, of course, since we are 2500 feet above sea level and a half an hour's drive from the coast. We heard it via the Emergency Alert System on TV. Within a short time, the warning was rescinded as officials realized the diminutive size of the wave, but they still urged caution pending the arrival of some trouble making ripples. There were several high water surges that washed boats up the Hanalei River on Kauai and caused some shoreline and harbor mayhem. Thankfully, nobody was injured. The wave/surge took 2-4 hours to reach Hawaii and about 11 hours to reach the west coast of North America. News reports said that the Crescent City California harbor sustained minor damage. That's really pretty amazing when you think about it. The wave took just 11 hours to cross the entire Pacifi...

On Sunday afternoons, the two local all-Hawaiian, all-the-time radio stations on the island broadcast an entire show in the Hawaiian language. It's very cool, despite the fact that I have no idea what they're talking about. Oh I pick up the occasion place name or common word. But mostly, it's all Greek to me. Still, it's a lovely sounding language. This past Sunday, the Hawaiian word for the day on one station was actually three words: aue ka nani . It means, "How beautiful!" Aue is a wonderful, universal P olynesian expression that works really well in plenty of situations. You might say, " Aue ka nani !" at the ocean or a blooming flower, or you might say, " Aue ! Da kine line at da buffet ees long, brah !" It's a great word. After the vog , we had several lovely days with a little sun and refreshing tradewinds . Aue ka nani ! Today, the trades died down, bringing back the humidity. Hopefully, we'll escape the vog this...

On Saturday morning, as I sat here checking my email and lamenting the nasty vog outside, I received a nice surprise. The phone rang. No, that's not the surprise. Although I did jump a little. The surprise was the voice on the other end. It was familiar, yet distant. A voice from the past. It was my college roommate Colleen. "I'm here. On the Big Island," she said. She was visiting with her son and an old friend who now lives on Maui. I met them in Volcano Village that night. We had a lovely dinner and talked story well past my usual bedtime. It was really great to see her after so many years. She looked pretty much the same. Mostly, I found it was good to hear her laugh. She has a great, infectious laugh. Sometimes it bursts. Sometimes it's a little ornery and lecherous. Amazingly, there was not one nanosecond of awkwardness between us. We just seemed to hit it off where we left off. The vog is now gone. It was brutal. For three days it lingered, frying leaves on...

I have a theory about computers. I believe that they are built to go belly up within two to three years of the date of purchase. So even if you don't need or want to buy a new system or upgrade your old one, you have no choice. The system forces that upon you. It's planned obsolescence. That's my theory and I'm stickin' to it. It was very early yesterday morning when Ron began to have trouble with the computer. The crazy thing started some sort of scan on its own. When the scan was complete, the computer rebooted, only to again launch the scan. This happened over and over. At one point, we were able to abort the scan, only to have Windows display a black screen with white script asking how we wanted to restart the computer. We first selected the "recommended" mode. This did nothing but bring the black and white screen back up. We subsequently tried all the start up modes offered, with no luck. The stupid machine was fritzed. It would not respond to anythin...