Mountains and Islands

So you walk in and they greet you with soft, white spa robes and hot tea.  Nice.  Ah, but don't be fooled.  It's a ruse, done to lull you into thinking that the procedure you are about to endure will be pleasant.  It is not.  Once in the room, a petite, smiling but serious woman with cold hands manipulates your exposed breast into a vice and applies 25 pounds of pressure.  Now, 25 pounds may not sound like much, but trust me, it leaves a mark.  There's gotta be a better way.   That was the morning's fun on Friday.  In the after noon, I was poked, prodded and probed elsewhere on (or should I say in) my person, which made for the perfect, shitty day.  This all happened in the lovely city of Honolulu.  Now, Waikiki is nice, with fancy shopping and swanky hotels.  But deviate from that strip one iota and you will witness the sordid underbelly of the service industry.  Hey, the regular people have to live somewhere.  For all it's azure blue ocean, balmy climate and swayi

The vog has cleared.  It has been replaced by rain.  At least the air is breathable again.  I spent the morning shopping for nothing too glamorous, getting a haircut, etc.  Hilo felt a bit like a sauna, all hot and steamy.  The girl who cut my hair tried to make me feel good about my frizz by telling me that curls like mine are the latest.  People are paying to have them put into their hair.  Now if only my high-waisted, big- thighed -woman  jeans would come back in style, I'd be the  hippest cat on the island.   Speaking of cats, my Lucy isn't feeling too well.  Poor little angel.  I gave her tuna tonight, just to get her to eat a little something.  Normally, she would wolf it down like there's no tomorrow.  At least she ate several bites.  That's more than she ate of her regular cat food.  At least she came in tonight and is now, as I type this, curled up on the couch.  I've made an appointment to have a mammogram and other womanly examinations in Honolulu at the

The tradewinds are gone and we are now besieged with..... VOG !  I hate vog !  Not that I have any right to complain.  It's been months since our last bout with the sulfur dioxide Nemesis .  Wait a minute.  Maybe I do have a right to complain.   When I was living in Gunnison , how many days of vog did we encounter?   Hmmmmm ....let me think.... oh yeah.  That would be ZERO!  There was a little smoke during the summer of 2005 when the entire state of Colorado was burning and some of it blew our way, but that was different.  It was something you knew would GO AWAY!  Here, we don't know if this encounter with Pele's bad breath will last a day or a week or a month.  Further, we don't know if the volcano will continue to spew for another day, week, month or 20 years.   Today, we drove to our new friend Andy's house to buy 2o more coffee trees.  Lately, the vog has been bad in Pahala Town, where Andy lives.  Today, however, the fine folks of Pahala got a reprieve, th

Lately we've been on a root beer float kick.  I've also been wondering why I can't lose any weight. Coincidence?  Absolutely! One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.  And no, it's not diet root beer. I considered using this blog to voice my concerns about Sarah Palin and John McCain, but I will resist except for  this short blurb.  For now, anyway.  I could go on and on about how disturbing it is that they are now soaring in the polls.  Sarah believes our involvement in Iraq is a holy war, that we should teach creationism in our public schools, that her pipe line is ordained by God and we should drill baby drill despite any effect it will have on God's green earth.  Then there's John McCain, a life-long Episcopalian who suddenly became a Baptist.  What the h-e-double toothpicks is wrong with Episcopalians?  I say, give me a man who has attended the same church for 20 years ( Obama ) and a good Catholic boy ( Biden ) any day.  And that's all I will

The other day, I walked into Ron's office and he noticed some blood on my arm. "What happened there?" he asked. "Oh, I guess I just scratched myself.  You know, they say your thin gets skinner as you get older."  That's exactly how I said it.  I noticed the slip as it came out.  "So I guess my thin is getting skinner, too." He laughed.  "I heard the way you meant it, not how you said it.  I guess my brain switched the words back around."   I bought a watermelon the other day.  It had been a long time since I'd had any and it made me think of my dad.  When I was a kid, I remember coming home from wherever I'd been and looking in the fridge to find a big, fat watermelon.  I'd remove the tin foil covering, anticipating a thick, juicy slice.  Instead, I would find the center of the carved out, as though some confused antarctic scientists had taken a core sample.  My dad had gutted the thing.  He'd taken the sweet heart, lea

Today, we made our way to Na'alehu town for the second annual Malama Punalu'u cultural festival.  There was some food, crafts and entertainment that included great local musicians and several accomplished hula halau, or hula schools.  We ate a pork burrito, shave ice(with coconut, root beer and mango syrup) and of course, poi balls.  We sat watching the performers from beach chairs under the hot Hawaiian sun.  Da Poi Balls are ono!  Deep fried blobs of poi.  Deep fry anything and it's good, right? Yesterday, we made corn chowder from our own home grown corn and lemon meringue pie with lemons from our own tree.  That's not entirely true.  I don't have a mixer, so I had some trouble making the meringue.  It takes forever by hand and I lost patience.  So we had lemon not -meringue pie, or lemon pie sans meringue, ex-nay on the eringue-may.  It was still good. Very lemony.  Meringue doesn't really taste like anything anyway.  Certainly not nearly so flavorful as po