making an offer

Booyah! We're making an offer on 2 acres tomorrow morning. Holy crap batman.

In the meantime, we already have the garden going - hydroponics style, with 47 different veggies or grains. We have 70+ plumeria cuttings, 30+ crown flower cuttings, a producing coffee tree, baby mango & 3 baby avocado . Now all we need is the land to plant it! Crossing the fingers!

Should be growing our own food, feeding the butterflies & making awesome leis within 6 months if this works out!

welcome Charlie!

There's a million things to blog about. I'm way behind & lots is going on. However, I'm going to throw in one quick post to welcome our Monarch Butterfly 'Charlie' into the world. He hatched out this morning...two days early little stinker!

Charlie is our first butterfly! His predecessors, Alpha and Bravo, both died in the pupae stage (Alpha fell & splatted, Bravo had a lethal parasite).

Delta and Echo are both pupating right now & should appear in 9 days if they don't have the dreaded parasite too.

Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Kilo, Juliet & Lima are still caterpillars & are munching away on Crown Flower leaves in the schwanky 'Butterfly Castle' we purchased.

We're raising monarchs quite by accident & totally loving it! We're going to turn our screened lanai into an indoor monarch house. Woo! Helping an endangered species is WAY FUN.

seattle

woo! I'm in Seattle with Steve. I must love him if I'm willing to be somewhere this COLD :)

Weather like this makes me appreciate Hawaii even more. It was 30 degrees when I landed. AAAAAGGHHHH!

Lava up close & personal

The lava finally came back down the hill last night. Pele's been hiding since July & we've been out for the past two weeks waiting for her to make an appearance. We heard she finally got down the hill to a walkable distance so we got our walking sticks, cameras, water & headed out. I was ready for a 4 hour hike like last year...this time it was 3 minutes! By the time we left the flow was only 25 feet from the spot where everyone parks!

Here's a starter set of photos:
Dat's a Rotsa Rava Reorge!

Yes, we are that close. Most of these are taken without zoom. We were only 8 feet from the lava most of the time. Luckily it moves slow & we stayed on the high spots. Gravity is your friend!

These movies and photos are hosted on my OWN site, so please just view them once & don't send the link around. I need to keep my bandwidth under the limit. If you know of free photo sites where I can host pics *and* movies, please let me know & I'll move em.

containerati + computer nerd0

Oh, did I mention the container arrived safe & sound? Folks keep asking, so I think I forgot to post it on the blog.

So yeah, it's here. It's been here for 6 weeks :) The mega-drama of everything going wrong is OVER. One the mainland, 'container' got to be a dirty word. Oddly, the moment it went on the boat, everything to do with the container has been effortless, inexpensive and all good. I take this as a another sign that I'm supposed to live in Hawaii.

It's been raining too much to cut into it. Besides, I have to unpack it first :) I did, however, get some schwanky metal roofing on the cheap last week & am going to throw a storage shed off the back of the container - thank god all my male pals over here are builders !

Old timey HighWire folks, this one's for you....
On a different note, I got a web job a few weeks ago, that actually has a lot of programming! The site's using Miva Merchant & it turns out that MM is written in SLP. I got to tweak templates & get my geek on. I was happy in ways that I'm embarrassed to admit.

rainy today, but still 85 degrees. no complaining here.

oh hot! hot! hot!

Well goodness me. After 5 weeks of rain the skies suddenly went BLUE, NO CLOUDS. It is freakin hot! Right now it is 92 degrees in the SHADE. Wah wah wah. I don't know if this is abnormal, but I don't care...alls I knows is that I got a sunburn on the 7th of freaking *january*. JANUARY.

Mom and Auntie Pam just left from my birthday visit. We had a mad, 4 day tour of the island. Quite an itinerary and I'm exhausted. I'm trying to convince my aunt that she needs to move here :)

Off to Hilo for errands.

I am Le Nerd

I made my website this weekend - well the guts anyway. And I made it with PHP. Oooooh la la....all the nerdy joys of templates without DTL. It started with one php snippet, then of course I had to bust out the TYPE-A and make it as 'streamlined' as possible. I can't leave well enough alone. Kinda cool though. Two small templates generate the entire site, with one file holding the settings to make each page look different, then the unique content pages. GEEK GEEK GEEK.

Other big news is that the container is on the ground! It's been raining every day so I can't play with it yet. First job is to harvest 20' bamboo up the hill & make a rain structure to keep the container dry while I'm fussing with it. Bamboo is free, renewable and compostable folks, so please refrain from lecturing me about how much easier/cheaper/faster it'll be to make my shade structure out of lumber or the metal carports! I appreciate the advice, but I can't grow Doug Fir or Steel in my back yard - but bamboo.... that I can do.