The rains finally stopped just a couple days after our visitors left. We've been enjoying warm, sunny days for a week now! It's lovely to dry out. Gorgeous pink and orange sunrises every morning, starry skies at night - perfect. The big ol' Hawaiian moon has been glowing down on us all night. Didn't get to see any part of the lunar eclipse on Wednesday though: there was a cloud bank just above the horizon blocking our view. By the time it was high enough, of course it was all over. Oh well, maybe next time - in December 2010!
Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa have both been beautifully snow-capped and showing themselves every day. Today the vog is so thick we can't see either of them. Usually the vog - the volcanic haze - goes over to the Kona side of the island. When the tradewinds stop, like today, it'll come over the eastside and settle in the Hilo Bay area, but kinda stay overhead of us here in Pahoa. Not today though; today we can see it, smell it, and even kinda taste it - and it's bad, sulphur-y. Yuck. We need a little wind to clear it away, and some is due to blow in this weekend.
Work on the studio progresses apace. Mike is having fun with taping and mudding the sheetrock these days. No really, he's having a blast! He's built his own scaffolding from some of the extra pieces of wood laying about, the better to reach the high ceiling. Yesterday was another Hilo day for us; we bought our 2 ceiling fans, a toilet, and went to several more flooring shops until we finally found what we were looking for at a price that wasn't exorbitant. We'll have a light-colored bamboo snaplock 'engineered' floor for the whole studio, except the bathroom, which will be Tarkett fiberfloor. It's all coming together! And it looks like we're still pretty much on schedule for moving in by the end of March. I'm so amazed at how fast it's going!
We started carving into the jungle to create a driveway on our next-door lot. The land is level, not too many big rocks or pukas (holes in the ground; this is an older lava flow, after all) so we may be able to do all the clearing by hand - our preference if at all possible. Our goal is to keep all the ohia trees growing, and just take out the 'weed trees' and some of the guava, etc. It'll take a few more days of work to hack our way back as far as we want the driveway to go. Then we'll go over it all again, cutting off the stobs and pulling out a couple old rotten trunks, add a load of gravel to smooth it out for driving on, cut into the fencing surrounding this yard, and put in a gate to connect the two properties. That'll be the studio's entrance as well as a start for our 'real' house, as we call it.
I'll post some more photos soon. We had fun at the Chinese New Year festival in Hilo, and there'll be some pics of the studio, too. Until next time, aloha.
No comments:
Post a Comment