We Made It!

Whooo-hooo! We made it! It took a week to get back online but I'm happy to say we're here at last: on the island of Hawaii, in our cute little home. Although it's been raining more than not, it's a lovely warm tropical rain, sometimes a downpour, but always nice and warm.

Most of this first week has been spent settling in, transforming our hale (pronounced hah-lay, house) from 'vacation rental mode' into our home. Anyone who knows me knows that I enjoy this kind of project! We bought some wire shelves for each of the closets for a little extra storage space that allows the air to circulate, a very important consideration here in this humid climate. And of course, we had to get more bookshelves! One box of media mail has already arrived, the rest could take up to 5 weeks from when we sent them. Our car and freight are somewhere out in the Pacific, on their way over still.

My little pineapple patch was completely overgrown with ferns and a kind of 'clover' viney thing. It didn't take long for me to get it all weeded and looking healthy again. The one pineapple that was ripening had been harvested and enjoyed by one of our guests, but there will be more. Every time we eat a pineapple, we cut off the top, dry it for a couple days, then plant it in a little mound of cinders. It takes a year or so before they start producing. Each plant will give 3 pineapples, one at a time, and they each take about 10 months to mature. We have yet to eat one of our own home-grown, but only because we've never been here when they ripened.

I started a future raised-garden bed and a compost bin. The soil here is mostly cinders, kind of a volcanic gravel with a thin layer of humus & dirt on top, very fertile but hard to work with. There are also larger chunks of rock that we dig out with a prybar and add to our blackrock walls. There are rock walls lining our driveway, around a bed of ti plants, and along the fenceline in spots.

I made my first batch of guava jam with 4 huge guavas from our jungle next door; I got a whole quart of delicious jam! Also in the jungle are at least 3 varieties of wild orchids blooming rampantly, very pretty above all the ferns and other greenery. We have a nice crop of lemons ripening a few at a time, and loads of avocados on our tree. It's avocado season - yay!! The 3 varieties of gardenias in our yard are blooming, as well as the star jasmine, making heavenly fragrance waft in the windows.

Yesterday, Mike & I packed a little picnic lunch and drove down the road to eat it at one of our favorite nearby shoreline spots called Honolulu Landing where the ancients would draw up their fishing canoes. It's so nice to be able to be near the ocean again; that's something we both missed a lot during our time in Idaho. After enjoying the ocean for a while, we drove towards Hilo to the Panaewa Rainforest Zoo to meet up with our friends, Molly & Willow, who moved here from Bonners Ferry a few years ago. Their homeschool group was having a field trip day at the zoo so there were lots of little kids there, too. It was great to see all these people again; we're sort of 'honorary grandparents' of the homeschool group here, which is a fun way to pass on my accumulated knowledge about homeschooling.

I could go on and on but I need to have breakfast and get outside into the sunshine (before it starts to rain again!). We'll be picking up Kerry from the airport this afternoon, and look forward to having her join us in our Hawaiian home.