There are 4 new albums on my Picasa page:
~ February's Studio Progress
~ The Great Outdoors
~ Chinese New Year Festival
~ An Inside Look into Our Everyday Life (which is really just whatever didn't fit in the other ones)
Let me know what ya think.
Oh, and by the way, you may have heard about Kilauea's latest excitement, but I want to tell you that the newly flowing lava is not headed our way... so far, so good. I would like to drive out to the Kaimu/Kalapana area at night to watch it flowing down the pali - supposed to be quite a sight!
Friday, February 29, 2008
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sheetrock and Flooring and Vog, Oh My!
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.
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.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Studio Update
Yay! All the windows are in, thanks to Dad's help. And the electrical inspector finally showed up! AND the building inspector gave us the go-ahead, too! At last, we can get going on this project again. :-)
We've got 2 bookings confirmed for April so there's a deadline coming up for completion. Shouldn't be a problem, says Mike. We can always 'camp in' for a few days, says me. ;-)
We've got 2 bookings confirmed for April so there's a deadline coming up for completion. Shouldn't be a problem, says Mike. We can always 'camp in' for a few days, says me. ;-)
Monday, February 4, 2008
Flash Floods!
We've had rain for 4 days and nights with about a 15 minute break a couple days ago. And again right now, it's finally let up for the past 25-30 minutes. We're not talking comforting pitter-patter of rain on the roof here: this is monsoon-like deluges! Someone up there has turned all the firehoses on full blast and walked away and totally forgot about 'em. The kind where you actually hear the silence when it stops.
On Saturday we drove in to Hilo - in the downpour - and noticed on the way all the ditches beginning to overflow, people's yards flooding, a few fire engines pumping out a couple homes. Once in Hilo itself, we saw the big drain canal gushing with muddy brown water creating standing waves! Many of the streets downtown were closed, even the highway. These are still closed too, with 3 feet of water slowly receding, and high surf crashing in to take its place. We went above Hilo to Rainbow Falls, a picturesque waterfall usually, but this time it was a torrential monster. We could actually hear it from the parking lot, still inside the car! And it was enormous and scary! Such raw power of Nature!
There has been much damage over the weekend from this storm, and it's not done with us yet! They say this stalled storm will linger over the islands through Thursday at least. That's as far as the forecast goes, so who knows what'll come next? But we are all safe and sound in our neighborhood. Only one little drip in the studio that Mike managed to fix by rescrewing one screw so the plastic seal connected properly. And lots of extra soil being washed into our driveway that I'll probably scrape off and add to my garden beds. Hey, I'll take what I can get! :-)
Oops, here comes the rain again. Excuse me, I need to run around closing up windows again!
Sure beats shoveling snow and scraping ice!! ;-)
On Saturday we drove in to Hilo - in the downpour - and noticed on the way all the ditches beginning to overflow, people's yards flooding, a few fire engines pumping out a couple homes. Once in Hilo itself, we saw the big drain canal gushing with muddy brown water creating standing waves! Many of the streets downtown were closed, even the highway. These are still closed too, with 3 feet of water slowly receding, and high surf crashing in to take its place. We went above Hilo to Rainbow Falls, a picturesque waterfall usually, but this time it was a torrential monster. We could actually hear it from the parking lot, still inside the car! And it was enormous and scary! Such raw power of Nature!
There has been much damage over the weekend from this storm, and it's not done with us yet! They say this stalled storm will linger over the islands through Thursday at least. That's as far as the forecast goes, so who knows what'll come next? But we are all safe and sound in our neighborhood. Only one little drip in the studio that Mike managed to fix by rescrewing one screw so the plastic seal connected properly. And lots of extra soil being washed into our driveway that I'll probably scrape off and add to my garden beds. Hey, I'll take what I can get! :-)
Oops, here comes the rain again. Excuse me, I need to run around closing up windows again!
Sure beats shoveling snow and scraping ice!! ;-)
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