Bike gang

Here are some photos from the ride to work today.  I bought the camera to try to take a picture of snow on Mauna Loa, but that's right where the sun rises!  no good for photo.  too cloudy later in the day!

 hmm.

 isn't it crazy how the ocean doesn't drain down to antarctica?  look at that slope!  good work gravity.

dirt biking on the Cellana Road.  This is the end of my commute. No Tresspassing!

clear skies

Clear skies in Kona.
I wish I had brought my camera with on the bike ride to Cellana today. Thursday is the first time I remember (or maybe noticed?) being able to see Mauna Loa from the road by Cellana.  You can't see it in town, because the slopes of Hualalai are too close.  Out by Cellana, the visibility was never high enough to have a good look.  Well it's been so clear here that I have had some peeks at it lately.  It is cool to see lurking behind Hualalai.  It is much less steep that Hualalai, but five some thousand feet taller.  Today, after the big storm yesterday, there was snow on a lot of it!  I always think it is cool to see the line where the snow abruptly ends in the mountains. Maybe I can get a picture for you tomorrow.

Rain in Kona!

Ok, it's been a couple of days.
I have:
-fretted over and finally submitted my best job application yet
-received my truck
-gone ocean canoeing
-witnessed a tropical rain shower in kona
-begun to wade through the process of registering the truck in Hawaii

The highlight is a toss up between canoing and receiving the truck.  This is the most excited I've ever been about having a car.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder?  Our legs are pretty worked after biking (almost) everywhere the last two weeks.  Thanks to our friends who have given us rides.  The hills here take more out of you than expected.  They don't look like much, compared to the mountain behind us.  But they are enough to tire a cyclist out. 

It is raining like crazy right now.  I would say that visibility from my window is about a quarter mile.  It is even raining hard enough to drown out the shrieks and cackles of what are starting out as very noisy neighbors.  It's nuts here, though.  They said flash flood warnings and 2-3 inches of rain-- I bet one has come down in the last 15 minutes.  This is all very weird for the side of the island that is normally so dry that there isn't even a stream on it!  The weather, as I think it is prone to do in the winter, is coming from the west, and the radar right now shows it is clear in Hilo. A total role reversal.

It has been spectacularly clear for the four days leading up to this.  That is also thanks to the winter weather pattern, I hear.  The vog, or volcano smog (more of which has been seeping out of Hualalai than usual for the last two years or so) is blown away from kona by these winds from the West (this is all speculation based on my limited observations. I should find some sources on this info).

click here for a bigger version of this cool photo looking east at Hualalai and the vog over kona from Mauna Kea observatory.  This guy also has a pretty blog about working at the observatory with lots of awesome sunset photos.



Beth and I went to Keahou Canoe Club Tuesday morning, her Sunday.  I didn't get any pictures, but there are lots of good ones here.  Also, if you are a lakes and rivers paddler, you might like this discussion of outrigger paddling technique.

The paddling felt really good.  With so many people in a canoe (we got in the idiot-proof canoe, as we were nubes, and had 10 people in the double hull) it is way more aerobic than the canoeing I'm used to in Minnesota, after which I inevitably had worked my shoulders really hard.   Also, the technique is such that I got a better back and core workout.
It was super fun to be on the water.  We paddled out for 20 minutes or so, then jumped into the super warm and clear water for a little "midlake swim"  then headed back.  We were with the retirees and other  people with nothing to do at 8 o'clock on Tuesday morning.  It will be fun to try paddling with the really strong paddlers sometime.

What can be said about the Hawaii "Safety" Check aspect to getting a vehicle registered here?  It is ridiculous.  $20 every year to have someone tell you that your lights work.  check.  At least it's not any more expensive.  And, I'm pretty happy with the folks down at Dixson Service. So it could be worse.
Here are some cool photos.

kiawe, koa haole, parrots, haoles and surf films

Beth and I went to the Kona Surf Film Festival last night. Check out their webpage.  They have some good video tidbits if you are looking for something cool to watch.  It was good.  One video offered a testament to the appeal of surfing: 200+ people sat outside in the bitter cold Hawaiian winter winds and watched over and hour of pretty similar shots of the same guy catching wave after pretty similar wave.  If it is that mesmerizing for us to watch, I'm sure that it is that much more fun to do.  There, I've revealed myself to be a total surfing nube.  The ocean is still pretty scary to this flatlander.

Some thoughts:
I'm getting cold here in the evenings.  Don't go thinking it's going to be all sunshine in Hawaii.  You need to bring a long sleeve t-shirt for when the sun goes down, or those 70 degree nights will chill you to the bone.

Cellana must make employees meet a quota of social events every month... it kind of feels like I'm a freshman in college again, with all these familiar, but unknown faces everywhere I go.  We're going to a "yankee swap" aka white elephant gift exchange tonight.  I'm going to take attendance.  Unfortunately, I could not find a single christmas sweater or even a T-shirt at the thrift stores here!  What ever shall I wear?


Ok, today's feature:  The Noisy Parrots of the Lot Next Door.

Not a great picture, I know.  This one was checking me out from the moment it landed.  It had enough after three photos similar to this one, then shrieked to it's buddies, and they all flew away.  I guess they don't like people. From what I can gather, they are Red Masked, or Cherry Headed Conures.  Native to Equador and Peru.  Apparently, they make bad pets, and got released.  I guess they bite, and I can testify they they are noisy. When we first moved in here, they came over every morning to hang out and eat Kiawe seeds in the trees next door (which is from the same part of South America!).  Sources say they are wary of people in the wild; that explains still loads of Kiawe seeds next door and no parrots.  Habitat invasion!
I don't think there are many Conures in Hawaii, but it looks like they are in stable populations.  However, they are endangered in Equador and Peru.  Another example of an exotic species successfully naturalizing in Hawaii!

In the picture above, you can (kind of) see the yellow flower spikes of the Kiawe (say: Key-ah-vey) trees.  At first, I struggled to tell them apart from the Koa Haole (say: how-lee), which also lives in the lot next door.  But, lucky for you, dear reader, I have cracked their code.
Specifically:

 Kiawe leaves are once-compounded

Kiawe has nasty thorns (but these are vairable in size and often hard to see)

Koa Haole has twice compounded leaves, which are more orderly and more delicate

Koa Haole has many, dark, clusterd seed pods.  Sometimes, you can find its white spherical flowers.

OK, here is the best way to tell the two apart:
Koa Haole has lots of brown bean pods in clusters all over the trees.  They are not more than about 15' tall.

Kiawe is about 30' tall, fuller, and has single yellow bean pods, much less conspicuous than Koa Haole's.

Here is a picture of a Kiawe in the middle of a field of Koa Haole.  case closed.

Koa Haole is named after the Koa tree, a majestic endemic more common in the wetter and higher forests.  It was an important tree to the native hawaiians, prized for its wood which was used for canoes and surfboards.  The flowers are similar, but yellow.  "Haole" means forgiener, generally, but nowadays is commonly a racial slur for whities. So "Koa Haole" literaly means "forgien Koa," but could now be construed to mean "white/white-man Koa," which has meaning on two levels instead of one.  Now that's what you pay me for.

One time, Beth tried to make friends with the parrots. It worked!

Selected sources:  Parrots sure are charismatic!

"Tracking O'ahu's wild Parrots" http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/Global/story.asp?S=10372980

"Red Masked Conures" http://www.avianweb.com/redmaskedconure.html

"The Wild Parrots of Kailua Kona" http://www.westhawaiitoday.com/articles/2008/09/10/features/features01.txt

Hawaiian plants, animals and landscapes: a mission statement.

So who likes to read posts about Hawaiian plants and animals? (e.g., the I'o, the garden orb weaver spider, and the gold dust day gecko)

I'm hoping to learn about the common and interesting plants and animals here in my yard in kona, and eventually, beyond to the higher and wetter forests. It's a good exercise to synthesize and catalog some of what I learn here on the blog-- so here I go!

I hope you like it. We'll see how long I last.  Hopefully, I can get it to be pretty user friendly.  It'll be a work in progress.  let me know what you think, here or via email.

I'm getting there on the job front, by the way.  I'm taking a break from application stuff today, after getting a sweet one in for a job I'd really like.  They're not officially hiring though... so I won't say any more now.  Except that Terra Firma was officially trying not to hire when I came on... and that this job would be a distinct departure from carpentry.

Gold Dust Day Gecko

Beth and I are going to a white elephant gift exchange tomorrow with her coworkers.   Oh man, you better hope you get my present.  I could barely keep myself from taking it out of the box and playing with it last night. 

As promised:
The gecko I pictured back in "Back in business!" was misidentified.  It is actually a gold dust day gecko.  What a looker!  These guys are really cool looking, and all over the place, too.

As I'm not so hot with the ol picture machine, I'm going to continue to blatantly steal images from elsewhere on the web. I'll work on my citations. promise. this is from here.

These buggers are diurnal, or active during the day.  We see them sunning themselves on our stair railings and plant leaves all the time.  We're glad to have found them, becuase apparently, geckos mean good luck to some Hawaiians.  For us, the fact that they eat bugs is lucky enough.


They don't really like to be looked at, though.  When they catch you staring for too long or from too close, they use their amazing little gecko toes to scamper around to the underside of whatever they are laying on.  Geckos are able to walk on the underside of leaves, up walls, and on windows thanks to these amazing little gecko toes, which have around a million hairs on each toe pad.  I guess the tiny amount of friction, compounded over millions of hairs, is enough to hold the buggers up! Check out this website for more on geckos. They do a more comprehensive page on these guys.

The gold dust day gecko is a species introduced from Madagascar, but apparently only common in the "suburban" areas of Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu.  So maybe it's not as damaging to Hawaiian ecology as many of the other introduced species.
Do any bit of reading about plants and animals in Hawaii, and you will see what a comprehensive impact introduced species have had on the endemic species that evolved on these tranquil little islands. More on that later.

comments! bring em on!

Beloved Followers,
I believe that I have figured out how to let you, my dear throng of frothing fans, post comments on my blog.  Now don't all do it at once and overwhelm the server.  Just know that you can (or should be able to).  Someone try it out.
Also, I've been busy fretting over a masterpiece of a cover letter, so I haven't gotten to the "cute and ubiquitous" house gecko.  I will soon.  In the meantime, check out my new "bookshelf" page up there in the top right corner.  I'm going to let you armchair travelers in on some little secrets!
Here's something to rest your eyes on while you wait for the gecko:

The view from my living room window onto the Paradise Garden (our yard), kona, and the ocean beyond!
Yes, that is a cruise ship in the bay!  On Wednesdays, when they come by, I feel like less of a tourist. Can you spot our sickly avocado tree in this photo? I promise I'll tell you about the plants in our yard soon.