I’m Alive!

Hey friends, sorry for the hiatus. Did you think I had given up already? Did you think that I had fallen into the lava? or that I fell off the coast? Nope! The interweb wasn’t working since Monday but I just fixed it! Turns out I just had to unplug and replug everything back in…

Anyway, I’ll try and give a brief update of highlights from this week:

I’ve sort of fallen into a routine and it’s working out well. I usually wake up at about 6:45 and I go into the greenhouse at 7:30. I predominately work in there with the tomatoes that we’re growing. The project that I’ve been working on this week has been hanging and moving cables that are hanging from the supports on the ceiling. Strings hang from spools on the cables and then are clipped onto the stalks to provide support to the plants. So I’ve been climbing up and down this ten foot ladder moving and hanging strings. It’s a big project and it’s really hot in the greenhouse, especially near the top so it’s pretty slow going but necessary work to do before the keikis that we planted last week grow enough to need support.

Then after work, Michael, Mike and I go to town and get something to eat at the Malama supermarket (They have really good fresh fish poke and sushi and other really good cheap stuff. Then we eat somewhere, sometimes at a park or by the beach or in the truck if it’s that kind of day. Then we go to the hot ponds. This place is quickly becoming one of my favorite places ever. The water is usually really warm in the ponds area and you can even go sit on the wall where you can feel the really warm fresh water coming in. Anyway, I snorkle about for a while and look at all the fish and stuff but i spend the majority of time there by the channel that allows the ocean water in. There is a rope there because the current is really strong, so I play on the rope and let the tides pull me in and out and I look at all the fish and the rocks and stuff. My favorite is when a big wave comes in and a rush of really cold water hits you and then there are just tiny little bubbles everywhere. It’s amazing. I definitely need to get some underwater camera action going on. Here’s a picture from the back of the ponds looking at the ocean and the breakwater. It was really high tide this day

Then i shower at the ponds and we go to the Kalapana cafe and store and get beer or ice cream. I applied for a job at the cafe on Tuesday! It would be really sweet to get  a gig there because it’s like 1.5 miles away and it’s the only place of commerce within like ten miles…

And then in the afternoons, I just chill out and read and stuff. I’ve been hanging out with Mike and Michael a lot. They’re really cool and we laugh a lot. I’ll have to tell you more about them.

More highlights: The other day I tried to put Mavis away. She gets fed special food outside of the enclosure in the driveway and Michael puts her away when she’s done. Well I thought that I would be helping by getting her back in the pen but since I’ve never worked with horses before, I wasn’t very good at it. I tried to lure her with a mango and it kind of worked but I was sort of nervous that she would bite me and she wasn’t really following me. Anyway, I finally got her close to the pen and I tried to open the gate and get her inside but Mabel(the donkey) came up and she knows that I’m trying to get them to like me by giving them treats so she almost got out before I could get Mavis in and then she freaked out and ran away. I was like shit, so I ran and got Michael and apparently whenever they get out, they always go right for the mango trees at the end of the driveway. This is Mavis escaped and gorging on mangos..

Haha, oh man, it was pretty silly me trying to coax this horse back. Turns out she has a lead that Michael brought down and as soon as you put it on she follows you. Farm fail.

This was after I thought that I had lost one of the cats. There are many many cats on the farm and one of my favorites, Spider Man, followed me down the driveway on tuesday when I was walking out and I told him to go home and he followed me about 3/4 of the way but stopped and then cried and meowed at me to come back. I felt awful but figured he’d go home. Well I didn’t see him the next morning and kinda freaked out and thought that I had lost the cat. So I run down the driveway calling his name or whatever and Michael tells Becky who says that he follows her down there all the time and he’s fine. I still haven’t seen him though… eee

The other day when we were in Pahoa, I was eating my lunch in the parking lot and this guy and his girlfriend were sitting on their car next to me and we sort of talked a little but they were obviously fucked up. Anyway, as we’re leaving he comes over and hands me this HUGE ball of hash for free. It was incredible. Seriously.

Michael has a bunch of old comic books, like cool ones and completer series and stuff and he’s tired of trucking them around so he’s scheming with Mike and I and we’re going to sell them on ebay. That’s where I come in. Apparently I’ve got the most computer skillz and so I’m going to work on the that and make some money, hopefully. But in the meantime I’ve been reading some oldies like Hell Boy, Vampirella, Red Sonja, Amethyst, and She-Hulk. Pretty cool.

Yesterday, we went to Hilo, because Mike and Michael found rapid fire pellet machine guns for like $20 last week and we’ve been talking about them ever since. So we went to get the toys (which they were out of but don’t worry it’ll happen) but stopped at Ken’s house of pancakes for breakfast. The pancakes were bomb and they had coconut, papaya, and passion fruit syrup (pictured below), it was amazing and I also had a loco moco, which is like a Hawaiian rice bowl breakfast gravy thing. Delicious.

Here’s Michael(left) and Mike(right) mid chew. The best.

What else? This afternoon/evening I’m going back out to the lava! But this time with Becky and Michael and a couple of their other friends so hopefully, they’ll be able to get us back here and I can take tips for how to go out alone.

This area that I’m living in is incredible. It has a really long history, which I’ve been learning about through a book about the area and a movie that Becky rented for me about the lava. Firstly, this area has a rich native history and native populations here at the time of contact were the largest in all of Hawaii. The land is plentiful and generous and there have been many villages in this area where natives subsisted and basked in the natural beauty and glory of black sand beaches and natural hot pools. Then as usual some fucked up land partitioning shit happened and natives were essentially kicked out. Then Kalapana gardens subdivision was built in the 60s and all these beautiful dream houses were built. But Pele’s fire wiped out the town in a span of a few years in the late 80s early 90s. The ruins of the town, sign posts, fence posts, etc are evident in the flows, which are about 8 feet thick, across the street from my driveway. It’s incredible and the highway that used to go through here was taken and so were beaches and the ponds etc. This recent flow, which is making the newest land on earth, is flowing through a lava tube into the ocean but isn’t coming this way. It’s so amazing to live this close to such an incredible volatile natural wonder. I’ll try and take more pictures tonight.

Okay, I think that was exceptionally long and I’d be surprised if you even made it all the way down here.  I’ll leave you with a picture of Mocha, she has laminitus or something like that and has trouble standing sometimes…