i found something soft and fuzzy to decorate the shelves in the naptry

hi kids, sorry for the silence. i have been battling a Colony of Evil Somethings that have colonized my interior and terrorized my posterior since thursday, when i believe i drank some tainted carrot juice in an attempt to recover from the cold/sinus thing. no food for 4 days = kill me now. tim sent me this lovely get-well card that seems to sum up the world's feelings about sick ppl.

will write more when better. or if not, send condolences to: Don and Sylvia Snook, 833 Cutter Court, Kure Beach NC 28449. and somebody please come get the Doodle.

there's a man in a tree outside my window

and i'm on the fourth floor. he's got a machete and is hackin away at a palm tree. huh.

so check out the poster! i need to go to vanuatu and learn their pidgin. i love it.

the third shot is the pool at this fancy place. but look, they nickel and dime you to death here. if anyone i know visits and stays here i'm going to kick their butts, cause this place is a ripoff. they wanted to charge me ten bucks a day for wireless internet. as if. hooray for bluetooth!

i'm sick as a dog today and sitting out the conference. they have a short day and it's mostly about ants of little concern to me in my new position, but i still feel a little guilty, and i'd like to be learning things, but i think the cold has progressed to sinus infection, so i'm just going to have to suck it up. i'll have some spicy soup for lunch and be better tomorrow.

doodle has a new little brother

this will be my token cat-lady post for the month. one of my neighbors has had it with hawaii and is going back to the mainland. she said she was going to take her kitty (the orange one i posted about long ago when i thought he was homeless) to the shelter. so of course i couldn't let that happen. he and doodle seem to tolerate each other, i've even seen them hanging out together. so this is Urnge, formerly known as Dog-Dog. he is a little freak. he's mostly an outside guy so everything should work out okay.

also in cat news, doodle likes coconut milk. here he is drinking my thai tea.

also in neighbor news, the guy in the back house (retired military, young japanese wife, listens to Rush Limbaugh Every Single Day) came up when i was helping the neighbor lady move. he said, "i'm moving too, got my orders. going to china." i said, really, what part, how exciting &c, and he said "Bangkok." i said, oh, i thought you said china. thailand, huh? i have family in chiang mai. then he said "That's where I'm going! Chiang Mai!"

i'm thinking we don't have all our marbles.

so that's your post for today. i'm feeling a little puny and am trying to shake a cold before going back to kona tomorrow. i will have pictures of the Phat hotel and the exciting ant conference later this week, i know y'all want to hear all about that. and belle, i'll let you know what's in the goody bags, cause i'm curious myself!

oh -- i just found out that some folks from nc state that i worked with (same dept, not really "with") are coming to this conference to present stuff. so it won't be all strangers. that's kinda nice.

birthday shoutouts to leah (yesterday) and blan (today). happy birthday, you'uns! kick out the jams. mofos.

Little Princess Report

aloha from the spoiledest little girl in hawaii! i got back to hilo last night after my spoilathon. we went on the submarine, went on the airplane, made orchid leis, saw sea turtles on black sand beaches, walked across lava, and ate a whole lot of yummy stuff. including a seafood buffet at the sheraton keauhou, where i'll be weds-friday for my conference. yeah. that place is Phat. wish somebody was here to keep me company in my Very Own Room with that fantastic pool, and a lovely beach known for its sea turtle and dolphin activity. if anybody's got some free time and a lot of frequent flier miles, get your butt down here before wednesday and go with me!

and speaking of potential visits, i now have kama'aina status (resident) with the submarine ppl and the airplane ppl. so now i can go for free and you can go for half-price when you come see me. so no more excuses, people. c'mon over.

oh yeah, another thing -- i got to sit in the cockpit in the airplane. i had a steering wheel in front of me and everything. it was soooo cool! thanks, mom & pops! yer the best. at spoiling me damn near rotten, that is!

i'm going to a conference and haven't even been hired yet. huh.

i'm going to be my new boss's "invitational guest" at the First International Pacific Invasive Ant Conference next week in Kona! yes, i get to come back to the sunny side of the rock, all expenses paid, for 3 days of playing catch-up, because i don' t know diddly about pacific ants! yes, i am now a myrmecologist. or an ecologist. or an invasive species person. or something.

anyway the conference will be cool and makes me happy for several reasons:

1) it means that if HR gives my new boss any grief about hiring me, he'll most likely kick some butt

2) it means that he is serious about sending me to conferences (maybe the next one will be in Sydney! or Tokyo!)

3) it gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning, finally.

well that third one is sort of a tack-on cause i needed a #3. but it's also kind of true.

the poor neglected Doodle, though. does anyone want to come cat-sit? anyone?

good news from the Bee Lady

from my friend Eleanor, who has just received her masters in Bee-ology:

ANYWAY, the official position about the bee situation (Colony Collapse Disorder) is that they are dying from the compounding effects of a variety of man-induced factors: mites, viruses, bacteria, migratory beekeeping, and sub-lethal effects of pesticides used both outside the hive and inside that cause those poor bees to be brain damaged and they can't find their way home (and it really is the saddest thing. all these "slow" bees don't remember how to dance because of fipronil and its friends and end up wandering around until they die). we like to call it "the case of a thousand cuts." and then when people stare blankly at us we say, "you know, you get cut once, you don't die. you get cut a thousand times, you bleed to death."

the unofficial position is that it is all a big media conspiracy, brought on by the loss of government subsidies for beekeepers (some of whom are very rich and very noisy), decline in the practice, rise in the california almond pollination industry, and slow news days that can be brightened by whacked-out theories of our impending doom from lack of pollination (CELL PHONES! RADIATION! RADIATION!!). these huge losses have occurred and been documented many times in the mellinia-old practice of beekeeping, and this one will surely right itself over time if we can stop using pesticides as preventative cure-alls and start using the biology of the honey bee as our yard stick for husbandry instead of the convenience of man.

the official position of eleanor is that it falls somewhere in between those two, or is a mix of both things. we're not going to die if the honey bees die. native pollinators are very effective at pollinating crops.

now i can sleep at night. thanks e. you're so smart. love the yardstick. miss you bunches.

now. here's some pretty pictures of what i saw with the folks yesterday.

Hot Diggitty Damn!

this crazy plan of mine just might work! i got the job! just have to wait for some paperwork to go through. and actually, i got a higher job classification and salary than the position i applied for! woo!

o happy day! mom and dad just took me out for a lovely celebration dinner. we've had a good trip so far but listen to this: we're gonna go on a submarine to the coral reef on saturday, and take a little airplane around the whole entire island on Sunday!!!

i'm a little princess.

i will post some pix soon. promise. we seen a lot of pretty things.

now that i'll have an income, i can start sending you guys presents! this whole time i've seen things that have made me wish i had enough cash to be generous. now i get to! sorry i couldn't sooner. love you all.

xo

drat, foiled again.

welp, i was gonna go see if the turtles needed anybody to swim with this afternoon, but then it got all overcast. that water is cold and i ain't gettin in it unless i have plenty of sunshine to warm me up after, turtles be damned. so instead i went to lili'uokalani gardens. it's purty. well. everything here is pretty, even the pigeons.

my mommy and daddy are coming to visit for a week, yay! they get here on mother's day and they got us a luxury condo in Kona, which is on the sunny side of this rock, so that's gonna be real, real nice. i'm going to go stay with them for a few days, then bring them over here to rainforest central, and then we'll go back to Kona. we're going to try to see a lot of this island. so you might not hear from me for a while, but then there's gonna be a whoooole lotta pictures up in here-uh.

no word on the job yet. trying not to freak out. keep 'em crossed a little longer.

aloha!

some of y'all have expressed concern

that i'm gonna thwack my head open on that shelf in the Naptry. i too had this concern. i actually sleep the other way round. it just looks cuter in pictures with the pillows up under the shelves.

i've been thinking about what kind of tchotchkes i want to put on aaaaalll those shelves, but then i remembered: earthquakes. perhaps light and fluffy tchotchkes. an assortment of origami, peut-etre.

happy wednesday!

earzz

now i *know* i need a job.

World's Smallest Bedroom

somebody call Guiness! Kressy and JB no longer have the smallest bedroom in the world. i do! i have finally converted the pantry into the naptry. i built a platform bed. yes, i am proud of myself. yes, i sleep in a closet. no, those two things together don't make any sense. but there's something about a Dedicated Sleeping Space that i enjoy very much, and the living room just didn't work as a double-duty bedroom. so now the Guest Quarters are official and no, i won't make you sleep in the closet if you come visit me. (it's very comfortable, though -- i should say i won't *let* you.)

next project is to get the baskets on the bike. remember i was whingeing about how steep the hill is to my house? well. the other day i saw a big humongous hawaiian dude on a bike *much* crappier than mine, and he was just pluggin his big self up that hill. so obviously i need to suck it up and get my leg muscles back in proper working condition. if i get the job at the volcano, i'll be driving a lot during the week, so i need to be able to navigate the topography on my rusty little grocery-getter so as to save gas and stave off driving fatigue on the weekends. hey, if those dudes can rock-climb crazy cliffs in their ratty ol' Chuck Taylors, i can do this. right? right.

other good news: the only good mexican restaurant in town, which has been closed for renovations, is re-opening for cinco de mayo. They have a variety of tropical margaritas: mango, liliokoi (passionfruit), guava, coconut, and watermelon. i will definitely be down there tasting at least one of those.

thanks to everyone who sent me their addresses. i still can't believe i packed the address book when it would have been soooo easy to just throw it in the purse. d'oh. i will be sending postcards out terreckly.

happy cinco de mayo! (otherwise known as tim's birthday -- happy birfday punkin!) also, happy kentucky derby. may the best horse win!

doodle hates it outside as well

hi kids,

well, the job interview went well, i talked to the PI for an hour and a half. i was his first interview for the position. he said he had 2 phone interviews and 2 other interviews to do, and then he rates all the applicants and submits his "recommendation" to the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii, and they make the final determination (based, one hopes, on his recommendation). if i get the job, the earliest i would start is june first, so i better start soakin up the scenery! actually, i'll be doing some of that at the job as well, but it's often quite cold at the volcano so i need to Maximize My Time Being Warm.

of course i will keep you posted on how that turns out. again, please to make with the finger-crossing for me. pretty please!

yesterday was lei day. May Day is Lei Day in Hawai'i. i missed most of the festivities but did see a few ladies making leis at the volcano. today i went to the bank, tho, and when i walked in, i was like, omg what smells so good in here? turns out they had a gazillion fresh flowers from lei day, including a massive amount of gardenias. it smelled sooo good.

nothing much else to report here. oh wait, we did have another teeny earthquake this morning. i almost slept through it. it wasn't nearly as Exorcist-y as that last one. other than that, there have been no turtles, no menehune sightings, no weird fruit. next on the list are dragonfruit and mangosteen. we'll see when those turn up at the market.

oh and what is up with the honeybees disappearing? y'all, if we don't have any bees, we're all going to have to eat, i donno, soylent green or something. let's all pray for the honeybees to come back and pollinate our everythings. i mean, okay, part of me hopes they just got sick of being pimped out and treated like slaves by people all these years and went native. but still, them crops needs them bees. it kinda doesn't look good for ol' mankind right now, what with the oil situation and the global warming and the bees and everything. let's all raise a glass to Future Generations Fixing Everything.