will someone *please* send NOAA a list of hurricane name ideas???

Flossie?? FLOSSIE?!?! that's a name for a cow, not a stinkin' hurricane!!! If Flossie destroys anything anywhere, it just adds insult to injury that the poor schmoes have to go the rest of their lives talking about what Flossie did to them (us?) in '07. Good god ammighty. It's bad enough I have to recall the ass-whoopin i took from Fran in NC back whenever that was. So obviously, NOAA needs some help with name ideas, especially girl names that start with F. I recommend they get ethnic and/or get some ppl with some imagination on staff, STAT, so they can come up with some names that ppl won't be embarrassed to say. Hurricane Fatima. Hurricane Felicia. Hurricane Francoise. Hurricane Fabiola. Florence. Frida. Frances, not Fran. Fran sounds like she'd be at the bingo parlor. (Frances is my grandma's name, and maybe that's why Frances sounds more formidable than 'Fran' to me.) Hurricane, I donno, Fookeisha. I mean, what's next on NOAA's list? Fluffy? Fancy? give me a break.

so yeah, it's kinda cloudy here, and that makes me mad because i wanted to see the Perseid meteor shower tonight. And i have to cuss at somebody named Flossie. i just can't stop imagining her with a bell around her neck. in the words of tim darby, it ain't right. it ain't fittin'.

in other news. you see that i've been un-posty lately. let me tell you why. see, here in hawaii, apparently, people like to work All The Freakin Time. Really. i'm trying to motivate myself to a whole new level of work ethic, and i just don't know how they do it. ppl that get paid a lot less than me do a whoooole lot more. and my peeps at the monkey house remember how hard i worked there..... NOT. that was such a low-output gig, i'm kind of in shock now at how much i need to accomplish. so that's been kind of taking all my energy. i even woke up today, a sunday, thinking about things i have to do at work. that kind of sucks -- except that i don't have anything better to think about! so i'm entering a phase of Knuckling Down, i reckon.

Oh and i have a lovely Kilauea Field Station Tan to show for it. I forgot to reapply my sunscreen (SPF 50, previously an unheard-of number in my sunscreen repertoire, which has always ended at 8) one day, just one stinkin' day, and look what happened! owie owie owie! note the line where the sunglasses were. oh, and i had that mineral powder concealer on -- i.d. bare escentuals, ladies, spf one million. it lasted all day. see those white splotches on my otherwise livid red cheek? that's where the concealer was.

amazingly, the next day i was just a little pink. i thought for sure my face was gonna peel right off! i was even wearing a hat and everything.

yeah. and boy, are my arms brown. But my legs are pasty white! I need to get to the beach and equilibrate. i look like i have a congenital skin condition. or several.

i did get to go back up on Mauna Kea the other week when it was a full moon, tho. i tried to take a picture, as it was sitting up above the cloud line, making everything all silvery and impossibly surreal, but my camera wouldn't cooperate and all i got was a fuzzy white orb on a black background. booooo. digital cameras aren't for every situation, sadly.

Anyway, there are nene, the endangered hawaiian goose, all up on that mountain. here's a gang of them that were givin' me the stink-eye. they attacked poor emily last time she went up on the mountain. they evolved from canada geese, and now they've lost the webbing on their feet and are purely terrestrial. like most geese, they enjoy golf courses, so if you ever want to see one, check out the golf course at Volcanoes National Park.

what else. there's some lava action going on. these lava ponds have formed that become "perched": the pool forms, the sides solidify into a sort of levee, the pond level rises, so does the exterior wall, until you have something that resembles an above-ground swimming pool -- full of molten lava! sounds pretty cool but you couldn't pay me to get anywhere near that thing.

that's all i got to report. netflix is still my best friend here. and i'm still waiting for the mangosteens to hit the farmers' market, will keep you apprised of that situation. doesn't anybody wanna come visit me, in the meantime? my next visitors aren't til December. boooooo!

hey, i am seriously thinking about a New Zealand/Australia trip in winter '08. (our winter, that is.) I need a travel companion. anyone? anyone? kristcha? we could be kristcha and kristcha in christchurch. heh. saljie? anybody? group trip? let me know.

last of all, here's a lovely gimungous hawaiian raspberry i found up there on the mountain. they have no thorns and are gimongous. the perfect berry.

Piece, y'all! keep it raaael.

k

back from the big city

yup, just got back from the Hawai'i Conservation Conference, which was awesome. Here's a picture from the convention center there. the conference was great, but they kept trying to feed us these wax apples in our lunches. the first day nobody ate them, so the second day the organizers made an "Unwanted Fruit" table. since there were about 900 attendees, there were about 899 apples on that table. shoulda took a picture of that. they were absolutely inedible.

but anyway. there were cool presentations on monk seals foraging (with nat'l geographic video, awesome), baby sea turtles, spinner dolphins.... oh and stuff i'm doing too, bugs and plants and everything. it was all really cool and i got to get a larger view of the kinds of conservation issues HI is facing. the challenges are many, and the obstacles pretty much boil down to a lack of money/interest from the State and Federal governments. huh. fancy that.

oh, and we took a Lexus taxi to the airport with a large and colorful assortment of little buddha figurines on the dash. there were tv screens on the seats in front of us, and the driver talked on her phone nonstop in vietnamese the whole ride.

i've been a very poor blogger lately. this whole work thing really cuts into my blogging time. i'll have to discuss that with my boss. oh wait, but he's gone to FIJI for two weeks. yeah. fiji. bastard. meanwhile, the rest of us are fixing to get back into fieldwork and set up the plots for my project. so i should be losing about 10 pounds in the next month or so. unless i make up for them in mai-tais.

that's it for now. i'll try to be a better blogger, but the problem i think is how infernally boring i've become. i'll work on that too....