hot lava!

if i was smarter, i could figure out how to make Chef start singing Hot Lava when you open this page. oh well!

so yesterday they ran a picture of the RIVER OF LAVA in Royal Gardens subdivision (near Kalapana, already been lava-ed a few times, population 2), then told people not to come gawk at it. Yeah, right!!! as if. It was about a mile hike to this action, the bottom of the river. We encountered people who'd gone further upstream, but what we saw was so awesome we didn't bother. They told us we were at the best place for lava appreciation anyway.

I hung back a bit while the kids (Corinna, Ginger, and Matt) got All Up Innit with a couple of dudes that were cooking apples and hot dogs in the lava. They had cameras on long sticks, which I'm totally doing when/if I ever go in search of hot lava again.

This picture was in case that hill they're all standing on melted into the lava sea. Luckily, they all survived, but my sissy status is solid now.

The other kids have pix of rescuing my camera, which fell (ok, i dropped it) into a crack (in cold lava) and was a bee-yotch to get out! We had to break some rocks and get a little scraped up, but the camera lived to deliver you these pics. i was halfway hoping we wouldn't be able to retrieve it so I can get the Olympus underwater digital camera i'm in love with.

Then we went to the black sand beach. I don't miss Louisiana as much today. :)

Oh! and it's my 1 year anniversary in hawai'i today! woo! happy anniversary to me!

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