I’m experimenting. I’m sitting on the porch using my laptop plugged into the little solar panel Daughter D gave me as a gift before leaving Oregon.
A few moments ago my laptop went into Hibernation mode, which meant, I guess, I had used up its batteries. I can plug it into the wall socket, or use my full-sized computer, but just think the sun is there shining in all its potent glory, warming us, sustaining us, and powering my computer.
Hallelujah!
I had decided to stay in bed all day today if that suited me as I believed all my synapses and neurons looked like cat fur after the cat had put a claw in a light socket. I did stay in bed for awhile, but finally poured myself out, and sitting here is refreshing, wonderful, and from my seat on the porch I can see DD taking a picture of BD sitting in the mowed grass.
The temperature is comfortable probably in the 70's. Husband Dear told me it was 10 degrees when he got back to Oregon–so cold that our cat Zoom Zoom’s poop was frozen. Zoom Zoom is on a different Quarantine schedule that the other animals, but when Husband Dear travels back here Zoom Zoom will come with him.
The shipping container hasn’t arrived yet, but our pickup did. The car and truck became separated in Oahu, poor dears. Now, though, we have the truck and not a rental car.
On Wednesday, that was day before yesterday, Daughter D, Baby D and I drove to Utah–we didn’t really leave the island, but we drove from the Hilo side of the island to the Kona side, and it looked like Utah. We left the rainforest and drove through an arid stretch of land where tufts of grass grew on a barren prairie sort of landscape and even cactus dotted the terrain.
This island is a wonder.
I will take pictures for you, but that day I needed to focus on driving. The drive was incredible; we coursed down the highway over ravines deep as Oregon’s Multnomah Falls is high. Everything that could be green was, and in the ravines we looked out over the tops of trees where blossoming umbrella trees dotted the canopy with red flowers.
When DD awakened and told me she had a nightmare about the grass growing, I decided it was time for a break. (We are afraid the jungle is claiming along with various mechanical devices sitting outside.) Before coming here we worried about these ten acres supporting four horses. Now we need animals to munch the grass and think about 25 horses might do it.)
DD had suggested we go to Kona and we went for it. We drove the beautiful drive, went swimming at our favorite pool at the Sheridan Hotel, watched the surf at sunset and Daughter Dear treated us to an exquisite dinner overlooking the ocean with the gift card her co-workers the Battered Woman’s shelter gave her.
And then I was fried the next day. Why? Overdid it I guess. On the way home I got stopped by the police for speeding, I had been doing 55 on the highway, and didn’t see the 35 mile zone. It was 10:30 pm. That used to be early for me, not anymore. (The day we used up all our solar power and the lights went out we went out we went to bed at 7:30.) The policemen said it was the witching hour when the drunks and crazies were out–and the police. He didn’t give me a ticket, but it served to totally unnerve me. And coming home BB got tired and was crying, and the three miles of potholes was the clincher.
I was ready to move.
It helps to clean.
Look what I found:
The future novelist of Hawaii got off the ship in Honolulu. He was thirty one years old–not a novice, but not famous either. He had been landed the exotic assignment of writing a series of articles for the most important newspaper in the American West...He was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), and he had only recently assumed the pen name of “Mark Twain.”
This was taken from the foreword by A. Grove Day wrote for Twain’s book, Mark Twain in Hawaii Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands.Mark Twain only spent four months and one day on the Islands. He wrote 25 articles for the Sacramento Union, and he often looked back on his adventures, and wrote a novel with a Hawaiian setting. What he wrote is still being collected in anthologies, used in advertisements, and quoted over dinner tables.
He wrote:
“No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and walking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides, other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear. I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”
