| "Spemque metumque inter dubiis" |
[Aug. 5th, 2005|07:54 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  chipper | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "BYOB" - System of a Down | ] |
Ok, so, I made my decision two days ago but haven't told anyone but my family so far (and Khrysti and my Higglet!). Thanks for the emails and calls everyone; words of encouragement helped! But alas, such a life change can only be set in motion by myself. Want to know what I chose? Well, follow with me this journey and maybe you won't be so angry with me for... choosing to stay here!
Last Saturday through Monday I went to check out the Big Island facility. For those of you who are unfamiliar with how this state is set up (like I was when I first got here), yes, the whole state is called Hawai'i, but each of the six other major islands has its own name (Ni'ihau, Kaua'i, Oahu, Moloka'i, Lana'i, and Maui). The seventh, the "Big Island", as people refer to it here, is the largest and southeasternmost of them, and is actually the one called Hawai'i. It has three volcanoes on it, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa and Kilauea. Mauna Kea is inactive. Mauna Loa is the largest volcano in the world: 56,000ft tall from the ocean floor. That's friggin' 10 miles!. Kilauea is perhaps the most active volcano in the world, according to the USGS. There has been lava flowing continuously from the caldera since 1983, and it is apparently very breathtaking to go watch the lava flows and "liquid hot mag-ma" (Dr. Evil anyone?)
Jeremy says they feel earthquakes every now and then because of the nearby faultline. They are usually only small vibrations, but I did get the stories of beds shaking away from the wall at like 6am a few weeks ago due to the most recent, which was a 5 pointer on the Richter Scale. It does make me a little nervous to look at the hazard zones of Mauna Loa and Kilauea.
To get to the Big Island from Maui is no easy thing, though you'd think it would be. What, only like 50 miles of ocean to cross? No problem, I could swim that in my sleep. No really, all you have to do is hop a little puddle-jumper turbine engine plane (which, by the way, sat eleven people, including both pilots) and fly for an hour to get from Kahului, Maui to Hilo, on the eastern side of the "Big I". And with me having inherited from my father, along with many, many the other good traits that cancel this one out, a fear of flying, you can just imagine the dents I made in the seat in front of me with my vice-like grip.
While Hilo is a large city- one of the biggest on the island, I think- it retains a smaller city feel and has less of a tourist trade than Maui and Oahu. In fact the whole island is rather sparsely populated relative to its size, and the only tourist meccas are really the National Park, just up from Hilo, and Kona, which lies on the opposite side from where I was. So Hilo is a quaint place with a large bay and a large native population. The area around it very much resembles the lush greenery of Maui's Hana because both sit on the windward side to catch most of the rainfall, making for a beautifully green and lush jungle along the main highway going up the slope of Mauna Loa on Hwy 11.
Jeremy and Kimberly where there to get me after I staggered off Pacific Wings flight 81. Get this, you get on and off the plane on the runway and walk to the terminal! Ughh, my nerves. Anyway, since Josh originally came from the Big Island facility, where he was an intern for three months before being offered a staff position here at the MBCC (essentially, we are switching places), he knows a few of the staff from the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center (KBCC), and Jeremy was one of them. He said I would like Jeremy because he and Josh were buddies and very much alike. Well, he was right. So I already had made a friend from the get-go ("besties", as Josh likes to say when jokingly referring to people who get along well) and Kimberly was a bubbly woman who had uncanny amounts of interests in common with me, including the more dorky aspects of anime and manga. Two besties already! Not even out of the airport, she asked me if I was wearing American Eagle jeans, I said, "Mochiron!" and they proceeded to tell me that AE was having a sale. So, guess what? I went to visit the Big Island and went shopping! No, really, both of them had the day off, so they took the time to show me around Hilo, such a neat place, and took me to eat before we headed up the mountain.
The Keauhou Bird Conservation Center lies within Hawai'i Volcanos National Park, which includes the summit of Mauna Loa and the lava tubes and flows of Kilauea Caldera on its southeastern slope. The nearest town to the entrance of the park is Volcano Village, a neat little (and I mean little!) town that's mostly residential with a general store. For real shopping you'd have to go about 25 minutes down the hill back to Hilo. If you check out a map here, you can see how close it is to the park. Jeremy, who lives just outside Volcano says he and his roommate Blake (who also works at the KBCC) can see the glow from the far-away lava flows at night.
The facility itself is massive. And it's state-of-the-art. Buildings are dedicated and built to their purpose, as opposed to rigged like ours. They have several more species of birds in addition to the crows (of which they have like 30-something adults plus the 7 new chickies), Puaiohi, and Nene (of which they have only 3). Then there are Palila, Akepa, A'kohekohe and probably more that I'm just not familiar enough with to remember. I followed Tracey, the facility director (Rich's counterpart from here), around the forest bird barns and marveled at their beauty. While their FBB's resemble ours in design (a long central hall with aviaries off to the left and right) ours are cube-shaped and consist of cement floors and a few potted plants. Their floors are natural lava rock gravel with plants actually planted in them densely, making for a more jungle-like feel, and are taller and longer for more natural flight paths. Just beautiful, and they make for more happy, vice-free birdies.
Each of the crow aviaries was a separate building scattered along two different roadways. Everything is so spread out that the staff uses vehicles (all 4-wheel drive) to get from one place to the other. In the BOB (Brooder Office Building) I got to see the baby crows, so fuzzy and cute! Made Josh jealous because he hasn't seen a baby crow yet, not with our sad breeding season.
Then came the kicker, the intern house, which is on property but farther away from everything. There is also a staff house but Tracey lives there with her family. Let me tell you about ours first, so you can have the comparison. Our apartment here has two rooms, one of which Eileen and I have to share, two passable bathrooms, one with a shower, and then a kitchen. It is cramped and old and cobwebby, with carpet dating back to prison days probably. I live in fear of spiders here because the place, according to Shawn, should be condemned.
Now the KBCC house, and it is a free-standing house, can't be more than three or four years old. It has three bedrooms, a master bath and a separate full bath, high ceilings, a stocked kitchen (with a dishwasher!), a large living room and a big lanai (that's a porch) with french doors and even a hammock overlooking the extensive fields outside. Hardwood floors, big windows, clean living, new furniture.
Apart from my beloved home back in Houston that my parents built, I've never lived in a place so nice. And I do get to live there, for at least a month or two, until I find my own place. I get my own room, a large bed, and hardwood floors (I know I said it already, but I love them!) And I even have a future roommate. Kimberly has also been hired on as staff just recently, and has to find a place soon. She and I get along very well, jabbering on about puppies and kitties and manga while Jeremy drives and rolls his eyes humorously. By the way, he used to breed sugargliders (a-mazing concidence), and couldn't believe I had two that were as old as they are (Aya's pushing 6 already!)
There is a place just down the road from the KBCC called the Kilauea Military Camp (KMC) which I'm not sure is a real camp anymore but no one seems to really know. They have a sort of community center there with a bowling alley and mini golf course and game room, where locals like to come and hang out. We went on Friday night, where I got to meet the rest of the staff. There are 5 full staff members (I will make 6) not counting Tracey and two others who were on vacation, and one intern. Everyone was super friendly, if a bit curious about why I was there. Tracey and Rich had been kind of hush-hush about my true reasons, but of course everyone had guessed some version of the truth. Jeremy was the only one I confided in, mostly because when we were away from the others he asked outright. So they offered answers to questions I couldn't ask without being obvious, like what rent was like, what work was like, is it very far from Hilo, is it livable. By the time I left on Sunday morning I was watching Amy feed the crow chicks and she said, out of the blue, "Everyone's really hoping you'll come here." And silly as it sounds, that was just a nice thing to say, and really kind of pushed the scale for me.
So that's it. The director of the whole program says it's not meant to be a permanent career, just a stepping stone to better things, and what I would learn more here- active conservation of highly endangered species as opposed to feeding and watering a public collection- is much more than I would ever learn by just being a keeper at the Houston Zoo.
Of course he is a bit biased, but as a semi-recent college graduate with a BS in conservation biology, what better place to begin a career than as an employee of the San Diego Zoo? How much higher could I start? I'm happy with that, with where I am and where I am going. Others tell me they would have chosen the H Zoo with the more diverse collection and larger staff, but I still feel like I made the right choice for me. As for the money, well, it'll work out. One cannot "spemque metumque inter dubiis", as Virgil states.
So that's that. Rich gets back from a series of conferences/vacation on the 15th of this month; I'm not sure if he'll know or not. He did call from Honolulu to see how my Houston trip was- that was nice of him- but without a cell phone he tends to be out of touch when he leaves on things like this. As for now, I get to go through the juggling act of how to get my car, pets and belongings out to the Big Island. I will leave Maui on the 29th and go directly to the KBCC. From there I will have to coordinate with Tracey about when I can get home to sort things out.
C'est la vie. Lots of egg-citing things coming up! |
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| "...it's not having what you want / it's wanting what you've got..." |
[Jul. 30th, 2005|10:41 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  confused | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "An Honest Mistake" - The Bravery | ] |
I hate flying. Hate it hate it hate it. Especially when it's a night flight, like all of the flights leaving the island are. We left at 9:30pm Hawai'i time, which is very close to my bedtime. Well, there would be no sleep for me. The geniuses at ATA apparently like to show movies even on their night flights, and I had a monitor staring me in the face, showing me a mediocre movie until about midnight. Then the rest of the time was spent slouching and adjusting to see if I could get a comfy position to doze in, but that wasn't happening either. This went on for five hours folks! We got into Phoenix around 6am Arizona time, so that's like 2am for me, then I got to wait for 4 hours until my connecting flight left for Houston. I managed to doze a little on that one since I had a window seat but the family behind me chose to sit their bratty little 6-year old right behind me, whose legs were just long enough to continually kick the back of my chair and jolt me awake. Grr! Kid or not, I felt like throwing my peanuts at him! (You can guess by now how horribly irritable I was, having no real sleep for over 24 hours...)
Nonetheless, I made it to H-town and to my interviews. I really enjoyed the Houston Zoo, it seems like a neat place to work. If your section of birds has chicks, you get this nifty incubator/hatcher which plugs into your car charger, and you get to take them home with you to feed. Kind of cool, right? And they have Quetzal chicks, which no other zoo has. Kind of cool too that they have Micronesian Kingfishers, which are not present in the wild anymore (like our 'Alala). Bottom line, they have a cool staff and cool birds (235 species!) so what's to stop me from taking this job, which has been whole-heartedly offered to me?
Well, the fact that I have been offered one here in Hawai'i.
Yup. The other facility on the Big Island, called the Keauhou Bird Conservation Center, has a staff position open and my boss has been doing some maneuvering to get me there. So I wouldn't be staying on Maui, but going to a whole new part of the state, which is a little more remote, but is supposed to be just beautiful, as it is in/near Hawai'i Volcanos National Park. So I would get to see some active lava flows! The kicker is that I will be an employee of the San Diego Zoo. Right out of college (well, sort of) and straight to the top zoo in the world! How's that?
You might not believe it, but I really can't decide what I'm going to do, and I have to choose soon- like this Monday. These are two very different places, two very different paths to take. The Houston Zoo is offering a little less money, but it is cheaper to live there than the Big Island, which is still cheaper than Maui, but I don't know how much cheaper. The H Zoo job's benefits are better in some ways, less in others (for example, the SD Zoo job starts you off with like 3 weeks vacation, and the H Zoo only 10 days). But the cost of moving myself out to the Big Island, moving the dog and cat (plus vet bills and quarantine procedures- it's only 5 days, tho), getting my car out there, finding a place to live... It will certainly be a juggling act to keep myself together. Plus, I would have to sell my fish tank at home, and find a permanent home for my sugargliders, which are not legal in Hawai'i.
On the other hand, the big shining beacon is opportunity. The chance to say that I lived and worked here with some of the rarest birds in the world, and the director of the program here assures me that anything I learn here will be much more valuable than being just a zookeeper.
And Sharon makes two good points: 1) you can do anything for a year, it's not permanent, and 2) talk about getting a foot in the door to work in San Diego itself.
But... Houston is home. It's where family and friends and security are. I know people and places there, and wouldn't put myself in the poor house moving into a space I could call my own, with all my beloved furniture and pets. Deep down I don't feel like money should be such a big issue, but in reality, it is. I have been a poor college kid for too long and am tired of it. I want my dog and cat and gliders back, and my car and surround myself with everything I care about again. Having been away from home and family this long already, it puts things into perspective. Am I one of those people who can throw caution away and follow opportunities and really feel like I'm living life? ...Or do I just want to be, but when it comes down to it will always choose the safe road because those are the things that matter to me?
Well, Rich has arranged that I fly out to the Big Island and see that facility, which is supposed to be very nice and big, because he doesn't think I should have to make an uneven decision. It's nice, but with all the backbending he's already done, what if I have to tell him no in the end? Or with as excited as the Houston Zoo's curator was for me, what if I have to tell her no instead? And how am I ever going to afford living here??
Well, in a way it's nice that I have a deadline to make my decision, so I don't fret over it for weeks and end up losing all my hair from the stress. I will go to the Big Island and perhaps be so struck by it's beauty and can perfectly envision my dog running up and down its hills, that my choice will be made for me. Or not. We'll see, I suppose; I leave today actually and get back on Monday morning.
Well? Comments? Advice? |
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| "You're really weird." |
[Jul. 24th, 2005|09:11 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  cranky | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Collide" - Howie Day | ] |
Yes, yes I know it's been a while, and I'm sorry that this will be short. There has been a lot going on around here lately, and unfortunately nothing of interest on my weekends! We have recently been through an IACUC inspection, in which the San Diego Zoo sends a team to check out the facility and make sure everything is being handled properly and safely. And with an aging facility like this one, we can only hope to do our best! It was a bit anti-climactic, however; three months of preparation (gardening, cobwebs, rearranging, fixing roofs, dump runs, etc) and the people only stay for about an hour. I barely even saw them myself, but that's because I ran from them. I certainly didn't want to be quizzed on the location of every fire extinguisher, first aid kit and eyewash station in existence! I saw them coming from the offices, led by Rich, and high-tailed it to the remote aviaries where they wouldn't go, due to Oni and Pikaka being on eggs.
Well, that's another bit of news. 'Alala breeding season is officially over. Pikaka, our only female of three breeding pairs, has laid three clutches, amounting to 10 eggs total I think, and none of them survived. Two made it to the pipping stage, but died due to mal-positioning within the egg. This is most likely caused by some mechanism of the egg-turning, we might not have been turning them enough, or just going in the wrong order. But the eggs themselves were always very small and chalky, so they weren't good quality anyway. It's sad to think, though, that we lost two adult birds this year: Mimo, suspected to some sort of air pollutant when the lower aviaries were being rebuilt earlier this year but the vet can't prove that; and Kolohe, who suffered natural organ failure due to old age. So we couldn't even replace the birds we lost this year. The other facility on the Big Island raised eight viable chicks I think, which is still not much considering that they have eight breeding pairs, all of which will lay four eggs to a clutch, maybe two or three clutches per breeding season- so eight chicks out of 64 possible eggs. And I believe that seven of those chicks come from one female, Lilinoe, who appears to have taken it upon herself to save her species.
It's sad. The 'Alala is one of the rarest birds in the world, and the remaining population is so inbred we have difficulty getting good eggs at all. The real tragedy is that their situation is this dire due to bad management in previous years before the zoo took over from the state. The state's failure to enforce certain laws allowed the population to crash needlessly, which just irks everyone because we still have to work in conjunction with the state after all.
Ok, off the soap box! I have a lot on my mind now concerning my future; lots of decisions to make. By this time tomorrow I will be in Houston for a marathon of interviews, then back here by Wednesday. Yay for time changes and jet lag! I will have to make my decisions by the end of next week. I'm seriously about to pull my hair out.
More to come when I get back! |
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| Ut mei misereatur / ut me recipiat / et declinatur ad me / et ita desinat |
[Jun. 29th, 2005|05:36 pm] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Starry, Starry Night" - Josh Groban | ] |
One of the things harked to people when they visit the island is the sunrise. No, not just any old sunrise (Dude, seen it, like, it comes up every day) but the sunrise from Mauna Haleakala, which literally means "House of the Sun". At an altitude of 10,000 feet it's certainly not the highest point in the state, which I think is on either the Big Island or Oahu (Mauna Loa or Mauna Kea), but you're still high over the cloud line, and averaging about a 30 degree temperature difference from the flatlands.
Now, the sun rises at about 5:45am, and there's about a 40 minute drive from where we live to the summit, and you usually try to be there about 30 minutes ahead of time. So Joshua and I set our clocks for 3:00am. Yeah, that's three aiy em! We bundled up as warm as we could get (really, who brings a ski jacket to Maui? Well, apparently Josh does, but I had to make do with two sweatshirts, double socks, jeans and one of Joshua's beanies, and I was still cold, people. With the wind it feels as if it's 30 degrees out there. On the way to the summit I was feeling the effects of the altitude, so I wasn't paying much attention to the ride up. Once I acclimated, we got out of the car and followed the herd of sheep, who were all curiously dressed in strikingly similar yellow jumpsuits. There must have been at least 300 people up there already, 80% of which wore this cheeky banana costume. All were gathered at the railing that stretched across the upper lip of the crater, which, by the way, at 5:30am is a big gaping mouth of nothingness but a howling wind and some eerie fog. These clowns in the jumpsuits were the biker-tourists. They sign up with one of several tour expeditions that will haul you, several of your close friends and family and a bicycle for each up to Haleakala for the sunrise. Then you hop the bike and coast all the way down the mountain. It's actually a great way to see the countryside if you're only here for a few days, so I'd best not knock it. But still! Sheeeeeeeeep. Luckily my family will have their own personal tour guide, and I come cheap! Just feed me!
Ahem, anyway. Josh and I found 4 square inches of empty space and huddled together for warmth as we awaited the sunrise. Already we could see the clouds lightening up a bit already, and it is the clouds that make this event spectacular. Without them, it's just another ho hum sunrise. Nah, just kidding, I wouldn't say that about one of life's little everyday miracles; though they are surprisingly easier to appreciate under my current circumstances than they were when I was, say, waking up to go through 7 hours of torturous hell they called middle school...
Suddenly, some dude wearing very un-official looking gear steps out of the crowd yelling, "Hey! Can you not read the signs?! That's endangered bird habitat you're stepping all over, please come back over the fence!"
Apparently people were responding to the age-old survival instinct of "Over-crowded? Disperse". They'd begun stepping over the cable fences that were marked with big signs of Nene nesting habitat. As they all began climbing back over, Josh and I exchanged glances.
"What do they do, make their nests out of rocks?" Josh says.
"Little ones," I answered with a snerk.
And then, as if one admonishing isn't enough, one guy got yelled at a second time because he hadn't moved. So he had 300 pairs of eyes watching him come back over the fence, and Josh and I took pity.
"They don't nest on rocks, pal," Josh wanted to say.
"And it's not breeding season," I wanted to add.
But as we were playing tourist that morning, we kept quiet and just snickered to ourselves. Incidentally, the wild Nene roost farther down the mountain where there is grass to make their nests of, and their breeding season doesn't start until November. But what do we know? I kept bugging Josh that I wanted to see a Nene, and would be really mad if I came all the way up here and didn't get to. Nevermind that we have 26 in our backyard and are currently tube feeding one daily and catching up and scrubbing the feet of eleven others. I think I see enough Nene everyday, thankyouverymuch.
The sunrise came, and what description I could give wouldn't do it justice, as I thoroughly maintain that there are no words in the world of any language can adequately describe such a thing and the human awe that comes with it. You'll just have to come and see for yourself, or try to glean what glory you can from the pictures I'm going to post (yeah, yeah, one of these days!)
We be-bopped around the summit for a while, taking funny pictures and embarrassing ourselves in front of people. That is, until the fact that we'd already been up for 3 hours and the sun had barely caught up with us hit, at which point we slothed to the car and began the windy way down. Back at the apartment our people had just stirred to go on about their work day (ha ha, suckers!) Josh cooked breakfast (what a nice, handy guy) and we vegged for another hour or so.
But the day began wasting. So we hopped back in the car and went down to Wailea, more specifically, the Grand Wailea, one of the most opulent resorts we've found so far. Though the beaches were crowded, we found some empty hammocks and chilled there most of the day, reading. I tell you, it's a tough life, but someone has to live it, right?
In other news, we have some unpaying tenants. A grey feral chicken and his wife have taken up residence on the facility grounds. You can hear them scratching about outside open windows, and see their paths through the brush. Well, these guys wouldn't be such a pain but that Mr. Greyfowl has taken it upon himself to sound Reveille every morning at around 4 am. Sometimes it's directly under our window, sometimes it directly under Rich's window. But in any case, it's under someone's window. Finally Rich had enough.
"I'm going to catch that rotten chicken," he says.
"Good, then we can eat it," I answer.
Well. Well, well. One must watch what one says. I was just climbing onto the riding mower this afternoon when Rich asked me to help him with something.
"Sure. What are we doing?"
"Getting dinner."
Ooooh, we're going chicken-hunting, I think and happily follow. Well, well again, it seems he's been a little misleading. I soon see that he's already trapped a chicken and we're going to 'dispose' of it. And it wasn't even the one we wanted! He'd caught the little Mrs. instead.
Rich instructs me to get her out of the trap, which I do by grabbing her hind feet like I've seen in so many movies. (Shh, but I've actually never handled a live chicken myself.) But it looked professional enough, and I laid her on the block for him. We 'disposed' of the chicken (I didn't look, but backed away as far as I could while still keeping a hold of her and turned my head) Then, Rich put her in a plastic grocery bag and handed it to me.
"What am I supposed to do with it?" I ask.
"I thought you guys wanted to eat it. Just pull the feathers with the skin when you pluck it, it'll be jolly good." Then he left me standing there with a not-so-tasty bag of raw KFC in my hands, gaping. I had absolutely no intention of making my own dinner out of this, especially when you still have to pluck it and gut it and all that. Taking a cellophane wrapper off is as far as I go! So what was I to do? Yell for Josh of course.
He came out (it's his day off but he was still home) and it took a bit of rallying, but I got him to take the thing on. We cut off the head and hung it up by the feet to allow the blood to drain out, and now it is currently sitting in the fridge awaiting plucking and gutting whenever Josh decides to make me a chicken dinner. This will be a first for me, real free-range chicken. I'll let you know how it turns out.
Incidentally, Mr. Grayfowl has been heard calling. Calling for his woman. It's really quite sad, but I'm sure he'll end up in the pot too if Rich has anything to say about it. I just hope I don't get employed for that job too. Run, Mr. Greyfowl, just run! There's nothing left for you here! Save yourself while you can!
Sorry for the morbidity, but it was such a surreal thing. And to imagine that people do it every day to eat! |
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| "About six months ago, on my birthday-none-of-your-business..." |
[Jun. 23rd, 2005|07:26 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | chipper | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "The Boxer" - Simon and Garfunkel | ] |
Eight weeks and maybe a day or two to go before this ride is over. Can you believe it? Not me. Well, it doesn't have to be eight weeks. I could make it six more months... But, reality checks me every now and then, and I don't know how I could go another 6 months without my dog. Oh, and my family and friends. (^_^)
So the job search is on, though I haven't gotten too serious about it just yet. After all, the earliest I could start anything is September 1st anyway, and right now I'm not even sure where I want to end up. There are certainly loose ends to wrap up, but I wonder if I haven't had enough of College Station, and it's had enough of me. It seems like my dear brother was right when he said, "You might be comfortable now, but just wait until you leave CS. You'll find it's just a big bubble." Don't get me wrong (especially those of you who still live there!) it's a great place to live... but if one's not going to/trying to get into school, and one hasn't established a real career there, is it really that great? Sure, it's safe and cheap and full of people between the ages of 18 and 25, what's not to love? Well, the brick wall you hit after you graduate, for one.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there. The point is, I could end up in Houston or Austin or St. Louis or Baltimore or San Diego! They're all looking good right now. Of course, Maui is the top choice, but a studio apartment here (right next door to dear Sharona and Bob and Karen) is about $800 all bills paid, and even though that seems actually very reasonable, I still can't afford it. Reality checks in here too, in that this is a small island. Once you've gone all the way around it, er, that's it. You can go around it again in the opposite direction, you know, mix it up a bit, but one gets tired of driving. Well, that's why I make Joshua drive.
My past few weekends have been full of beaches and cafes and books. For some reason that's all I've wanted to do lately. I did finally get to Wailuku and pick up my Hawai'ian State ID card. Now I am officially kama'a'ina, and man do I look tan and happy in my picture! I have to go flash it around and get all my discounts. It's so amazing how peoples' tones change the instant they find out you live here.
Ok, back to the main story. Josh has been having problems with his computer (silly Mac user) so on our shared days off he's usually on the phone trying to get help fixing it. But this past weekend he finally broke down and took the thing in for service (at $80/hr! Jeezy Creezy...) so I bullied him (well, more like whined and batted the eyelashes) to take me to Hana.
Ah, Hana. The Mecca of Maui, the gathering place. That magnetic north (well, southeast) beckoning all tourists to its lush, lovely hills. Hana, always spoken of in hushed and reverent tones. What is this place you say? Well, Hana is actually a town on the opposite side of the island from everything else. All the major hubs (Kahului, Kihei, Wailea, Pa'ia, Kula, Ulupalakua, Makawao) lie on various points of the north side of Haleakala, which makes up most of southern Maui (remember this island is shaped like two circles joined in the middle by a stretch of gum). The winds over the island travel in a westerly direction, so Haleakala's eastern side is windward, and consequently under the effects of a precipitation cycle and rainshadow. Clouds laden with moisture (insert weatherman's gestures here) come off the ocean onto the mountain's slopes, drop all their rain due to the cooling temperatures, then move on to the other side, which is chronically dry. What all this means really is that the southeastern side of Haleakala is lush, dense and beautifully rainforested, while the southwest curve is arid scrubland. Hana rests right about in the middle of this green haven, and the drive to it is one of the most traveled roads in the whole archipelago. About 1,500 cars take this road per day.
Josh and I started about 8am down through Pa'ia, which is harked as "The Last Stop Till Hana". Well, my a**, but anyway, they like to tell tourists that. It was raining of course because it always rains in Pa'ia, especially when yours truly just had to wear a white shirt for that 'quick trip' to Mana Foods, and of course you can only park a minimum of three blocks away from anywhere in town you want to get to. (It's ok, Josh was a gentleman and gave me his sweatshirt, no matter that it was humid as all get out...)
We knew that the weather would get better, but the question was, when? We certainly weren't the only ones on the road but, man, did we stand out! Josh's maroon Acura Legend was like a sore thumb against the silver, convertible Sebrings and the red Jeep Liberties (which were of course all rental vehicles; the Sebrings because that's the best way to see the gorgeous drive, and the Jeeps because some people are ignorant enough to believe the rental place when they say you need a 4-wheel drive vehicle to go to Hana) That's usually how you can tell if someone's local or not, by their car, their "Maui Cruiser". And let me say that Christopher, though we didn't take him for this particular trip, is so local his horn honks, "Eh Brah!".
The road to Hana is a twisting, turning crazy-straw road that goes sometimes along the coast ("makai", towards the sea), sometimes along the mountain ("mauka", towards the mountain). You can be assured to see every shade of green you could ever imagine and then some, not to mention all the trees and flowers in bloom this time of year. But the main attraction, even if you're not a hiker, are the water falls. Too many to count, you pass falls at almost every hairpin turn, from little trickles to full-blown white water. And since it had been raining pretty steadily, you can bet these things were churning. I took lots of pictures, but we only stopped once or twice at a particular bridge or two to see the falls from the side of the road. Wailani Falls had to be the most gorgeous, but O'heo Gulch had to be the most spectacular (aka "Seven Sacred Pools", which, by the way, are neither sacred nor are there seven of them, but that sounds better in a brochure than a 'Come see the big gulch!'). These falls were within the eastern arm of Haleakala National Park, and normally are a huge attraction for swimmers and hikers. However, because of all the rain, they were closed to swimming, and I doubt I'd even have considered it anyway. O'heo is made up of basically a river flowing down the hillside, with various pools carved out of softer lava layers by the fall of water. So you have river, falls, pool, river, falls, another pool, and so on until you get to the ocean. It was simply grand, not to mention deafening to the ears.
Among other things we saw was a black sand beach at Wai'anapanapa (Why-a-na-pa-na-pa) State Park, formed by lava flowing into the ocean and blasting apart into sand particles as it hits the cool water. Evidently the beach is fairly young (since Haleakala's last flow, late 1700's?), and in a thousand years or so won't exist anymore. There were some cool lava-formed caves to explore, and I took some polished black rocks back to put in Frank's aquarium. Well, his bowl.
Hana itself wasn't the angels-singing-you-to-the-gates experience I had expected, but rather it was a quaint little town, complete with about 17 billion churches (the prevailing religion is Catholicism due to the missionaries) and its own high school. The one restaurant worth mentioning (man could I make a million dollars by opening a better one) was the Hana Ranch House or something like that. Since everyone tries to get an early start for Hana, as the trip literally takes all day, everyone seems to end up in Hana about lunch time. This restaurant makes a killing; we saw three tour buses pull up during our meal alone.
After eating a decent meal (I didn't think the place was as bad as my Blue Bible says it is- how can you screw up a hamburger?) Josh and I slipped into considerable food comas for another several miles. It's ok, there's not that many places to stop after Hana, unless you're into some serious hiking. Here is where the scenery begins to change, and it's literally in the blink of an eye that you move from rainforest to rainshadow. The green gives way to less trees and more grass, and then suddenly, you're in southeast Maui, and it looks a lot like southern California. Gold and silver grasses stretch as far as you can see, right up the slopes of the backside of Haleakala, and the dirt turns from rich black to the famous dusty red. You can't even see the top of the mountain because clouds cover it like giant cotton balls all in a row. This is also where the road goes unpaved for about 5 or 6 miles, so it was a bit of a bumpy ride. A bit hard to nap off a big lunch to that! But I suppose I should be thankful, seeing as how it prevented my driver from napping too.
We came around the western arc of the mountain and everything turned green again. We were now in Ulupalakua, where the winery is, so of course we had to stop and take advantage of our 4 free tastings before heading home. It's now about 5pm. Not including lunch we have been driving about 7 hours, and the odometer reads just under 100 miles. Talk about a trip and not getting anywhere! Well, that's what it looks like but certainly not how it feels. I loved this trip, it's one of my favorites of the places we've gone thus far, and I simply cannot wait to take my family on it.
Other news: Saw Batman, amazing movie, and not just because it has Christian Bale without a shirt and Liam Neeson in another Qui-gon Jinn role, plus Michael Cane being his genius-of-an-actor self. Nope, just really a good movie, I was very surprised. Rich, Josh, Karen, Shawn and I also went to the Maui Film Festival and saw March of the Penguins, an 80 minute long documentary by the same French fellow who did Winged Migration. We were all impressed by the cinematography as they followed a rook of emperor penguins for a year through their breeding season, but, being the nerdy-birders that we are, all would have liked a little more information on the birds and their behavior, and less anthropomorphizing through the editing, camera angles and sound bytes. But it was very beautiful nonetheless. Afterward we went to the Ale House for dinner, which, much to my joy, had potato skins (unheard of anywhere else it seems!) Karen shared them with me, as it appears the others, the non-Texans at our table, can't appreciate good food when they see it.
So, eight weeks. Eight more chances to explore this little island and fill the void with movies we're waiting with baited breath to come out- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the New World... Eight weeks...! Am I happy? Or am I sad? Well, I have no idea. |
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| "We've been ratted out, boys..." |
[Jun. 11th, 2005|04:59 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | cranky | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Win Some, Lose Some" - Robbie Williams | ] |
You know, living on a stipend shouldn't be that hard, really. When you don't have to pay rent or utilities, or a phone bill for that matter, and your only real expenses are groceries and the occasional tank of gas, a very small pay rate could go very far actually. You just have to make sure you cut the spending, ie: eating out, shopping, movies, Starbucks, etc.
But when the boss wants to go out, that isn't the time to cut corners, unfortunately. And he's wanted to go out lately. In the beginning Rich seemed to be very careful about 'fraternizing', especially since Josh is the only other male around this place. But it's been very easy to talk him into going out with us, much to Josh's and my delight, since it's just the three of us more often than not. However, there are some who think it's not proper that he go out with us, even though they themselves deign to come out either way. Personally, methinks someone had a crush on him at the time, and now she is just very bitter because she's made a lot of mistakes lately and he's been angry with her. Trust me, to be a girl is to know how other girls work; I know the thought processes! I wonder if I'm making sense or if I'm just sounding rather cryptic here.
Well, that doesn't really matter anyway. The point is, I've been spending precious money because I can't pass up an opportunity to hang out- my time here is too short! So a few days ago Rich, Josh and I decided to go see Madagascar. A bit kiddish, but there were some parts I laughed my arse off during, mostly to do with the penguins ("You didn't see anything...) or the 'king' of the lemurs/various other primates and marsupials of Madagascar ("Maurice! My arm is tired, wave it for me. Faster!") Some of the quotes are great. So we saw this movie, and it was quite entertaining for me, since I had Josh on one side and Rich on the other, and Josh laughs so loud and sometimes so high-pitched we get people staring, and Rich just giggles like a school boy. After that we went and ate dinner at one of our favorite places- Bankok Cuisine- and talked birdy things. It doesn't sound like much, but I really am going to miss these guys! Makes me sad to think of leaving! Of course Rich says, "Stay as long as you like. You can even do another 6 months if you want to!" No, no, silly Brit, don't give me a decision like that to make!
So then Thursday came round, and I walk in to check for any mail, and Rich says, "I rather fancy a movie tonight. What's playing?" Inside I cry because I have no funds but know I can't decline for something so trivial as that. That's why God invented credit! (Aren't you happy to hear that one, Mom? Dad?)
"Cinderella Man," says I with a happy grin.
"That's got your man in it, does it?"
"Mmm. Russell Crowe."
"You like those rough trade chaps, sort of like Clive Owen, don't you? You know he's quite popular with British housewives over the age of forty."
So ha ha. Turns out no one else wants to go, so it was just Rich and I, speeding down the hill to make a 7:30 showing. Well, didn't make it. Next show is at like 9:45, should we go? UK here has got the pm chick shift, so he doesn't have to be at work until noon the next day, whereas I needs must be up at 6:00am and we've at least a 30 minute drive home afterwards. Back to that thing about never being able to turn opportunities down... Yeah sure, let's go see the late movie. I can sleep when I'm dead, right? Or go to bed early the next night, whichever comes first.
To pass the time and dinner, we went and ate at Ruby's, a 59 Diner-esque restaurant where the waitstaff has to wear this god-awful candy striper car-hop outfits. After we made sufficient fun of them, the conversation got serious. Rich has always been a really good resource for information and advice, especially about starting out in this field, because he's already done so much. So far, my goal following this internship has been to find a steady job and some kind of home for myself so I can support myself and my dog. However, this he was shaking his head at. "What are you going to tell your grandchildren when you're eighty years old? 'When I was 24 I settled down into a house and stayed there for the rest of my life.' Or you could say, 'When I was 24 I decided to take another internship after Hawai'i in New Caledonia. Then there was Madagascar, and Mauritius and New Zealand, et cetera.' No one says, 'Man, I wish I'd never taken those 2 or 3 years off to travel and see the world.' Why settle in so fast? Besides, the man you marry might not even be an American."
Perhaps not so surprising, he's actually describing himself here, since he's done the very thing. But I have in essence loaded myself down with a few responsibilities that can't be pawned off on others forever, and I miss my dog so much! It's food for thought at least, though I'm sure my parents are just loving me going off on this new bent. Don't worry, I'm not hopping a plane to New Caledonia. No, if I were going to get on a plane, it would be to Japan from here. ^_^
Incidently, Cinderella Man? Excellent movie.
So remember how I was planning on going to bed early on Friday night? Well, it didn't happen. (I have since turned into an old lady, in that when I don't get at least 7 hours, the following day just plain sucks. What happened to the good ol' party til dawn days? Or the all-nighters for school?) Thursday out with Rich I didn't get in bed before 1:30am, and last night I was still up at midnight. That's because I got talked into going to see an improvisational comedy troupe called Organic Laughter at a restaurant called "Bada Bing!" in Kihei. In terms of going out with Eileen and Shawn, I have been kind of the party pooper (hey, bars just aren't that fun for me lately; I hardly even drink anymore). So We four (Josh included) drove down with wary expectations, as improv can be really funny or it can be really bad, inducing in one this great conflict of being torn between feeling sorry enough for those on stage that you stay and give the courtesy laughs or do you cut and run to salvage your night. Well, fortunately, these guys were effing funny. They asked for suggestions from the audience for states of being or emotions, and people shouted, "Sad! Happy! Excited!" But you can bet I was shouting, "Narcoleptic! Co-dependent! Recalcitrant!" And they used them! It's quite fun watching them act out some of your suggestions! At the end they asked someone in the audience to tell a story of something that had happened to them that day. Shawn told them she had gotten attacked by a crow. So they took this story and acted it out- in the form of modern dance. It was so damn funny we were almost out of our chairs, and I was angry I hadn't brought my camera! Oh well, next time. They play every Friday night; I think I might make my family go when they get here!
In the last update I mentioned Pikaka's eggs. Well, sadly, the world of corvid conservation has suffered a setback; all the eggs from that clutch are dead. Of the two remaining good ones, one was an early embryo death and the other had pipped at last, but instead of pipping upwards into the air cell of the egg and making a circular motion so as to pop the top off the egg like a cap, the chick was malpositioned, and has begun making a vertical line down the egg, and then ended up puncturing its own yolk sac (which, during the pipping process, receeds into the stomach and makes up a large part of its insides if he were a healthy chickie). Chances are he got too tired and had to rest, then probably ran out of oxygen, since he wasn't in the air cell to begin with. For both of these chickies Rich dissected them out of the egg for preservation in formaldehyde jars. Quite sad. We were so close!
But, hope springs eternal. We have just pulled egg #3 from clutch #2 from Pikaka's nest. Crows usually lay a four-egg clutch, and she's finally recycled from her first clutch. She laid egg #1 on Wednesday and we immediately pulled it. Same for #2 a day later. No matter how good natural incubation is, it's not even a question that these birds be allowed to rear their own chicks- too many things can go wrong! So instead of even waiting for the clutch to be complete before pulling the eggs, Rich has been pulling them one by one and replacing them with dummies, to try and avoid them getting punctured by sharp toenails. We'll hope that these turn out to be viable!
Lastly in the nerdy-birding news, I'd just like to say I find it very ironic that people can be so concerned for conservation, and yet be so violent towards those species that are invasive! Rich and Josh like to make comments about hitting house cats on the road purposefully (the kitties really are a menace to bird populations, and no, neither of these guys would actually do it), or any comment similar about the mynas, the sparrows, the rats... Ah, the rats. Niele's aviary has been visited for the last several nights by some unseen R.O.U.S. He leaves his mark on her food pan, but is gone by morning. So Sharon (or Shezza, as we like to call her) and I went on rat trap patrol, and here's where the ruthlessness comes in. We don't set a quick-acting poison (can't, because of the birds), nor do we do a catch-and-release-elsewhere type of thing. Nope. We set spring loaded traps, the old style wooden ones ones with the metal bar that snaps to crush a skull or snap a neck when the bait is taken. Day 1 passes, nothing. But day 2, and you know it had to be the day I was on crows and had to check the traps, we had a taker. Ugh, it was awful looking at this poor rat (a huge, grey, ugly thing) caught, quite dead and probably instantly, with his skull almost in twain by the trap. I had to get Shezza to take him out because I just kept thinking about "The Secret of NIMH", and how we'd probably just killed Nicodemus.
Yeah, I got over it. Filthy vermin! ^_^ |
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| The little alien says: Car broke, phone, yes? |
[Jun. 7th, 2005|08:27 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | contemplative | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "24" - Jem | ] |
Jimminey Christmas, I haven't updated in a while! Well, it's Tuesday, marked by my extreme weariness, Eileen and Shawn gone out for the night, the smell of Josh grilling on his little barbecue wafting through the apartment, and Rich just visible across the dark courtyard in the video room, reviewing the daily recordings of our 'Alala breeding pairs. I'm sure in a bit he'll be standing over my shoulder telling me to hand over the computer, though by definition, this is my time to get on it- after hours. But evidently being facility manager means there are no 'after hours', as he is frequently seen working late, even on days he works a.m. chickie shifts, and should be off at 2pm. A week or two ago I had my intern evaluation (which was hardly that- it was more him giving me a list of qualities over which I was to rate my performance, and all he did was agree...) and one of the things was about time management. Now this has always been in question with me, since we are supposed to be off at 3pm. We don't get paid for more than 8 hours a day, and certainly nothing like overtime. So more often than not we try to finish our projects and work and p.m. feedings by 3. Given his tendency to work later, I had to ask him, "If one is done with their projects by 3pm, do you consider that slacking or do you consider it good time management?"
In essence, he said he considered it slacking. He understands that some days just get tiring and long and one wants to be done by 3:00. But if one is consistent about throwing in the towel every day on time, he looks down on it. So what are we supposed to do? Work until 5 or 6pm? That would make it an even 12 hour work day, now wouldn't it? It irritated me a little bit that that sort of thing was expected by him, especially since his own staff members, Karen and Sharon, urge us to be done and out of there by 3, since they themselves don't want to stay longer than they have to, and they get paid a lot more. I have certainly put in my time after hours and have been fortunate enough to share many projects with Rich (ie: feeding chickies, perching aviaries) that he sees that I work longer hours, but dammit! One does get tired of sucking up, and one does need to get to the bank or post office before it closes at 4pm, and one does like to take an afternoon nap every now and then (blame that residual habit on my college days, when 2:30 in the afternoon was a perfectly reasonable time to nap for four hours).
I really never had much of a problem working long hours at the hotel, or staying late when there was an opportunity to go home early. But then again, we got paid for that, and very well sometimes if you count overtime. Here, it's just different. You work hard, walk long distances (uphill, I might add) and complete a number of odd jobs in the blazing sun before noon- naturally, you like to be able to look forward to 3, when you know you can be done.
It's not that bad; I just get a little irritated by the duality of it all. If I can balance days where I am a 'good' intern, versus days when I'm 'lazy', it'll be fine.
Last Sunday Shawn and Eileen went on a browse run, which means they took the 4-wheel drive truck up the mountain a bit more into an area managed by the Maui watershed people. You have to have a permit to go in there, and it is an off-roader's dream. It takes about 30 minutes to get to where you want to be, driving along a very rough, overgrown jeep trail amid fantastic temperate rainforest. When you get near the end of the trail, you slide out of the truck, grab your handsaws, and hike it up the slope into groves of ohi'a, pukiawe, ohelo and kanawao, to choose carefully branches fit for our forest bird and crow aviaries. Walking around there is incredible; you breathe in air that is fresh, clean and cool, as your nostrils fill with the scent of rich, moist fertile earth. The trees and ferns, so many different shades of green, so many different shapes and sizes, drip with recent rainfall, and you can hear nothing but the wind through foliage and the birds. So many birds! I love browse runs, since you get to spend several hours out there, all muddy and wet, filling the bed of the truck with enormous branches you know you'll be toiling over later to cut and bracket and hang.
Anyway, Eileen and Shawn went this last time, leaving Josh and I at the facility. He was finishing up the a.m. chick shift and I was doing the crow routine. Incidentally, I was done with 15 'Alala aviaries in record time- 9am! Normally it takes you until at least 10. Someone *coughShawncough* probably thought I was slacking. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But I think I have found the thorn in this rosy haven. I'll just say that it's very difficult to get along with someone who obviously wants nothing to do with you, and exasperating to no end that you know they're putting on their resume "works well in a team environment". It's not just me, I'm just the only one who can't be like "whatever" about the situation. It's awkward to work with someone who only speaks to you to tell you something is wrong.
How did I get on that rant? You guys should stop distracting me, I'm trying to get this done. Now pay attention!
To use any of the tools around here you have to be 'trained' by a staff member. Which means if you want to use the weed-wacker, push mower, or even a power saw, someone has to stop what they're doing and show you how to properly use it. Talk about annoying! Especially since my father had in his garage alone about 3 different versions of every tool in this place (with the exception of the riding mower- my parents only have one, sadly). However, in this instance, I was glad Josh was required to show me how to use the riding mower, so I didn't have the embarrassment of asking when he told me the courtyard and side drives needed a trim. Ha! I retain my 'handy' status.
I never realized but riding mowers are super fun. Except when you're a redhead, wearing a tank top and have forgotten to slather on the SPF 15. Regardless, I spent the day buzzing around, cutting whatever I could make an excuse to cut. (And you can bet someone who'd gone on the browse run and who wasn't Eileen had a problem with me using the riding mower, but Josh set her straight). Anyway, I had to constrain myself to the front and courtyard lawns, however, since the upper and lower crow aviaries, as well as the remotes all contain 'Alala breeding pairs (one per building) and must have minimal disturbances. So far only one pair, Pikaka and OniOni (or as Josh and I call him, "Onion" if you lose the last 'o') in the remote aviary have produced anything. She laid four eggs, which we pulled as soon as the clutch was complete. One had been punctured (most likely by a toenail in Mom's hasty leaving of the nest) and the insides had leaked out. Another had been cracked severely, but we tried to repair it with superglue and intently monitor it's weight loss in the incubator, and the other two were intact. They are currently in the incubator, and as far as I know, hatching of the two good ones is imminent (incubation for these guys is about 22 days). With these as our first of the season, the other facility, Keauhou on the Big Island, has already hatched out a few. Well, they are working in a state of the art facility with state of the art aviaries and 30 state of the art crows, and we are working out of an old prison with psycho imprinted birds. But hopefully these eggs hatch well and soon. I can't wait for more Double Trouble's and Lahiki's!
My past few weekends have been fairly calm, with nothing terribly exciting to report, which is why the updates have been few lately. Mostly I have been driving about to Kihei or Wailea and taking some walks on beaches or boardwalks and sitting on some coffee shop's lanai to read a book on a nice day. I don't want to leave here and regret not making the most of my time, even if I had nothing better to do than read a book on the beach.
However, last week Josh and I did have one interesting little adventure. He constantly checks out Maui hiking books from the library and we try one out every now and then. This time, he'd come up with one right off of Pi'iholo Road, a curvy, sorely paved road that travels up our side of Haleakala to end up perpendicular to Olinda, just half a mile above the facility. To get to this hike, we had to start off at the bottom of Pi'iholo, amidst the extensive spiky landscape of pineapple bushes and billowing red dust. We parked on the side of the road and climbed an embankment onto a small right-of-way that passed alongside the pineapple bushes. Now, being from Texas, I never knew that pineapples grew as such, and didn't appear hanging from the fronds of some palm-like tree. Nope, these things pop out from the center of a waist-high bush with long, pointed leaves that point upwards like fingers, opening up in the center like Aphrodite in the shell, to reveal this itty bitty little pineapple, where it will grow big and round and ripen to a strong yellow hue before it's ready to be picked.
We walked along this jeep road a ways, kicking at the silky red dirt that coated our shoes, slowly angling uphill towards a farmhouse and a large water tower. The book said to pass this and turn away from the paved highway a bit until we came to the gate where we were to (and I paraphrase) "climb over the gate to get onto the private land where you are to walk at your own risk of getting caught by some big angry Hawai'ians who already hate haole's and who would assume you tourists and not bird conservationists and are likely to shoot you on sight."
Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but the gate was taller than me, and had a large sign on it that said "NO TRESPASSING". Hookay. Who doesn't like breaking the law? Raise your hands.
Yeah, that would be me, but Josh, my intrepid friend and avid hiker, seemed not bothered a whit about it. And you know what? I dumbly followed him, telling him that if we got put in jail, it was up to him to be the chivalrous man and take all the blame, proclaim my innocence in the matter, and say that he'd drug me kicking and screaming over that fence to take that hike. Incidentally, he promised to deny all knowledge if my existence. Jerk.
I couldn't shake my nervousness, even though the trail was deserted and overgrown, and very obviously not frequented by many people by an occasional hiker or two reading from the same book. I kept looking backwards, imagining a million stories I could use as an excuse if we got caught. Ahead of me, Josh ambled on as he does, singing something loudly, but strangely on key, to the cows that we passed in a field on our left. It was only when we climbed through a grove of trees and over a small stream that he stopped, threw his head back with a laugh and started to clap. I could just see ahead of him what he found so thrilling. The stream we'd just crossed widened just higher up the slope past the grove of trees. When we emerged we saw a utopia. It formed a large, sparkling green pool, sided by higher cliffs to the left and right, with the stream's source, a small waterfall, splashing down into the pool in the middle. I'm not joking, on that gorgeously sunny day, in what seemed to be miles away from anyone else, it looked like heaven! Signs of man were there, though, in the two rope swings that hung out over the high edges, giving the swinger a a good several meter fall into the pool. Josh was almost dancing about he was so excited.
We didn't swim, unfortunately, as neither of us came prepared for that, but at least now we know it's there. Happily, after climbing about a bit more and hiking along some precipitous cliffs further upstream, we headed back. I'd labeled him "the trespasser" and he referred to me as "the thief". Huh, funny guy. I swear, you share one little story with someone...
So yeah, it hasn't been too exciting around here, but it's been enjoyable just the same. I'm getting a lot of reading done. Currently I'm on Metropolis, Year of Wonders (it's about the plague!), and am sorely considering checking out book six of Will Durant's Story of Civilization series, The Reformation. I love the library! |
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| "You Druids! 200 miles in this day and age? I don't even know where I live now!" |
[May. 22nd, 2005|08:58 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  indescribable | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Underwater" - Vertical Horizon | ] |
I think the greatest part about this job is the surprises. I can't name the number of 'firsts' I've experienced just being here for four months. Imagine all the things I came to Hawai'i to do! Learn to drive standard, eat organic foods, cook with onions, get a tattoo... eh heh heh, juuuuust kidding! But seriously, I now get to add more to the list! Have a read.
We have one female puaiohi that is an egg-laying machine. Of all our females (out of 3 breeding pairs) GN/WH has managed to lay 10 clutches. Unfortunately, she also manages to lay these clutches anywhere but in her nest box. She drops them off perches or lays them on ledges where they roll off. The only two chickies that are hers are actually from her first clutch, Guacamole (whom I found in egg form on a ledge) and Salsa Verde. All the other subsequent clutches were found smashed on the floor. Now, this little Pu has a thing for me, evidently. First, she's guarding little Guacamole-egg on the ledge where she's laid him, and I find him. Then, a few weeks later I walk into her aviary for routine feeding/cleaning, just in time to watch her drop one off a perch. Then, just a few days ago, I walk into her aviary and find her perched on top of one of the baskets we've hung for her to choose from as a nest. She's not moving from that spot, so I go up underneath her to see if anything is wrong- observation is a huge part of what we do, watching for anything amiss, or as we call it in the animal world, NQR ("not quite right") behavior. This is so important, especially with the 'Alala who always manage to hurt themselves, that we have two meetings a day to discuss anything that went on.
Anyway, I look up underneath her (the Pu's are about the size of a robin; the are thrushes in the same family) and she's laboring to push an egg out! I can see it, along with her 'contractions' and she's just standing there, watching me watch her. Quick thinking- I grab a handful of dried grass that we've given her to make a nest from, right about the time that egg pops out, right in my hands. I had to catch it, or else it would have dropped on the floor. Wow, I've just had a bird lay an egg in my hand. Wow. Or as Rich put it, with wide eyes, "That's extr'ordin'ry!"
It's a shame that she wasn't being socialized with her mate, so the egg wasn't fertile. I would have loved to point at that chick when it hatched and say, "You see me? I'm the reason you're alive."
More nerdy-birdy news, the quarantine Nene finally got banded for release! We have those 12 Nene gosls, sub-adults more accurately, in the quarantine barn so we could keep them under mosquito netting. Months ago we had blood-tested them for avian malaria (transferred by, what do you know, mosquitoes!) Since they all came up negative, that broadened their options for release spots, or else they would have had to stay here on Maui and go to Haleakala State Park. Then Rich went on a 3-week vacation, and there was a hullabaloo about their blood samples and us needing more, blah blah. Anyway, they've been in that barn long enough. Trouble is, before their release, they need to have a physical by an avian veterinarian, and the state officials have to come out and do the microchipping and the actual leg banding for their release, which will at a glance identify their sex and that they came from our facility. Males have the thick orange and black numeric bands on their right leg, females on the left.
Rich finally managed to coordinate all these people, and I happened to be on the Nene routine that day. We caught them all up (feisty brats that they were) and put them into large carriers. Then, we formed an assembly line. Rich held the gosl for Dr. Moyer to give a physical and implant the microchip in their breast. The gosl was then handed off to a lady who works for the state who sexed it, and her associate did the leg banding. Then there were three of us just taking notes and keeping track of numbers (me for our facility, two for the state and the fed), since we all had to have the same information. I can also say I am more familiar with what is under a goose's feathers than I ever wanted to be.
The state people are supposed to come back in the middle of this coming week to take the Nene off our hands, as they will do the releasing, not us. These Nene will be going to the island of Molokai, which is visible from Maui's northern coast. Exciting, yeah? And we are so glad to get those gosls out of that barn, since it takes about an hour to clean everyday, and they're standing on hard cement floors covered by mats. Except that we can't rejoice too much; our last batch of gosls will be going in their as soon as this bunch leaves, and this time there will be more of them. 6 from our courtyard pair (who hatched very soon after I got here- there's pictures of me holding them as babies), 2 from C pen, 2 from E pen, 3 from D pen and then there's Nu, one of our beloved breeding males. He's served us well and sired many clutches, so now it is time to release him and bring in a wild male for 'DeeDee' (DD, Nu's current girlfriend), so that we may spread the genetic lines apart. We're all sad because Nu is our most accomplished beggar; he follows you around like a puppy dog, and he's so familiar with people that we're afraid he's going to get hit by a car touring Haleakala, something that evidently happens more than anyone would like.
I would also like to introduce the newest member of our household- Frank. My new pal is a betta fish, with light red fins, a white body and bright blue eyes (Ol' Blue Eyes; thus his name). Josh likes being a jerk and calls him Sashimi, so needless to say, Frank doesn't like Josh too much. Unfortunately, I haven't told Frank that Josh is his godfather, and will be looking after him when I go- that is, if I can part with him! I do have the ultimate laugh, however, in that I am making Josh take care of a pink fish. Ha!
Well, I suppose that's the excitement for now. It's nearly 10pm here and yours truly has to work tomorrow. Rich's parents are in town from England so Eileen and I both have covered his shifts so that he may have a few extra days with them. It sucks because I am working a 6-day week. But that's ok because when I collect on the day he owes me, I get to work for only 4 days and get a 3-day weekend. ^_^ |
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| "There's no poetry between us, said the paper to the pen..." |
[May. 17th, 2005|06:04 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | sunburned! | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Mad World" - Gary Jules | ] |
Yup, you're seeing it right, another update! Well, a little one. And since the last one was little too, imagine them combined to be one big one, and your effort to read was worthwhile.
Summer has certainly hit here and it's come like a ton of bricks. 6:30am used to be dark as dawn, and now the sun shines in our faces to wake us up, a happy "Good morning, rise and shine!" to start the day. The temperature ranges from 62 at night to right at about 80 at the highest, but I swear Texas never felt so hot at noon. Maybe it's because we're closer to the sun by a feet thousand feet? Riiiight. The flatlands below are sizzling too when we go down for town trips and weekends. If you're by the water, no problem because there's wind and spray, but if you're hiking in full, stark sun, you can feel your skin bubbling and the big "C" comes a'knocking. (The big "C" is what we use when making skin cancer references, of which there are many.)
Sunday night turned into pot-luck night! Rich had an idea that he would make cock-au-vin (a French chicken and wine dish), but then when he realized 50% of our staff is vegetarian or vegan, he changed it to BBQ and a few veggie burgers. Josh made a fruit salad (sort of- do large chunks of melon and a few vines of grapes make a salad?), I made a regular salad with balsamic and olive oil dressing (yes, yours truly is becoming quite the cook!), and we also brought chips and drinks and dessert. Rich made the BBQ as promised, but also ended up making the cock-au-vin anyway and some tuna steaks, rice, and a stuffed pepper for Eileen (who's veggie). So here there are 6 of us (me, Josh, Eileen, Rich, Sharon and her boyfriend Bob) trying to make a dent in these enormous amounts of food. I can't remember having more fun just eating, all of us together and hanging out. Rich and Bob used to live together on their other island (Bob also used to work for the Keauhou facility) so half our entertainment was sitting there listening to them insult each other.
Then came the real fun- charades. Or as Rich kept saying it, chaRAHdes. I would like to point out before I get judged that I had never actually played the game before, it had always seemed to me to be the type of thing one plays at camp or at a really dull party. It turns out, I couldn't breathe I was laughing so hard. Once one gets over really caring what they look like, it gets to be loads of fun. Rich kept trying to stump our team by giving us British books and films to guess at, but fortunately for us, the BBC was one of my favorite channels back when I still watched T.V. Unfortunately, however, we could never stump him either with obscure British references. The fact that someone else on his team besides him guessed "Brideshead Revisted" correctly was mind-boggling to me. And how am I supposed to act out "Desperado" in 3 minutes or less?
Anyway, I suppose you could call it good clean fun. Certainly not a game I can see us playing at Kyle's house amid the trashcan punch, keg and booze coolers, but it certainly made the evening, and damn, it's a cutthroat game! Twister is next, we've been promised.
Yesterday I went to the beach for my Saturday, determined to work on my tan, and the big "C" for that matter, and finish "The Thorn Birds". This book is like 800 pages long, has a story that spans some 40 years, and I have been reading it off and on for three weeks now, unable to get through it for some reason. I love it dearly, but it doesn't even help that I've read it before. Frustrating! Maybe my problem is that I'm also reading D.H.Lawrence, which would slow down a Japanese bullet train from page one.
I packed it up and headed to Baldwin Beach, so named for one of the rich, early plantation colonials, whose house you can pay to see in Lahaina Town. With all my good intentions, however, it was so windy that all I stayed long enough to accomplish was a pretty decent burn on my back (yay for low SPF sunblock!) and being buried beneath three inches of hot sand. Next time I'll take Josh's advice and stay away from the windward beaches when he says, "Oh, it's a bit windy." Well, duh.
Today was better. Josh and I headed to Ma'alea Bay to visit the Maui Ocean Center, which was of course plagued by white-legged tourists and their families of seventeen screaming children. No matter, we sailed in ahead of them, enjoying our 50% off kama'aina discount. The place was incredible, partly because they're funded by the Pacific Whale Foundation, but mostly because this isn't Moody Gardens in Galveston Bay (which is still very impressive, don't get me wrong). But this is Hawai'i, where all you have to do is stick a hand in the water and pull out plate-sized moorish idols, yellow tangs, reef triggers, lagoon triggers, bandit angels, and the list goes on. They had a large acrylic cylinder that ran from ceiling to floor, full of box jellyfish, moving in graceful slow motion around in a long circle, lit with black lights so that they glowed an eerily soothing pink and blue. It's enough to hypnotize you as you sit there in the dark room, watching their slow dance, listening to soothing music.
The main attraction for me, however, was the diving tank. It's a wall of acrylic from ceiling to floor that allows you an uninterrupted view of their largest tank, which held their biggest fish, rays and sharks. All of a sudden, there was a diver in there. speaking through a microphone in his mask as he hand fed this giant spotted eagle ray, while black-tipped reef sharks and tiger sharks swam around him. Then he introduced the real giant, by lifting up from the tank floor, which we couldn't see, the largest sting ray I'd ever seen. It slid up the side of the tank, mouth facing us, and was larger in width than if you were to look down on the top of a large SUV. This thing was gi-normous! And so cute with its not-so-little mouth sucking at the fish treats!
I took a ton of pictures so they'll be here soon! Actually, there are about a billion of them, from feeding chickies to walking in Wailea to the Ocean Center to our trip around West Maui. I'm falling behind here! Well, the good news is that soon we will have DSL, and I can start uploading my own stuff, so my dear mum won't have to keep track of all this. We're just waiting for the day we join the civilized world and get off dial-up, 28.8Kbps!
Oh, one last thing- Congrats to all my friends who graduated! I'm sorry I can't be there for the ceremonies, and more importantly, the after-parties! But I'll drink one for my homies here, and try to live vicariously a little. But we know it's not the same... *sigh*... |
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| "Ah, a bear in his natural habitat. A Studebaker." |
[May. 13th, 2005|08:19 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  hot | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Green Fields of France" - Dropkick Murphys | ] |
Genuine Hawai'ian white chocolate covered macadamias to whomever can tell me where that quote came from! I can only think of one person of my acquaintance who possibly could...
Wow, I'm in such a great mood! It's a wonder too because I'm also in such pain. We have a blacktop walkway out back that the grass has been encroaching upon for months. Rich and I were back there today in the blistering heat (it's now been staying a steady 80+ degrees here, and though being from Texas I realize that's not much, it's still bloody hot in full sunlight. We were on our hands and knees pulling up these blankets of grassy sod, then hacking it apart from the rest to see how much of the walkway we could expose. It was over a foot on either side at some spots! So out in the sweltering heat doing severely manual labor, it's hardly worth saying that I got really sunburned and that my arms are sore. I'm not complaining, the company was a riot, and we finally got one of our major 'to do' projects started by filling in some of the gardens in the crow aviaries. Most of them have an area bounded with cinder blocks and filled with dirt. Since the aviaries have had recent construction (and might I add that a one-armed monkey with Tourettes could have done a better job) most of the gardens were destroyed. Hopefully the sod will take and we can at least get a little grass growing for them to play in.
So, sunburn is fun. But I am also lucky that I live in the hippie health capitol of the world, and fresh aloe is just a snip-snip away! Eileen had a few bits of the succulent in our fridge, which she got from some weirdo in Makawao who wanted to show her and Shawn this recording studio he had in his backyard. Weird, yeah? I wouldn't have gone! But he turned out to be totally harmless, and I got fresh aloe for my singed flesh out of the deal as well. It's interesting the number of weirdos per square mile there are here, and how many are willing to talk to you without invitation. For example, on Earth Day last month, we all went to a festival on the beach in Pa'ia (which was chock-a-block full of dirty people of all races, pregnant women (we saw like 17!), and of course the reefer. Josh and I were standing there trying to look like we fit in, whilst Eileen and Shawn were busy dancing in a "circle for the earth", when this man holds out his hand to me.
"Hi, my name is Adventure. What's yours?"
Who wants to say their boring name to someone called 'Adventure'? I could have answered with, "Oh hi, I'm Escapade, and this is my friend Challenging Experience," but he probably wouldn't have gotten it. And just the other day Josh and I picked up two hitchhikers on their way to Kahului, two very nice girls our age who work with horses just down the road from where we live. One of their names was Aspen (I think) but since Josh and I can't remember for sure, we just try to name off types of trees or ski resorts in Colorado when we refer to her. Man, if I could pick my own name I think I would be called... well, my name is cute enough, and not too typical. I'm satisfied. ^_^
This past weekend's adventure was to Hana! Well, sort of. We didn't quite take the whole drive, but we made several stops on the road. To go to Hana itself is a whole day trip and then some, as it resides on the opposite side of the mountain from where we are, and it's a notoriously winding, car-sickness inducing road, that takes you two hours to drive though it's only a few miles long. But your end-result is Hana, a beautiful oasis of waterfalls and vistas, supposedly the most breath-taking spot on the island. And the drive there is half the fun, as it contains countless waterfalls and hiking trails just off the road, some really pretty seascapes and gorgeously lush plant life.
We stopped on the side of the road and made a hike that took us to Twin Falls, an area where two rivers with unbelievably long names converge into one, amid an extensive colonial-built irrigation project. It was a beautifully sunny day and we were walking along some 100-year-old culverts and dams, watching the little fish (feral swordtails; undoubtedly liberated from someone's aquarium). Though there were a fair amount of tourists, there were also enough trails to get away from them, and Josh and I enjoyed the walk, crawling over tree-roots and wading through running streams to get to see the falls. Though the volume of water coming down was low- we haven't had too much rain lately- it was heavenly. Just the sound, this low constant drone as you approach the spot, then come upon this cascading line of water that falls just in front of a large hollowed out cave into a clear pool below, ferns growing all around, the smell of moist earth on a warm breeze.
I was disappointed we couldn't stay longer, but there were a lot of other people there. This was one of the first places on the road to Hana, so everyone stops here first (all Maui tourists go to Hana, it's like Mecca to them). One thing we did get to see, though, was a waterfall gnome! Josh and I came upon a another small falls with a rather naked, bearded old man sitting beneath the falling water. He didn't speak, but just watched us, as if we were the oddballs. While the mysterious Maui moose remains elusive (pay attention, or you miss the moose!) it would seem quite easy to find a shameless water gnome in plain daylight.
I'm just kidding about the mysterious Maui moose, there aren't any large mammals here (natively, of course). Horses, cattle, goats, deer- they're all imported. But we like to watch for the moose anyway, so that we make sure we don't take anything for granted. Where am I? Oh, that's right. I'm in paradise. I hope I never get used to it.
In fact, speaking of the moose, I'm adding all sorts of little sayings to my vocabulary. Rich actually asked me if I had Irish blood in me, because evidently some of the words I say sound that way. Quois? However, he said this on Cinco de Mayo, and we were all a bit full of margaritas and high on pool, so I let that go. It's probably his fault anyway.
I did 'surrender my mouse' yesterday though, literally. Our best breeding crow pair, Oni Oni and Pikaka, have been nest building like mad, and now it comes down to observations and calculations on when Pikaka will lay her eggs. We need to know and be ready because Oni (as well as all our breeding males) is a convicted egg-eater, and these 'Alala babies are too valuable to be lost in such an avoidable manner. With 15 birds here, about 30 at the Keahou facility on the Big Island and none in the wild, you can understand how delicate things are getting. We have 3 breeding pairs, Oni Oni and Pikaka, Keawe and Niele, and Hoike and Pomaikai. So far, I think Oni and Pikaka are the only pair who've produced anything viable, namely Double Trouble (our boys, Alii and Miki Miki), and Lahiki.
The staff closely monitors daily videos, as each pair has a camera mounted over their nest so we can watch but minimize the disturbance. A female builds a nest and begins cup-forming, a process where she lays down on her belly in the nest and kicks backwards with her feet to shape it. She does this a lot in the beginning, then she starts intermittently sitting in her nest. Slowly the amount of cup-forming drops off as sitting increases, and there is a moment on these two curves where we can predict fairly accurately (using percentages of sitting time vs number of cup-forms) when she will actually lay. This is crucial, because in Pikaka's case, if she lays an egg and we aren't ready for it, the remote aviaries are all the way at the back of the property, and Oni will have had his breakfast by the time we can get there.
So the point I was making was this: we have begun separating the two for short spells to avoid nest-hogging by the male, giving Pikaka a chance to sit and make the nest her own. There is a small aviary attached to the large one called a hack box, and this is where we have to get Oni to go when we want them separate. However, without the use of nets (Rich has banned them because they're too stressful on the birds) we have to resort to trickery and deception. First, it was very easy to get Oni in there. Just throw in a mouse, he goes in, close the door, job done. Then he would be let back in to the large aviary again to socialize and copulate, and have to be separated out again a day or so later. Back and forth. Now it gets harder. He's a crow, a smart bird, and he remembers. Now it takes almost two hours to get him in there, luring him with pinkie mice or squeaky toys, shooing Pikaka away beause of course she wants all these treats too and is not as cautious as Oni. If she gets your treat first, she'll fly away and share it with him; now you've 'surrendered your mouse' and lost your opportunity. Rich has no problem making us wait 2 hours for this, simply sitting there, hidden from view of the crows, watching, waiting, hardly breathing so they don't know you're there. Nevermind all the other projects you have to do!
I was on the crow routine today and got very lucky. Since we expect her to lay soon, today or tomorrow, I didn't have to socialize and separate! I got to attack the gorse instead, a tall, spiny invader plant that has set up colony around our aviaries. We hate gorse. Josh and I went at it hacksaws and large pruning shears, and now we plan on putting our kill in a large pile, setting it aflame and dancing about it like happy heathen.
Next weekend we check out the Ocean Center! Yay for museums! I hope Josh doesn't get bored whilst I run about- it was his suggestion we go. But in the past when friends and I have gone, no one seems to like museums as much as me. Sad. Or maybe I am that much of a nerd! Ah well, at least I'm a cultured nerd. |
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| We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams |
[May. 2nd, 2005|11:45 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | aggravated | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Sister Madly" - Crowded House | ] |
Ah. Another day, another day dirty. Since the ban on yard work has been lifted- as Rich didn't feel the need for mowing and weeding as much as the previous director did, but now he's seen the light, evidently- it's been an endless way to fill the free time between feeds, medications and cleaning. The courtyard around which the main facility building is built has a small garden along the inside perimeter, and it has taken us collectively 4 days to weed and gut that alone. Then there are the gi-normously extensive grounds to keep (meaning mowing, weed-whacking, then raking it all up). I like
weeding actually, gives one time to reflect. It's the raking I can't take. My delicate hands! Yeah, right, I have more callouses than a professional rower.
To tell the truth, all this manual labor makes one feel very good at the end of the day, and getting down to play in the dirt is quite fun. I'm up to the elbows in grease and dirt a lot of the time from fixing doors to changing tires (yeah, again) to putting up rain gutters to perching aviaries.
I think I have changed more tires in the course of a few weeks than in my entire lifetime. First the F150 got a flat, in the mud no less, so I changed it. Then Christopher got a flat on the side of the highway (incidentally we had no spare at the time; I blame Eileen and her "We don't need to buy a spare! What are the chances we'll get a flat in the next 6 months?") so I had to use my day off to drive Porsche down the hill to the car, take its flat tire and drive to Wailuku, get it replaced, then drive back up the hill to put it back on our car. We'd moved Christopher into the Foodland parking lot in Pukalani, and it is here, in front of a bank and a busy shopping center that I had to get good and greasy. Several folks stopped to help and I thanked them politely and sent them on their way- what do I look like, a helpless girl? No really, the one I thought memorable was this older man who came up, looking like he just walked off some south'n plantation in his white hat, shirt and slacks. He told me he'd help but he was in his nice clothes that day and I laughed. Then he started to speak to me in Hawaiian, and I said that I didn't know that language.
"Really? If you live here you'd better learn."
"Oh, I know. I do know a bit of Spanish, though."
At this point he begins to jabber on en español.
"Oh, well, I don't know it that well! Ha ha..."
This continues for four more languages. He spoke Hawaiian, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Tagallo and Japanese. Keep in mind too that I'm on the ground moving tools and tires about while he's just chillin' next to my car.
"Wow, where did you learn all those languages?"
"At school, at school."
"Well. Wow."
"You're a very pretty girl."
"Ok! Well, looks like I'm all done here! Gotta go now..."
So now, I had to change the Ford's tire off the spare (which is full-sized so I think it would've been fine) back to its repaired tire (which was plugged, not patched) All the while giving a tire lesson to the other double-X chromosomes so they'll not be at the mercy of whomever decides to stop for them on the side of the road. Rich actually said he'd award me an honorary Y-chromosome for fixing the truck and putting up the rain gutters. Gee, thanks. No wonder I have a hard time feeling feminine sometimes! I'm too damned handy!
But we had to change the Ford's tire; we had to take it into town to Wailuku's drive-in theater! That was tons of fun last night, it was just us girls laying blankets and pillows in the bed of the truck and laying out under the stars. The movie was called "Riding Giants", and even if you're not a surfing fan, it was an incredible movie/documentary. From Greg Noll, the first man to start riding the 30-footers at Waimea Bay to the incredible Laird Hamilton, who is considered the greatest monster wave surfer of all time. Just check out the picture to see the wave he caught in Indonesia, considered one of the most amazing rides ever achieved. If it looks like a normal surfing picture to you, I'd like to point out that he's using his right hand, his back hand instead of his front to slow himself down to keep from getting in the tow. That's just amazing. Then there's Maui's own Peahi. This 80ft surf is so big and fast that surfers have to be towed into it with a jet ski. Click the link to see why Peahi is better known as "Jaws".
Phew! Ok, on to what normal people do. So last Tuesday Josh and I hit the West End. That is, West Maui. You take the long drive following the coast on Hwy 31 and 30, starting in south Maui at Kihei, then you end up in Wailuku once you've gone all the way round. There are several stops we made:
First, there was Subway. One has to have a sandwich ready for when lunchtime rolls around.
Second, we stopped just down the highway outside Kihei at Ma'alea Bay. This is the leeward side of the island (for those not hip with the nautical jargon, this means facing away from the oncoming winds- that would be the windward side). This also happens to be the spot where whale-watching is most successful. However, being nearly May, this is the tail-end of their season, so we didn't see any that day. Get it? Tail end? Like a whale's tail..? Yeah, I don't care who ya are, that's funny.
Moving on. The drive is spectacular- with calm seas on the left, mountains on the right, the sunroof down, bare feet on the dash and Josh at the wheel singing country tunes at the top of his lungs. We come to Lahaina Town, where the tourists flock like the salmon of Capistrano. Wait, they were swallows. Anyway, Lahaina doesn't have what, say, Kihei and Wailea have in terms of lodging, but man does it make up for it in shopping and eating. It reminded me a little of a sunny, clean Galveston Strand, just a little more open and right on the waterfront. People were everywhere and there was tons to see; I wish we had stayed longer. But we only walked about for an hour or so (I was with a boy, and boys don't like window shopping).
Back in the car we drive around the northwest curve. We stopped in Kapalua and walked across a golf course (grr!) to Honokahua Bay to see the Dragon's Teeth, interesting formations in the windward rock that salt spray has formed into convex jagged "teeth" pointing to the sky. We strolled along here for quite some time, checking out tide pools and hidden "blowholes" in the rock through which you could hear the surf underneath. Somewhere around here we stopped at a park to eat lunch, too.
Now we were heading south on the windward side of the island, where there are no beaches, but just jagged cliffs of rock the surf crashes into with incredible power. Sitting above it looking down it's like watching nature's fury, and you can feel the drum of the waves in your chest. Somewhere around here we stopped along the road and walked to the coast to see if we could find the Nakalele Blowhole, which sprays water out at 70ft. To get there we hiked across what would have looked like a forsaken wasteland of grey rock (the moon?) if not for the ocean beyond it. Needless to say we found it, and what a sound it made! Wailing like a huge hollow straw with wind blowing through it and then gushhhh!, the water rocks out like a geysar. Then, just down the road some more we hiked down to the Olivine Pools, named for the color of a precious stone that's in the mountain rock. These huge tidepools sit at sea level, with the ocean crashing at the just slightly higher surrounding rock. They were uber-cool. Nevermind the climb down to them, their color and marine life was just brilliant in the afternoon sun, and Josh and I were the only ones there, so of course we swam! I was sore that we hadn't brought snorkeling masks to see the fish we were swimming with, but some of them were so huge, and so numerous! There were little sea fans and gi-normous gobies and palm-sized angels and claw-waving crabs.
Of course, after all this excitement we got to climb back up, which was infinitely harder than going down. Our highway then took us to the dreaded West Maui mountain road, where tour books will tell you you need four wheel drive for this winding one lane heartattack-inducer. Well, you don't exactly need such heavy duty cars, but people still rent 'em because that's what the dealer tells them to do. Josh's little Acura Legend did just fine, though I'm glad he was driving. It was literally one lane, sometimes half a lane, and you have to honk your horn when coming round some really tight hairpin turns, where any oncoming car can see you as well as you can see them, which is not at all. The country turns from rocky cliffs and surf to lush green foothills and jungle with a few little truly native Hawaiian villages tucked away in the valleys. However, they are not so against the haole's that they don't try to capitalize a little from the passing tourists. We stopped in a really quaint place called Kahakuloa Village and bought some homemade banana bread from a roadside stand. Our blue bible ("Maui Revealed" though we don't reveal it to anyone that we actually use this book) harks this as the best banana bread you'll ever eat and I have to agree. Think about this business for a second: if the lady sells 60 loafs a day (before noon, easily), at $5 each, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, that's $109,500 a year running a small rentless roadside shack a block from your home and working for about 4hrs a day. O_o... Absolutely mindboggling.
Now snacking on yummy bread and bottled water, we continue our drive past a few waterfalls. One spot we passed had a white horse just chilling next to the fence in an open spot just big enough for his body among really dense foliage- of course I got out to pet him and he got some banana bread. I'm telling you, this horse'd had the banana bread before from others coming down this road. He knew where to stand!
Josh and I finished our trip by eating at the Stopwatch in Makawao for dinner. Not the greatest food, but pleasant enough- but what I wouldn't give for some Cheddar's! Or Roadhouse or McAlister's! But one thing you'll notice when you're here is the absence of chain restaurants. You get fast food and maybe an IHOP or Denny's and that's about it, dammit. Well, Kihei has an Outback Steakhouse, but on $100 a week, that's a bit of a splurge! So at any rate, eating out is always an adventure and a wager of whether you'll like it or not.
Wow, just got done writing about last weekend and here I have another one upon me! What will I do? Hm. Well... having a plan, while being one of the biggest analities of my personality, has taken somewhat of a backseat lately. Maybe it's me loosening up, or maybe it's the people I'm with. Or maybe it's just this place that does it to you. Aloha!
6. Ode
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
~ Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) |
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[Apr. 24th, 2005|04:08 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  awake | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Dueling Minstrels" - Minstrels of Mayhem | ] |
Man oh man, what a week. You know a lot happened because I'm updating again so soon! I figured I might as well while we are waiting for Josh to get done with his feeding of the chickies so's we can go into town.
Tuesday! I know last time I mentioned with slight disappointment how I would be missing out on a cool day with Josh on the West end. Well, Shawn and I ended up having one of the funnest times I've had yet, so I must apologize for not being more excited about having a day off with her. We still hadn't decided what we would do until about 8:30 Tuesday morning, when I was rummaging about in the pantry (really no reason, but you can always find treasures in there)
"Hey, are these any good?" I ask, holding up two sets of snorkeling gear- masks, snorkels and flippers.
Shawn looked up from the couch. "Sure they are."
So it was decided. I would go snorkeling for the first time! I actually have been scuba diving in Acapulco, Mexico, but that was very shallow water, and I was young so I don't remember it too much besides that it was part of a great family vacation. Shawn gets super-excited, and we pack the car with sunblock and towels and whatnot and head down to South Maui, past Kihei and Wailea to a place called Ahihi Cove. To get there you take this hilly road that has absolutely no sight distance, passing huge beach front homes that are in the, oh, 7 million dollar range. Seriously, one of the houses we passed Shawn said was made entirely of imported Tahitian timber, a beautiful, smooth, dark grained wood. I can't even imagine how much that one cost. It's not surprising, however, that we were seeing all these great houses, as Wailea, the nearest town if we headed back north, is the epitome of tourist ritz. This is where all the pricey resort hotels are, and Shawn and I got a chance to see these up close and personal. That afternoon we took the same walk Eileen, Josh and I had taken a day or so earlier, but this time we actually went into the resorts, checked out their pools and beachside bars and restaurants, and I began checking rates. I can get kama'aina rates because I live here (Hawaii really likes to shove it to the tourists and non-residents, even though they are the island's bread and butter, no doubt). Kama'aina rates mean that I can get a $500/night room for about half that, if I was so inclined. However, even $250 is a lot to pay! I had my family in mind when I was visiting these places, but I think I can show them a better time if they stayed in a cute cottage in Kihei, just a little north, that has more restaurants and shopping in addition to nice beaches. But man, maybe it's me having worked at a hotel, but I wanted to run all around those places and check out their banquest halls! The Grand Wailea was my favorite; it was so big we couldn't find the lobby. I'm not kidding. But all these places had large open-to-the-outdoor lobbies with fountains, breezy and cool, with white marble floors and winding staircases. My second favorite would be the Fairmont beause its beachfront rooms were actually condos with their own jacuzzis, and the architecture looked like the thing belonged on Santorini.
Ok, so back to the snorkeling! Can you imagine? Just a nice little inlet were you can park your car and it's not too crowded, where you just hop in the cool water and take off, and it's all free! Weeeell, that is until we started grabbing our stuff out of the backseat-
"Ok, towels, sunscreen, tevas. Should I leave this here?" (holding
up my bag)
"Yeah, it'll be fine. Don't forget your underwater camera."
"Got it. Have we got everything?"
"Hmm. Yup, I think so."
"Um, Shawn?"
"Yes?"
"Where's the gear?"
(pause) "I don't know. Where is the gear?"
"I'll tell you where it is. It's sitting in a bag on the kitchen floor of our apartment, 30 minutes away."
"Well, sh*t."
No matter, Hawaii is prepared for such emergencies. After we both had a good laugh at ourselves, we headed back down the road 10 minutes to Kihei where Snorkel Bob came to the rescue. For $5 each we could rent the same gear (probably in a little better shape) for a day. Superb. So then it's back to Ahihi, jump in the water and off we go!
For those who know me, you may be aware of the fact that while I love the ocean- I believe it's one of the last remaining frontiers- I am also deathly scared of open water. That and sharks with nasty big pointy teeth.
But being there, watching the life under me as we swam, it's easy to let that fear go. All these fish I've seen in pet stores, sold them to people even, and here they are in the wild! Beautifully breathtaking, and I was having so much fun trying to identify them! We saw several horseface triggers, aka Picasso fish, aka humuhumunukunuku apu a'a- widely regarded as the Hawaiian state fish, and yes, I can pronounce that. Can you?
We saw all sorts of corals and a huge school of blue-stripe snapper, like I'm not kidding. Huge. Reminded me of the big school of fish in Finding Nemo; I half expected them to start doing impressions. And wonder of wonders, we saw sea turtles! Three of them! So beautiful and graceful; I'd never seen one in real life. It was quite an experience, and I can't wait until I get my pictures developed. Hurry up Costco!
So we spent a great day together, got plenty of exercise to work off our fish tacos from the roadside vendor just down from the Cove- don't laugh, these guys are an island secret! The food is excellent and cheap! I didn't even get sunburned because I was on top of the sunscreen (I can just feel my mum patting me on the back for that one). We got windblown and sunblown and waterblown and we were sandy and sweaty and our clothes were wet, but driving in the car on a hot sunny day with the windows rolled down, I never felt so content in my
life. ^_^
The next day, my Monday, I decided to ask UK how I was doing, if there was anything he thought I needed to work on. He's quite famous for little to no feedback, and we all know he will never yell at an intern because we are too valuable to him, working so hard for so little. He and I were walking across the grounds to FBB2 to pull 2 Puaiohi eggs from the nest that were due to hatch in the next fews days. Y/BL female (our builder of maxi-big nests) had been sitting on them for about 12 days now and gestation for these little things is about 14 days...
Actually, here's your little incubation lesson for the day. Most bird eggs, at least the ones we work with, need to loose about 1% of their lay-weight per day in proper development. So that means if these eggs were in the incubator from the moment they were laid, we would expect them to lose about 14% of their original weight by the time they hatch. However, since the female had been sitting on them for twelve days, we have to use the current weight at the time we pull the eggs to extrapolate its weight to how much it weighed when it was laid. And using this, we can calculate how much weight loss we need to regulate until it pips. The weight it loses is water weight essentially, as the chick inside develops, and we manage this by adjusting the humidity in the incubator, through the use of adding or subtracting water pans in the bottom of the machine and checking the reading of the wet bulb- which gives us a relative reading of the humidity inside incubator. When the chick pips, we move it to one of the temperature/humidity controlled hatchers. Internal pipping (also called a 'peep') occurs when the chick inside pokes through the yolk membrane into the air cell at the wide end of the egg (think about the shape of a chicken egg). From the internal pip it's only a matter of a day or so until the chick makes an external pip in the softened shell and it hatches.
Easy, right? Well, when Rich explained it at first, it was a bit hard to follow because a) he's difficult to understand what with the accent and all, b) he tends to talk very fast and/or mumble a bit, and c) he does all the math in his head and sometimes the progression of that doesn't come out in the explanation, at which point I find myself transported back to freshman calculus and saying, "Where did you get that from!?"
Ok, end incubation lesson. During our walk our discussion progresses from how Eileen and I are doing as interns to his narrating how to properly pull an egg (having warm dummies ready, using two hands, having a thermos of warm millet handy with which to transport the real eggs, etc.) I told him I really wanted to learn more about the hand-rearing process, because right now, all we do really is day to day maintenance. I want to get into the good stuff. His eyes light right up, and you can tell very clearly that he was once a teacher, and a good one. We candle the eggs to make sure they are fertile and then settle them in the incubator. He immediately begins to chatter on about the whole process and how to do proper record-keeping, how we need to turn the eggs every two hours, only on a 180 degree plane so as not to twist or strain the membranes and circulatory system, and always with the air cell pointing slightly upwards. I tell you, the man is a mountain of information and he absolutely loves sharing that knowledge. If only my professors at uni were half as excited about what they were teaching!
UK was on the p.m. shift for feeding the chickies (am shift- 5:30am-2pm, pm shift- 12:00pm-8:30pm) so after I did my afternoon feeds, I followed him back into the forest bird kitchen to watch him feed the babies. He shows me how to feed the gaggy little Puu's and how the Mapa chick (named Dodger) eats much better because she's older. Then he hands me the little tweezers and food cup and lets me do it, telling me not to feed more that 4 grams and demonstrating what proper bite size looks like. I hadn't expected him to let me- they are very particular about the chickies, especially the Mapa! It was so great doing all that, and he told me I could shadow him again the next time I was on the forest bird routine. That means instead of weeding the garden, raking grass or mowing (yes, the yard work has begun!) I can go feed cute baby birds! This is actually something Shawn hasn't done, and she's supposed to be the seasonal staff, on board because of the breeding season. Then again, I don't think she's asked to do it, whereas I can't keep my mouth shut. It was really nice having a little bit of extra responsibility, even if it was under the boss's supervision. I actually find that extremely easy to bear. ^_^ |
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| "What is it, Sebastian? I'm arranging matches." |
[Apr. 18th, 2005|04:44 pm] |
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| |  accomplished | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Kill" - Jimmy Eat World | ] |
Phew, what a week! Let's see, I last wrote on... Monday? And, wow, it's Monday again? Fascinating.
I have a new life philosophy, born of what I've learned in life and whilst being here, and it is this: Never Surrender your Mouse. It comes from trying to outwit smart crows, and how you never, ever, give them what they want without getting out of them what you want. I love it, because this phrase can be applied to so many things in life. If you have a problem and come to me for advice, this is what I'll tell you. Never surrender your mouse. There, problem, solved!
And once again I find myself blown away by how my eyes pop open at 6:00am all on their own. Then comes that lovely nap during what I like to call the "in-between minutes", between the time you wake up and the time you're supposed to wake up, when no position is uncomfortable, when no sleep is ever more restful. But then again, with Monday being my Saturday, there's really no need to get up is there? But no, I am awake again at 8am with the whole glorious day to myself and ready for fun-filled adventure.
Well, nearly. It's nice having a day off to myself that I don't share with anybody, but it can also a bit lonely. Sometimes one likes the alone time and sometimes one wants the company, you know? Well, I jumped into Christopher and gave him a pep talk about how we needed to make a connection and bond a little. He started up wonderfully (with hardly any belt screeching this time!) and we were off down the mountain. Mind you, I haven't really driven in several days, so I think I tend to lose a little of the muscle memory, as exemplified by my last drive with Eileen a few days ago, when it was stop-jerk-clutch-jerk-die a few times.
This time, he and I were in sync. We were one as the moon and stars, sun and light, apples and peanut butter. I feel better about driving than ever before, whereas previously even Eileen has accused me of avoiding driving if I don't have to. No longer, says I (unless it's a steep and busy stop-and-go corner of course- I do try to avoid those!)
We cruised on one of the prettiest drives, Haleakala highway past the main entrance to the National Park, past Kula to Ulupalakua once again, back to the Tedeshi Winery. They were in stock of their Pineapple Snow white chocolates, which are so popular they sell out on a regular basis, and are in themselves a tourist attraction. Four boxes paid for and bagged later (none of them for me, by the way), we were back on the road, this time to Kahului.
Anyone who knows me knows that there are two very strong passions in life for me (among many)- movies and Clive Owen (King Arthur, Closer, Green Fingers, Gosford Park, etc). So when I began seeing previews for Sin City, a highly stylized black and white film based on Frank Miller's comics, I was drooling. I knew nothing of the plot or characters, but since when did that matter? Clive is in it. However, as a stark contrast to my movie-going crew at home, no one here seemed all that excited to see it. So I did what I told myself I would never do- I went to see it by myself. Anyone who has done this probably already knows, but it's actually quite nice to take yourself on a date! Kind of peaceful and calming in a way. Needless to say, the movie was excellent, of course I would like it! Stylish and dramatic, overstated and gory, a number of famous actors to boot, and it was directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino (to those of you who know those names, you know what that means!) It's certainly not for everyone; I wouldn't recommend this movie to say, my mother (sorry, Mum!) but man oh man was I happy as a little girl when I left the theater, floating away in a dream world of car chases and gritty, noble heroes with big guns.
All right, all right, I'll stop. Yesterday afternoon after work Josh invited us all to go on a hike. He'd checked out a book at the Makawao Library (I got a card, too! It has a flower on it!) about where to hike on Maui and was anxious to try one out. Shawn neglected to go with us, a fact I try not to point out too obviously that I responsible for how much she feels left out. Any road, We three went in Josh's car and made the 20 minutes drive to South Maui, home of Wailea, Kihei and all sorts of shops, hotels and restaurants that cater to the tourists. Our hike was less of a hike than it was a long walk along the boardwalk from Kihei to Wailea, with the ocean and a setting sun to our right and opulent hotels with their verandas full of sun-burned, Hawaiian-shirted vacationers. Josh, being the swimmer, wanted to check out each of the pools they had, though none of us had brought bathing gear. It was a wonderfully good time, and a great opportunity for us three to bond more. Josh walked behind us, randomly singing inane songs and greeting people who passed us, while Eileen and I walked ahead, exchanging glances and amused smiles over the dork that followed us. We stopped and looked at pools, checked out restaurant menus posted the entrances, played a little ping pong at an unmanned table (Josh won), and overall relaxed and stretched our legs for about two miles. Every hotel we passed got bigger and more exclusive looking to me, and I just wanted to dart back and check out their banquet facilities (yeah, old habits die hard). I couldn't help but start planning for when my parents come. I'm super-excited about that, to get to show them all of this, but it's still so unplanned and far away it seems.
Heading back- this time with flowers in our hair, Josh and I tossing some type of fruit picked from a tree back and forth, and Eileen walking on the raised stone wall scaring us both- the sun set and we were walking by the light of the torches that lined the boardwalk. We supped in Kihei at LuLu's, a restaurant/bar open to the night air, where we experienced the slowest service I think yet. One has to earn that nothing moves very quickly here, from traffic to waiters, and all who live here adapt quickly to it, a slow-paced lifestyle of leisure and a "hey, t's cool, brah" attitude. So I wasn't concerned at all with the time it was taking because we were chatting and laughing through our weariness. Eileen is convinced we need to have serious 'discussions' when we're together, instead of always talking about work. So a lot of times we pick a topic and go. However, discussions don't come that unnaturally, she doesn't realize. Often those kinds are forced and staggered, whereas when Josh and I are out and about by ourselves we have great, spontaneous conversations, but we don't tell Eileen because we don't want her to feel bad. ^_^
That reminds me, however, that though he and I normally share a day off, this week we won't, dammit. Shawn wanted to switch days with him because she has a doctor's appointment and doesn't want to have to leave work early. So now, after Josh has already asked me to take a day cruise around West Maui (at least 2 hrs to get there), we have to change plans, and I will now share Tuesday with Shawn for this week. Don't get me wrong, I like the girl, but dammit! I want to see West Maui and Lahaina! So now I am torn between making my disappointment known to Josh and hiding it from Shawn, to make sure she doesn't think I don't want to hang out with her. So now Josh and Eileen are going somewhere together- surfing lessons, I think. And that's cool too that they can go do that at least once, because that's not something I'd want to do. I just have to wait another week, that's all.
A little aside: Shawn and Eileen just got back from the Superette and they bought me a 24oz. Smirnoff Ice! I had told Eileen last night my Chilifest shenanigans a year or two ago involving a case of said drink. That was nice of them to think of me!)
Last Wednesday we went to the Kokua Festival in Wailuku. I don't think I've been to a concert since high school, and now here I pay $40 (well, Josh paid and I'm paying him back) for a list of people only one of which I recognize, and that's Jack Johnson, but I only know like one of the songs. Once again, though, the point is for us to go out and do stuff together, and Eileen and Josh are rabid JJ fans. The others (Jackson Browne, Ozomatli and G.Love, etc) were exceptionally good, if all very different. I liked the encore, where everyone did a cover of each other's songs. The people that made a human car wash of this outdoor amphitheater under the palm trees were all kinds of surfers, freaks, hippies, dirty people, clean people, college kids and tourists. Josh and I amused ourselves with the rich opportunity of people-watching while Eileen and Shawn engaged in other unspoken of activities that certain of us don't approve of, and that's all I'll say. Consider the crowd, people, if you're trying to figure me out here. Any road, it was a blast and the music was good, even though JJ didn't stray much from his CD sound, which didn't make it an 'exciting' show per say, but good nonetheless. And I got a t-shirt! Double the fun.
On the nerdy-birdy side of things, we had a bit of a tragedy this past week. Our oldest bird- indeed the oldest one on file and the only representative of her genetic line- died at the ripe age of 24, which is considered very geriatric. Her name was Kolohe, and she was the only of the crows were were actually allowed to interact with, as she wasn't a candidate for release or breeding, and she was highly imprinted. Terrible timing, however, as Rich was giving a tour to the MFBRP people and interns when they found her on the floor of her aviary. The staff here who have known her for years were very sad, but life goes on, I think. I read her autopsy after she was sent to the San Diego Zoo, and amid the jargon ("glomerulonephritis, proliferative, multifocal, mild, with rare thrombosis of afferent arterioles") I discerned the primary cause of death was a rupture in her liver, but her main disease was pancreatic cancer. It's sad, because when I first got here we had 17 crows, and now there are 15!
All the rest of the crows are well, as are all the other birds. The pre-release Nene with the bumblefoot are improving, though they really are really starting to struggle and fight during their daily foot-scrubbing. I can't count how many times I've gotten scratched or slapped by webbed feet, and even got bit on the face by evil, evil Pink #41. But they're still fun to cuddle. And Guacamole and Salsa Verde are growing so fast! They're in their own outdoor aviary now for several hours a day, and the little Mapa chick is flying! Still getting fed, but she's looking more and more like an adult every day! So cute, I need to get pictures... That reminds me though, I do have some new ones:
http://home.austin.rr.com/whatt/index.htm
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| "Hello, hello, what do you do? You’re a plumber. What on earth is that?” |
[Apr. 11th, 2005|09:11 pm] |
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| |  tired | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Arthur McBride" - Bedlam (Irish trad.) | ] |
So I should really learn my lesson about updating at least weekly. It's been like 10 days and I think I'm forgetting everything! Hmm. So let's see. I think I can pick up from my last days off, which would be Monday and Tuesday.
Shawn has this book that every tourist should own but no one who actually lives here should get caught dead with. We residents are a bit prejudiced to the tourists (I hope you know me well enough to be reading that wry humor). It's called "Maui Revealed" and gives you all sorts of great info on where to go, sorted by what area you live in- South Maui (which is not really south), West Maui, Hana, Haleakala and Upcountry (that's where I am), etc. Well, I wanted my own copy of the book so I could make notes and fold pages and such, so on Monday I braved Olinda Road and took Christopher down to Kahului, about a 15 minutes drive. Incidentally, I'm not one to trash talk my dear beloved Pathfinder at home; indeed, I miss her muchly, but Christopher gets about 400 miles on one tank of gas, and even from an old junker, you can't really beat that. Maybe I'm spoiled because I've only owned SUV's, so I'm not familiar with the mileage on a smaller car, but damn! 400 miles? When gas is now a whopping $2.79/gal, that's a deal!
Anyway, I have been driving the 5-speed thing for several weeks now, and am getting better and better, but am still not totally comfortable. I may have said it before but I'll say it again- downhill is no problem, it's getting home that's tricky. I try to take one of the two back routes to get to Olinda instead of braving that four-way stop at Makawao Avenue and Baldwin (if you go up it's hellishly steep and turns into Olinda, if you go down it goes into Pa'ia). And who can blame me for a rolling stop at a stop sign if it means I can avoid rolling backward into the car behind me? I knew you would understand. In fact, that's how I managed to get home last night.
We made it to Borders and there I sat in the car with the windows down, perusing the book and trying to decide what my first adventure would be. It was a beautiful morning, breezy and warm and sunny. There's one good thing about getting up at 6am every day, and that's when your day off comes, the latest you can sleep is about 8 or 9 am. Wow, the whole day ahead of you to do with what you will? Mind-boggling. Why hadn't I figured that out before? Oh yeah, because getting up at 6 is no problem when you go to bed at 9 or 10pm. Working
at a hotel, however, I don't think that happened in the three years I worked there. Oh sure, I had nights off, but then there was that pesky thing I liked to call my social life.
The point is, at 10am in Kahului, it really does feel like the paradise it's supposed to be. I decided to check out Polipoli Reserve, which sits on Haleakala somewhere on the southern part of the island (not Hana side, which is the real 'south', but I think more facing Kihei). Anyway, Polipoli is famous for its redwood forest (again, me with 'oversized' things). To get there you take the highway past Kula to Waipoli Road, a twisting-turning-oh-my-god-slow-down-zigzag-of-a-good-time type road. Keep in mind now that I am not a complete expert at driving and downshifting, let alone the fact that one of Christopher's 'quirks' is his lack of power steering. Eh heh. Anyway, Waipoli Road is about 10 miles long but it feels like, oh, a billion. But the country was very beautiful, and you could see the whole of the island from the altitude. And that's when I learned that Christopher as an affinity for ditches. Well, never you fear, we got out to say the least (and I am, trust me).
On a small hike away from the car I stumbled upon an old lava flow. Haleakala's last eruption date is debatable (1790? or was that 1490?) but there it was, a frozen black river, sanded down to smooth rolls with time, sand and water. I did a bit of nerdy-birding while I was there, sitting peacefully among the rocks, watching the mist roll in and out, where you really are the only person for miles. Well, if you don't count that cow that I came upon.
Well, I decided that we'd had enough and headed back down. It was so steep and winding that I wasn't comfortable in 2nd, so I shifted to neutral and coasted. Maybe I rode the brakes, but hey, best not risk those ditches again, right? Eh heh heh, ahem.
The next day, Tuesday, was great. I love Tuesdays because I share that day off with Josh, and it's just the two of us hanging out. That day we decided to find the Tedeshi Winery in an area called Ulupalakua. Apart from their wine, the place is famous for the white chocolates they sell. A friend of Rich's brought some as a 'Thank You' for a tour, and we stared at the box on his desk for 3 weeks while he was on vacation. When he got back, it was so on. I've never tasted anything so good. Some divine combination of white chocolate, macadamia and their pineapple wine. However, they're so good that they often sell out, which was the case when Josh and I got there. Dammit. But their grounds are absolutely beautiful, so that made up for it. I was hoping it was an actual vineyard, but I think it's just the winery itself, and they bring in the grapes from other ara of the island. They have a lovely tasting room, and each guest gets 4 free tastes (they only bottle about 7 or 8 types of wine). I wanted to get the Framboise de Maui, a special reserve, which tasted almost like a port to me. So sweet. Also, if anyone is a fan of sweet wines, they have Splash!, a white that is extremely tasty and very fruity. Fue como una fiesta en la boca! I can pick up a bottle or two for friends if you like, just let me know, but bear in mind that this is Hawaiian-made wine and all are very fruity, especially pineapply.
Josh and I hung around, took pictures, got to know one another. The more I learn about him the more I really like him. No, not in that way, but just as him being a genuinely good person. Not a bad bone in his body. Of course, he comes across as being a bit </i>clueless</i>, but I think that's just because he's just very unassuming of anything. He's that lucky type that never gets angry, never holds a grudge. He makes a great friend, and when it's us three girls with one guy out and about, he's very protective and watchful.
However, that niceness sometimes hides his sarcasm a bit too well, to the point that he preys on my gullibility so well that half the time I don't realize it. For example, yesterday he and I went out for dinner at the Pa'ia Fish Market.
"Josh, what does ono taste like?"
"I'd say like sting ray."
"Oh. Well, what does sting ray taste like?"
"Kind of like boiled leeks."
"Boiled... leeks?"
"I guess you could say it's like they're cooked in oil and apple cider vinegar."
(pause while I fix him with a glare and he smiles)
"Jerk."
No wonder he and I get along so well.
It may be going in the wrong order, but I forgot to mention that Rich got back from Australia a week ago last Sunday. Yours truly got to be the one to pick him up, by no means a random or accidental event. Yes, I can be a bit conniving if I want! Shameless, shameless, I appall myself even.
But he was so cute when I found him at the airport! He was the epitome of unshaven rough trade (who wouldn't after backpacking 3 weeks in the outback?) but he opened the back of the Xterra to throw in his stuff and said with a huge smile, "Am I pleased to see you!" He refused to drive because he's backward from driving on the left side of the road for so long, so I drove as he recounted everything he'd done, from hiking to swimming with dolphins.
Now, I had also been sent to pick him up for a reason. We all had dinner plans at Sansei's with some people from MFBRP (remember, Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project) and we wanted Rich to go. I seem to have the best record of getting out rather reticent boss to go out with us (chalk it up to my relentlessness and the refusal to take no for an answer). But he'd just gotten off a 15hr flight, so the chances weren't good. But I managed to get him to go, and when we got back to the facility, Josh and I even got him to drive (his little car is named Blue Bell). Shawn and Eileen had left already. It was a fun night, because Sansei's menu is 50% off at happy hour twice a week, which is such a deal. It's an expensive place; my meal was still about $20 for sushi and sake!
Tuesday night as well, and we checked out Sandbar first but there was a band playing and we didn't want to pay the cover. So we walked to Charlie's, (Willie Nelson's favorite hangout when he's on Maui, by the way) and though it tends to have an older crowd, much to the annoyance of Shawn and Eileen who like to boy-hunt, Josh and I had a good time just playing pool for free. Eileen met an older guy drinking at the bar alone and invited him over. He was taking tequila (ugh, Cuervo) shots. He offered me one; I jokingly said I only took Patron. So he offered to buy me that and I had to politely decline. Why? Because one too many tequila nights just gets to you after a while. Er, so I've heard.
So the next work week was relatively uneventful. Yeah. Josh, Eileen and I went grocery shopping on our town trip (when we get to take the Xterra down). When we got back to the apartment all three of us were so bored we got super goofy, and started giving each other airplanes (you know, where one person lays down and props the other on their feet), and leg-wrestling, and just laying around together. It was great. However, and Shawn felt left out that she wasn't asked to go eat (she wasn't even home when we left), and didn't like walking in on us laughing and having a good time (even though she had holed herself up in her room long before). Thus starts a several day stretch where she pretty much avoided all of us, while we were really unknowing of what we'd done wrong. Eileen isn't good at reading people, Josh tends to like to leave people be, and I'm, well, me. I had an inkling of what she was upset about, but couldn't tell if she was one of those who gets over things by themselves, or one who needs someone to notice that something's wrong.
So a few days ago, she calls the apartment from the Livewire Cafe in Pa'ia, where we all like to occasionally go to get coffee and check email. I seized the opportunity to meet up with her, even though I had just gotten off of work and really, REALLY didn't want to go all the way down to Pa'ia (takes at least 10 to get off the mountain, 10 more to get down to the coast)- it's rather crazy how one gets used to scale. When I first got here, everything seemed so close, but now, that seems like such a long drive! And I didn't want to brave Pa'ia pedestrians in Christopher. But I did it anyway, and we went to a restaurant called Des Amis, which I thought was French, what with their crepes and all, but also had half a menu full of curry dishes. Interesting. Well, over a bottle of wine we talked it out, her being the type who stresses over little things, tends to be a bit anal, and is very sensitive. Of course she and Eileen like to blame this on her star sign, Cancer, but I could never believe in all that mumbo jumbo, except of course, when it comes to my own. It's a trip, read the description for Aquarius. Scary how on target that whole thing is, yeah? Well, it is for me anyway.
I find it interesting how we all get along and yet we are all so very different. I know I still hold myself apart from them (I always do with people for some reason until I get to know them well) and even Josh has already accused me of being very 'independent' (he doesn't know that when people say that to me I sometimes read it as 'cold and unaffectionate' and wish I could change). And yet we still get along famously. It's only now, when we've been together for a few months that the true personalities come out, and I am proud of myself that so far I've pegged them all correctly when I first met them.
So it's almost 10pm now, and we are all tired from an adventure into Wailuku where we had picked out a restaurant from the local rag, the Maui Times. It took us to a bar that served food, not a restaurant, where we were the only haole's (non-natives) in the place. Actually, since we live here I think the term would be kama'aina (non-Hawaiian locals). Haole is what they brand white tourists, and 'Hawaiian' is only used to describe local, native-blood people. Gah, why must we all be neatly shuffled into our little categories? I don't like to be pigeon-holed, especially as a haole when I live here, but then again, that's the pot calling the kettle black, yeah? It's human nature I suppose to have some sort of order to things, or else we just make it up as we go along. I don't mind being part of a crowd, just as long as that doesn't imply mediocrity. ^_~ |
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| "Thank you for flying Church of England. Cake or death?" |
[Apr. 1st, 2005|09:08 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | too much chai tea... | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Breathing" - Anggun | ] |
You know, learning to drive wouldn't be nearly as difficult if I knew my way around better. And it's difficult to know your way around when the street names are Kamehameha, Hamanu, Pu'unene, Alamaha, Pulehu and the like. No worries, though, I'm figuring it out. The one road that matters is actually called Dairy Road, and it's got the Walmart, the Starbucks, Jamba Juice, Borders and Home Depot all in a row. I found Queen Ka'ahumanu mall all by myself today. Ka'ahumanu is the name of a Hawaiian Queen, and man, has she got a nice mall! It's open to the outdoors with a series of stretched and peaked canvases over the middle ways, and the stores are wonderfully familiar! The clothing selection is quite different though, which is nice. There's a movie theater, and the food court is chuckabuck full of Asian to go places. There's one called Edo (former name of Tokyo, shogunate era) where they cook for you on hibachi grills, like Benihana. So it's good, and good for you, and still very cheap! Dammit now I have to stay here.
Man, we have been developing our social life! I haven't written in a while, but we have since established our nightlife routine. Currently our favorite place to go is the Sandbar, a bar in Pa'ia with booze, pool tables and live music regularly (open mic nights, various local bands/singers). It's small, and open to the night so it's comfortably balmy and casual. The four of us (Josh, Eileen, Shawn and I) hit the pool tables and team up. Now, I grew up with a pool table but that doesn't mean I ever played on it enough to have any kind of mad skills. But just you wait, I'm getting better; we all are. It's tons of fun because the people are mostly local, super friendly, and everyone's got a story about how they ended up here. And man there are some hotties too! Yeah, had to say it, sorry. The surfer dude has never been high on my list, but there are plenty of adventurer types around, and not to mention the island has a 7:1 ratio of guys to girls. Sweet. Last week we were all watching this good-looking guy who towered above the friend he was with. Josh is 6'3" and even he looked short. We all made our bets- 6'8", 6'9"? Surely not 6'10". Well, I was intrigued enough to want to find out, so leave it to me to go ask the guy. "Hello," says I. "May I ask how tall you are?" (Ok, so I know better than this- I don't think there's anything a tall person dislikes more than constantly being asked how tall he is). But this guy smiled big and said, "7 feet." Holy crap. "May I stand next to you?" I asked, explaining that I knew what 6'9" looked like, but a true 7 feet really just boggles the mind. So he gave me a hug and bought a drink. How's that for starters? His name was Ivan- no kidding! I think Shawn picked herself up a man that night too. ^_^
And now, this Sunday we are supposed to meet at Sansei's (yummy sushi happy-hour in Kihei) with the people up the road who work at MFBRP (or "miff-burp" as we call them)- the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project. They are the ones who actually go into the field and do collections and studies, while we, the MBCC, are the captive breeding program for the birds they bring back. I'm excited, because MFBRP has their own interns we get to meet. And Rich should be back too, so I'm sure he'll go. Kirsti, the head of MFBRP, is also British, and you know how they like to stick together...
Christopher is running dandy, one all new shoes. We bought new used tires, and in doing so, found out why Wailuku is not really in the tourist books. That's the greasy industrial town, just up the road from squeaky clean Kahului. Car shops, shipping yards, warehouses, industrial parks, low income housing... Ugh. Not a pretty place for two females to be walking four blocks to the nearest grocery store because the mechanic only takes cash. Hmm. Josh once told us that Hawaii is a place with first world amenities and second world citizens in a third world environment. I believe it.
The new tires come just in time for the buckets of rain dropping on us! Well, maybe "dropping buckets" is implying too much. Rather, it spits all day. Sometimes real rain, sometimes it's just a fine mist enough to make you have to wear your rain gear even though the sun is out and warm. Then, when you've had enough and you decide to take the gear off and roll your sleeves up, it starts raining again, but by then you're way on the back of the property, no-where near cover. No, this hasn't happened to me twice this week or anything.
Ok, time for nerdy-birding news! The Mapa chick looks like a small adult now; I can't believe how fast they grow! Chuette has a history of producing all female chicks, so it's most likely this one's a girl too, though a male would be better. The other island facility has 2 males and 4 females. Our Pu chicks, Guacamole (the one I found as an egg and then watched hatch) and Salsa Verde got banded today, by Sharon and I. She lets me do all sorts of stuff, and I think sometimes that makes Shawn mad because she's the seasonal staff and I'm just an intern, but nyah nyah! I got to hold the little chickies while Sharon banded them. Salsa Verde actually got a green band (it's fate) and Guacamole got light blue. It's ok, his little nest cup is a rinsed out guacamole container. I couldn't stop laughing at them- their beaks are too big for their face, and the corners turn down so when they look right at you it's like the have this big frown. Add that to the tufts of "hair" (some downy feathers) afro'ing it out on either side of their head. Seriously I need to get a picture of them.
We have 12 nene goslings that make up our pre-release group.They're pretty much full grown, except that where the adult has almost white neck feathers, these guys are still brownish. When they came of age they were moved into the barn so they could be under mosquito netting. That way we can take blood and test them for avian malaria. If they have it, they will be released here on Maui; Haleakala most likely. If not, they will go to the big island for release. But, this barn was built by the state eons ago, and it has cement floors and metal drain covers. The stalls are small, and we have them separated by families, 5 on the right, 7 on the left. We put down mats to make it easier to walk, but these mats hold moisture, and you run the risk of foot problems if they have to be there for an extended period of time. It's a terrible place to keep them, especially since all their bloodwork has come up negative, but now more blood has to be drawn and sent elsewhere for whatever reason. That means they can't be released until those results are in, and only that after someone draws blood again. That is not a fun activity, and it's stressful for the birds. These poor guys. And now- not surprisingly- they turn up with a condition called bumblefoot (painful sores on the bottom of their feet) which comes from standing on hard, moist surfaces. To treat this we have to catch them up twice a day and scrub their feet with a betadine solution. It's such a pain because it takes two people and no less than 45 minutes to an hour to do it. This takes a huge chunk out of the day, especially after lunch when we only have 2 hours to finish any projects that need to be done. Usually we end up getting off of work late, which just plain sucks. Grr.
But I'll admit, it is kinda fun to catch them up. You hold the goose (struggling and thrashing about for its life usually) while someone else scrubs its feet. Eileen prefers the "football" hold, where you tuck the goose under one arm like a football, with its feet pointing outward for easy access. My personal favorite is the "cuddle" hold, where you span your hands around the bird to hold its wings down, and cradle its back against your chest, belly facing out so the other person can get to its feet. But you also have to tuck its head and long neck under your chin or against your cheek to keep it quiet; just like you're cuddling. It's so funny! I'm really sensitive about my neck, so I've had to get over the ticklishness when they wrap their neck around yours and nibble your earlobes. I have pictures of us doing it, so you'll see. It might sound strange but you just can't help but nuzzle them! They're so warm and soft and they actually smell good. Not like the crows, who, when you walk in the room, smell of musty feathers, dead rodents and fruit. I like the Nene a lot, but I'll be happy when this group goes! If we can get Rich to draw blood during his first week back that would be best, but with him having been gone for three weeks I don't imagine he'll be jumping on something like Nene when we have chicks to feed every hour on the hour from 5am to 8pm. Ah well. Until we can get blood drawn again, I'll continue to cuddle geese and feel somewhat guilty for having a down comforter on my bed. |
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| "Spock, you're talking about the end of every life on earth!" |
[Mar. 28th, 2005|08:52 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | Brr, my feet are cold... | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "I'm Still Here" - Vertical Horizon | ] |
So I confess. I like Star Trek. Well, notsomuch the new stuff, but I used to watch the old series with me Mum, and she owned most of the movies on VHS. I grew up with a favorite that not a one of my peers understood- I think it's movie number IV, The Voyage Home. It begins right after Spock has "died" and has been regenerated by the Genesis planet before it destroys itself. He must regain all the knowledge of his former self, while Kirk (an Admiral now because of some past heroics) awaits court martial because of his unorthodox way of saving Spock and his crew. As soon as they can leave Vulcan (that is, in their high-jacked Klingon starship; the Enterprise was "destroyed" in movie III) the story goes on that an alien probe appears and starts short-circuiting everyone's power, moving toward earth and vaporizing earth's oceans. No one knows how to answer the probe, but of course Kirk and his crew decipher somehow that the language the probe speaks in is the song sung by whales. Humpback whales to be precise, and they have been extinct for 200 years. How does one answer in a language no one speaks? Easy, you take your rust-bucket ship, slingshot around the sun at warp 9 (if she goes that fast) and thusly go back in time to the 21st century, to the "present", when the movie was made (this would be 1985, and boy, is it dated!)
San Francisco, Earth, 1985. They find two humpback whales, a male and a pregnant female- Spock knows because he talked to her- who are about to be set free back into the oceans. Perfect! But oh, what to? There's not enough power to get back and hold two whales with water and rescue captured shipmates who happen to be Russian (1985 + Cold War + San Francisco + nuclear vessels in the harbor + hapless Russian crewmember asking where they can find said nuclear vessels so they can recharge the ship = problems that I didn't understand at the time I first watched the movie.)
I do have a point, and I'm sorry that I had to drag you through all this. Understand that this movie fascinated me because of the whales. Anything to do with humpback whales actually, has had my undivided attention since the 5th grade, when we did a few weeks spotlight on them. It is on my list of things to do before I die, to swim with them close enough to feel myself so small and insignificant that I understand in the great universe how amazingly unlikely was my birth. This is of course an extension of my fascination with all things oversized and gi-normous: redwood trees, whales, the Grand Canyon, the ocean, mountains, monolithic architecture, Galapagos tortoises...
Back to the point (it's here somewhere, promise) I retained this love of whales through high school and college, where I most certainly would have done marine mammology had not every other Life Sciences student and their mother's mother wanted to do it too. The field is ridiculously competitive. And in all my years of liking whales and reading about them and wishing, wishing, I'd never actually seen one.
Well, we took Christopher for a drive yesterday to Kihei. And I saw whales.
They pass by the west side of the island all summer long, you can see their spouting and breaching from shore. People have told me if you can find a quiet shoreline with no wave noise, if you put your head under water you can even hear them singing. But seeing them was enough for me! Amidst an absolutely beautiful sunset while we sat on the rocks just above shore, listening to the music of a local band playing in the park behind us for a huge, extended Hawaiian family Easter party.
I was so excited I was teary eyed, that's how much it meant to me. Why? Couldn't tell you even remotely. It's just one of those things that you find means so very much, that little or no one else in the world would understand. Like the time when I met Owain Phyfe at the Renaissance Festival and he signed a CD. It was just a little moment of joy that was purely mine and mine alone.
Wow, that was a long intro just to say I saw some water spraying in the distance, wasn't it? Ah well, that's your torture, you have to read through all this to get to the interesting bits if there are any. Muaha.
Second piece of news. After one week of parking lots, short lessons on neighborhood streets and one or two drives back up the hill, Christopher and I have made our first foray into town alone. No Eileen to scream "Clutch in! Clutch in!", no Josh in the backseat trying to rile me up and get me nervous like I would be in traffic. Nope! Just Christopher and me, two buddies cruising along.
Up until now I had trouble with reverse, until Eileen decides to tell me, "Oh, by the way, you don't have to let the clutch all the way out in reverse." Wow, and I was having so much fun squealing the tires and stalling. So today, reverse out of our front lot, no problem, very smooth. Down the hill, not so bad because I was engine driving to save the brakes, which are a little questionable. My goal today was to make it to Walmart and get Christopher's oil changed, which meant braving stop lights and stop signs and stop-and-go traffic. Glad no one I respect was in the car with me when it's clutch, first gear, less clutch more gas, less clutch more gas, lessclutchmoregasnothat'stoomuch! Stall.
Actually, I only stalled once. Well, technically twice because it took two tries at the same stop sign, but that was after all my other driving and I was already 3/4 of the way home, and it was on a hill. So I count myself pretty successful considering my first city drive I had to go it alone. And also it was a little rainy, and also I nearly had a heart attack at the every light. Seriously, if the light ahead of me turned yellow, I'd yell "Dammit!"
It was ok, nerve-wracking for me as it was because I tend to freak myself out, especially in anticipation. And Walmart gave me three hours, ahem, three hours to wait on my car, thinking about the drive home, which is almost all uphill. No matter, I handled it. But when I got home I was like, "Ok, get the keys away from me, I'm done for the day. I don't want to drive anymore." I was still shaking when I got out of the car because I'd passed a school bus on the narrow road up and had to slow down too much, making me have to shift back into first to have enough power to finish the incline I was on, while trying not to hit the bus at the same time. I suppose it's a good sign that I did it all without thinking and made it up fine. It shows I'm learning. Pat on the back, pat on the back. But I was still so wrought up I had to take a nice hot bath and lay down to read a book and settle my nerves. If anyone hasn't done this already, I highly recommend it- works miracles.
And it also makes me happy that my bum friends finally are answering my emails. Seriously, I send four out and didn't get nary a one back until I had to sick my ex-roomie on them, and then it was, "Oh! I totally forgot!" Or "Oh! I keep meaning to." Do you people not understand? I need connections with home dammit! I need to talk to people who don't eat natural foods, aren't vegetarians, don't have to recycle all the time, who wear clothing from "normal" stores and who understand sarcasm when it's directed at them!
So now I have (most of) my emails, and finally some pictures from my going-away party too, so I'm a happy clam. I'd throw you all shaka's if you could see my hand. Yup, I'm picking up the Hawaiian ways. You give someone a shaka as a sort of "right on!" It's similar to the surfer dude's hang-ten, only you show your fingers to the other person, and you don't wiggle your hand so much. And it's funny that Canada's so far away, because instead of ending their sentences with "eh?" As in, "Just goin' over the border for some backbacon on a bun. Canada, eh?" Hawaiians end theirs with "yeah?" As in, "I'm out of no-salt vegan tofurky breakfast Boca burgers. We're going to Mana Foods, yeah?" Then, after having to get affirmation on everything you say, you adopt the Australian way of accepting apologies, with a "No worries." Eileen has picked these up already, and of course Josh and Shawn, too. I'm a little more stubborn in my ways when it comes to talking like an Australian Canadian. |
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| From your Kama'aina |
[Mar. 22nd, 2005|10:01 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Mille Regretz" - Owain Phyfe | ] |
First off, new pictures!http://home.austin.rr.com/whatt/index.htm
Wow it's been a little while since the last post... sorry about that. It's getting a bit rough round here. Hookay, second things second!
Way back in some post I mentioned me finding a Puaiohi egg on the ledge of one of our FBB2 aviaries. We had put it back under the female who'd laid it but she never started sitting. There is a certain amount of time before development starts where it's ok if she doesn't sit on it, but only if she's never sat on it before. If she starts incubating, then gets off the egg for too long, that's bad. So with the egg still viable, we put it under Green Mama, our resident foster mum, but she never started sitting either. So we pulled the egg into an incubator. That means someone has to go and turn it and weigh it several times a day, just like we did with the Nene eggs, only this time, instead of a large chicken egg, you're turning something the size of the first segment of my thumb. Tiny.
Anyway, long story short (too late) Sharon called me into the incubation room around 5:30pm because my little egg was hatching! I couldn't believe how small the little guy was, and I was very lucky to get to see him hatch! The first Pu egg this season, and I named him Guacamole. Then a second Pu egg hatched a few days later, so he's Salsa Verde (ask Jennifer, those names must always go together). God help my children if I have twins.
So now, a few days later, they no longer look like wrinkled old bald men, but have two lines of feathers growing in on their chests that look like suspenders. That, coupled with the large downy feather afro... they're pretty hilarious to look at. And our Mapa chick (previously called Friar Tuck because of the circle of feathers round his head) is growing at an appalling rate. He's almost ready to move out of his hatcher and nest cup into a howdy (large, galvanized wire cage).
We also weighed the Nene gosls a few days ago and they are just as cute, but are some fatty little buggers as well. And dirty. But if one must be shat on, isn't it better to be done by a cute fuzzy baby goose? Better than the crows, who seem to try to aim. I have been lucky, to not be christened by them yet. Any road, I got a few pictures of the gosls this time too, as well as Guacamole when he was hatching.
So, on to the real news. Eileen and I have been dutifully researching cars and calling people. Most of the cars listed in our price range are what we like to call "Maui Cruisers", rusty junk-buckets, that is, but they run and everyone drives them round here. One must remember that this is a Mecca of backpackers, bare-foot hippies and college kids, thus making the cheap selling of MC's and hitchhiking the two major roads of mobility. So a MC it had to be. We called a man named Marshall (I suspect it was his last name, but no matter) about an '89 Honda Accord he had listed for $1200. Now, blue book value on that year Accord is about $1100, not bad for a 16 year old car. Honda makes a good car, we all know. So we asked to see it. Our mobility being limited (as a nice Catch 22) he had to bring the car up to Makawao for us to see it.
How we got down there is a little story unto itself. We were supposed to meet him at 4:00pm, and had hopes of taking Porsche down, but Shawn said she was going to take the old girl in to get her tranny looked at. So Eileen and I set out down the road, thumbs out for my first hitchhiking experience. A two-door tan sedan stopped (nice condition- a rental) and an older couple asked where we were going. "Makawao," said we. Four miles in the direction they were already going. The wife gets out so that we may get into the back seat. The wife had a kind British accent, the husband, a soft-spoken American. He asked where we were from. "Houston via Austin via College Station," I said. To this he laughed and said he used to teach at UT. I said, "Well I'm glad you let me in before I had to tell you I was an Aggie." Oh ho ho, clever me. Jolly good, we all laughed (except Eileen, who politely smiled because people from Arizona don't get it). The man said he was in the art department, so he didn't care about the rivalry. I said I was in wildlife, six hours short of having a minor in art history, so I didn't care about it either. They were very friendly folk. We got to Makawao, and thus endeth my first hitch.
Now, the only description I'd had from Marshall about the car was that it was an Accord and that it was light blue. Hmm. So when we walked into Polli's parking lot and saw a baby blue hatchback staring at us with one good eye, I nearly snorted my chai latte through my nose. Eileen, having less car experience than I (mine was of course learned through my can-do-and-fix-anything father and savvy-practical-minded mother, a deadly combination to me ever buying an MC), saw nothing wrong outwardly and kept a serious game face. I put questions to Marshall about how long he'd had it, when the last time its oil was changed, had he replaced the clutch... oh yes, it was a 5 speed. And anyone who knows me knows that though I may be able to do anything (I am Superwoman after all), there are two things in life I can't do: a) the moonwalk, and b) drive a standard car. Strike #1.
Marshall was a nice fellow, honest as far as we could tell, but keen on selling the car. His family had bought it for him last year so that he may get around and find a place to live. Now that he has found one, he plans on hitchhiking everywhere without the cost of gas or inspections and registration. I think insurance was a moot point for him- he didn't have any. What else to expect from a late-20 something man who spent the last two years living cheaply in Peru because, "Hey, why not?", and who now currently lives in a tent in a campsite, on a $200 government pension for God-knows-what, who probably sells plasma and grows his weed next to where he puts his Tevas at night. But who am I to judge? He was super nice, and I was actually fascinated by the guy. How did he get where he was? What drives someone to not want a real home, who likes traveling round living day to day? He evidently has family support, a fine thing, but where will he be in 5 years? Tibet?
Quietly sipping my drink, I was eying the tires as Eileen talked on with Marshall. They all looked quite bald, as if they were the factory issued 16 years ago. Strike #2. And the car's two headlights are the kind that raise up when the lamps are on, but only one of them goes down all the way, like it's looking at us through one good eye. But no matter, he offered to let us drive the car back up the hill home, to see how it feels on an incline. Porsche had always felt very weak going up, like she was making it by clawing her fingernails into the pavement, but this one actually felt rather strong. It's got a motor that sounds like a tough lawn mower, a real 'purrer', but making it up these inclines, Eileen remarked it felt rather solid. She, of course, was driving, leaving me to have to take her word for how the car felt. Marshall was in the backseat, softly recounting all the car's quirks. You can't expect a car like that, 9 years from being a 'classic', not to have quirks, so Ball #1. The passenger side window didn't close all the way, but he'd never had a rain problem, Ball #2. And he's just had the alternator replace, for which he showed us a receipt, Ball #3. But what? No power steering? Ooo, Strike #3. And if I could, I'd make a Strike #4 against its price, which probably should have been #1-3 from the beginning.
He dropped us off back home, looking anxious for a yes or no. I was certainly not thrilled, but we needed to talk it over. After Marshall had gone, we both burst into laughter. "$1200?!" mocked we. "That car's worth half of that, if anything!"
The next day, Marshall called, wishing to know our decision. So far we were the only ones who'd looked at the car, and he was anxious to sell it. Eileen got on the phone, because I am not good at saying no, and told him we thought he was asking too much. "How much do you think it's worth?" he asked. "$600." She blurted out. He politely wished us well on our car hunt, and that was that.
Or so we thought. Ten minutes later, Marshall calls back and says, "I talked to my dad. He says to take the $600."
All of a sudden, its problems turned into a few more silly quirks, now that the major strike against it, its price, was gone. So Eileen and I bought an MC for $300 each. That leaves us room in our budget to buy new tires and get the oil changed, both of which it probably needs very badly. And we are going on faith here that since a clutch usually goes bad after about 10 years, this one had already had its replaced. I may be still trying to convince myself, but we're not looking for a car to last us until we're old and gray. Only six months, at the end of which we may be able to sell it for almost the same price we bought it.
I have currently had two lessons already on it, and Eileen is a good teacher, except that she hides her face when the tires squeal a little, or I stall it, of which I've only done a handful of times. It's difficult only because we live on a friggin' hill, which means we have to drive elsewhere and find a parking lot (all of which are tiny), or a quiet residential area that's not on a hill. But I feel good about it. Next time we may try a little street driving, then hopefully I will be comfortable enough to take on the hill that is Olinda road, which will probably serve as my final exam. It sucks right now because these are my days off, and we have a car, but it's not accessible to me just yet. He (yes, it's a he) sits out there, watching us, and waiting. His name is Christopher, for the patron saint of travelers. His full name is MC One-Eyed Christopher, but we only shout that when we're mad. |
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| Rain, rain, rain |
[Mar. 12th, 2005|03:40 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  knackered | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Float On" - Modest Mouse | ] |
It has been raining for 3 days now. The first day, I was on Nene routine, so that meant I was outside all day. First it was like, Is it raining? (hold hand out) Oh, wow, it is! Cool! (hose some more, empty some buckets) Man, I love the rain, I'm so close to nature right now... (humming to self) Hmm. Starting to rain a little harder now... (teeth start chattering) OknowI'mcold! (start hosing a bit faster, give up, run back home; slip and fall, of course)
So I trudge back, muddy and happy and shivering. Then I find the rain gear! Yellow pants, yellow jacket and hood. So for the past two days I have looked like a banana. Or Big Bird. Or... a school bus? Hmm. And I go stomping around wearing boots (like Gaston- anybody get that?). The point is, it's great even though we can't get a whole lot done. There are several aviaries that need to be perched still (hand natural tree branches with the use of brackets) so we can move the birds for breeding, but none of us feel like slipping off a ladder. These branches are hella heavy and awkward to be putting up in the rain. So we mostly sweep, or do waxworm maintenance (eew), or clean things and try to look busy. If we can stretch that out until 3pm, it's all good.
Meanwhile, Eileen is going cabin crazy. Her days off are Fridays and Saturdays, which means it was raining the whole time. Sucks! But wait, it's not like we could go anywhere. We did end up taking Porsche down the mountain again, though, and this time I got to drive. Seriously, this car is so little my chin was resting on my knees. Driving it, you can feel the alignment is off, the tires need air, the shocks are shot, and the gear shift (tho it's an automatic) can't find drive from reverse from neutral to save it's life (or ours). It's funny, you think you're in drive as you go down the hill but oh, try to accelerate after a curve and it's no, no. You're in neutral buddy, t'won't work. Nevermind, a little jiggling around will find it. The car jumps five feet ahead and you're off again. We made it down to Makawao in one piece, needless to say, and parked. We picked up some yummy trail mix from Natural Foods, a Dr. Pepper from the gas station (that was a bit of a hike) and sat at Casanova's again looking for cars in the local Bulletin. It was actually really relaxing. That really has been the extent of our adventure in the last few days, apart from the three of us (me, Eileen and Josh) getting to know each other better. I never wanted to live with more than one roommate, but it's actually kind of fun. Josh is seriously the nicest guy I think I've ever met. Like squeaky clean shiny white nice. He's always lived with female roommates, so he's heard it all, I'm sure. And now Shawn comes back tomorrow, so there will be four of us again.
The courtyard Nene pair have hatched 6 little goslings ('gosls' we call them) and they are super adorable! Josh and I weighed them yesterday and we got to hold them in the process- so cute and fuzzy and squeaky! They're about 11 days old now, and we'll weigh them again on day 15. I'll try to get some pictures of them then. It was sad though, to take them from their parents even for that short amount of time. We put them into a small dog carrier and mom and dad followed us around, honking, hissing, tripping and nipping us. And after we left the pen they paced back and forth by the gate because they could hear their babies but couldn't see them. What good parents!
UK is gone on vacation finally, for three weeks. We'll see what a state the place is in when he comes back! Poor guy has to go spend that time in Australia and New Zealand. Man, life's tough. It'll be so boring too without his Britty sense of humor, and those awful jokes. (How do you hide an elephant in the jungle? Paint his b*lls red and hang him in a cherry tree. What's the loudest sound in the jungle? Giraffes eating cherries.) Well, we all have our own bad jokes, but say them with an English accent and it's double the fun. Especially the ones we didn't really get because they make plays on words we don't use. That's ok, I got him with "What do you do with an elephant with three balls? You walk him and pitch to the rhino." Ha. No, that won't work, you can't retrofit it to a cricket match, Rich.
Hoookay, so that's about it for now. We've gotten a call back or two on some cars and get to go see them next week. My roommates are so helpful when I'm on the phone calling about cars- or at least they try to be. I'll admit though it's a bit difficult to give my name and number to someone who wants to be helpful with Josh in the background going, "Aow aow, getcha some." Funny, funny guy. |
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| "Smoke me a kipper, Skipper, I'll be home for breakfast!" |
[Mar. 7th, 2005|07:07 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | awake | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | None; Josh chatting on the phone is much more interesting. | ] |
All right, we need a car. Eileen and I have picked up one of those autotrader mags and are currently working our way through it to see if we can find something within our budget. I especially like the ones that give you this great description and then at the very end it's, "needs clutch" or worse, "needs engine". Our budget is very low, but considering that we're sharing the car, it will help with insurance and gas (though that might even out if there are 2 people driving it). It's a steady $2.69/gal for gas here, and most of your driving is up and down the mountains. But Eileen and I took Shawn's car again today down to Makawao, and enjoyed coffee on Casanova's raised streetside porch. C's is a nice place to have dinner and go dancing at night, but they have a coffee/deli on the side of it that's open during the day. It's a really neat place to sit outside and people watch. If you're not seeing tourists (Makawao's not as bad as some of the other cities), you're seeing hippies with barefeet and bandannas. Tres cool.
So while we were down there, enjoying iced chai latte's (mmm!) we came to the absolute conclusion that this trip and internship is for naught if we can't make the most of everything. How are we to grow as people if we don't exercise our adventure muscles? Not that even the act of taking Porsche down the hill wasn't adventure enough! We are both here to try to be better people, to learn things, and be on our own away from the comforts of home. And to do that, we need a car. Then the sky's the limit! Whale-watching in Kihei, the road to Hana, shopping in Kahalui, people-watching in Pa'ia, sunsets at Haleakala (I still haven't seen one yet!), surfing at Ho'okipa Beach... There is seriously so much to do that, though I love reading, I feel like I'm wasting valuable time when I get off of work!
Work... ah work. When there are only about 50 'Alala in existence, when one of them gets hurt it's a big deal. Lahiki is one of ours that has had problems all her life evidently, and now she's pulled out a toenail completely. So we have to treat it twice a day and hand feed her 3 times a day to make sure keeps her weight up. This on top of feeding and watching over our other 16 'Alala. When I'm on the crow routine I don't get done until 4pm, when I'm supposed to be done by 3. There's no overtime here. If I work 10 hrs a day, I only get paid for 8, period. Sucks! But that's the job I suppose. It's difficult right now though because our boss is leaving on vacation in a week. Vacation? For 3 weeks? In the middle of breeding season?! Yeah... And with a lame crow whose toe is looking necrotic? He's under a lot of stress; it isn't easy running a place like this with a small staff and when your entire facility is rigged (ie: not built for its current usage). We live in an old minimum security prison. Yeah! Complete with creepy shower room and solitary confinement! But to say the least, when he's stressed out, we all are. I enjoy what I'm doing so much, but I am so happy sometimes when 3pm rolls around (ok, 4pm) or it's my day off.
The real reason for this update is that I have some pictures online posted by me mum. Thanks mum!
http://home.austin.rr.com/whatt/album.htm
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| "Lift, I need lift!" |
[Mar. 2nd, 2005|06:12 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | cold | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "Buffalo Soldier" - Bob Marley | ] |
Phew! After two days off (Mondays and Tuesdays are my Saturdays and Sundays), I can now consider myself fully trained. Well, at least my boss seems to think so. I am comfortable doing Forest Birds and the 'Alala (the most specialized and complicated routine) and have just finished learning how to do the Nene routine. They seem to have saved the easiest for last, because after sweating it out with FB's and crows, for Nene I get to excerise my quick-thinking and decision-making skills by standing in one spot with a hose. That's it. Feeding and hosing. The geese are in outdoor grassy pens (A, B, C, D, E, Courtyard and Pre-release we call them) and they each have a small kiddy pool, some A-frames and maybe a little dog-house type cover for those with eggs. So you clean the pool and hose the poo into the grass. Then you feed. The feeders are called kakapo feeders and they're designed to keep sparrows out of their crumble. The geese have to learn how to lift the lid with their bill and get what's inside. I wonder how many geese we've released go on to become picnic basket thieves!
So it's not really challenging; I actually like doing crows more, even making their time-consuming diets. Rich was supposed to do the 'Alala today but I ended up making the diets for him before he'd even fed out the ones we had ready. I swear, I don't know how he runs this place, there is so much to do and keep up with. With Shawn on vacation for two weeks and one of our full-time staff members still in the field, he's streched very thin as it is. So this is what I get- short meeting sessions, a list of things to do and then I don't see him again. Eileen sees him all the time evidentally, which I do have to admit makes me a little jealous. I mean, I'm here to learn as well and I have my share of questions, but he'd rather throw me out here to do things on my own while he leads her around. It's unjustified, I know. So I was really bummed out for a while (it gets lonely doing your rounds during the day!) so I asked Sharon about it. She's full-time and quickly becoming one of my favorite people here, and she reminds me of my dear Higglet! No joke, she says, "Well, you've only been here two weeks and already I think you're one of the best interns we've ever had." Well, ok, so I felt better after that little stroke of the ego. Warm fuzzies all around.
Any road, it's always nice to hear you're doing well. UK is quite the non-confrontational type so I hear, and will only tell you something's wrong when it's been building up for a long time! So I will have to make sure to ask him every now and then to tell me what I need to work on, though here the biggest issue seems time-management. We get an hour for lunch at 12:00, so we have to have feeding and cleaning done way before then, along with any projects specific to your routine. Because after the 1:00 meeting, he'll give us 3 hours worth of projects to get done before the 2:30 feedings (we call it giving them their "pm's"). And we're supposed to be off the clock by 3:00 (yeah right, no overtime here). So that's what I'm learning- time-management, in addition to medicating crows, getting a proper "bird-hold" for injections, how to inject sub-q fluids in avian skin and their dosage, how to hand-feed, all the highly specific egg incubation procedures along with all the math involved in projecting how much humidity is needed to maintain the proper level of water/weight loss in an egg per day up to the day it hatches (esp if you have to speculate when the egg was actually laid), lots of detailed record keeping, nutritional requirements and supplementation, sanitization procedures, how to operate a hatcher and incubator, reading a wet-bulb and a dry-bulb and know what they mean in order to adjust accordingly, and learning how to cut and hang perches. Knights of Columbus, I've only been here a few weeks!
And you have to do all this with absolute confidence. All these birds are very endangered, and it's a little nerve-racking to think that even with one little mistake, none of them are expendable. For example, Rich showed us the Mapa egg he'd pulled from Chuette's nest to put in the incubator. She is a good sitter, but there's a danger of her killing her chicks once they hatch, so the eggs are pulled right before they hatch. Anyway, we saw how it was fertile and we saw movement, not thinking too much about it. Then he told us, rather incredulous himself, "This is the only Mapa egg in incubation in the world. Furthermore, Chuette's the only producing Mapa female that we know of." That puts such an emphasis on what we do here! It's really gratifying to be a part of something like this, and to work under someone who is so knowledgeable and passionate about what he does.
There was another bird called the Po'ouli, which was brought in from the wild several months before I got here. He ended up dying due to all kinds of problems (he was rather old), but with him went the species, just like that. He was the last of the Po'ouli anywhere in the world. It actually made me really sad to hear the stories from those people who'd been here and gotten to see it. It's someting very hard for me to fathom, the end of an entire species that had spent ages evolving.
On to brighter subjects! We candled the Nene eggs today (hold the egg to a bright, direct beam of light so that it shows silohuettes of what's inside and we can see its level of development). We saw lots of movement, and how the chick is pushing up into the air cell at the wide end of the egg, where soon it will "pip", and begin breaking out. Should be any day now, and that's really exciting! Babies! The Nene are all really funny actually. Some hiss and charge you, but they're not very threatening; not when others are insanely addicted to lettuce and follow you around like puppies. They're all such individuals, kind of like the crows. But one thing about doing Nene sucks: it's friggin' cold in the mornings, and to stand there with a hose makes your fingers and toes freeze! Sharon (Rich calls her Sheza, some UK thing?) promises it will get warmer, but I'll believe that when I feel it!
Next item on the list: Eileen and I need to get a car. She is going to drive us all nuts (so she threatens) if she can't find a flat place to go jogging and get out her energy (I keenly suggested she not eat powered suger for lunch). And we all know I've always needed to be mobile. However, even if we buy an old junker I'm still skeptical about buying something not road-worthy, like Shawn's car (see the entry below this one for that story!) Too much of my parent's good common sense has rubbed off on me I suppose. Splitting the cost however is an appealing idea, though if I were to buy a car on my own, it would cost about the same to just ship my car over here. It already has insurance and would certainly make it up these mountain roads. Ah well, future plans, future plans. Everything is wide open right now and I love it, despite not having a lot of guidance in the day-to-day things. But I suppose I should be glad he thinks I'm capable of operating on my own. Makes me feel nice and useful, despite that insane jealousy thing. (^_^) |
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