What's Elon done now?

What's Elon done now?  Via still-stuck-in-San-Diego friend and reader Simon M.: I can fix South Australia's power network in 100 days or it's free.  As Simon quipped: “You’ve got to love this guy!”

Triggered memory ... of my “plantsman” dad...

Triggered memory ... of my “plantsman” dad...  Some of my favorite memories from the many trips I took with my dad are of our conversations.  These conversations mostly happened in two settings: while driving (and we drove a lot, as some of our destinations were 1,500 miles from our home) and while resting in some beautiful spot on one of our hikes.

During one of those “while driving” conversations, while on the way to Santa Rosa, California, we talked about Luther Burbank.   My dad and I were traveling to Santa Rosa as a sort of pilgrimage for my dad, to Burbank's old estate (now a gardens and museum).  Burbank was one of my dad's botanical heroes, for lots of reasons.  He died when my dad was but a little boy, but his dad visited Burbank on his epic travels to California in the early 1900s.  My grandfather Earle Dilatush brought back stories and memories of that visit, and shared them with my dad.  When I was a small boy, my dad kept a set of books detailing Burbank's work by his desk.  All I can remember about those tomes is that they were thick (and heavy!), filled with photos and a few color plates, and all the text was completely beyond my comprehension.

So what triggered the memories that led to this post?  Reading this article, link forwarded by a friend.  My dad and I saw all of the plants referenced in that article on our visit that day, sometime in the mid-'90s.

Once again I'm reminded just how much I cherish those trips with my dad, and how thankful I am that Debbie and I found the money and time to make some good memories with our parents...

A whole band ... on a single guitar.

A whole band ... on a single guitar.  Cool!

Paradise ponders, dancing with jigs edition...

Paradise ponders, dancing with jigs edition...  Our Tesla Model X is still at the service center, but I did get some news on it yesterday.  The technicians there tracked the problem down to a corroded “hinge” that lets the spoiler move up and down.  It's not at all clear to me how a hinge would be used to move the spoiler up-and-down on its mounting posts, but that's what they told me.  There's a new hinge on order that should come in today.  The techs told me that some other Model Xs have been having the same issue, so engineering is tracking it and looking for a long-term solution.  It was refreshing to have such a frank and open discussion with a car manufacturer's representatives; that attitude is much appreciated by me.  We're hoping to be able to return the #%(*#($ Mercedes CLA 250 today and pick up our Model X.  We may have to take it back in at some later date for the long-term fix, but that's ok.  We knew we were getting a version 1.0 when we pre-ordered it. :)

I did manage to get a little time in on my stairs project yesterday, and I hope I'll get some more today.  I'm putting three dowels down the centerline of each 4x4 butt joint I'm making, and to get the holes precisely positioned in the opposing faces I needed a drill jig.  That's what I built yesterday, from some scrap white pine 1x6 and a 2x4.  The first photo shows the guide I rigged with clamps in order to route a groove in the 2x4 to insert the 1x6.  The second photo shows the result.  The third photo shows the 2x4s being glued to the 1x6, and the last photo the end result.  This morning I'll drill the three template holes in the 1x6, and then the jig is done.  I didn't really dance with it, though. :)

This exercise made me think of the day, many years ago, when it dawned on me that clamps were pretty much the center of any woodworker's universe.  When I thought of a wood shop, I, like most people, thought of tools like saws, planes, hammers, etc.  But now I think I could best tell you if someone was a woodworker by looking for the clamps in their shop.  :)  I own 28 clamps (I counted yesterday) of five distinct types, and I have 8 more arriving today (pipe clamps, for the sixth type).  This isn't nearly enough; I'm pretty sure I need at least twice as many, both in number and in type.  I also need a rack to store them all, as right now I just keep them in a messy pile.

Habits and conventions...

Habits and conventions...  This morning I had my usual tea and toast (Cache Crunch!) for breakfast.  To get the bread out, I had to untwist the “twist-em” closure on the loaf's bag – and for the ten-millionth time, someone (presumably named Debbie :) had twisted it on “backwards”.  I'd expected to twist it counter-clockwise to remove it, but instead that just wound it up some more.  With the twist-em closures, you can't really discern the direction of twist by inspection, you just have to try it to figure it out.  For me, it was disconcerting to discover that the closure was twisted that way – but I find it that way so often – roughly half the time – (including straight from the bakery) that it must be me that's weird.

So that got me to thinking about why I thought twisting clockwise to close the bag was the “right” way to do it.  I believe it must be derived from learning how to tighten and loosen bolts, screws, and pipes.  Except in the unusual case of “left-handed” threads, all of these everyday items tighten (screw in) when twisted clockwise, and loosen (screw out) when twisted counter-clockwise.  I've done so much work with such devices over the years that the directionality of them is now at the subconscious level.  When I do run into one with left-handed threads, it's disconcerting in precisely the same manner as that backwards twist-em.  But then, thinking about that, I remembered that I've known quite a few people for whom this directionality was not so clear.  Many of these people are women who have not (for reasons I'll let you speculate about) done much work with bolts, screws, and pipes.

Others, though, have life experiences more akin to mine.  Just to make one example: I have a neighbor who is older than I am, and has spent his entire working life around machinery.  While fixing an irrigation pipe last summer, he ran into trouble that he thought was caused by his arthritis interfering with his finger strength – he was unable to remove a 6" long nipple.  He called me over to help him out.  The pipe unscrewed easily, and when my neighbor saw me do it, he immediately started making fun of himself – because he'd been trying to tighten it!  Fifty years of field experience with machinery, and he still didn't have the directionality of threads down pat.  In fact, I discovered, he relied on a little jingle (“righty tighty, lefty loosy”) to jog his memory, but somehow he'd messed that up.  He told me that he's always had trouble remembering the direction to turn bolts, etc.  He's even marked his tools with arrows to help him remember.

Thinking about this apparent dichotomy (people who can or can't easily remember thread directions) got me to wondering if it might be related to dyslexia.  A little googling quickly eliminated that hypothesis: dyslexia is strictly related to words (as you can see from the word's roots!), and doesn't affect any other abilities so far as I can tell from the studies I scanned.  I learned thread directions so long ago that I can't recall at all whether it was difficult for me to learn.  Anything you've learned so well that it's now not even raised to a conscious level is, I suspect, like that.

Might it be related to one's spatial reasoning ability?  That's an area where the tests I've taken indicate I have a high ability, and it's also (feminists, avert your eyes) one where women score, on average, considerably below men.  Some men, obviously, score low as well.  I wonder how well this ability correlates with the ease of internalizing thread direction?  Or the sense of “proper” twist-em direction?  :)

Unusual morning skies...

Unusual morning skies...  The mountains to both our east (the Wasatch range) and west (the Wellsville range) have clouds over them this morning, and the sun is rising through a notch in the Wasatches.  This caused the Wellsvilles to be very brightly lit this morning, by sunlight pouring through that notch and under the clouds on the Wasatches.  These conditions don't all come together very often!

Haversine...

Haversine...  Just ran across this trigonometric function in my reading this morning.  I'd never heard of it before.  Turns out there's a boatload of these “vestigial” trig functions. As the author of that post mentions, I learned about sine, cosine, and tangent in high school, then picked up secant, cosecant, and cotangent somewhere along the line.  The rest of these I'd never heard of: versine, vercosine, coversine, covercosine, exsecant, excosecant, haversine, havercosine, hacoversine, and hacovercosine.

The reason why these functions were invented is interesting, too.  It all comes down to the fact that people didn't used to have calculators or computers at their desks, and these functions, provided in tables, saved a great deal of manual computation...

Paradise ponders, koa cat and bad Mercedes edition...

Paradise ponders, koa cat and bad Mercedes edition...  While we were in Hawai'i last week, we stopped a couple of times at an interesting shop that we really enjoyed: The Gallery of Great Things.  It's a bit of a challenge to characterize this place, as you'll see if you wander around their web site.  The employees who helped us were a delight: the polar opposite of the pushy salespeople – they seemed a bit unhappy that some of the items they carry were departing.  The store serves as a retail outlet for quite a large number of Hawai'ian artists of many types: painters, sculptors, tapa makers, bead artists, and many more.

There were quite a few things there that we enjoyed looking at, and some wooden items in particular that we wanted to buy.  On our past visits, we never had enough money to even consider buying some of the larger wooden items that we liked.  This time we could, though, and we bought two of them.

The first thing we got was a cat carved from a koa log (three view below).  It stands about 3' tall and weighs about 35 pounds.  I'm not quite sure what to call this style.  “Abstract” doesn't seem quite right.  The engineer in me wants to call this “low resolution”, since it's a bit like an image rendered in low resolution.  Whatever you want to call it, we liked it a lot.  The carving is nicely done, and the finish is beautifully done – smooth and pettable. :)

The carved koa bowl at right is the second piece we got.  It, too, is carved from a koa log.  On the right hand side the blue “streak” is a crack that was filled with crushed turquoise and epoxy.  The rest of it is flawless and carved down to roughly 3/8" (10 mm) thickness.  It's now the centerpiece of our dining room table.

We selected both of these while in Hawai'i, letting the gallery ship them back to us in Utah.  The folks at the gallery assured us that the owner was the world's leading expert in packing fragile items for shipment to the U.S., and that they do this pretty much literally every day, so I wasn't too worried about it.  We got the packages a few days ago, and I can attest to the quality of the packing job – both pieces were swaddled in so many layers of waterproofing, shock-absorbing, and protective materials that it's really hard to imagine how anything could have hurt them!  And nothing had: both pieces arrived in perfect condition.  They were shipped UPS Ground from Hawai'i, which, one presumes, isn't really how they were shipped. :)  Each piece took just 3 business days to get here, which really seems kind of astonishing to me.  The cost for shipping each piece was well under $100.  The world seems to get smaller all the time...

The bad Mercedes?  Well, that's got nothing to do with Hawai'i! :)  This morning we drove our Tesla Model X down to Salt Lake City for the technicians to try again (second time) to repair our reluctant spoiler.  It's supposed to extend and retract automatically as you drive; ours was stuck in the fully extended position.  The techs couldn't estimate the time, so they arranged for a (free) loaner car.  They didn't have a spare Tesla to lend us, so they rented a Mercedes CLA 250 instead.  We drove that back home.  We hated it.  It's tiny, we feel like we're riding in a go kart, every little bump feels like someone is hammering our butts, it's noisy, and the way the engine stops and restarts every time you pause at a traffic signal is very distracting.  The worst sin of all, though, is that the damned thing doesn't even have a backup camera!  We had a hell of a time figuring out how to use some basic things, too, such as the radio.  We were both thoroughly underwhelmed.  We want our Tesla back! :)  The plan is to drive back down to SLC tomorrow to get it...

Lossless compression ain't quite what it used to be!

Lossless compression ain't quite what it used to be!  Way back in the dark ages of computing (I speak of the early '90s), I worked for a company that made quite a bit of money from lossless compression software (and even a little from hardware!): Stac Electronics.  I wasn't one of the subject matter experts there, but I worked with them every day, and a little bit rubbed off.  I've had an interest in it ever since.

So when a blog post raved about a lossless compression library I'd never heard of before (Zstandard), I went and read about it in a blog post, then off to the GitHub repository to take a look at their docs and at the API.

It's really kind of amazing what's happened in the 25 years since I was at Stac.  The core LZS code at Stac had a trivial API by comparison, and the code base was vastly smaller.  As with almost every kind of software, the newer things are far more complex, more sophisticated, and more capable.  Even just looking at the statistical graphs is kind of mind-boggling; we didn't have nearly as complete an analysis – mostly we had “point” tests with results under just a few sets of conditions.  Of course the CPUs are vastly more powerful these days, and that enables all sorts of interesting things, some of which Zstandard leverages some of those.

Sometimes I wonder if there's any such thing as simple software anymore... :)

A stunningly great support experience...

A stunningly great support experience...  Those are not words I write often! :)  I just got off the phone with a support agent (Debbie) at Health Equity.  They are a company that provides and manages HSA accounts, a confusing topic in the first place.  The health insurance that we started this year (Regence – Blue Cross/Blue Shield) uses Health Equity as a partner.

We're new to the whole thing as of January 1st, and I was trying to understand why I had a credit showing on one of my claims.  It looked to me as though the claim should have a zero balance, but the Health Equity website showed a small credit on it.  I first submitted a request (yesterday) via a web support page, but promptly got an email saying that I should call them, as they didn't want to put private details in an email (good security practice!).  They sent me a number that was allegedly 24x7 and invited me to call.

So at around 7 am this morning, cringing in anticipation of a difficult conversation, I picked up my phone and called.  After a short and easy automated routing, I was put in queue for a support agent.  Within 10 seconds, Debbie picked up the phone and we started talking.

That call may be the best single telephone support interaction I have ever had.

What sticks in my mind the most is Debbie's attitude: cheery, eager to help, funny, friendly, and personable as you could imagine.  She's located in Draper, Utah – just south of Salt Lake City – not northeastern Uzbekistan or Sri Lanka or whatever.  English is her first language.  She knows the area – she's even familiar with Paradise!  Bottom line from the call: neither she nor others there understand why there's a credit on that claim.  It looks to them, too, like the balance should show as zero.  They were open and upfront with that; no BS was dispensed. 

Kudos from this ancient manager to the folks at Health Equity that are making this happen.  Support like that doesn't happen by accident...

The next time I need to call them, I certainly won't be cringing in anticipation.

Hell, I might call them if all I need is cheering up!

Paradise ponders, rectangular redwood edition...

Paradise ponders, rectangular redwood edition...  Well, now that I've finished snowplowing for the day, I managed to get some time in on the steps project.  I made 3 more passes through the planer on each of the 8 4x4s that I started with.  That's 24 passes today (half filling my dust collection barrel!), and now the redwood 4x4s are distinctly rectangular in cross-section – but the corner radius milling has been completely removed.

The first photo shows the 8 former 4x4s; the next two show the micrometer measurement of the thickness and width, respectively.  So ... the 4x4s are now dimensional lumber, 2.8225" x 3.3530". :)  The thicknesses are all the same to within my ability to measure, though that will change as the pieces dry out.  The widths vary considerably, though: from 3.2733" to 3.4504".  Note that all of them are under the 3.5" that they're supposed to be.  I'm not sure if that's the mill cheating us a teensy bit, or (more likely, I think) shrinkage from the wood drying out. 

One of the challenges of building out of solid wood is dealing with shrinkage.  This project is much less critical than, say, a tabletop.  I will be using dowels to keep the centerline of the pieces stable, and then good glue joints to attempt to keep edges from shifting.  I'm using good quality glue that resists shear forces, but even so, if the differential shrinkage between two adjacent pieces is too high, they will slip and form a little ridge.  The only way I know of to guarantee that that won't happen is to glue up all the pieces and then dry them in a kiln for at least a few days.  The few days I've got, but the kiln I do not. :)  I'll be letting them dry in my heated barn for 4 or 5 days before I sand them down.  Hopefully the majority of any differential shrinkage will have occurred by then..

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders ... Debbie and her cat edition...  Yesterday afternoon I brought firewood in and laid a fire, thinking Debbie (who's still in the throes of some evil virus) would like it.  I got it going nicely and then went into the bedroom where she was napping to roust her.  The sight at right greeted me.  That cat is Jahar, our Savannah cat – and he owns Debbie.  He just barely tolerates me, and then only on special occasions.  She went back to napping, and didn't come out to enjoy the fire for a couple of hours. :)

Yesterday evening we had terrific gusty winds and fairly heavy snowfall.  The snow was of the wet, gloppy kind.  With all the wind, the accumulation was variable: zero in some places, but over a foot in others.  The photo at left is a metal-bending machine (for roofing panels) parked near our house.  The tarp protecting it tore and blew off, and the machine (as you can see) is pretty well stuffed with snow and ice.

Around 8 pm, our power and cable Internet connections simultaneously died.  Our backup generators kicked in within a few seconds – and ran constantly for the next five and a half hours.  The outage that got us also took out the entire southern section of Cache Valley, 1,000 or so homes and businesses.  That was just one of over 50 outages suffered along the Wasatch Mountains front at roughly the same time.  The snowy and icy road conditions meant quite a few accidents, and some of those were collisions with poles.  The wind meant quite a few downed trees, and some of those took out power, telephone, and cable lines.  I'm not sure which failure mode we experienced, but the repair time was long because the power company's crews were stretched to the limit.  Our general experience is that we're back up within an hour or two; this was much longer than that.  After the power was off for an hour or so, I poked my head out our front door and back door, to look around at the valley.  Other than at our house, there wasn't a light in sight – total darkness prevailed.  Apparently we have the only backup generator within a couple of miles.  After last night's experience, at least one of my neighbors is suddenly very interested. :)  We were very grateful ourselves, as we didn't have to worry about getting cold, losing the food in our freezer, or even being slightly inconvenienced.  Everything just worked.  If my memory serves me right, this is the fifth outage we've had (and by far the longest one) since installing the generators.  The decision to spend the money on them is feeling pretty good right about now...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders ... homecoming in the wind edition...  We've got smiles on our faces around here, because our friend Tim D. is due home from the hospital any minute now.  His recovery went faster than anticipated, always a good sign.  He's up and walking around, but he does have rather severe limits on what he's allowed to lift: just 15 lbs. for the next year (though it's possible they'll relax that earlier if it's clear he's healed enough).  For a retired guy whose hobby is farming alfalfa on five acres, that's going to be tough.  So many things require lifting around a little farm like this, but most especially the irrigation pipes (which are in use roughly half the days from May through September, and which must be moved on each of those days) and hay for his two horses.  The hay Tim's wife Jeannie can handle, except when one of the big 1,200 lb. bales needs to be moved; for that, my tractor will do the trick.  The pipe moving we've started to organize some of the (many!) youths in Paradise, and me.  So good to know he's home and the surgery was successful!

Debbie and I had breakfast at Angie's this morning.  She had a “Santa Fe” skillet with chicken, I had eggs and ham.  Good, solid, delicious food as always.  It was fun to hear the locals talking about local things once again; the first time we've been immersed in that since our trip to Hawai'i ended.  I overheard the conversation at a nearby table, a middle-aged couple visiting Logan because they're considering moving here from Ogden.  They were raving about Angie's – they couldn't believe the quality of the food, not to mention the quantity, and the smiling, friendly service just blew them away. We're not far from Ogden, but the cultural difference really is quite large.  Ogden is much more the “big city” atmosphere, and service such as provided by Angie's would, I'm sure, really stand out.  But I think that only explains part of it – some of it is Angie's. I've met the owner, who's often around, talking with customers.  He's just like his staff – open, friendly, welcoming, interested, eager to please.  I'm sure that attitude and energy trickles down to all the staff, or at least all the staff who stay employed.  It's not that we get unfriendly service elsewhere in Logan, because we do with but rare exception.  What I'm really trying to say is that even here Angie's stands out.

Despite overly full belly ('cause there's no such thing as a small breakfast at Angie's so far as I can tell, and it's so good you're definitely going to want to eat it all!), I started working on the steps project that I bought lumber for yesterday.  There will be just two steps, 44" wide.  The upper step will be more like a landing, 36" deep, because the door from our house will open over it.  The other step will be about 11" deep.  Both of them will be roughly 3" thick, solid redwood.  I'm making them by gluing multiple 4x4s together, using dowels to get accurate joints.  The 4x4s come from the lumberyard with a roughly 3/16" radius to make rounded edges – a good thing for most purposes, but not for mine, as I want the top of the slab to be free of the grooves that would make.  So I'm planing all the 4x4s down on two opposite sides, to eliminate the radius.  That will reduce the thickness to roughly 3" instead of 3.5".

In the first photo below you can see the side I planed on the bottom, and the unplaned side (with the radius milling) on the top.  The second photo shows all eight of the 4x4s I need with one planed side (on the top).  These all measure 3.137" in thickness now, down from the roughly 3.4" (with lots of variance) as I received them.  This little exercise was a nice test of my planer, to see how stable its depth of cut was.  So far as I'm able to measure (0.001"), it's perfect – the first piece and the last piece both measure 3.137" thick no matter where I measure them.  A few hours from now, as the wood starts drying differently on the different pieces, that will no longer be true. :)

To plane all those 4x4s took a total of 24 passes through my planer, three for each piece.  Why?  Because the planer can only remove 3mm (a shade under 1/8") on a single pass.  So to chew off enough wood to remove the radius milling, it took three passes.  I'll have 24 more passes to take off the opposite side of each 4x4.

When I finished that first side on all of them, I decided to take a break.  I went to shut off my dust collection system and saw that the collection barrel was over-full (see first photo below).  Oops! I've only emptied this barrel twice since installing it almost two years ago.  Most of what I do doesn't make all that much sawdust.  But the planer is an entirely different story: it removes a lot of wood, and fast – in fact, that's it's entire job.  The second photo shows what I saw after I removed the lid and cleared the “extra” chips from the transparent feeder tube.  Those are all redwood chips on the top from the planing I did this morning.  I reached down into the chips to see where the redwood started – and discovered that 2/3s of the barrel are redwood chips from this morning.  I'm going to have to pay closer attention to that system when planing! :)

The wind is howling outside.  We have an average wind speed of 28 mph predicted for later this afternoon, and I think it's probably around 20 mph average right now (though some gusts are clearly much higher speed than that).  The temperature is 53°F right now, about like yesterday, and between the wind and the heat our snow cover is melting very rapidly.  Many fields are completely clear already.  But ... our forecast is showing up to 6" of snow over the next couple of days, so I'm not removing my snowplow from my tractor just yet...

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  We've been visiting Tim D., our friend and neighbor, in the hospital every day.  He had back surgery to fuse three vertebrae on Wednesday.  The surgery went very well, and he's recovering faster than they'd predicted.  We saw him a couple of hours ago, and he's smiling and ready to be up and at 'em.  I warned him that I'd take a baseball bat to him if we caught him trying to lift anything (he's got a 15 lb. limit for a year!).  It's really good to see him doing well – he's one of the good guys, and we've been worried about him.

Debbie's out having her nails done at the moment, and she drove her new truck by herself for only the second time.  She's had it for two months now, but didn't want to walk by herself when we had snow and ice.  So we've been going together, in the Tesla, while her new truck sat in the garage.  It started right up after we figured out how to do it (there's no key, and it won't do a darned thing unless your foot is on the brake).

My brother Scott went with me to pick up some lumber today.  I'm building a set of stairs to get from our bedroom to our new sun room; there's a 12" drop involved, so just two steps.  I'm making them from redwood, which I'm going to bleach, artificially distress (basically, I'm going to bash the hell out of it with a variety of bashers), then finish with a two-color system to accent the dents, and finally a coat of matte polyurethane to keep the natural wood look but protect it well.  It should be an interesting experiment.  Just getting the wood was more trouble than I expected.  First, redwood is rather expensive these days.  Second, in both Home Depot and Lowe's the lumber had been handled roughly and left outdoors – so it was quite dinged up and in some cases soaking wet.  Lowe's had more of it in stock, so we went there and picked through a pile of wood to get the 9 4x4's that I needed (I'm gluing up the 4x4s to make a thick slab for each step).  One item I wanted didn't exist in the store: pipe clamps.  You wouldn't think pipe clamps would be scarce in an area with so many woodworkers, but they only had one in stock.  Lots of bar clamps, but just the one pipe clamp.  I had to order them from Amazon...

An accidental discovery...

An accidental discovery...  While on our recent trip to Hawai'i, we stopped in at a coffee and tea shop to stock up for the mornings in our cottage.  Naturally I'd forgotten to pack my favorite little tea infuser, so I asked at the shop for one.  They didn't have any (which really surprised me!), but they did have something I'd never heard of: tea filters.  I picked up a 20 pack of them for a few dollars, and used them during our trip.

How did they work out?  Short answer: they're better than any infuser I've ever had, and I really liked the infusers I've had for the past few years.  I ordered 200 filters last week and got them yesterday.  The filters themselves are conical paper (much like coffee filter paper, but a little finer) with two little holes at the top.  The filters come with a little plastic stick, cleverly shaped to go through the two holes, sit firmly on your cup's rim, while holding the filter cone open (so you can pour hot water over it).  I've been rinsing my tea leaves in the infuser with cold water to get the tea dust off; that's not necessary with the filters.  If you let the filters drain in your sink, in a few minutes they're dry enough to toss in the trash – very convenient.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves tea...

Slow blogging for a few days, most likely...

Slow blogging for a few days, most likely...  I'm catching up on the huge pile of paperwork and backlog of stuff put off while we were on vacation.  In addition, a good friend (Tim D.) had some serious back surgery yesterday.  We'll be spending some time with him in the hospital until he gets home.  Also we're on standby to help out at his home with anything his wife might need...

Excellent...

Excellent...

Some advice for liberals...

Some advice for liberals ... on Carryn Owens' moment in the spotlight last night.  The author is Mary Katharine Ham, also widowed (under very different circumstances).  Her response to the loss of her husband is itself a moving story of strength under incredible pain.  Rereading some of those events even today brings me to tears.  But here the point is that she knows a bit about the topic she's tweeting about...

Home, we are, safe and sound...

Home, we are, safe and sound...  But not without a bit of drama!  Just before we boarded our plane in Kona, we heard an announcement.  Our plane was not going to San Francisco as scheduled, but was instead going to Honolulu!  It seems our aircraft had a broken HF (high frequency) radio, and without the radio it couldn't make the long flight to the mainland.  It could, however, fly the short distance to Honolulu, where they had the parts to fix our plane.  So off we went, away from home.

In Honolulu they told us we couldn't be on the plane while they tested the repaired radio, so off we all trudged.  A half hour later we were told that we were getting a whole new airplane – so they unloaded all our luggage from the broken plane, threw it all into our new plane, and then we all trudged aboard.  Finally we took off, headed for San Francisco.

We'd be arriving in San Francisco about four hours later than originally scheduled, so naturally we missed our flight from San Francisco to Salt Lake City.  While we were in the air, United rebooked us onto a later flight, but not with the upgraded seats (more legroom) we'd paid for.  I had to be rather insistent before the customer service agent would set that right, but finally I did.  United has a ways to go if they want to be known as the friendly skies!

A friend was driving down from Paradise to pick us up, and fortunately we were able to catch her before she drove down for our original arrival time.  She picked us up without incident, and we had a nice drive back – got all the local news, heard about our naughty animals, and shared a nice meal at the Red Iguana.

The animal reunion was exactly as expected (especially the overjoyed canines!), except that Jahar (our Savanna cat) is still upset, and is yowling.  I expect he'll settle down after we've gone to bed...

A really great last day...

A really great last day...  I'm writing this from the gate area of Kona Airport in Hawai'i, where Debbie and I are bored to tears waiting for our flight.  My bandwidth here is very limited, so I'm writing this post now, but will put photos up after we get home and have enough bandwidth to make that process endurable. 

Amazingly enough, today worked out pretty much as planned.  We started by packing up and saying goodbye to Hale Ohia, our home-away-from-home in Hawai'i.  Then we headed down to Hilo to have our last breakfast at Cafe 100.  We both had locos – Portuguese sausage loco with a side of Portuguese sausage for Debbie (could you guess that she likes Portuguese sausage?), bacon loco with a side of ham for me.

By the time we finished our breakfast, it was about 8 am.  Just after 9 am we were on the dirt road up Mauna Kea.  We drove one of our favorite roads, looking at the beautiful scenery and looking for pueos.  We saw no pueos.  After about four hours we got to our destination: the Dr. David Douglas memorial, and a memory I cherish – taking my mom and dad here, and hiking the quarter mile or so to the monument with my dad.  I got down to the monument this morning and leaned up against a koa tree, memories flooding in.  Just a minute or so after I stood against that tree, a little elepaio landed on a branch less than two feet from my face.  He perched there for 30 seconds or so, head tilting first one way and then the other, watching me and chirping as if to ask me how I was doing.  Then he flitted off to investigate something else interesting in his little empire.  I hiked back up to Debbie and our truck with a big smile on my face.  Those elepaio are one of our favorite birds here, and also one of the most elusive.  We'd only seen them three or four times on the rest of our trip, and never such a close view. 

Then we headed back down toward Waimea, going about 15 miles on this dirt four-wheel road.  We were still hoping to see pueos, but weren't too hopeful based on the complete failure on the way up in the morning.  Boy were we wrong!  We ended up seeing ten individual pueos, including two pairs courting (which involves some spectacular flying).  One of the pueos we saw was perched, but the rest were flying – and they spent at least some of their time quite close to us.  That meant that with our binoculars we had simply wonderful views of their swooping, hovering, low-altitude aerobatics – by far the best that we've had on any trip we've made to Hawai'i.  We also saw an io landing in a tree and flying away, close enough for a very nice viewing by binoculars.

Despite all this, I think the highlight for Debbie was the chance she had to feed granola bars to a very eager horse.  This fellow happened to be standing near a fence we could access, and then Debbie went to work on him.  Within a couple of minutes he was (literally!) eating out of her hand.  Many smiles were upon Debbie's face. :)

After all that, still glowing from our birding and horsing experiences, we visited The Gallery of Great Things again.  We had a bit more shopping to do there.  Then we went to The Fish and the Hog for dinner: ahi poke appetizer that we split, fish and chips for Debbie, and fish tacos for me.  All were delicious, and a fitting “last meal in Hawai'i” for us.  Then it was time for us to drive down to Kona, turn in the rental truck, and start the air journey home.

As I write, we've checked in, gotten our boarding passes, gone through security, and now we're just waiting.  We still have another hour before boarding.  :(  Then it's a five hour flight to San Francisco, an hour layover, and a two hour flight to Salt Lake City.  There a friend will pick us up and ferry we two sleepy, cranky folks back home for a reunion with our furry friends.  That should be great! :)