Warning, this post contains a graphic visual death scene...

We did cancel today's dives. I only had to get part way into town to know it wasn't worthwhile. On the way into town you could see the water was fouled (actually, it looks a very pretty light blue at a distance) from the highway for a couple hundred yards offshore to where there was nothing of diveable depth available, and there were wave sets that were miles long in length coming in from the west. It's apparently coming down fast on Oahu right now and hopefully will be flat and diveable in the morning tomorrow here.

So today was a day to relax. Pat had the day off and we went into town to dump a load of greenwaste. Kona has a spot where you can drop off yardwaste (unfortunately it's not really in a spot near where anything grows, and things grow like mad here, so it probably down't get as much use as it could if it were near where people actually have green stuff to get rid of) and they compost it and offer free compost to the public. Anyway, we take a truckload in every so often. When we get to cutting things it's easy to get 4-5 truckloads of stuff and hardly make a dent in the jungle surrounding our yard. On the way we stopped at the recently opened (for the second time, they got shut down for not having proper permits earlier) Hooters to try 'em out. I'd say they have better than average chicken wings, and the other stuff we had (burger, cobb salad)was OK, but for a couple bucks more the food is better down at the Hard Rock in both Pat and my opinion.

I forgot to mention something about yesterday's dive... we still have whales hanging out off Kona and yesterday while the divers were down a group of whales came within a couple hundred yards of the dive site. There was a calf breaching... neat. I hadn't seen a calf that small (I'm guessing maybe in the 15' range) breaching before.

Now on to the gore... Last year some time I wrote about how ants had taken over the electronics in our microwave and were turning it off and on at will. This year our oven started not working properly. Pat was wondering what was going on and I took a sniff and said it smelled like a dead reptile (remember, I spent more than a decade in the pet biz). We've had geckos fry a laser printer, the mother board of my computer, and generally make a mess of things with droppings, so it was time to order a new controller for the oven.
Luckily Pat grew up with a dad who could fix anything and she learned from him, so we could avoid having a repair guy come out and replace it ourselves... so a couple hundred bucks in parts later here's the old part.

Yuck. These little guys like to wedge into tight spaces, sometimes it gets the best of them apparently. Anyway that's my latest story about the pleasures of paradise.

later,

Steve