Recent happenings… Just finished re-reading Patrick O’Leary’s The Gift, quite possibly my most favorite book… Still trying to decide what to say about Barbara Kingsolver’s latest essay collection, Small Wonder. She says everything I wish I could say, and better than I could hope to… The pictures from our excursion to the National Botanical Garden are back, and I have lots to upload if only I could find the time… Finally made it out to Tunnels. I found it less then it’s cracked up to be since I spent all my time fighting a current and seeing nothing. Ian, on …
Category: Hawaiian Days
Welcome to March. Our time in Kauai runs thin. . . Detoured to the beach on the way to meet some of Ian’s teammates for dinner last week. We were early, and my Monday had been a Monday and Tuesday all rolled together. Spending time with the ocean is therapy for crazy days. (How do people who live in Kansas manage??) We waded into the surf a short ways before being distracted by a dark shape in the waves breaking on the reef edge. Patience revealed the shape to be two sea turtles swimming close to shore, surfing down the …
I sat up last night waiting for the thunder. Like the meteorologists’ predictions of floods and high winds, it had teased us all day, the sound rolling on and on just on the edge of hearing, but never quite living up to the hype. The night proved to be mostly about the rain coming in waves, like the wind, building, fading, building, fading. Of course, the interesting weather always happens at night. I wish for cat’s-eyes, to see in the dark. Even without them, though, Jupiter is amazingly bright right now, at least on less stormy nights. We went for …
My name is Christina, and I’m a workaholic. I have this overwhelming sense of responsibility to my to-do list, and just about everything else seems to suffer because of it. It took two hours of enforced rock-sitting at the beach yesterday afternoon before I could mentally unplug enough to take the evening off. At the risk of stating the obvious, my work/life balance must be off if work things are demanding this much of my mental energy. The Rich Dad author was talking about personal finance, but “Pay yourself first” applies to most other parts of life. The challenge, of …
We visited the McBryde Garden of the National Tropical Botanical Garden with Robert and Jo last week. Took lots of pictures; hopefully some of them will find their way to the gallery. The plants were lovely, naturally, but I found myself somewhat annoyed by the self-guided tour pamphlets’ constant reminders of how rare and endangered the garden’s plants are. It seems the precious status of the plants in a botanical garden would be a given, since there’s probably a reason these specific plants are receiving that degree of care. No one puts dandilions in a botanical garden. Surely, there is …
Enormously full week; feeling overwhelmed and more than a little behind. We watched an orange moon rise out of the sea one evening, five days past full, a ship on fire behind the streaming clouds, sailing for Valhalla. We sat on the beach, watching the path of light between us and the moon waver and ripple on the restless ocean. At first, the way was marked only by flashes of darkened gold on the black water, but gradually it became a highway dappled with shadows, wide enough for a tin man, a scarecrow, and a lion to walk with me. …