Checked out Whalers last night, a bar in Lihue that does its best to become a techno dance club on Saturday nights. Evidently, we missed the memo that everyone was going to be at some event on the North Shore and that the club population would never top 20. I can forgive quite a bit when it comes to dance music played incredibly loudly, but the forgiveness requires lots of happy people melding with the rhythm. And that just wasn’t happening last night. There were, however, strings of Christmas lights everywhere attracting some of the tiniest moths I’ve ever seen. …

There’s a new balance to learn – not to work so much that we never leave the house to experience this beautiful place, but not to forget that we are not on vacation. Yesterday, we hiked out our front door and up the street to Ho’opi’i Falls. What geologic coincidences made the rock collapse just so, right here? It’s all igneous, from the same volcano. I love the contrasts here, the obvious convergence of elements. Fire built this place; water and air tempered it. Earth has claimed it now, but water will one day have it all. Ian explored the …

When you are moving, everything else stops. At least, when I am moving, all my other projects grind to a halt. But the move is over now; time to adjust to a new place and find a new rhythm for all the things I mean to do. We’ve gone light, paring down to essentials and computers. We’re developing new habits about shoes and dishes and sunscreen. I even read the “Disaster preparedness” section in the phone book and have determined we are not in the tsunami flood zone. Between breakfast and lunch yesterday, it was blustery, leading into a brief …

Finished War Against the Animals yesterday on the plane. A bit purple in places, but perhaps that was appropriate for its cast of gay men living in the small New York town of Stone Hollow. The author’s heavy reliance on adjectives sometimes popped me out of the story, something I kept having a difficult time getting into since the author seemed to expect that the reader would already have some knowledge of what it is to be young and gay and to hate and fear it. But the book made the time on the plane pass, and that’s really all …