Pāʻina, pule, a me hula.

Or to put it another way, party, prayer, and hula. Yesterday was the end-of-the-semester party for the whole Hawaiian Language College, with each class performing something such as a hula, or a mele (song or chant). It was started off with the most beautiful choral a capella rendition of the Lord's Prayer set to music I've ever heard. In Hawaiian, of course.

E ko mākou Makua i loko o ka lani,

E hōano ‘ia Kou inoa.
E hiki mai Kou aupuni,
E mālama ‘ia Kou makemake ma ka honua nei,
E like me ia i mālama ‘ia ma ka lani lā.
E hā‘awi mai iā mākou i kēia lā
i ‘ai mākou no nēia lā.
E kala mai ho‘i iā mākou i kā mākou lawehala ‘ana,
me mākou e kala nei i ka po‘e i lawehala i kā mākou.
Mai ho‘oku‘u ‘Oe iā mākou i ka ho‘owalewale ‘ia mai;
E ho‘opakele nō na‘e iā mākou i ka ‘ino.
No ka mea, Nou ke aupuni,
A me ka mana,
A me ka ho‘onani ‘ia a mau loa aku.
‘Āmene

Our class performed our haʻiʻōlelo (speech) and hula smashingly, if the crowd reaction is any indicator. I can say that the difficulty level of our performance was pretty good for a first-year class, after watching all the other classes perform.

After the party as I was walking home, the storm that had been threatening to rain for two days finally opened up and poured. Several times I was wading through water up to my ankles on the journey home, as the drains simply couldn't keep up with the influx of water. But all that rain had a brilliant bright side, as I discovered when I got up this morning: we got snow on Mauna Kea!

View from our front yard.

I'm on the schedule to go up to the Vis tonight with the UAC, so I may have more pictures for you soon! (The snow won't be down to the level of the Vis, but I might be able to get some spectacular shots of the mountain above us.) A hui hou!

How many Ph.D's does it take...

UH Hilo is planning to hire a new physicist to fill the vacant post of Assistant Professor, vacant after the Chair of Physics and Astronomy retired last semester. They narrowed it down to two people, and are bringing them to campus for evaluation. So today I got to sit in on the colloquium given by the first one, an experimental high-energy particle physicist. The talk was pretty routine as talks go, all about searching for cosmic strings in GOODS and COSMOS data, with the unsurprising result that they haven't found any. But there was a humorous episode about halfway through when the laptop the presenter was using to present started hibernating. Apparently he had his presentation on a USB flash drive, because he was able to get it up and running on another computer pretty quickly, but it led to the amusing sight of first one, then two, then three, and finally four of our physics and astronomy professors, including the new Chair coming up to offer assistance and see if they could get it going again (hence the title of this post). I can hardly wait for Tuesday when the second one will be giving his talk (he's an atmospheric physicist, so it will be a bit different).

In other news, I am doing well, though quite busy recently. I've been trying to organize the monthly UAC trip up to the Mauna Kea Visitor's Center, something I haven't done before and which I'm learning about the hard way. I still don't know if I have everything down, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow when I go up.

General Busyness

Well, the post I wanted to write yesterday never happened, due to running out of time and having to work on homework. This post will be short for the same reason. I got my paper and USB cord for my printer today, so I was able to set it up and get it running. I haven't had much reason to use it yet, but it seems to be working just fine.

My trip to the Vis on Saturday went fine, although there weren't many people from the UAC there. Which was not a problem, because the local amateur astronomy club was there with several extra telescopes set up. Which was good, because I could not believe how many people there were up there! We probably had crowds getting up into the 70's or 80's for quite a while, and though it got quiet later on, it never completely slowed down (usually, we might have 20-40 people on any given night at our busiest).

One of the guys who works at the Vis commented as we were setting things up at the beginning of the evening on the clouds rolling down the mountain like water, and how he would like to make a time lapse movie of it some time. Well, I had my camera on hand, and as soon as everything was set up, I set it up on the balcony and proceeded to take a hundred shots over about five minutes, which I plan to put together into a really cool movie showing the clouds flowing down the slopes of Mauna Kea when I have time. It's an amazing thing to watch, and easily visible to the naked eye if you look for more than a few seconds. It happens fairly often at the beginning of the evening, when the cooling air causes the moisture to condense and move down the mountain. I'll have to see about linking to the video of it when I have time...