A belated birthday

Another year, another birthday, and I forgot to write my usual birthday blog post! And I'm 35 now, old enough to be president. This past week was a bit topsy-turvy and I even thought about it the night before, and just forgot. It was the annual board meeting at Gemini last week, which meant a number of additional people around, some sessions open to staff (which I mostly listened to in the background on Zoom while getting work done), some meetings with board members interested in talking to the staff, a team meeting for my team since my boss was out in Hilo, and just generally a lot of things out of the ordinary routine which threw me off.

And for added fun, the air conditioning has been out on the second floor (where my office is) for the past two weeks. It gets uncomfortably warm pretty quickly with the windows closed (due to a lot of electronics in the building generating heat), but thankfully the past two weeks have also had somewhat turbulent weather with a bit of breeze, so with the windows open and a fan on me it's not too bad. Hopefully we can get that fixed fairly soon, as we're around the time it transitions from the cooler/rainier winter weather to warmer summer weather. We've had some later-than-usual stormy weather this year (having lost time on the summit from storms this past week), but I imagine it'll start being hot and sunny pretty much any day now. Never a dull birthday here! A hui hou!

A new view of the Wailuku

It's been so rainy for the past few months that I haven't had many chances to put a drone in the air. Last Friday we had an absolute downpour of up to 3 inches per hour for a short time, which caused a pretty widespread power outage including at the Gemini offices. I heard of one person in Piʻihonua whose rain gauge went from empty to 7 inches over the course of the day. A few weeks ago the rain let up long enough for me to get in a flight, and while the lighting isn't the best as it was still overcast I thought the photos I got were interesting enough to share.

I've been vaguely aware that there's a small hydroelectric power station in Hilo on the Wailuku River for some years now (it gets mentioned in the occasional local news article), but didn't actually know where it was located. There's an electrical station next to the river near downtown which I thought was associated with it, but I recently learned that it's actually upstream, outside the city proper above Waiale Falls (in Piʻihonua, actually).

I'm pretty sure that's it in the photo below, given the water coming out (though I don't know where the intake is). It's not very large, which makes sense since the Wailuku, though it reliably flows all year, spends most of its time in a very low flow state that can't be providing that much energy. I found myself more enchanted by the rest of the scene, with the emerald-green grass and the Wailuku rising up the mountain side, a distant waterfall barely glimpsed in the distance. It's quite idyllic…though the invasive Molucca albizia trees growing on the right shore spoil the mood a bit. (They grow faster than native trees and crowd and shade them out, but are pretty fragile and easily drop large branches, making them dangerous during storms.)

Anyway, that's all for now. I just wanted to share a nice photo of a new part of the Wailuku I hadn't really explored before. A hui hou!