Hurricanes and (UH) Hilo

Well, it's been an eventful month here. A week-and-a-half ago on the 15th hurricane Lala swept by and knocked out power to 60% of the entire state, the week before the fall semester started. I lost power for ~54 hours from Saturday afternoon through to Monday evening, and there are people who still haven't gotten it back. We didn't actually see too much wind or rain here in Hāmākua, but Puna and especially Kāʻu got slammed. Then tropical storm Moke passed by on Saturday, but thankfully was far enough away not to add much more than a little rain. I definitely learned a few things about disaster preparedness (namely, that having solar and a battery is the way to go, having spoken to multiple people who were able to keep their fridges running for even longer than the two days I was without electricity).

And did I mention the fall semester started at UH Hilo on Monday? I'm back to teaching with a few more classes this semester, though most of them are labs for which we have experiments already prepared. (I will be grading a lot of lab reports, though.) There was a bit of the usual start-of-semester craziness, with the building AC once again not working, the internal network acting up, the laptop I'd been using last semester giving up the ghost over the summer, and me forgetting to put in the list of rooms I needed access to for my key fob until the day before, but things have been working out. (The AC has been halfway repaired, the network seems to have sorted itself, I got my key access before the end of Monday, and the college has a loaner laptop I can use which should come this week.) I also switched up how I'm writing my syllabi in a way which should make it easier to update them (namely, using Typst instead of \(\LaTeX\), but that'll get its own post here shortly.

In brief: no real damage about the place (but hurricane seasons lasts through November), classes have started, and I'll probably get really busy next week as the labs start to kick off. But I do want to talk about Typst now that I've actually gotten around to trying it, so expect a post on that before too long. A hui hou!

Hummingbirds, sea lions, and honey bees, oh my!

I spent the final week of July in California visiting family where I had the opportunity to take a number of pictures of animals I don't see very often. Hummingbirds were active about the feeder, we visited Pier 39 in San Francisco and saw the sea lions there, and there were a lot of thirsty honey bees around in the July heat.

It's difficult to get a good shot of a hummingbird in flight with how fast they move, so my only chance was when they came up to the feeder to eat. I tried on two different days (seen here) and I'm impressed with how clear the wings came out in the first photo considering the blur they were in person. I was also impressed by how close they let me stand to get these photos. Occasionally one would fly over even closer, at about arm's reach, to hover at head-height and regard me quizzically for a few seconds, a delightful (and ever-so-slightly unnerving) experience.

We were fortunate while visiting Pier 39 that there were a number of sea lions there, since it varies. Mostly they were napping in the sun, though there were generally always one or two swimming about, jumping on or off the floating rafts, and occasionally getting into disputes.

And sometime after my last visit, my parents let a commercial beekeeper park some hives on their property. (It's a great location with all the eucalyptus and almond trees around.) I don't think I've ever really mentioned it on this blog, since it happened before I started writing it, but I used to have bees for a few years before moving out to Hawaii. I enjoyed it, though I'm a poor bee-haver; I picked a bad time to start between Varroa mites and Colony Collapse Disorder (and it hasn't exactly gotten better since then), and my hives didn't manage to survive. I figured it best left to the past when I moved, but I've always retained a sort spot for honey bees. When some fell into the pool I was filling up for them I rescued them with a leaf and let them chill on my hand while I did some macro photography. It's always funny to me how matter-of-factly they go about cleaning and drying themselves before taking to the air again.

And that's it for this post. There are plenty of cool critters here in Hawaii (including honey bees), but it's nice to see some that I haven't in a while. A hui hou!