Life lived in one place

As of today it's been about two years since I moved back to Hawaii from Australia. Together with the nine years I spent in Hawaii before, I've now lived a little over eleven years here. That's now finally (and definitively) longer than the previous longest span of time I lived somewhere, in California (which was about nine and a half years). I was going to write about this last year when I surpassed that record, but I have once again managed to get off-by-one-year in my reckoning of anniversaries. (I suppose summer trips back home during college would've added several months to the California total, so waiting another year is playing it safe.) We'll see if I can manage to beat my record for continuously living in one place someday…though given past events I'll almost certainly remember it a year late if I do.

Anyway, that's about it for this post, just a little rumination on life. My family moved multiple times during my early childhood, so while I've lived in quite a number of places, I've only spent more than five years in just two, California and Hawaii. Hopefully, I'm finally at a point in life where I can minimize the number of future moves I have to make, as after experiencing multiple different climates in my life, I've discovered that “tropical island” suits me juuuust fine. We shall see what the future holds, I suppose. A hui hou!

Fun with drones in the California countryside

Back in May I took a short trip over Memorial Day weekend to visit family back in California. This was the first time I'd been back since I starting drone flying last July, so I was looking forward to seeing some familiar places from the air. My brother Joel also has a drone (in fact he started flying before I did), so together with my other brother Jonathan we had some fun going drone flying together. After a session out in the countryside, as we were getting ready to come home I had the idea of following our car from the air (while driving slowly, on a deserted country road, with multiple people for extra situational awareness).

I've never operated from a moving vehicle before, and it was a fun experience practicing my cinematic moves trying to track the car while also riding in it. The full video was a bit too long to be interesting, but I extracted a few nice shots and put them together into the shorter version below. I'm especially proud of the bit near the end where, as we went under I-505, I managed to transition on the fly (literally!) from following mostly behind the car to instead tracking it from straight above. (I even left the ugly jerky animation bits in there which I've cut out from the rest of the video, just to show how it worked.)

Anyway, just a calm video of a relaxing drive through the countryside. (I've left out the parts where I almost ran into power lines…twice. It was fine.) And thanks to some recent system updates, I might have something new in a similar vein to show off pretty soon. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 4: 2011

In the previous post in this series we looked at a whole bunch of panoramas of Mauna Loa. In 2011, in contrast…okay, I can't lie, we'll see a few more panoramas of Mauna Loa. If ever there were mountains made for panoramic viewing, it's Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. But! We'll also see some new and unique vistas which for various reasons I haven't had the chance to recreate.

2011 was the year I finished college and graduated from UH Hilo, and thanks to all the volunteering I'd done at the Visitor Information Station I had a job lined up to start there in 2012. But for now, let's get on to the pictures…

January

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In January 2011 my housemate Jonathan and I decided it'd be cool to try to get some photos of the Sun rising out of the ocean from Hilo. It took us several trips to various locations around Hilo at the crack of dawn over the course of a few weeks to realize that the joke was on us: there are always clouds away off on the eastern horizon around Hawaiʻi. So we never did get the pictures of the Sun rising majestically out of the ocean like we wanted, but at least I got this first light panorama of Hilo Bay out of it (unintentionally, I only found and put these photos together while writing this post):

Mauna Kea over Hilo Bay. Coconut Island on the right.

This panorama from the morning of January 17th shows Mauna Kea, resplendent in the pre-dawn chill, with Hilo stretched out along the left side of the image and Coconut Island on the right. You can probably only see it if you already know what you're looking for, but you can see the breakwater that protects the bay stretching along the horizon behind Coconut Island on the right side of the picture. It looks like it may have been raining north of Hilo and further up the slopes of Mauna Kea that day.

February

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On February 22nd I hiked the summit trail of Mauna Kea (down) for the first (and so far only) time as part of a volunteer effort to pick up trash and keep the trail clean. (As before, you can follow that link and mouseover the panoramas in the post to see the original hand-made versions.) This allowed me to get a panorama of a rather different body of water:

Lake Waiau.

This is Lake Waiau, at an elevation of 13,020 feet (3970 m) making it one of the higher lakes in the world (though it depends strongly upon which list of lofty lakes you consult, as there's no official definition of what a lake is). I did originally have a picture of the right hand side of the lake (its north end, from this perspective), but somehow lost it in the process of transferring the photos from my camera to my computer all the way back when I made my first, manual version of this panorama. I have another panorama of this lake, but that's for a future post!

Mauna Loa, from part-way down the south slope of Mauna Kea.

And here's our first Mauna Loa panorama for the year, from somewhere down the trail. The summit area of Mauna Kea is so broad and flat that it can be hard to remember you're on top of a mountain sometimes, but as you descend you reach some (moderately) steeper bits that allow you look down and see the Saddle region spreading before you, with Mauna Loa in the distance. If you look closely you can even just make out Hualālai peeking over the hills on the right. This is definitely another one of my favorite panoramas I've taken.

June

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On the 12th of June I had the opportunity to hike to the actual summit of Mauna Kea, something I've only done three or four times over the years despite being in the general area more frequently. (It's not a long walk, it's perhaps ten minutes or so from the closest road, I just never usually had time when I was up there due to other duties.) Whenever I had the chance to do so, however, I'd always discover that I had either forgotten my camera, its batteries were dead, or the weather was so bad that I couldn't get pictures (it wouldn't be until January of 2012 that I got my first smart phone, and I had no way of getting photos off the phone I had before that).

Except this time. For once I'd remembered my camera, it still had battery power, and the weather, though not great, was good enough to get this panorama:

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea summit.

This may be the only picture on this blog from Mauna Kea's summit, at the rarefied height of 13,796 feet (4,205 meters). This view stretches from looking east on the left down towards Mauna Loa to the south. As you can see the weather was not particularly great that day, with lots of cloud cover both around the slopes of the volcanoes and also much higher up. The cinder cone bowl seen in the foreground on the right of the image is Puʻu Wēkiu, wēkiu meaning “summit” in Hawaiian. The summit proper is simply the highest point in its rim.

I really wish I'd done a 360° panorama for this one. Oh well, future life goals I guess. Someday when the weather's better would make a better picture anyway.

July

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Come July I was once again back home in California visiting family, and my mom's family had a reunion up in Washington so we drove up through Oregon to attend. Along the way we stopped at some pretty nifty places, and I was able to get a few panoramas out of it (only one of which has shown up on this blog before).

One of the places we stopped was Crater Lake inside Mount Mazama, which is a fabulously cool place to visit. Despite visiting in July there was still plenty of snow piled high in places.

Crater Lake, with Phantom Ship visible.

This simple four-photo panorama comes from somewhere on the south-eastern side on the rim of the massive caldera that makes up the lake. Visible near the bottom-center is Phantom Ship, the smaller of the two islands in the lake. This and the next panorama were only created while writing this post, so they're new to me as well!

Crater Lake, this time with the much larger Wizard Island visible.

This panorama comes from the walkway heading towards the Visitor Center which provides an overlook of and lots of information about Crater Lake itself. In this shot the much larger Wizard Island near the western side of the lake is visible. The lake is 1,949 feet (594 meters) deep at its deepest point, yet Wizard Island still towers an additional 755 feet (230 meters) above its surface! It's a cinder cone formed in the caldera after the monumental eruption that dropped Mount Mazama's height by nearly a kilometer and created the original caldera.

Crater Lake with Wizard Island again, from the Visitor Center.

Finally, this panorama is one I've shown before, though this version was created with Hugin rather than by hand (you can compare the two by mousing over the image in the linked post). I really didn't write that much about Crater Lake when I visited it, which is a shame because it's a fascinating place. Especially after living in Hawaii for a few years and becoming acquainted with volcanoes.

For instance, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the US, the ninth deepest in the world, and has some of the clearest water of any natural bodies of water anywhere. And the scale is simply mind-blowing: Mount Mazama was estimated to be about 12,000 feet (3,200 meters) high before its fateful eruption; the highest point on the rim is now 8,159 feet (2,487 meters). A beautiful and poignant reminder of the raw energy of the natural world.

Another place we stopped after visiting the lake was the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Painted Hills Unit. (Hooray for taking pictures of signs so I know where it was!) These two panoramas were both two-photo accidental panoramas that I only discovered while writing this post.

Painted Hills, Oregon.

The landscape was truly spectacular. I wish I'd created more panoramas while I was there, as there was no shortage of subjects.

Oregonian bluff.

I'm not sure what this bluff is called (if anything), or where it is exactly—all I can tell is that we took a few group photos in front of it after I got this panorama and it appears to be near where we ate a picnic lunch. It's a great representative of the landscape in the area, though!

September

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September found me back in Hawaii, taking pictures of the same familiar subjects once again: more Mauna Loa panoramas! Seriously, I'll have to count how many different ones this single volcano's featured in when I finish this series…

Mauna Loa.

This panorama and the next are reminiscent of a similar one from 2009 seen in part 2 (though here the grass is brown and dry). Possibly an attempt to recreate it, as the 2009 version is one of my favorite panoramas I've taken. Don't look too closely at those fence wires, they kinda pop in and out of existence near the bottom of the image. I imagine close-in fine details like that are difficult for Hugin to deal with when there isn't enough photo coverage and the perspective changes rapidly.

Mauna Loa, again.

This panorama (from a zoomed-in perspective) is the Hugin version of a panorama I originally created manually whose existence led me to discover this forgotten post where I'd already shown off the manual version but forgotten to apply any tags. Don't look too closely at the barbed wire in this one either.

Mauna Loa, from just outside the Keck building.

This two-photo mini-panorama comes from outside the Keck building, though it doesn't show much other than Mauna Loa in the background and some of the so-called Sub-millimeter Valley where the telescopes sensitive to light with sub-millimeter wavelengths reside. You can see CSO in the middle, and some of JCMT on the right. Pretty sure this wasn't planned to be a panorama originally or I'd have taken photos with a wider coverage.

November

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On November 4th the University Astrophysics Club was able to get a tour of Gemini North, the InfraRed Telescope Facility, and UH Hilo's own Hōkū Keʻa telescope. This trip is the snowiest it's been up at the summit while I've been up there, which makes for some great images! The first two here I only created in the process of writing this post.

Snowy Mauna Kea summit, overlooking Submillimeter valley.

Another shot from outside Keck. (I'm not actually sure why, as I don't think a Keck tour was part of our itinerary—I don't have photos from inside it, anyway.) The snowfall must've been recent, but fairly light. (And judging by the distribution, must have come from the west, maybe? This is facing south towards Mauna Loa.)

Mauna Kea's snowy North Plateau.

This one's kinda interesting. It looks like it came from near IRTF, and is facing north over the North Plateau (where TMT, if it ever gets built, is slated to go). I don't usually take too many photos facing north like that, especially if the weather isn't clear and Maui isn't visible.

From a few weeks later (November 27th, to be precise) comes this panorama of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Though it may not look it, this one is actually from a (slightly) different location to the others that have shown up so far. On the left of the image, between the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, you can see the peak of Puʻu Kelepeamoa, where several of these panoramas have been from. That peak, however, is merely the highest point in the rim of a giant cinder cone just below the Visitor Information Station (so large, in fact, that the Access Road runs through it). This panorama was taken from the second-highest point in the rim, on its eastern side. (Puʻu Kalepeamoa is on the west.)

In the original hand-made version of this panorama (visible at the link above) I put Mauna Loa on the right of Mauna Kea (possible as it's one of my rare full 360° panoramas), but I think this composition works a lot better.

December

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In December of 2011 I graduated from UH Hilo (or technically, I participated in the ceremony, a slight miscalculation with paperwork meant that I didn't officially graduate until next semester). Also my family came out to visit for the first time! We did some sightseeing while everyone was there, and I have a lot of photos, but I could only find a single accidental panorama, from a botanical garden we visited a ways up the coast north of Hilo:

Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden, looking out onto Onomea Bay. Don't look too closely at the middle palm tree.

And that's it for 2011! A pretty good year for panoramas, all told. The next post's going to be pretty short as I really didn't take too many panoramas in 2012, not even accidental ones to be discovered after the fact. There're a few good ones, though, and starting in 2012 there'll be ones taken with a phone camera—they're pretty awful at first, so it'll be interesting to watch them improve over the years. A hui hou!

Personal Panoramic History, Part 3: 2010

In the previous post in this series we looked at 2009 and a couple of my first attempts at taking panoramas of certain volcanoes. In 2010 I refined my technique a bit by taking panoramas of the same volcanoes—several times—but also experimented with some new things as well.

May

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My first panorama of the year comes from May, when the University Astrophysics Club at UH Hilo was given a tour of the Subaru telescope. I had the chance to do a little hiking around Hale Pōhaku while we were waiting to acclimatize which I used to take the following panorama from the top of Puʻu Kelepeamoa (a popular sunset-viewing spot nearby):

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea.

This was my first full 360° panorama. Actually, it went slightly more than a full turn around and when I first stitched a panorama together from the photos I refused to drop any of them, leading to a rather weird image with Mauna Kea in the center and the summit of Mauna Loa showing up twice, on either side. Hugin luckily can work out a full rotation and stop there, and also allows you to rotate your endpoints around, so I've made it a bit nicer looking by scooting Mauna Kea over to the side and no longer splitting Mauna Loa in twain. If you follow the link above you can see the original version by mousing over the panorama (which is now this new one) in the original post it came from.

June

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Mauna Kea summit area.

In June I had another opportunity to visit Mauna Kea's summit (probably helping with a summit tour) and used it to snap this panorama. This one is taken from a totally different perspective than the one in part 2 which was taken from in front of the Keck building, which is the two identical domes near the center of the image. From left to right, you can see UKIRT, CSO (just barely), JCMT, SMA, Subarua, Keck I and II, IRTF, CFHT, and Gemini North.

July

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In July I created this, my first and so far only astronomical panorama. This one's another hand-made image, as Hugin couldn't manage it. This is because the image is made up of twelve different images, each of which was a thirty second exposure in order to collect enough light. While thirty seconds is short enough that the star trails induced by the earth's rotation aren't too noticeable in each individual image, the entire sky would have moved pretty appreciably between the start and end of the series of exposures. I'm not entirely sure how I managed to wrangle this into a panorama myself—with a lot of effort, I suspect—and looking at it now I sometimes think I see some duplicate bits, but I'm still pretty happy with this view of the northern hemisphere summer Milky Way from the area near the Visitor Information Station on Mauna Kea. (You can see the glow from Hilo in the center of the image.)

August

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In August 2010 while I was back home for vacation during the summer my family went on a two-day road trip around some parts of northern California, including the coast and through the redwood forests. This let me experiment with a vertical panorama:

The Chandelier Tree in Leggett, California.

This is a hand-made panorama, as I just couldn't get Hugin to make a good looking result. It probably has to do with the unusual way the perspective changes from standing on the ground and rotating the camera up to get pictures. It's an interesting challenge though; maybe I should try more vertical panoramas in the future.

November

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In November 2010 I had my first chance to observe on Mauna Kea at Subaru while working as a student research assistant. Since we spent a day and a night at Hale Pōhaku acclimatizing before going up I had some time to hike a round and take a few panoramas:

Mauna Loa, Hualālai, and Mauna Kea.

You'd be forgiven for thinking I'd accidentally posted the same panorama from May again here. While writing this post I had to carefully double-check to make sure that I hadn't, as they both look pretty similar in the tiny preview thumbnails (this one has more cloud cover on the left, at least). While they do look very similar (and were taken from locations very close to each other on the top of Puʻu Kalepeamoa), the layout seen in both of them was created in this one and retroactively used for the May version when I was remaking both with Hugin. I like this layout a lot better, and I like to think it shows that I was getting a bit better at framing panoramas by this point.

Mauna Loa.

The previous panorama was taken from the summit of Puʻu Kalepeamoa, which is the hill in the foreground on the left of this image, which was taken from a cinder cone (or puʻu) slightly higher up Mauna Kea's flank. (Well, technically, “ka lepe a moa” means “the comb of the chicken”, and Puʻu Kelepeamoa is so named because it's a range of three or four rusty-red cinder cones that could be seen as a cock's comb, and I was technically still on [another part of] it while taking these pictures. The name is typically mostly used to refer to the hill lowest on the mountain and closest to the VIS, though.)

Mauna Loa and Hualālai.

This panorama was taken from a bit further up the flank of Mauna Kea again. In the foreground on the left you can see the summit of Puʻu Kalepeamoa again as well which helps give a sense of the movement between pictures. On the right side of this image you can see some more of the gigantic cinder cones (or puʻu) near the Visitor Information Station. These final two panoramas I'd never even created until writing this post so they're both completely new, which is a shame because I really like the last one—going through and creating these huge panoramas of gorgeous landscapes I just keep thinking “This would make a great picture to get printed and hang on my wall where I could actually enjoy it all at once, at full size.” Maybe in another decade or two when I can start to think about settling down and not moving every few years.

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And that's it for 2010! I spent some time refining my panorama technique with the same choice of targets that year (you're probably sick of Mauan Loa panoramas from the north by now), but for the next part covering 2011 I'll have a few unique panoramas which, for various reasons, I've never repeated. A hui hou!

Redwoods…in Australia‽ Happy New Year!

Well, here's some trees I didn't think I'd see in Australia:

REDWOODS!

Yep, that's right, authentic Californian redwoods, Sequoia sempervirans, in the flesh. Er, in the bark. Back in the 1930s the Australian Board of Works planted a patch of land that had been cleared of its original eucalyptus forest with 1,500 redwood trees imported from California (along with Bishop pine and Douglas fir) in an experiment in hydrogrogy. (The experiment's results are, sadly, unknown.)

I got to experience this cool home-away-from-home forest due to some friends from church, who planned a New Year's Eve barbecue lunch with a bunch of other people out in the Yarra Valley about seven kilometers from the forest, which we explored afterwards.

They're not too big around yet, but they're already quite tall!

The redwoods are planted in regular rows, giving an interesting effect as you walk around. Otherwise, add a few banana slugs and you could almost be back in California! (At least until you get to the edge of the forest and see the old-growth eucalyptus forest all around.) I've got some other pictures from the trip that I'll post when I get a chance, but for now, I'll wish you all hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, and I'll see you all in 2018!

Edit (1/1/2018): Have a few more pictures I didn't have time to include last night:

The Yarra River, where we had the barbecue before going to the redwoods, in the beautiful Yarra Valley.

Most trees here are between 55 and 80 meters tall (180–288 feet).

One feature not usually present in Californian redwood forests are these large man-made bird nests.

And while there may not be any banana slugs here naturally, it's nothing a few minutes with GIMP can't fix!

(Banana slug picture from the last time I used the “redwoods” tag on this blog, all the way back in 2010!)

What I've Been Doing on Vacation

It's been a busy vacation for me here in California. There have been parties to attend, old friends to catch up with, and the many little chores that are ubiquitous on the farmyard. For instance, my sister happened to have a bottle-baby pygmy goat this year, by the name of Arthur:

I mostly called him Squeaker due to his high-pitched bleating when wanting food or attention (I ended up bottle-feeding him a couple of times). If you're wondering why his ear and side have shaved patched on them, it's because he spent the first week of life in intensive care at UCDavis Veterinary Hospital.

He was quite the cute little chap, though, and seems to be doing fine. After using my powerbockers I definitely have a better understanding of what walking involves for goats, so it was interesting watching him trying out his legs and learning to leap and bound.

Anyway, I'll be back in Hawai‘i for the New Year, so I might have some more to say then. Happy New Year everyone! Hau‘oli Makahiki Hou!

Meanwhile, back in Hawaiʻi...

Well, today I am safely back in Hawaiʻi, just waiting for the next semester to start on Monday. My, how time flies! My apologies for the quiet week, I just seem to have less motivation to write (not to mention time) when I'm at home. I did come up with some ideas to write about, so you can look forward to that in the weeks to come.

Now...to catch up on all the sleep I missed while in California! Playing Risk into the wee hours of the morning can cause strange side effects, like conquering the entire North American continent in a massive single-turn blitzkrieg starting from a single surrounded region, or contemplating whether Iceland has ever actually been involved in any wars through history (yes, if you count civil strife), and whether or not it was ever a colony of one of the Scandinavian crowns (also yes; first Norway, then Norway-Denmark, then Denmark controlled it before it officially became its own nation in 1944).

Sky High over the Pacific

Well, if everything goes as planned, I should be on my way back to California when this posts.

I'm looking forward to a little R&R at home over Christmas, hopefully get my laptop's keyboard fixed, catch up on a little reading, spend some time among the eucalyptus wielding a machete, trying to catch some of my rapidly-expanding duck population, photographing the upcoming total lunar eclipse on Monday night, etc. etc.

Sights and Smells of Hawai‘i.

Ever since moving here to Hawai‘i, I've found myself noticing smells a lot more, to the point where I sometimes find myself unconsciously sniffing the wind to sample the scents of an area. It's kind of interesting, picking up the fragrance of the rain, or of the sea, or of other, more localized scents. Plants often give off noticeable perfumes; sun-baked lava rock has its own peculiar odor. Up on Mauna Kea, the wind has the intoxicating bouquet I associate with rolling Nebraskan prairie, which is probably one of the earliest scents I can remember.

I'm not a hundred percent sure why I seem to be paying more attention to my sense of smell now, at this time in my life, but I think it has to do with the generally higher humidity of Hawai‘i compared to California, and the fact that scents tend to travel better in moist air. Whatever it is, I enjoy it. Just another perk of paradise!

Mean Weekly Victual Cost™ (MWVC)

Well, yesterday marks the first time I have spent more than a hundred dollars in one grocery store run. It's a bit special for me, because I've been priding myself on keeping it below a hundred dollars each trip, despite the high cost of food here. Mostly it was so high because I was restocking on necessaries now that I'm back from California, though I did cave to a few luxury items (Parmesan cheese is expensive...and milk! Gallon for gallon, it's worth more than gas in California. You'd think they have to pump it out of the ground or something).

On a whim, I went through all my receipts over the last semester, and figured out how much I spent on food, then normalized it by the number of weeks in the semester to figure out my Mean Weekly Victual Cost (MWVC). While the total figure took my breath away ($850.73), my MWVC looked a lot better: a mere $36.99. That's right, I can feed myself happily for less than $37 a week. In fact, I could probably feed myself contentedly for a lot less than that, since I could admittedly have gone without certain beverages (and after getting two cavities filled over vacation, I'll be cutting back on them quite a bit this semester!).

I did the same thing for the previous semester, and while I don't remember the exact figure I know it was between $40 and $50, so I'm getting a little bit thriftier. The challenge is on, now...I shall do the same thing this semester, and see if I can't lower my MWVC even more.

Oh, and don't forget to vote in the poll!

Memoirs of a family trip.

In contradistinction to my last post, I haven't been especially busy for the last week, other than a family trip to Mendocino County over the weekend. I've just been enjoying my vacation, and too lazy and unmotivated to write anything. I thought I'd post some pictures from the trip, though.

Banana slug near the hotel we stayed at.

We went to an old Russian fort, saw the famous Chandelier Tree that you can drive through, and toured a large botanical garden, but the coolest experience for me was at our unplanned stop to change drivers and stretch our legs at a random spot on Highway 1, deep in the coastal mountains.

A little mountain stream was making its merry way way down the valley not too far from the road, so we climbed down to investigate it. The majesty of the place was amazing -- coastal redwoods stretching hundreds of feet above our heads, the noon-day sun falling through chinks in between the branches in soft rays of cool sunlight, reminiscent of the grandeur and beauty of a cathedral. But pictures speak better than words sometimes, and I think this is one of those cases:

The stream at the bottom of the dell.

We also stopped at the Chandelier Tree, the famous tree that you can drive your car through. It was, unfortunately, too short to allow our huge van to pass through, but I got a nice shot of Abigail nosing it in before we were sure we couldn't make it.

She set her Facebook status to
 "Drove the van into a tree." when we got home.

Splashdown!

Today I went to the California State Fair to watch Abigail show some of her pygmy goats, then went to the Raging Waters water park on the fairgrounds with my brothers and some family friends. I'm going to get more time in the water in the few weeks I'm here than in the entire last two semesters (in truth, I think I already have). If you ever get a chance to go to that park, I highly recommend the Dragon's Den ride. You go by two's in two-person inner tubes down a steep drop in the dark, circulate around in a giant whirlpool for two or three revolutions, then finally vanish down another short drop and get ejected out into the splashpool at the end. The description just given, however, really doesn't quite capture the essence of it, nor the mix of anticipation, terror, and exhilaration that comes with riding it (especially because the official policy of "heavier person in the back" can send the inner tube backwards down the final chute).

It's just something you have to experience to really understand, I guess.

Home again, home again.

Well, I have to start this post off by pointing out that I completely flubbed the scheduled post time in the post directly before this one. I'd meant it to post at 10:00 PM California time, and accidentally set it to post in Hawai`i time, which means it posted three hours later than I planned (probably about the time I finally fell asleep, though...).

Traveling to a warm location from Hawai`i certainly has its advantages -- no coat necessary, and flip-flops (er, sandals) work fine, making getting through security a breeze -- probably the quickest and easiest I've ever been through...

...followed as always by the inconvenience and discomfort of several hours of trying to fit my lanky frame into airplane seats designed for a mean passenger height several inches shorter than I am. (Ironically, inter-continental flights are better, not worse than domestic ones...the seats there are usually larger, and built more with an eye for comfort. On domestic flights of a few hours, engineers figure you can just tough it out.) But, the long and short of it is, I made it home safe and sound, and am slowly adjusting to jetlag (very slowly, as the fact that I'm posting after 11 o`clock should make clear). I should probably get to bed now...

When worlds align...

Well, the frogs are chirping merrily away in the background, and for once there are no clouds in the sky, allowing me to see the close conjunction of Venus and the Moon, with Mars and Saturn nearby for good measure. It's a beautiful night in Hilo.

It almost makes me sad, knowing that Thursday I'll be on the airplane back home to California for a few weeks. By the time you're reading this, I may already be in the air. To be honest, I'm going to miss the lovely weather here. And the rain. I'll probably miss the rain.

In the almost 11 months I've been living here, Hawai`i has steadily grown on me, ever since I first got off the airplane. I love it here, and will be sad if or when I eventually have to move away.

But all good things tend to come to an end, and indeed, trying to hold onto a good thing too hard often ends up being counter-productive. It'll be good to see family and friends again, catch up, "talk story". And at the end of my vacation, I have the coming back to look forward to. So I guess it's not so bad after all.

Mentioning that conjunction reminded me I should try to go photograph it. As you can see below, it's quite the picturesque alignment:

Saturn, Mars, the Moon, and Venus. Click on the image for a larger view.

Visible in the full-size picture but hard to see here, Saturn lies near the top of the picture with Mars to its lower right, while just to the right of the three-day-young Moon lies Venus. And the nifty part is, the alignments just get more interesting as we head into August! Saturn, Mars, and Venus will each take turns getting close to each other over the next few weeks, and are optimally placed for evening viewing. Check them out some time, if you get a chance. There's really no way you can miss Venus, as it's the brightest thing in the sky after the Moon, and Saturn and Mars will show up as fairly bright stars to its upper left, similar to the picture...for a few days, at any rate.

See you in California!