Weather and This and That

And I had a good blog post in mind...now, nothing.

Due to a pressure system to the North-East of the Islands, we are having South-ish winds, which means a little vog and some sun.  Halemaumau Crater has a lava lake, although we went to see it and well, you can't see it.  All you can see is a huge plume of vog.  I am sure if we went at night, we could see it glow.  I did see the vent at Pu'u O'o fountaining from the top of my road, but it's several miles away, so I would need binoculars to see it clearly.   Fortunately, the wind is brisk enough to blow the vog farther up the chain - well, fortunate for me and my plants and not so fortunate for others in Hawaii. 

The sun seems to make the animals expansive.  Even Gibby Crazy Horse isn't quite as liable to shy violently when you put out your hand to pat his neck.  He even calmly ate several horse cubes from my hand and let me pet his nose and neck for quite a long time on Saturday.  For the sheep - or at least the youngest two lambs - "expansive" means shimmying under the fence to check out the neighbor's yard or our front yard.  Fortunately, they are getting better at remembering where the dips under the fences are so they can get back where they are supposed to be. 

However, by the time I went on my favorite walk (both Saturday and Sunday) the sun had gone behind the clouds and it was quite chilly.  A man stopped to laugh at (with?) me for walking, "You better hurry before it rains!"  I smiled and said, "I brought my jacket,"  but I was thinking,  "If I wait for there to be no rain, I would never do a thing!" 

This has been the weirdest year, weatherwise.  Usually in May it is really lovely making me want to be out in the garden and eager to plant more of everything.  This May, although it has been drier than the last 8 months or so, there are still unexpected downpours and quite chilly (mid 50s) days (at least up at our elevation). 

I dreamed last night of tsunami - which actually is a infrequently occurring recurrent theme in my nightmares.  I would think it comes from teaching in a school located in the tsunami zone during the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, except that I have had them since I was in high school.  Some of them are humorous in retrospect:  sitting on the Pali Lookout on Oahu and watching a B-movie type giant wave roll over my hometown,  running up the Pali Highway inches in front of a wave (the wave would have to be impossibly large to roll that far uphill),  waking up one morning to find that I now live on beachfront property (I am 2500 feet above sea level and miles and miles away from the shoreline). 

There was a tsunami warning when my oldest was a baby.  People took off from work and lined the Pali lookout and the H-3 freeway to watch for waves.  I think when the tsunami arrived it was all of 6 inches.  We did have a tsunami a couple of years ago - it was fascinating to watch the footage, although the waves weren't all that big - maybe a few feet.  We went down to Moku Ola, a little island beach park reached by a small bridge, the next day to find that the waves were, although small, quite powerful.  It's amazing to think of the 2 tsunamis that occurred in the 20th century (before I was born) - how powerful and how big compared to what damaged some of Coconut Island. 

I have no idea why I dreamed of tsunami last night - maybe it is the end of the school year rushing down on me.