Another year has passed and I’m still enjoying Hawaii!

I see the occasional post now of people on the mainland fighting cold weather and snow flurries and ice have started. I feel your pain but like to remind you that I don’t have those worries. Normal temps here go from 65 to 85.

I am getting my share of aches and pains though. My hip hurts when I weed whack because I tend to swing the the thing back and forth to cut through heavy weeds. My wrist hurts today because yesterday I was yanking vines away from some of the coffee trees.

I am trying to get the farm looking better because I have a lease-hold inspection coming. They tell you a few days before the month they will inspect, so unless you contact them quickly, you get anywhere from a few days to a month to prepare. I have some dead coffee trees I want to replace and have some areas where certain fruit trees did not do well and will be planting something else there; probably starting with some finger limes.

I have 20 solar panels I’ll be installing soon. They will be configured to replace as much of the daytime usage as they can without sending any excess power back to the utility. I won’t get paid for any excess power, however I also will not need a contract with the utility for net metering, etc. My 2Kw system cost $3,100 and with a couple hundred dollars of mounting materials, I’ll have them up and running with little hassles. I’ll be mounting them near the ground as I have room for them there without any obstructions.

I am still managing a number of websites for neighbors, friends and relatives. I help out on occasion at another farm; generally drinking coffee and giving my opinion of how things should work. Sometimes I am right and sometimes I’m wrong. They seem to only remember the suggestions that worked 🙂

I am still suggesting people install Voice Over IP (VOIP) to have cheaper phone service at home, however many people just rely upon cellphones.

It is 1:30am at the moment. I went to bed early and then woke up at midnight. I’ll be heading back to bed soon as the alarm is set for 5am. It seems the dogs like an early morning walk.

My day today looks like this: Up at 5am and take the dogs out. Clean out the accumulated items from the truck. I have been working on a few projects lately and taking items around in the truck.

At 7am I’ll be driving to Holualoa to pick up a young worker who will be doing some weed whacking for me today. Meanwhile I’ll be on the tractor re-mowing areas that look crappy (I like to have it looking nice for my inspection). This land inspection will be used as the basis for renewing my lease for 30+ years.

I have been cleaning out the storage under the house and will need to fix a few things in the downstairs bathroom. This will give the worker a bathroom without having to interact with the dogs who will be inside during the farm work.

I need to recharge the car battery I mounted on the ARV for my sprayer and need to finish spraying areas of the farm today before the rain.

A neighbor is having garage door issues and I’ll go by and see if I can fix it. I don’t know if it is the electronic opener control I recently fixed or a physical issue.

Since my friends farm is on the way, I’ll pick up the trash bags and put them in the truck bed.

I’ll need to go into Captain Cook at lunchtime and will take the worker with me. He probably won’t have lunch with him. I’ll stop by the post office and get the mail. I have a new pillowcase arriving. It was one of those free-just-pay-shipping deals and supposed to be pretty good. My female Lab, Olena, has a tendency of licking pillows and I hope this may help stop her.

Somewhere around 4 or 5pm I’ll take the worker back to Holualoa. On the way will be a stop at the transfer station to drop off the trash.

One of the workers there has a moped whose lights went out. I offered to bring my tester and see if it is just a bulb or fuse.

The workers are going to be having a get-together after coffee pulping and I may attend. There will be a pool 🙂

Sometime later I’ll head further north into Kailua-Kona itself. Things there have slowed a bit now once the Ironman race was over and people started to leave the island.

My main reason for hitting town before midnight is that I get a free meal at Denny’s for my birthday. I try never to pass up a free meal!

So that is my schedule for this birthday. As you can see, I have a pretty easy day, unlike most days!

3 or 4 years ago my neighbor and I were looking for someone to do some farm work. We had a Craigslist ad posted and we got a phone call from a kid who was working as a waiter on the inter-island cruise ship. He had decided it was not what he wanted to be doing and left the ship when it was docked in Kona.

Not knowing anyone here nor having any place to stay, he slept outdoors that first night. I went into town and met him on Thursday and he was ready and able to do the job we needed. He mentioned that he could get a tent and sleep on the farm, but we had a better solution. There was a cottage (a tiny house of sorts) and he stayed there. So within a day, he had a job and a place to stay.

As the months went on, he became a bit restless, as teenagers do and he went on to take a couple jobs here on island and then on to Oahu. Finally he moved back to the mainland. He took some programming classes and all of a sudden ended up on Oahu again.

So Thursday evening I get a text message that he is on his way to the mainland for an extended trip, but is stuck at our airport. Seems he had a flight from Honolulu to Kona to the mainland and missed a connection. That meant stuck in Kona for the night. I was unable to drive up to the airport that night but met him in the morning for breakfast. Since he had a 9:40pm flight, we did a bit of driving around while I picked up some supplies. He met a friend on a jobsite and made some programming contacts at a local farm. Then I took him to the farm where he lived before and he was able to shower. I heated up some chili and we headed down to Two Step to the Friday night pot luck. There he visited with many people he knew when he was here 2 years ago.

At dusk I drove him back to the airport and as I write this, he is back in California.

The deja vu part of this story is that while we were driving from the airport and doing that shopping, he mentioned that he had a job prospect on the mainland but was not sure if and when it would start. I took him by the limo company here and they were ready to him him for a couple week project where they are short drivers.

Twice now he has visited this island unexpectedly, and twice, within 24 hours he has found a job and friends.

I guess it can’t be all that bad living the the middle of the Pacific after all, is it?

When I moved here from the mainland, I didn’t ship a TV. I bought one and initially used the VCR I shipped along with a tremendous number of VCR tapes.

The last people in the house had cable TV and internet, but I only wanted internet at the time. When I hooked up the router to the cable, I also tried connecting the cable to the TV antenna connection on the TV and scanned for channels. I was surprised to find 20 or more channels. Because of the filtering they used on the cable, these were general low tier channels and many were noisy of dropped out. Still, there was enough to watch if I cared to.

The cable company is in the process of changing over to all digital, so these channels are disappearing.

I have multiple Roku devices and a TV with Roku built in. My viewing consists of a combination of free streaming channels and Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

My house is around the way from where I could pick up broadcast channels from Maui, so streaming it is.

Many decades ago I had a big satellite dish and had many channels for very little money. You could subscribe to ‘packages’ of channels, however you also could just pick and choose Ala-carte. For less than $400 a year I had HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, WTBS, WGN, the weather channel and so on totaling perhaps 30 channels. My signal came from the same satellites that the networks used, unlike Dish and others that take these same signals and redirect them back up to another satellite and back to viewers. You have no idea how clear the original signals were before people like Dish and the cable companies get hold of them and compress the signals.

So in any event, I recently lost a bunch of channels, but I’ll get by. 13 years of no cable TV bill was a great run.

Does any of this make sense to you? Is this what our country has become?

Note the following: 2 boys lift and toss a shopping cart over a railing and seriously injure a woman.

The court decides that the kids are 10% responsible, the security company 25% responsible and the mall 65% responsible.