I keep meaning to post a whole ting about my hawaii trip with photos but 1) i have no time and 2) i have so damned many photos to go through.

So here’s a sample set i like.

I was in the town of Hawi, northenmost town on the Big Island of Hawaii. This is King Kamehameha’s birthplace, and a sort of artsy enclave unlike the more touristy center of Kailua-Kona.

I was walking from a store that sold jewelry across the street to a fantastic tattoo shop I’ll post more about later (i only wish I’d had time to get tattooed). But i found this lizard (an anole, in Hawaiian, which is not the same as a gecko). I picked him up and we bonded; I could NOT get him to crawl off me and onto a nice safe branch. Seemed he was happier crawling up my arm to see the highest point.

Click the photo for a slide show.

(this is exported from iphoto, i’m not sure i like the way it builds the pages, but i didn’t feel like waiting on stupid flickr uploads)

Dive Makai, the fine folks I was diving with the last two weeks, gave me a whole CD full of photos taken on our dives as a birthday present. Though that wasn’t as great as the dive i had on my actual birthday with my man Todd Emmons (three different kinds of scorpion fish (Leaf scorpion, decoy scorpion, and a huge titan scorpion) on one dive, plus we got to watch a triton’s trumpet dine on a crown-of-thorns starfish (there was much slow-mo carnage), and i got down to 150 feet in a Dr. Seuss landscape of wire coral and nitrogen narcosis.)

Still, it was pretty fuckin’ cool.

Most of the shots are, you know fish, which you’d love if you’re into that sort of thing (vs the ray-feasts-upon-the-flesh kind of fish.). But here’s one of yours truly, just to show how completely dorky i look under water. What is the deal with those chipmunk cheeks?

As usual, click for a bigger version of the image.

I was gonna save this for some sort of HNT posting but i may have a good bruise picture for that.

Words can’t add much here.

That’s me (the one without the wings). I’m actually touching the manta (a no-no, but in the moment – well, you know how I get, I’m all hands.)

click the image to get a larger version – this is from a video another diver made of last tuesday’s Manta dive. I’d like to post a bit of the video but it’s in some weird format i can’t figure out how to convert. If anyone’s a whiz kid with the video maybe you can help me out with how to do that.

I keep thinking of profound (or so it seems at the time, but maybe that’s the nitrogen narcosis) things to blog, when I’m under water, or on a dive boat, or looking at pretty girls sunning themselves on beaches, lizard-like in the hot sun.

But then later, here in my condo, between the cooking of dinners and the bedding-down of kids, and the daily fatigue of a trip on the go, i can’t recall what I meant to write, or i can’t summon the energy, or simply don’t have time.

I’m not complaining. Snorkeling, diving, hiking lava flows, or just laying around on a beach in the hot sun, all beat out blogging. But i had a vague notion of a daily travel blog as with my fiji trip. For some reason, it simple hasn’t seemed important.

I hope, though, to have pictures to post when i get home at the end of this week; and possibly video since I have a DVD of my manta dive last week, professionally-shot footage that one of the video people described as ‘national geographic quality’.

I’m here for three more days. Tonight, we have the full tourist experience, the luau. Tomorrow is my birthday, and i plan to spend it underwater, hopefully with an all-day adventure trip that will take me to the far-south Kona coast to dive areas that rarely see dive boats; last time I did one of these trips I saw a twelve-foot hammerhead, so I’m looking forward to it. Wednesday is my last full day here, and while plans may change, my youngest daughter wants me to rent a harley and take here for a ride. And who can say no when a pretty little girls says take me for a ride, daddy?

This trip has gone by far too quickly. I’ve been busy, yet not in any way harried. I’ve had time to do most of what i wanted to do (not all, it seems that cannot happen on a hawaii trip – i need to live here). I do not look forward to being home or to dealing with Real Life; only missing friends (both real life and virtual/distant whom I lack time to keep in touch with while I’m here) makes me in any way long for anything but this. My kids asked for my three wishes yesterday as part of some game, and my first was to live here, and the second was to transport certain key individuals here with me.

The islands call me. I hear it all the time, and never more than when I’m here. Nevermind that the islands in my genes are in a loch in scotland; this is home.

Whump

That was the sound of me collapsing at the end of my week. As of now i’m on vacation, until December first.

I’m not actually gone yet – that’s still (as of now) about 78 hours away. But mentally i’m already high above the pacific, thinking about hula girls and slack-key guitar, and hoping my flight (Oceanic Air flight number 816) doesn’t find itself a little off course.

This is about a mile from my condo; the dock on the right is in front of the King Kam hotel, and it’s where the dive boat i favored used to go out (though they’ve moved north to the small boat harbor, and they’ve also sold, so i dunno if i’ll still use ’em).

Keep an eye on that web cam, you just might see me. But not, you know, doing a show. You have to go look for Merrick for that action.

It’s been a long and emotionally complicated week, and that ain’t over. My mother still needs at least five days of care in the three days I have left, my mother in law’s computer woes got worse (woise? Woes got Woise? Something like that), in that her computer went from needing a new drive to needing a new entire computer, which of course won’t get here til’ I’m gone so now I have to find her someone to set up her new mac.

And there’s other shit complicating my life, small and large, but fuck it, I’m on vacation. That is going away for the next three weeks. Meanwhile, hula girls, bikini girls, girls in wetsuits (god you know i love girls in wetsuits), and a lot of not thinking. Though if i’m lucky, some writing, and if you-all are non-lucky, there will be blogging.

Vacation. I’ve forgotten what that feels like.

Well, today I:

1) paid for my condo in kona, for a trip one month from today.

2) read the reports on a historically large earthquake in that same region.

In that order.

So you know, life remains interesting. More as I learn if this has any effect on me apart from possibly meaning it’ll be easier than usual to get reservations at the best luaus.

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Well, this isn’t sounding like it’s too terribly serious. Big pain in the ass for those who saw damage to their houses, and I’m sure, scary as hell, but unless i hear otherwise from the condo joint, i’m thinking all is well. Though I’m thinking a lot of silly people will now cancel plans for travel and crowds may be down.