DO NOT WORRY, I'M FINE

I was planning on getting back to writing here on the blog next week, as I'll be having Spring Break and will have some extra time and a few things going on, but I figured it'd be prudent of me to write this now.

A few minutes ago, as I'm sure you probably know if you're reading this on Friday (tomorrow for me) that an 8.9-magnitude earthquake happened a couple of hundred miles off of the coast of Japan. I haven't heard much about the damage in Japan, but I hope the damage is not too bad, and the people there are safe.

If you're here reading this, it's because you're wanting to know how I'm doing here.  It's true that as I write this  (after midnight Colorado time), Hilo is under a tsunami warning, with the first wave expected to hit around 3 a.m.  That said, I'm fine and will remain so.  I'm well above any area that will be hit by the tsunami.  No need to worry about me.

I just received a call from the secretary of the school that I'm working at, and she's collecting the servers and other tech stuff from the school sites and hauling them to higher ground.

With any luck, the waves will die down before they get here, and life tomorrow will be business as usual with the added conversation of another disaster averted for the town of Hilo.  If that's not the case, I'll be posting here and possibly on twitter.

Ok.  That's all for now.  I have a feeling I'll be up pretty early tomorrow, so I'm going to try and get some sleep while I can.

Thanks for checking in, and I'm sure I'll talk with all of you soon.

EDIT: Just as I hit "post", at exactly 10 p.m., the first warning siren kicked on in town. It's a bit creepy, to be honest.

Fun With the Yellow Pages

Let's say you found yourself in a situation where you desperately needed 10 gallons of hot sauce (I'd recommend Sriracha, it's great) AND you needed a propane stove to cook on?  Why go two places when you can go to just one? Just call Scoshi World!

Rumor has it they also deal in septic supplies..... talk about covering all the bases!

The Finer Points of Buckets

So my bucket collecting days are all pau (Hawaiian Word of the Day: pau [pow] - finished, done, complete), and that's good and bad.  At the end, I was collecting  at least 50 five-gallon buckets full of green waste a week.  On the upside, it made my arms really strong.  But with the large amount of compost we now have on hand, and with the rainy season quickly approaching (making dry compost piles a figment of everyone's imagination), it was decided to put compost creation and therefore bucket collection on hold indefinitely. Chances are we'll be back at it in the spring.

Still, you know it's time to stop when you start getting buckets like this one:

Trouble in Paradise

The unthinkable of unthinkables has occurred.

My hammock started to rip.

I know what you all are thinking, and the answer is "Yes, it is serious!"  I've found that I've come to depend on my hammock as a place of refuge and comfort at all times (except when it's really windy or rainy or the mosquitoes are really bad).

But there is good news.  

There's a name we've given for the living arrangements I have (tarps and corrugated metal roofing as bathroom walls, urinate on whatever trees look like they need it, plywood floors with garage paint on them, and yet hot water on demand, a fully functioning recording studio, and internet), and the term is "farm chic."

Therefore in true farm chic fashion, I've fixed my hammock.

The Four Subaru Outbacks of the Apocalypse

This car (or its owner) believes I'm the Antichrist.

(post time: 2 minutes...thus the uncropped photo)

Because 10 Minutes Isn't Enough....

And 15 minutes is more than you're legally allowed.

Son of Jor-El...

Imagine I photoshopped a potato rake in there somewhere

KNEEL BEFORE ZOD!!!

Like everyone from Krypton, our farm is now powered by the Earth's yellow sun.  Our improvements were extensive and very effective.  We swapped out four low wattage panels for twelve high watt ones, added a charge controller, a DC monitoring system, rewired the power shed, added  door to the battery room, and generally made everything better.

Before we were getting a max of 2.5 KWh out of our solar, and now we're at 6 KWh on really cloudy days, and up to 20 KWh on sunny days in the summer.  Life is good.  We can now use electric fridges, power up the studio w/out running the generator, and I'm going to invest in a nice surround sound system after Christmas.

I was planning a long detailed blog about this, but there's no way I could do that in 7 minutes.....plus it'd be boring.

Strangely enough, we were doing all of this work at the same time that Des blogged about her publicity she and her mom were getting about their system.  I really wanted to blog about it then, but we didn't have all of the components yet.

Also strange in the timing, Hawtness.com posted this photo, that basically represents exactly what our farm and system look like now:

I swear I didn't photoshop that at all