We’re experiencing a winter storm at the moment. Perhaps related though not reported as such, maybe you’ve seen the news that a Hawaiian Airlines Phoenix-Honolulu flight yesterday experienced severe turbulence. Thirty six people were treated, of those 20 were transported for further treatment, and 11 of those were seriously injured. It was a blustery day yesterday, and the ocean was rough and choppy, with lots of white caps, everywhere we could see. It’s a good thing the Lighted Boat Parade wasn’t scheduled for yesterday. We watched kids standing at the end of the pier enjoying the occasional wave crashing over them. I just hoped they wouldn’t get washed out to sea. The hard rain started at our place around 5:30pm. We received an inch in just over an hour.
Around 2am we had a long-lasting, exciting thunderstorm. There were lightning flashes in the sky that were occurring every few seconds, and sometimes close and blindingly bright. I sat outside and tried to film it on my trusty iPhone. It didn’t correctly capture my experience, but you get the idea. It wasn’t pitch black when there wasn’t lightning, though that’s the way the video is. Here is a screenshot I made from one of the videos, and two short videos. Big storm, but not all that much more rain throughout the night. Only another inch added to the 5:30pm downpour.
For the few of you who are curious or care, during the thunderstorm we brought our cat out of her private sleeping quarters, the laundry room. She’s not a dog, though, and didn’t seem all that nervous or agitated about the thunderstorm. In fact, the rest of the night she was the sometimes sleeping, but more often playful, attacking pest she normally is, waking me up multiple times by bringing her favorite self-generated ball (felted from her fur) on the bed and playing with it, sleeping on my head, sleeping on my legs and attacking me if I moved. She has sealed her fate of sleeping in the laundry room whenever I’m home.
Continuing on topics from previous posts … I was excited when my dragon lava photo got printed in West Hawaii Today on Friday. I only learned the Sunday prior, almost two weeks after it was taken, that I had shared a photo with a dragon in it. While we were at breakfast out, a friend just wanted a photo of what we had seen the night prior, so I just quickly texted two. When she later shared it had a dragon in it, I wanted to share it with a wider audience.
Before I submitted it to the paper, I shared it with several people and wanted to give credit where credit was due, and said it was Rune’s photo. But when I was going to submit it to the paper and looked at the information to find the date and time, I noticed it was taken on an iPhone XS, my phone. It made sense since it wasn’t as close up as the photos taken on Rune’s DSLR and my shot included more of the clouds and smoke.
After it got published with my name, people tried to keep me honest. Starting bright and early with my friend who texted me at 5:22am, “Get u~~p Ur pic is on WHT i thought its Rune’s.” I happened to get up at 4am that day because it was raining pretty hard, but I didn’t see the text until 5:30 when I picked up my phone. And a few people commented about me taking credit for Rune’s photo. It’s all so funny.
I’m always tickled by serendipity. Another example happened around the same time, with my house guests. My friend’s wife shared that she’s buying adjoining parcels of land in another state and wants to restore the native plants and forest in that area. I looked up again a friend of a friend’s website, Future Forests Nursery. It was a great fit with my friend’s wife’s interests, and she managed to join a tour in their short visit here. Later that evening she was bubbling with enthusiasm and so very impressed with Jill Wagner’s knowledge and her work.
Hubby and I are going to have to take a tour and/or have her visit and assess our farm and get to know Jill in her professional capacity. Maybe this will help us figure out possibilities of how we can best move forward from our coffee farm. I had also recently talked with someone who many years ago replaced coffee trees with native trees and received a federal grant to do so, and who also has bee hives to satisfy the agricultural designation of the land. We’ll have to investigate and inform ourselves of what options there are. If the low yield we got this year ends up not being an anomaly, running this farm as we have been makes no sense. Hubby shared this article, “Former White House Chef Says Coffee Will Be ‘Quite Scarce’ in the Near Future.”
To the theme of diversifying the farm beyond coffee, and another update on a previous topic, the tree babies … unfortunately, one of our recently planted tree babies didn’t survive. It made me realize that we actually have pretty good success with most things we plant, if the pigs don’t attack them. Luckily, we had planted two cherimoya seedlings. One is fine; one is dead, probably not enough soil where we planted it. There are areas in the land that have dense, very hard blue rock beneath the surface soil. It seems a bit early to hit that problem, though. Maybe the roots got damaged during the transfer out of the pot. We have a few more cherimoya seedlings in pots in our courtyard, so we can plant another.
As to coffee … because we had such a low coffee yield, and peaberry is about 5% of that, we had a dismal amount of peaberry to offer, and I suspect we won’t have any more of note in our final dry milling of this season’s coffee. We did have some nice rains late November and December, so we’re having occasional Kona snow (coffee blossoms). We’ll probably have a round at the turn of the year thanks to this storm. It’s hard, though, because we see all the snow on the trees closest to the house, and that’s the block up for pruning in a month or so. Bye, bye, budding coffee fruit.
Hahahahaha: “attacking pest she normally is, waking me up multiple times by bringing her favorite self-generated ball (felted from her fur) on the bed and playing with it, sleeping on my head, sleeping on my legs and attacking me if I moved.”
You laugh because you know that problem!