Na Pali Cliffs

We left the harbor at 6:00AM and the Captain drove the big power-cat down the coast past the missile-launching and tracking site, and around the corner of the island into 6-foot swells and driving seaspray. I got kinda soaked as the seas were a bit rough but despite every effort (it seemed) not a trace of seasickness.

About an hour later we pulled around to the far-opposite side of Kauai, below Hanalei, and drifted back down the coast with the wind and current, calm now as the sun rose up and lit the incredible, magnificent cliffs.

Their immense scale is positively dwarfing and nearly incomprehensible - one sand dune against the cliffs that the Captain pointed-to was over 6-stories tall and the cliff-spire behind it taller than the Empire State Building. Freakin' Amazing!

Afterwards we went over the channel to the small, "forbidden" island of Ni'Ihau which is inhabited solely by native Hawaiians living in the old style (and owned by the Robinson family who own the sugar mill), and went snorkeling at a cinder-cone that stuck out of the water.

Spinner dolphins greeted us and surfed the bow-wave of the big catamaran.

Beauty and the Ugly Beast - chores

As you can see from the damnmatically enhanced photos, the hallway needs some help - but jeeze I hate this leaky beast of a machine, this crappy Hoover SteamVac V2 Widepath with Auto-Rinse - one that dribbles fluid everywhere like a poor old incontinent doggy. It needs a Veterinarian with some sodium pentothal - complete re-engineering.

UPDATE: What a freaking ill-begotten, badly-designed, downright-ugly, POS machine - the short, nasty, and brutish life of a Hoover SteamVac V2 Widepath with Auto Rinse...it committed steam-vac seppuku on the carpet.
And it's NOT a "steam-vac" - that's stretching things hugely. At best it's, "Hot Water Enhanced" - and it dribbles warm-water like a drunken sorority sister with too much Chablis at a garden party.
The stupid and poorly designed Hoover SteamVac V2 Widepath With Auto Rinse's detergent tank, the thing that has **DO NOT REMOVE FROM TANK** boldly written on it and repeated in several locations in the manual - as if that were any excuse, while in use detached itself and leapt to it's dribbly death.
It f*ING detached itself.
I managed to finish the hallway while holding the damn tank in place with one hand while using a wet, bare-foot to lift the cord out of the way and keep from running over it.
Maybe duct-tape will work, but I fear the dribbly detergent has a way of loosening the adhesive.
Maybe it can be epoxied once it's dry.
I hate it to death but we have carpet everywhere (except in the kitchen and bathrooms) and it gets hammered.

But it gets the job done nicely on the area rugs - it's just that it's so obviously made at the least-bid, lowest-engineered level, from cheap quality and cheaply designed plastic.

Backcountry Zipline

Backcountry Adventures Kauai, puts on a very good show. They do Tubing also, but we chose to Zip since we had already been Flumin' - and we were sorry to hear from them that "Flumin' Da Ditch" on the Big Island was shut-down on account of the earthquake. It was a good local-jobs program.

click for embigginationTo the left above you can see the take-off ramp for another section of the zip-line that crossed further over the valley, above the treetops and over the river.
It was pretty neat stuff that even Da Guurlz (wife and her friend) enjoyed.

Memorial Day 2008

Thanks be to God and the mighty brave boys who flew in slender aluminum cylinders, high into the midst of enemy flak and fire many decades ago, today we don't have to watch the skies above for howling Stukas, Messerschmitt Bf 109's, or Focke-Wulf 190's - but we still can feel the rumble of our ancient engines on high and the wind sweeping through our thinning hair. What a ride.

And I only wish more of those who are so richly rewarded and highly affluent, living below in this region of impossible wealth and greed had a better grasp of why choosing to learn a foreign language like French or German is a valuable cultural and personal asset, something rather distinct from a dominant paradigm being forced upon them...


Bunch of tofu-eating, kool-aid drinking, prius driving, ecoBamaweenies.

Changing Weather

The heat is coming up and the green spinach of springtime is already fading to the hot and dizzy blond of summer, the mirage was fierce at Practice.
I was shooting a new-to-me load of Privi Partizan 75-grain Match and I had a hard time seeing the holes through the morning haze and where it was printing. It was printing low. I shot somewhere in the high 300's.

I'm going to take a Blogcation for a couple weeks, a Blogiatus as it were or a Blogattical.
It's only going to be dryer and hotter when I get back.
Enjoy!