Close

Close was Originally Posted on November 13, 2009 by lavarock

Close

This just in: Two secret diesel-electric Japanese submarines have been uncovered, just off the coast of Oahu, where they were sunk during the war. National Geographic will have a TV special on these around Nov 17th.

As I was saying, close by me, we had a light dusting of snow. It was hard to see on the web cams, but Mauna Kea definitely had snow today early in the morning, then it melted and reformed at dusk. There may or may not be lots of snow there in the morning.

Yesterday we had absolutely fantastic (or should I say FUNtastic) weather. The storm took the vog away and the air was very clear. The nighttime sky was also very clear with lots of stars.

Over at Oahu’s Ala Wai canal, they brought out a boom to contain a small oil slick. It appears some guy did laundry in the water and an oil slick headed towards the harbor.

Lately all you have heard is that the economy is horrible. That is until you realize that this is the highest unemployment since (drum roll… the mid 1980’s). So we just passed 1980’s unemployment rate. Interesting. Still, never trust statistics. Over the years the government has tweaked what being unemployed means. It is not just that these people are out of work; they have to be looking fro work. So, I can go from being unemployed and drop off the radar, if I stop looking for a job. It makes sense, but then it makes it harder to compare numbers now with numbers then, if the rules have changed.

I stopped by the U.S.D.A. office today to go over my farm contract. My administrator will stop by tomorrow to take some photos, and probably Monday I will submit some of my last receipts to close out the contract.

A few days from now, the leaseholder will come by too. I think they will be pleasantly surprised because last time there were no crops in the ground and that was like, April. How time flies!

Now that I have a working mower again, I have already cut the grass in the coffee rows and am now attacking the tall grass, some of which is growing between the coffee trees. This stuff easily grows 10 feet and taller and resembles stalks of bamboo. There is bamboo nearby but I think this is quite different. In any event, I hope to get it under control soon.

As for the trees, we could use lots more rain because the flood watch may have been useful across the state; we got very little rain here. Also, my tanks are not yet hooked up to the roof and may not be until after the beginning of the year. Still, I have picked the first round from the new trees and am ready to go through the rows again. As I mentioned earlier in blogs, the first pot of coffee from the new trees will be interesting, and in hindsight, very, very expensive! Next year I’ll have a really nice crop and the year after will be in full production.

For those of you who use Windows systems, have you been using Firefox, an alternative browser from Mozilla. Since it is open-source, people worldwide have added many options. I like the one that shows me what is up for sale at Woot.Com by adding text to the bottom right of the browser. The Beta version of the software is really fast. That beta version will be a release candidate soon. Also, I have used their Thunderbird email program for years and love it. There is a “gotcha” during install. I access multiple mailboxes as separate identities rather than merge all the mail in one big intray. This allows me to switch between email accounts all in one program. However, when installing a new POP email account, the default is to put all the mail in the global mailbox. The other default is to download all email from the server to the local computer and delete the messages on the server. Since I sometimes want to read the message from another computer or online, I opt to keep the original messages on the server. It is easy to set that option, but generally new users choose the default and then you can’t put the messages back up. You just have to not download the messages into the new account until you have modified the server setting. If people really want to try Thunderbird and not be caught by this, I’d be happy to step-by-step describe how to install and skip this option. The program is really good and stable!

Enough for now, I have paperwork to do.