Hardly Working Or Working Hard?

I have to admit not posting much of late. There were times I posted multiple times a day. Now I am lucky if I post a few times a month. So what has been going on?

I had a couple of relatives move here and they have been fixing up the bottom level of the house and making it livable. It used to be an old power room and a bedroom. Now it is a bedroom, full bath, kitchen, living room and lanai. It is almost complete as they are just putting up the last of the molding. We had help at the beginning with the floor foists and walls but have install most of the flooring, some of the plumbing and all of the electrical. I may post some photos when it is finally complete.

I have been lax working on the farm involving multiple issues with the tractor and mower and needed to assemble a canopy for the truck, tractor and storage. I have had most of the coffee trees heavily pruned and try my best to cut the grass and weeds, however we have had our fair share of rain. An example, a couple of days ago I was up in town and it sprinkled. However just 15 miles away the farm got 4 inches of rain. To make it worse, those 4 inches accumulated in 1 hour. Imagine the torrential rain and flooding.

I need to replant areas of coffee trees and rather than spend thousands of dollars buying them, I will grow them myself. I also need to propagate many fruit trees to be fully planted.

I have taken over the hosting oif our Coffee Farmers website (I’m a founding member of the organization so I am donating much of my time and resources). We are taking the site from a Windows host to a Unix host and eliminating a lot of specialized code and using off-the-shelf plugins. This will allow others to work on the site rather than a paid programmer.

This is the same organization who successfully brought suit against many large companies (a warehouse club, well-known supermarket chains and online sellers) who were advertising coffee as having Kona coffee in it, but was either a smidgen or less). Granted, the supermarkets and warehouse club didn’t know what they were selling, just having gotten it from distributors who were cheating the consumers. Still, they were put on notice that they need to have these suppliers assure them of authenticity. The suit is being settled by most companies and the fund is up over $13 million dollars so far. I personally will probably not get much at all, but the main thrust was to make it know that these practices were harming the 800 or so farmers who actually grow the coffee and not the evil people putting a sprinkling of Kona beans in with crappy overseas produced coffee and calling it Kona.

I also am on the Board of Directors of a non-profit which welcome visitors to the island and helps visitors find tours and places of interest to explore. We have had real challenges staying afloat during the pandemic but have recently seem large influxes of visitors arrive.

I have worked with a few local businesses to change over to VOIP phone service. This was a much-needed addition to help them through personnel shortages. One example is a limo company. They closed their one warehouse location where they performed dispatching and now have 3 people dispatching from their homes. If it is not their shift, they set their telephone to Do Not Disturb, because all 3 phones are set top ring on an inbound call.

A friend wants to set up a website for his American Legion Post and get Mail Chimp newsletters set up. A neighbor has a friend who needs a router set up.

I have many other projects and little time to get it all done. They include a remodel of the upstairs of the house wich involves the master bathroom, the hall bathroom and kitchen.

And so it goes…. Thank Goodness I am retired or I would have no time at all.