Spring Break Day Two: Goat Farm The excitement today was the Keiki Fun play group visit to the Lava Rocks Goat Farm, home of Puna Goat Cheese. They'd visited before, last year, and Max was quite excited about going back. It's a small family operation, nice folks who make really nice cheese. I think the pictures pretty much speak for themselves...

  ¶ Tuesday, March 28, 2006 0 comments

  Spring Break Day One: Rainy Volcano By a strange twist of fate, a nearly unprecedented failure of Murphy's Law, Max and I have the same Spring Break! Needless to say, there's more than a few "sometime soon" trips that we've been saving up. The complication: a record-breaking run of heavy rains (I'm talking state-wide flash flood and tornado warnings, thunderstorms, dam failures, sewage spills, etc.) of six weeks and counting, expected to continue at least to this weekend. Nonetheless, the first thing on Max's list was a hike in the Kilauea caldera, so...

Here is the view from the Halemaumau overlook parking lot. The steam really does rise from the ground all over the place, and the cool, wet conditions highlighted the vents. There were a few vents close enough (or on) the path to allow us to feel the rising steam, and it really was steam! There's a definite sulpher smell around, too.

The Halemaumau crater is a small subcrater within the Kilauea caldera, the remains of an upflow from the early 1980s.	The crater is a bit over a mile across, and about 250 feet deep

This is a close-up of the steam vents and floor inside the caldera from the overlook. It's hard to describe just how different this kind of landscape is. It's a different planet. It's certainly not earth, yet.
	This is a view of the 1984 flow field: it's still solid rock, unadorned by vegetation or wear after two decades. Most of what we were walking on was much older, with scrub grass and bushes (see below). When we got to this point on the trail, about a half-mile in, Max decided that we'd gone far enough.
	One of the few plants growing in the caldera is 'Ohelo, a berry bush. Apparently it's one of the only things for the local endangered nene geese to eat, so there are signs all over telling us not to eat them. But at the supermarket later that day, I spotted some Ohelo-lilikoi-guava preserves. Haven't tried them yet.
After we reached the edge of the new lava field, it was a bit hard to tell where the path was. I went ahead a bit anyway, just to scout. Max is wearing the rainshell that we bought in Seattle! You can see the divide between the newer flow (foreground) and the older field (background).

  ¶ Tuesday, March 28, 2006 0 comments

  The New Fridge Door Blogging is the new Refrigerator Door:

Max is still not painting very representationally. At school, they just paint watercolors across the whole paper; at home, Max has a tendency to ask me for help making specific shapes, at least once or twice, then he improvises. Recently, we were painting penguins (still his favorite animal, of course; we've added And Tango Makes Three to our collection of "chick"-lit) and after we collaborated on a few (in various reds and blues), this was his independent effort.
Sometimes Max just likes to experiment with colors, and the watercolor acrylics are great for mixing and layering. There's about 20 layers of paint here, and he only stopped because he ran out of colors and the paper (a big roll of calculator paper) was starting to disintegrate. If he did this on canvas, and we gave it a really abstruse title, it'd sell for .... dollars, at least.
Max still has the performing bug, too. Over at his friend Kaj's house last week, Max was MC'ing the premier of a new movie: kind of a cross between Singin' In The Rain and March of the Penguins...

Blogging is the new "marks on the wall":

Max can stand flat on his feet and put his chin on top of the kitchen bar. Of course, when we moved in he could walk clean under it. He can also reach the bottom edge of the CD rack on the wall -- the one we put up to keep his CDs out of his reach -- and open the gate on the front door by himself.

Of course, his former diaper table no longer fits. Not even close! Its new function is as a multi-level home for his stuffed animals, temporarily evicted in the process of searching for the rightful owners to some of their recently laundered clothes.

  ¶ Tuesday, March 28, 2006 0 comments

  Changes Growing!

Look how long he is!

Endings

It's been four years plus in the making, but Woody finally finished Max's baby blanket! To be fair, there were a couple of years in there where she couldn't keep a knitting project out for fear of Max undoing it, but now that he's older, she's been working on it regularly. Max loves it, and has already selected her next project: a sweater for him! We picked out yarn -- he picked out the color -- last weekend.

Max's best friend -- Caden, in the "Scotland" shirt -- left Hilo this week, which was sad for all of us. Caden's parents, like Caden, have been in our lives here almost since we arrived, and we'll all miss them. That didn't stop the kids -- Caden is flanked by longtime running-mates Kaj and Sienna -- from having a rollicking time at Auntie Julie's Play Group last Friday. Max provided entertainment, reading his favorite book of penguin poems (Judy Sierra's Antarctic Antics in dramatic style.

Beginnings

	I'm not much for yard work, I'll admit. So it was with some satisfaction that I finally got around to destroying (which Max enjoyed) and removing the old wooden bench swing -- useless since we arrived -- on the patio. Max answered the question of what to do with that space pretty quickly, "I wish we had a two-person swing"....
	This was a success! Max's regular patio-snacks have all been in the swing since it went up. Now, I'm just waiting for a break in the rain so I can mow....

  ¶ Friday, March 03, 2006 0 comments