TREMBLES
Minor earth quakes are not too uncommon here but until March 8th we’d not had one that I’d noticed. This time Myrna, her sister Dolores and I were still sitting at the dinning table after supper when I noticed a tremor, we all stopped talking and looked at each other as in one second it progressed to a sharp shock wave and mild shaking over 3 seconds and a cracking sound then subsided over the next couple seconds. Five or six seconds total, no damage, but the most impressive earthquake I ever experienced. Turns out it registered between 4.4 and 5 and was located only a few miles Northwest and 14 miles down. This is when the light frame construction we live in is a safer place to be than heavier materials that could crush a person. There are no aftershocks to report.
The next day we went snorkeling at the Kapoho tide pools, toured down the coast to Kalapona, saw turtles south of Hilo
Now it is April 1st and I’m wondering how a whole month slipped by. Actually I know how. The first half we had three sets of delightful company and the second half we took turns having a cold.
We still see whales occasionally and Myrna was even awakened by their loud slapping once last week but they no longer lay around on the surface for long. By now some are probably on their way back to the Alaskan feeding grounds and those remaining are probably thinking hard about breaking their winter fast. We will miss them.
I just got a couple loaves of banana nut bread out of the oven made with wheat I brought (still), macadamia nuts I gathered from three different places, and 7 or 8 of the small bananas like I usually get from our yard or the vacant lot next door. The past week or 10 days, however, we’ve not had our own so this time I found a bunch at the Hakalau community park. A couple days after they started ripening one of our own began turning yellow but that was a ‘problem’ easily solved when I discovered that neighbors we’ve sometimes gotten bananas from were themselves out. We freeze some bananas and other fruit but I doubt I’ll ever bother canning any with such year round availability here. I don’t think (since I just ate a big slice) that I’m going to freeze one of those banana/nut breads either!
The stage that the tilapia experiment has reached is that I now have two kinds (11 fish total) in a 100 gallon stock tank that is watered by putting a gutter down spout into it when needed. Unlike cold water fish, tilapias not only don’t require running water, they can actually do better if algae are allowed to grow in the water because they are gill strainers so that every breath they take gathers food for them also. I’ve fertilized the water with a little composted chicken manure to encourage the algae and I’ve put dolomite and egg shells on the bottom to provide a substrate for the kinds of bacteria that breakdown the metabolites of the fish. My main question is can I grow the protein that the fish need in addition to the algae. Because the water is cloudy from my fertilizing it is hard to tell what they eat from my offerings so I’m not sure if they ate the shredded coconut, sweet potato leaves or heloconia leaves. One offering that they like enough for me to be sure is meal worms (beetle larva) that grow in our compost tumblers. That adds another way to recycle. They also like earth worms but I’d rather have them in my garden. And, of course, the fish will eat all the mosquito wigglers that hatch in the tank and all the termite queens that fall in it when their colonizing season begins. I will use a light over the water to draw termites to the fish. The commercial growers keep two varieties or more separately and hybridize them to produce a nearly all male offspring because males grow faster and bigger than females. That is too much trouble to pay off for a small back yard tank so we will have to be happy with eating any size we get. Aloha!
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