Hakalau Market and Island travel

Most Hakalau market days some of us attend more for the 'jam' than for the food.  Pictured at right are Art on mouth harp, Barbara on guitar, Myrna on ukulele, Scott on guitar and myself on tub bass.  Others join in for some songs.  Last week we had another guitar, and another ukulele so Scott played mandolin. In the event of rain the market is held on the street-side lanai in front of Akiko's Bed and Breakfast and the Jam is just inside the entryway to the great room.  We are actually easier to hear there under the protection of the building from the breeze.  Market attendance has been growing to where I think we may have hit 100 if you count the many children running about and rolling on the grass.  One couple has been bringing fresh fish that they catch at South Point.  Two vendors have held cooking demonstrations to educate us on how to use their ethnic produce.
One of the things that indicates a lot about the nature of the people in our neighborhood (and the price of gas) is that about half of the cars (not counting the pickups that many drive) are hybrids.  Today I drove our THINK electric car to the post office to get a package.  At that moment 2/3's of the cars at the post office were electrics because Tom arrived in his Leaf at the same time I was there.  By the way, the THINK  has not been without a glitch.    One morning when Myrna was starting to drive to work it stopped completely as she was adjusting her mirror.  After a couple hours of troubleshooting I learned that adjusting either mirror would blow a fuse which in turn tripped a relay killing the engine.  I talked to a factory tech eventually who agreed that the most likely fix would be a new switch but when that arrived we still had the same problem.  It could be the hot wire from the switch to the mirrors but in the meantime, at least, we've adjusted the mirrors for Myrna and will leave them there. 

Last week our son from Oregon visited for the first time.  We hoped he and his lady would want to move here but although she loved it Zeno seemed unimpressed.  Of course I understand not wanting to move anywhere but Myrna just made me an offer I couldn't refuse!  Myrna took the occasion of visitors to use some time off so we could tour them about the Island together.  They did look at a couple real estate listings they had seen on Craig's list that were very inexpensive because Hawaiian Acres has terrible roads. In the picture to the left Brittany is walking up the lane in Hawaiian Acres.  There are still some foreclosures auctions  happening also but they take a lot of time to check out to discover possible encumbrances.  We also looked at a piece of ag land 10 miles up the coast from us which was 2/3's in sweet potatoes and will be auctioned in October.
C
The unemployment rate has dropped faster than the national average here since Americans with the money for Hawaiian vacations were less affected by the recession and also because middle class Chinese are starting to take Hawaiian vacations.  The Japanese tourists resumed their travel this year and there is often a help wanted ad for Japanese speaking tour guides.  The Imiloa Planetarium even has a once a day Japanese program.  This week there are 3 cruise ships stopping at Hilo instead of the usual 1.

 It is very easy here to find Ocean shoreline (not beaches) with no people in sight.  This one is just North of Kapoho.

Here Zeno is inside a lava tree mold at LAVA TREE STATE PARK.

                                                                 This tree mold looks like a face.

Tree molds are formed when moving lava is cooled around a wet tree enough to solidify before the tree catches fire and then the rest of the lava drains away from around it.  Over the years what remains of the tree rots and washes out so we are left with a hollow tube of rock.

 Here the family poses in front of the Hehau interpretive center at the spot where King Kamehameha solidified his rule over the whole island.

And this is at the view point above Honounou, just below the vog line for that day.

 

Zeno is very susceptible to mosquitoes, and is glad they are not by the ocean!

 I may add more pictures later.
Aloha!

EATING CHILI WITH CHOP STICKS

One of the things that I enjoy about living on the Big Island is the mix of cultures.  As this summer season has many social gatherings I've been reminded of that.  July is the month for the annual Hakalau Paka celebration which is especially well attended by Hawaiian families and also on the following weekend the Wailea  Kumiai Potluck whose attendees tend more to being of Japanese descent or "mainland" retirees.  At both all ethnic or racial groups are equally accepted as far as this old retired hippie can tell.  It seems the most important thing is to wear a smile and show aloha!
                                                                           I've written before of the Hakalau Paka celebration  so I'll not say much expect to note the difference this year was that we had a few less people, about 350 compared to 400 last year and this year the County Mayor, Billy Kenoi, arrived to speak to us about youth activities (pictured at left). We had more children (about 100) than last year.  In fact 23 of the keiki (children) were entered in the youth surfing contest this year.  The younger divisions competed over the gavel bar and the older a bit beyond that.  The Hakalau is not the best surf spot around partly because boulders make it unsafe to ride in close to shore unless you are right in the middle where the gravel bar is so surfers usually need to bail within about 4 seconds.  But the tide and the waves were just right for the youth contest on that day and I suspect most of them will be back with friends next year hoping to win one of those great surf board prizes provided by sponsors.  I am always impressed with how well local business supports even small events like this on Hawaii.  They may charge high list prices but they give back a lot to the community.  After the contest many of the teenagers climbed to the first level of the bridge girders to jump into the river while the little ones got to leave their hand prints, and sometimes foot prints, on the sea wall.

While the Hakalau Paka party featured food and bands brought in from outside our community, the Wailea Kumiai is a party of residents and former residents of the Wailea and Hakalau area that meets annually in the Kolekole Beach County Park on the Kolekole Stream.  Here the warm up music was the Hakalau Jam Band which is whoever shows up to play at the local farmers market every Tuesday (the four regulars actually rehearse twice a month).  For this occasion the band had, in addition to the usual four stalwarts, an additional guitar, a mandolin, a percussionist and a guest vocalist plus some more who joined to sing a couple of the songs.  We were amplified for the first time and a bit unsure about that but we were told we sounded great.  I didn't even bring a camera so I can't pass any of that on.  Perhaps someone will send some photos I can add here?
While there is a ten minute business meeting and a book exchange tent, mostly this is a socializing and eating opportunity and the potluck tables bore much more than could be eaten.  When I got back to my place I realized that my plate contained food of many nationalities and I was eating chili with chopsticks.  I mixed in a little rice and then it held together fine!  After the meal there was the traditional bingo game with "hurricane supplies" (canned food and toilet paper) for prizes during which I strolled down to the beach to watch the surf a bit.

So far this year we have been closer to normal rain fall and I have been writing down the readings from my rain gauge faithfully so I can report we had 93.9 inches through July 31.  This compares to 58.76" in Hilo at 11' elevation where the normal to this point would be 70.47".  At our elevation Hilo rainfall is closer to ours.  Still, the amount of rain does not seem oppressive to me.  Yesterday I was gardening in just shorts and crocs on a cloudy 78 degree day when it started raining lightly.  I kept working and soon the rain stopped and I was still comfortable although I had gotten a bit muddy.  My method of not bringing mud into the house with me is to keep a bucket under one of the downspouts where I can dip my feet and scrub them (and my crocs) with a brush if necessary.  This picture of the little garden on the south side of our house shows how the Yakon has grown to six feet and is covering the broccoli, Hawaiian pepper and okra.  That is our dog 'Taco' running around the garden!  Our east side of the house garden has more purple sweet potatoes than I can keep up with harvesting and the early variety avocados have been ripening for about 10 days.  We extracted the juice from about 15 gallons of Lilikoi (passion fruit) last weekend then made about 3 pies worth of Lilikoi cheese cake.  Mostly we dilute the juice 1:10 for drinking or put some in the pancakes.

Aloha from the wet side!

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

The past month we've done a lot of things and a couple days I joined our company, the Hampson family on their tours of the island.  The photo above is is not a flower but rather the fruit and bright red bud case of a yellow flower very much like a buttercup that grows on bushes.  We found these bushes in the 2 mile nature trail at Manuka State Wayside near South Point.  Later I found one in a Hilo park but I still don't know it's name.  Anyone?
Thank you, BJ, for finding that this bush is Ochna Serrulata, commonly know as "The Micky Mouse plant", and that it is native to Africa.

This year I netted my broccoli to protect them from birds.  4 or 5 varieties like to eat the flower heads as soon as they start to emerge and they are so persistent at it that last year we rarely got any.  The kind that does the most damage are tiny grey birds with burgundy/brown heads on the males.  They travel in family groups of about 6 except in nesting season.  Wednesday I saw a male flying from the lower edge of our property, through the banana plants, up into our 60' tall mango tree, around an extended branch and up into the thickest part of the top, all while carrying a 10 or 11 inch blade of grass that must have been a load for such a small bird.  Then, much to my surprise, that bird was right back out in 4 or 5 seconds flying right back to where he had come from.  As I had just sat down on the steps for a rest I watched as that bird found another piece of dry grass where I had done some scything, cut it to length, and took off for the nest building site.  Again he emerged from the mango in a few seconds and headed straight back to the dry grass.  As I watched he completed 15 trips in about 12 minutes, for his size about the equivalent of us running up the stairs of a 100 story building carrying a chair I imagine.  I've often found the spherical baskets that these birds weave so here is a picture of one that blew down.  The female must have been in the tree weaving the nest as the male delivered the material.  They are so small and move so continuously that I couldn't get a picture of the birds.  These baskets are much bigger than a nest would need to be but after the fledglings are mature they continue to travel with their parents all day and for maybe a month and they all return to the nest at night.   Again, what's its name? 

Another small and continuously moving critter here is the Hawaiian bumble bee, also known as the carpenter bee.  Being large, black and noisy, they are good at scaring people with bee phobias.  Although they lack hair on their abdomens, the thorax is hairy and they do have pollen baskets on the hind legs like other bees.  Each female nests separately by boring a 1/2" hole into soft dry wood and her mate may hang around to "guard" it but as he has no stinger he can only bluff.  Four holes are visible in the log in this photo with one flying bee. Here in Hawaii, as everywhere else in the last few years, honey bees are in decline due to a confluence of pests and human spread poison.  As about 1/3 of the crops we eat depend on insect pollination it is important to encourage our insect helpers.  

When I saw that a gate I had built with a frame of African Tulip wood had become occupied by carpenter bees I didn't mind them buzzing around me every time I went through it because the females are too busy feeding and boring to bother chasing and the males can't sting at all.  I did realize, however, that the gate would not last for long.  To provide the bees with a good spot to bore into next I cut a 5" diameter dead African Tulip log eight feet long (it is very soft wood so it is preferred by the bees), and hung it by galvanized wires from the eves of my back porch.  This would put them close to the bored-in gate and close to the lilikoi (passion fruit) vines whose flowers are a favorite of the bees.  They also like the flowers of our lima bean that covers the porch of our guest house as seen in the photo below (actually six plants cover about 240 sq. ft. of vertical space).   I hung the log in November and as soon as  we had some warm dry weather in January I noticed "bee dust" floating down from the log.  I am so happy to have more pollinators in our neighborhood especially as the honey bees are almost non-existent now.  Today I googled 'Hawaiian carpenter bees' and was discouraged that nearly all the cites were "how to exterminate" types.  It is tempting to conclude that most people who post on line are idiots, but then we are exceptions, aren't we?  If my method of giving them someplace better to bore into other than the house fails in the future I will be sure to let you know.

We also have a much smaller pollinator that I have cultivated a bit. I am now talking about the leaf cutter bees that I mentioned a year ago when we spotted them carrying leaves into our small bamboo wind chime.  This year I found one stuffing the top tube of a polyethylene lawn edging scrap.  We will never get any honey from either these or the bumble bees but they are well worth encouraging as pollinators and please stop the poison!  


A much smaller insect here has been costing me gasoline.  I think it is a VERY small beetle or weevil that is attracted to boring in my plastic fuel 'cans'.  After both my mixed gas and straight gas cans started leaking careful examination revealed several partial and one clear through hole in each.  The holes were about 1/32nd inch diameter.  A friend suggested that cutting through to the gas must have killed the bore so I gave the whole container a careful examination and on one I found a tiny dead beetle that I needed a magnifying glass to see.  A trip to the University Of Hawaii at Hilo Agriculture extension service identified the beetles on the gas can as Granulate Ambrosia Beetles, a type of tiny weevil. They are about the length of Eisenhower's ear on a dime but only half as wide.  You can view one at: http://extension.entm.purdue.edu/caps/pestInfo/pics/big/Gran_ambrosia3.jpg   However, the entomologist does not believe that they would eat plastic.  I keep telling everyone only they they "bore" into plastic, not that they eat it and their size fits the holes perfectly.
 Not only are fuel 'cans'  and fuel expensive here, real metal gas cans are nearly impossible to find.  Only one local dealer that I found carries a metal can and that is for a special Federal standard to qualify for carrying gas inside a vehicle.  It sells for well over $100 so I guess I'll be buying another plastic one and coating it with insect repellent.  I later did find a more normal metal gas can for $50.
Aloha!

ELECTRIC CAR - OUR FIRST THREE WEEKS!

Our Think City car finally arrived on June 15th.  I got a ride to the dock and had no trouble getting it from Matson and with only a little trouble getting the sequence right, I got it started.  because the car had not been charged in a month I was a little concerned that the battery may have self discharged but it still had 80%.  Driving home was uneventful and I still had over 50% when I got home.  Like most electrics this car has only one speed but the "shift lever" does have, in addition to drive, an econ position which limits the amperage draw and the top speed in order to get the best range.  I, of course, choose econ and found it completely satisfactory on our hilly 55 mph limit highway.

As you can see, the Think is noticeably narrower
than our Subaru and a lot shorter.  It is a two seater
with a large space in back with rear hatch and the 22kw
li-ion battery is under both the seats and most of the rear
space.


The Think brand has had a difficult life of high 
hopes followed by bankruptcies.  At one time 
Ford owned it, in 2011 it was back under 
Scandinavian ownership with an American
division assembling cars in Elkhart, Indiana.
Such a small car at a premium price was a 
hard sell here so they bankrupted the American
division and sold the European division.  We
learned the 100 or so cars remaining were being 
sold at steep discounts.  Since here on Hawaii, 
where no dealers sell electric cars, we would 
need to service our own car anyway we were 
more willing than most to risk an "orphan" car
brand.  
    

Myrna started using the Think for her commute the next day and after the battery was cycled a couple times it did even better.  She now uses about 30% of the charge for each round trip, about 10% down to Hilo and 20% back up to Hakalau.  Saturday we made a trip to a potluck at about 2,000' up a slow bumpy road and I was pleasantly surprised that the climb only took about 2% of charge.  A 110 volt charger came with the car and that takes about 7 hours for Myrna's usual drive discharge.  For $800 we could get a 240 volt charger that would take half the time but as it doesn't matter under the current use we will put that off.

This car feels rock solid and since the dealer agreed to JPEG the whole shop manual my only fear is failure of a computer module.  The bumper sticker says "I GET MY ELECTRICITY FROM THE SUN".  The house got most of its electricity from the sun before we got the car but now we will need the rest of the roof covered to supply both.  Since cheap geothermal power looks to be stalled, more solar will be next year's goal right after we sell our former house and get our federal  tax rebate of $7,500 for the car.  The Hawaiian tax rebate fund was consumed by May and won't apply anyway to cars bought out of state.  For tech details, the Think website is: http://thinkev.leftbankcompanies.com/owners/

Nuclear Waste

I've always believed that we as a race are not equipped to plan for events that exceed our civilization's existence many times over in duration.    Yet the quest for massive amounts of centralized (read billable) electrical production, encouraged by government demand for access for enough bomb building plutonium to destroy all life on earth many times over, drove us to build many nuclear power plants that are now operating beyond their design life.  Even more foolishly, the incredibly deadly waste they turn out by the ton "every four to six years", in the form of "spent" fuel rods that must be kept in deep pools of cooling water for years before they can be moved to a long term waste depository, has been allowed to build up in those pools with no long term storage in sight.  There, at the generator sites, they are more accessible to terrorists and to natural disasters such as befell the Fukashima Daiichi reactors which are still leaking cooling water into the Pacific Ocean and will never be fully "cleaned up" in our lifetime.
For years our nation had a plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada and we spent probably a billion dollars preparing the site.  When it was almost ready in Obama's first year, he keep a promise to Senator Harry Reid  and stopped the whole project.  Did this stop the nuclear power industry from continuing to produce waste?  Do we have a new waste depository plan?  No and no!  In 2010 they got a Nuclear Regulatory Commission extension of 60 years for the time they could store waste on site ( http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2012/2012-06-11-092.html).   Now I ask you what for profit corporation, that undoubtedly has a holding company insulated it from possible losses by separately incorporating each nuclear power plant, could be trusted to care for money loosing waste storage and processing for 60 years AFTER that plant is decommissioned as these aging plants soon will be?  The linked E.N.S.  article discusses the federal appeals case of that NRC ruling but not the long tern implications.  Clearly the industry plans to stick the tax payers with ALL the waste costs as soon as they stop making a generating profit just as they have always done for most of the insurance costs and most of the cost of preparing Yucca Mountain Repository.

So just one more reminder and I promise no more till next year, we don't need to build more Nukes!  The means to survive on all clean renewables is here if we just put all our resources that we are currently spending on fossil fuel subsidies, defense of our access to other countries fossil fuels, world domination, farm subsidies to millionaires and the clean up of future obsolete  waste.
Next I hope to be writing about our life with our electric car that should be arriving soon.

SPRINGTIME 2012

Springtime is almost over and although I've not done anything real important it has been busy and interesting.  In many small ways we have become more comfortable and more integrated into our community here in Hakalau and East Hawaii in general.  I continue to work most Friday mornings with the all volunteer community park maintenance crew.  We continue to enjoy swimming at several different places and a couple weeks ago I added (at 67 years old) jumping 21' off the old county road bridge into the Hakalau river.   Here is a video of others doing the jump from the top of the rail (23.5') where I will jump next time. http://hxcmusic.me/video/EqeFAAga1Vw/Hakalau%20bridge%20jump

I attended the Hawaii County Democratic Convention last month.  Until he arrived himself at about 11:00 I was distributing fliers for my choice for congress from our district, Bob Marx.  He is a Hilo attorney of 30 years who has represented a lot of public interest matters.  The "grandson  of plantation workers" on Oahu, he graduated from Law School in Portland then served tree terms in the Oregon State Legislature before returning to Hawaii to set up practice in Hilo.

I worked pre-convention on the resolutions committee and spoke on two resolutions.  One that I wrote was poorly received and I'm afraid it illustrates how little people understand or are willing to take ownership for environmental destruction.  It was to give polluting bio-mass burners no state or county support and to encourage geothermal and other clean renewables instead.  People are desperate for jobs that the average person can aspire to and that will reduce our dependence on oil imports that they are willing to overlook the pollution of bio-mass burning.  About 1/3 of the attendees oppose geothermal because either they believe Pele will be offended, and we are not talking about natives in particular, or because the only currently operating geothermal facility has had a few leaks and not enough buffer zone around it.  I think very few people have any understanding of how much energy they waste and they are not willing to give up commuting in their monster trucks that undoubtedly produce in aggregate 1,000's of times the pollution that a few geothermal leaks let out.  Regarding surplus geothermal power going to free cars of gasoline, they've never seen it so they don't believe it.  They have seen successful use of solar here and don't see why we can't just put a solar panel on the car's roof because they refuse to learn about the amount of energy required to move their monster truck or SUV.

There are a few early adopters on this island driving electric cars now, Leafs, Mitshubishi "i cars", and one Tesla, and sometime next week we will receive the Th!nk City that my wife Myrna test drove on a family reunion trip to Chicago.  Yes a long way to ship a car but as none of the electric brands are carried by a dealer here we would have needed to ship from Oahu at least.  This car was a European brand that has had a long history of struggle and ownership changes.  Our's was assembled in Elkhart , Indiana then the company went through another of its bankruptcy/re-organizations resulting in closure of the Elkhart plant.  About 100 cars remain to be sold at discounted prices and they have longer range than the Leaf or the i (100 miles city, 85 miles highway).   They have light weight, large battery, no-rust recycled ABS plastic body panels and will require about twice the electricity as our whole house uses per commute day.  And yes, we do have enough room left on the roof for that many more solar panels --- when we can afford them.  Follow the link to the web site for Th!nk.

http://thinkev.leftbankcompanies.com/why-think-city/exterior-gallery/

ENERGY

ENERGY

What did you think of when  you read the title "ENERGY"?  Since many of you are around my age I suspect some thought of their personal energy level declining lately.  That is not what I am writing about today but there are some parallels.  As the world's fossil fuel reserves decline and their costs go up with the added cost of extraction, we are all needing to work harder just to stay even.  So even if your personal energy levels are not in decline you will still get run down quicker.  Today I am thinking about more strategies to preserve energy. 


When we lived in NE Washington State my main strategy for the house was to use as little electricity as possible by super insulating, using the most efficient lights and appliances heating with dead wood and growing most of our fruit and vegetables so we didn't make as many trips to the grocery.  We also had 2,400 peak watts of solar electric which there amounted to less than 20% of our usage. 

  
Here in East Hawaii at 230' elevation there is no need for insulation or heating and we do have, so far, 1,680 peak watts of solar electric and solar hot water.  Four months of the last year we had negative consumption yet with the $20.40 minimum bill we still average $33.52 per month on 670 kwh's consumption for the year and that is with an electric cook stove and hot water back-up.  In the photo above the west edge of our house shows the back side of our hot water panels, the clothes line (solar clothes dryer) runs from our house to our guest house and beyond the clothes line  you can see the top of the talapia tank that is filled by the rain water from the roof and drained to the vegetable patch. 


 A year ago it was my goal to get more solar when we next had money and then follow that with an electric car.  Lately I've flipped that goal to getting the car first.  I think I can easily explain why.


The grid here is 20% geothermal base load, about another 9% geothermal peaking load, around 1% wind and 1% solar.  The balance is a combination of oil in conventional boilers and naptha burned in jet turbines.  The power bill contains a fuel surcharge line item that increases every two years.  Although we have had geothermal power here for decades the private power company has no incentive to abandon their investment in fossil fuel burners because they can always pass on the costs.  To change this the legislature is working on a bill to separate power generation from power distribution businesses.  Some are saying we could be 100% geothermal in 6 years.


Geothermal done right is closed loop, non-polluting, and should be there for the next 500,000 years till our Island moves off the hot spot.  It also should be very in-expensive which would make electric cars very attractive. If we doubled our geothermal generation (hopefully in separated locations to reduce impact of a lava flow hitting one) over what we need in electricity, some could be exported to other islands and/or used to produce hydrogen or NH3 ammonia for fuel cell cars.   Distributed generation, such as on-site solar, has additional advantages in that it would be less interruptable compared to the event of a lava flow taking out some geothermal.  But if we, personally, were to move (as we have been prone to) after installing enough solar for an electric car we would need to leave behind a lot of investment with little likely return. 


Another factor for buying a electric vehicle (EV) first is that there is a state income tax credit in effect for $4,500 on top of the federal $7,500 credit, but it expires March 31, 2012.  Currently the Big Island Nissan dealer won't get certified for Leafs because she doesn't believe she would sell enough to be worth sending a tech to Japan for training and paying to have a level 2 charger installed.  Mitsubushi has a sightly smaller EV that they have had on the road in Japan for 2 years and Austraila one year.  It is now available on Ohau for $6,000 less than the Leaf and even though it has 10 miles less range at 60-90, that would still be plenty for my wife's 30 mile round trip to work in Hilo.  If our former house in Chattaroy sells  soon enough for both credits we've decided to go ahead and get the iMiEV.  Here is a link to see it.
http://www.plugincars.com/sea-change-electric-cars-top-greenest-vehicle-list-112004.html

This row of "our" bananas is actually on the vacant lot next door and supplies about half our annual bananas.

P.S. The house sale did not go through so we don't know when we will get an EV.  Stand -by for a report when we do.