Jewel hunts for them. She often finds babies along the edge of the carpet and I’ve even found one on the kitchen counter.
The best place so far was the one that was hanging in Jewel’s hair, and would not let go.
%5B4%5D.jpg "lizard 2 (10)")
This is what they mean when they say he’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth.
My day started at five…IN THE MORNING, with a text from my mom asking Are you under a tsunami warning? what’s the reports from your end?
I don5 know. still sleeping. It’s 5
8.8 IN CHILE – check your local – SAID WILL HIT AT SIX YOUR TIME.
That got me up! Within seconds Joey calls from work saying they’re stuck there, the highway’s been shut down because of a fatal motorcycle accident. Then I start getting facebook messages and texts and phone calls, and to be honest, I wasn’t scared until I sensed that everyone else was! I was never worried about mine and the kids’ safety because we are, what they call, “up country”. I was just worried about Joey and what would happen with him, and that we’d be without him. All I could think was I WANT HIM HOME. I wasn’t even paying attention to the news and the fact that the entire island was stocking up on food and gas. I knew the tsunami would never reach us, so no need to bother with those things. Once Joey made it home (the freeway closure was behind him) he called his good friend that lives in the evacuation zone and then we headed down to the beach to help them move things to higher ground.
It was around seven when we went down and our road was already starting to fill up with evacuees. The tsunami wasn’t expected to hit until after eleven, and everyone on our side of the island seemed to be taking it seriously, and I didn’t see anyone panicking. The roads were pretty clear way up here, but Joey did say the two lane highway, Farrington, out to this point was very busy, but moving good.
Makaha Beach was deserted except for a few lone diehard surfers, and a plane flying overhead blasting a loud siren for all the people that live "on the beach”. They have no electricity and quite possibly could not know what’s about to hit. Up at our place the sirens were pretty weak but our friends down here were jolted awake by them.
On our way back up the hill I was trying to get some quick shots of the evacuees along the roadside when one woman said, Look at dat bitch..taking pic-tures! That’s all we need is to give the locals another reason to not like this Haole.
Our friends ended up evacuating to our place, and at eleven we were standing on the street corner at the top of the hill to see what’s going to happen. I expected the entire complex to be out there looking but I think we were the ONLY ONES. Everyone else were evacuees. There was no way I wasn’t going to be out there!
People were set up in the ditch like it was a day at the beach and they were relaxed and enjoying themselves.
When we’d already been out there an hour and hearing reports that it was finally starting to show some action over on the Big Island, we knew we had to wait at least that much longer still. I hardly took my eyes off the water because I did not want to miss anything. The kids were already over it.
%20edit%5B4%5D.jpg "tsunami & post 009 (2) edit")
Cars were parked everywhere on our street, including in the bus stops and center divider.
At one point the kids found a lizard and Jewel was ecstatic. Then I made her let the little kids hold him too because she couldn’t keep running away from them all day. She didn’t want to let them “because they’re only five.” Which translated to “she’s not responsible enough and will drop him!” Which is exactly what she did. The rest of the day was a big fat sad face for Jewel.
This picture screams to me, The Natives Are Restless!
I loved all these little island kids playing with big sticks and no one getting hurt…. and no one yelling at them to stop. Where’s all this panic the news was reporting?
Finally we started to see some action in the water. First I saw one single solitary large wave, and then probably half an hour later I started noticing this white circle in the ocean.
It started off as a solid circle and then very gradually started to spread out.
The weird thing was..no one else was commenting on this. Or else they’re all just very very quiet. Or else, it’s, you know…normal.
While I was keeping my eye on that growing circle I notice the family in front of me.
How sweet is that? I half expected people to be stressed out, scared, nervous, agitated. I saw none of that.
We decided to walk down the hill a bit to see if we could get a better view. We can see the circle has gotten really wide and thin now……and there are whales riding right in it! We also saw the line of cars down to the coast………… doesn’t stop.
Jewel did find the one empty spot to sit down and sulk in, though.
After a couple hours we figured there wasn’t going to be anything more to see so we went back to the condo to wait for them to lift the evacuation order. Around five Jewel and I went down to Makaha Beach to see if there was anything even noticeable on the beach.
Up here you’d never even know this road housed hundreds of people just hours earlier.
And peacocks stood where we stood all afternoon.
And the beach was quiet and welcoming.
Looks like the water didn’t get any higher than any other day. The only difference were the lack of sunbathers for a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, and a lack of waves.
I still can’t believe we live in Hawaii, and now we experience a tsunami. A TSUNAMI! 2010 is proving to be quite an exciting year, and we’ve barely just begun. I CANNOT wait to see what the rest of the year has in store for us.
We finished off our day getting our ankles wet in a post tsunamic ocean and if I hadn’t been so wiped out from a long day, I may just have taken Jewel up on her request to get our suits on and go for a swim.
Since my last blog post on friday we've been busy shopping fools. Just when we thought we could finally relax and slow down since we got into the condo, it turned out our work was almost just starting. We've at least now gotten everything we NEED and can take our time from here on out getting the things we WANT...like furniture.
We've met up with some friends and friday night we were invited to a BBQ with some locals we'd never met before. We got to meet an original Hawaiian, which are not as common as you would think, and he was also one of the cliffdivers in Waimaie Falls, so that was a treat. We've been invited back for a birthday party this weekend and we're really looking forward to that. They go all out here for the kids! One of the many things that makes the Islands so wonderful is their love for family and how they cherish the kids.
We drove out to Yokohama Beach the other day, which is as far as you can go on the westside without hoofing it out to Kaena Point. The surf was way too rough for us, but the kids did get to play with their boogie boards at Barking Sands, which is our most favorite beach because of it's privacy and closeness......and Jewel amazed us out there. Last time she was in Hawaii she was scared to death of the waves and now here she is trying to ride in every wave. She caught on so quick, you'd think she was born with that board. Love that girl!
After a while we decided to check out the north side of the island and go snorkeling in a protected bay. It was protected, just not good enough for the twenty two foot waves hitting that day. The water was real churned up and choppy but at least Jewel got to see her first fish snorkeling and we even got to swim with a large sea turtle.
Along the way we passed fields of pineapple, red dirt, a surf competition, a wild rooster with about a dozen small chicks in the middle of a grocery store parking lot, and stopped for shrimp from a van and a roadside farmers market with avocados the size of grapefruit and bananas the size of vienna sausages.
Our favorite thing to stop for is ahi poki, or raw ahi tuna cut up in chunks and marinated. We've had about ten different types so far, ranging from spicy to seaweed, to wasabi to shoyu, to teriyaki, and so far have not found one we didn't like....and as much as I prefer buying from roadside vans, have found the local Sac N Save grocery store to carry our favorites.
Two of our seven boxes arrived today and I'm already starting to rethink that shipping anything was a good idea. I'll wait until everything is here and then make a final opinion.
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I would normally have a gazillion pictures up by now to go with my posts, but because I do almost everything exclusively on my Droid now I'm not using the laptop, so no photos, but on the brightside, without Droid there wouldn't even be a post at all.
When I said my views changed, I wasn’t kidding around…..
Starting at o’dark thirty:
then o’dark thirty two
The views change quick around here
from a cloudy Fall day
to a snowy sunset reflection
with an early moon
After a rain
before the storm
or bright crystal blue
I love them all, I do
Our neighbors to the north
and our frozen pond on one freak blizzardy morning in October
with the lights of the Interstate twinkling (even though we’re not ON the road, we’re still on the ROAD)
Every morning and every evening these deer can be found grazing in the fields behind us, sometimes they drink from our ponds and stare in our windows, too…for reelz
My favorite thing about all these pictures…they’re straight out of the camera, so all those colors you’re seeing is exactly what we’re seeing.
But I know what you all want………….
The House
and The Land to go with it
Home Sweet Home
For Now
