February 2023…

2022 is finally behind us. We now find ourselves firmly in the gaping maw of 2023. The ensuing diatribe will address all but one of the following: the completion of our lanai project, the holiday season, personal updates, island life, cats, the Super Bowl, and the discovery of an unlimited source of power that could rescue humanity from ruin.

Plus there will be cool pictures of stuff.

The Lanai Project

The lanai project is finished. Finally. Nothing to see here, move along. Actually, here are some pix of the finished product including terrifying photos of the spa being placed onto the lanai.

First the terrifying spa photos. The first photo shows you where the spa previously existed under the house – not the most inviting area. The rest of them are the actual placement of the spa onto the new lanai. The forklift driver later told me he was worried about sliding down the grade while he was lifting the spa up there. Aaaarrgh!

Well it seemed a lot more terrifying in person. Here are some pix of the finished lanai….

After the lanai was finished we added a bamboo enclosure for our outdoor shower. It turned out pretty well and we use this shower as much or more as we do the inside shower. Outdoor showers in Hawaii are a singular experience.

The 2022 Holiday Season

We had an awesome Holiday season. There were parades, food, trees, lights, movie stars and celebrations. We watched all of these things on TV as we enjoyed a quiet season at home here on Kauai.

Speaking of movies, we actually made a list of things to watch in December that we consider fun holiday fare. Some of the items on our list were: Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. the movie Scrooge (and Scrooged!). The LOTR trilogy – not Christmas movies but they were originally released around December every year so we include them. Also, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, A Christmas Story, Christmas Chronicles and this year we also watched Bad Moms Christmas LOL.

A lot of popcorn and alcohol were consumed during this time.

Island Life

We had a really dry start to winter, but the rain has picked up in the last few eeks. A couple of weeks ago we got about 6 inches of rain in 5 hours along with lots of thunder and lightning. We also got some rain dripping through a hole in our roof where the pipe from the solar hot water panels come through the roof. I dragged my old butt up the ladder and patched the hole with some UV resistant roof caulking/patch. Hopefuly this will take care of the problem. We’ve had some pretty good rain since then and everything appears to be nice and dry up there now.

Gardening – We have finally cleared out the dead branches and junk that had acculated in the green belt behind our house. With all the rain we wanted to make sure that the water could flow freely PAST our property. We think we want to add a banana plant down there since they do like water a bit. A volunteer papaya is growing there already and we’ve enjoyed a few papayas from it. We recently planted a dwarf valencia orange and a dwarf tangelo tree (Barbara won the tangelo in a drawing from our local nursery, Seascapes Nursery). We also have 3 pineapples starting to form and another papaya tree in the front yard.

Cats

The cats continue their quest for world domination. We are subjugated by these feline taskmasters who never miss a chance to wake us from a perfectly good sleep to service their hunger for kibble. Sheyna continues to improve and stay healthy after her bout with sickness and that makes us happy. The other two, Cali and Mr. Beasely, continue to be themseleves, in other words, awesome.

We have had the opportunity to help out wth our nieighbor’s kitty, Salem a couple of times – mostly just feeding him and giving him attention. Salem is super friendly and we always look forward to hanging out with him.

Cool Pictures of Stuff

Barb and I like to beachcomb down at Hanalei Bay. Here are a couple pix of some of our recent finds.

Sunrise on the Hanalei River and sunset in Princeville.

Unlimited Power for Humanity

Yes, I have been thinking about this lately. Well, it kind of flashed through my mind once. I think that if we could just harness the power of hot air from DC, we could power the entire planet until the end of time. There, I said it. If I disappear inexplicably, you will all know what happened.

Other Rants

This is a new section that I have added to the blog. Since moving North our home project nonsense has been greatly reduced. (For those of you who want to revisit my original rants about our home projects from the last house, you can start by going back to the blog posts from January, 2017 and work your way forward)

The result of the reduced projects/repairs is I now have less to complain about.

That really gets me mad.

So I will reserve this part of the blog for random rants about anything.

I can’t think of anything right now. You’re off the hook. Thanks for reading and much aloha!!!!