three months gone...

i've been amazingly busy with various things, but i'm still having fun! over the last three months, i've been working with the hilo toastmasters' outreach club at the kulani correctional facility. it's been a great experience, but the economic doldrums in which our state and nation find themselves in have resulted in a sad turn of events. the group from hilo toastmasters will continue going up as long as the educational program is going on, and i'm trying to consider our options for a different outreach program.

i've also become active in the open arms metropolitan community church that meets in the ainaloa longhouse on sunday mornings. it's a great group of people, and i'm enjoying the fellowship.

my real time-drain is facebook. it's the first thing i do in the morning, often before i even get out of bed, which is a very sad statement on my geekiness and lack of real life.

other than that, i've recently found that despite my intermittent phantosmia (smelling smoke [or other smells] that's not there) i don't have a brain tumor or partial or temporal lobe seizures. i guess that's something, but it's still driving me mental. there are days when the smoke smell is so strong that i sneeze and/or get a headache. i'm awaiting additional differential from the neurologist... some time within the next couple months whenever the neuro doc comes to this island.

so there's my life in a nutshell. not too exciting, but it's a life!

too gone for too long...

so it's been a long while since i've updated this, and i keep thinking about it but thinking about it doesn't get it done. i don't really have much to say. i've been busy with toastmasters (the website address is going to be changing soon) and work. things are going better than they were before, and i've had the opportunity to play a bit.

i actually took a class on how to make chocolate and took lots of pictures (on my flickr photostream). but here's a shot of the pods on the trees to get started.



i'll try to post some more pictures soon, but i think i'm running out of space on my free flickr account. i may have to break down and pay for the upgraded version.

a little trip to o`ahu

having never been to o`ahu i took advantage of the cheap inter-island fares and went wandering. i got to visit lots of friends who work in the corporate offices but who i'd never met face-to-face, and i got to see a little bit of different topography on an older island. here are some pics.

pali lookout

honey bee on a flower

really strange plant in wahiawa botanical garden

fiddlehead and leaf skeleton

three different plants with variegated leaves

hapu`u fern fiddlehead

the view behind the mall at kaneohe

sunset over mililani

traffic on the h1--the kea`au-pahoa road doesn't look quite as daunting