Saturday, March 13, 2010

I got the new edition of the fish book at Big, and it has the finescale triggerfish! That was the clincher for buying it. It also has tons of other great new stuff (especially lots and lots of new photos) and includes sea turtles, dolphins, whales and seals this time. There are all these great sidebars with stories about fish behavior and stuff... it's just crammed with coolness. I wish I had time to read the whole thing. It says the finescale trigger was considered a stray from the Eastern Pacific until an adult was photographed off Kona, and recently it has been found in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands and in the Marquesas. That's why those things I found online didn't jibe with the correct region even though it was clearly the right fish--they were out of date!

Also, I noticed that my huaraches are very long in the tooth! I will have to break out a new pair after this trip. I am hoping my current pair will even survive to the end of this trip. They look perfectly fine on top, but there's a huge horizontal split across the bottom of the right one (where it bends when I squat down to refill the jars from the hose, and stuff like that), and hunks of the edge of the sole are falling off. Yikes. Good thing I brought my Ocean Mindeds, so I don't have to wear the huaraches all the time.

Posted at 8:17:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

lotus
cappuccino organic Kona coffee by Rooster Farms - strong with really tasty foam!
fish satay
tofu spicy app (weird!) dean likes
chicken green curry - likes this!
sooooo the best chik ever!
pad thai toad omelet

[We went to Puako, and I had only one frame left on my dive slate vellum, so I wrote really really small so I wouldn't run out of space (so small, I can barely see it). Also, the only thing I wrote was:

Puako Saturday partly cl.
D/L = 32
only 15 min in & I'm COLD!!
1,200 end

Hahahaha. I had tons of space left. Here's a picture, though.]

Posted at 7:05:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Went back to the farmers' market at 10AM and got more pitaya/dragonfruit from the Ahi Guy: the very last yellow one (Dean made me do it), plus a new ALB-colored variety to try! It's a special mixed breed combo between yellow and red/magenta, and is orange on the outside & magenta-pink on the inside! Wow! I bet they won't taste as good as the yellow kind, but obviously I had to get some. The Ahi Guy told me that the yellow kind is native to Columbia and the new mixed breed was field collected in Peru. Very cool!

When we first got to the market, of course I made a beeline for Bruce's (Lulo Guy's) stand. He was back from his trip, and it was so great to see him again! I had to give him the bad news about the Gs' failed attempt with the lulo seeds he gave me last year (they only grew about a quarter inch, then croaked... I guess they didn't like North Carolina). Things are really bad this year... because of the drought, the coffee trees have had only had one flowering, and if he waters the lulos, the wild pigs come down out of the mountains to eat the worms that come out of the ground, rooting around and ruining the plants. :-( However, he had Tahitian lime popsicles for sale, and I snagged the last one! BEST POPSICLE EVER!! (Well, after lulo pops.) It was nice and tart and a great texture, not all icy and hard like store-bought pops. I love Trader Joe's lime popsicles, but these were even better. He also had lilikoi pops (!!) but there were none left. Next week I'm going to snag one!!!!! (I hope!)

I tried a lilikoi bar from the Cookie Lady's competitor for a contest, but the Cookie Lady's is better. (Dean likes the competitor's better. It's sweeter. But I'm the lilikoi guy, so I should get to pick!) We got our traditional Lotus Guy lilikoi juice and summer rolls (just one each today) and had them plain since he was all out of sauce and we didn't want to wait around for Mrs. Lotus Guy to come back for more. I love the sauce, but they were really good that way! You can taste the fresh and delicious ingredients more. Thumbs up!

Makali'i wasn't there today, so we couldn't get our Makali'i food, but we ate our Lotus rolls on our traditional bench. The tunes guy was playing such great music again!! I love all his songs. I want a CD of the tunes guy!!! I don't think he has them, though. When I put some money in his tip basket, I picked up one of his cards, and it just says "Music Entertainment - All Occasions, Private & Public" with "Cye" (his name) and a cell phone number.

Almost forgot: we ran into Josh again, on his bike! (We also saw him at Island Naturals yesterday, two minutes after talking to him at Big.) He's everywhere!! Me, excitedly: "You should get some yellow dragonfruit!! Oh... I bought the last one." Heh.

Posted at 12:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

!!!!!!!!!!!! Dean went out early to the Keauhou Farmers' Market without me and snagged the ONLY four lulos! AND, he snagged a big pile of 7 yellow dragonfruit from the Ahi Guy's stand (I gasped when I noticed them!)( he said there was a huge line at that stand with tons of people buying tuna!). Plus, three lilikoi and lulo jam from the Lulo guy (made by Colehour... I checked the label), a pair of chocolate chip orange mac nut cookies and Meyer lemon juices from the cookie lady's stand (and I was just thinking about how I wanted to get one of those cookies all to myself today!), baby treats (coconut rice wrapped in a banana leaf) from Lotus guy (I refused to eat mine even though he tried to claim it's the Early Shopper's privilege to pick out the food and the other guy has to eat it!). He also got papayas, and a big lilikoi juice at the Lotus stand without me and slurped it all down at the market. WOW + Aaaaaagh!!! I'm so impressed by what he snagged but so waaaaaahed at being left out!!! I was also really impressed that when I ran down the stairs asking if he had lulos, he was teasing me and claiming there weren't any lulos, and I said, "Yeah? What are these???" while pouncing on the tiny pile, he answered, "Persimmons." I wasn't fooled for a second, but that was a good answer! He said the Lulo Guy said it was a really bad year for lulos because of the drought and pigs.

It's all a big NO FAIR!! I wanted to get up super-early too, but he told me not to! The early bird sure gets the worm at the Keauhou Farmers' Market! He was super-efficient and got all that stuff in only half an hour (including driving time). What's going to be left for meeeee?? What a classic tongue massage!

Posted at 8:54:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Friday, March 12, 2010

I was actually super awake and alert and feeling great last night, after that ton-of-bricks tank (stayed up waaaay too late), and tonight, after a fun and easy Pebbly dive, I'm zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Maybe it's because it was Thirsty Thursday?

Anyway, not writing anything, but:
ahi @ Ke'ei is good (waaay better than spearfish)
and !!! the triggerfish we saw today is really rare around here and wasn't even in my fish book! (I wonder if it's in the new version??) it was really hard to figure out what it was, but I'm pretty much positive it's a finescale triggerfish
big fancy fins both ways solid gray magnificent very impressive fish

Links I found: this looks like it!, Mexican chomper, fishbase (with movie!).

Posted at 11:14:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

SUCH a good soursop this morning! Yuuuuum. Soursop is better than mangosteen.

Posted at 6:58:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Having dinner @ Ke'ei Cafe (brie!!), after a super-fun dive @ Pebbly. Saw a huge moray eel stalking a whole bunch of fish that were crowded around gorging themselves on a broken uni!!!

Dive slate notes:
Pebble / partly cloudy
nice viz!
did you see?
snowflake
100ft Josh area is zzz
gilded humu
coral rubble area is inferior
go to usual area
hungry... can I have some uni ?
big gray trigger with super flappy up and down fins!

[new kind! tons larger than other Hawaiian triggerfish, and plain gray, with very fancy fins... reminded me of a Queen Trigger! wow!]
BIG spotty moray swimming free!!!
wants to eat fish that are eating smashed uni!
[he bolted to his dark bolt-hole when he saw us, but we got a good look while he lurked in there waiting for his chance again. he was big!!!!!]
WOW
2 lei humus swimming in circles following each other
trigger up
harassed by wrasse
tiny eel [dwarf moray]
18' - shallow for linckia! [Hey! Stay out of the picture! The "ham" wrasse was trying to hog all the attention again. (I signed "H-A-M" to Dean when he started harassing us again.) Okay, ham, here's your picture. Yes, you are very pretty. (And no, we don't have any treats for you.) The ham is a male Yellowtail Coris wrasse.]
rock in BC! [stuffed it in to stay down while riding the waves to shore ♥]
L=4 D=3

Posted at 5:32:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Okay, it wasn't a steel tank, it was a weird aluminium "neutral density" tank, that, like steel, weighs tons more than a regular tank, but, unlike steel, you can't fit extra air in it! Basically the most usless tank ever, according to the dive shop guys. Even if you dove with no weights in your BC (unlike me, who had my normal amount of lead in, since I had no idea I was using a bizarro tank), you'd have all the weight crushing down your back while you're underwater, rather than in your weightbelt or (like me) in integrated weight pockets in front of your BC. Why does this tank even EXIST?? I told Josh, maybe it's for if you want a huge workout while diving. Not really a great combo, though, especially since it made me gulp down my air super-fast! Aaagh! Picked up NORMAL tanks for today. :)

Posted at 12:53:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Yum!! We got calamansis! I picked them because they were cute and little (even though the mean-looking lady at the Huli Fruit Stand said yes when I asked her if they were limes... clearly she was thinking "Too hard to 'splain.") Dean had one with a papaya just now and I tried it and they are definitely calamansi! I am EATING the rind!

Posted at 11:40:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Sweet Chili Shrimp topping = Ono. I love Cafe Pesto's crust. EDGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted at 6:19:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Thirsty Thursday! Cafe Pesto. Good cappuccino but she forget the umbrella garnish. Paradise Passion.

Posted at 5:56:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

I can't believe it--we finally went to Puako General Store!

Posted at 5:00:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Beautiful, calm day at Puako. I don't think we'd ever been here when the surf was this flat!

As we were gearing up, some other divers commented, "They got prime parking!" Heh heh heh... we sure did! Our fav spot, again. We took our traditional Puako scuba gear portraits before we walked down to the entry spot. (Not sure why it's a tradition, but it is. Probably it started because it's just so pretty at Puako.)



Nice snowflake eel, in the shallows on entry! I said hi close up in rocks.



When I let the air out of my BC after our surface swim out, I immediately dropped! I only use 10 pounds of lead (6 lbs in my BC, two 1 lb ankle weights, and a 2 lb tank trim weight), so normally I have to kick down at least 15 feet or so before I am negatively buoyant enough to reorient facing upward and drift the rest of the way down. Not today! It was weird, but Dean was recording a video while we descended, so I was thinking, "Wow, this probably looks great for the video!" When I reached the bottom I whumped right down on the sand.



The whales were singing again, and I sat there and listened to them, then wrote:


(Yes, this is sized proportionally to my other scans of dive slate notes! It took up an entire "screen" of my slate! Very cool whale sounds this year!)

Then as soon as we started swimming around, I wrote: My tank feels really heavy!

We had noticed my tank had a different style valve handle and a slightly different texture, but otherwise it seemed pretty normal. Neither of us had noticed a difference in weight on land, and I even stood around posing for the pre-dive photos while wearing it. Now Dean looked closely at the embossed writing and speculated maybe it was a steel tank! I felt a lot better when he said that because it validated that I wasn't crazy and there really was something weird about it.

More dive slate notes:

blue w/yellow edge flatworm [a Fuchsia Flatworm! my book says it's fuchsia rimmed with scarlet and gold, but appears deep blue in deep water]

cool song this year!

feel like I'm dragging this huge heavy weight around!
huge workout instead of effortless floating
need to go slow or I'll wolf my air

Posted at 2:14:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Original Thai last night--duck soup OK; sticky rice not sticky, but best mango EVER!

Posted at 11:53:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

I had a dream about tropical fruit trees last night, and woke up right afterward, at 3 AM.

Posted at 12:51:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

I'm tired tonight. Did a lot of swimming because we got lost underwater. Just tired and relaxed and don't want to write. And my ears feel screwy. I am about ten days behind on ALB and have about ten zillion drafts saved. aaaaaaaagh. Feel very good this trip though.

Posted at 12:14:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Why are Seac Sub fins so impossible to find, even online???

Posted at 11:17:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Dive slate notes: Pine Tree Portal!
I can tell right away I'm gonna dis the fins. :(

calm & nice
cool trumpet w/nice mouth

super cool & Loud whale!
sounds like bass string orchestra tuning up!

a little bit too sloshy :(
1 size too big
I wish they were 1 size smaller

[I really liked the fins, other than them being too big, so it was a huge tease. Seac Sub is definitely my brand. (Too bad it's not available in the US anymore, aaaaagh!!!) We switched fins so Dean could try them, and he liked them too, and liked the fit. I wrote on my slate, "[they] don't look you-ish though." His fins were GIANT on me! They are crazy-loose. I was wearing the fins with my normal thin hotsocks plus the thicker neoprene Sara sox, and I hated the Sara sox because there was tons of rattling around room for my feet inside them. Later I made Dean show how they fit his foot, and it turns out that even though our feet are around the same length, his are tons fatter than mine! They filled up the socks just fine. So his fondness for shoes that I think are way too big makes more sense to me now. :-) I don't have narrow feet, so they must just be skinny tallness-wise. (Okay, and, yeah, he's a guy and I'm not.)]

[On the way out, Dean accidentally thought Pine Tree Portal was Pine Tree Pool, so we swam to the right looking for Pine Tree Portal. (I never have any clue where we are, and blindly follow him for navigation.) As a result we ended up swimming way past Pine Tree Portal and Dean surfaced to figure out where we were, while I stayed at depth. He was low on air, so he swam on the surface back to Pine Tree Portal while I followed him below. It was a little hard swimming on the bottom while looking up to keep track of where he was! When we reached it, he motioned for me to come up through the portal on my own. I held onto a big rock to keep from ascending too quickly, then dropped it as I neared the top of the stone arc and rose the rest of the way to break the surface. Dean filmed me coming up, but I'm not going to post it because I'm wearing my False Fins and holding a bunch of trash (several pieces of lost/broken gear we found at depth and collected to throw away and help clean up!), which kind of detracts from the coolness of the portal! :-) I LOVE coming up through the Portal. Pine Tree Pool is nice and easy, but the Portal is a portal.]

Last thing I wrote on my slate:

Posted at 3:22:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

I was really thirsty & Dean got me a shave ice from Ali'i Gardens Market. They have lilikoi! (!!!) Turns out I actually still like passion-orange/li hing the best, but it's still wow. And, afterwards I spotted MY BRAND fins! Only $12! It's a newer model and one size bigger and translucent blue (matches my mask) instead of silver but it's the closest I've ever seen. Worth testing at least!

Posted at 2:04:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

The students at Aloha Massage Academy give such good massages. I love their technique there. Plus they still had all my information on file from last year! And it's only $30. for an hour! Unfortunately, they only have 3 students right now, so they're all booked up until after we leave. Oh well. It was a fantastic massage--one of the best I've ever had. I love how they are so deliberate and focused, gentle but also firm. I don't think I've ever felt so relaxed during a massage. I am a lot more relaxed and less stiff than usual right now, so that also helps. :-)

Posted at 12:28:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

Ke'ei Dive Report!

Ke'ei is such a nice spot for a dive... the bumpy road, the little village, the setup area, the lava and the palms, the old boat ramp to enter by, the deeper channel on the right to swim along...

It was mostly cloudy, so it was a super-nice temperature for gearing up, not all hot! My wetsuit was still a little damp, too, so it was stretchier and easier to get into. Easiest gear up-age of the trip!

Easy to kick out here, on surface swim...
Water is 77° on surface--warm!
Beautiful single purple coral near bright red pencil urchin.
So much coral down there...
Round see-through pea-like jellies suspended in water! ♥
So blue

Deep section (approx 120') ♥
Lots of cukes that you can from far above see while floating down...
Garden eels up tall!
Seaweed that looks like the kind I saw for sale at KTA near the poi! Just 1 of them.
[Looks similar to My Favorite Spooge.]
Cukes crawling! Mouths around-the-cornering, sucking up sand.
73° @ depth.

Take a pic to show how there's tons of coral...
Vac cuke! [A Lion's Paw sea cucumber! Hiding in coral. It didn't want to come out, but it did grab onto my fingers with its sticky spicules.] Dark brown with 2 yellow stripes.

So much coral!!

Fish like it under the roof overhangs.
It's like visiting a village of cute little houses.

Zebra moray hiding in coral. Looooooong, but I can't find the head! Body winds all around...
!!! My mysterious mauve cuke in same coral head! Kept one eye on eel while holding flashlight for Dean to photograph cuke! So great!!! He got a picture of its cool lamprey-like mouth as it retracted! Wooooooow!!



Gang of three really pretty longnose butterfly fish.
I like the u/w stairs at the end, where you come up...

After we de-geared, we hung out on the lava for a little less than an hour, in our lava chairs under a shady tree. It was so nice! It was the first chance I had on the whole trip to write any postcards, and I wrote two, both to Michelle. :) I need to write some for Duke! Then it was time to drive to Ke'ei Cafe! No fruit stands on Napoopoo Road this year, not even Eddie's! The stand itself was still there but it was all empty and had a sign that said "Closed" instead of "Eddie Aloha." :-( Is it because of the drought, or other reasons? Also, we haven't seen ANY slurpy oranges!

Nice nice nice way to spend the day, in any case...

Posted at 11:27:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

The self-guided fruit trees tour was really interesting, although none of the trees were labelled (?!), so it was sort of like a "Can you identify this fruit tree?" game and I did pretty well by thinking back on weird stuff I've tried from the Keauhou Farmers' Market (mostly from Ken Love's table). It was really neat to see what everything looked like growing. The cherimoya rollinia tree was the coolest! All the one million "it's a crime signs" (as K.L. calls them!) were pretty hilariously over the top, though.

Photos:
- Dean with a small papaya (his favorite fruit!) tree.
- Me with a cute little pineapple plant.
- Fig tree! My hand on one of the huge leaves.
- Rangpur tree, I think. One unripe green Rangpur and one ripe orange one, growing side by side. (I can't believe how strong my normally straight-up-and-down twig-ish arm looks in this picture! Did I actually get some muscles, somehow? What's going on??)
- Dean looking at some banana plants.
- Me trying to show a bunch of bananas that was lying on the ground... but it was held down by a fallen-over entire banana plant, so I could only raise it a foot off the ground. (Notice my Ocean Minded shoes! :-)
- Not yet mature rollinia fruit in tree. WEIRD and COOL!
- Another rollinia fruit with other stages of the same fruit.
- Also in rollinia tree. Yikes. (Large, softball sized, hard, and dangerous-looking...)
- Dean with sugar cane. The leaves are sharp!
- Soursop growing right off the trunk of the tree! Weird and yum.
- Me with a banana flower, in front of a banana plant. Huge, and very pretty color!
- I also identified pomegranate, otaheite gooseberry, and bilimbi.

After the tour, we got a little fruit at the UGG store (along with a cup of dark roast Kona coffee and toasted coconut Tropical Dreams ice cream, as is traditional)--some limes, 2 Bluefield bananas, and a soursop. Most of their soursops were really HUGE! I found a nice reasonable-sized heart-shaped one though. I massively wanted a cherimoya rollinia because they were so cool looking, but they didn't have any for sale (maybe none of them were ripe yet... they were all spiky like my fav spiky sea cucumber). I tried one of the Bluefield bananas tonight, and it was sort of flat-ish shaped, and a little longer than an apple banana but not as good. They don't stay as firm.

Posted at 11:10:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Best idea ever for a massage: a scuba massage! It takes place at the bottom of the ocean, at a scuba resort, in a place with really warm water. A weighted thing gets draped over your middle, and you wear a mask and breathe scuba air. Then tons of sea creatures come and give you your treatment! A whole bunch of crowns-of-thorns crawl on your back and massage you with their big yellow tube feet (maybe the massage therapist spreads some coral scraps on you first, to make sure they'll stay and not run away during your massage) (and so they won't get too hungry and eat you instead!). Meanwhile, cleaner shrimp are giving you a big cuticle treatment, nibbling off all the little pieces of dead skin. After the crowns are done, an OCTOPUS comes out!!!! It massages you with its 8 fantastic suction-cup tentacles, and it's amaaaaaaazing! that would be the best massage EVER!!!!

Posted at 6:48:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Double Ke'ei! Ke'ei dive followed by Ke'ei Cafe. We're the second ones here, and got the best table, out on the balcony!

My order:
Blue Hawaiian margarita (with li hing mui edge!)
baked brie
spearfish with lilikoi sauce

Dean's:
Caipirinha
vegetarian black bean soup
toad with lilikoi sauce

They have Voss sparkling here!! (I didn't get it.)
Kailua Candy Company's lilikoi cheesecake with Honu chocolate crust and chocolate ganache frosting for dessert??!!?

Dean wants a brazillion of his drink.
My drink looks like an ocean.

Mmmmmmmm mmmmmmm!!!! I badly ate my whole brie! It was so good! Dean thought it was yucky. "Your baked brie would be good if not for the brie." The bread was really crispy/crunchy and it seemed like it would be too hard but it was perfect with the phyllo'ed brie!

That sauce is intense! When you have lilikoi you want it intense, not all watered down. (I'm not too crazy about the spearfish, though. It's okay, but not my fav. Kind of slabular. Saving room...)

We got the cheesecake! Yum in spades.

Ke'ei was good!

Posted at 5:13:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

We are going on the self-guided fruit tree tour at the Kona Pacific Farmers' Cooperative on Napoopoo Rd. today, and I am excited! We saw it last year after a dive at Ke'ei and I massively wanted to go, but it was closed, and we put it on our Do Next Time list. Today's plans: trees, Ke'ei dive, then Ke'ei Cafe for dinner!

Posted at 10:53:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Monday, March 08, 2010

Rapanui
spinach cuke toad bean shoot salad ap - split in 2 - good!!!
veggie curry with root veg
satay combo - minus beef
inferior likikoi juice! (tastes watered down & sweetened)

Wasabi peanut butter balls
individual coconut cream pie

Wasabi pb was good!
So was cute coconut

satay meat was a little gnawy

Posted at 7:04:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Pipe - Nope!
Lighthouse - Nope!
Loli as possible future dive site? (nope today)
Yay for Old A?

Yay! Roller Rink.
Hot out there and cold in here!
ice shock bath!
freshwater mix from spring makes it cold

wavy above, calm below
pinktail trigger in hole!

I have green blood!



watch is beeping
Dean: Just warning at 120.

All these great creatures when watch says 0 minutes no deco time!!
wire coral, cushion, green linckia, loli-like cuke... no time!

30' - lots of nice triggers: guilded, pinktail, lei, humu... & barred filefish
nice big varicose phyllidia

lots of different fish
Roller Rink is a good site

We didn't find our shoes.

[More photos from today: a) Head picture I took while waiting around for Dean to finish some work e-mails that popped up right when we were about to leave :) b) Cystallized salt left behind from evaporated sea water in a shallow pool at Wawaloli. Yes, I licked it. Of course! c) Underwater scene at Roller Rink. Looks kinda like the urchin whose spines got stuck in my leg the day before!

As you can see in the video footage, I hardly reacted to getting pricked, and didn't even pause before going back to petting the crown goodbye. :) It wasn't a very deep cut and barely hurt this time. The site of the puncture didn't even turn blue afterward! The poison does contain an anti-coagulant, though, and my finger was bleeding totally disproportionately to the size of the wound. This was super-cool because we were at about 75 feet and it looked like I had green blood! My blood looked the exact same color as the crown-of-thorns. So awesome!!! ♥ I looooooooved it! :)

(I should have been more careful and not gotten pricked at all, though... I was being a little too cavalier in my crown handling because I didn't want the video to be slow and boring. A good c-o-t taming session really should be super sloooooow and gradual and gentle.)]

Posted at 2:55:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Kona Wave has tart!!!! I jumped up and down & squealed (quietly) when I saw through the window that one of the flavs is tart! It's pretty cool--you serve yourself and they charge by weight. I got tart and a little green tea (pretty tart also!). They were both pretty good, but not as good as Robeks. Not as tart or as creamy.

Dean's been claiming they have tart, but I never expected that they really would, since I knew he was just making it up!

Posted at 2:23:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Now they're playing my fav Brother Noland song!!!

Posted at 11:38:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

It's so beautiful out! It rained last night and now the sky is clear and blue and un-voggy, and surf is FLAT!!!! Plus, now KAPA is playing a Hawaiian cover of a Dylan song ("I'll Be Your Baby Tonight")! :-D

Posted at 9:58:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

On a solo Jeep mission and "Ka Manu" is on the radio--the Dennis Pavao version! :-)

Posted at 9:54:00 AM by Laura W. Petix.

Sunday, March 07, 2010

South Kona Green Market this morning! I've been hanging around all day (eating soursop, making coconut rice pudding with mango on top, writing a birthday card, talking to family on the phone, doing laundry, helping Dean update our dive log, not working on ALB...) but I didn't write about it yet. Luckily, I have my Piece of Paper with my notes! It was really confusing when we got there, because all the stands were in weird mixed-up locations! When we talked to the Lotus Guy, we found out why the layout was all rearranged: it was because the church behind the field where it's held needed extra parking because of a big funeral for a famous lomi massage elder. Three different funerals were being held for her, on different islands. Anyway, I guess the market needed to be crammed into a smaller space, although that doesn't totally explain the different positions for all the vendors. Maybe they were just trying to blow people's minds.

We got our usual avocado summer rolls and lilikoi juice from Lotus, and also a ginger lemonade right before we left. I tried to suggest Dean into getting a coconut from Coconut Pete, but he said he would do it another time when he wasn't as full from all the market food (because after you drink the coconut, Coconut Pete machetes it in half so you can eat the inside). I don't know when that will ever be, since there's always tons of great food, but I said sure, it doesn't have to be now, but he has to get one some time while we're here. He said fine but I have to get a bracelet sometime while we are here. (I had looked at some at two different stands but didn't want to buy any of them.) I said fine. About two seconds later, we walked by a stand where a lady was selling her handmade Ni'ihau Kahelelani bracelets, and Dean picked one out for me! They are really special and the lady told us they are the only kind of shell jewelry that can be insured, like gems. She collected the shells in Kauai in the 1960s; they come from a kind of sea snail that is endemic to Ni'ihau, the Forbidden Island. The one Dean picked for me is an extra-nice one because it contains multiple colors. It's strung in a herringbone configuration, and fits my wrist perfectly. The clasp is button-style, and made from a puka shell. It looks really nice on my arm! Dean has good taste.

Other stuff we got: a reprise of our quiches and oatmeal cookies from the real dishes lady from last week, except I tried a dark chocolate cranberry oatmeal cookie this time, even though I knew the chocolate mac nut oatmeal kind that we had last time would be better. I was right, but I still had to do it. Next time it'll be two choc mac oat, though! (Not that the dk. choc cran kind wasn't good, but the original is superior.) I told the lady I kept thinking about how great they were all week. Didn't get much fruit to bring back: just 3 papayas, some Rangpur (the orange ones in the photo), and three baby wild mangoes that the Lotus Guy said we should check out. They are super-tiny and were from the Lemon Stomper's and Inferior Juice Guy's stand. Kind of hilarious, since those guys are Lotus Guy's competitors! :)

[Edit: Here's a picture of my little wild mangoes. My hand is there for perspective, and to show off the Ni'ihaui Kahelelani bracelet Dean bought me right before we got the mangoes!]

Posted at 10:31:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

Wow--I got a real phone call on my Treo, & I was hanging around here and answered it, and everything! It was David. :-)

Posted at 4:46:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.

L: What do we say about the 'sop?
D: That you're not feeding it to me!

Eating my perfectly-ripe soursop! It's good! Both Dean and I like it. I'm surprised that he does, as it's slightly sour, but he kept begging me to feed him more. It has a delicious tropical flavor that reminds Dean of jackfruit (which tastes like juicyfruit), but it has a subtle yummy sourness to complexify the sweetness. It smells good, too. Neither the taste nor the scent is overpowering or anything; it's just good. It reminds me of a really good fruit salad with various stuff like strawberries, sliced banana, some citrus, etc. in it. The texture is soft and slimy and it has big black seeds that are easy to take out. It makes my teeth feel spinachy!

Now Dean's crying because it's all gone!

Posted at 12:51:00 PM by Laura W. Petix.