Monday Visuals

Do you ever wonder where your sugar comes from? Well, after they’ve chemically spayed the sugar cane with the plant equivalent of human growth hormone, this is how they start the harvest. I once knew an acquaintance whose job it was to start these controlled burns and another acquaintance who reminded him of the karmic affects of doing so, as fire equals death to many critters.

Oh what a lovely topic, one lump or two in your tea dear?

Somewhere over the rainbow……. lies Haleakala and just to the left under the pot of gold is my house.

And talking of my house and critters I’ve had a little uninvited room mate for the last few days. I saw him with abject terror on Sunday night, but today we finally met and I like him. I’m going to take him to a new home today where he can forage for food and live happily ever after. In my on going efforts to increase my karmic credits, rest assured his new world won’t be near a human house or a cane field.

Don't worry, be happy.

I’m reading a book right now called ‘The Geography of Bliss’ by Eric Weiner, which has the tag lines; One grumpy writer. Ten countries. Will any of them make him happy? Well you get the plot and it’s a humorous and fascinating read.

Happiness is normally something I feel quite a lot of, but lately I’ve been so focused on picking out paint, carpet, furniture blah blah blah that whenever a friend has asked “so watcha been doing” my answer for the last few months has produced the glassy eyed malaise of those quickly losing the will to live! I was even boring myself stiff but as the book so deftly points out; "happiness for most is simple math. Add up the pleasurable aspects of your life, then subtract the unpleasant ones. The result is your over all happiness” So in order to raise my own Gross National Happiness level on Tuesday, I loaded my truck full of toys and headed out into nature promising myself a full 8 hour day of fun.

First stop a little surfing. There wasn’t much surf to speak of but I didn’t care, I just wanted to get wet, and look at the mountains from the ocean and if I was lucky, catch a few rides in the process. Blurred pici but proof positive I did exactly that. Next stop my beach chair and the reward of my early morning chopping, let me tell you, fresh fruit salad never tasted so good! Another little happiness tip, evidently most of us like to earn our joy, it just feels better.

Onward to Kanaha where I had a 2 hour sailing window. Today was a good reminder for me not to sail with a time limit as it really gets in the way of my flow. In doing the happiness math my sesh wasn’t ‘unpleasant’ but it didn’t merit the points that an open afternoon would have rendered. Still – what the hell – it was Tuesday, I was off work and heading for a lady bits wax and as “attention is the universal currency of well-being” I figured all that personal attention would out weigh the pain!

Home for a quick nap then the highlight of the day, dinner with Lano! Evidently social scientists estimate that “70% of our happiness stems from our relationships, as camaraderie blunts our misery and boosts our happiness” and I think all of us left both boosted and ever so slightly bloated. What a treat to break pizza with this man (and his clan) from the land of downunder, where women glow and men plunder, can't you hear, can't you hear the thunder, you better run, you better take cover!

Time for a change.

When I moved to Hawaii in 1989 I shipped a few big pieces of furniture with me, along with my trusty little yellow Toyota hatchback. The car was gone within a few years but the furniture…. well what year is it now?!

Let me put it this way, my friend Julie called me at least 5 years ago to say that she was writing her Will and was leaving me a bit of brass, but that it came with the following caveat. "If you haven't got rid of that fucking couch by the time I've croaked I've stipulated in the will you have to use that money for a new sofa"!

I’m pretty good at saving money, but spending over a couple of hundred dollars for anything will make me think twice. Hence my home has always been cozy-but in the cold light of day a bit worse for wear. "Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.”

And so the time has finally come to start anew and all I can say is ‘thank god for Craigslist'! Confession, I didn’t want to have a garage sale because I wondered what the neighbours would think when they came over to check out my shit only to realize that it really was shit! And I didn’t want to put all my crap outside with a ‘free’ sign on it because what if nobody took it-oh the shame! So I’ve discreetly given almost all of it all away courtesy of the ‘free’ section on Craigslist and kept my dignity intact in the process.

So the house has been painted inside and out. The hot tub removed and the deck rebuilt, the carpet picked out and hopefully installed next week, the new art is on it’s way courtesy of my friend Alexis & some simple new furniture is here. The best part however, is that my old comfy crappy sofa is having the last laugh as it remains fully ensconsed until September, when they finally row my new one across the Pacific.

A proposito, the Italian rower Alex Bellini who really is rowing across the Pacific Ocean recently had his first communication with people in four months. The article reads “The communiqué described the rower's moral as excellent and his main concern was his jar of Parmesan cheese was emptying too quickly” Check out alexbellini.it for some amazing photo’s in his personal diary. “We must become the change we want to see.” Mahatma Gandhi.

As an aside and a cautionary warning to others I got a wake up call with all these changes as last week, dinner got cold because we were fiddling with the new flat screen and GP commented “all these stresses because of new stuff”. He’s right - stuff is just stuff and not worth fretting over, so with any luck I’m done for another 19 years!

When you're finished changing, you're finished.” Benjamin Franklin.

Feeling fruity.

I’ve adopted the Square Foot Gardening method of growing my own food and even though my harvest is small, it’s still ridiculously satisfying. Look at my baby water melons (as the actress said to the bishop)!

And talking of food, its mango season and this was my well deserved lunch after a great little surf sesh last week.

There are mango trees everywhere and evidently there’s quite an etiquette to poaching someone else’s fruit. It seems to go like this. If the tree hangs into no mans land (the road or pathway) then those mangoes are up for grabs. If the fruit is on private property then ask the owner nicely if you can pick some. Don’t be a greedy guts and take all his fruit and for goodness sake don’t be found at the swap meet by the owner selling his own harvest back to him!

I’ve just came home from a really fun beach BBQ, the excuse of which was Ulli’s birthday. What do you get the man who has everything? Well Darien & Lisa were the winners and here are said gifts modeled by the very non fruity Danny and the birthday boy himself. The only one to taste the cake was Ulli, as, in the good old tradition of custard pieing it was thrust into his face moments after it's arrival. Oh the revenge will be sweet and swift on this one!