In which my kindergartner daughter leads the way.

A beautiful, warm day! We went swimming yesterday evening after my daughter’s hula class.

There’s hula everywhere this week!

Waiting for a tsunami to arrive.

How refreshing.
I was driving in Kea‘au, stopped at a light, when three middle school-age kids in their dark green school t-shirts, two boys and a girl, walked across the street in front of me.
They’d obviously just come out of McDonald’s because they held McDonald’s bags and cups. As they got to the other side of the street, laughing and talking, they tossed their trash to the ground.
Oh, the thoughts that raced through my head: “What is the matter with them?” “WHO RAISED THEM?” “Why doesn’t one of those kids call the …

Every morning I drive my daughter to school, and every morning we deal with the road work on Hwy. 11 as we motor up the hill toward Kea‘au. It’s been going on at least since before her July summer program at the school.
To the construction company’s credit, they have been keeping the road open (at least during the morning rush hour; I don’t know about the rest of the day), though it does slow and narrow to one lane at places. It could be worse.
But it’s never fun to drive …

I wrote about vog recently and the article is out in the current (August 2009) Honolulu magazine.
Here’s how it starts:
It comes on the Kona winds—the dreaded yellow-brown haze of vog that makes eyes burn and lungs protest. On the Big Island, of course, it has done far more damage. How bad could it get? And what do we really know about vog and its effects?
Three-thousand, eight-hundred people lived on Miyakejima, a small island off Tokyo, until one day in September 2000, when the Japanese government ordered the island evacuated because …

Local excursion #2 of our Summer of Exploration was a slow, winding drive down the four mile, scenic route that diverts from the highway and runs along the coast, more or less, between Pāpa‘ikou and Pepe‘ekeo.
This used to be the main road, I told my 5-year-old. This is the way people used to go to get to Hilo town a long time ago, I said, and we talked about how the road is smaller and much more winding, and how they must have driven much slower than we do now.
I …

For our first official “exploration” of the summer, my mom and I took my 5-year-old daughter into Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park the other day.
First we sat on the grass on our green and blue blanket, watched and talked about the birds (as they watched and talked about us) and ate crab sushi that we brought with us.
Then we looked around in the Volcano Art Center, especially at a kids’ juried art exhibit. That was pretty neat and we discussed that maybe my daughter will want to enter it next year.
We talked …

We live on the Hamakua coast, a little ways outside of Hilo, and almost every time I drive into town I think about my grandmother, my Tutu, telling me offhandedly once that her great-grandfather had known every twist and turn of that road.
Even when he was in his 80s and 90s and fully blind, she told me, he knew where he was by the turns and feel of the road, and he would call out the name of every small bit of land as they drove by.

In the old times from …