goo

....although I'm not sure which is which.

This is Silas and I at the Pali Lookout - I think he's on tiptoes, to show off how much taller he is than his shrunken, tired, beat-down and oppressed elderly father.

I was going to post some scuba pix today, but Ethel won't upload 'em. I was then going to (instead) post a pic of all fhe stuff that we bought in Hawai'i, but Ethel won't send me that picture. So you get this.

Life at home has been strange. For one thing, Maia the Malamutt stinks. I don't mean that in an ethical or esthetic sense - I mean that she STINKS. We can't find the actual source of the stink - we can't locate the place on her body from which the stench is emanating (although, you can bet that if I had had a camera handy when Ethel was checking to see if it was Maia's anal glands, you can bet that I would have uploaded that one myself, and today would be a very, very different Fat Charlie's Diary entry) - we've given her two baths (Maia had never had a bath before, in my memory - there was one time when she and Kia got each other bloody, though, which might have brought about some scrubbing) and she was not amused by it, at all.

In addition, we are now living between piles of bags full of Macadamia Nuts, and stacks of Aloha shirts and beach towels. Ethel went bonkers at the Macadamia Farm Outlet. It was like she was the Bubba Gump of macadamia nuts - roasted salted macadamia nuts. Roasted UNsalted macadamia nuts.Honey Roasted macadamia nuts..Cinnamon encrusted macadamia nuts..Kona Coffee encrusted macadamia nuts.. Garlic and Onion macadamia nuts. Macadamia nut coffee (whole bean and pre-ground)..Fried macadamia nuts, boiled macadamia nuts, macadamia nut gumbo, macadamia nut etufe' (okay, I made those last few up).

And we have a lot of Aloha shirts - somebody kept buying them - and beach towels. I have no idea where they came from, but I'm wearing 'em. I will probably make it into late September wearing a different Aloha shirt to the office every day.

But walking around Arizona wearing Aloha shirts and sandals (or, as they say in Hawai'ian, "slippahs") causes a bit of cognitive dissonance (that's psychology talk for "feeling weird") - Arizona is sort of all beach and no ocean. It should be pointed out here, though, that Hawai'i (like all of the other 49 states) has its own idigenous species of prickly pear cactus: here's a shot of one that we saw on the day that we went climbing at Makapu'u point:

                                     

Being home after being gone on vacation for over three weeks is weird anyway - I've only done that once before, in 2002, and that trip was also to Hawai'i. It's nice to get the time off, but I'm having some trouble getting completely back in the swing of things - for instance, they've got this gadget on my desk here at the office. It has all kinds of buttons on it - some of the buttons have letters, and some have numbers, and some have punctuation or little words like "Ctrl" or "Alt" - what am I supposed to DO with this thing?

I'll report back in as soon as Ethel posts some pix.