Happy (well, maybe, maybe-not) New Year!

[Note: This is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland.]

12/31/21

Aloha All --

Happy New Year.  I guess.  My New Year's resolution is to not get my hopes up about 2022 like I did for 2021.  It (2021) started off, before January 6, with high hopes.  Then...well...not so much.  After bottoming out the roller coaster ride continued with a high point of getting vaccinated and breathing a sigh of relief. We relished our re-found freedom, including a trip to the mainland in the spring.  Then...Delta.  Sh*t.  Bottoming again. But then up we went with some fabulous demonstrations of what humans can do right -- like flying a drone on another planet!  Yay.  Even an international trip in late summer, wow!  And Christmas seemed to be going to be ok, when the roller coaster took another dive with Omicron.  I think I'm going to barf up my cotton candy. So this New Year's Eve I'm just going to wait and see what happens next. That way I figure I will either be pleasantly surprised or pre-resigned to more avoidable human folly.

Ok, we had a pretty good Christmas and I hope you did too.  I gave Karen a honu (turtle) pendant which she liked, and a blouse which didn't fit.  50% isn't bad.  My record of buying her something to wear hasn't been all that great, and you'd think I would learn my lesson.  I have managed to pull it off in the past, but not this time.  She gave me a golf shirt, a golf glove, and a nice fuzzy blanket to keep me

Abandoned Nene Egg

warm during my "contemplative naps."  I put the shirt and the glove to work on Tuesday, when I joined Karen and her usual golf partner for a round at Makalei.  I think the glove actually helped my long shots, and it looked really cool, too, almost like I knew what I was doing. We saw a fair number of peacocks and about 8 mating pairs of nenes.  The lower number of nenes has us worried a bit, because they might have had a difficult time with that big storm we had that brought down limbs and uprooted trees right where they

My Orange Ball To The Left

usually nest.  And then the clean-up effort involved lots of power saws and heavy equipment.  Hopefully most of them survived ok and simply decided to relocate somewhere with less damage and disruption.  At least one nest didn't make it, though, because we found an abandoned nene egg on the edge of one of the greens, not far from a stand of trees.  Oh, and I nearly whacked one nene with my tee-shot, which wound up lying next to it.  Maybe it was contemplating adopting it to replace the lost egg???

Tonight (New Year's Eve) we're having dinner at our house with my college friend and his wife.  This is the couple who own a small coffee farm not far from us in Holualoa.  They've decided to sell their place, however, to take advantage of the insane housing market and buy something more manageable that requires less work. They're in the process of prepping the house and "staging" it for the market, and it will be interesting to find out what this has involved.  I've decided that 2021 doesn't deserve a pyrotechnic send-off, so this year the dogs in the neighborhood will get a break from my usual noisy firework extravaganza.

Ok, I hope you have a fun, healthy, and reflective New Year's.  All the best for 2022.  We're all going to need it, I think.  Take care.