I counted 21 open flowers on this orchid, another 14 buds, and even more nubbins that promise to be buds that promise to be flowers. Talk about an over-achiever!

Yes, it’s been… let’s just say a while since I’ve posted. But I’m still kicking and, per my lovely photographic evidence, still doing it in East Hawaii.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve written a bunch of brilliant blog entries, usually in the shower or in bed at night when I can’t sleep. Of course, you’ll have to take my word for them being brilliant since they never made it from the ether to the digital page.

I could blame the Covid Times and general existential malaise, punctuated by the disruption caused by more travel than usual. (To be fair, anywhere farther than the grocery store is unusual during the past few years.) 

I’d like to blame The Blog Eaters.

(I’m currently reading Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters, which is a brilliant book. I don’t how the mechanics would work, but you know Blog Eaters would be total drama queens.)

Often the potential posts became so big in my head, so unwieldy that they just didn’t happen.

Thus I am sharing this shortie post to let you know I’m still here, still tippy-tapping away at some Sydney Brennan stories, with another project in the works. And I’ll be back again soon, or if not soon, sometime. Pinky-swear.

🌴 That is, unless the palm tree in our yard has its way. 🌴

Yesterday, the big boom of a coconut hitting our chainlink fence nearly gave me a heart attack. An hour or so later, another boom—palm frond and spadix, again hitting our poor martyred fence.

(The spadix is the coconut palm’s inflorescence, or flower head. Tuck that one away for trivia night.) 

For those who don’t live in the tropics or tropic-adjacent, palm fronds are surprisingly heavy and bad-ass and they will take you down.

See that black thing in the middle of the missile zone? That’s our compost bin. (We had to move it inside our fenced yard because the pigs shoved it over at night like they were raiding a dorm fridge.) 

Though it takes a bit away from my delicious dramatics, I feel compelled to offer this dose of reality: the oft-reported 150 people (!!) dying from falling coconuts a year is total BS, urban legend repeated so many times that we assume it’s supported by data. It is not.

But, if you happen to drop by our house and wonder what is that odor coming from the kitchen?, you might want to check the compost bin by our sink and see how full it is. A true friend would be brave and take it out for me. 😉