You are using an insecure version of your web browser. Please update your browser!
Using an outdated browser makes your computer unsafe. For a safer, faster, more enjoyable user experience, please update your browser today or try a newer browser.
On the Garden Island of Kauai, there are many, many chickens. They greeted us at the airport when we set down, begged for food (especially the fried chicken) and crowed early in the morning. You could live off of a diet of chicken and fruit for free in this patch of earth in perpetuity. Chickens are plentiful.
There are also many, many plants. You probably deduced this from “Garden Island”, but really, the plants are many in variety, hues of green, shapes, sizes, etc… If you are a botanist, this is one Hawaiian Island not to be missed. I didn’t take too many plant pictures, as there were an abundance of colorful animals to focus on.
There are an assortment of fish, this one being a blenny hiding in a hole dug out of a tidepool enclosed by sandstone. I wonder how blennies taste–they can’t be as bad as mudskippers, as those are certifiably the worst fish I’ve ever tasted and I’ve eaten a lot of fish, some of it even fermented. That’s right, mudskipper tastes worse than fermented fish. Don’t believe me? Go to Saga prefecture, Japan, and taste for yourself.
Frogs also occur in high concentrations, in certain spots. Did you know that frogs love manicured fields of grass? It’s a fact! Another point of interest: frogs are hard to see when they’re hiding in the grass unless you’re looking for them. Watch where you step, or you may end up inadvertently playing the part of Godzilla to Frog Tokyo.
MVI_0620
There are a bunch of lobster hidden among the reef structure. Unfortunately, this one was not big enough to be legally taken.
Jesus Quintana rocking out in a toll booth–that’s what this cat looks like when I pull up to the queue to cross the bridge at Martinez. I remember the last time I saw him, a few months back. He’s a tall, lanky Latino wearing black with a long ponytail and a large silver cross, laced with stones, hanging from his neck.
Dude is having the time of his life, smiling and dancing in his booth and is super friendly as I hand over $5. We exchange greetings, and though I interact with him for less than 10 seconds, that instant makes me much richer for the experience. What is your secret to being so happy and how did you develop the ability to infect strangers instantly in a toll booth, of all places? Clearly, you have found your road to happiness. I choose to believe that the random string of great music pumping out of my iPod for the rest of the night was somehow the result of running into this guy.
If you happen to be driving this stretch, I’ve run into the happy toll booth attendant one booth over from the furthest right hand side. Go see him. It will be $5 that you won’t mind handing over at a toll booth, and you may come out richer for the experience.
…or a cube of beef fat into a big, hot pan, followed by thin, delicate slices of well-marbled beef. Then comes the vegetables, tofu, mushrooms, scallions and yam noodles. Toss on some sake, mirin, shoyu, dashi and sugar and let simmer until the meat is just done and the veggies are tender. Scoop up on to a bowl full of rice, dip a morsel in raw egg and enjoy.
This dish is best enjoyed with a cold beer, with feet under a hot kotatsu table and a good movie.
Sukiyaki on a cold, dark night reminds me of living on Awajishima with Justin. Max and Mina, I will have to cook for you when we next meet…
I used to listen to Pandora 40 hours a week, only when I was working. I’d turn it down low and keep it running until I clocked out. When they started limiting their free subscription to 40 hours per month, things started to go downhill. I had stopped listening to Pandora until relatively recently, only to find that now advertisements are wedged, frequently and conspicuously, between tracks are distracting and make the listening experience less-than-optimal. I guess it’s better than local radio, but then again almost any city has better radio than Monterey.
I much prefer Last.fm to Pandora. Once in a great while, there is an advertisement and they don’t seem to have the same negative effect on my listening experience as Pandora. The interface is also more appealing–it looks cooler and gives me more information that I want in a format that makes Pandora look bland. This is my new go-to-station.
Lately, I’ve also enjoyed listening to 8tracks–it’s cool to hear a “mix tape” that someone has put together. It makes me nostalgic for tapes that family, friends and strangers used to commonly share.
Another site that I’m currently checking out is Stereo Mood. From the little I’ve used it, I’ve enjoyed the eclectic mix of music that is strung together by, well, the mood of the tracks. The juxtaposition of genres united by emotive themes seems to work pretty well.
There are some other sites that I’ve listened to, and I’m sure new ones will come to my attention and pop up along the way. I’m just glad that I can listen to a variety of interesting music without having to blindly take a chance on buying CDs that I may or may not like, nor do I have to depend on knowing people who are really into discovering and sharing new music. Now I can be lazy and let the internet bring an interesting variety to me, as I do other things that I want to do as I listen to selections that have been assembled by another person or an algorithm. I like the internet.
When I worked for ECC in Osaka, a company that was one of the larger companies that provided English instruction in schools and in the private sector, I occasionally did voice acting for their manuals. It is very possible that in some classroom or study area that Japanese people are listening to my voice, trying to imitate my accent. Scary thought.
Today, I got a request from my friend Luke asking me to record the following:
This is a script students are doing for a play and they need American voices.
Can you help and make a recording???
I would SUPER appreciate man!!!
A: Where is the Jap?
B: I heard an explosion over there.
C: Be careful.
A/B: Yeah…
A: Hey! Look!
B: Freeze! I’ll shoot him.
C No, don’t shoot.
B: Why!? He is Japanese.
C: Look he surrendered.
A: But it might be a trap!
C: No, he has already lost his fighting will.
B: Yeah…
Your motivation is that this Japanese villager was about to commit suicide by blowing them all to pieces and couldn’t go through with it. Eventually surrendering.
So I roped Mika to play the part of “C”. Here’s what we came up with. Now that I’ve started to accumulate a portfolio as a voice actor, I’m expecting the offers for lucrative opportunities to come rolling in. Any second now… luke_script
It turns out that there are a lot of camp sites available in the Fort Ross area of the California coastline, and the beginning of September during the mid-week is an ideal time to get a place to yourself. We returned to a place that had yielded some pretty good results on a previous trip at Stillwater Cove, in Sonoma:
As with most of our trips, we tried to find new spots that people were less likely to access, as we found out that one cove over from the main beaches was much more productive than the well-picked-over waters closer to the road-side parking. Recently, we’ve been seeing more and more people who don’t seem to be very comfortable in the water diving for the snails. Luckily for us, we are a bit more comfortable scrambling down areas that are not as accessible, going for longer swims and able to dive a bit deeper.
Here’s a picture of the cliff we went over–this is not easy to scramble down so we usually end up chucking our gear over the edge first, though we’re still wearing 20 pounds of weight and 7mm wetsuits:
This is what it looks like going down. The rock was rotten sandstone, and it was not easy to climb down, and thus there should be plenty of abalone…
Here’s a video of the entry into the water:
In this particular spot was apparently perfect for prickly sea urchins (which we were very careful to avoid, but if you like uni this is the spot!) and though we saw two abalone, they were both nowhere near legal size and crammed into deep, well-concealed crevices. On another trip, we had discovered that the channel between a group of rocks jutting out of the ocean and point on land was super-productive, however it is only safe to go in on the calmest of days. This day, though there were no huge waves, was not doable, so we had to dive the spot that everyone else goes to pick their abalone. Notice that this descent is easier, but still requires a rope to get down to the bottom when in full diving gear:
In order to find decent sized abalone, not just ones that were barely of legal size, we swam further out into areas where the surge was stronger and where the water was deeper. Luckily, this spot was nice and sunny, so we saw things like this (usually, it is cold and foggy which makes you appreciate the warm and sunny days):
Here’s an abalone, in situ:
The Tyrannosaurus Rex of echinoderms, the sultan of sea stars: the mighty sunflower star
Abalone and a giant green anemone:
Smaller, orange anemones:
And we had a visitor as well:
Once that was said and done, we found a spot about 30 feet down under a submarine ledge with a number of decent sized abalone:
It took me a while to select three to pull, as thirty feet is about as far as I can comfortably and safely dive right now. This is an improvement of the first time I went, when going down 15 feet was really challenging. Here’s a shot of me at the bottom. The yellow line is attached to my ab bar and gauge one one side, with my MacGuyver’d float (made out of two children’s PFD’s, rope, zip ties and a carabiner) 30 something feet at the other side:
…and at the surface, putting one away:
Here’s a shot on land. You have to tag the abalone right away once you get on your boat or come onto land, otherwise you potentially face a stiff charge:
Unfortunately, Heather didn’t bring her abalone card with her, but luckily for us, this meant that she could play around with Mika’s new Canon Powershot D10, which is rated to go down to 10m.
I don’t have any pictures of our campsite, but you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you that it’s worth getting out there in the off-season. The sites are well-maintained, there seems to be a lot of areas to go hiking, diving and fishing, and if you pick the right site, you can end your dive with a nice hot shower!
There it is, swimming an endless circle, the last of its group. Hard to imagine how such a large, shiny animal can suddenly mute into the endless blue backdrop, but when it happens only a keen eye can pull it out of shadows. Where giant tuna once were, a massive bait ball now dominates the seascape–perhaps more fitting now than ever as their race to extinction is hastened by nets and oil slicks.
If you have the time, go and see the Outer Bay before it goes away for a year. Though it will return, it is quite possible that it won’t be the same exhibit.
