"Hiroko" must mean smile

Banana, Coconut, Pineapple with ice cream and beans...

Matsumoto Shave Ice

A serious learning curve

Mary set up a digital loom workshop with Emily Dubois, who recently moved to Hilo and donated her compudobby loom to the program. I been going in and out in between teaching but it's been nice to stop and be a student if even for a couple of hours. With a digital loom a weaver can input patterns into a computer and the program figures out the warp and weft and then with the push of a button lifts the proper heddles. Emily bought fabric paint and showed us how you can paint on the threads, for example you can paint different colors on the warp threads before you weave and then a pattern will emerge after the section is weaved, and, and.. Basically I got teased with lots of options and new possibilities for making and I don't know when I'll ever have the time.

It's up!

The info on the upcoming TCM show is finally up here

As Kainoa's mom it makes me so happy to see him with such a good friend in Kai. The two of them can just go for hours on the beach and even though they are very different children they compliment each other well and enjoy each other without limit. We were up every morning before them and Kainoa would hang as close to the door of their tent as I would allow him to get and say in a soft voice "come out. come out. come out." and then when Kai finally emerged from the tent Kainoa would bust into a wide grin of satisfaction and anticipation. By the way, that's no sunset, that's the sun rising at 6am. lovely.

another lazy weekend at Malaekahana

we got to go camping this weekend with John, Hiroko, Kai, and Frank. it was restful but not without weirdness. i'd heard about the treacherous bugs in Hawaii but had only ever seen cockroaches and termites. this weekend I almost plopped my hand down on a giant centipede while collecting firewood and then I came way too close to sitting on a scorpion who had made a bed in my camp chair. Kainoa and Kai roasted their first marshmallows and Kainoa gets more comfortable with his abilities in the water every day. so, first a great video of Kainoa on his boogie board, and more pics to come...

Lesson learned

Never get your child a new bicycle and then expect them to sit through dinner at a quiet little Vietnamese restaurant before you go home for his first ride ..... pictures by Kainoa

Halloween..

I really have underestimated the breadth of Michael Jackson's influence..

For you on Halloween

happy halloween from our house to your house

Another packed weekend, finally getting some rest today. Robyn and Kevin were married Saturday on the great lawn of the Bishop Museum (no pics of Kevin and Robyn together, they all came out fuzzy). The great lawn meant plenty of room for all the cousins to run, roll, spin, and on. Music was by Brother Noland.

Go go grom!

Kainoa surfed his first wave all on his own. Next stop, Triple Crown....

more pics from Kainoa's life changing visit to the Hickam Fire Station...

Stop, drop and roll

This was the most amped up I've seen Kainoa and his preschool buddies, before their visit to Hickam Air Force Base Fire Station.

The zoo is still as hectic an outing as ever but this time Kainoa made an instant friend in a little girl named Christine. We ended up spending the day with her and her grandparents who described her as a rascal...two peas in a pod...

If you happen through Holland....

It's been Kainoa and I since Tuesday night (Glenn's been in Chicago) and I've done my best at satisfying my young son's family needs ("put my truck in the bathtub... I wanted to make the letters turn blue... draw a soccer team for me... let's pretend we're hippos... lay with me... i don't want apple juice i want cranberry juice, no i want apple juice...") The comparison has been made many times before but one more time here we go, caring for a young child can be much like tending to a drunk. We've had a wonderful week but I'm flat out exhausted. The Intersections visiting artist arrived this week and didn't do his paperwork right (meaning we can't pay him unless divine intervention i.e. immigration, cooperates), his artwork needed a clean storage space (at UH?) and the sweet organic grocery store that volunteered to provide the food for his reception dropped the ball and now in the midst of it all I need to come up with reception food for tomorrow. Not all that hard but another thing on my plate. I'm supposed to make work for my show in December, I'd better find my magic hat to pull this rabbit out of....

more ridiculousness...

We ship our garbage to the Mainland, we have a water park on an island and we're in a war that could be from the pages of "1984." "Labyrinth of the Ridiculous" at Soullenz Gallery (186 N. King St.) takes note of the all-too-surreal life through works such as Isaac Parker's video "The holy onset exotic erotic metabolic bucolic erogenous disorder zone." Through Nov. 10. The gallery is open by appointment; contact Dieter Runge at dieterr@aloha.net.

Kainoa stands, holding a pine cone from our days in Montana:
"Mama we have to return this to the forest. No. Wait. Let's keep it and you eat and eat and eat so that you live forever and we can be together forever with our pine cone."

Labyrinth of the Ridiculous, Soullenz Gallery

The world is backwards, upside down, inside out. Everyday we have to
negotiate the Labyrinth of the Ridiculous: the media, the streets, the
bureaucracies, the wars, 3000 mile plastic salads, garbage shipped
across the globe. Try opening a cd case lately? Do we laugh, cry or
drown in despair, or turn it into a sensuous encounter between the
umbrella and the sewing-machine...