Heading to Kona

I am now in Kohala; I took a mid-morning flight so that I had time to meet with Curtis and hand off some things he needs to do with Dad. They were so fast turning the planes around at the gate  I didn't see the plane that was here when I got to the gate leave. The next thing I knew, the plane that I was going to be on had arrived and people were getting off!


My flight was boarded and ready to leave in no time at all. It turns out this must not be a popular time to fly; about the back 1/4 of the plane was empty.

The 3 rows behind these and those behind me were empty except for 2 seats.

This morning Curtis & I went to Koa Pancake House for breakfast; its in Kaimuki. The menu is on the wall, you go up to the counter, order and pay; they give you a number to take and post at your table. I had the Vinha d'alhos Omlette (pronounced vin-gah dos). Curtis had the Meatlovers Omelette. I'll come back for this and to try some other items on the menu that sounded ono.

Vinha d'alhos is a Portuguese dish. Mom used to make it with fish; Curtis doesn't remember her making it.

When I got to the house the first thing I went to see was the back yard. When I left in early June they were about half done with the work to begin the retraining of the fruit trees (avocado, lychee, orange, grapefruit, persimmon, banana, macadamia nut, mountain apple). The back yard is so nice an open again! The fence at the back property line has been installed to keep the feral hogs out. One unfortunate thing is that the young avocado tree that we were going to replace the old rotted one with was demolished when a windstorm came through and toppled the remains of the old avocafo tree on it; I will be checking to see if they have a comparable sapling at the nursery that I can replace it with. Now I have a lot of work to do to clean things up. And I still need to have the invasive African tulip trees, octopus trees, and christmas berry bushes removed; Masa is working on those but hasn't made much progress on them.

June 6th, work partially done.

Today.

Tomiko & Aunty Florence arrived in Kohala on Sunday. Last year Tomiko & I tried to make salted limes with ripe fruit, but Lem said we needed to use greener fruit. We put the limes we had in to the brine that was left from the properly prepared ones that he gave us; there were a couple bags still in the refrigerator so Tomiko made a chicken tagine for dinner tonight with the salted limes and other ingredients we had on hand. We also used a casserole dish since we didn't have a real tagine cooking vessel. In spite of all that, it was really good! (Sorry no photos, my phone was not cooperating.)

Lem & Francine came over for dessert. We had a Holy's Bakery apple pie with Roselani haupia ice cream. As always it was good! Then we spent hours talking about family things. It was really great! It's too bad Fran has to leave tomorrow to get back to work and helping her husband China with his surf meets; she's going to miss out on the bigger family gathering on Friday. (Tomiko took a photo; I hope to get a copy to post here since my phone was being tempermental.)

Happy Birthday to Becky!