Archive for March 8th, 2010

Man, was that close or what? I thought about writing the latest blog during the hours before the inevitable crushing blow delivered by the tsunami of the century and chronicling  the various aspects of human behavior involved with handling the situation. I've lived through these scares before. No disasters have resulted. But this one, this one was a wave generated by a magnitude  8.8 earthquake. A wave moving, by some estimates at five hundred miles per hour. A wave with the potential to cause ripples of destructive force throughout the Pacific. A wave that caused an exodus of lowlanders to seek high ground. They parked along the kula highway and filled up Rice park and Keokea. They brought coolers and beach chairs and binoculars. They lined up for gas with tempers flaring and fears surfacing. There was a strange kind of exuberance underlying the vibe, like mail call at an insane asylum. Would there be enough toilet paper to go round?

In the grip of such moments of dire speculation there are two basic revelations. One, that we are at any given moment at the whim of natural forces that in an instant can change our lives forever, and two, that we better have adequate party supplies to deal with it when the slurry hits the sluice way. For the most part we are hedonists at heart because feeling good is the only antidote, period. After twenty, thirty years of practicing whatever discipline, it occurs to you that a vicodin, glass of wine and spliff are about as good as the collected works of Rumi, or the Bhagavad freakin' Gita.

So when the wave doesn't come, and our view of mind numbing devastation is put off till another day, there is a strange sense of being let down, like finding out that the phone number some uber hotty gave you was to the local Jiffy Lube. Cause really, what could be cooler than seeing Wailea turned back into a pristine coastline marred only by one of Helen Hunts Gucci dresses hung up on the branch of a Kiawe tree and flappin' in the breeze. There's no turning it back, there's just wiping it out. Rumor has it that mother nature has been revving up to do a serious cleanse due to a burgeoning infestation of mammalian bipeds irritating her skin.

We got a hundred two day old chicks in a couple of weeks back. I know, I know, its a love/hate thing. Got one breed called Cuckoo Maran, said to lay dark reddish brown eggs. This will give us the much needed contrast to the white to cream to light brown to brown to speckled brown to dark brown to blue to blueish green to reddish brown spectrum of colors necessary for us keep our adoring public amused and well fed. If only the yolks matched the shell color. Did you know that you can tell what color egg a chook will lay by the color of its ear lobes? Did you know that chickens have earlobes? File that  under obscurely cool factoids.

Since the last post detailing my delusional view of the molt cycle, the little darlings have stepped it up to eighty to ninety eggs a day. When the current batch of youngsters reaches laying age around July we'll have scaled up to about half the potential productivity of the property when it comes to egg output, and that, as they say in the biz is a crapload of eggs. Its one of those aspects of Permaculture that stimulates the brainstorming potential in any situation. Yes, diversity is the key, but addiction creates its own mojo and that's what our marketing strategies are based on. People love (are addicted to) eggs. We arrange ours in the carton such that the combination of colors and their juxtaposition in the box opens up a delta brainwave moment at which time subliminal messages written in invisible ink on the egg shells spell out our various instructions to the customer. There is also an invisible disclaimer.

There's this nice little water feature out the back of the house that has been providing a lovely sanctuary of sound and reflected light and fish moving in ways we can only dream of. In the course of the past six or seven years there have been numerous changes in plant life patterns. Lately a new kind of algae has shown up. Not the kind that just makes the water green. Its kind of light green and gloopy with air bubbles all through it. It hangs down in the pond and floats around presumably growing. The fish don't seem to mind it or particularly like it. Its not like the guppies  are bellying up to the bar.

Well awhile back I pulled some out and laid it on the rocks bordering the pond and the other day, nurse Natalie and I found some that had been dried by the sun. It looked like an oddly shaped sheet of seaweed, stuck to the rock and crispy dry. It peeled off the rock real easy and had a kind of iridescent sheen to it in the sunlight.

We looked at each other in that sort of dare you to eat some kind of way and I tore off a little piece and placed it delicately on my tongue in plain view of my taunter. It had a rather pleasant, somewhat salty taste, which I conveyed to the smiling Natty who then went ahead and tore off a small green corner of her own. After agreeing that it wasn't an entirely unpleasant experience, we went on about our day.

It wasn't until the next morning that I noticed that Natalie's dread locks had unraveled, floofed out and resolved into a kind of mega-mullet riding atop her elfin visage and that I was growing what appeared to be a third testicle just bellow my left elbow. As if listening to Johnny and the twins banter on about sex all day isn't bad enough. This was rather distressing to both of us and I decided it would be good to consult an expert. So I called the local ag extension officer in charge of aquaculture. A fella name of Roland Plotzkrell phD.

When I described the look of the algae and the side effects there was a pause on the phone followed by a long drawn out, "oh my".  Apparently we have been sabotaged by a group known as Permaculture Sucks who, along with Monsanto have contaminated our waters with a gmo algae designed to forever alter the genetic makeup of anything that comes in contact with it. I was wondering why the Gamboosia looked liked members of Duke Ellingtons orchestra.  Plotzkrell thought it most likely that we would both experience our "District Nine" moment and with any luck wander off foraging the land until morphing into a pile of charcoal.

"Oh c'mon unky jp, thats audacious even for you."

"I know little fella, aren't pain killers and scotch great?"

"Great indeed, unky jp."

The more you show, the more we'll grow. Be disturbed, be very disturbed, Jp