Blogs are a pain in the ass.  And blogs that nobody reads, except robot spammer vacuums, are an even a bigger pain.   But every once in a while I get people sending me emails asking me if my teeth are still in the front of my mouth, and if I have recovered from my long painful kiss with Pele, and and the long painful recovery from ankle and sciatica injuries.

So I'm here to tell you I'm getting better and with many fits and starts getting back in the hiking/running saddle.

Living on the top of Kilauea has taken some adjusting to.  The cold at night, the damp afternoons, the precocious weather in spite of its general predictability, make it hard to just head out and run, as I did on Oahu.  Here at 4100 feet it is a different game.  Ten years in near climactic perfection on Oahu have made the transition to a different Hawaii hard.  But six months ago, after six months of living in a house not really suited for the Volcano Park area, I moved into my present place and have found it easier to keep warm, and am generally warmer and more comfortable.  Though a lot of that increase in comfort is just my understanding that fleece, any kind of fleece, and stocking caps makes life nicer most of the time.

In my new place I get the morning sun, see Mauna Loa in the morning, and can sit with my coffee and zone on  a vista of greenery.  I can do my 20 minutes in the sun for vitamin D3 and other sun exposure hormones, enjoy my coffee, tend my plants, drink my green drink (Kale, celery, apple, banana, ginger, other greens.) and mellow in the morning sun light.  This short period is more on than off, and then by 10 or 11 AM it changes, and the clouds come up the hill and mists and rain can join in, and by afternoon there is often a moist and gray top to the volcano.

But moist and gray are not that bad, if you know how to live in them, and getting out is cool, it just takes a bit more determination. Like running in the cold or snow or other so called weather of the mainland.

This past afternoon Felisha and I did a hike that I have been doing since the eighties.  It is the Halina Pali trail, and the Ka'aha trail down to the water.  About 2300 feet down to ocean, 1500 of that along narrow pali cliff trails that switchback down the cliffs.  It was a beautiful day,  few clouds in the sky at that elevation, a breeze that faded as we dropped down the cliff, and finally died on the relative flats at 800 feet.

The recent hurricanes had produced a profusion of high grasses along the trail, and it was often difficult to see what was underfoot.  It was hard, and in many places dangerous as faultering and falling off the trail would have been a bloody experience producing pictures not unlike what I have already posted.