I can't get rid of those black lines for the life of me. However, this recent brush with the bitterness of humanity (a.k.a. loss of electricity for 2 hours) has helped me realize what is truly important.

back to the good old days

I write this by candlelight, not a flicker of electric glow in sight as the village of Kealakekua has been unexplainably plunged into darkness. It’s been a long time since a blackout that wasn’t caused by torrential rains or a devastating earthquake.

Could this be a harbinger of a new normality to come, as we run out of fossil fuels? Days ending with sunset; TV culture dead before the idiots of The Hills realize they’re no longer being taped; people forced to depend on each other, to commune in ways not seen since the pre-modern era? To spend the evenings (provided one’s store of homemade candles is plentiful enough) whittling tree stumps into crude toys for a child’s birthday, or ruining one’s eyes darning Bounty towels for re-use? Ooh, or crafting peanut and walnut shells into little dolls? I used to love doing that!

Thank god my computer battery is charged.

Gall durn. I just tried to download a plaintive-yet-uplifting Irish ballad to accompany my piety, but realized our wireless router is asleep in the blackout.

There sure are a lot of cars driving around. I bet people (young people) went out for drives because they couldn’t bear the lack of stimuli, and at least could listen to the radio or charge their i-pods in the car.

Whoa! I’ve been on for 15 minutes and my battery is already down by half. This does not bode well for my future as a Hawaii Outpost of the Pioneer Days blogger.

Now, let us pray that I someday am able to retrieve this, as I must turn off the computer to preserve precious battery life.

On to a week’s backlog of candlelit crosswords. Pray the stubs of wedding candles that I so presciently hoarded are not the cause of my early (but how romantic!) demise.

away from her

Last night while Ben was working his job as an A/V geek, I watched Away from Her, a heart-breaking movie about a sixty-ish woman's initial descent into Alzheimer's. It was really good, but I imagine it would be very hard to watch for anyone who's actually cared for someone with the big A. It was directed by Sarah Polley, who the dorkier among us know and love from her starring role in the sadly short-lived Ramona series on PBS.

My initial reactions were typical: Call parents. Spend more time with grandmother. Do two crosswords a day to keep mind sharp. Stop eating so much canned food, stop using anti-perspirant.

But what's lingered with me the most is Julie Christie's awesome wardrobe. She continues, of course, to be a stone fox 30 years after McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and even in the nursing home where she ended up, was a gorgeous, intellectual type. What does it say that I covet her ivory herringbone coat with a shawl-like collar that buttoned intricately at the neck? Or that I want to practice wearing my hair in the loose, careless way she pinned up her silvery-blond curls?

I want to dress like a sixty-five-year-old woman. Albeit, one in designer clothes carefully chosen by a costume designer, but the impulse is still worrisome.

greens

I'm basking in my own virtue after tonight's Sunday dinner:

• Vichyssoise, a pureed soup of leek, potato, peas and sorrel, which I had never heard of until Wednesday when I picked up our weekly produce subscription and it became my new favorite edible leaf. It's slightly sour and has the texture of a mint leaf.
• Stir-fried chicken with spicy beet greens and spinach, topped with green onions and peanuts, over brown rice.

I've also whipped up some chocolate soy pudding for Ben and portioned it into four dessert cups. Next I'm going to pay my bills, dutifully filing the statements in reverse chronological order, fill my weekly pill case with vitamins, and then iron my clothes for the week.

In case it's not painfully obvious, I have some job applications (which all include essays!) that should have been submitted a couple of months ago. Just as soon as I take care of all these essentials, they'll be the very next on my list.

Seattle probability for today: 87 %, not factoring in Friday's announcement that Seattle Public Schools is effecting a hiring freeze. 96 % when factoring in the report that Theo "ran into Mommy with the [child-size] tractor."

for those of you who are keeping score,

80 percent sure we'll move to Seattle. Or, as I like to think of it, Theo and Levi's playground that I, their favorite auntie, will turn into the magical backdrop of all their most beloved memories.

two a-holes in a 'stang

Just got back from our honeymoon. When we arrived on Kauai, the rental agent upsold us to a Mustang convertible. My excuse is that he was over 60, which elicited my pity (anyone these days who is my parents' age and working elicits pity, as I wish for my parents to be doted on while lounging in clouds of non-gravity), and it was only a few bucks more per day!

The car, which we couldn't have known would be cherry-red, prompted us to embrace our newfound mantle with gusto and fully inhabit the obnoxious couple personae played by Kristin Wiig and Jason Sudeikis. We cracked gum, we wore our sunglasses when we didn't really need to, we went to the hotel pool bar in the afternoon when there were children nearby.

We ordered things like tuna melts and fries when there was a shrimp stand across the street and perfectly good mangoes on trees nearby, I guess. (Dude, I hate shellfish, and fruit is a waste of stomach space, much like hard candy.)


We felt an unnameable malaise until the fourth night when we moved from the Hilton to our vacation rental and were reunited with the mother's milk of Fark and The Superficial:



We became the most animated when we found scenes that conformed to our images from television ads, like this one from a Bank of Hawaii commercial where teenage girls jump off the Hanalei pier and proclaim, "This is our Hawaii":



But we also provided one of the only stores of booze at the BYOB wedding, and as far as I'm concerned, that makes up for any touristy a-holeness we may have perpetrated upon the island. Our handiwork:

This would've been all water bottles without us, Babe.