weblog meta-note

OK, I'm now officially following Trev's excellent piece of advice: flip and write my weblog in the morning when no one's around, rather than at night when everyone's online and constantly derailing your train of thought. *chuckle* That way, he says, I won't be "late" either. Huh. Late? For what? Where's the party? ;-) Time's relative though isn't it, dude? But in addition, Kass says that if I flip in the morning there'll be "something to read" when they get home from school. Uhm... oooooo k? Well, we'll see how this goes. This may even encourage less sloth from me and I won't wake up at indecently late hours in the morning. Right now would be 'decent,' though: it's only 8:30 a.m. Lahainatime and I woke up naturally, the green gloom notwithstanding. *yawn* So, first order of business for the day, then... boil H20 for coffee.

coconuts and butternuts

This picture's from yesterday. That's Keiki Beach, which is about half a mile north of Lahaina town. No, it's not an island -- it looks weird like that because that's a panoramic picture, a 180-degree sweep from north to south (north being on the left), about 6 images worth of stitching. Click on it for more detail and to see the curious artifact of that strolling couple and their dog who seem to appear twice in one moment, if one were to assume that the whole scene was photographed just once with a wide-angle lens. On the far left, they're walking along the sand, on the far right they're in the water with their dog, who was chasing after a stick. On the background right, that peninsula jutting out to sea marks the town proper.

So yesterday afternoon I was at that beach, where I went to read another Civil War history. Though James McPherson's Prologue to Battle Cry of Freedom was stirring, the humid air though moving with a caramel breeze made me drowsy and I fell asleep under one of those coconut trees. When I casually mentioned this to Trev last night, he blasted me with a NO! and a citation of the 'fact' that hundreds of people die each year from coconut beanings. LOL. I assured him I do know that for a fact, and I did check first to see if there were any fruits on the bole of the tree above. This is to be expected from someone who grew up on a Southeast Asian island lush with coconut trees. Clearly, there were no threatening woody-shelled fruits, much less a sudden falling of them, otherwise I wouldn't be recounting this now would I? *snicker* [That link above is to an excellent NY Times review of the McPherson book. If you haven't registered for the NY Times yet, do so. It's free and painless, and you get a treasure trove of info and news from that site.]

Reading the civil war histories, a new word learned: butternut. I kept tripping over the usage, while reading the Shelby Foote book, as he referred to the Confederates from time to time as "butternuts." Eventually, I deduced that this probably had to do with their colors (gray as opposed to the Union blues who, incidentally, didn't have as evocative a nickname) but as to how or why I had no idea. An eventual Internet search revealed the answer, and I was duly enlightened: the butternut is another name for the eastern North American walnut tree, and a brownish dye can be obtained from the husks of the walnuts. Confederate uniforms were dyed with butternut extract, thus yielding the nickname.

{ net.casting }
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