That's the number of consecutive days I've been weblogging. Hehe. Counting from June 6th, which is when my streak began. I'd started my weblog in late May, but didn't write daily until a couple weeks later. Note the stress on write, not FLIP. *chuckle* Biiiiig difference. ;-) Naturally, Spark has a response to this already; not the flip/write difference, but the competitive aspect of it. LOL. Oh, and watch out for the lurid Xmas colors (and in-joke profanity) on his page. *snicker*

1

That's the time right now, in the p.m., and I looked up in astonishment to see that my day is evaporating! LOL. Where'd it go? Oh yeah. I logged on at around 9, and spent the better part of the morning chatting online with the usual suspects: Kass, Quad, Spark, Trev, Kati, Ozzie... and trying to write a weblog, rather unsuccessfully. But now, I really must go and continue my acquaintance with my fishy friends in the ocean. Thanks Kass for reminding me to buy the frozen peas. (This particular treat is to feed the reef fish, though it's technically not a good idea to do this since they'll come to rely on it if many people do this all the time. But it's fun to have a colorful swarm of fish around you when you bring out the plastic pouch of peas and start releasing the green morsels into the water. Trouble is, the smaller fish attract the bigger ones, which attract the biggest ones, which attract the HUMONGOUS ones. Those cartoons are right, in this regard. *chuckle* Perhaps if I'm lucky I'll see a tiger shark or two. They don't scare me at all. Their reputation is ill-deserved. Facts prove that it's about as likely to get killed and eaten by a shark here in Hawaii as to get hit by lightning. Much more likely to die in a car crash on the way to the ocean. *shiver.* Anyway, I've seen my share of sharks in the ocean, way back when I was into bodysurfing Point Panic regularly, in Honolulu Harbor. (Pt.P. was near a fish processing plant, and though shark sightings were common, no one was ever known to have been attacked there... an errant bodysurfer WAS decapitated by a passing fishing boat one day, as the guy was swept by the big waves that day into the channel. That was awful, tragic.)

Another interesting tidbit... the fish in my fave snorkeling area, the Honolua Bay Marine Area Preserve, are smart: a lot of them call it 'home.' Meanwhile, in a nearby bay (which is not a Preserve), there are far fewer reef fish. I guess they know to go where they won't be spearfished by divers and local fisherfolk. Interesting, ne? So, anyway, see you all later. Hope your day is as warm and gentle as mine.

6.5

That's the time now in the evening, and I must say, imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, as the old saying goes. Check out Trev's hilarious number list, which he evidently patterned after mine, not to mention ripping off some precise phraseology. Not that I mind. ;-) With a title like he has, though, he's bound to incur the wrath of his fellow Lowell High schoolmate and 49er fan, Anna. Hehehe. His whole page takes a while to load, because as you will see, it's utterly infested with iguanas LOL!! Which is a tribute to his new pet, I'm sure. (Trev, any particular reason why the letter M comes before L in your alphabet? *snicker* So I can't add... well, you can't recite your glyphs in the correct sequence. Ha! ^_^)

160

That's the approximate number of degrees covered in the panoramic picture of Honolua Bay below (click on it to see larger [82k] version). I snapped the series of images (the whole thing is a stitched sequence of 3 different shots) when I was leaving, so it's a little dark already. Like yesterday, there weren't many people here at all, due to the large-ish northwestern swell and surf today, and I practically had the bay to myself! While it's generally not a good idea to go snorkeling or diving alone, I made sure I didn't take unnecessary risks and venture into some shallow undersea caves in the area. Most of the action was occurring in the far top right of the picture, where lots of local guys were crowding the best surf spot in Maui. It was a good day to surf... 4 to 8 feet, with nicely-formed waves, and cool tubes on the largest sets. In between snorkeling episodes, I sat on the rocks and watched the action with my binocs.

My favorite area of the reef is on the right side of the bay, where the coral formations are healthy and starkly multi-colored (all shades of white, yellow, pink, brown, green, orange, red), and quite shallow at about a dozen feet deep, with numerous little 'alleyways' through which to swim. The water is crystal clear, and when the sunlight is angling down at a particular time of day (around 3 p.m.), the resulting play of light penetrating the wave-dappled surface results in a cascade of rays or shafts down to the sandy bottom, past walls of coral. It is all too intense, and quite a rush, I tellya. (Btw, that's the island of Molokai off in the distance.)

2

The number of scar pictures I have, from kids who were in accidents: David's elbow and Frankensteinish stapled stitches from his sk8boarding crash, and Trev's knee when it got ripped up by that barbed wire fence he was clambering over. It's really gross, hideous and weirdly compelling, like the scene of a car crash. Any requests to see Trev's bloody knee? haha. I shall post the pic here, if so. (I don't think iguanaboy will mind, since it's not a picture of his face. *smirk*) David's elbow pic weblog that I wrote is here...

(Many fruitless minutes later) Well, I'll be a goldurned dratted numbskull!!! There HAS to be a better way of searching for specific weblogs you've written in the past other than going to each and every day and scanning. Surely, someone who uses editthispage has begged the Manila gods for a proper search feature? GRRRR. Or maybe there's one but I don't know about it...? Anyone out there know? (There isn't even a page that lists titles of each day. That would be semi-useful; that is, if your titles are halfway descriptive of what you actually wrote in the weblog.) OK, well there's David's elbow pic on this page, but it's NOT the picture I had in mind.

[ Thanks, Spark, for the suggestion of using the Google site search; I have used that before, but it's no good for more recent weblog entries, which are un-indexed yet. For those who don't know, you can search your own weblog using Google by entering the search string: site:yourweblog.editthispage.com "whatever you're searching for" (Click on the link to see an example of a specific, non-hypothetical ;-) search I did. NOTE: don't use quotes if you're not searching for an exact string) ]

{ net.casting }
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