Back to Hale Pohaku

I'm in one of my favourite places on the earth right now. I just arrived, 1.5 hours ago, after a magnificent drive up the winding Saddle road. Big island of Hawai'i has 12 different climate zones, and you cross a few of those on the way up. Hilo was humid and warm, and up here it is clear, chilly in the shadow, very warm in the sunlight and fairly low pressure (as an airplane). I'm sitting in a comfy chair with my ibook, after a great dinner at the HP, slightly short of breath, a little bit dizzy. Most of which is due to a pretty nasty cold I acquired the evening before I left (I literally could feel it hit me during the time of about 5 minutes. Nasty. So, I hope it will disappear tomorrow before I start my osberving run. It is so wonderful to be here again!!! I look out the windows, see the flat shape of Mauna Loa, the volcano that pretty much covers half the island, and I feel so happy! Even down in Hilo, at the JAC, I can feel that awesome feeling; it's the same feeling as at the Onsala observatory. Life is good.

It's impressive how far out from the mainland Hawai'i lies. I left Winnipeg early in the morning (7 am, in an CRJ200), went to Chicago and pretty much immediately boarded a B777, that brought me to Honolulu. Just for the record, I was only 3 minutes off the winning guess of when we'd reach the midpoint, a little competition United has on the way to HI. The entire flight was 8.5 hours, which is longer than it takes to go to Europe. But, since the flight is domestic, you better bring food or cash, or you'll be hungry... haha! United also have started charging a baggage fee, for every bag that you check, even the first one. From HNL, I flew a 717 with Hawaiian airlines to Hilo. Cool plane, although I was on the wrong side for seeing the Mauna Kea summit (the plane flies on exactly that height, so you see the observatories very distinctly. My ear never really recovered from this flight, and so I've been partially deaf since then, except for a little while on Saddle road, before they popped the other direction. 

Door knobs - ultimate locks or ridiculous invention?

After a longer period of silence, I have decided to revive this place a bit. I'll start with a small rant: Doorknobs. Especially Winnipeg should start using handles instead. Ever tried opening a door equipped with doorknob after having applied hand lotion?
Winter in Winnipeg (not yet here, but it's coming) requires fair amounts of hand cream. It's just not compatible with doorknobs. I just found myself stuck in the ladies washroom on 5th floor (and to turn it more lady-like it is now equipped with bags with all kinds of necessary toiletries, so as to deter guys from using it - I would normally not have a problem sharing the washroom with guys, except for when said guys leave both stench and stains, yuck), trying to turn the stupid doorknob with no result.

Weekend trip to Minneapolis

Swedes might think what they want about IKEA while at home, but if they'd move abroad, they would probably do like me - travel at least 7 hours oneway to the hearest one, and get loads of stuff. And cheese. And kaviar. Flatbread. Dammsugare (aka punschrulle). And at the same time be extatically happy about it. Weekend trips are nice - you get to go somewhere, but still not lose any valuable working time. This past weekend kept a steady temperature of about 30 degrees, so I was enjoying it a lot. An American asked us, upon hearing where we had travelled from: "Travelling south to enjoy some of our heat?" (fyi: Wpg had the same temp, and there's as far as I know no difference in climate between the 2 locations - but Canada has a certain reputation). "Yeah, I asked the neighbour to take care of our pet polar bear, so we could take the weekend off. And it's funny - already at the border crossing, one hour south of Winnipeg, the temperature rises from 30 to 90 degrees!" I didn't say that of course... But it would have been fun... 

Commercial break: Have you visited http://fenomenalarecept.blogspot.com? The site being in Swedish is no excuse, my good friend who is Canadian and lives in Scotland (i.e. very English speaking) uses http://translate.google.com, which seems to be sufficient to create the wonderful dishes on this superb blog. And when not, the translations give a good laugh. Plus, it's a good way to learn Swedish whether you ever had that notion or not. So, go ahead, add it to your rss-reader asap. 

Mark Knopfler concert

One of my favourite musicians came to Winnipeg. David and I went to the concert last friday, which was given in the centennial concert hall. So despite our seats (2nd balcony, last row), the sound was pretty awesome. The seats were decent too, smack in the middle, and straight above the mixer board, which usually is a good sign. You don't get to choose your fellow audience members though, and what first looked like pleasantly empty seats in front of us, were eventually (after the pretty awesome opening number by a single female and her guitar, ressembling swedish singer Anna Ternheim quite a bit - totally great) filled by 4 rowdy individuals, complete with accompanying drinks, and a cloud of alcoholic smell. The most rowdy one sat straight in front of us. Everything about him was big - the shoulders, height, neck, and especially his voice. Another interesting feature of our seats was that the main spotlight beam went straight over our heads to Mark himself. My curiosity as to whether my hand's swift motion through this beam would be visible on stage would soon be stilled. Not by myself (I considered it, but decided against), but by mr Voluminous in front. It was slightly irritating after the first 3-4 times (he apparently didn't register that the effect of it luckily was minor, and had to repeat multiple times), not because if the effects on the scene, but because the massive amount of light reflected off of his toilet lid -sized hands got slightly distracting.
All this was soon forgotten after the music started. I always liked Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler later solo stuff, but after this concert, he's my new hero. The music was excellent in every way. I was amazed by the manner in which Mark, seemingly with such ease, plucks that music out of his guitar(-s - there was a steady stream of different guitars on stage, one following the other). The rest of the band was as impressive - the composition of it(including a totally excellent violinist, who had a prominent role), as well as their capabilities. WOW! During the 2nd song, Why Aye Man, which is one of many favourites, our mr Massive on the front row engaged in a discussion with his fellows, his voice bellowing out his opinions during my absolute favourite parts, so this time I couldn't resist my urge, but tapped him friendly on the shoulder. And, it worked (well, more or less), believe it or not! He was still acting out his stereotype for 'person you want far away from you in an audience', but, seriously, the concert was so great that I benignly could oversee it. If it hadn't been for his smell of course (aftershave applied in proportion to size of the wearer). Ugh. But, also in this area, the location helped - the air circulation in the concert hall is great, and after less than an hour, also this disturbance was as good as gone. Sometimes I envied him his voice. During applause, all I can do is shout in my high-pitched manner, which doesn't carry very far. Mr I-have-no-barriers had a voice that carried. It might have had something to do with the fact that he chose to deliver his sentiments during numbers rather than the conventional inbetween. The audience was really great though. I'd rather have that, than a bored one that can't adequately mirror my own enthusiasm for the performer. This audience were of exactly the same mind as myself. I didn't really need to learn how to whistle with my fingers, as everyone else did it for me.

Every single song was AMAZING. The concert was on the same quality level as the Sting concert I attended in Göteborg a bunch of years ago. Nothing can really ever beat Simon & Garfunkel's Friends tour in 2003 (Washington DC), But Sting is a very strong second, and this concert was extremely close, if not even on the same level. Major goosebump level.

A trunk less ordinary (update on vehicles)

For about a year or so, David and I have been driving around with a bunch of clothes in the trunk, with the intention of donating them at some station for that purpose. Some clothes were from my algerian room mate, that she left when she moved back to Algeria, (and she was tiny, so I had no use for those), and some were David's old stuff. One day, upon opening the trunk, repeating the phrase that always accompanies that action ("we really should get rid of these clothes some time soon"), we discovered a black pair of pants there, that none of us recognized. david thought they were our friend's, that I had borrowed for skiing, but nope. My memory is bad, but I had for sure never seen those pants before (bad memory doesn't mean amnesia, only that reminders have to be firm before recollection can occur. Seeing the object in question is usually a good enough reminder to bring forth memories). Some days later, we were at a party, and it got a bit chilly. David went to the trunk, and sure enough, there was a hoodie waiting there for him, that neither of us had owned or seen before. We have a magic trunk. But, alas, we actually managed to dispose of almost all the clothes last weekend.

On another note: The bike next to where mine got stolen (the one that really should have been stolen instead of mine), was "finally" stolen this morning, and as I predicted only the frontwheel was left, attached to the lock in the fence. So the owner might have been innocent after all... (I feel kind of bad - my plan was to post some notes of caution on the door of our building for the bike owners that it's not safe to leave them out, and I never got around to...