Hawaii 2019, Day 2

We had big plans for day 2. Get up early, swim at our beach and go to Shangri La.

I wish I could recreate the experience of the little beach in front of Michel's restaurant via a photo tableau, but I don't want to lose my phone there, so I just have to keep it in my heart. To get there you walk through our hotel's parking lot and walk next to the service entrance of the little hotel next door. Then you're on a teeny little beach with one palm tree. It's maybe 100 feet wide, and bounded by the sea wall and the Outrigger Club. People meet there every day to swim and take out their outriggers, with the occasional small group that has hired an outrigger to do a paddle out and scatter cremains. It's perfect for us because both the beach and the water are in the shadow of the hotel above Michel's.

When I'm feeling stressed and want to settle down I think of that beach, of floating on my back and listening to the pebbles clink against each other underneath the waves. It's so restful. I feel like I leave my body when I'm there.

We had lunch at the museum, which is always a pleasure, and visited an exhibit that paired my favorite Lee Bontacou piece with Louise Nevelson's work. So satisfying. I kinda want to make a quilt in the likeness of this Lee Bontacou.

And then we went to Shangri La. It's incredibly beautiful, and during our tour I suffered from heat stroke. This is why January is the perfect month for us to be in Hawaii.

After Shangri La we went to a great beer bar and waited for our friend who works at UH Manoa to get off work. She used to work at the forklift factory.

And then we went to dinner. OMG it was so much fun to reconnect. We heard all about her new adventures moving back to Hawaii. She's such a foodie. We told her how much we like the experience at Michel's (on the other side of the glass from our little beach where we swim). So we agreed to get reservations the next night and have some Cherries Jubilee :)

So ends day 2.

Except! I forgot that somewhere in this day we also found time to go sell clothes at Barrio Vintage. This is the second time I've brought a suitcase full of clothing to sell them, and it's been quite satisfying both times. I don't think I walk in the door looking like someone who has an amazing stash, and I do. My boobs are just too big to get into some of my outfits, so it's time to downsize. It makes me happy to repatriate the goods to Hawaii.

Hawaii 2019, Day 1

Last year we went on vacation to Hawaii. It might have been the most relaxing vacation ever. Like I kept saying to mrguy "I am so FUCKING relaxed". But I haven't felt the ability to write it up. Today that ends.

It had been several years since we'd gone to Hawaii, and it felt like it was time. It also happened to be my birthday, so we went.

As all vacations begin, we put the Ka'au Krater Boys on and took a drive.

 

a drive from the airport to La Mariana Sailing Club for lunch.

Things were a little more spruced up than usual. We asked our waiter how things were going, and she said that business is great and that they were featuring La Mariana as a set in the current Magnum P.I. reboot (season 2). They came to do a bunch of exterior shots and then for interiors built a restaurant with a fake marina with half sailboats stuck onto the floor for shots looking out from the inside of the restaurant. We will have to check this out. We heard that this all starts in season 2, episode 2.

That evening I found a film at the Hawaii International Film Festival about The Band, which is a favorite subject of mrguy (he played briefly with Garth Hudson). Cause as readers of mrsguy are aware, that's what we do in Paradise. We watch movies indoors!

So ends day 1.

Orchids In Place

I feel like the least sheltered in place human around. In the last two weeks I have been:

• In the ER for 6 hours
• To the podiatrist
• To the eye doctor's office
• To the mama's doctor's office (to pick up a urine sample kit)
• To a hospital (to drop off the above)

I've also been to the pharmacy (because the Depends orders didn't arrive), to the market every day, to my mom's retirement community twice (picking up prescriptions), and to the mama's shelter in place location three times (to get her settled, and to bring groceries). Mrguy has been on most of these adventures also, and I worry about him.

It's funny how much effort we exert in order to keep a 92-year-old healthy and happy. And it's a little unfair that after five years of sprinting to do so we now are running uphill with this coronavirus thing. Mom will probably outlive us all.

It's important in these times to remember that beauty has a purpose and that gratitude is healing, so I made sure to stop and take photos at the doctor's office, even though I kinda hate him for making us do a urine culture on top of all the other stuff we're doing. But here you go:

I really like how this orchid seems to be yelling at me:

Coronavirus Sheltering

While we can shelter ourselves at home, that wasn't a possibility for the mama, and we have caregivers to think about and it brings a different level of complexity to this situation.

We moved her into the Airbnb, which is beautiful. But settling in required a lot of last-minute wrangling, while listening to mom's non-stop litany of questions and general yammering. We had to put everything away that we'd brought with us, as well as hiding beautiful items that the owners had set out. The mama likes to pick things up and examine them, and she breaks a lot of things, so we hid many objects in the closet.

In the meantime, she took out her hearing aids because she wanted to not hear my sister, who was devotedly transporting her from her house to the new place, an hour-plus ride. So when we were all together in the new place she complained that we were speaking too quietly. We weren't speaking to her, so whatever.

Have I mentioned that I'm kinda *over* my mom right now? Tired of the slings and barbs, and the recent relentless wheedling about how everything would be perfect if she could have her #1 caregiver all the time, not #1s daughter, #2. We have explained to her that #1 is an extraordinary person who could not be duplicated and who has her own life to live outside my mom's. So we have #2, temperamentally different from her mom, who is really nice and completely competent and works mostly nights. Mom is never satisfied.

The awesome thing about the mama is that she doesn't seem to feel bad about herself *at* *all*. Her impression of herself is that she is completely capable: "I could have helped you with that!" (translation: it's your fault that you're working so hard on my behalf because I could help you and you don't ask me to), "I could just drive over there if I wanted" "Don't you think you could have told me that?" (translation: I can't remember, but it's your fault). She does not really understand that the fact that she has had caregiving for the last 5 years means that moving to an airbnb means that she will have caregiving there, also. And we have to have conversations about this stuff and it's exhausting.

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Update: we're half a day into the process. We brought the mama to her new digs, moved in her clothing and some food. Upcoming tasks include figuring out the tv situation, setting up her shower bench, trading some meds with the nurse at her apartment building and getting a urine sample.
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Happy thought of the day: all this mom stuff keeps my mind off the coronavirus, even though we're doing it because of the coronavirus. Funny!

I Will Hide Stuff In Your Food

Because I can.

I am the child of Depression-era parents. I am the daughter of a woman who didn't give me more than half a paper napkin until I was almost 40. I remember teasing her "You *do* love me, Mom!" She laughed at other people being cheap, but after she had enough money to offer her guest whole napkins, she still would have a friend over for lunch and the two of them would spend the afternoon cutting paper luncheon napkins in half while they chatted.

The corona virus has us all pretty spooked today. Yesterday we moved my mom out of her living situation temporarily because we don't think a building full of other old people is a safe place for her to live or a safe work environment for her caregivers. The day before that we had a 2+ hour Vortex of Power conference call about all of the covid-19 nonsense and what to do about Mom. What's scary about all of the scenarios you see on tv is that I am the only person in my family that isn't high risk, because I'm the only person under 60.

Tomorrow we have bigsis coming to pick up the mama to take her to their house for two days, at great risk to themselves. Bigsis is 72 and her husband is 85. Scary for them. And I suddenly had the mama for (almost) two days in which she asked me about what was happening many many times, couldn't remember the answer and was indignant when I'd take a deep breath before answering.

So between worrying about food shortages and being annoyed with my person, I didn't feel bad about hulling strawberries for her morning waffle and then serving her the hulls in her evening fritatta. No I did not. I almost went around the property pulling edible weeds and sauteeing them, as well. And I worried that I am eating too much food and not conserving enough.

I hope this coronavirus thing ends soon. But I sense that it will not.

The Deed Is Done

I collected camellias from various persons. Our friends have a gorgeous red camellia that weathers to a velvety pink.

Turns out that our trees are so direly dweeby that it took hours to find the right places to graft. What I see happening in our trees is that last year's pruning has really produced some growth. But that made me not want to disturb it, so I did less grafting than I had hoped. Next year, though!

This tree had such tiny branches. I learned a lot. Realized that none of my plant materials resembled the examples I was seeing in videos, and now I understand why people like to graft and demonstrate grafting on younger plants rather than on established trees. So I did a few tiny grafts, and we'll see whether they take. One thing that I've heard happens is that a graft may fail but it may stimulate growth at the same time, so there can be a nice trade off.

By the way, I've decided that I actually like our camellia blossoms now. I just wish I had more of them.

Here is my fanciest graft. Two different varieties in a cleft graft on one branch. Wrap that puppy up with grafting tape, trim the leaves to half a leaf and you're good to add a wire cage and plastic.

 
Here is my pride and joy -- a pile of discarded Chinese New Year lantern innards that I turned into wire cages. The wire cages and plastic create a humidified environment for the grafts.

This is the one camellia tree, with a tent over the graft.

And now we wait 4 months. By then my fingers should be healed from using tin snips, grafting knives and the other pointy objects required for this work. It was fun.

Camellias

Once I started thinking about grafting citrus, I realized that maybe grafting could help with our camellia issue. We have some established camellia trees by the front door, but they're a light pink and the trees are super dweeby looking. It would take years to grow new camellias to the size I'd want them, and in the meantime birdies like to hang out in one of the trees. I don't want to deprive them of their hangout by cutting the trees down and starting over. Maybe I can graft a camellia I like onto the trees that I don't like as well. Did a little research and it turns out that you sure can graft camellias. This is my favorite grafting video.

My favorite camellias are these two from our old house. This first one grows at least three kinds of blooms on the same tree -- solid red, white with deep red stripes and solid white.

This one is the glamorpuss. My favorite shade of pink, with a peony center and occasional splashes of white. I mean, really. Hubba hubba.

So I identified these two and looked for a source, but I finally decided to reach out to the folks who own our old house. They are down to let me take scions from their tree and graft it onto ours!

Before I had that nailed down, though, I went to the local camellia society gathering last weekend to see their camellias and perhaps buy something that I could graft onto our trees. The camellia people let me in during their judging hour because I'd come from some distance...

The camellia show involved various kinds of competitions. I think these were the basic categories and how they worked:

• Single blooms (you present your best bloom of a named variety, and are judged against other peoples' best bloom of that same variety).
• Threes (you present three blooms of a named variety -- not sure how you're judged)
• Fives (same thing, I guess?)
• Three different sizes of three different named varieties by one grower
• Were there competitors for pre-1958 or something? Can't recall

I didn't get as far as buying camellias (they were too busy judging), but they let me take photos.

A table of threes:

 

 Single japonicas. I really like this variety, a variegated Frank Houser

 

Single reticulatas:

 

Singles, all of whose varieties start with the letter F. There were lots of examples of one called Ferris Wheel, the striped guys on the right. The biggest were crazy large, like the size of a small grapefruit.

Three different or three different sizes by one grower. This is a good time to use your second best bloom, since you're going to use your absolute best in competition for singles.

And so ends today's exploration into the world of camellia grafting and shows.

Grafting

One current obsession: grafting.

It started with a painting. Mrguy had a painting reframed and hung it in a place where our view and the painting lined up. The painting, a watercolor of the bay, was painted by a former neighbor and friend who lived nearby when we lived in the "old place". Seeing the painting in a different setting made me think of the painter, and I remembered a personal detail -- she liked to graft roses.

What is that, I wondered? So the obsession began. How does it work? What does it take? What could I graft onto what? My first thought was of grafting another kind of citrus onto our lime tree, which has suddenly become robust after many dweeby years.

Research led me to the knowledge that it is illegal to graft citrus in our state. The only place to legally buy citrus scions is here.

But in the meantime, I learned that the local rare fruit growers group was having a scion exchange at my old school. A scion, since you're asking, is a green stick -- the bud wood that you are going to graft onto your existing plant or tree to make whatever you're grafting grow on your tree. You make a notch on a branch of the recipient tree, then whittle the scion into a point, line up the cambian layer of both, do some other stuff, and with any luck the new thing will grow on the existing thing. Some people have apple trees, for example, with lots of different varieties of apples on it, that they've grafted onto the existing tree. And you can graft a quince onto a pear, I learned. How did I learn? At a grafting class, taught before the scion exchange. Packed! I sat on the floor.

What's a scion exchange? People bring small lengths of budwood to an exchange. They put them in a plastic bag and label it. Someone lays out the budwood on tables, organized by the type of scions. There were zillions of different kinds of apples, for example, all laid out together. At the scion exchange, you pay an entrance fee and then you may take anything you want with you. You bring your own ziploc bags and masking tape and a pen, choose a scion you want, and use the masking tape to label the little sticks of budwood you've selected, so you know what you are grafting.

The class was great, and the scion exchange was a little intimidating. I only have citrus trees to graft onto, so I mostly just browsed and hyperventilated. I went home with some plants grown by the horticultural club and a gigantic sack of Cara Cara oranges.