A lazy afternoon with a banshee

There were so many plans I had for my 4-day weekend: paint the inside and outside of the house, replace the roof, build a new deck, kill all the moss in the garden and plant a new lawn, kill every coqui within a half-mile radius and finally chop down the rubbish trees and plant some fruit trees in their place. So what happened?

I bought a nice copper-plated thermometer for the lanai, a sandwich maker and some fertiliser. Oh, and I took some trash to the solid waste transfer station ("the dump" for my British friends).

The thermometer is great, it always reads 76 degrees, so clearly the climate here is more stable than I realised. I haven't been out in the garden to use the fertiliser but the sandwich maker works, I used it this morning to make a nice grilled cheese and ham sandwich. So much for plans...

I settled in for the day to watch some NFL football and then fell asleep and missed most of the latter game. That shopping trip yesterday must have tired me out more than I realised. So, before the Sunday night game started (and what a game it was in the end!), I headed off to Hilo not really knowing what I was going to do, but just had to get out of the house. A visit to Home Depot was definitely on the cards though.

On the way I stopped to take a picture of Hilo Bay and it's the one above. The water looked inviting but the time needed to correct any problems with the panorama didn't, so you get whatever the first run through hugin gets you. I have more important things to do like feed the cats.

Then, when I realised I had the camera with me, I took a drive to the scenic route just north of Hilo. That was a mistake.

On that route there's a spot you can park your car and take a nice picture of the coast. There was no-one around today so I parked the car, got out and started to take several pictures which I'd planned to make into a mind-blowing panorama that would make everyone else really jealous!

I was halfway through that process when there was a scream from hell about two feet behind me. Not only did I try and throw the camera over the cliff's edge I was standing on, I was going to throw myself off the cliff as well. Anything would be better than facing the banshee who'd sneaked up behind me.

"HEY *%$@**!, THE VIEW HERE IS THE GOOD ONE!"

A couple of local girls, and "girls" is a relative term here, had driven up behind me without me noticing and parked their Honda on a blind curve assuring an accident if any unfortunate tourists were driving the other way. It was OK though, they left their hazard lights on.

I find it hard to describe my feelings when this happened. I was carefully aligning my camera to take some great shots of the coastline, was halfway through the dozen or so shots required and was really concentrating hard. Try sneaking up on the next person you see in the post office working hard on filling in a form, get within a couple of feet of them and then shout to your friend a hundred yards away that they really should see this. Then imagine a 200-foot drop right in front of your victim.

I was not happy, but at least I'm still alive to write this. It's the season of goodwill so will try to forget this incident, but boy, it'll be difficult.

The panorama I tried to take? Pretty much destroyed. The camera lense is dirty but hopefully isn't damaged, it doesn't like being jammed into a wooden fence and then dropped to the ground.

I was trying to take a panorama of this place:

As for visiting Home Depot? Perhaps another day...