My heart goes out to the students and communities who have to wonder "Why" this happened in such quiet and loving communities.

I don't have CNN or many tv channels, and I heard about the Virginia Tech shootings hours after they happened. Even if I had it, I would have left it off because of how the news is handled.

Because Tech is located far away from civilization, there can be a real lack of up to date video feeds and I understand that the weather kept choppers from spending time over the area. It looked to be snowing on the few reports I saw. Because of this, I can only imagine the following set of events. CNN would switch from the occasional news flash to full reporting. Since they have little informatuion, they would have to rely on telephone calls from people nearby. Those people may be getting their information from rumors or from local stations who are guessing what is happening.

Then there would be the sketchy reports on the geography of the area, the weather and the reasons that there is little information coming from the region. There would have been calls to the local police and security guards, all of whom would have little information yet or no approval to give out what sketchy information they have.

Then there would be the phone calls from people who used to go to Tech, and perhaps a call or two from current students.

The above information will cause them to begin using the expression "We don't want to speculate" followed by the the word "BUT" and then will go on to interview experts about the profile of the type of people who would do this, whether there was more than one person, why the police are not forthcoming with any information. There would have been parallels drawn to the Columbine and other shootings, with timelines given showing the number of people killed at other institutions like this. Someone will comment on how hard it is for students and the pressure they are under at school.

As you listen None of this speculation and nothing up to this point will have helped answer the question "Why"?

I don't know that I could do any better than this. I was in radio and reported a few news items, but I was not trying to fill in on a major news item and ceratinly not hold the attention of the world; but know that in the first days or so, little useable information is broadcast by any of these organizations. It is the nature of the business.

If the shooter is descibed as a quiet person, a family man, the neighbors will be wondering Why? If the person is troubled, peopl will demand to know why something was not done, or done sooner to identify and help this person. Schools all over the world will begin to review their policies of protecting their students.

The world will continue to ask WHY?

I used to get clobbered when I would write a long entry into the posting window, only to click on the wrong button, timeout or lose my text for some other reason. So I went to Word for Windows. It has decided that to make my text look better, it should change single apostrophies to some other ASCII character and the quote markes to opening and closing quotes. Thus, many people reading my text would see all these funny things instead of real punctuation marks. I've gone abck and fixed some entries, but the rest will have t owait a while.

A few minutes ago I was playing blackjack against an imaginary dealer (the only other thing to do was taxes...) and the phone rang. It was a cell phone from some foreign state. Now I have a few choices, let it ring to voicemail or answer it. I answered it as it might be a customer. "How is the weather down there?" they asked. I now have to think. Is this a cell number I recognize? Is there someone on island visiting that I forgot and might be calling prior to a visit. Is it a wrong number? Are they actually calling Hawaii or one of the 4 other numbers in other states that feed into this number.

"Errrr, ok" I replied.

"Is it cloudy?", "Yes, it usually is down here". Since they asked about clouds, I have to assume they are on island and worried about snorkling or whatever.

OK, well we just wanted to check before we head to Hounaunau.

"Thanks" they said before hanging up.

So, yes, they are on island, I don't know them and they obviously dialed the wrong number.

I even think I know who they were trying to call because there is a B&B Farm wioth a very similar number near me. In fact, dyslextic people might call either number easily.

I was very polite and helpful. Besides you never know if the other number tries to sell people my coffee..

I received all of the plans for my catchment tanks and I will start shopping around next week for people to put them in.

Whikle clearing weeds last week I found some tomatos growing wild. I tasted one and it was swwweeeettt, in fact, very sweet! Actually, I should check with the extension agent here. Maybe it is NOT a tomato after all. Tomatos are part of the nightshade family and until fairly recently, people thought them to be poisonous as late as the 1820's!

Many think of tomatos as vegetables (they are even in V-8 vegetable juice, but in reality, they are a berry and similar to a fruit. Since they are eaten with a meal and not desert, many think they are a vegetable. There was a big to-do a few years ago when the government intervened. It was not to create yet another quality food from catsup, but rather a clarification decision based upon the tariff act of 1883.

So whether it is a berry, a fruit or a vegetable; whether it is pronounced TOEmato or toeMAHto, they sure are good. and you can quote me on that!

Although I probably don't have to use it, I searched and found a Gantt diagram program (for free) [ http://ganttproject.sourcefor... ] and started loading my project into it. Gantt diagrams are graphs of blocks of time that either follow each other or are performed simultaneously. This helps you plan tasks and the number of people working on a project at any given time. It also helps you ensure that one person is not assigned more tasks or workload than he has time to perform.

An example of some tasks are, that I have to put a layer of gravel on the ground where the tanks will be, prior to putting the tanks there. That has to be done in that order, however, I also need to kill all weeds on the farm, which includes the area where the tanks will go. Since the area for the tanks is small in relation to the rest of the farm, they are essentially different items not related to each other., and I can just zap the weeds at the tank location and treat both tasks as not related. Both the spreading of gravel and the killing of weeds are tasks that are not dependant on each other and can be done at the same time, unless they are to be done by the same person. THAT is what the software helps you determine. It helps you plan tasks that overlap and might be done by the same person.

Since moving here, I tend to perform these Gantt charts in my head for simple tasks. For example, if I need to go into town, I try to schedule a number of stops at one time. They should be done in a particular order to save gas, since the trip is all along one long line. I leave the house, then stop at the Post Office tio drop off any coffee shipments (and if all received mail is not yet distributed, I will stop again on the way back). Then if I have coffee to drop off (or need to stop by the USDA or talk with the extension agent) I stop there. Closer to Kona I may stop by Sandra's to play with the dogs, then perhaps stop by Christine's to drop off green coffee for roasting. Then it is into town for shopping.

Depending on what I need to buy, there may be a need to price shop. Based on the item I might stop by one or more of Lowes, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Ross, Radio Shack, K-Mart, Home Depot or COSTCO. At COSTCO I would gas up with the cheapest gas in the state. Then after seeing what prices I found, I would reverse the trip and stop and buy what I needed. Luckily each of these places in right along the same road and are familiar places to anyone who has visited here.

If I need to buy food, I would have put the electric refrigerator in the truck and it would be cool already. I would perhaps buy frozen food at COSTCO or KTA or Safeway and then head home. The fridge allows me to make any stops along the way and keep the food cold for hours. It just plugs into the lighter in the truck and sits behind the passenger seat. It has no moving parts except for the small fan and operates on a heat transfer effect on a solid-state device. It is called a Peltier junction, for those who care.

So looking back, you may already coordinate trips to town at perhaps a bit less complicated manner, but we do these types of organizing projects all the time, unfortunately, many of us schedule too many overlapping projects and then get few of them done. Isn't that why we go on vacation, to drop all of these concurrent projects and schedules, allowing you to randomly load new stops in the trip.

One of my first tasks now is to spray weed killer on all weeds. As imagined, I did an online scan for prices, discounts and sales, then I headed into town. Although I might have found a better price by buying a generic product, it gets difficult doing all of the math and conversions to see what coverage you would get per dollar. I ended up with Roundup from COSTCO. Later a neighbor suggested a competing product at a better price, but didn't know where they bought it. This is why I broke down and bought the Roundup at a decent price, even though I might have saved a bit of money elsewhere. I hate to overpay, but by price shopping to the extreme, I don't get much work done.

Roundup appears to work by interfering with a plants ability to gather sunlight and create chlorophyll, thus cutting off an important source of nutrition to the plant. I don't think it is considered a poison per se because when we talk about poison we mean that the item would be fatal to humans should they ingest it. I don't suggest drinking Roundup or its cousins, but there is no skull and crossbones on the label. I think of it as zinc oxide that you smear on your nose to keep the sun off of it. Based on this description, you may realize that Roundup works as a POST emergent, which means that the plant must already be above ground and have leaves. A PRE emergent weed killer would attack seeds and keep them from germinating. Thus roundup does not kill seeds and thus has a very small time that it is active. A heavy rain might wash the stuff off, so you would want to spray it on a sunny day when the leaves are open. Also, you might only have to spray the front of the leaves that face the sun, but I don't know. It makes sense not to spray it when it is windy, as the droplets would carry and perhaps stick on plant leaves that you do not want to kill. Some people buy a cheaper version without a surfactant, and add a bit of hand detergent (soap) to break the surface tension and have the stuff stick to leaves until it can begin to do its work.

Now you might ask yourself "Why do I care?" Well it may just be that you wanted a nice diversion from your own schedule to read about something that you would never investigate on your own. Although my description is probably not quite correct, you are welcome to read further!

Last night I was up in town helping someone with a computer and was close to Sandra's. I thought about seeing the puppies, but it was too late and she is a bit under the weather.

The weather has been pretty good, but it has looked like rain every afternoon. That has forced me to spray weed killer early in the morning when the sun is out [now you know why].

I just got the call that my plans for the catchment tanks are complete and I can swing by the USDA office and get them. In the past week I have been up into town 3 or 4 times, which is not the best way to plan these trips, so now I am thinking, is there anything else I have to do up there today?

Last week I was down on the Kailua-Kona pier selling coffee at a fundraiser. Our coffee group was selling coffee in bags, but the cup and a number of other items including honey. I was able to sell 12 one pound bottles of it! The secret is having a sample to taste.

Playing almost next to me were some Grammy winning musicians. Of course they won in the Hawaiian category.

I was at the KonaWeb party on Tuesday night and we saw many spinner dolphin right near the shore. The photo taken just before sunset is at http://www.konaweb.com/togeth...

We were not threatened by the recent earthquake and tsunami as the quake was on the far side of their island and it shielded us from it. We have only had 2 tsunamis of any consequence in the past 50 years as I understand it and now these days we receive notice and warnings many hours in advance. They only way a tsunami could sneak in here would be due to qa large earthquake almost on top of us. That happened Oct 14 but the quake was so close to the Big Island and Maui that there was no room for the wave to generate before landfall here. Maui protected Alaska and the Big Island was in the way of any waves going towards the mainland (you're welcome!).

As for the weather, same as usual, a bit cool some nights but other than that, not bad. Still getting into the frigid 60's at night!

Last week two guys from the USDA came by with the preliminary plans for my water system. As you might know, I have cleared 5 acres for new coffee. I applied for and received a contract with USDA under their EQIP grants, which pay me a portion of the cost to use rainwater for crops instead of county water. Although we get sufficient rainfall here most of the time, a draught is possible and these tanks will help. I will have 80,000 gallons of water stored here.

They surveyed the property, took topographic readings and generated an overall map. Next week they stop back with official copies of the map, layout and complete specs for the project, which also includes drip tubes to water each individual plant.

The other day I was up at COSTCO buying some things. As I exited I passed a woman who had a cart filled to the brim with items. She saw me carrying a jug of Roundup weed killer. "How is COSTCO going to stay in business if you buy just one item?" she asked. I lifted the jug up and said "Well, this jug just cost me $150!" "Oh" was her reply!

So, over the past few days I have been spraying all 5 acres with Roundup to kill the weeds that are springing up. I had put down some grass seed but only enough to get a bit of root structure in to hold the dirt after clearing. I need to get a good ground cover on, but need to kill the weeds too. There will be a lot of weed pulling soon.

Speaking of pulling weeds and working… I am considering a project called "Woofers". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It is kinda like a work/study program, which started in the UK. The original idea was to get people out of the city and onto an organic farm to see where their food comes from. The farmer would put the people up; they would work some in exchange for the learning experience and perhaps dinner. It is not just limited to organic farms and a recent request to me came from a guy who was working on an orchid farm on the Hilo side of the island.

I think there are many organizations popping up and individuals who are doing this without being under the umbrella of the Wwofer organization. It is certainly not very different from itinerant workers.

Woofers might pick crops, dig holes, put a roof on a barn or perhaps prune trees. They might need lots of supervision or may already have the skills needed. Each farm might have different needs and abilities to host woofers. Perhaps one farm might have a cabin to offer along with meals. Another might only be able to offer camping space and a shower.

Perhaps I could find a woofer who knows how to build a cabin and hot tub…

I will be posting a link on the ItsKona website soon, so that those interested can follow along with the photos of the project.

Speaking of the website, I will be officially offering some honey soon. This is the same stuff that was snapped up at the event I mentioned earlier. The problem is that that the honey is in a one pound container and can be a bit expensive to ship by itself, I'm looking at box sizes and ways to ship it in a cost-effective manner.

Speaking of cost effective, I have a customer in Canada who wants coffee and I had found a way to get him 12 ounces at a time. The 12 ounces was chosen to come just under the import duty, which would cost him another $5 Canadian. Anyway, I think that I am ready to ship to 2 pounds of coffee to Canada now; as long as the recipient knows that he will be responsible for any extra charges. We here have no idea what extra charges a foreign country adds to items received. Our Post Office even tries to stay out of that.

Right now, I am offering free shipping to the U.S. on the website. As you can imagine, that cuts into my profits quite a bit, and I can't keep that offer going forever. I expect to change that any day now. I have to make adjustments to each item and will set some time aside for that. That is, after killing the rest of the weeds because I'm not orgainic!

Just on Wednesday I picked up freshly roasted Medium coffee and today (Saturday) I will be getting some coffee roasted dark. And that will ship beginning Monday. Gosh, with the extra day to do your taxes, it might even get there in time to keep you awake!

I mentioned in my last blog about Destination Kona Coast, who meet arriving passengers to our island. Well, in a way, I too have "arrived".

I bought a domain name a while back to help me sell my Camaro. The site was "OwnThisCamaro.Com" and yes, that WAS my Camaro shown there now. So now that the car has been sold, I thought that I would offer the domain name for sale, or perhaps I could load up a classified ad software and sell ads to people wanting to sell their own Camaros.

While searching Ebay to see what domain names might be going for, I entered in a keyword Lavarock and found something interesting.

Years ago I read a book by Isabella Bird about her travels to Hawaii in the late 1800's. I was so fascinated by the book that I wrote book reviews and posted them on popular book sites. Imagine my surprise today to see someone selling a hardback copy of the book and there on the listing is my review (Lavarock from Marietta Georgia). You can see the listing for the next couple of days by looking for item # 170097405732.

While not a scholar (and some would say not even a writer) at least this one seller thought that my review would help him sell the book!

So I guess I have "arrived" now that someone else is quoting me… :-)

The fund-raiser was for Destination Kona Coast, an organization who helps visitors to the island and is looking to have a more permanent structure on the pier.

They had a blessing at 5pm with the event going from 5-10pm. The host was Kahikina from KAPA Radio; there were food booths and a silent auction, hula and lots of Hawaiian music.

The entertainment included Grammy Nominee Makana, Grammy Award Winner Cyril Pahinui with Mike Kaawa and Kata Maduli. The final act was fire dancer Awana Akau. Not bad for free!

Our Kona Coffee Farmers Association brought our coffee shack and set up a table to sell coffee, caps, Kona Coffee Barbeque sauce, jellies, jams and even a wonderful honey!

I had an opportunity to talk with visitors about why a 10% blend is deceiving to the public and had a great time seeing friends stop by to say “Aloha”!

All in all, a very fine evening and lots of fun!

I carefully considered the unit and did my homework, but in the end I replaced the old tank with a similar but larger unit.

I believe that a tankless system would have been better, but I ran into a few issues. On the plus side, installation would have been simple in that it just mounts to the wall and I already had flexible water pipes in place. I had easy access to the ceiling and the breaker box and could have run wires easily.

The existing water heater wad a single 20 amp wire in the wall. The new system required two 30-amp circuits. That would require me running 2 cables 40 feet each. Not difficult but it adds to the cost and the time involved.

Because the heater is not within view of the main circuit breaker box, I would need to add a small breaker box (or cutoff) near the new heater. Not extremely expensive, but more parts and cost and time.

For the two new wires I would need one more breaker in the main box, which I didn’t have available. I would need to remove either an unused set of outlets in the house, or rewire a breaker to handle more outlets. Although I know how to do this (I used to work for an electrician), it really should all be done by a licensed electrician.

Not having the proper tools, having to run back and forth to buy more equipment and the thought of being without hot water all that time, all led to me just replacing the current unit. The new one was about $230 and was pretty efficient.

I still would consider replacing a regular hot water heater with a tankless one, but next time I will be better prepared.