With that said, I think coffee drinkers should consider a system like this. If I was in a somewhat different situation, I would purchase one at regular price.

The system is a curved unit with a water supply in the back. I found the water holder a bit difficult to fill from my gallon plastic water holder (I use spring water in a refrigerator type dispenser). The unit holds enough for a few cups of coffee. Still, it was pretty easy to fill and set up and use.

The coffee comes in pods which look a bit like tea bags or round ravioli. I tried the medium regular coffee, and when it was brewed, it tasted good and had a nice cream head on it that lasted. To do that it appears they grind the coffee quite fine.

You can make 1 or 2 cups of coffee at a time (2 cups will actually fill a good size mug). You activate the power switch, wait for the light to come on (water at brew temperature) and press the brew button. In seconds the cup is filled with hot coffee.

The company offers many types of coffees and gourmet brews, but lacking is a Kona (which I had hoped for). I also got the unit to experiment with making my own pods with my own coffee. I had less than stellar results because my coffee is not ground fine enough and the water went through it too fast. I got the filter material on Ebay and used my regular drip grind). I am sure that Phillips shudders at the thought of people making their own pods. When I worked at HP, we sold the printers cheaply but made our profits off the ink refills.

Since pod systems have been around awhile, there appear to be companies making their own pods. Unlike printer and replacement inks from other companies. the replacement pods may work alright, I don't know. There is not much to clog in this system, so one could experiment.

As I say, the coffee I tried was good enough and in a different situation, I would stock up on pods. It is very easy to use and very quick to have a hot cup of coffee.

I would love to see a 100% Kona Coffee offered and will talk with my fellow farmers to gtaher interest.

If you have an opportunity, try a system, I think you will like it.

While waiting at Kaiser to see the Opthalmologist, I saw Joan go by. She is a Doctor there and her daughter used to go to Sandras to care for her labradors.

I went back to the office because I was not seeing clearly enough to drive home yet. With the rumor of free food, I wnet to a local restaurant that had its grand opening for dinner (they used to only serve breakfast and lunch). It did indeed turn out to be a rumor, but was a pretty nice time none the less.

My boss knows the owner and I've met him before, so we went at 6pm. We arrived at U-Top-It (there is a story behind the name, something about you create the topping for breakfast crapes). The first thing I noticed was that they expanded into another storefront next door. There was a guy putting a dimmer switch in to lower the light level in the second room. The guy was Ignatio (his nickname is Natcho) and he works at the condos for us as a maintenance man.

After chatting with him for a few minutes we take our seat. There are two guys playing live music ad the guy on the right is a guy we just hired to help Natcho fix up some of our units. He used to work at the real estate place, but times are tough.

Outside at a table is Calli and her boy friend. Calli works with me at the front desk at the condos.

Midway through dinner our waitress gets up and performs a hula with the musicians.

While we are eating, Curtis the owner makes his rounds going table to table, thanking people for coming by the grand opening for dinner.

Although I don't know him, I did recognize one of the other patrons whom I've seen around town, by his somewhat unique hairstyle.

Kailua-Kona is a small town yet at a somewhat small and local event I knew 1/3 to 1/2 the people there.

It really does feel like home here.

Since Mom doesn't have a credit card, the easiest way to get her some miles is for me to rent a car and use her frequent flier number. The special I found was 8,000 miles for renting a specialty car. I chose the Ford Focus and rented it for a day. I could have found here a few miles that qualified by perhaps buying magazines, but this was more cost effective.

So I drive the vehicle home but know better than to let it travel down my driveway, so I parked it up on the grass. Next to where I left it was my new mower. I would use this to get down to the house. Since it was pitch black outside and there are no nearby houses, I opened my cell phone and used the light as a nightlight to find the mower ignition switch.

I loudly aproached the house but when I cut the mower power off, I heard no noise at all. I climbed the steps and there was Koa, quietly expecting me. I know he barks at strangers, but perhaps he recognized the mower noise or smelled me across the field. I don't know, but he expected me!

Tonight Koa was very happy to see me. He really wanted to play fetch. I think he would play fetch all day and night, stopping only to sleep and eat.

He has a game he plays and he invented it. I take a tennis ball and throw it. He brings it back and puts it in my hand. I can trow it again and this will continue until he tires. However, if I throw it and he puts it in my hand and I don't throw it again, he will back up a step or two and wait a few seconds. If I don't throw it again, he will take another step back and wait. After about three times he will run forward, take a paw and push the ball out of my hand. Then he picks it up and puts it back in my hand again; kinda telling me I have to throw it to him.

If I am lying on the bed, siometimes I hide the ball under the pillow of blankt. He will jump on the bed (avoiding touching me) and will dig for the ball. If I am holding it and hiding it in my cupped hands, Koa will stick his snout in my ear and lick me. When I remove a hand and swat my ear, Koa grabs the ball and runs with it.

He is one smart dog and loves his games!

In the morning a guy is coming to the farm to look over my farm and give me a quote on laying out the pipes and pump for the irrigation. I am getting a lo closer to having new plants in the ground. I just need to throw more money at the project...

Tomorrow night I take the rental car back and on Friday it is yet another trip to town, this time to see the Opthamologist.

It is interesting to see how things become obsolete. Drugs for example. When I was young, it was common for parents to take paregoric and rub it on your gums when you were teething. It had a numbing effect and there was a slight anise taste like liquorice. It was also added to a preparation used to control diarrhea. In this case, it was easy to see why it was made generally obsolete. Its main ingredient? Morphine! No wonder it quieted down the little ones.

I turn now to shopping carts, the first one invented in 1937 and looked like a baby carriage. Here is a quote from Wikipedia.

The invention did not catch on immediately. Men found them effeminate; women found them suggestive of a baby carriage. "I've pushed my last baby buggy," an offended woman informed him. After hiring several male and female models to push his new invention around his store and demonstrate their utility, as well as greeters to explain their use, shopping carts became extremely popular...

This brings me up to the real reason of the blog. Baby carriages.

"Hey Mark! Baby carriages are not obsolete!" you say? Yes, that is true, they are all around, but try to find a 4-wheeled one. No go on, try. The new trend is those 3 wheeled sportster models, not the 4 wheeled ones that looked like shopping carts.

The only baby carriages I see now are 3 wheeled, directed by young women in tight spandex shorts. The women have on a baseball hat and seen sticking out the back is a brown or blonde pont tail.

It cannot be the same woman I see in every town and hamlet, it has to be a trend.

I'm careful not to attribute local customs here in Hawaii to the rest of the country though. I know that McDonalds across the land does not generally serve spam and portuguese sausage or taro pies. Other states do not have their teenager kids roaming the neighborhoods with ukuleles instead of guns. Although frowned upon, local kids go barefoot (even in stores) more often that other places, and yes we do wave people into traffic in front of us rather than ignore the poor guy trying to enter traffic for an hour.

Now wrapping up the blog about obsolete items (items which may still work but are unwanted), I send you to the website http://Freecycle.org. It may take you a little time to read the ruules and get joined in, but it is a great way to recycle things you no longer want. The name is derived from the idea of recycling and free. You can't charge for items, you just give them away.

I can tell you that the idea works. I was able t oget a perfectly good washing machine and dryer through Freecycle. Also someone gave away a tape that fit my digital video recorder.

Sometimes people give away broken things for parts, othertimes they bought something new and don't want the old thing even though it still works.

In the next few months look for old analog TV's that people are replacing with digital ones. A simple converter boox and an outdoor antenna will make them useable again.

Until next time...

I made 3 sandwiches and packed them away, but when it came to breakfast, I found I had frozen microwaveable pancakes but no butter, no syrup and in fact, no jelly either. Imagine how great pancakes are without anything on them!

I left for the polling place at 5:20 and was there by 5:30am. Then I helped set up everything. We ended up opening the polls at 7am and closed them at 6pm. Then it was an hour and a half before the equipment was packed and picked up.

I got home at 8pm and about collapsed. I'm reading emails and doing a few last minute things before getting to sleep. My normal job begins again at 9am Sunday.

Did I mention that when I dropped my dog off for a few days of daycare, that I found a pony (Shetland?) casually eating grass right next to a pack of barking dogs that cound not get next to the horse? I took a photo with my phone, but have not had time to uplaod it anywhere. I may do that, but don't know if anyone really cares to see documentation of my escapades. Still, I take the photos anyway, just in case :-)

I found the owners and returned the horse by walking it down the road to its paddock. The last thing I thought I would be doing is leading a horse home... but this is Hawaii and anything goes!

I appreciate all the comments about the farm and my dream. I'm really thring to get this place in shape, but as I mentioned, it is a long road. Still I go on.

I received preliminary blood tests and everything so far is within normal ranges, except perhaps good cholesterol, which is just a bit off.

Well, time to eat a hot dinner (some left-over lasagna) and then off to bed.

Wednesday I was heating a bagel at work and the microwave caught fire. Seems the person who had problems with it on Tuesday didn't unplug it. It is a good thing I was standing in front of it, because the smoke was horrible and we might have had a fire.

Wheel of Fortune has wrapped up their taping. The shows should be broadcast in January I think. It will give our island a bit of a bump in tourism!

The other day they had a funnel cloud on Oahu. When they touch ground they become a tornado.

On the way home, an Ambulance passed by and again everyone on the road pulled over. Cool, because that doesn't seem to happen other places as smoothly.

At work I tell visitors not to walk into the water in front of our resort. A guy came in Wednesday and said "Remember when you told us not to go in the water here? Well my wife did it anyway and now is picking sea urchin spines out of her foot". I tell people and they hear me, but they don't get it. It is like a wet paint sign that people just ignore.

I did some shopping for sandwich stuff so I can make lunch and snacks for tomorrow. I will be at the polling place at 5:00 or so to help set up. I will man the ballot box at the Painted Church. I'll be working until about 7pm!

A little while ago we had an earthquake over my the volcano. I'm at least 45 miles away as the crow files but still felt the 4.2. It shook the house for a couple seconds, but was not enough to get me to leave. besides, it was pouring down rain outside at the time. If you would like to see how often we get quakes, go here: http://tux.wr.usgs.gov/Quakes...

If you want to see some neat time-lapse videos of our lava flow, go here: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/galler...

Aloha for now!

I have 1500 holes ready for coffee trees, but need to get the water lines run, but the company I am buying the water pipes and sprinklers has not yet ordered the ite,ms for me. It will be another $17,000 I figure. Just the drip line is $7,000 and $1,000 for a pump, and then there is installation costs, although I can run a lot of the pipes myself. I may hire someone to glue them all together and make the supports to kep the plastic pipes from creeping.

If I plant parchment or green, the crops will be a bit later and a bit smaller in a couple years, but it saves me $5,000. Grown trees are about $5 each. Parchemnt or green is free. I'm told the difference is about a foot of tree height in two years. Not enough to worry about.

I could plant today but need the water from my tanks to irrigate. The problem beomes that if I don't get enough rain while the crops are new, they die. Having irrigation in first eliminates the worry of daily rain. The trouble is that I'm weeks away from having the pipes in. Just waiting on delivery could be 6 weeks...

Nobody said farming was easy. It is a hurry up and wait situation.they may be cloed until Monday.

I swear I'll have my new plants in the ground this year. I've been hoping that for years and have had many slowdowns.

This planting will give me a big influx of coffee to sell and I can begin real marketing. When I get the next planting in I'll be in full production. With just a few more things falling into place (and a few more spare dollars) I could have the whole property planted this year. Somehow I just doubt that will happen though :-)

On another tangent, I seem to be seeing some flashes of light when I twist my head. It may be nothing but a pinched nerve, but I need to schedule a appointment with Kaiser. If they need to do extensive testing, I'll be able to test drive their procedure that flies me to Oahu for tests! Their office here in Kona is very small and they prefer to pay to fly you to Oahu for tests and procedures.

Koa is doing well, although the other day he jumped up while I was holding a ball and I was afraid he poked his eye on my thumb. I think it just missed his eye becaus ehe seems fine now, but it was a very long few hours before he would let me look at his face. I saw no redness in his eye and he is catching fine. I have to schedule a vet visit for him soon and I'll have them check that out. At least I know HE doesn't have to go to Oahu for it!

I have been to training again to be a polling place worker and the Primary is coming up fast. I have to have my boss work for me on that saturday, but for Election day I'm usually off anyway on Tuesdays.

I used to be a disc jockey in Kentucky. This was a real DJ job, not a DJ in a club. I played music, commercials and hosted an imfamous "Swap Shop". For those not in rural areas, the swap shop is a radio program whereby local residents call up and attempt to sell anything from cars, to beds to even chickens and roosters. Think of it as a radio-based classified ad.

To get from college to the station I had a very long and windy road to follow. Thus I really identified with the Beatles song by the same name (The Long and Winding Road). My life also seemed to follow a long and windy road..

At the condos today I was talking with guests about moving. They say that they have lived in the same house for 30 years and expect to die there. In contrast, I have lived in so many places that it takes 5 minutes to remember all of them, and it is possible that I will miss one or more. I was born in New Jersey and lived in various places in the states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia and finally Hawaii.

I have worked in the construction business, washed dishes in a restaurant, built equipment for satellite TV, the phone company, ham radio operators, written inventory systems,managed a large computer room and many other jobs. I can't even remember some of the jobs. I have only been on a couple of job interviews in my life and been lucky enough to be hired for most jobs I've applied for.

So besides the ride to work, my life has been a long and winding road too.

My current job is coffee farmer and although I came into this with no prior knowledge, I seem to be doing OK. I did things a bit backwards compared to other people in the business. I started with designing the label and deciding what bags to put it in. Before long I had created my website, created a shopping cart and started tracking sales. All at the same time I was clearing macadamia trees and brush from my land and preparing to take the next step. That is to design and plant 5 acres of coffee where the mac nuts used to be. The property had some coffee on it, but this would be a major investment.

I hit a number of challanges along the way. Who can get rid of 500 trees and how? What steps are needed to clear the land, lay out the rows and get them planted. In fact, just determining how many plants per acre took me a while to decide. There are two types of pruning. Both use different calculations and make a difference in how the farm is run.

I was able to acquire a contract to conserve water and it helped me offset some of the cost of setting up water catchment tank to irrigate the plants. I finally had the land prepared, the tanks installed and holes for 1500 initial trees punched into the rock. I had started hundreds of trees from seed, but over time and during many false starts, many of them failed to thrive (so to speak). Then the land got overgrown with weeds and I have twice paid for a guy to bring a flail mower down here to clear the area. That is over a thousand dollars each time by the way. In a attempt to do much of that clearing myself, I purchase a Cub Cadet garden tractor, but have had a number of challanges and will have to return it for some other manufacturer I guess.

Then I got the dreaded postacrd from the lessor, wanting to visit the farm to see the progress. I was hoping to have amber waves of leaves waving in the breeze by now. In reality, I have holes covered with weeds. My land here is leasehold whereby I own what is above ground and borrow the ground itself. It is a common land ownership here in Hawaii. You CAN buy land here and own it outright, but leasehold allows you to have a lot of land for not much money. You must farm it though.

I left my previous job kinda kicking and screaming. I was offered an early retirement and if I did not take it, they would have let me go. I ws not ready for retirement and was not ready to make the move to Hawaii, but decided it was now or never. I know of others who had plans to do things after leaving, but never did. A co-worked was amazed that I up and left, but agreed that they were impressed that I was following a dream. I often joke that Hawaii is famous for dreams. In the movie South Pacific there is a song whose lyrics say "If you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?". The Maryland lottery ads followed a similar theme that "You have to play to win".

So I moved all over the east coast, changed jobs often and ended up creating a dream of moving to Hawaii and following that dream. I found land, starting working it and about used up all of my savings.

Then I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I cashed in my investments and borrowed from my retirement funds (without penalties by the way). I have holes ready for plants and a new influx of cash. I have the paperwork ready to show the inspector and will move ahead with the planting. Soon I will see thousands of trees spout and be fed with freshly captured rainwater.

In 2 or 3 years I'll have a ton or more of coffee cherry and when processed and roasted, will be looking to have each of you scout out stores and restaurants who will sell and serve the coffee that had taken years to come to fruition.

So as you can see, and without exagerating, it has been a long and winding road to get where I am and the journey is not yet complete.

I have held off giving tours here, but with the new water tanks and crops in the ground, I'll have lots to show off. Soon I hope to have a wet mill where I can pulp and dry coffee. I hesitate to build that now (even if I had the money) but with my current part-time job in town, I am not able to process coffee here on the farm and work up in town. Just drying coffee requires you to be here for days in a row to rake the parchment and measure the moisture of the beans. Pull them off the deck too soon and they can mildew in storage. leave them to dry too long and they will dry up. In either case, they won't roast right.

So frogive me if I don't get blogs written often enough, but know that there is still work going on here and soon, very soon, this part of the trip will be done.

Bob makes a 3 string standup bass and sells them at KonaWalkingStick.Com and he runs KonaWeb.Com

My recent picnic photo is at http://www.konaweb.com/togeth... (in the upper right, click to enlarge it) I'm 3rd from the right in the back row.

First, I changed the shopping cart to a black theme, more in keeping with the color of coffee. You can see it by going to http://ItsKona.Com and clicking on SHOP.

When I get some more time, I think I'll update the outside of the website from its burlap look to one that more closely mirrors the cart.

Speaking of the color black and the website, yet having more to do with brown and a dog... (what a transition...)

Koa (the wonderdog) has picked up fleas. Unfortunately, the two options available to me at the moment are a flea spray and a flea shampoo. He hates both.

He was on Frontline, but it appears Comportis works better out here. I'll be getting him a perscription soon.

I have to be at work at 8am to start setting up for an island orientation. We will have perhaps 17 people show up at 9am and we will feed them muffins, bagels and cream cheese, sweet rolls, fruit cups (with and without whipped cream). The cups will have watermelon, papaya, star fruit and so on.

For drinks we serve a passion fruit/orange drink and I brew up my Pele's Passion 100% Kona coffee. The neat thing is that for many of these guests, this may be their first taste of real Kona!

While we tell the guests about our island, we touch on the difference between blends and 100%. Then we tell them what Madam Pele is doing with the volcano and where the lava is flowing above ground.

Then it is inside to help people decide what they want to see and do during their week in Hawaii.

By then it is lunch time and perhaps I will have some fried rice or a "plate lunch". I will work on some paperwork, help some guests and soon it is 5:30 and time to go home.

Koa (my chocolate lab) will greet me like I've been away a month and it is off to exercise him, have some dinner, watch some TV and off to bed.

On my days off from my part-time job, I try to get my farm into full production. It is slow going. We spend more time killing weeds than we do fertilizing. Such is life in Paradise! :-)

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I just got back from work; they let me leave a bit early because it was a very slow day. Our orientation started at 9am and instead of a normal 17 people, we had 2... just 2. By 9:15 a few more people showed up, still we never exceeded 7 people. Many of our guests have been here before, thus they may not need to learn about the island and available activities.

Tuesday night there is a KonaWeb picnic, but I'm not sure I can make it. I have a guy coming by to mow the farm to eliminate acres of weeds.

My Lessor is scheduling an inspection this month. Hopefully they are happy with what I have done to the place since I got it. Many of the delays were outside my control and I having some isues getting some other things done quickly as I juggle finances. As you may remember, I had $35,000 outstanding while I waited to get money back on my contract.

Aloha until next time.