A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A RETIREE IN HONOLULU

I woke up today to this view.  You can only barely see it, but there is a beautiful rainbow...and and no rain clouds.  Amazing.  The following is one of my recent lunches at Magic Island.  Again, you need to click on the photo, but you'll see a Hawaiian green turtle in the middle of the blue:

It comes to say hi almost everytime I'm here.  Of course, that is because this is where the turtle lives and it needs to breathe.

After a third of an apple, I zipped by Zippys:

 and purchased a chili moco:

To quote The Tasty Island:

1st Layer: White Rice
2nd Layer: Mayo’-based “Secret Mac Salad Sauce”
3rd Layer: (1) Hamburger Patty
4th Layer: Zippy’s Chili (classic only)
5th Layer: (2) Eggs

Then on to my Manoa Campus office (POST 113b):

To the left (top to bottom) are a copy of Frank Eldridge's text, Wind Machine (which I have been intending to return to Paul Yuen for about 30 years now), a microwave oven and refrigerator.  There is an appropriate early lunch drink next to the chili moco, with today's Star Advertiser and USA Today.  You can't see my SONY sound system, but outside my window is the trunk of Pearl's Gold Tree.

I today thought I would visit with two of our renewable energy scholars, Luis Vega and Michael Antal.  Luis heads the Hawaii National Marine Renewable Energy Center:

I first met Luis almost three decades ago when he ran his engineering consulting company in Berkeley, California.  He soon thereafter moved to Hawaii to work for the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research on OTEC.  Today, we mostly discussed wavepower, for the U.S. Navy and Department of Energy are mostly funding this marine energy technology.  I was not overly unenthusiastic with my feelings about this option.  Kaneohe is, actually, an excellent site for testing these systems.  We continue to harbor strong hopes for ocean thermal energy conversion and the Blue Revolution.

Michael is the Coral Industries Professor of Renewable Energy Resources:

I first met him when, in 1980 (plus or minus a year), he dropped by my office in the U.S. Senate.  He was from Princeton, and on his way to the University of Hawaii to fill that position.  He has, thus, been here for around a third of a century.  He is the world authority on many things related to biomass, including charcoal, supercritical conditions and products from ethanol.  He was particularly hopeful about producing jet fuel from Brazilian ethanol.

At home, Pearl's sunbursts are blooming again.  A bunch of them appeared six weeks ago.  Now five more are out.

At this point of the day I thought it would be best for me to begin the process of returning to my weight of a month ago by walking 18 holes at the Ala Wai Golf Course.  Professor Ed Chen, former chairman of the Civil Engineering Department, and I coincidentally showed up at the same time, so we formed a foursome with two others, one from Cambodia.  We learned a lot about how things are going in that country and part of the world.  I also chatted with former Dean of Engineering Paul Yuen (got to get him that book) and retired Professor Kwok Ho and his wife Cathy.  All in all, a great day.

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