A Heads Up

SUBHEAD: We'll be heading for a trip to the mainland and will be unable to post to the website from Tuesday until Thursday.  

By Juan Wilson on 6 June 2011 for Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/06/heads-up.html)


Image above: A view of the back of The Farm in Panama, New York. Photo by Juan Wilson in 2008.


Linda Pascatore and I head for the mainland on Wednesday. We'll be leaving our chickens, vegetable, fruit trees and cat to a caretaker staying in our home. Given the fragility of the world economy as well as the price of oil we expect that this may be the last time we'll be able to get back to remote western New York state.

We have lots of things to take care of if that's true. When we first moved to Hawaii we thought we might spend half the year on Kauai and half in Chautauqua County, NY. Our plan was July-January in NY and February-June in HI. Well that never happened. We knew that couldn't really fly until Linda retired from the DOE here.

In the early 2000's We did spend our summers back in the woods of the Amish country that is the western tip of the Empire State. We simply called the place The Farm, as my grandmother, my mother and now my kids do. We even had a dog and a couple of cats that our renters took care of while we were here. - Ah - the renters.

That was one reason we pull off the snowbird life. We needed someone staying in our place back on the mainland when we were on Kauai, but we didn't want them there while we were. It was hard to find renters that didn't mind being displaced for eight weeks a year. Few did more than one tour of duty. That problem was mirrored on Kauai.

We needed people to stay in our Hanapepe house and take care of things. Often time that meant people staying for free and us paying to keep both places up and running. That gets increasingly difficult form a distance, and will only get worse. We intend to consolidate our efforts of resilience and sustainability here on Kauai.

It's going to require jettisoning a lot of our old lives and reducing four generations of our past into a 1/4 of a 20' shipping container. I'm not looking forward to the triage. Anyway, once past the overseas trip we have to get a car registered and running, pick up a DLS modem, install it and get our laptop up on a wireless network.

Once that's in place we'll be back online with new material for Island Breath. For continued coverage of the birthing of a self relient Hookahi Kauai we need you, who will be on island, with your observations. Please let us know what's going on - KIUC, FERC, DLNR, PMRF, GMO's - whatever.

Email juanwilson@mac.com or
lindapascatore@me.com.

We'll be there. .

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