This will be slightly more random than previous entries.

My new Facebook profile photo:

If you took off the “falling coco-” part, it’s what I think I should wear as a sign around my neck.

Found this on the beach near our condo. It’s an old seed pod of some sort, but it looked so much like a jawbone with teeth that I had to prod it with my foot to check.

Cute little snails with black (well, more like deepest, darkest blue) shells:

Pretty piece of black coral (that’s not an official name, btw, just my description)

This is something I feel I should recognize but, sadly, don’t. It was cool regardless.

This is our condo from the beach:

One night we drove down the road to Wailea and kept going. After awhile the manicured golf courses give way to cacti; this is, after all, the dry side of Maui.

 

Eventually we stumbled into this strange, volcanic, post-apocalyptic landscape:

You can kinda see where the lava cascaded down after an eruption…not sure when this took place.

Early last week we went to a museum about sugar. Although I will include a photograph, I’ll omit the name because this museum was, well, sort of a lowlight of the trip thus far. It offered a slew of technical information about how sugar cane is harvested and processed, so much that my eyes glazed over early into the explanatory video. Some displays were interesting, such as one showing the outfit a Japanese woman would have worn to work in the cane fields around 1910. But, you know, while I try to be sympathetic to historical perspectives that differ from my own*, it was really tough to stomach how whitewashed some of the history seemed. All the pictures of happy plantation workers pursuing their dreams contrasted sharply with the reality that even the museum presents: they worked 26 days out of the average month, at least 10 hours per day.

*The Green Hills of Africa is a case in point–Throughout the entire book I was like, No, Great White Hunter, do NOT shoot another rhino! Someday they will be critically endangered because of people like you! Jerk. Of course, I have never been any sort of a Hemingway fan.

It’s just across the street from the industrial edifice of the sugar-processing plant.

Just to mix things up, I’ll end with a flower this time, rather than a sunset: