6/12/2010

Pineapple paradise

Shortly after we moved here, sometime around the fall of 2008, I planted a pineapple top cut from a pineapple we got at the store.  It slowly grew out in the backyard and now FINALLY we have a ripe pineapple! 
I was getting a little worried that this little guy would get ripe while we were visiting MN. I would hate to wait 18 months for a pineapple to grow and then miss out on it!  Well yesterday we went ahead and picked our pineapple.  


We cut it up after dinner tonight and it was really sweet and tasty.  One of the best pineapples I've had, so I guess it was worth the wait.  Now supposedly in another year it might produce another one, that's a long wait!


But our banana tree has decided to produce a bunch of bananas, so in a while we'll have some more tropical fruit.  We have a dwarf apple banana tree that I put in last spring.  Apple bananas grow all over here, I don't know if you can get them outside of Hawaii but they are very tasty.  
Here is the flower pod that will produce the bananas.  You can just barely see the baby bananas way up underneath the outer petals in the pic below.  
Not sure how long it takes the bunch to grow, but I'll have to keep a close eye on it.  Them I just need to wait for our papaya tree to get bigger and I'll have some fresh papayas too.  Gotta love Hawaii!



6/05/2010

A day on the bike path

Since we spend so much time on the bike path here on the weekends and also since we never know how long we'll be here or when Monsanto will tell us it's time to move on, I decided I should chronicle a typical day on the bike path so we remember what it looked like.


Here we're just starting out, looking out over the golf course across the street.
As we head down through the neighborhood, we go past Adam's old school...
Here's a shot of me and Adam taken from the bike along the way
Once we get down through the neighborhood and under the freeway, we head down to the Pearl Harbor bike path.  The start of the bike path begins near a 'convenience dropoff center' i.e. a place to drop your trash that can't be picked up curbside.  Then it runs along the back of some properties in Waipahu  (a different part of Waipahu than where we live) where there is a small canal with fish and ducks in it.  Many of the yards have chickens, roosters, and ducks living in them.  You can see the canal in the pic below and the bridges from the yards over to the bike path.
Once we get past the residential section, the bike path runs right along Pearl Harbor.  Here's a view of the Mid Loch, which I think is basically a ship graveyard.  These ships don't look like they've seen any action in a long time from the amount of rust on them...
A shot of Adam on the bike.
Further along, we come to the taro patch,
And the watercress farm that are alongside the path.
More pretty views of Pearl Harbor looking towards Ford Island.
This is nearly at the end of the bike path, our turnaround point.  You can see the Ford Island bridge towards the left in the picture.
And it seems that a ride wouldn't be complete without a stop to fix the bike.  This time a jammed chain.  But we were off again shortly.
Now I hope in a couple years or more we can look back at the bike path pics and say 'Hey, I remember that!'.  Because who knows where life will take us next.  It would be nice to know!

6/04/2010

Scrapbook Fun

I've finally had time to play with Adobe this week and finished a layout.