Where's Smokey When You Need Him

I'm sure I've blogged about it, but every now and then the sugar company gets around to burning sugar cane near Kihei. It's how they harvest it. I'm not going to get into how bogus that industry is, but the point is, last week they were doing it again round these parts and we got the results, a lot of coughing, black snow all over our cars, extra dust through the open windows, etc. That kinda sucked.

But then last Saturday I was coming home from the Y. It was around 8pm so it was dark. I had heard that there was a fire in Kihei. Miles before I had gotten there I could see this thing. It was actually a brush fire that burned a lot of land, but it was really freaking close to the fire department (ironically) and a lot of houses. But from where I was coming from, it really looked like a forest fire. The more I started to think about it, the more weird it got...what if there was a big ass fire on this island. There is no where to go and the roads are so few and laid out so ridiculously that it would be difficult to go even to another part of the island that was relatively safe.

I must be Notra-freaking-damous. Two days later there's another fire in Kihei, during the afternoon, between my school and my house. They had to close down the one highway. I had to go to town to work at the Y and I was an hour late for work. We were in a serious traffic jam and if this fire got out of control it would have been chaos instead of gridlock.

In the year I've been here, when all the Maui-experts pontificate on why mainlanders find it so difficult to live here, one of the reasons is "isolation". I hadn't had that feeling until this week. This place is kinda dangerous...and you damn kids get off my lawn!

Other News:

Thought I'd show you video of Summer, her speech from the fundraiser. It's 13 minutes long.



That one's OK...but the one I loved was where she verbally punched Kyle in the mouth at the Kula forum. It starts out slow, but she let him have it at the end. You couldn't see or hear me, but I was in the back of the room trying not to start the wave.

The campaign's going well. We're good money-wise...getting a lot of endorsements, people are starting to write letters to the newspapers, good interviews, etc. That's why I haven't had much time to call anyone or post much. It's pretty much school, Y & campaign. The primary is Sept 20th and I'll have 2 weeks off of school then, so I'll get some rest before we (hopefully) gear up for the general election. Jeez, I think we may actually win this freakin thing.

I did have a parent give me a compliment at school yesterday. She was psyched that I showed the kids The Story of Stuff. It was the only nice thing anyone said to me the whole day. School hasn't been very uplifting so far. More on that at another time.

Other than the time I spent on the phone with Jimena (I was also doing laundry and cutting campaign flyers), I've been doing campaign stuff all night - wasn't paying attention and had too much caffine. But I think the couple of beers countered that and it's really late, so I'm going to try to go to bed.

So to sum up...while from reading this post, it may seem funky here...it's nothing major. Everything's OK and I'm just looking forward to getting this school year over with and getting off this death trap. Eyes on the prize.