First I have to say that I had planned to work on the house quite a bit this weekend – trying to paint the foyer. As of today the progress is good, but not complete. More on that latter. So, Saturday Adam calls and we plan to get together in the afternoon for a west-side surf. I frantically work on the house project as Adam calls and says there are other people at the summit that would like to join us. I say fine, we can fit 6 people in the CRV. At 3 I show up at the Ihilani Resort in Ko‘Olina with three boards on the roof. The summit crew walks out and jumps in. I only knew Adam, who sat in the way back where there are no seats. As we drove to Mākaha he introduced me to the others:
- Steve Schneider – Stanford climatology prof., member of the IPCC (which won the other half of the Nobel Peace Prize won by Al Gore), and member of the National Academy of Science since 2002. Note: Dad was Academy class of '98 and after he read this said Steve is a hero - something I don't think I've heard him say about anyone else.
- Andrew Revkin – New York Times columnist/author (The Burning Season) focused on global warming and climate, manager of the Dot Earth blog on the New York Times website.
- Adrienne Dreiss – Board Member of family's George & Cynthia Mitchell Foundation and director of their Texas Energy and Climate Change Program.
- Anna Rose – Founder of Australian Youth Climate Coalition, among other things.
So, it was a motley crew. Adam, by the way, is the co-founder and executive director of the Vote Solar Initiate, so he belongs in this group. On the drive we didn’t see much surf and the discussion was more about the global environment and the fact that with six people in the CRV we were getting great gas mileage. But I knew there would be surf at Mākaha.
As usual the beach was packed, both on the sand and in the water. Adam and I left the environmental lobby near the life guard stand and made for the nice looking 3 to 5 footers rolling onto the reef. Caught a nice long ride but of course someone dropped in on me down the line and insisted on sharing the rest of the wave. Every once in a while a real set would come in. I could see this one coming and thought I might score. Staying in the pit and paddling out instead of scrambling for the shoulder as other did I hoped for the best. The wave peaked a little too early, catching me inside. I tried to duck it but was just under the lip and felt the board buckle as the wave unloaded, so I just let it go. Sure enough, the board was busted. It was an old board but still surprising because I build them tough and had never broken a board before.
Adam helped me in after the set past and the environmental lobby was a buzz over the action as I made my way to shore. Luckily I had the third board still in the car and took that out. In the end it was just too crowded and we caught one more in.
Back at the hotel the founder of the Blue Planet Foundation, Henk Rogers, was hosting a party for the summit people. Adam said it was cool for me to come along so I crashed that party and meet more great people, including Denis Hayes, the guy that coordinated the first Earth Day. Didn’t get to say more than hi to him though. Also at the party was Jeff Mikulina, Sierra Club Hawai‘i Chapter Director; FYI – I was just elected to the executive committee of the O‘ahu Sierra Club. Adam and others had enjoyed talking with Jeff during the summit and were particularly fond of one of Jeff's sayings: "Hawai‘i is one supertanker away from being Amish." Had great wine and food, so much great wine that I crashed in Adam’s room instead of driving home.
In the morning Adam bought me breakfast before we drove out to Mā‘ili for some more surf. Waves at Mā‘ili were much smaller but far less crowded than Mākaha the day before and we had a great time. Caught a bunch of mostly 2 footers but they were all walling up and rocketing along. Adam was setting up deep and being the goofy foot had plenty of good views of long walled up sections and nearly got into a few little barrels. His favorite move was turning up the wave and launching over the lip just before the close out – a few times he got a good 10 feet in the air with that maneuver. And the best part, no one broke into our car!
On the way back we picked up Adrienne and went back to the house. Managed to get the two visitors to help with the foyer project, which was great because tacking up 13 foot long batons on the ceiling is a job I would not have been able to do without them. The three of us got into a good rhythm and banged the job out fairly quickly despite the constant rain. Here are a few photos of us in action:
As you can see I had sanded all the wood, about four weeks ago when Joni and Rylan were on Maui. I had removed all the batons during the sanding because they were termite eaten and cracked. This is us putting up the last new ceiling baton. You can see the new batons on the wall behind us because they are much lighter than the older boards behind.
Everyone got a turn with the nail gun.I gave the visitors the afternoon off; they went to Waikīkī and I stayed back to keep working on the smaller parts of the project – nailing up shorter vertical batons, caulking all the joints and gaps (with brother-in-law Joel’s help), and fishing wire and cable. Overall good progress, but had wanted to get primer on this weekend and didn’t get to that. Maybe next weekend.
So, thanks to all for helping with the house project this weekend and special thanks to Adam for inviting me to the summit wrap up party.
No comments:
Post a Comment