We are now on the last leg of our Hawaiian vacation, and will be spending the last few days in Hilo. We’re staying at a small hotel a few blocks away from old town Hilo – that’s the part that remains of Hilo pre the 1960 tsunami. Before coming here, I never gave a lot of thought to tsunamis and Hawaii. Now that I’ve been here, I won’t ever NOT think about it. Hilo’s history is written around tsunamis: the 1946 one that leveled the town, and the 1960 one that AGAIN leveled the town and made everybody move back from the oceanfront. Where Kona is built right up to, even onto, the ocean, Hilo is built back from it. There’s a park and a road that separates the closest buildings to the ocean here. And Hilo is part of the Tsunami Warning System – you see what look like air raid sirens all over – and if and when they go off, you head for high ground right away. Living in So Cal and having experienced a fair number of earthquakes, I felt pretty savvy, disaster-wise. Visiting the big island has given me a whole new level of appreciation for the idea of living with disaster. On the Kona side, you live with the uncertainty of the volcanoes. Over here in Hilo, you live with the uncertainty of tsunamis AND the uncertainty of volcanoes. It doesn’t inspire me with a desire to pack up my bags anytime soon and move here, I’ll tell you that!

I’m in bed typing this now, and I have earplugs in again (we used earplugs every night in Kona as our room was right next to a bust highway on one side and the roaring ocean on the other) not because of traffic or ocean noise but because of the cacophony of sound made by the hordes of tree frogs that have invaded the area. They apparently arrived here from Puerto Rico via landscaping materials brought over for Walmart (that’s the story we’ve heard, anyway) and have bred like, well, tree frogs, as they lack any natural predator here. They are nocturnal, so we didn’t hear them earlier this afternoon. When we came back from dinner, they were doing their thing at full volume. They spend the entire night croaking at a high pitch to each other and it’s an insidiously annoying sound. They like the tropical atmosphere of Hilo, so we never heard them in Kona. We’re making up for it here, as there is a tropical garden in the back of the hotel. The frogs really, really like the garden. So it goes.

Here we are in this lovely paradise and I have to confess that my mind is pretty much entirely consumed by the fact that tomorrow marks the release of the iPhone (aka the Jesus Phone) and the odds of my being able to get one here is Hilo where there are no Apple Stores and only two AT&T stores is slim to nil. Chuck, enabler that he is, is willing to give it a shot and go to one of the AT&T stores in town tomorrow afternoon and see if we have any luck. I want the 8GB model, which makes the odds of success even slimmer, but I think I’ll give it a try. I realize this makes me a pathetic Apple whore. I accept this fact. I still WANT MY DAMNED IPHONE! Okay?

On that happy note, I think I’ll call it a night.