Mele Kalikimaka - Merry Christmas!

First an apology for the lack of posts this week.  My laptop died in its sleep earlier in the week. Without a vehicle at our disposal, that means the earliest we can get it looked at is Monday, when we can hop on a bus and take it into Kona.

Sadder even than the out of commission laptop (I am currently borrowing Papa Bear's to write this post) is the fact that all of my pictures from the Big Farm this summer and all of my Hawaii pictures are on that laptop.

All of the posts I had been writing about coffee and picking macadamia nuts and visiting Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park - are all sitting naked in Blogger, awaiting the addition of photos so I can post them.  Photos I can't access and may possibly be lost forever.

(I know what you're thinking - where are your photo backups???  We can back our photos up to Carbonite, but it requires many gigabytes of data to do that, and we have a 5GB/month data plan. So the only time we normally do it is when we're visiting a coffee shop with Wifi. With no vehicle here, we don't often get to coffee shops).

But enough whining.  Papa Bear brought his little point & shoot camera on our latest outing to Volcanoes National Park, so I have a few photographs our fellow WWOOFers took and those will have to do until I get the final verdict on my laptop.

This is the first Christmas we will be celebrating without any of our family, and it feels quite strange. In fact I keep forgetting it is Christmas at all.  Especially with the lack of snow and plethora of tropical fruits everywhere. 

This evening, an evening I have for all the many decades of my life normally spent in a quiet church on the northern shores of Lake Superior, singing carols and lighting candles, I will be missing from the pew beside my family. 

But I will be there in spirit, reliving the miracle of a tiny baby born far away from home and placed lovingly into a hay-filled manger, his arrival heralded by none other than the common and lowly shepherds tending their flocks in the fields.

Blessings and a Merry Christmas to you all!