... but the centipede he crawl all over your feet...

One of the defining concert experiences of my young life was a show that Kenny Loggins did in the Lahaina amphitheater behind the police station, some time in the late 1970s. We got tickets through friends who got them for free from the radio station, and we nearly didn't go ("we" being my sister and me). We had to work that day, physical work out in the sun, and we were tired. We also started work every morning at 6.30, so weren't accustomed to staying up much past 8. I'm guessing the concert started some time around 8. I do remember the sunset behind the stage, out over the Lahaina roadstead, with Lanai in the distance and sailboats making silhouettes against the light.

In any case, for whatever reason, I was able to convince my generally-not-up-for-this-sort-of-thing sister to go. And it turned out that Kenny Loggins was a fantastic performer. I had liked the stuff he did with Jim Messina, but wasn't a huge fan of his solo work. Still, he could really work a crowd, and we were sitting outside on the grass in the tropical evening, and it was a blast, well worth staying up past 8.30pm for!

But one of the things that happened was people were calling for "Lahaina," the song that Loggins and Messina had recorded. I was enough of a music nerd to lean over and mutter to my sister, "He's not going to do it, it's a Jim Messina song." And I was right, he didn't do it.

All of which is a pretty much unrelated to this video I shot with my phone two nights ago, here in Haiku:

This is a decent sized centipede (compare to the hand that appears late in the show). But this sort of thing doesn't phase me much. Having grown up in Hawaii, I'm ok with most island critters. Centipedes, scorpions, mosquitos, bees, spiders, mostly - I actually dislike cane spiders more than I do centipedes. Centipedes at least run away from you rather than jump AT you when you frighten them. In Seattle I catch spiders in the house and release them outside. When we had a cane spider in a condo here on one visit, M and the girls expected me to do the same. I shook my head and said that they didn't understand, that besides being about 4 inches across, it would jump toward me if I approached it, and it would move "frickin' fast." I moved toward it, just enough to make it run, and it crossed about 25 feet of wall in a fraction of a second. M looked at me and said, "Ok, I get it." We left it alone for the remainder of our stay. It was hidden behind the cabinets in the kitchen, which was fine by me. I do less well with non-island folks like snakes, bears, and lions and tigers I suppose though I've never encountered either of those in the wild.

It's been a gloriously damp visit here, with rain sweeping in from the northeast and making all the lawns green (including Mom's which is unusual at this point in the year). And after years of drought, the island sure can use the water. I've even seen a buffo or two, something I haven't seen in years.