Day Twelve, Saturday in Kailua-Kona

Yesterday we stayed near our condo.  After the usual fruit breakfast, we headed to Kahalu'u Beach to snorkel.  This is a very small beach, shallow and completely protected by a reef.  It's wildly popular.  We had to wait and follow a couple who were leaving to get a parking spot.  The sand is coarse lava and coral, and probably only covers about 200 square feet.  Not much bigger than my living room, and smaller than the adjoining picnic pavilion.  I had an ill-fitting rented mask, and really gave up before I started.  I had a lovely view of my feet before eyes and mouth full of salt water irritated me to the point of not caring what might be swimming out there. Pat saw an amazing array of fish and went out three times, so the expedition was worth it.  I opted to omit sunscreen for about 20 minutes after coming out of the water, so addedto my tan, which is coming along very slowly and safely.

We got back to the condo around one, showered and hung everything out to dry on the lanai.  Lunch was at a local hangout, the Big Island Grill.  The food is good and plentiful, no alcohol is served, and the sparse crowd at two p.m. was mostly local.  It was a delightful experience.  We went to the grocery store for healthy snacks, which are in the fridge because pretzels are more fun than carrots.  We also hit Payless Shoes, where Pat bought good flip flops and a pair of sandals with traction, something his old leather ones lack.

We spent the late afternoon on the lanai watching the daily surf show and later drinking mai tais and snacking.  When I finally got around to uploading photos and blogging, I found that some program (still not sure what) had taken over my computer.  It claimed to be a Windows Security program, and said it had done a scan and found worms, viruses, hacker attempts - 26 in all.  And wanted me to register the program for $60 so it could fix the problems.  Which McAfee didn't find.  We had all kinds of problems last night and simply turned the computer off and gave up.  This morning and again this evening Pat, my personal hero, played around and basically found work-arounds for all of the problems we're still having.  Josh suggested I download Ad Aware, which I've tried to do but whatever has the computer in thrall won't let me do.  I think Josh is right that it's a non-malicious ad program.  But I'm concerned about it's legitimacy because of the persistent pop-up boxes and a conspicuous misspelling.  Wondering if it's an attempt to steal a credit card number.  For all it's charm and class, this condo has an unsecured internet connection, which I suspect may be the origin of my problem.  Fortunately, we bought the Dell mini specifically so we would have a laptop with nothing personal on it, so we're in no danger of losing anything important.  If any of my computer guru friends have any ideas, please let me know!

The other evening event yesterday was our discovery of a baby gecko (about two inches long) under the glass that covers a living room end table.  The table itself has a ridged top with an outer rim that the glass sits on very snugly.  We couldn't insert anything between the glass and the rim, and still have no clue how this little guy got in there.  Except that the condo was painted right before we got here and maybe the glass was moved and then placed back without regard to the new occupant.  Pat got a plastic bowl with a lid and was able to catch the little guy and release him outdoors.

Gecko under glass