Lights are on, toilets flush, moving in this week! Oh, and the lava's poised to take out our local shopping center, then the highway...

Last Friday, we had 6 electricians, 2 plumbers, our contractor and his carpenter, and excavation/driveway/lawn guy at our property doing all the little touches needed to make our house move-in ready. By the end of the day, we had, for the first time, electricity and running water! Only three major items are left, along with a list of minor ones, and the construction project will officially be our new home. First, we need our final inspection. After that, propane gas for the backup generator will be delivered. Then Jeremiah Augustine, our solar contractor, will come out to do his final tweaks of the solar system. We'll be spending our first night in the house before all that happens-yes, after 11 months of construction, we're ready to move in!

There's already furniture in the house. Our state of the art alarm and video system is up and running. All systems are (almost) GO!

With my husband Robert here, we're focusing on making the gardens sing. We have a great crew from the Gaia Yoga farm, and now that my great-nephew Nick Moll is visiting, we even have him helping in the gardens, too!

The travelogue has photos from our great-nephew Nick's visit to Uncle Robert's beach near us. There is bad news from Hawaii, though. He likes it so much out here he says he's not going back to Maine, and who can blame him? It's 60 degrees warmer here, and you can actually swim in the Pacific without freezing!

You'll see it all in the quick video followed by the pictures below. Aloha!

PS-Lava update:
June 27th Lava Flow Observations: HVO, along with Civil Defense, is monitoring a narrow flow lobe that branches off the west edge of the flow field below the crack system. Civil Defense reported, this morning, that the leading edge of the flow was about 1.6 km (1.0 miles) upslope from the intersection of Pāhoa Village Road and Highway 130, near the Pāhoa Marketplace. The active lobe is following a steepest-descent path that takes the flow towards the intersection of Pāhoa Village Road and Highway 130, in the vicinity of the Pāhoa Marketplace. In addition to this active lobe, a breakout from the lava tube on December 5, about 2.6 km (1.6 mi) from Puʻu ʻŌʻō remains weakly active.