I suppose we will all be watching Hurricane Flossie for the next couple of days, hoping that it follows the forecast scenario and loses steam as it gets closer to Hawaii. Hopefully we’ll get some rain out of it and not much more. In the meantime, though, it’s a definite source of anxiety.

Congratulations to Honolulu Weekly editor Chris Haire, who has accepted a postion as managing editor of the Charleston City Paper in Charleston, South Carolina, and will be heading north to the South sometime soon.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a recent series on police officers busted for DUI. Honolulu has had some experience with this, but I have no idea whether reporting of this kind could be done here.

If you’ve got a spare couple of million sitting around after the Wall Street carnage of the last week, you might want to check out Willie’s house, located behind the Kaaawa fire station and on the lower side of four acres of empty state-owned land in front of our house. It’s on the market now, listed for a mind-boggling $1.95 million. It was only a few years ago that I wrote a piece for Honolulu Weekly observing that Kaaawa still had no million dollar homes. Well, I guess times have all too quickly changed.

Mr. Toby decided to go and get complicated on us this morning. He did come in early for a snack, but fled at the first kitten sounds. When a solid morning rain started several minutes later, there were some scrambling sounds that drew my attention up and that’s when I could see Toby’s underside as he sat huddled under the open skylight in our small dining room. At the first pause in the rain, I offered to pluck him off the edge of the roof, but he danced out of range. He finally dismounted while we were out walking, but did run to greet me when we returned.

And so it goes on this muggy Saturday morning.