It was certainly disconcerting to get an email message received at 2 p.m. yesterday from Dave Reed which started like this:

Aloha!

If you are reading this e-mail, then the first thing that you must know is that I am obviously no longer among you.

That is not a bad thing.

I thought at first it was some kind of joke, as Dave would have to reach way down into his large collection of friends and acquaintances to come up with my email address.

Then I went looking for a fresh obituary. Finding none, I got sidetracked into furthering the preparations for today’s termite tenting.

But this morning the news of Dave’s death was well reported by the Star-Bulletin’s Mary Adamski, with reference to the final email.

Gov. Lingle voted “salesperson of the year” by a marketing organization? One reader commented early this morning.

“Can you say “Suck Up!” For definition, see this.”

I’m pretty sure the “suck up” comment was aimed at the organization giving the award to Lingle, since the Star-Bulletin’s Erika Engle even managed to slip the Awana issue into her brief story.

So I was slaving yesterday bagging food and other gassables, trimming plants around the house, etc., when I discovered Bob Jones’ endorsement of sodium borate spray for termites rather than fumigation. He wrote about this option in a MidWeek column last year, an option you don’t hear much about. Maybe next time.

Every once in while you read a story and just know that there’s a lot more to be reported on that issue. That’s what happened to me this morning when I read Kevin Dayton’s fine account in this morning’s Advertiser of the financial problems afflicted Fred Yamashiro’s company, Fredco, which is under contract to build houses for the Department of Hawaiian Homes. The company is apparently out of money and has notified the department and it’s bonding company that it cannot finish the homes already under contract. Who is left holding the empty bag is one of those questions Dayton explored today. The answer, of course, is that stuff rolls down hill and those Hawaiians waiting for their houses are taking the primary hit so far.

This grabbed my attention immediately because Yamashiro has been on my radar screen for a couple of years due to Hawaiian Homes’ unexplained urge to shovel contracts his way.

Google for Yamashiro’s background as a home building and you won’t find too much. Small projects, a few houses. And yet DHHL started shoveling lots of work his way as soon as the Lingle administration took over, through Fredco and Menehune Development, both controlled by Yamashiro, according to business registration records.

The capper, and the one that originally caught my attention, was the huge hotel, condo, commercial development on Hawaiian Homes land surrounding Honokohau Harbor in Kealakehe on the Big Island. Jacoby Development, a large and experience developer based in Atlanta, was selected for the project. But the fine print, sometimes reported and sometimes not, made clear that the developer was Kona Development Group LLC, a partnership between Menehune Development and Jacoby. Since Menehune appears to have absolutely no experience with this type of development, my alarm bells started going off.

When I had an opportunity to inspect the lease issued by Hawaiian Homes for this development, I was most interested to find that there was a sandwich position inexplicably created for Menehune Development. If I’m not mistaken, and I don’t have the lease in front of me, the deal is structured so that Hawaiian Homes leases to Menehune, which in turn subleases to Jacoby, the actual developer. Why this was done was not spelled out in documents related to the deal.

I always use an astronomy analogy when observing situations like this. The planet Neptune was discovered in 1846 by observing unexpected movement in the orbit of Uranus, which mathematically suggested the presence of an as-yet-undiscovered planet with its own gravitational impact. Similarly, a deal like this involving unlikely partners and a politically-charged department suggests as-yet-undiscovered politics and interests at work.

My early morning conclusion is that Menehune’s new financial woes offer an opportunity to explore a wider web of influence and political connections at DHHL, and that promises some good reading to come.

In between bagging and boxing and tracking cats yesterday, I did manage to get up to date on my Kaaawa photos by gathering my favorites from November. This was one of my images of Sunday morning, with the Sunday paper out in front waiting to be read. There are more November dawns in this collection, as well as some photos of the minor flooding experienced with the rain during the first week of the month. Just click on the photo for more.