Rainforest Zoo & Evening Candlelight

First some duck pictures. They are getting so big! These were taken last week and since then we have built them a larger enclosure and a secure housing shelter for nighttime. We have been bringing them into the house (in their purple bin) every night, but they're getting too big for that.

Below...from left to right clockwise...Mr. Drake, Meg, Jemima, Calvin, Roosevelt, & Alice.

Stella and I went to the zoo with a friend the other day...they ran ahead and were holding hands.

Petting some goats.

I didn't take many pictures...Stella is the one with the red skirt & yellow shirt :)

Living with limited electricity means that we use oil lamps and candles for light at night. Tom took some pictures of me reading to Stella (Stregga Nona by Tomie dePaola). I love the candlelight at night and wouldn't change it for electric lights...no way!

Ahalanui Warm Pond

The boys have Fall Break this week, so we have been busy! First off this week we went to the Ahalanui Warm Pond...Tom, Stella, and I have been there before, and the boys were anxious to go.

This geothermally heated warm pond (with fresh ocean water during high tides) is about 25 miles from our house.

There were a lot of tourists there...we heard from New Jersey, California, and Chicago to name a few.

Above and below Kyle is snorkeling. There are little fish that get washed in with the tide...and some eels, but we didn't see the eels.

Reeve below in a "hot spot."

Kyle (below) snorkeling.

It was a great day, and a fun way to start their Fall Break. Confused about Fall Break? Keep in mind their school started August 1st!

From the Roof

You might have noticed we have a new look to our blog...it's called a Dynamic Blog. I think it was just the change I was looking for. Do you see the black bar underneath our title "Raye Family Updates"? It has several different choices of "dynamic looks" for the blog. It defaults to 'magazine'. My favorite is 'Flipcard'. I like that you can see one picture from each of the blog posts going back several years...all on the same page. The other day I decided to take the camera up on the roof when Tommy was up there working on the solar array.
This is the view of the duck enclosure. You can still click on the pictures to make them appear larger.

Another zoomed out view.

Tommy with one panel in place.

Unfortunately the folks who built this house used used roofing material. Some day we will have to re-roof this.

This is the solar array that the previous owners installed. Not good. It's noon and the panels are in the shade. This array produces just enough battery power to run the laptop, modem, and inverter...on a nice sunny day. If we try to plug anything else in, or use the electricity on a cloudy day then the inverter beeps a warning.

Backside of the array

Solar Raye with a Mage 190watt panel.

Me...on the roof! I actually helped to secure these two panels to the racking.