The total cost of fire in the United States is defined to be the combination of losses found in the actual loss in fires, the money spent to minimize loss when fighting fires, and the costs in containing, detecting, and suppressing them. For the year 2005 the total cost for all fifty states was just shy of $300 billion. Over time, the actual costs due to fire have experienced a dependable but gradual decrease annually.

As for the Big Island of Hawaii, our fire hydrants suffer from lack of use. Poor fellow. Stuff just doesn't ever get bone dry here.

At an earlier time along the 120 yards of our Route 202 frontage in northern NJ, we had a bed of flowering daffadils and irises - 360 ft by 4 ft. dimensionally. I knew our front yard was 120 yards wide because as children my brother and I measured it for a football field. Most of the flowers shared the same colors of th orchid below. And the appearance of the iris is remarkably similiar.

Darwin coming upon the iris and the orchid might believe each had been molded by similiar natural forces and were similiarly naturally selected. Not a chance here. For the radius greater than 1000 miles of our location we have nothing but a relatively few volcanic islands and lots of ocean....very little open soil, relatively speaking.



Most significantly the orchid does not send roots into the soil; the iris must. Orchid roots are used to secure the plant onto another structure where neutrients are gained through fresh water that is nearly continuously present with mist and rain.

Imagine ripping an iris bulb with it's root mass out of the ground, securing it upside down on a horizontal screen above ground in nearly full but filtered sun and watching it thrive without soil nutrients, but just rain. The orchid thrives under these circumstances, making it a flowering version of a rain forest Camel. It stores a volume of water in some of its leaves.

It typically blooms for an extended period once or twice annually. Some of these orchids are pollinated by bats.

I personally speculate here, now. Someone really intelligent created this plant where it could rain so hard that all soil and other plant life can be washed into the ocean, but any orchid gripping a lava outcropping would be absolutely comfortable with the conditions and propogate in spite of it.

Adorned with Layers of Leis

"Yes, Daddy. I did go into the tall grass again. There are such beautiful critters hiding in there. How did you know?"

Sometimes the picture we take, even with a full zoom on a quality lens will not get close enough. I would have needed a telescope to get the picture I wanted. You can see him nearly dead center in the picture.
It's a mature Chamaeleo jacksonii (common names Jackson's Chameleon or Three-horned Chameleon)... an African chameleon belonging to the chameleon family (Chamaeleonidae). This subspecies that is distinct to Hawaii is called the Chamaeleo jacksonii xantholophus. I wrote about him earlier reflecting on how easily it is to handle him. You can find the previous topic entitled "Miniature Triceratops"
Here he is badly pixelated after editing and cropping with Adobe Photoshop. But you can still see he is much larger than the fellow we got to know earlier.

I actually saw him from 50 yards away! Sitting in the livingroom with a new read in my hands "The Art of the Start" by Guy Kawasaki, I took a moment to gaze out the window thinking on a point being made in the text, when all of a sudden on that wire there was that familiar motion, contour and color. I went to the front porch astonished to see him and his fragile body walking directly above the moving traffic of cars and trucks, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. You could see the wind buffet his body but his feet held fast. I quickly got the camera, went to the front porch and braced the side of the zoom lens on the vertical trim on the house, hoping to have a steady enough shot to get the focal point on the lizard when clicking. Needless to say, he was smaller than the focal point. We stopped watching him once he cleared the highway.

As I had stated before, they move ever so slowly and they certainly don't walk fast if they even cared to. I chuckle because for the first time in many years this evening we were watching Jurassic Park. We had it recorded on our DVR and stopped it right after the TRex ate the lawyer. My wife and I sat ourselves down to do some reading and zap there we have a miniature triceratops walking a wire.

This place is still a gas.