it's a protea of some kind, isn't it? Thanks for the beautiful foto. The world is amazingly lovely.

FYI--timed out of your site...uh Monday? And prrevious comment took about 75 seconds to post.

Liz, it's nice to see you here, thanks for your comments. Yes, it's a protea, although I'm pretty much clueless about the specific variety. The photo (and subsequent linked ones) was taken at Sunrise Protea Farm on the road to Haleakela, when we were over there on spring break.

Erm, I'm not sure what to do about the slow comment function here, I think it's because my little old server here at fredshouse is just durn slow. But I really should try to fix that. Oh, and yes, we were down for awhile a few nights ago, when the local grid went down due to evryone running their air conditioners. The joys of self hosting...maybe I should get a real ISP :-(

testing...turned off unnecessary automatic rebuilds on templates as a first step...is this better?