Hostel dog!

This is Lilly. She lives at Pineapple Park Hostel in Kona. She's a chihuahua-Jack Russell terrier mix. Her ears are always like this--one up and one down. Annie, her owner, says it's because one ear is chihuahua and the other ear is terrier. She is a sweet dog!

Was of course hoping to post a picture from my whale watching trip today off the north Kona coast. We were able to see a large pod of humpbacks (one of which did a full-on breach out of the water!) and a huge pod of spinner dolphins--there were over 100 of them! Trouble was, as trouble always is with this sort of thing, I was much too busy yacking off the side of the boat to get a single picture. Ahhh well.

The spinner dolphins are incredible. You must go find them if you're ever in the neighborhood. When they jump out of water, they twirl around spastically in the air (up to 7 revolutions per second), kicking their tails around and looking gleeful. They are in fact the only species of dolphin that spins like this. Even the babies do it--and they're only one to two feet long! Tiny twirling dolphins! Oh, seeing them made it all worth it....