I guess I never mentioned that the first of my several yarn orders arrived Friday - Lorna's Laces sportweight in the color "Hawaii" from ThreadBear. There was a nice note from Rob in with it; he is somewhat familiar with the place where I teach, having applied for a job here himself a few years back.

It's a nice combination of colors - I think it will probably stripe or spiral when knit up, because it is dyed in "chunks" like the socknitters rainbow yarns rather than as smaller pieces (like the other Lorna's yarn I've used - the colorway called "Clay"). This yarn is quite bold: purple, deep bluegreen, blue, and white. The bluegreen is for the ocean, and the white and blue are for the sky with clouds (or maybe the white is the whitecaps on the ocean). The purple is all the "exotic" birds and flowers in Hawaii (the ecologist in me has to put "exotic" into quotation marks; an exotic species, ecologically speaking, is one that doesn't belong where it is - it is introduced - as opposed to a native species, which is supposed to be there. Although actually, many of the really showy flowers in Hawaii ARE ecological exotics).

And since it's again grey and drab where I am:
Tour the Hawaii Tropical Botanic Garden
Actual botanical information on native Hawaiian species
Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (an awesome national park; I've been there twice)