Blake and Deborah in Hawaii: Temporary Home

The owner of the house where we are pet sitting is named Tamar, a single mom with daughter Mia in high school and son Cam in college. They're a very nice family and we enjoyed getting to know them over the three days we spent with them before they left to visit relatives in California for the holidays. We gave Mia a ride to her school one day and she gave us a tour. The West Hawaii Explorations Academy is like no other we've seen. It's science-focused, outdoors, hands-on education (motto: “where no child is left inside”). It's not about traditional classrooms, it's about kids designing and conducting their own experiments in marine biology, aquaculture, botany, etc. Mia gets to clean the shark tank.

Our home base here in Waikoloa Village is a convenient one but the house, as Tamar herself describes it, is a modest one. There's a fair bit of deferred maintenance and half-finished amateur DIY projects. Her boyfriend installed a garbage disposal but the switch is always on so you have to reach under the sink and plug it in and then unplug it again to use it. At least the cabinet door is missing so that makes it easier. We just keep emptying the bucket under the dripping bath faucet and as long as we are mindful not to trip on the gaps in the laminate flooring or ungrouted tile, or to pull too hard on the doors of the kitchen cabinets, which seem already to be leaning away from the wall, we'll be fine here. We sleep in the converted garage where the bed is surprisingly comfortable. The laundry lines hang over our bed so if feels like we're in a cozy tent.

There's a strange lack of furniture in the living/dining area, with a large dining room table for all the cat bowls, a smaller wooden table and chairs for the humans, yet another table for the fish tank – which has no fish in it, just anemones and urchins – and a couple of cabinets. No sofas or cushy chairs – probably a sensible choice because of all the animals – so if you want to lounge you pretty much have to go lie on your bed. There is some reasonably comfortable outdoor furniture, but only for those rare occasions when the winds aren't at gale force.

The bigger challenge here is cleanliness. Tamar has admitted to not being the best housekeeper, and has frequently apologized for the state of the house, especially after Deborah emailed her – before our arrival – photos of our home back in Olympia to assure her that we were clean, tidy people. You can imagine the challenge of keeping a home clean with 13 cats and two large dogs, not to mention the constant gusts that blow the arid landscape in through the open windows. So Deborah cleans once or twice a day to get this place closer to her admittedly high standards. That's in addition to bathing the smelly dogs and washing their smelly beds. The cats aren't innocent either. One of them sprayed Deborah's suitcase, thereby ensuring that the whole lot of them are henceforth banned from our room. And somebody has even been peeing on one spot on the kitchen counter (I know, yuck).

Sometimes the pets get a bit naughty when we're out of the house for several hours. Once we came home to find the kitchen floor littered with the contents of full plastic bins that had been pulled down from the shelves that line one wall. A cereal box had been chewed open and partially eaten. A bag of flour had been torn open and flung everywhere. We know at least one of the dogs must have eaten some of the carnage because there were two piles of barf to clean up as well. That was the worst incident, but by no means the only one. Sometimes there are worse things than barf to clean up. The dogs might be upset that their owners or gone, or that we're gone too long, or they might just be bored. But it's hard to get mad at them. If they and the cats weren't so pleasant this would be a lot harder.