Visitor

My good friend from high school, Sheng, was here for the past week and a half. Unfortunately, I had to work quite a bit during the week, but on the bright side his arrival was the impetus behind me finally fixing my car. It had been out of commission, on and off, for the past couple of months... side story: Midas quoted me $1790 to fix it. In the end, all I had to do was pull off the spark plug caps and dry the one connector that was wet. Problem solved. It took me two minutes once I actually worked up the courage to start pulling my car apart (and after Adam suggested to do that). Midas is bad news. Very bad news. Anyway, Sheng was able to find his way around the island with the GPS acting as a guide rather than me during the week.

We did get some weekend sailing in as well as some swimming, snorkeling, tennis, and the like. After his week here going to different attractions, I'm pretty sure Sheng has seen more of the tourist sites on this island than me. I still haven't gone to Ala Moana, the swap meet, Diamond Head, or even Pearl Harbor. I really need to be a tourist some time and see what this island has to offer besides beautiful beaches, bays, forests, and waterfalls. Then again, maybe I can just wait until the rainy season for those other things. They will still be there even when the sunshine is not.


In other news, this is my last week with a roommate. For the first time... well, for the first time ever, actually, I will have an apartment all alone. On the one hand it will severely detract from my weekend socialization. Danny was the only other single guy at work, so we hung out quite a bit. On the other hand this could be an opportunity to try new things and meet new people. I am unplugging the TV and even canceling the internet. I figure by doing so there are two likely paths for me: 1. I find things to do outside the house in the evenings and all day on the weekends, or 2. I go crazy. No matter what happens, the important thing to remember is that I don't have to wear pants anymore. That in itself is a gold mine of an opportunity. Trust me.

Breakfast & Earthquakes

It was a good weekend. On Saturday Danny and I had some friends over for breakfast and football watching. There's nothing like giant pancakes and blue hash browns (not sure how that happened) to get the morning started. Breakfast spilled over into some body boarding/races around the buoys at Kailua beach.

This morning began with a little earthquake. A little after 7:00am the house started shaking. No serious damage, just some pictures falling over and about 37 seconds of shakiness. I was pretty surprised that the clock hanging in the bathroom fell from the wall to the top of the toilet and not into it. It's a big clock (about a foot across) and couldn't have been flushed. Someone would have had to go in for it.

Fifteen minutes later the power went out and stayed out for 12 hours. It made for a pretty good day. We went to Kailua Beach for an hour and on the walk home got some free ice cream from the wiki (wiki = convenient store). Instead of throwing it away they gave it away. Free ice cream tastes way better than bought ice cream. Maybe it wasn't that it was free, but the fact that all I had to eat all day was cold Spaghetti-Os and uncooked muffin batter that made it good. Doesn't matter: it was good either way.
















All in all we had some good times. Between swimming and scrounging for food we had some time to entertain ourselves with some guitar playing and napping.

It was starting to seem like we may have an evening of candlelight and quiet reading, but around 7:30pm the power came back on to the cheers of all the neighbors. In the end, electricity isn't so bad. It kept me from eating a dinner of condensed cream of mushroom soup out of a can.

A Return to the Water

It had been a while since I last made it out on the water. In fact, our trip to Molokai on Labor Day weekend was the last time Madeline & Nine got to stretch her legs. We finally made it back out this weekend.

On Sunday we went to the sandbar. Within five minutes of starting, our adventures began. Somehow when I was rigging the boat, I didn't securely fasten the line that hoists the jib up the forestay. As I started to hoist the jib, it took me three pulls to realize that it was way too light. By that time, the line was already dangling 25' up the mast, out of our reach. Normally, that wouldn't be the end of the world; however, a little while back the same thing happened and the line actually totally came out. Therefore, we didn't have any spares and were out of second chances.

The wind was very light this weekend, so with only one sail we were crawling our way out to the sandbar. That gave us plenty of time to try to come up with solutions for getting the line back down. We went from the boat hook only to the boat hook with a loop of string attached to the end. From there we made it so that we could tighten the loop via a line extended to the bottom. The boat hook was just a little too short, so Jason attached it to a 5' length of PVC pipe. We still couldn't get it to grab, so we attached a gaff hook on top of that.

Now in order to picture what this looked like, imagine a 6'6" man standing on a boom 4' up a mast with a 15' contraption pointed to the sky, swaying dangerously in one hand while using his other arm to grip the mast tightly. Add all of that up and you begin to see why it was so hard to capture this line swinging freely back and forth in the light breeze. All the while Erin is laughing in the background trying to get me to shimmy up the wires or climb up the sail and Patrick is trying to get her to stop with the jokes, to no avail.

Long story short, once we got to the sandbar we had a more stable platform and some luck. We got the line back down.

Today, Monday, "Discoverer's Day" (sorry Christopher Columbus), we went into the ocean in search of fish. We didn't catch any, but it was a good time anyway. Today there was even less wind than the day before. We motored all the way from the marina to about 3 miles offshore. By that point I could no longer take the drone of the motor. We killed the power and raised the sails. There was such a lack of wind that the sails wouldn't even fill with air. The closest thing to wind we had was when the boat would pitch left and right the sails would slightly catch the air and make luffing sounds. Weak.

We sat out there and bobbed up and down for a couple of hours before we caught sight of a grey blue sky coming our way. "Is that rain?" was the question that brought the wind. We went from no wind what-so-ever to a nice, steady 15 knot breeze. We used that to sail home and called it a day. No fish and a little sunburn. All told, a good day on the water.

New Apartment

My roommate Tara is moving to Colorado. That means two things for me: 1. I'm losing a great roommate who really made Hawaii seem like a welcoming place for me and, 2. I need a new place to live.

Tara is a local Hawaiian and is ready for a change of scenery. Too much of a good thing, as the saying goes. Not only that, but she is moving closer to family, a better job, and near a vet specialist for her hypochondriac dog. Tara, I wish you the best and thanks for being such a great roommate!

As for me, I have already moved into my friend Danny's place. It works out well seeing that we are the only two single guys from work. Oddly enough, that isn't an exaggeration. We are literally the only two single guys out of twenty plus. Anyway, the new place is across the street from the old, so moving wasn't as painful as it could have been. That's not to say that it wasn't painful. I don't understand how I can have so much junk at such a young age. I think it stems from my "just in case" mentality. Of course I can only recall a couple of times that I actually used any of the items in that category, yet here I am carting college text books and clothes I never wear into a new place. Maybe when I try finding places for all of my junk I will apply the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and simplify simplify simplify. Here's hoping.



The new place isn't quite as nice as the old, but it's a little bigger. The carpets are faded and the walls are mismatched colors, but who really cares? It is a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bathroom place. The thing I really like is that there is an upstairs. It makes the place seem so much bigger. The best feature of all is not the fact that we face a parking structure with bright fluorescent lights, but that we are less than a mile from Kailua Bay and the trade winds never stop blowing through the apartment. It just goes to show how perfect the weather is in Hawaii. We don't have A/C, we don't use fans, and there is obviously no heater. All we have to do is leave the windows open and the temperature is always perfect. Gotta love that.



Hopefully next weekend I can get some sailing in. It has been way too long...