No Work on Monday

This is what the Sand Bar looks like when you take a Monday off of work and it isn't a public holiday. I know I've said it before, but it bears repeating: I love Hawaii.

Kokua Festival

Today I went to the Kokua Festival with my temporary roommate, Henry. The concert is put on by Jack Johnson in support of conservation and being green. Ironically, they made me dump out my Nalgene bottle of water before letting me in. Apparently being able to charge me $3 for a bottle of water is more important than not generating plastic waste. Not to mention all of the plastic cups used for beer, the paper plates used for all of the food... basically it was a concert about Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling, but it looked just like any other concert when it came to concessions. The only difference was that they had recycling bags all over the place to make you feel better about it. I have a sneaking suspicion that they just threw that all away as well. There were three openings in order to sort your stuff on each container, but only one bag in the bottom. It was a bit suspect.

The show itself was amazing. I mean, the lead singer of Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder, was there along with some other good artists and Jack Johnson himself. How could you go wrong? They all sounded great and performed well. It was a great evening. The whole scene was very Hawaii. The beautiful weather, palm trees swaying in the light breeze, and the stars shining. The music, as I said, was beautiful, and the sound itself was perfect. I usually don't like concerts because they are so loud that my ears want to bleed. At this concert, you could actually hold a conversation with the person next to you. The music was very crisp and near-sounding, but not loud. Perfect.

Tomorrow we have off work, so it will be another day on the Sand Bar. This life Hawaiian.

Over a Month

It has been quite a while since I have last written.

Since my last post, a close friend of mine, Derek (refer to any of my posts where I get injured... he was always there with me), has fallen into a coma. It came to such a shock to everyone. When it first happened, I thought that it would last a few days and he would snap out of it. It has been a month and progress has been very slow. He is currently in California, nearer to his family and his wife, Nicola.

Today we cleaned out his apartment. Since Nicola said she didn't want it shipped to California, and because it is so much fun, I took Derek's inflatable kayak. He and I had planned so many times to kayak out to Monkey Island, just on the ocean side of the Sand Bar in Kaneohe Bay. On Monday I hope to finally get out there to see what we have been missing. The actual island is a bird sanctuary, so we can't walk around, but I hope to at least take a lap in the kayak.

I have been doing a lot of sailing these last few weekends and some friends stayed with me this past week. I will write more on that tomorrow.