Thursday, March 27, 2008

Video?

I tried this before with a higher quality video, but the file was too big to load. Let's see if it works with the camera on "email" quality video. The video itself is of the cottage my parents stayed in for the first few days on island.

Other than that, my parents just got done with a week out here. I took off work for most of the week and I was able to show them around a bit. It was a busy week, but a good time. My dad broke his arm the first morning he was here, but he took it like a trooper and didn't let it ruin his vacation.

I hope to upload some pictures this weekend...

Sunday, March 09, 2008

The Cost of Laziness: $250

Blogger hasn't been working for me lately. When I try to post, the tool bar has been missing, meaning the all important picture upload tool and spell checker are gone. Without those, posting seems less appealing. This morning all is well again, so here is a post with both pictures and correct spelling.


In the past couple of weeks, Jens and Anne have come and gone. It was good having them here. We all hung out on the weekends and they did their own thing during the week while I was at work. We spent the night at the sandbar, went to Mokapu'u Lighthouse for the sunrise and some whale watching, went to the North Shore for some shrimp shack and wave watching, and they taught me some German.

Apparently they don't have aluminum cans in Germany, so Jens is re-living the American joy of shot-gunning a beer while Dan tends the fishing line in the background. We caught a fish, but it broke the line and took the hook with it.

Girlie drinks at twilight.

Morning swim at the sandbar after spending the night.

The height of German fashion.

The weekend after Jens and Anne left, I went out to the sand bar with (from left to right) Wook, Justin, Danny, and Dan.

Sunrise.

Kayakers silhouetted against Mokapu Peninsula.

That brings me all the way to this weekend. What happened this weekend? Per the title of this post, I lost $250 because I was lazy.

Like most areas with a high concentration of people, there is a shortage of parking where I live. I usually park about a mile away from my apartment when there is no street parking nearby and walk the ten minutes back to my place. However, since I was planning on going to Chinatown for the monthly First Friday festivities and I had a couple of bags to carry up to the apartment, I parked in the guest lot instead of walking. I planned on driving downtown anyway, so I would only be there for an hour.

I got home and got lazy. I decided to not go out and I forgot about my car until precisely 7:00am the next morning when I shot out of bed with feeling of dread very similar to the one you get when you realize that you forgot to do a major school assignment or oversleep by an hour or two on a workday. I ran outside to check on the status of my car and, sure enough, it had been towed.

Getting your car towed in Hawaii is not cheap. To be precise, for me it was $250 (cash only) not cheap. $75 hook up fee, $25 impound fee, and $7.50 per mile towing fee. So it goes. I really have no one to blame but myself, and even if I could have been mad at someone, it wouldn't have done any good. Dan gave me a ride to Sand Island to pick up my car and I paid the painfully polite cashier through the tiny slot in the fully enclosed impound yard office trailer.

The rest of the day was spent swimming and playing football at Kailua Beach. Today's excitement includes working on my motorcycle and buying groceries. I really need to stop putting off fixing my motorcycle since my parents will be here next weekend and I hope to let them use my car. I plan on taking a few days off in order to do some of the tourist things with them. I still haven't been to the majority of the tourist site on the island despite living here for almost 2.5 years. I guess that, too, can be chalked up to laziness.