All in all, this 4th of July weekend was one of the most relaxing weekends I have had in a while. At the onset, I had some really big plans, but in the end I wound up not really doing anything besides sleeping and enjoying the beach.
At the onset of the weekend, I was going to build a bed frame for my new, gigantic bed. I have been drawing up plans (in 3-D!) for the past week or so and I finally settled on a design I liked. I even went the extra mile and figured out how to do the whole thing Amish style: no hardware, just wood joints held together by gravity and friction (i.e. I was designing a deathtrap, potentially my own tomb). On Thursday I went to pick out the wood. After looking at the different types, I decided on cherry. It was between that and a type of African mahogany called sepelle. The sepelle was a bit too dark and reddish with a narrow and stringy texture, but the cherry had a nice light tone with curvy patterns. It was a bit pricey at $8.50 per board foot, but certainly not the most expensive. It would have been nice to make the frame out of koa, which is native to Hawaii, but at $33 per board foot, I was looking at about $2500 just in wood. Like I was saying before, cherry is nice.
The place I went to did not have the best selection of wood, but in Hawaii you can't really expect to have the pick of the litter when it comes to anything imported. Another thing about Hawaii is that since there are so few places to get anything done, businesses don't have to practice the "customer first" style of operation. Everything here closes at ridiculously early times and nothing is open on the weekend. With that being said, I wanted to be sure to get all of the wood taken care of this past Thursday.
Of course, they didn't have all of the wood I needed. I was going to use meranti for the interior, which is still a hardwood, but much cheaper than cherry. While that was the plan, they were out of the sizes I needed, so that was strike one. Strike two was when all of the 8/4 cherry boards I needed were 10' instead of 8'. That would mean buying an extra $50 in scrap wood. Strike three was the customer service. I got there at 2:30pm and they closed at 4:00pm. I spent a long time trying to find out which wood I wanted to use and picking out all of the right sizes of everything. Once I figured out that they didn't have what I needed (about 3:40), I went in the office to talk to someone in sales. The guys I were talking to earlier in the afternoon were gone and the other guy wasn't about to help me at all. His opening line was, "we close at 4:00 and I'm not staying one minute after." Let's just say it was downhill from there and I didn't end up buying any wood. Not because I wasn't willing to purchase it, mind you, but because he didn't want to go through the trouble of tallying my bill. When we reached that point there were only 10 minutes of work left in the day, so my mistake, I guess.
For part of the weekend I was thinking that I didn't really need a bed frame. It would be time consuming and expensive and after next weekend I will have plans for just about every weekend up to when I go back to the mainland the last week of August. I ended up changing my mind about not needing a bed frame at 3:55 this morning. I awoke to my arm slapping the back of my leg and and me jumping out of bed before I was even awake. Something large and heavy bit me. I'm still not sure what, but the bite mark, as you can see from the photo below, is about 1/2 inch across and it drew blood. After I was bitten I turned on all of the lights, grabbed a flashlight and a bat, and tried to find and kill whatever it was. When I grabbed my sheets and threw them up, something plopped out and scurried under my white shelf before I could get a good look. It could have been a giant spider, but I really can't say for sure. What I do know is that I didn't find it and I'm pretty sure I do need a method of getting my bed off the floor in order to avoid future (tonight?) attacks. The good news is that there was no poison involved. It stung for a little bit, but I went to sleep on my couch in the manroom and didn't feel it when I woke up 5 hours later.
Other than that, it has been a slow weekend. I went to a friend's place for a 4th of July bar-b-que, watched some fireworks from the beach, I cleaned my car and motorcycle, and I have slept a lot. I have been working my way down on the sleep: 14 hours on the first night, then 12, 10, and hopefully 8 tonight. I'm thinking about going to an Everclear and Live concert tonight, but I don't know if I have the energy to fight the crowds. Relaxing on the beach can be so draining.
