July 31
[ Taken June 8, 2009 | Tropical Flowers | Lahaina, Maui, HI ]
Because of car troubles, we have been a one-car family since about mid-day last Friday. Since I have the option of working from home (or, really, from anywhere that high-speed internet is available) and John does not (and since John is embroiled in mandatory-overtime-year-end work at his office, which made the option of carpooling extremely unappealing) I played telecommuter for the week and let John use my car.
I enjoy working from home. And, in the interest of being honest, there is really no reason for me to sit in the LN office. None of the people that I work with on my projects are in the LN office here – they are in Seattle, Indianapolis, New York, and London.
So. Presented for your consideration. A typical day in my life of working at home.
5:00am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
5:10am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.
5:20am: Alarm goes off. Get up. Turn off alarm clock. Go downstairs and start coffee. Feed the fish.
5:30-6:00am: Drink coffee. Read news and the morning comics. Write some email.
6:00am: Might as well get started with work.
6:30am: John leaves for work.
7:00am: Break from work to start second carafe of coffee.
7:00am-8:30am: Work work work.
8:30am-10:00am: Meeting (phone/webconference)
10:00am-noon: Meeting (phone/webconference)
Noon-1:30pm: Break from work. Go to the basement, and do a workout. Shower. (Yes, I generally sat around and worked, unshowered and still in my bathrobe, until after noon. Obviously I allowed some of my standards to slip while telecommuting, no one saw me other then the cats, and they don’t care.) Lunch is leftovers from yesterday’s dinner. Start a loaf of sage-rosemary-parmesan bread.
1:30-2:00pm: work
2:00-3:00pm: Meeting (phone/webconference)
3:00-4:00pm: Work
4:00-4:30pm: Meeting (phone)
4:30pm: Bread is done. Take it out of the breadmaker to cool off. I am on a roll with some concept designs and continue to work for a little bit.
7:00pm: Break from work for the day.
All told… about an 11 hour workday. This is typical for when I work from home. Obviously it is in the best interest of the business to just allow me to work from home all of the time. I work a much longer day and get a heck of a lot more done then I do when I am actually going to an office. On the other hand, I should not work from home all of the time because I will burn myself out in about on time flat.
July 25
[ Taken June 4, 2009 | The Hilo coast | Maui, HI ]
[ Taken June 4, 2009 | Birds-eye view of one of the Seven Sacred Pools | Maui, HI ]
[ Taken June 4, 2009 | The Wall of Tears | Maui, HI ]
[ Taken June 4, 2009 | Burning a sugarcane field near Paia | Maui, HI ]
“You have to do a helicopter tour!”
Almost everyone who found out that we were planning on going to Maui told us that. They also told us that helicopter tours were “not cheap” but that they were “totally worth it”. It did sound fun, and it did sound cool, but it also sounded like an unnecessary splurge, and John and I weren’t really planning on doing one…. Though we both agreed that it did sound totally cool.
John’s dad and Stepmom got us reservations for a tour as a wedding present.
And everyone was right. It was totally cool.
We overestimated how long it would take us to drive from Papakea to Kahului where the heliport was, so we ended checking in early and then driving up the coast a couple of minutes to Paia (a small, artsy, hippy, surf-bum town… basically a smaller version of Yellowsprings with a huge beach) for breakfast. Beach bum hippies make great coffee and even better kahlua pork eggs benedict. Yum.
Our helicopter pilot’s name was Kirk…. Captain Kirk, and he chose to play the Star Trek theme music over the headsets (we all wore huge earmuff headsets so we could hear what he was saying about the scenery over the sound of the rotors) while we were taking off. Just one of those funny little things. He was a great tour guide, very knowledgeable about where we went and everything that we saw.
The tour covered pretty much the entire island. We flew east over the Hilo coast and saw the seven sacred pools (a system of pools and waterfalls) and ancient lava flows. It was a clear enough day that we could see the volcanos on the big island, over 100 miles away. We flew over (well, near, since we weren’t allowed to fly directly over) Haleakala and over the crater… some of the ash cones in the crater are more than seven stories high. They didn’t look that big from the helicopter, though… We flew over mountain slopes and rainforests in the interior of the island where people had never gone.
We flew into the clouds deep into a canyon in the northwest corner of the island (second wettest spot on earth) and flew in as far as we could, and saw where freshwater leaked out of the sheer sides of Waihee Valley and formed dozens of waterfalls - called “the wall of tears” by the native Hawaiians.
We flew over the cane fields near Paia and saw the farmers burning sections of the cane in preparation for harvest.
It was amazing. Totally cool.
July 18
[ Taken June 8, 2009 | Sailboats at sunset | Lahaina Harbor, Maui, HI ]
Vignettes
I have finally been able to try a candy bar that I discovered online – Vosges Haute Chocolate Mo’s Bacon bar – but was hesitant to order because buying candy online seemed just a little bit too decadent. However, the fancy market near my house started to carry them, so I bought one. Verdict: insufficient bacon. I could hardly taste the bacon, and the only way that you knew that there was actual pig in the chocolate was from the occasional chewy bit. However, the smoked salt (which was very noticeable) was a great foil for the milk chocolate. I will probably get the candy bar again, but not because of the promise of bacon.
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The crabapple tree on the front corner of the house is doing rather poorly. The leaves are a lot smaller this summer then they have been before, and they are already turning a spotted yellow-brown and falling off of the tree. Not good. I don’t know anything about trees, so I can’t tell if the tree is sick, if it is actually dying, or if it just hasn’t been getting enough water. The rest of the trees in the yard look fine, so I doubt that it is a water issue. I hope that the tree doesn’t die… it is a very nice tree, and it would be a royal pain in the neck to have to get it removed.
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There is a restaurant called “Roosters” that I drive past on my way to work. I have never eaten there, but from the name I can guess that they focus on chicken… probably fried chicken. I recently noticed that they have changed the sign out in front of the restaurant. Now it says “This is what Willis was talkin’ about”. Which immediately made me think of the extremely cheesy early 80s sitcom it was slyly referencing. It made me laugh. Laugh, and vow to get a photo of it.
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Driving to work very early for a very early meeting, I am at a stop sign when a school bus (in the middle of summer?) approaches from the other direction. It pulls over to the side of the road, flashes the yellow lights briefly, and then turns the lights off entirely. I pause for a few minutes, and decide to just drive on, assuming that no flashing lights = okay to go. As I drive past I see the bus driver glare at me and flip the flashing red lights on. Oops? Eh. I decide I don’t really care if I have committed a driving faux-pas or not. School busses shouldn’t be out at that hour on a beautiful July morning anyway.
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I have a little bit of moisture in one of my car’s headlights. Not a lot of moisture, but just enough to cause condensation and annoy me. But my little bit of irritating moisture was nothing on the woman I saw while out doing errands last weekend. She had easily 2-3 inches of water sloshing around in the tail lights of her car – on a hot and sunny day.
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My knees have been bothering my lately, especially my left knee. And I think that I have (finally) figured out why. In order for me to be comfortable using my computer (keyboard, mouse, ect) at my desk at work, my chair needs to be high enough that my feet don’t quite touch the ground… my toes touch the ground, but not my heels. Not a comfortable way to sit for long periods of time. So I have been sitting with my left leg curled up beneath me and my right foot kind of braced against one of the chair legs… which is probably (certainly) not good for my knees. I think that I need a little footstool or ottoman or something… Ugh. I didn’t think that I was quite that short…. If I need a footstool for my desk at work then it is a sure thing that I also need one for my desk in my office at home. Not to self: your posture when working at the computer generally sucks… work on that.
July 9
[ Taken July 1, 2009 | Dawn at the House of the Sun | Haleakala National Park, Maui, HI ]
[ Taken July 1, 2009 | View of palms from our balcony | Maui, HI ]
In which I finally start to write about Maui. Not because we weren’t overly impressed with Maui. Quite the opposite. We loved Maui. It was 10 days in paradise. We loved Maui so much that we decided that one day we want to move to the islands. It is hard to distill something like that down into black and white text.
I have uploaded and organized the photos from the honeymoon... random photos of Maui, photos from Haleakala, underwater photos, and photos from the helicopter tour we took
We left for the honeymoon bright and early (our flight out was at 9am) the morning after the reception. Cincinnati to Seattle, long layover in Seattle, and then Seattle to Kahului on Maui. Even though we were in coach both legs out, the second leg we had an exit row all to ourselves, which wasn’t bad. We were able to stretch out a little bit and get sort of comfortable. As comfortable as possible, anyway.
Kahului is the biggest city on Maui, which isn’t saying much. I think that the entire city was maybe a quarter the size of Ann Arbor. The airport was like pretty much all tropical island airports (granted, besides the Kahului airport my experience with tropical airports is limited to the Grand Cayman airport) in that it was small and pretty much open to the elements. Not a lot of glassed-in windows, in other words.
Finding our way from the airport to the resort once we had the car wasn’t too difficult (because I am crazy like that, I had printed out a bunch of directions and maps from GoogleMaps before we took off) since there are only a small handful of roads on Maui. I am not sure that we would have been able to get lost if we had tried.
Papakea resort was nice. Very very scenic. We had a lovely view of the ocean from the balcony of our condo. And as nice as it was, it was still no where near as pruned and trimmed and frighteningly high-end as some of the other resorts. We started to refer to Papakea as the “ordinary people’s resort” about the second or third day in.
Pretty much all of the western side of the island, from the old port town of Lahaina all of the way up the full length of Kanaapali beach was one resort after another. Ours was up near the northwest corner of the Island.
The very first night that we were there we got up at 3am to make the 2 hour drive to the top of Haleakala to watch the sun rise at 5:30am. We figured that we might as well try to make the 6 ho time difference between there and Ohio work in our favor. It was a long, dark drive… and there were a lot of switchbacks and sheer drops when we got to Haleakala National Park and started to drive up the volcano. But, wow, was it worth it. We joined the crowd of people who were there to greet the dawn just after 5:15am as the sky was beginning to lighten, and spent a few minutes looking out (and taking photos) over the crater from the rim near the ranger’s station at the summit. Then (at my urging, as John didn’t want to chance us missing the moment that the sun actually breached the horizon) we scrambled up a steep half-mile or so to the true summit. It was worth it. So worth it. The view was glorious. Watching the sun edge up over the clouds while standing on the top of the world was an amazing experience.
I normally don’t much like photographs of myself, but some very obliging and friendly cruise-ship workers snapped some shots of John and me with the rising sun in the background. I think that those might be some of the best shots taken of me… well, at least they might be some of my favorite shots of myself.
The views on the drive down from the summit, now that we could actually see them, were breathtaking.
Just outside the park entrance we stopped for breakfast at a Mom-and-Pop roadside restaurant that one of the rangers recommended to us. Best breakfast sandwich that I have ever had (I was starving at that point, so that probably had something to do with it) We also got our first taste of some local fruit – loquats. Hard to describe the taste, but very mild and refreshing, with surprisingly large seeds for a relatively small fruit.
We ate at a lot of very excellent restaurants while we were there. The Mai Tai Lounge, Lahaina Seafood Company, Kimo’s, The Aloha Mixed Plate, Sansei Seafood and Sushi, CJ’s Deli… Most of these were in downtown Lahaina. We only ate at resort restaurants twice – the first night, when we had just gotten in and were exhausted and hungry and just wanted food, and then again the second night before we figured out any better and learned to avoid the resorts. We had some very very very very excellent food. Amazing seafood. Fish that had been happily swimming around in the ocean in the morning that ended up on our plates that same evening. Delicious pork…island barbeque.
The Aloha Mixed Plate ended up being one of our favorite places. We had dinner there twice and had become regulars at their happy hour by our third day there. An open air, beach-front restaurant, half-price mai tais, and caramel banana cheesecake lumpia is something that is very hard to argue with. We got in the habit of snorkeling (or whatever) till midway through the afternoon, returning to the condo for showers and a change or clothes, going to the Aloha Mixed Plate for their happy hour, and then wandering from their down to Lahaina to meander around.
There was a really good used bookstore in Lahaina. We went there several times (of course). The proprietress was a transplant from the mainland, and we enjoyed chatting with her for a while about her decision to relocate to the islands and her experiences living there.
We both bought some Hawaiian shirts (really, in Hawaii how could we not?) from the Aloha Shirt Museum.
It was funny… most of the people we met on Maui, from the girl at the dive shop where we bought snorkel gear to the servers and chefs at the restaurants where we had dinner, had moved there from the mainland. We met a girl from Lexington who had gone to the university there, several people with ties to Ohio and Dayton, and a guy who had grown up in Tipp City. Kind of funny. Not that we didn’t meet native Hawaiians – we met plenty of them as well – but the number of people we met who had decided to move from the Midwest to Hawaii was large and entertaining. They all had interesting stories, and their reasons for relocation all pretty much boiled down to the fact that they had visited there, fallen in love with the place, and decided to pack up and move on the spot.
We snorkeled most of the day, every day.
The water proof camera case that John got me for my birthday worked very well. It kept the DSLR dry and enabled me to bring a very nice camera into the briny deep with me. It was a bit awkward to use, though, and took a bit of time and practice to get used to. Kind of hard to look through the viewfinder through the couple of extra layers of heavy plastic surrounding it, as well as my mask. It was harder to dive while holding the rather buoyant camera. Also, fish and other marine life don’t exactly hang around and pose while you are trying to take pictures of them. Still… I got a lot of very good photographs.
I didn’t always bring the camera out with me. I only took it out about half of the time. Naturally, the times when I didn’t have the camera were the times when we saw the coolest things… lots of moray eels (snowflake and yellowmargin eels), large numbers of green sea turtles swimming right up to us, multitudes of very brightly colored fish, a living cowrie shell twice the size of John’s fist…
I have heard that snorkeling in Hawaii is not as good as snorkeling in the Caribbean, because the water is deeper and colder, and the currents swifter. I don’t know about that. I think that the snorkeling in Maui was as good as any in the Caribbean, and we saw more large sea life then I ever saw in the Caribbean. There I mostly saw fish, once an octopus, manta rays (at a location chosen especially for the large numbers of friendly rays) and a couple of times a lone sea turtle at a distance. In Maui we saw moray eels and extremely friendly (or at least extremely indifferent to humans) green sea turtles during almost every dive. We saw an octopus, a huge manta ray, and a very shy white-tipped reef shark. And, of course, scores of gorgeous tropical fish.
Across the street from the Aloha Mixed Plate there was a little dive shop that was renting out body boards for $2.50 a day. $2.50 for an entire day. They were practically paying people to take out their body boards. So we rented a couple for a couple of days and John introduced me to body boarding. It was great. Tons of fun. The most fun that I have ever had being swept up by waves and then pounded into the sand and half-drowned by the waves crashing on top of me. There is a trick to timing the right second to catch a wave, and it took me a little bit to figure it out, but once I did…. Oh man! Awesome!
We had a lot of fun. We loved Maui.
We hated to leave.
There is a lot more to say, but this should be good for a start.