Mele Kalikimaka!

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas day!

Or so the song goes.  We have a lot of updating to do, but at the same time, there isn't much to say.  Employed husbands are much happier, except when they're employed exactly during the days when I'm not employed, so that means our adventure time over the last three weeks has been cut down to, oh, zero.

My schedule was pretty normal.  We got a day or so off after the Pearl Harbor memorial ceremonies, and then we did a concert with a local middle school.  After that week, though, my schedule was pretty normal, and Stephen's was also pretty normal, which means I worked Monday-Friday playing Christmas carols around the base, and Stephen worked Wednesday-Sunday getting people out on boats.

We actually had Monday and Tuesday off together last week, but it was pouring buckets.  Those were some of the worst rain storms I've been through in a long time, and it only picked the two days we were off together, so I don't even have pictures to share about that!

Fortunately, Stephen finally got approved for his Hawai'i teaching license, and when he did the math, found out that averaging just three days a week would be better than his job at the marina, so we're excited for school to get started up again.  He already made contact with the principal at Kalaheo High School just up the street from us, so hopefully he can get on the list at that school.  The way it works out here, once you're on any school list, you're eligible to sub at all the schools on the island, and it's a small island.  If he does really well, we'll look at picking up an island beater (that would be a car...) so the commuting isn't an issue.

On to the pictures, since that's why you're all here anyway...

 Santa definitely made his presence (presents?) known!  Amazon Prime is the best thing ever!  Maybe it's something about not having any snow, or any cold, or any wintery anything, that made it feel necessary to make the Christmas happen.  And we did.















Stephen is being jolly, in case you couldn't tell...



Most people I work with went home to the mainland for the holidays, so Stephen and I had a quiet Christmas Eve in.  We had a friend over for dinner, and I tried to make a whole Lithuanian shebang.  I don't know if I got all the details right, but I made beet salad, silke(s), a bacon-less kugelis (Stephen was glad I had the meatless reason, because he was kinda mad when I said I wasn't putting bacon in it), and baked fish, and I also supplied some black bread, smoked salmon, and cooked veggies from Whole Foods that completely didn't go with the meal but we all thought were a welcome addition.  I didn't have time to make my favorite, the cranberry pudding, but our friend had a German stollen that his grandparents sent from a bakery in his hometown, so we thought that sufficed for dessert.  I also made some spiced wine that we all enjoyed.  Turns out using actually decent wine makes for decent spiced wine, even when you're missing spices.  Who knew?

We also all watched Scrooge together, and now we've indoctrinated a new person to the hilarity that is the Albert Finney musical.  I don't even know if he actually liked it (except he loved the Ghost of Christmas Present), but I don't care, it was still fun!

Christmas morning was a lot of fun!  Technology is wonderful!  We Skyped with my family first while we opened presents, which was so neat and so fun!  We finally have a nice desk, so one of the last piles of clutter has been organized and a Blu-Ray player so we can stream movies and shows out to our lanai.  Cuz, you know, just sitting outside isn't always enough.

When we were done opening presents with my family, we then Skyped with Stephen's family and went through the same process, opening the gifts we got for each other.

Well, I supposed I don't really need to go through a play-by-play of everything we got.  I make it sound like we came away with the motherlode of stuff, but really we just ended up with a nice, condensed Christmas of only things we really wanted or needed, plus a lot of chocolate, which messed with my plans to make banana-macadamia pancakes.  Le sigh.  :-)

Christmas Day was actually the first beautiful day of the week, so we went down to the beach and yes, we saw a TON of people sunbathing and wearing Santa hats.  It was really cheesy.

Then Stephen went back to work, and I ensued being bored.  I tried to make the most of it.

In the picture on the left, I went down to the base and rented a Stand-Up Paddleboard (aka SUP) and went around the bay.  It was overcast, but fun.  I think that was on Friday, if anyone really cares.  I'm a lot better at SUPing than I am at surfing.  In the picture on the right, which was just on Saturday, I was bored enough that I rode my bike down to the marina (about a half-hour trek from our place) and joined Stephen on a kayak for his lunch break.  He gets an hour, so that's just enough time to get the kayak, go a decent way out, and then come back.  Like I said, I was BORED.  Sunday morning, we took my new TRX down to Kailua Beach Park before sunrise, tied it to a tree, and I showed Stephen some of the basic moves before I dropped him off at work.  I was too tired from the early morning wake-up and too lazy to feel like doing anything other than reorganizing the place after our Christmas feast, so that was that.

Today, I had to get up for work again, and again, it was Stephen's day off.  He drove me to work since it was only going to be a half day, we both got some good practice time in on our instruments, and then we met up with a friend of Stephen's from the Army School of Music and went to hike Koko Head, which is near Hanauma Bay.  It was a beautiful day for climbing a million stairs!

Here is a view from the trip up.  They're not really stairs, they're railroad ties for when they needed to get supplies up to the lookout point at the top.  Now we just walk up them like stairs.  I can't seem to find any other information about them online, but maybe Stephen can fill that in later.

A view of Hanauma Bay

I don't know what I'm looking at

Standing on top of some lookout ruins with Hanauma Bay in the background

Hug a random cactus

The railroad bridge everyone fears

Sheri and I crawled on it

So yes, even with the three super rainy days, there's still no shortage of sun and beautiful views.  Oh, and on the way back, we drove along the eastern shore, and right near Bellows AFB, I got an amazing treat!

A coconut!

It's a touristy thing to do, but on the side of the road, a guy had set up his coconut stand.  So you buy a coconut and he hacks it open with a machete and provides a straw.  If you've ever had the trendy-popular coconut water from the health food stores, well... it tastes like crap compared to this.  Don't even bother.

Well, that's all I have for now.  This is probably the last post of our crazy year, so Happy New Year, be safe, and we'll see you again in 2015!

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

I guess I was supposed to blog last weekend after Thanksgiving, but I don't remember anything particularly super amazing happening.

Stephen had to work on Saturday and Sunday, but we already made plans to have people over to watch the OSU - Michigan game.  They were nice enough to let him off at 1pm, which is when people were supposed to arrive.  The game was already long over, but he thought that either we'd be able to download a rerun of the game or we could just watch whatever was happening in other college football.

Turns out my coworkers aren't exactly the social type.  We had three people, and a fourth one showed up two hours after game start, already a few sheets to the wind from playing something called "slosh-ball" that is like dodgeball but with details that I'll spare.  Still, company is good, and we spent a nice, relaxing evening together eating lots of our homemade buckeyes and failing at grilling chicken.

I must say, I made some of the best buckeyes ever, and I attribute it largely to really whipping the daylights out of the butter and sugar before I added the peanut butter.  I'm sure the Ghirardelli chocolate coating didn't hurt, either!

This week started my first official week as an E-5.  Yep, all that psychological warfare, and at least I can say that this time I got promoted!

Not that it wasn't a total cluster.  Apparently Navy Advancement accidentally posted the results the night I posted about their power ploys and then immediately took them down, but the damage was done.  Friday morning, I found out from my command that I had been selected for promotion, so I had three working days to get my uniforms in order for the promotion ceremony that was held the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

I was the last person to make the cut, so I won't actually get paid my new grade until, oh, June of next year, or something like that.  Yep.

BUT I MADE IT!!!  WOOOOO!

So what does being an E-5 look like?  The same as being an E-4, except apparently I don't have to drive vans and I don't have to do janitorial work.  That'll change come January I'm sure, but we only have two weeks before we go on winter leave.

This last week was mostly a ramp-up to the commemoration of the Pearl Harbor bombing.  We had some rehearsals, and we also just had a lot of our regular old ceremonial work.  On Thursday, though, we played for the arrivals of the last remaining survivors of the USS Arizona at the memorial, and then I think we had another gig in the afternoon, but I don't remember what it was.

Friday was a day off.  Over Veterans' Day, everybody got a four-day weekend, except for some people, like myself, it got split up because we had the parade in Hilo and a Veterans' Day ceremony.  My group got booked for an extra concert on one of our days off, so we got our "fourth day" on Friday.  I guess that works...

Sunday was the big day for us, being the actual commemoration of the Pearl Harbor bombing.  We had a 6:30am muster time because the ceremony started at 7:45am with a moment of silence at 7:55am when the bombing began.  I played for about three-quarters of the ceremony before my small group had to leave and catch the boat out to the USS Arizona memorial.  We played music while the VIPs arrived and then stopped playing during the ceremony they had.  I think we were there for about 2 1/2 hours, and then we left, had a little over an hour for lunch, and then returned for a late afternoon ceremony where the last survivors offered a toast to their fallen comrades.  It should have been more poignant than it was, but someone's kid was screeching in the vestibule where it echoed (you know, instead of taking her out to the pier where she would be less disruptive), and while people went up to throw rose petals into the memorial pool, everybody else just started striking up conversation.  They should have had us play mood music during that time.  I would say live and learn, but this was the last year that the survivors were formally reunited.

Today, Stephen and I both had the day off together, and he was chomping at the bit to take a boat out.  We tried to get a group of people to go with us, but like I said, my coworkers are a little anti-social, so out of the 16 or so people we asked to split the cost of a 10- or 12-person boat, we only got 2 yeses.  So we went by ourselves on a little boat and just had a date.  We drove the 20-minutes out to a sandbar in the middle of the bay that at spots was less than knee-deep.  When the tide is low, the sandbar is actually above water, and you can take chairs and volleyball nets out there and have a whole picnic lunch on the beach.  The view was amazing!  We took a million pictures, so I'm going to stop the blogging and just share the pictures.

Boat full of tourists setting up a volleyball net

Shaka!

Christmas wrasse

Cleaner wrasse

So many fishes

A view from water level

Swimming near coral

All the Moorish Idols

Sandbar from the boat.

And there we have a few last-minute fishies from our attempt to snorkel near Coconut Island.  We found the sandbar snorkeling to be some of the most satisfying because of the sheer numbers of fish!  It was so awesome!  Coconut Island was cold, and we didn't get the boat anchored very well so we had to swim pretty hard back to it once it started floating away.

Still, one of the most amazing days I've had here in Hawai'i.  I have a small touch of sunburn on my face and shoulders, but it was awesome beyond what words can describe.  I think I got two weeks of relaxation in during four hours.  Since we're not going anywhere during the holiday leave period, I look forward to renting a boat more.  I also look forward to Stephen getting the opportunity to learn sailing, even if today was so calm you couldn't sail if your life depended on it.

Anyway, that is all for now!  Mahalo for checking back in!

Employed Husbands Are Happier

I'ma kine update jus'a little. Just a quick look at a few days past up to the present. Wit a sneak peak at our Christmas decorations!

So, I, Stephen, finally have a job. Is it a glamorous job? No. Is it a job where I do not come home smelling of gasoline and possibly fish? No. But, is it a job? Yes. So, there's that. Sadly, this means less weekend time to spend with Deanna (for now, as I am holding out the hope that I will be able to land a better mo' payin' job with regular M-F 9-5 type-ish working days/hours).. but for now, it lets us save us more moolas and do more things, and maybe go more places, see more things. So. Yay! Long story short, after much paper work, etc, I am an MWR Assistant at the Marine Base up at K-Bay (Kaneohe).. it's 8-5, weekends mandatory, technically "on-call" but for now while they are busy, full-time. Essentially, if someone rents a kayak, I help them get a kayak, if someone rents a pontoon boat, I help them embark, and subsequently help them dock when they return. Then fuel up boats, fill bags of ice. Stack chairs. Defrost frozen squid and put into baggies to sell as bait (this is how my hands might smell fishy).. yup, that's my new job.

So, Thanksgiving came and went, while I definitely miss being able to see the families. I am thankful that we have made some friends, and had our own little Thanksgiving feast. There was a nice spread of food and good peeps to hang with (and subsequently play hearts with). Oh, and we did it all at the beach, which, yes, included Apple pie in beach chairs looking out at the ocean. Yea, you're jealous. No sense in denying it. =P However, as great as it was, we will have to make a trip stateside to see familiar relations. Hopefully, that's one of those things that my aforementioned job will help us be able to do (and any subsequent, mo' betta job).

 I decided to throw in some obligatory cat picks for those of you who like cats. These are basically pictures that were taken to send as a random text message to Deanna during the day, to either brighten her day (if maybe it was not going so well) or just to make her go "aww" and fawn over how cute we think the kitties are. So, enjoy! YOU KNOW YOU WILL THINK THE KITTIES ARE CUTE, THERE IS NO SENSE IN RESISTING, IT IS FUTILE

Oh, a nice picture of our spread of food.

So, today when I got off of work (that's nice to say for once, it's been a while!), we bummed down to the Whole Foods, got some quick grub walked back and ate our dinner. We then sat around with a whole big "WTF" hangin' over our heads trying to figure out just what to do. Finally we just decided what the heck? Let's just get in the Christmas spirit! Cranked the Christmas jams on Spotify and got ourselves all festive with the tree and lights. So, here is our work. Who's coming to Hawai'i for Christmas? The tree is ready! See you soon?!?!

Getting ready to put ornaments on the tree!

Wrapped the trees outside and hung some garland

Is it?!?!

Welp. That's pretty much it. We have other things going on this weekend, however, I will leave that for Deanna to blog about in the next few days. 

Mahalo for letting me talk story at you. =)