Life and hurricanes

I guess it's been a little bit since I updated.  I'm sure all of you were aware that Hurricane Ana threatened us with the apocalypse, and you've been waiting with baited breath for an update.

Well, here it is: we survived.

All that happened was a slightly heavy rain that lasted through the weekend.  I still ended up working on Saturday night for the Navy birthday ball.  We were in the Sheraton Waikiki, and let me tell you, the sight of the angry waves of the Pacific was something to behold!  We didn't get to behold very much of it, though, because mostly we were playing honors and ceremonial music.  The four-star admiral, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, loved us, though, and that was super-cool.  When the master-of-ceremonies went through all the thank-yous for the Navy ball committee, and then at the end a four-star admiral yells, "Thank the band!" you feel pretty special.  That moment made getting home at midnight worth it.

But really, it rains here every single night.  I think it was Thursday night that we had a torrential downpour that woke both of us up and even set off a car alarm for the entire rest of the night.  I think the car was getting attacked by kukui nuts.

It's raining right now.  Did I say it rains every single night, because it really does.  That's why the windward side is so beautiful!

Thank goodness Stephen didn't make me get up on Sunday to watch the Browns game, but at the same time, I'm pretty sure that since I wasn't watching the game or wearing my lucky jersey, we lost.  Ugh.

I spent the day working on some sewing.

You know what's cool about Facetime?  I actually Facetimed Mom about why I couldn't make my sewing machine work, and I could show her on video up close what I was doing, and she could sit at her sewing machine simultaneously and show me what to do.  I had a moment of being totally floored by what technology can do.  Here I am, literally half a world away from family, but I can Facetime and have a total mother-daughter moment.  Awwwwwww.

That moment resulted in this pillow:

For just sewing a bunch of squares together, I was pleasantly surprised.  The best part was when it actually fit over the skazzy old World Market pillow it was intended to gussy up.

Yeah, the hurricane passed so far south of us that all we got was steady rain.  It wasn't even hard rain.

Since I had to work on Saturday, we had Monday off, and by then the hurricane had passed and the weather was nice and clear.  We thought we would take a chance at snorkeling around Lanikai, because why not?

Here I'm happy about snorkeling

Sad because it's too murky to see

So, as you can probably tell by the lack of pictures, the water was a little too murky for us to see anything.  We ended up just laying out on the beach for the last little bit of daylight, which these days seems to be around 6pm and getting earlier every day.






The rest of the week was fairly uneventful until I went to take a lesson with a clarinetist in the Hawai'i Symphony.  While I was there, the top of our Miata got slashed.

That's our duct-tape job to keep the rain out since it rains every night without fail

You can see the nice duct tape job we did on the T-shaped slashes in our car.  Nothing was stolen.  As I was driving back from the lesson, I could hear the vinyl ripping from the wind resistance as I was driving up the Pali highway, so at a traffic light I put the top down.  Just my luck, once I got into the mountains, I hit a torrential downpour and got soaked.  I'm pretty sure I was that person on the road where everyone is laughing and thinking, "Why doesn't she put her top up?"  LOL no.

I talked to some people in the band on Friday who encouraged me to call insurance, and Dad encouraged me to file a police report, so we took care of that on Saturday.  It's just all so dumb.

Actually, I wasn't nearly as bothered by it as Stephen was, but that led to an amazing terrible night's sleep for the both of us.  But like I said, we filed a police report on Saturday because who knows.  At least insurance knows that we did the report.

The top can't be repaired.  It'll have to be replaced for over $1000, but at least insurance covers part of it.  I'm tempted to see if we can wire the thing so it electrocutes the next person who tries to slash it!  :-D

In other news, I had my PRT, my physical readiness test, on Thursday morning, and I passed with flying colors.  I actually maxed out, again, so yay for that.  I also got certified to teach TRX, which is Total (body) Resistance Exercise.  That was kinda cool, too

On Saturday, after we were done practicing and filing the police report, we decided to have a date day and snorkeled out to the Flat Island.  That was such a B.S. swim, I crabbed to Stephen the whole way.  There's nothing like swimming with flippers on and seeing yourself go nowhere because of the tide.  Ugh.

This is my ultimate derp face, because I was hella tired when we were done with that swim!  I'm pretty sure I stopped Stephen about 10 times to let him know I thought that swim was crap.  We didn't even see any good fish.  And the Flat Island is a bird sanctuary, but you can't go in and look around.  There weren't any birds to see anyway.  It was pretty, and it's probably a nice place to picnic, but I'd rather just kayak out there or something.  There were lots of surfers, for what it's worth.  And for what it's worth, where the surfing is good, the snorkeling is bad.  It's just the way the world works.

Stephen sneaked this shot of me just kinda checking out the scenery from the island.  You can't really argue with that, but you also can't argue with any view from anywhere, and most of them don't come with an exhausting swim against a current.  So yeah.






After that was done, and an equally exhausting swim back to the shore (who knew the current could be going against you no matter what direction you went!), we decided to bop down to Lanikai to see some real fishies.  We didn't see anything that was particularly new or exciting, so here is our highlight pic:

I don't know if it's been mentioned before, but as the sun goes down, these fishies turn progressively blacker until they are just black fish with a while spot just above their tail.  It's kinda cool.  You don't really see it happening, but one minute you see that they're white, and the a little bit later you see that they're black with a white spot.  The fish on the very top middle of the picture is a good example of the transition -- that really white spot is going to stay white while the rest of the fish turns black.  Interesting camo.

Later that evening, we went out to celebrate a friend's birthday, so we spent the evening in downtown Honolulu, only a few blocks away from where my car got slashed.  It's a nice neighborhood.  Oh well.

So yep, Stephen and me hanging out with a bunch of the single guys who are stuck in the barracks.  Somehow neither of us gets along with the married couples in the band.  Ah well, livin' the life!  Hey, the food was good and so was the company, so who can argue?

We also finally bought me a bike.  I decided that it was going to happen this week come hell or high water, so we went to The Bike Shop just down the street from us.  I debated between a tweener bike and a super-cute coral Townie.  I ended up going with the tweener.  We rode it down to the Marine base to watch the Browns game this morning!

So there I am with my new bike and my lucky Browns jersey. I say lucky because last time I wore it, the Browns beat the Steelers, and when I wore it today, we won handily (if ugiliy -- is that a word?)  Oh, and notice my helmet.  Safety first!

It's a nice ride with fun trigger shifts, so all-in-all, I'm pretty happy with it.  It will get me wherever I need to go in Hawai'i.  It was about a half-hour ride to the Marine base for the game, and then we did some grocery shopping and put our food in our backpacks.  The weather is finally becoming less hot (I won't dare to say it's cooling off, because it's not, it's really just "less hot"), so with the breeze it was almost bearable!


Oh, and another picture:

This is a quick selfie of us at the Marine Base where we were watching the Browns game.  Notice the aqua ceiling.  It's probably the most popular color in Hawai'i and is an obvious reflection of the aqua seas and skies.  I can't really argue.

Stephen also sent me two pictures of the cats that we have to include, so here they are:

Audra under the ottoman

Tikti on a leash, hunting all the cockroaches

We are slowly getting the last little bit of our stuff taken care of.  There was a big TV stand built on our lanai that Stephen took off this afternoon so we could have more sitting space.  Now that it's getting more comfortable in the evenings, we have enjoyed sitting outside and reading.  I've found that I sleep better when i do that in the evening instead of spending time on computers and whatnot, so that's all good.  Plus, watching our fat cat go after all the lizards and cockroaches is really fun!  We got some bookshelves and got rid of the last of our boxes.  We are well on our way to making our one-room apartment actually feel like a home!

On a final note, it's been a little over 10 years since Stephen and I started dating, so we decided to celebrate (mourn?) the occasion with dinner out at a nice little restaurant down the street.  Gotta love having someone cook fresh fish for you and being able to sit outside comfortably in October!

So that is our life for the time being.  We'll update again next week!