I suppose the last time Stephen blogged, it was right after he had his first drill weekend, and after I finished what he called the "Canadian Football League."
CFL actually stands for Command Fitness Leader, so I spent a whole week, all five days, learning how to work out, eat healthy, and complete the appropriate piles of military paperwork. Fun stuff.
It boils down to doing absolutely nothing fun.
Then, as Stephen already told you, he had drill. Fun stuff.
I had work the following week. Yep. Wait, you wanted me to tell you something you didn't already know?!
Well, thanks to Stephen's drill, we had no chance of catching the Blue Angels show on the Air Force base. So that stunk.
I had a bunch of gigs during the week. I sat through two ceremonies where chiefs got commissioned as warrant officers and three retirement ceremonies. It's always fun, in the not fun way, because you can tell who people liked and who they didn't like based on the speeches and their reception.
There's always a reception for these things, and we never once get a cupcake. Le sigh. Yes, maybe I DO want a cookie!
On Saturday, we took the car in to get detailed, a.k.a. removing the mold from the half-inch of water that arrived in the trunk. It was supposed to be a 4-6 hour job since it was a small car, so one of Stephen's racquetball buddies picked us up and gave us a ride back to the base so they could play and I could practice. After racquetball was over, we went back, and it turned out they were only half done because, hey, it's Hawai'i, and the mold was apparently worse than they expected. So we got a pretty decent sushi lunch and then hung out at Starbucks.
Why is it that detailing places are in nasty industrial areas with nothing around?
And why is it that so many big cities still don't have acceptable public transportation systems?! Boston, New York, and D.C. have definitely spoiled me that way. You want to go somewhere? Hop on the subway. Easy day.
In Honolulu, I could catch the bus and take 3 times as long as it would normally take to get anywhere.
No, but seriously, when your traffic jockeys for first with L.A., you really need to think about a better public transportation network. L.A. and San Fran, I'm also talking to you! Heck, even Dallas just plopped down a commuter rail.
Le sigh. Relying on a car all the time has made me a little car-cranky! Thank goodness it's at least the Miata and is fun to drive!
But I digress. So detailing the car took until 6pm, at which point there was nothing to do. The sun sets here around 6:30 since we don't have daylight savings time.
Early to bed and early to rise. Stephen had drill on Sunday. Again. Oh, and I had an emergency gig come up. Actually, it was kind of cool because it was only 10 minutes long. We were at Punchbowl Cemetery.
Side note: Punchbowl Crater was named such because of its shape. Super-creative, guys. That's so much better than leaving it Puowaina, which means "Hill of Sacrifice" because that's where Hawaiians offered human sacrifices and executed people who violated taboos. But who wants to hear about that? Definitely not military people! Just call it a Punchbowl instead!
Sarcastic rant aside, the gig was for the arrival of an Australian dignitary. It is customary for dignitaries to pay their respects at the local National Memorial Cemetery when they arrive, so he arrived, we played the appropriate honors, we played the Australian National Anthem, we played the US Anthem, one of our buglers played taps, and then that was it. We were instructed by the Australian officers to go get some shade and get a drink, preferably a beer, when we were done because they ruined our beautiful Sunday afternoon.
But now try and say all those instructions with an Australian accent!
We also got coins from the Australian Army. Leave it to the Aussies to have theirs shaped like bottle openers. That made my day! Plus we got a full day off on Tuesday in exchange for messing up our weekend! Normally they'd give us Monday off, but I had to play a ceremony for... a crane. Not a bird. The machine. We decided it was a Deceptacon. It was a long ceremony in the middle of lunch, so of course none of us were happy.
For a crane.
We played preliminary music and ceremonial music. For. A. Crane.
They did have a traditional Hawaiian opening and invocation, and closed with a Hawaiian blessing. There was much blowing of conch shells. It was pretty cool, right up until the haoles (Hawaiian word for white people, and derogatory only if you put enough stank in the inflection) thought it was appropriate to applaud the invocation. Really? Just because it wasn't in English and involved conch shells?
Le sigh.
No, the fun really began on Tuesday, when we decided that, after two weeks of nothing fun at all, it was time to go surfing! Weeeeeee!
We went down to Waikiki to the Hale Koa hotel, where we could rent boards for the military rate. The waves weren't too big, so we paddled out to where a few people were floating around the break and tried our luck.
But holy cow, so much paddling. It was far, even from the rock pier. I thought we were going to swim forever, and you can't even use your feet! But we finally got there, bobbed around a bit, and then decided to try catching some waves.
Stephen caught on pretty quickly and actually got a few nice, long rides in. At least they were long compared to the rides in Newport. I actually rode a wave for a long distance just on my stomach, like I was on a really big boogie board. Then there were a couple of waves where I caught them, tried to stand up, lost my balance, and fell off. After one of them, though, I started paddling back, and I saw a wave coming at me that I wasn't going to catch, and was definitely going to break before I could float over it. Stephen caught it and surfed, and I did the awesome safe way of avoiding the wave by pushing the nose of my board under the wave and letting the wave go over me.
When I surfaced, there was this big wall of white in front of me.
It took a few seconds before I realized that the wave had simply taken me along for the ride. So there I was, riding the wave on my stomach, backward. I was waiting for the wave to flip me over, or for the fins on the back and bottom of the surfboard to do their thing and correct me, but no. I just rode the wave backward.
It was the same one Stephen caught, only apparently I'm so awesome at riding waves backward that I went twice as far as him. He was done with the wave, sitting on the surfboard, looking around, and getting slightly concerned about where I was. Then he heard some splashing behind him, turned around, saw me, and shouted, "How did you get over there?!"
Um, I rode the wave backward.
So while Stephen did the most surfing, I had the most awesome fails.
We came back with some good sunburns, too, but our skin is finally getting tan enough to handle it! Next time, rash guards.
We were out there for two hours, and let me tell you, two hours is a lot of time bobbing on water and trying to catch waves. I've been hungry in my life, but not like that! Our first call of duty was lunch!
Of course, then we had all the other boring household and car stuff to take care of, because we're still getting settled, but yadda yadda yadda...
How about a picture of Audra on her new favorite perch?
Fishbowl for better perspective, too! Yes, I'm sure that's much better than more boring life stuff! So I will leave you with that!
Mahalo for reading, and we'll keep you posted!
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