Part III: Stairway to Heaven or I how almost died at the top of a mountain....

Stairway to Heaven (or Hai'ku Stairs) is one of Oahu's most famous hikes, made only more popular and desirable a climb because of its illegal status. I won't go until the details of why nearly 4,000 stairs were installed into the side of a massive mountainside or why it is now illegal, but if you want to read a little bit more about the hike and it's insanity, click here or here.

David has been dying to make the climb ever since he first heard about it a couple of years ago, but never found the right time or a group of people with whom to do it. The entrance to the trail is generally manned by a guard to prevent people from going up the stairs and you have to get there and on the trail early, early in the morning, before the guard shows up at 6 a.m. So when the Siebachs invited us to join them and a group of their friends on the hike the day after Christmas, we lept at the chance. I, for one, was totally unprepared for what was to come.

Sure, I knew there were a lot of stairs. And sure, I knew that you basically climb into the clouds and it gets really cold. But the hike kicked my trash and I'm glad I've lived to tell the tale.

Our story begins at 4 a.m. on Friday morning, when David and I woke to our dual alarms clanging and clacking us awake. We dressed and packed our small camelback hiking bag (with our provisions for the day for both of us) and walked over to the Siebach's house to wait for the three other people joining us on the hike. By 5:30 a.m., we'd made it to Kaneohe (after one or two wrong turns) and had found a relatively inconspicuous parking spot in a residential neighborhood near the first gate.

Now, there are many barriers in place to prevent eager hikers from reaching the stairs, but they are in such disrepair that it seems almost a joke to have them there in the first place. So we easily climbed over a fallen section of fence to reach a road, then traveled through a dark bamboo forest with the aid of a few flashlights (remember we began this hike when it was still pitch black outside) and paraded past the empty guard station to the trail head.

Had it been light enough outside to see anything, we might have stopped to see these signs at the foot of the trail.

But since it was pitch black, we strolled right past them, on our merry way, and shimmied past the second gated fence and got into position inside the metal railings of the stairs.

Now had it not been pitch black and had I been able to see that this was what I was about to climb up, I might not have agreed to this in the first place. But being blissfully ignorant of my future, I began the climb with all the zeal and excitement my sleep-deprived body could muster.
It wasn't very long after starting the climb--which at some points is quite literally vertical, like climbing a ladder--that I realized how woefully out of shape I was and quickly fell behind the others. Luckily, David was not about to abandon his wife in her time of need and he fell back to encourage me the rest of the way up.

I was ready to give up many, many times, especially when I would think we were nearing the top of the ridge, only to discover that there were nothing but more stairs in my future. Every muscle in my body was protesting and I had to stop and rest constantly, trying to wipe the dewy mist from my body. But finally FINALLY! I made it to the first platform, with the hardest part behind me.

The sun was just coming up as we reached the platform and I was greeted with this view of Kaneohe Bay below us.


It was a good thing I got a look at it when I did, because the clouds moved in not too long afterward and this was all I saw for the rest of the climb:

On a clear day, you can see all the way to Kaneohe on one side and to Pearl Harbor on the other. All I saw was stairs, sheer cliffs, and whiteness.

At the second platform, there's an old abandoned building, an old supply depot of some form, missing its roof and full of rusting parts.

Like the old pulley system behind us.

I don't think anyone would really want to use it anymore.

But I love old rusted bits of machinery. Can't say why.


So we continued climbing past the second platform, where the trail widened out a bit. There were some parts of the trail that were so narrow that I could barely squeeze my child-bearing hips through. But I actually discovered that the narrow railings made it quite a bit easier and much less dangerous in the ascent and descent. I think part of the reason the trail is "closed" is because it's not fit for two-way traffic. There's no room for squeezing past someone.

But, as we moved across the top of the ridge, to the final platform, the trail was wider and less vertical. And when we reached the end of the trail, we came up to another abandoned building.

The old building was an old satellite/radar outpost once used by the Navy and built during World War II.

Hence the big, unusable satellites.

More rusty things. Just because....

We stopped and rested inside the old building while two of the boys rigged up hammocks. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach the summit and I was hot and sweaty and my muscles were quaking with the effort but suddenly, I became inexplicably and undeniably cold. As I lay in one of the hammocks, wearing two sweatshirts, I started to shake uncontrollably and my teeth started to chatter. I'd never had my body temperature drop so quickly and while I knew it wasn't normal, it didn't scare me.

Poor David, on the other hand, was very worried but he went automatically into Boy Scout mode and started treating me for hypothermia. The other, more prepared members of our group, lent me a pair of warm track pants and a windbreaker and I stripped out of my damp clothes and into the warmer, drier clothes. David and I decided to start back down the mountain before I became incapacitated while the rest of the group stayed behind.

I started to warm up once we came out of the clouds and got past the first abandoned building, but my legs were turning rapidly into rubber. Anytime I paused, my legs shook....but eventually, I realized that this was happening to everyone else and didn't feel so ashamed.


The climb back down took us half the time it did to come up....and thank goodness too because I don't know if I'd have made it off the mountain if we had stayed any longer. And since it was actually daylight by the time we scurried down the mountain, I was able to get some shots of the craziness that is Hai'ku Stairs, like David descending out of the clouds on our way back down.


Or two of our companions making their way down the stairs. There were some parts that were scarier to come down than to come up, but for the most part it did not require one to make such faces as the guy above did.

Here is the most vertical section of the climb, which requires you to climb down like a ladder, while clinging to both the rails and ropes.

But though Stairway to Heaven was crazy and it nearly killed me, as you can see....it was totally worth it. Even the parts when I thought I was going to die. And even later that day, when I still felt sick from climbing 85 million stairs and even now, when my calves ache from all the activity and my knees don't want to bend anymore. Totally worth it.

So we made it off the mountain and back through the hole in the fence [so much for our early start....the guard never came] and then we passed through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops....oh, wait. We just went through the bamboo forest and down the road and over the fallen fence and back to the car.

And then we came home. And died.

Well, actually, we got breakfast and then the Siebachs, David and I went to the hospital to visit Brad and Charlie. And then, just as we had sat down to eat dinner with Gaby, Luke [the Siebachs], and the missionaries, a lightning and thunder storm rolled into Oahu and wiped out all the power on the entire island for twelve hours.

So my morning starting in the pitch black bamboo forest and ended in my pitch black bedroom. But oh, what a glorious day it was indeed.

Part II: Christmas

I woke up bright and early on Christmas day to the sound of my sister calling at 7 a.m. from California. My family in San Diego, consisting of my sister, her two children and my parents, were getting ready to open presents, and I was late getting my computer turned on, and my webcam up and running. After a few technical difficulties with Skype (I'd never used it before), I got to see my adorable niece and nephew open up their Christmas presents from me and then David and I got to open our other gifts. My sister bought me a set of springform pans so that I can start baking cheesecake (yay!) and a beautiful new ornament for my tree. My grandmother got us The Dark Knight and my mother sent me some more Food Saver canisters, Legos for David and money. My mom also got me a gorgeous nativity set hand crafted by Jim Shore.



Have I mentioned I love Christmas decorations? And I love this Nativity set with its beautiful colors, quilt-like art style, and hand painting. My mom only bought me the stable, Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus.


The holy family.


Joseph's face.


The virgin Mary.


This is the detail on Joseph skirt and the baby Jesus. Isn't it just gorgeous?

I'd like to buy the shepherd, farm animals and the three wiseman who go with this set as well. Maybe I can use the money my mom sent me to buy some of them, after I've bought myself all the books I want. And there are a lot of those...

David bought me a new food processor (it looks awesome!) but he went a little overboard with the stocking. He stuffed it full of gum, chapstick, the new J.K. Rowling book, candy, and kitchen gadgets. I could barely get them all out.

This year for Christmas, I decided to make things a little harder for David. I bought him a beautiful deep purple tie and inside of it, I hid the first of five scavenger hunt clues. He had to follow the clues to find his gift -- a Lego x-wing fighter from Star Wars. See, the thing about Legos is that they are not easy to disguise because of all the noise they make in their boxes, so I wanted to hide it away from David so he couldn't guess what it was before Christmas Day. (I'm notorious for doing this. I was really wrong this year about what David bought me.)


Here David is trying to figure out the fourth clue. He had a hard time with this one.


He finds his gift in the closet! (Where it's been hidden since Halloween. Yes, I bought his present that long ago.)


David opening up his new Lego set.



And here's David building his X-Wing fighter.



While David built his plane [edited to say that David has informed me that the x-wing fighter is NOT a plane, so don't listen to me], I watched Mulan, which was a gift from one of David's sisters.

At 11 a.m., David and I got all dressed and ready, and headed to the house of one of David's co-workers for a big brunch Christmas party. We ate lots of delicious Belgian waffles, quiche, and fruit and then settled down for some board games. I love board games. I basically love all games though.

Eventually, however, the board games were disrupted when the hostess wanted to break out Rockband and insisted that David be the singer. David has a very good voice and does very well when rocking out to Rock Band (or World Tour). I think if he had voice lessons, David could be a very good singer even without Rock Band helping him along.


Here's David singing at Rockband, while all the other guests watch and cheer on the band.


Some more singing and rocking.

I played a few songs (on guitar). I like to sing, but only songs that I know really well, and I haven't had enough practice on the drums to feel comfortable playing them. I need to work on that, but I have bad rhythm. I'll get it one day.

We stayed until 3:30 p.m., finally tearing ourselves away from Rock Band, in order to go to our next scheduled engagement, a big Christmas dinner with another of David's Navy friends (who, incidentally, also served his mission in Taiwan at the same time as David). Adam and his wife Kiona, have two girls and a six-week old baby boy, who I got to play with while Kiona made a very delicious and entirely homemade meal with a turkey/pork beast, ciabatta bread stuffing, purple sweet potatoes (only to be found in Hawaii), real mashed potatoes, and pies. Though the dinner was a little bit late, it was very delicious. I was quite stuffed by the end. And then Adam made his own special kind of hot chocolate that was rich and delicious but nearly killed me in its decadence. David and I were barely able to roll ourselves back to our car and stumble into our home around 9 p.m.

So Christmas Day was very enjoyable all around, filled with family and friends and lots of good food. We got ourselves packed and ready, and went to bed early to wake up at 4 a.m. the next morning to face the Haiku Stairs, also known as Stairway to Heaven, an illegal and treacherous hike up a mountain. Stay tuned for Part III: Stairway to Heaven. You won't be disappointed.

Part I: Christmas Eve

We’ve had an interesting three days of Christmas, jam-packed with hospital visits, near-death hikes, blackouts, and a little bit of holiday joy. In order to get it all out, I’m splitting my holiday posts in multiple parts. Part I begins on Christmas Eve.

David went to work [not to actually do any work, but to sit around for a few hours] while I put the finishing touches on his Christmas gift scavenger hunt [more on that later]. Once David got home from work, we hooked up our webcam and connected with David’s family in Atlanta to watch each other open our Christmas presents. His family generally opens their gifts on Christmas Eve (which is sacrilegious in my opinion) but it ended up being a good thing, otherwise we would have had to wake up at 4 a.m. to open presents with them on Christmas day. It was sheer madness on his parents’ side, but it was nice to see each other despite the distance.

So we opened presents which is always a delightful thing to do in my opinion despite what may be inside of them. After we got off the phone/webcam with them, we ordered pizza from Papa Johns (it's a Hayman family tradtion to eat pizza on Christmas Eve). We decided to do pizza for lunch since we’d been invited over to a friend’s house (the Siebachs, the only other young married couple without children in our ward) for a dinner party with some of their other friends. We were just getting started on our holiday feast, when David received the first of our bad news.

While living in Monterey, David and, to a lesser extent I, became good friends with an older couple who were serving in our single’s ward as adult advisors (second counselor in the Bishopric). The Orsburns were unable to have children of their own and they opened up their home to all the young military men and women from the single’s ward who had no home to go to. Many of them, like David, came to consider the Orsburns as a second family and were called their kids. Brad and Charlie came to Hawaii last week for a vacation, chosen not only for Hawaii’s attractions, but also because the most number of their “children” were now living here. About two years ago, Brad had a terrible bike accident which left him with a brain injury with many residual side effects. While on vacation, he came down with a bad cold and that morning, before they were set to fly home to California on Christmas day, Charlie insisted that Brad go to the doctor just to be on the safe side. They discovered that he had a blood clot in his lung and two in his legs and he was checked into a hospital in Pearl City. Had he gotten on the plane, the altitude and pressure might have moved the blood clots in the wrong direction and killed him. He's stuck in the hospital until the blood clots clear up which could be another week. Worst vacation ever.

About five minutes after hanging up with Charlie, after promising to visit them in the hospital, David remembered that Brother Spencer, the second counselor in our current ward, had called him while he was at work and wanted him to call back. So, thinking nothing of it, David dialed up the Spencers and received more bad news. Our stake president, President Kim, and his wife, Linda, are extremely well-respected and well-known through Hawaii and Taiwan, where they had served as mission presidents. (Sister Kim is Taiwanese.) They also happened to be David’s mission presidents for the first five months of his mission in Taichung, Taiwan. Needless to say, David and I love the Kims, and their whole, huge extended family that all live in Hawaii.

On Christmas Eve, Sister Kim started complaining of a headache in the morning, and while they were at the hospital, a brain aneursym ruptured and she was left brain dead, with no chance of recovery. This news came as a huge shock to both of us. We had just gone to the Kim’s house on Monday to deliver Christmas cookies and while Sister Kim had a cold, she was otherwise in good health and spirits. It’s one thing to hear of the death of someone who knew was ill or old, but quite another to hear of the death of someone you didn’t think would be gone so soon. It’s the first time I’ve experienced first-hand an unexpected death like this and it hit me hard. I will miss Sister Kim a great deal. David always looked forward to speaking Chinese with her every Sunday, and she was one of the few sisters in the ward who ever speaks to me or sits next to me in Relief Society. She was our music conductor and organ/piano player (she taught piano at BYU Hawaii) and an all-around positive person. It’s hard to imagine that she is no longer around.

After hearing such bad news in quick succession, David and I managed to gulp down the rest of our pizza and then got ourselves ready to head to Kapiolani Medical Center to visit Brad and Charlie. Another of their Monterey kids arrived as well. After a short visit, we led Charlie back to the home she was staying in (with another of her kids, who lives near us in Mililani) and got her settled in with food and company and we headed over to the Siebach’s home (who are also friends with Brad and Charlie) for our Christmas Eve party, only two hours late.

We quickly filled up on Gaby Siebach’s homemade tamales (so good!) and pozole, while the group played Scene It and passed around presents. We stayed up late talking about this and that, and generally taking our minds off of the afternoon's unpleasantness. We finally stumbled home around 11 p.m., got ready for bed and quickly fell asleep, dreaming of the Christmas fun yet to come.

I'll be back with more about Christmas and the day after. Don't worry.....it gets a lot better.

I Am My Mother's Daughter

As the baby of the family, I like to pretend that I'm my mother's favorite child. Sure, I've got some worthy contenders in the form of my siblings [especially my sisters for having the first grandbabies], but if nothing else, I am most certainly my mother's daughter in a way that my sisters are not.

Christmas has always been one of my favorite times of year because my mother is a woman who likes to decorate, who likes to bake, and who likes to celebrate the holidays in style. Most of my Christmas memories involve helping my mother bake Christmas goodies, hang ornaments on the tree, or lug tubs and tubs of Christmas decorations into the house from our shed in order to transform our home into a Christmas wonderland.

In honor of being my mother's daughter, and the fact that I'm spending my first Christmas not in her home, I'm here to share my holiday baked goods and sparse decorations with you.

I spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday baking five different types of cookies and two types of fudge and packaging them up in little Christmas tins and then hiding the results from the crafty ants. I went through nearly three pounds of butter, a bag of walnuts, half a gigantic bag of chocolate chips, four pounds of powdered sugar, three pounds of flour and sugar, and a dozen eggs. The results? Totally worth it. Though the waistband of my favorite pair of jeans has started to complain.

To me, Christmas is just not Christmas without sugar cookies. We always made sugar cookies for Santa Claus' plate.

This recipe is one of my favorites because the cookies bake up fat and moist.

Next up was fudge, another holiday staple in our home. I generally use the fudge recipe on the back of the jet-puffed marshmallow creme to pretty consistent and delicious results [although this batch did not firm up as much as I would have liked]. This batch was just plain chocolate fudge.

And this batch included chopped walnuts and toffee chips.

Another popular cookie in our home is the angel thumbprint, rolled in nuts (walnuts again) and filled with jam or jelly (strawberry and boysenberry in this case). The jelly centers always fool me into thinking that these cookies are not as bad for me as other cookies.

I also attempted to make "magic bars," which has a graham cracker crust, condensed milk, chocolate chips and coconut. It was a first time for me and it didn't turn out as I remembered it. Still tastes good though.

And then, of course, I baked my pumpkin cookies. Here they are waiting to be slathered with maple frosting. Have I mentioned recently how much I've come to love and adore maple frosting? Because I really, really do.

I'm keeping all the leftover pumpkin cookies for myself. They're that good.


I also baked some peanut butter cookies. Normally I roll them into balls and then stick a Hersey's kiss in the center. This year, however, I took mini Snickers and rolled the dough around it so that when they baked, the chocolate and caramel and peanuts inside the Snickers all melted and oozed into a delicious center surprise.

I'm sending most of the leftovers with David to work on Christmas Eve, which is good because I've got a ton of fudge left. The other cookies may not survive until then.

On the decoration side of things, I've been having a hard time finding just the right kind of decorations that I like. Then again, my mother has been collecting her warehouse of decorations over the past thirty years so I guess I can exercise a little patience. I've already shared our tale of two Christmas trees, so I'll move on to other decorations.

Our stockings, which are not hung by the fire with care. We don't have a fireplace. That would be a waste of space in Hawaii.

Our Hallmark dancing snowmen, sent to me by my mother during previous Christmases. I went to Hallmark to get this year's version and they were all sold out! I was very sad.

My small Fontinini nativity set. It seemed only appropriate that our shelf of foreign scriptures be the backdrop for this scene.

And finally, let's not forget our bathroom wreath which I hung there mostly because there was a random, unused nail there. Also, cinnamon scented pine cones. It's about as close as I'm going to get to getting that pine fresh Christmas smell.

I think my efforts would make my mother proud. If she could eat my fabulous baked goods, I'm sure she'd declare me her favorite child.

Seriously, maple frosting is that good.

And if I don't get a chance to blog before Thursday, have a safe and merry Christmas!

Ants are in my pants. Literally.

Ants.

I've really grown to loathe and despise the little buggers.

Ants are a common problem in any home; I've squashed them all over the place, most especially when I lived in San Diego and D.C. But the ants that lived in those fine places came during predictable seasons (spring and summer), they hunted in predictable places (the kitchen) and died in predictable ways (Raid, ant traps, etc.).

Not so for the ants of Hawaii.

David warned me, insisted even, that the ants of Hawaii were a particularly cunning creature, able to find a single speck of food from miles away. And it's true. They come pouring out of the electrical sockets and through the windows and who knows what other crevices and pounce upon anything resembling food or water. They especially love water.

I could handle the ants that invaded the kitchen. I knew where to find them...I knew how to kill them. But then they started showing up in other places.

I've found them eating the soap bubbles in our bathtub or licking water straight from the shower head. I've caught them crawling across the living room floor (in search of what I don't know) or strolling across my laptop (!!!). I've spotted the ingenious bastards climbing up the cord of the iron to get to our tomato plants on top of the ironing board or taking picnics on our dining table. Last week they reached a new frontier. Our closet.

There was a whole line of them, crawling up into my drawers, poking their noses into my purses and climbing past my pants. That was the final straw. So we cleared everything out and we sprayed and we sprayed and we wiped every inch clean.

But I swear the ants of Hawaii are bionic ants. Even after using the toughest at-home ant killer we could find, the ants did not die.

In fact, I think it only made them stronger. And more determined.

So, no matter how much we spray and kill and wipe the ants away, 100 more just keep coming in their place, in the most random times, in the most bizarre places and there's nothing we can do to stop. You'd think with all the geckos [who supposedly eat ants] we have living in our air conditioning unit that we'd have a built-in ant trap but I'm beginning to think that our family of geckos are vegetarians.

The moral of the story is this: You might be one of those people who lives in a cold location, where it drops below 65 degrees and *grasp* possibly even snows. And if, when you're cold and shivering in your layers of clothes, you think to yourself that you'd love to be in some tropical paradise like Hawaii, basking in the hot, humid, muggy heat instead of slowly freezing to death from the inside out, just remember the ants.

And be happy that you're not fighting a loosing battle against bionic Hawaiian ants.

I swear they're out to get us.

What do you do with a bunch of drunken sailors....?

Okay, so the sailors weren't all completely drunk. Not that I'm a very good judge of a person's level of intoxication unless they're flaming drunk. In any case, David and I attended the Navy holiday party at a hotel in Waikiki for the sailors in his division tonight. And since I've suddenly felt the need to deluge this blog with daily updates, I'm here to report on the festivities.

First I'll say that I love any excuse to dress up. The only problem is that I always underestimate the amount of time I need to get ready which means that I'm generally always late. And I hate being late. It also didn't help that there was a lot of traffic getting into Honolulu (why there was so much traffic at 6 p.m. on a Saturday night, I'll never know) that it took us an hour to get to the hotel, find a parking spot, and then get to the venue.

I'll also mention that it's still raining. For the third straight day. And the party was held in an outdoor venue. See, people who live in Hawaii have this thing where they think that they live in paradise and that it is never anything but sunny around here. Despite the fact that it does happen to rain here quite a bit [though not quite as much as these past few days], they still insist on holding parties and functions outdoors. Granted, there was a roof over our head, but the walls were open to the elements and there was more than one person who was quite wet by the end of the night, or at least by the time we left. Especially since the dance floor was out in the open.

Despite our late arrival and the rain, it wasn't a terrible evening, although large, semi-social activities like this aren't always my favorite thing. The theme for the night was James Bond, which meant that there were a number of men in tuxedos and women in short, skimpy dresses.

Exhibit A: The 007 ice sculpture from the dessert table. It slowly melted away during the course of the evening. The rain certainly didn't help matters either. Whenever I see an ice sculpture, I always think of The RM. [David always asks if we have ice sculptures in Relief Society. He was quite disappointed that I didn't want to carve one myself when I taught the RS lesson last week.]

Exhibit B: David's dessert plate, mostly filled with fruit because David is a sugar wimp. For the record, I put the chocolate cake on his plate because I didn't have enough room on my own plate. Sad, but true. The pineapple, as seen poised on David's fork, was exceptionally tasty tonight.

Exhibit C: My dessert plate. I don't know why I have this sudden compulsion to document all the food I bake or eat, but I can't help it. It somehow seems important. The tart was the best part of the dessert. Mmmm....I love strawberry tarts. What is it about strawberries that makes them taste so good with chocolate?

Exhibit D: The newlyweds! Did you know that David and I have been married for 6 months now? It feels like so much longer but in the good, I feel like we've always been together and how did I ever live without you? kind of way and not in the bad, I have to spend eternity with this person and I can barely stand you? kind of way. I often forget that to most people 6 months is nothing and that we're still very much newlyweds to them. We've packed a lot into these past six months. I wonder what the next six will bring. And the next sixty years...

All in all, the party was enjoyable. They had a number of "door prizes" (what does that mean anyway?) ranging from a DVD of Casino Rayole to a Wii and a flatscreen TV. We left early, before they gave away the bigger prizes, but of course, we didn't win anything and probably wouldn't have won anything had we stuck around. Still, I always hold out just a shred of hope that one day I'll get lucky. I guess it's not meant to be. My favorite part of the evening, however, was seeing several older men in full Scottish regalia complete with pleated kilts, furry sporrans, silk stockings and coats leaving the hotel as we were walking back to our car. [I've recently developed a thing for men in kilts. I think Kara may understand. ;-)] And now, after this exciting night of black dresses, 4 inch heels, James Bond, good food, and men in kilts, I'm spent.

Say tuned later this week for the chilling saga of our ongoing battle against the ants of Hawaii, my first substitute teaching assignment, and my Christmas cookie/baking extravaganza! I know y'all can just barely contain your excitement. I know I can't.

The Rain Continues....and other unrelated useless bits of interest

The rain abated by late afternoon on Thursday [the day of the flash floods and heavy downpour] so David got up at his usual time on Friday morning to head to work. I declined to get up and drive him to work myself since I had a terrible headache and no need for the car that day. This turned out to be a very good thing since David was sent home from work at 11a.m. Though it wasn't raining, the sewers were backed up with all the water from the day before and they had to shut off the water in David's building, meaning that there were no functioning bathrooms. And when there are no functioning bathrooms to be had, you get to come home. Thank you heavy rains! I've enjoyed having my husband around.

By dusk of last night, however, dark clouds had rolled in over Oahu and we had a good-sized thunder and lightning storm, accompanied by even more rain. I love watching lightning light up the sky, especially at night. The best lightning I ever saw was in Arizona. You could actually see each individual lightning bolt streak across the sky over the vast and empty desert. Here I could only see bursts of light, but it was the first good storm I've seen on this island so I took what I could get. It's like the first snowfall of the year. You love the sight and sounds and smell of the snow and bask in its beauty....and then you slowly start to despise it as the winter progresses and you feel like you'll never be warm again. I'm starting to wonder if this island will ever be dry again.

The rain had stopped by nine o'clock last night and, having been cooped up in the house for quite some time, David and I headed out to see a movie. To see Twilight.

I had avoided seeing the movie for so long because I expected it to be three parts lame, awkward, and poorly acted. After hearing the reviews from friends who opinions and interests I generally share, I determined that my expectations for the movie were sufficiently low that I could probably enjoy some of the movie, if not just laugh through the whole thing from sheer lameness. Plus, I figured the 12 year screaming girls would be gone by now. I had also finally convinced David to come with me and so we set out for the 9:55 showing.

I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed the movie. So did David. Sure, there were a few things I did not like but I think the series has the potential to vastly improve. Especially under a different director with a bigger budget. I think it really did help that I expected the movie to suck, that I was prepared to laugh at all the awkward moments.

What I Didn't Like
1.) The special effects could have used some help. I especially hated the shots of the vampires running and jumping, etc. Since when did their feet not need to touch the ground?
2.) Was it just me or was every scene with Eric extremely awkward? Maybe it was the hair.
3.) Same for Jaspar. He seemed so pained. I swear....in some parts, he was the spitting image of Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands. I wish there had been less of the Forks High students and more of the Cullens.
4.) The direction. I felt like there were some weird shots and direction in the movie, especially in the scene where Bella and Edward are revealing his vampire status in the woods. [It also didn't help that the emergency alarm started going off during this scene.] Why all the close-ups of trees and not the actors while they are in the middle of talking? Why did Edward look like he had body glitter all over him in the sun? I always thought he would sparkle much more, and have a greater amount of light radiating off him. There were just some weird shots and I'm glad that Catherine Hardwick will not be back to direct the sequel.
5.) Robert Pattinson. I actually think Robert is very physically close to how I pictured Edward Cullen. And I didn't think he did a horrible job with the entire role, just certain parts. I always knew Edward was very intense, but Robert gave Edward a creepy intense vibe and came across as rather wooden at times. It was the scenes in which he loosened up and smiled that I actually believed him as Edward and enjoyed him in the part.
6.) Of course, it's not all Robert Pattinson's fault. The script was rather clunky in a lot of places and there was some bad dialogue.

What I Did Like
1.) Kristen Stewart. I'd never seen her in any movies and just from the trailers, I didn't think she was the right choice for Bella, nor did I think she was a good actress. Her performance as Bella was actually my favorite part of the whole movie. I thought she did a terrific job and really conveyed Bella's character perfectly.
2.) Victoria. Sure, she didn't say much and sure, I thought she'd have redder hair, but her presence was exactly as I imagined her.
3.) The chemistry between Bella and Edward. They worked together.

So yes, Twilight was not the most fantastic movie, but I at least enjoyed it, which was far more than I was expecting. I only wish that they had pushed the new Harry Potter movie back six months! Oh well.

Now, I suppose it's time to clean the house a bit. Tonight we're going to the Navy holiday party at a hotel in Honolulu. It's a bit of a fancier affair and I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully it will be exciting enough to warrant a post and some pictures.

Let it Rain!

I woke this morning to the sounds of torrential rain beating down on the roof of our condo and the distant flashes of blue lightning. Now, in a place where there is no prospect of snow and little climate change between summer and winter, rain signifies something resembling what winter should be, which puts me in the mood for Christmas....which until we put up our tree last night, I wasn't really prepared for.

I also woke to the image of my poor husband, bleary-eyed and wet [from a shower, not the rain] putting on his uniform. (Not one of the good ones, either.) My car has been out of commission for the last two weeks because of a leak in the power steering line which means I can't turn the blasted wheel. In any case, I've been waking up early (by my standards) to drive David to work at 6:30 in the morning so that I can have use of his car during the day.

So I stumbled out of bed in time to put on a baggy sweatshirt and slide into my slippers to take the 15 minute drive to David's work. We ran to the car but not before getting soaking wet and set off.

Our first indication that nothing good was going to come of this endeavor should have been the fact that our windshield wipers could not wipe fast enough to let us see out of them. It only went downhill from there.

We got onto Kamehameha Highway [Kam](which isn't so much a highway as a two-lane street that wraps its way around the whole island) and, as we headed down the hill, we were met with a police blockade which forced us to turn down a side street. We had no idea how to get where we needed to go from there, but all the other side streets we went down were fully flooded and we were spraying water all over the place. Cars were backed up and unable to decide where to go and rivers of water were gushing past our car.

We eventually got turned in the right direction and came to an intersection where we could get back onto Kam, this being the only way to get to work other than the actual highway which would require a lot of back-tracking through roads we didn't know to reach. Once we finally inched our way to the intersection, all the cars in front of us started to turn around. We finally realized that they were doing this because the entire intersection was completely flooded and there was a Jeep stuck in the water in the middle of the road. So David and I sat there, trying to decide if our little Pontiac Sunfire could make the right hand turn onto Kam of if we would get stuck like the other car.

By this time, we'd been battling the floods for 20 minutes and we were only a mile from home. The radio was full of people calling in, updating Perry and Price of new road closures, more flooding, bad traffic, blackouts (whenever there's bad weather, half the island is subject to electrical outages) and school closures.

David wasn't ready to admit defeat yet and so he gunned the engine and we made it though! As we drove back up the hill, we had to dodge fallen tree branches and brackish mud. As we reached the ascent of the hill, where it levels off before hitting Wheeler Air Field (still a ways from where David works), we noticed that the lights up ahead had just gone out. Just then, three minutes before David should have been at work, David got a call from his boss saying that the whole area around their building was flooded and that he should stay home. I was quite relieved because the whole time we were attempting to get David to work, I was thinking how much I didn't want to have to drive in such heavy rain or inch my way through flooded roadways.

Luckily, we were close to an on-ramp to get on the highway, so we zipped on home, shed our soaking wet clothes and hopped back into bed to sleep for another two hours (three in David's case).

Also lucky for us, we live in Mililani, which is in the center of the island, on a hill and has much better drainage and less flooding. We also still have electricity, which others do not have right now, and we're safely ensconced in our home, still wearing our pajamas at 11:00am on a Thursday morning.

It's still pouring rain outside but after our adventures this morning, I think I'd rather just stay right where I am. At least I have several good books to read and a husband to annoy. :-)

A Tale of Two Trees

I must state for the record that I am now, and always will be, a true lover of real Christmas trees. Growing up, we never had an artificial tree. Sure, there were years when our tree was a little scraggly, or it bent oddly to one side, or it turned a little brown way too soon. But it also always smelled wonderful and the pine needles felt like little pin-pricks of Christmas joy in my skin.

I am not, for the record, a believer in fake plastic trees. (Radiohead would agree, I think.)

I am, however, a pragmatist. Or a realist. Whatever you would call a person who, while holding a deep loathing of garishly green plastic trees, also understands that while they do not smell woodsy and wonderful and fresh, they are infinitely easier to handle, cleaner, and oftentimes more practical than dragging in a fresh tree to slowly die in your living room while dropping its little needles all over the floor.

Knowing that the sad little pine trees that get shipped to Hawaii during Christmas lack something in authenticity and freshness and knowing that our next two Christmases will be spent in a foreign land that may or may not have trees readily available, David and I decided to purchase a fake tree.

The other thing you should know about living on an island is that if you see something at the store, you buy it then and there or else it may not be there again for a very long time....or never again. (There was a month period when I swear there was not a single box of Cinnamon Life on the entire island. And I looked. When it reappeared again, I bought 4 boxes. And I grab a box everytime I go to the store, even if we don't need it. The moral of the story is, you never know when something you love may not be there anymore so buy it now!) Anyway....I saw a tree at Wal-Mart that I liked. They had six boxes so I thought I'd bring David back later and pick one up. (It was too big to lift myself and there were six. Surely they'd still be there the next day!) Long story short, when we came back, they were gone. So we picked up a smaller tree just in case. (Like I said, if you see something and you think you may want it, you buy it! You can always return it. It's a state motto or something.)

Still, if I was going to suffer through having a fake tree, I wanted a really nice one. I didn't want some dinky one that obviously was completely fake. So, I dropped by Wal-Mart on my way home from work yesterday and lo and behold, they had 3 boxes of my big, beautiful tree. I grabbed a friendly Wal-Mart associate (who was actually not so friendly) to help me lift the box into my cart and I was off!

I was terribly excited about the tree, so I convinced David to ignore his homework to help me put together the tree.



Here I am surrounded by all the groups of branches. One thing I did not know about fake trees is how dang long it takes to fluff out all the individual branches. And those fake needles sting just as much as the real ones. But they don't feel like pin-pricks of Christmas joy to me.



Here's our tree in the process of being erected. It was pretty good looking, as far as fake trees go.



And here's David doing a last bit of fluffing before putting the last piece on top.

So after an hour of fluffing and fitting all the branches into their little cubby holes, we had one beautiful (albeit fake) Christmas tree.

There was only one minor problem....



It was way too big for our little condo. I didn't take the width into consideration when selecting the tree....only the height. With our 7.5 feet tall and 5 feet wide tree scrunched in one corner, there was no room for both our couches or our little dining room table in the living room. Either the tree or the couch had to go.

Luckily, we still had the smaller tree we had purchased before so today we spent another good 45 minutes dismantling the plastic beast and re-packaging it to go back to Wal-Mart and we set about erecting and decorating our new tree.

This one fit a lot better. And it had fewer branches which meant less fluffing. All in all, it was a good decision to use the smaller one. It does look far more fake than the bigger, more expensive tree but it is a lot smaller and will therefore require less storage space. Which is good because we're running out of room.



This isn't the best picture of our tree, but it's hard to capture it in its full glory. I love a Christmas tree all lit up and decorated. It's one of my favorite things about Christmas.



Here's a close-up of the red ornaments and pretty ribbon I used to decorate the tree with.



And our tree from below. Even though it's fake and it doesn't smell like anything, it's still David's and my first Christmas tree as a married couple and it looks beautiful and feels special to me nonetheless.

Besides, if I need to sniff something that smells good, I'll just go hoover over these tasty cinnamon rolls I made yesterday.



And then I'll eat one. Yum.