Trip up Mauna Kea

Paul's Movie . . . .


My movie from my digital camera . . .



And some photos!

Luis and I are standing on the saddle road, right before we turn up the mountain. Mauna Loa is in the background, and we are standing on a lava flow.



Although most of the snow had melted, there was a little left :)





We took a couple of snowy shots





And we were FREEZING!! So we packed our beer in the snow and went down to the beach!






Mauna Kea in the background. We were there only two hours before!

Turkey Day!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Announcement: Blog is now private! So now Luis's students can't read it, and I can actually use his name without calling him "Hubby."

This morning, I got up at 6:00 am and spent three hours at the beach with my mom watching my brother surf at Kua Bay. Here is a little video I found. Waves were huge today (medium size in video)



There is snow on Mauna Kea (click here for the webcam). It is just so amazing to be so hot at the beach and look up and see white stuff.




Luis and I are in charge of appetizers, so we are making crab stuffed mushrooms. Then we are going up to my parents house and basically porking out until we can barely move. We are bringing Pista and Cosi so we don't have to be worried about them being alone on the holiday (yes I know that is cheesy).

Tomorrow Paul, Luis, and I are going to head up Mauna Kea and enjoy Hawaii from the top!

Bosu

I went to the gym and did a Bosu Class. It hurt. I don't know if I will be able to walk tomorrow.

Poutine - Bon Anniversaire!

I spent a summer in Canada before I got to college. I actually suggest everyone ought to spend a summer in Canada. Especially if you don't know what the difference is between us and them (besides latitude, obviously).

I was in a French immersion camp run by Quebecois, and besides actually nailing my French down better than I did when I was in boarding school in Geneva, I did try one thing completely new and amazing: Poutine.

Poutine is celebrating 50 years in existence: here is a little excerpt from an article I pulled off of Fark:

The exact origin of poutine is unclear, but most stories place the date at 1957. Fernand Lachance, a restauranteur who referred to himself as the father of poutine, was asked by a customer to mix french fries and cheese curds together in the same bag.

Warwick, then replied: "Ça va te faire une maudite poutine" ("It's gonna make a hell of a mess"). The sauce was added later to keep the fries warm.

It has all of my favorite foods: Cheese, French Fries, and well, who doesn't like warm gravy? And on top of that it is finger food! I recommend all of you go to Montreal, either for the jazz fest or the winter festival, and dig in to some poutine.

While it is heart stopping and artery clogging, I still think the Hawaiian dish, loco moco could cause more arterial damage, with white rice, topped with a hamburger patty, a fried egg, and gravy.

Things to do before I go

Found a cool list of things to do before I die on thingstodoblog.com, and I thought I would steal some that made sense to me:

1) Read the Bible straight through
2) Shipwreck Scuba Dive
3) Go the the ice hotel
4) Drive a sled with snow dogs on it
5) Learn proficient french
6) Get a PhD
7) Write a book
8) Start up and run (well) a Cafe or a small Restaurant
9) Get really good at Yoga
10) Learn to Sail
11) Write a Biography about my dad
12) Start a cattery
13) Makes Goats and sheep milk from my own sheep or goats
14) Learn to croquet quickly and well
15) Learn Spanish like a native speaker
15) Polish up my Portuguese
16) Teach third grade
17) Memorize 50 poems and be able to recite them at will
18) Attend at least one major sporting event: the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the U.S. Open
19)Watch the launch of the space shuttle.
20)Ride the Trans-Siberian Express across Asia.
21)Experience weightlessness.
22)Learn to juggle with three balls.
23)Learn to do three coin tricks
24)Donate money and put my name on something: a college scholarship, a bench in the park
25)Visit the Holy Land

The red ones are things I could do right now

dangerous

Yesterday Paul and I went surfing and had the best time ever. There is a low pressure zone to our north, so for the last week and a half there has been an amazing swell. Winter is coming!

Paul nearly sliced of his right pinky toe while he was paddle boarding on the sharp coral, so we have been waiting until it healed before we got in the water again. Hawaii has really warm waters, so staph infections are more common here than in other places.

Kahaluu has three breaks (see the photo) The first one is really close to the rocks. Unless you have a very maneuverable shortboard, I don't suggest this one as as soon as the wave breaks, you are on top of the rocks, so you need to be able to move.

Paul and I usually stick to the last break, where all the surfers in the satellite image are. However, the waves were so huge that I was getting pummelled, and so was Paul. One time I was under so long I thought my lungs were gonna explode. I felt this really sharp pain in my thigh as the leash of the board wrapped around my leg and gave it a hard yank.

I moved to the second break, where the waves were a lot more regular and I was able to stand up most of the time.

When I climbed out of the water, Paul asked me what happened to my leg. I discovered that the cord hadn't yanked it, but I had actually slammed into the coral. I guess I didn't think I had been pushed down that far. As you can see from the photo, there is a A LOT of coral. During low tide (when the surf is best), you are probably in three feet to four feet of water. It is fine during a controlled fall, but not when the wave dumps a ton and a half of water and holds you down.

Unfortunately, a man drowned out there yesterday right after we finished surfing so Paul and I are going to be super cautious. Gonna wait until my leg heals a bit before I get in again, but I will keep you all posted!

P.S. Blog is going private tomorrow

private blog

Hey you guys! Great day, I walked 6.5 miles, ran 2.5, and went to an hour yoga class. Hubby and I watched The Lives of Others, best foreign film for 2007. Slow start, but great movie.

I am going to making this blog private in about a week because I don't want my husbands students reading it, and I am getting a lot of hits from Dallas Texas (yes I know who and where people are reading my blog).

Will go private in a couple of days, just giving you all a heads up.

A couple cool sites...

www.10questions.com
Round 1: You ask a video question to the presidential candidates.

Post your question or someone else's to YouTube, MySpace Yahoo Video, or Blip.tv. Make sure to tag it "10questions" so we can find it. In addition, be sure to give it a descriptive title and any other tags you want.

Note: It can take up to half a day for your video to show up here. To find it, search for your username with the search tool below.

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2. You vote on the best questions. 3. The top ten questions get selected
Round 2: Top 10 questions are presented to the candidates 2: Candidates post their video answers 3. You decide if they actually answered the questions

www.freerice.com
FreeRiceis an online game where you can show off your vocabulary by selecting the correct meaning of words. In terms of mobbing, it should attract 2 kinds of people: speller show-offs, and smart spellers who want to send rice to hungry people. The game explains: For each word you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. The rice is paid for by advertisers whose names appear below the game.

My Wedding

Part I - Pre-wedding Craziness and the Ceremony



Part II - Goofing off after the ceremony, champagne, toasts, and THE TAHITIANS!



Part III - Hula, First Dance, Father Daughter Dance, and Party!

published

I read a letter to the editor in West Hawaii Today and got pretty ticked off. So I wrote a response letter and it got published yesterday. For your reading enjoyment:

Letter that pissed me off:

Racism

Friday, October 26, 2007 8:55 AM HST

Tolerance is as bad as the actions of racists

The racism displayed by many but not all Hawaiians doesn't bother me as much as the tolerance that is shown for it. If these were black people down in the Southern states being treated as the caucasians are in Hawaii, there would be riots in the streets -- and rightfully so.

The bottom line is: We won't be investing our money in the third world state of Hawaii until your leaders start leading and put an end to the acceptance of racism.
Try and put a price on what Hawaii loses by making it easy for us to decide to invest our money elsewhere.

We won't start building our home there this fall as planned. We won't be buying another vehicle there. We won't be buying gas and oil or paying a mechanic to service our vehicle there. We won't be renting a house while ours is built. We won't be hiring local contractors to do the job. We won't be paying higher property taxes because our property will remain undeveloped. We won't be buying clothes and groceries there. We won't be sending my daughter to college there next year. Etc., etc..

We love the place, however, and will occasionally visit. I'm a professional photographer and do a lot of work for the travel industry, so my career brings me there occasionally. We will stay in the resort areas where almost magically the aloha spirit still appears to live on and the local people make an effort to be friendly -- if only because their income depends on it.

For now we're travelling the rest of the U.S. and loving it. I haven't once been referred to in disdain as a "haole."

So far, we've met a lot of really friendly people who are proud of where they're from and eager to share it with others. Only a couple bad apples so far, nearly opposite the Big Island.

Brian Elmore

my response:

Isle racism

Thursday, November 1, 2007 8:38 AM HST

Attitudes set us back

As a haole raised on the Big Island, I read Brian Elmore's disdainful letter on Hawaii's "tolerance" or racism toward haoles with interest. I was happy to hear that he would not be moving here, or gracing us with his economic bounty.

No matter what the brochure says, Hawaii is not paradise. Were he to look more closely at the resorts he stays in, he would see that people with darker skin are the busboys and the housekeepers, while it's the haoles who serve drinks and work with the dolphins. Racism abounds there, too, it just doesn't affront him.

His comment that haoles in Hawaii are treated worse that African Americans on the mainland is almost laughable. The "H" word in no way compares to the "N" word. In 2007, African Americans were threatened with lynchings, refused jobs, shot and killed for asking white cops questions, and charged with attempted murder for giving a white person a shove. How could one argue haoles in Hawaii face a worse discrimination?

My brother and I, like many haole children raised here, have been harassed, taunted, pushed, and even assaulted by locals.

However, growing up here has instilled us with knowledge of the history of Hawaii, the utter decimation and exploitation that the haoles imposed on other ethnicities, the resulting economic and social poverty, the frustration and its manifestations.

We do not tolerate racism; we understand where it is coming from.

Haoles, Asians, Filipinos, Portuguese, Hawaiians, Samoans, Hispanics (I could go on and on) understand the complexity of the ethnic tensions and are committed to undoing prejudice through interaction, support, education, and the respect of the local culture and the difficulties they face. Third-world attitudes about race set us back to square one -- and we don't need them.

Dana Csige

Kailua-Kona