My Open House is on Sunday and I have a lot to do. My husband and son are golfing, and Someone is lonesome.
Cats and stamping are a bad combination.
Just taking a quick bath...really...
The evidence.
On deadline
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Category Archives: Personal
Good morning, Waikiki
Waking up in the city is a feast for the senses, especially when that city is Waikiki. All cities are noisy and busy, but this one adds a quality that is so elusive…a destination, a resort, an icon. At 6am the sun is barely above the horizon but already its light is filtering through the high rise hotels. The traffic is incessant, although you seldom hear drivers honking. There’s the regular whine of mopeds and the beeping of trucks maneuvering into narrow alleys and driveways to deliver clean linens and produce. There are birds, too, but mostly pigeons and sparrows who are attracted by the carelessness of tourists eating their breakfast at open windows. And there is sand, blocks from the beach, drifted in little dunes against the curb and settled into the crevices in the sidewalk.
I’ve joined my husband for his weekly overnight. He has offices on Maui and in Honolulu and he spends one night every week on the Busy Isle. He almost always stays at the same place, a quiet hotel one block from Kalakaua in Waikiki. Downtown Honolulu is pretty slow in the evening and Waikiki is a short drive but light years away.
We were up early and walked over to Kalakaua for coffee. He loves to sit on the veranda of the Moana Surfrider in their big koa rockers and watch the people go by. Sometimes he’ll phone me early in the morning when I’m at home to tell me he’s there. This morning, I was with him.
The parade of people on the sidewalk is mostly made up of visitors. They are running with their iPods or power walking or just out for a stroll, having given up the fight with their internal clock still set on Eastern Standard time. Occasionally a surfer walks by with a board held tight under his arm, hoping to ride a few sets before heading back to his apartment for a quick shower and work. A woman in a hotel uniform pedals gracefully past, weaving around the omnipresent delivery vans. A light sprinkling of liquid sunshine passes through.
We sit and drink our coffee, admiring the ornate trim on the hotel and saying little. At home, we would hear choruses of birds but little else. No one walks past our house on a cul-de-sac this early in the morning. My neighbor might drive quietly past on his way to an early tee time, but there’s no traffic that early in our quiet neighborhood. At one time, I thought I might enjoy living in a city. If the opportunity presented itself now I wouldn’t turn it down point-blank, but I don’t feel the enthusiasm I once had. I’ve lived on a small, quiet island for long enough that its slower rhythm of life fits perfectly, like an old pair of rubbah slippahs.
I enjoy the visit but one night is enough. Time to head back to my reality.
Aloha, Waikiki.
Captain Stupid Head
I have a cat. He’s an orange tabby with way more personality than brains. My husband has a theory that the smart cats are more aloof, hence the ones with personality make good pets but have short-comings in the intellectual department. This cat is undeniable proof of his theory.
Remember the beautiful bag I made with the Big Shot? Well, I had help. When I posted about the bag, my daughter told me I needed to share the pictures of my helper with you. I know her reasoning. She’s living in Australia now and she misses this big knucklehead. Most mornings about 3am I would be more than glad to send him to her. So Carol, these are for you:
Inspecting. Why does it move?
You’ve heard of curiosity killing the cat? If curiosity doesn’t get to him, I might be tempted to help.
Watching...watching...watching...
OK, if you have a cat I’m sure you know what’s coming next, right??
Attack!!!!
At this point I yell at him and tell him to beat it. Unfortunately, this cat has a mis-placed worship crisis. I am his Cat-Mother, the one who feeds him, brushes him, and gives him his pill (don’t ask me why, he thinks it’s a treat to have a little black sphere crammed down his throat every morning). I am also Head Nurse/Veterinary Technician, cleaning and bandaging his wounds when he finds himself on the losing end of a turf battle. He feels obligated to grace me with his company.
I'll be good, Cat Mother. I promise.
Of course he’s purring. You know how long this lasted?
I'll rescue you from this dangerous pin cushion!!
He was actually pulling the pins out of the pin cushion with his teeth. At that point I decided it was a beautiful day outside and he needed some fresh air. Pronto.
When we brought him home we named him Duke but no one calls him that. The kids call him Pookie. My husband usually calls him Knucklehead. I generally call him Meat Ball, Captain Stupid Head, or when I’m really annoyed, something unprintable. Use your imagination.
Happy Mother’s Day
This morning my son and I picked flowers and strung lei for the youth group to sell this weekend at church. Take a deep breath…
I hope you can smell them – the fragrance was incredible. Happy Mother’s Day to all of you nurturing women!
20 years, and no foolin’
It’s been 20 years since my husband, my almost-3-year-old daughter and my 7-months-pregnant self stepped off the plane in Kahului to begin what we thought was a two year job on Maui. Actually, stepped off the plane doesn’t really tell the story. We’d given our daughter some Benadryl during the flight to help her sleep, and it took a little longer to kick in than we expected. When we landed she was sound asleep and we had substantial carry-on luggage even without her and her enormous car seat. Oh, and did I mention I was 7 months pregnant? What WAS I thinking??
The crew that cleans the plane was so compassionate, and helped us down the stairs – back in 1990, there were no jetways in Kahului. Someone brought a golf cart to the bottom of the steps and we loaded my still-sleeping little girl and my enormous ankles onto the cart for the trip to the baggage claim.
Fast forward 20 years…and I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Thank you, Maui. Thank you to all the beautiful people who have been part of our lives, and for the richness of the Hawaiian culture. Thank you for the opportunity to live in a true mixed-plate community, with the richness of many cultures blending and sometimes struggling together. And thank you, Lord, for this incredible, beautiful island of mountain and beach, lava and sand, fragrant breezes and tropical blooms. It is truly home.
- Thank you Kindly and Embrace Life stamp sets
- Whisper White, Basic Black, and Kraft card stock
- Sahara Sand Classic ink pad; Stazon Black ink pad; Pretty in Pink ink refill
- Champagne Mist Shimmer Paint and Aquapainter
- Pink taffeta ribbon and Scallop trim border punch
10:05pm  I forgot to mention that this card was inspired by the Curtain Call Color Challenge: CC23
I’m retiring at last
No, it’s not what you think: I’m retiring as chauffeur. My son passed his driver’s license exam this morning!
It’s tough to pass the test in Hawaii – as it should be – but he was well prepared and ready to take the test. I’ll tell you what’s REALLY tough – it’s sitting on that bench, watching as he walks out to the parking lot with the examiner and waiting while they go out on the road. This is my third time through that process, and it doesn’t get any easier. My stomach is always in knots as the test begins, but as time goes by and there’s no early return (meaning failure) the knot starts to settle. It’s a great feeling to see your child come around that corner with a confident smile and a thumbs-up. (My middle daughter thought she would be funny and walked towards me looking as downcast as possible, sending my heart to my toes until she lookup up and grinned and said “I passed!”. Stinker.)
My life as chauffeur is over, and I am thrilled to become the chauffeured. Congratulations, Matt. Well done.
Happy Birthday to me
Nothing new for you, though I did work on a couple of projects today. It’s my birthday, I’ve had a lovely day, and I just wanted to share a couple of highlights.
I came downstairs this morning VERY early and I had my own Balloon Birthday from Kseniya. Yes, she did the pencil drawing of me in the middle of the balloons – she’s very talented! What a great way to start my day.
I’m training to be a Weight Watcher’s leader, so it was off to an early morning meeting. After the meeting, Cheryl, Robbie and I met for pedicures and laughs. I’m sure the salon professionals thought we’d been drinking, we laughed so hard! Cheryl got sparkley pink, Robbie got a pinky- purple, and I went for violet:
Yep. Those are my wide Birkie feet. Those purple toes look great in Birks!
It’s been a wonderful day – I’ve gotten cards and flowers, lots of happy phone calls, and we have plans for dinner later tonight at Mala’s Wailea. I even set up a Facebook account – my girls finally gave up protesting. I’ve promised not to lurk. Shoot, I probably won’t even keep my own page up to date!
Happy Birthday to me!
It’s good to be safe
We had a different sort of weekend. Friday night, as we were finishing preparations for my son’s Scout troop rummage sale, someone came in and announced there had been a huge quake in Chile. When I got home late that night, I looked online and saw the first tsunami advisory for the Hawaiian islands. Since the first potential wave wasn’t forecasted to arrive until after 11am, I went to bed.
My son called about 4:45am from the site of the sale where the boys had camped out in the courtyard. The sale was off and he needed me to come pick him up. (At that time of the morning, it took an awful lot of repeating for him to get that message through the fog in my head.) I got up, threw on some clothes, and headed out the door.
I couldn’t believe all the cars on the road. Drivers were lined up outside service stations, the parking lot at the grocery store was full, and cars were already heading across the highway and up the slopes of Haleakala. I am NOT a morning person, but I have been on the road at 4:45am once or twice, and what I was seeing was not normal.
When I picked up my son, he was as bleary eyed as I was. We headed home, and since our house is outside of the inundation zone, we all went back to bed. Or tried to…the first Civil Defense alarm went off at 6am.  I tried to go back to sleep, but after the third set of alarms I gave up.
That’s about the time Cheryl called.   She lives a little higher up than we do, and was calling to ask if we wanted to come up. The more we thought about it, the more we decided it was better to be safe than sorry. With the Indonesian tsunami on our minds, we decided to pack a few things and head up the hill. This included putting a very indignant feline in his kennel and he wasted no time in telling us how much he disliked this plan! It was an hour and a half before he stopped complaining.
As we sat together in Cheryl’s house, it felt like a party, except of course for the threat of enormous destruction. We watched the live broadcast, eventually starting to make jokes about the news anchors trying to find something new and interesting to say as time ticked by and no significant wave appeared. The biggest applause of the morning came for what appeared to be a wasp crawling across the lens of the camera that looked across Hilo Bay, and eventually we started shouting at the poor weather guy whenever he came on-screen and blocked our view.
When it became apparent that the equivalent of Class II rapids through the mouth of the bay were all we would see, we opened a bottle of wine to celebrate and quit watching the newscast. (It was noon by then!) Since I wasn’t sure if we were going to be Cheryl’s guests through dinnertime, I’d grabbed some leftover spaghetti and a bottle of wine before we left the house.   As fate would have it, the wine was Chilean.
As much as we enjoyed ourselves, it was sobering to think of the people of Chile. I grew up in California and know how destructive an earthquake can be.  I’ve never experienced a tsunami, and as fascinating as it would be to see the power of nature I think I’ll settle for the relative hum-drum of a near miss.
The tsunami alert system worked exactly as it should have, and we all had the opportunity to decide how we would react. You don’t always have 12 to 15 hours of warning before disaster. Do you know what you would do?
Malama `aina: to care for the land
One of the fundamental concepts of Hawaiian culture is to care for the land.  On Saturday, a diverse group of people joined forces to malama `aina, care for the land.
We met early in the morning at Papahana Kuaola in Waipao, O`ahu.  This area was once rich farmland growing crops like taro and sweet potato, but invasive species have crowded the stream and made the area impassible. Previous work crews had cut down the thick growth,  so our task for the day was simple. We would create a human chain that would move the debris from one side of the Ha`iku river to the other.
We began with a pule, or prayer, and then moved to form three lines across the river. We stood side by side, and piece by piece, the wood was passed from hand to hand down the bank, over the stream, and up the other side to form a pile that could be accessed by a truck with a wood chipper. It was easy to imagine this same task taking place hundreds of years ago.
It wasn’t long before the jokes and stories started up, and the time passed quickly. After our mid-morning break, the large group split into two. Some continued to pass the debris across the stream, while others moved to the lo`i, or traditional planting beds for taro. They had been shaped and the soil turned, but there was still much to do before they could be planted.
We were inspired by the sight of the lo`i already planted:
Our diligence in clearing the stream bed created a very gratifying pile of debris on the hill above the stream bank.
Our entertainment for the day was Lili. She leaped up and down the stream, more nimble than a mountain goat. Her priority was rocks, and her preference was for enormous rocks. She would paw and push under the water to loosen a huge rock, then stick her whole snout into the water to attempt to pick it up. If you were standing nearby, you were guaranteed a shower!
We finished the morning with a sense of accomplishment and community. Working side by side with a diverse group of people, some from around the world, we made a small contribution to the land and enriched our own lives immeasurably.
A Christmas reflection
Peace be with you.
Whether you celebrate the birth of a poor Jewish boy who would become a Messiah, the arrival of a Jolly Old Elf by way of the rooftop, or simply a new dawn, I wish you peace this morning. In a complex world where we often focus on differences, perhaps today we can focus on our common humanity. If we recognize the things we share instead of those which divide us, we bring the dream of peace just a little closer to reality.
Each of us has the ability to make a positive difference in another person’s life. What may seem a small gesture can have a great impact. One of the greatest, wisest women of our time said it well:
We can do no great things, only small things with great love.                Mother Theresa of Calcutta
Merry Christmas.
The Maui Stamper 