DEAD TOURISTS

I don't think people realize how inhospitable Hawaii can actually be.  Over the last few days we have been experiencing really high, thus dangerous, surfs.  They close down the beaches, post warnings, put alerts on the radios and keep lifeguards at their stations making people keep away from the surf.

But...they find unmanned beaches, go in and .....drown.  We have had a few lately.  You get so that when you hear those sirens you kind of shiver and go "another one bites the dust".  This last one was really sad though.  It turned out to be a dad and little little child.  He was holding him and the sea swept them away.  :(

We were at turtle beach on Friday.  We had planned on going to the county fair in Kahului.  First we popped into a flooring place and chose the laminate we want to put down in the condo.  When we got to the county fair after that we were told it wouldn't be open til five.  Damn!!

Not wanting to head home so soon we headed for turtle beach, stopping at Paia for a picnic on the way.  While we were parked in our usual spot, watching a really high surf, two families, travelling together, with five little kids between them, went down to the water.  There is a natural break water where the water sits calmly in front of it.  I will put a couple pics in here to show what I mean.  But when the surf is up, about every 20th wave comes along and is huge and pours over the top of the breakwater with quite a force.  So these people, babies in arms, start climbing on the coral breakwater.  I kind of freaked because they obviously didn't know.

Just as I was thinking about going down there to warn them I noticed the lifeguard heading over.  Not soon enough.  A monstrous wave broke over and literally slammed into them send them ass over teakettle, scattering them like bowling pins, babies ripped out of parents arms.  When the water rushed back it goes sideways to the edge of the breakwater and back out to sea, and in this case taking a baby with it.  Thank god the lifeguard was coming from that direction.  He managed to grab her before she was washed out beyond to where the turtles are.  Kind of traumatizing.  They were all crying and freaking as they climbed up to their cars.  Poor people.

Yesterday we sort of hung around the condo, me writing, Bill reading.  About four in the afternoon we headed into Lahaina.  I was determined to get me a new wallet...and I did.  We stopped into Kimos for an awesome sunset dinner.  The food was great, the ambiance the best, the mojito delicious!  A really nice day.  Today its Sunday and I am going to go find sport sandals.  I left mine on the Alberta/north trip.  So sad.  I had had those reebok sandals for about 7 years and I truly loved them.  They never wore out.  Also another quick trip to Costco!!!  Yay!!!  TTYL

THIS IS THE BREAKWATER AND THOSE WAVES ARE NOT BREAKING OVER THE BREAKWATER

DEAD FISH IN A PRETTY KOI POND

THATS THE DEAD FISH THERE, IN A RESTAURANT...NOT APPEALING!

AND HE'S ONLY DRINKING WATER!

I THOUGHT THIS WAS COOL....LOOKS LIKE THE TIKI TORCH IS REALLY BURNIN' IT UP!

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SO CUTE!  HE WAS SO PROUD OF HIS BEAUTIFUL NEW SHIRT HE BOUGHT ALL ON HIS OWN AND HE WAS MODELLING IT FOR US.....NO IDEA IT WAS BUTTONED ALL WRONG

YET ANOTHER ARGUMENT

Bill and I have completely different ideas on how to spend the bulk of our days here in happyland.

MINE:  the bulk of the day/days to be spent in the condo/pool.  I can spend hours puttering around, cleaning, laundry, writing, reading, tv, swimming, cleaning up my photos (very time consuming) in my pjs or close to, hair a mess drinking a ton of coffee or cold water or v8 juice.

BILL'S:  get up really late (this I like) have coffee, take a half hour to put shoes on, eat cooked oatmeal, sit on lanai for a few minutes and go back to sleep for half an hour, come in and say " So where are we going today?  Banana bread trail?, edge of the earth beach?, Lanaina? Lava Beds?  Lavender Farm? Huh? Huh? Huh?  Well?  Where to?"  And then he restlessly wanders around until I give in and get dressed, give my poof a yank and put on my vicious green crocs and go.

Its like a tug of war.  I think we will need to compromise.  One day we stay home (he can go out if he wants..I wish he would) and one day we go out.  Tomorrow I think we will go somewhere and bbq.  Thats his all time fave thing to do!

I try to write my blog in the early morning before he gets up.  So I am always writing about the day before.  Its good cuz I will mention only the things that stand out and this won't get too tedious.  The only way I could get him to settle down yesterday was to promise we would go out late afternoon to our fave spot and watch the sunset.  And thats what we did.  I spent the day deleting about 1000 pics.  I am not kidding.  I started with 22,785 pics and my goal is to get it down to 2 or 3 thousand.    At 1000 per day its going to take weeks!

As per my promise, we headed out around five and watched a very wimpy sunset.  They aren't very good right now for whatever reason.  It was more fun watching the hobos that congregate there with their booze and ukeleles.  And I love watching the little kids that show up at that time of night with their local parents, who are also drinking, smoking and playing guitars etc.. The kids here in Maui are pretty resilient. Throw in a few pit bulls and you have a show.  Also, on this beach the newer long boarders practice so it gets interesting.

NOTE THE REMNANTS OF MOSQUITO BITES ON MY LEG

SORRY BOUT THE BORING PICS.....BY THE TIME WE GOT HOME THE SKY WAS PINK

And thats it.  Thats all we did.  Today is going to be a lot busier...we have a few things out there to do. Maybe a more interesting report tomorrow.  TTYL

LOSER DAY

Enjoyable, but didn't accomplish much.

Bill didn't get up til after 11 this morning.  I thought maybe he was dead so I decided to give him til 12 and if he hadn't come out I would go see.  It got me to thinking about what I would actually do if he WAS dead.  Halfway through the thinking process I got too upset so I got busy and cleaned the whole condo.  Then when he came out we discussed it.

He said to get him cremated here to take him home.  Easier than in a giant expensive coffin.  Thought that was a good idea.  Then we got arguing about where to spread his ashes until we decided to quit talking about it.  Jeez!  We will freaking argue about anything.  When we realized we were arguing about something that wouldn't happen til after he is dead we felt kind of stupid.  But I told him that I won.  Cuz if he was dead I could do anything I wanted  to him.  (I just read this to him...he is nodding his head)

This afternoon we went to Kmart.  I was looking for a certain type of laundry soap.  We ended up going through the food aisles.  Things here are so different.  I took a couple of pics of stuff I don't think we see on our shelves at home.  Maybe we do but I haven't seen them.  You see a lot of Mexican things here that we don't at home.  But some of it is awful...as you will see below.  (if this blog thing decides to put it below...you never know.)

Next we hit Costco..or rather Bill did.  I stayed out in the car and read.  A young, fairly well dressed lady came to my open window and asked for money...for a car that is "up the road a ways" and out of gas and could I help her out.  Like I am in the middle of the parking lot, nowhere near where anyone else would go for real legit help, but what the hell.  I gave her a twenty.  She needed it more than me.  Don't tell Bill.  

Home and tv and loser supper and now to bed.  Sorry this is so boring.  TTYL

COFFEE AND UNDERWEAR

I spent the whole day yesterday, the whole long day, in my underwear, big old dirty shirt, drinking coffee, diddling with my keyboard, playing scrabble online, and watching totally crap tv.  Ahhhhh...now thats a holiday!  I did shower and clean the kitchen and do the odd load of laundry, but mostly I sat in the living room going from tv to keyboard, to laptop, to iphone.  Bill can't stand it.  He gets really restless.  So he went out for three hours.  He drove down to where we can see the sunset at this time of year, took his book and sat there reading, waiting for the sunset.  He came back very happy.

I wrote another poem.  Just think I will have 99 poems on Jan 1 2013.  I don't think the song thing is going to happen though.  I just am not a song writer.

JUST ABOUT ALL MY PICS I AM BEHIND A CAMERA

THE GREAT WALL IN CHINA

OUR TRIP TO OAHU A COUPLE YEARS AGO

HE IS SO MUCH SKINNIER NOW...CA'NT SAY THE SAME FOR MYSELF THOUGH!!

EVEN MORE YEARS AGO

THE MAUI BANYAN CONDOS

IN A MIRROR...THE ONLY WAY I CAN TAKE A SELFIE!

GUATAMALA....LOVED IT THERE

JAN'S BEAUTIFUL GARDEN....I AM GOING TO COPY HER ONE DAY AND DO THIS...I LOVE IT!!!

A GOLF COURSE IN NORTH VAN....THIS IS THE PICTURE THAT MADE ME DECIDE I WAS GETTING A DSLR CAMERA

TWO NEW YORK LADIES HAVING LUNCH IN THE SQUARE

I did not take one pic yesterday.  So its back to the rolling mouse and randomly picking a few.  Today I am going to try to get outside!!  Maybe go swimming if its sunny enough.  Its been kind of cloudy and rainy the last couple days.  TTYL

GOGGLES AND BAGS

Yesterday was very quiet.  We took off to Kahului to pick up my glasses.  My very large googly eye glasses.  I needed glasses that would transition to sunglasses.  So my brilliant idea was to get big sunglasses and make them transitions.  So I picked out a perfect pair of sunglasses, and Lens Crafters has my prescription on the computer linked with North Van, so ten days later...voila! a pair of lovely glasses that turn into sunglasses outside.  What I hadn't realized, because I am quite blind and couldn't really see when I tried them on with no glass in them, is that not only do these large glasses allow the bags under my eyes be seen, but the bifocal MAGNIFIES them.  Man, I can't win!  Too bad, I am wearing them anyway.

We then decided to go out to Turtle beach to see the surf.  Its really up today.  We stopped in Paia at their food store there.  We hadn't been in there before.  I couldn't believe how big and well stocked the place is...and the prices are really good.  I bought two awesome delicious sandwiches, a bag of organic grapes (its a hippie town..so all is organic and healthy) and organic teas and nectars.  Loaded with a delicious picnic, we went out to turtle beach and we were most rewarded with huge waves and huge turtles.  I will post some pics and if you are a fb friend you will have already seen them.

We came back home to an awfully quiet empty condo :(  Its so hard to recover after visitors have left.  I don't get it.  At home I love company but I am always quite happy after.  Not here.  Its lonely without the chatter and trips we had each day.  Oh well.  Now we need to keep each other happy. Hahahahaha!!!

We went back to Costco near supper time, its quieter then and bought a few things.  One of them was a casio keyboard.  Only 70 bucks!  The 99 thing I am going to do.....Bill is going to give me a word a day, randomly, and I will write a poem.  I LOVE writing poetry.  Don't panic I won't be posting any of them here!!!  But I will write them and maybe put a tune to them...thus the keyboard.  Monte said that I can send them to him and he can produce them, sing them or whatever.  I am not sure that will happen but I already have the first two poems written.  I went to bed last night and then remembered he had given me a word that evening and I hadn't written the poem.  So I got up and quickly wrote a poem.  The word was claustrophobic.  Jeez!!! and today's word was healthy.  So poetic!

Now its really late today.  I will write about today tomorrow morning when I get up.  Huh?? Okay that sentence confused me.  TTYL