Happy Turgoduccochiqua Day!

Things I am thankful for:

1) Dragons — They're always there when I need a warm up and nobody understands me like they do.

2) Friends — I saw a couple of them last night and it's so great to reconnect with people when you haven't seen them in a while. Constant companions rock.

3) Being able to have just a part-time job for the last six months — It really helped me relax from the tension I'd been building up previously, and do a lot of different things I'd not have had time to do otherwise.

4) Technology — I know it seems materialistic and maybe it is, but I love love love technology. It makes so many things easier and makes so many things possible. Little electronics are your friends.

5) Mass transportation — What little there is in Seattle (Could be worse, right?) and the great bus system in Honolulu that got me around perfectly for so many warm years.

6) The guys at the fish and meat counters at Whole Foods — For giving us "WOW!" samples and making our Turgoduccochiqua dreams come true.

7) That our car is paid off.

8) My eyebrows — Thanks mom!

9) Mi familia — They always seem to be causing me a lot of grief, but the truth is that I wouldn't be anything like the person I am if it weren't for them. Some people might argue that's a bad thing, but I don't know any other way to be and I think I'm pretty spiffy.

10) Cats — The furrry purries and the fluffy tuffies, not the musical.

hey.

How about that? I'm an aunt!

Born today: Kaela Jordanne FeBenito. 4 lbs. 11 oz.

I hear she's perfect in every way. Can't wait for pictures!

Places we ate in Hawaii

• Aoki Shave Ice
  
• Liliha Bakery
  
• Champion Bakery
  
• Tai-Pan Dim Sum
  
• Zippy's (twice)
  
• Moana Surfrider Beach Bar (just me)
  
• Shogun (all you can eat crab!)
  
• Dixie Grill and Crab Shack
  
• Green Papaya
  
• Panya
  
• Cafe Laufer
  
• Magoo's Pizza
  
• Bubbies
  
• Ba-Le
  
• Yummy's Korean BBQ
  
• Curry House CoCo Ichibanya
  
• Camellia's (just mike. that jerk. twice.)
  
• Rada's Piroski (just me again)
  
• Hungry Lion
  
• Mai Tai Bar (@ Ala Moana)
  
• Island Manapua Factory
  
• Libby's Manapua
  
• Liu's Chop Suey
  
• Gloria Jean's
  
• Shirokiya
  
• Poi Bowl (just me)
  

This explains why I always gain weight when I go on a trip back home.

On the bright side, I think we did eat everywhere I've been missing and we had some great great eats. Honolulu —such a great place to be hungry.

Easy does it

One wedding down and one to go.

It was a good, nay...great...wedding. Fun and lively and, well, big. I was pretty worried that we'd know not many people there. Of course, we did know people there, and once we were seated for the reception, we made pretty good acquaintance of the folks we were seated with.

Also, turns out, one of my buddies from high school was there! With his twin brother! They're cousins of the bride, and I never knew.

Here's a lesson for you mainlanders: In Hawaii, it's always a smaller world than you think it is.

We saw my sister and her husband and my niece to be yesterday. She's developing nicely, I must say. Jordan's very friendly. I never got too much chance to talk to him before, and I'm glad my sister married someone so cool and nifty. I think they and Mike got along pretty well too, which is important.

Next time we come back, there'll be one more person for us to visit. Trés cool.

Tomorrow, I think we're seeing ever awesome W and possibly doing some other stuff — maritime festival maybe?

It seems promising!

Island of the Primitives

So we're here in Kalihi. We thought we'd be fairly "off the wired grid" for the duration of our weddings going vacation, but we first took advantage of the open wireless at the Apple store and procured the information needed to get free internet at the Kalihi house. That is to say, we got the UH dial-up information.

That's right, dial-up. I haven't been on a connection this slow since I got cable in early 2000. In fact, since I had 56k dial-up for a couple years before that, I actually haven't been on a connection this slow in almost 7 years. That's right, I'm on a 28.8k connection. Yikes. You'd think that UH would maybe upgrade their modem pool to 56k sometime, but on the other hand, you'd also expect them to clear out the usernames and passwords of people who haven't been at their school for 5 years.

Thank you, nameless bureaucracy and laziness for the free dial-up, however slow it may be.

Anyway, we did pretty much all the wedding related shopping we needed to do yesterday and today (after Mike gets his requisite amount of work done) we'll see a movie, probably Jarhead, and have dinner at Dixie with the Febenitos to get acquainted with my niece to be.

Tomorrow is wedding number one.

...

it's amazing how much things change when you're not looking.

When you're here in my childhood home, you can see all the way up into the verdant crack of the mountains all the way down to the sea on the other side. it's a breathtaking view if you're not accustomed to it. While Washington is a very green state (well, it is the Evergreen State, it's not this green, this jungle lushness that thirsts for sunbursts of showers and afternoons of uninterrupted heat. I suppose I miss that.

I miss the effortless "gardening" that mostly involved planting what you wanted where you wanted it to grow and waiting for it to be done. I miss the eight kinds of fruit that I could go outside to just grab off a tree — mango, avocado, pommelo, mountain apple, jackfruit, tamarind, guava, banana, and avocado again. To be fair, we never ate those bananas, so I'll call it seven.

Here in the valley, things seem pretty much the same. They've added a traffic light down by the shopping center, but other than that, it seems about the same. I can't say the same for the town areas. As we were driving around yesterday and the day before, the things we said we as much "That place used to be..." as "That's where we used to..."

. . .

It's kind of funny the way you see things with new eyes when you've been away for a long time. Neither of us had noticed before that the building across the street from the Zippy's by Washington Intermediate was the Miss Hawaii Building. And why would we?

To make a long story less long, it's good to be home again. I've missed you.