My Life in Hawaii: A Retrospective, Part II

Continuing the walk down memory lane with my birth month (October 5th if you want to send presents)

From October 2011...

Shawn and Kris getting engaged!

Celebrating my birthday with new friends

...To October 2012

They got me a shoe...that they found...on a fire hydrant...birthdays are fun.

Another day, another show...

Throwing a Halloween party with the fun folks of Late Night Theatre

From November 2011...

Being touristy with Joe

We're watching you...

...To November 2012

Voting is important!

November 2012 also featured Mexican Thanksgiving, but it was too epic for photos to do it justice. There were tacos. 'Nuff said. Moving on.


From December 2011...
 

Chistmasing in Waialua

...To December 2012

Surviving my first finals week since 2006

Ice skating in Hawaii!

Having a romantic Molokai getaway

And Joe closed out the year with the longest high five...

Continuing to be continued...

Vote

All the  cool kids are doing it. Seriously. Joe and I already went.

Everyone is telling you that THIS is the year you need to vote, that the issues are so important this election of all elections. And you are thinking that you hear that every election year, that people say EVERY year is the year that our whole future could change.

That's because IT IS. Every election affects your future, your rights, and the rights of those that you love. Please vote.

5:30 AM

Monday/Wednesday/Friday have become very early days. Why? Great question. Because we've all lost our minds. Koko Head: my nemesis (sorry, Steve, it has stolen your place).

How does a person wake up this early? You listen to this in the car on your way (if you are one of the lucky people never to have heard or seen this ridiculous video, please skip over it and continue on to the pretty pictures):




I have to (grudgingly) admit that Hawaii is still good at being pretty at 5:30am.

Sunrise looking towards Molokai from base of Koko Head.

Standing in the same place looking back to the West.

Sunrise at 6:15am looking out at the "ugly mountain" as Cher and I have now nicknamed Koko Head. We are waiting for enough light to start yoga. The boys are already climbing the ugly mountain.

7:15am

We are clearly insane. 7:30am, headed home.

Harry Potter and the Memory of Sunlight

One of the perks of House Management is having an office. Now that I have it, I seldom leave it. I hear that there is such thing as sunlight, but I'm not sure I believe it.  Matthew (my office mate/roommate) lives in this office with me (there is more to this room than pictured, I promise). One of us is always here and when we are both here we share chocolate and potato chips.

This is my desk, in my office at the theatre. Under the stairs. You can see all the essentials are there. Thermos full of hot coffee? Check! Mug and warmer to keep that coffee hot? Check! Speakers for blasting the sultry sounds of Adele while working? Check! Gently sloping roof for maximum space enjoyment? CHECK!!

In the back you can also see my yoga mat, always conveniently on hand, and in the foreground is my laptop on top of a text book. Missing from this picture? The huge pile of library books that is now ALWAYS on my desk because it is too much to take them all home (and who goes home, anyway?). Also missing from this picture? My house elf. Obviously.

Want!

Hawaii: A Year in Review

We arrived in Honolulu in August of 2011, tired and hungry. My brother carted us back to his apartment and we fell asleep.

Since then it has been a wild ride full of ups and downs and being thrown for lots of loops. The beginning was hard. I tried to keep a good face on it all for the internet, but internet, you should know: life sucked. School was not what we wanted it to be; life was not what we wanted it to be. Thank God, Hawaii is pretty.

We went from living like this:

We use boxes as furniture for a few weeks

Sleeping on the floor!

To living like this:

Kaneohe!

We miss this house...

In October things got busy.

Shawn and Kris are engaged

I turn a year older and celebrate with new friends

I stage manage the first show in the season for UH Manoa: Oklahoma!

The first five months here are rough, but by January we had a routine and I was starting to pull myself back up.

Joe and I threw ourselves into school projects and rehearsals for the randai show. Just as things seemed calm, Shawn and Kris had to move back to Florida. Two days before opening two shows (they opened the same night, back to back) we found ourselves moving everything we own into a very tiny apartment.

After that, we went through the agonizing process of deciding whether we wanted to stay in Hawaii, while waiting to find out if our tuition waiver applications had been accepted. When we moved here we agreed to give it one year and then reevaluate. Luckily we were both granted waivers and I was hired as the House Manager for the theatre.

Life has continued to change on us, over and over again. We've done tons of hiking, but thanks to a knee injury I am in physical therapy and unable to hike (or do anything fun) until further notice. We've mostly given up caffeine (gasp!!). Joe has withdrawn from UH but is still studying Asian acting styles. We are still doing yoga with Cher (thanks, Cher!). We've made some great new friends, and recently reconnected with some old-new friends as everyone has returned from their summer adventures.

I'm very excited to be off on this next leg of the journey, knowing that I have an amazing network of family, friends and colleagues to support me. Yes, the workload is stressful. Yes, I was crazy to take the particular combination of classes that I've chosen. Yes, I am unreasonably excited about my thesis project (and yes, it will be unreasonable in scope).

The past year was incredibly, horribly, awfully, terrible; I can't lie about that. It was also wondrous and made us both grow so much as people and has strengthened us as a couple. Looking back on the past year as our anniversary weekend comes to a close, I am sure for the first time that I am where I need to be right now.

Magic

Some people spend their Sunday mornings at church. It's a time to reflect, renew and find a new joy for living as we prepare for the week ahead. I like to do that too, but I don't go to church. I went to the library. This is my happy place, a calming place, smelling of books and full of wisdom.

Do you remember going to the library as a kid? For me it was always magical, exciting. When I was very young my grandma would take me to the main branch library for story time and afterward we'd feed the ducks in the pond outside. My parents took me to our local library all the time because my book habit would have bankrupted us if we always bought what I wanted (I'm still bitter that my Babysitters Club collection has gaps where Mom wouldn't buy a book and made me get it from the library instead). When it was library day at school I'd come home carrying as many books as I was allowed to take. My dad would pick me up from school on Book Fair days and I'd have bags of books, excited at my haul and ready to read them all that night.

I like books.

This morning, I got to relive that magic. I signed up for a library card. Do it. It's awesome. Do I sound like a public service announcement? Good.

The best part of the experience wasn't the browsing, though. It wasn't the armload of books I walked out with. The best part was the noise and chaos in the children's section. If it means that parents are reading with their children, then I never want another quiet library ever again. There must have been 20 families at the library this morning, attending a reading and activity session. Once it was complete almost every family stayed; I was thrilled to see parents helping their young children carefully choose books to take home with them and read. These are parents instilling a joy of reading in their 3,4,5 yr old children! I saw older kids too, walking out with bags full of books. Bags. Full. Of books!

Here was my favorite moment:
I'm sitting on the floor, browsing the graphic novels, pile of books already in my lap (I'd already hit up children's lit and young adult fiction) and I see two boys sitting on the floor to my left, with a book. The boys couldn't have been more than 6 years old. Dad is sitting in a chair just a couple of feet away, reading a book of his own. These boys have the book spread open across both of their laps and they are flipping through it together, discussing the pictures, enjoying the book together. Pointing at the page, I hear one say to the other, "Look at his tail!" His brother replies, "Yeah, it has a hand. That's clever for using underwater."

I have no idea what they were reading, but I'm sure the clever one was really their father, sitting in the library on a Sunday morning, listening to his kids learn to love reading.

Reality Check: Walmart

A little background:
We had no clean clothes. None. We were to that point where you pull out your last two clean pairs of underwear and they are the underwear that you never wear, ever. The ones you aren't sure why you still own because they are falling apart, don't fit right and are really uncomfortable. I'm wearing that pair of underwear when this story takes place, in case you were curious. We needed to do laundry.

In order to do laundry at our house/apartment, we must pay $1.25 into the washer and another $1.25 to the dryer or the little gnomes that live inside these machines and make them run will refuse to work for us. And the gnomes only accept quarters. We had no quarters, hence why no laundry had been done in many days at Hale Winskye. Quarters were needed. Banks were closed. What to do? Which is what I asked Joe. And he came up with what was probably the most horrifying answer I had ever heard; we must visit that beacon of all that is crowded, disorganized and wrong with the world: Walmart.

I try not to visit big-box stores if I can avoid it, fearing the sale-hunting crazies that will run me down with their carts or smother me between their close-pressed shoulders as they fight other shoppers for the last $.01 can of sardines on the shelf. Desperate to avoid the untold number of frustrations that Walmart has presented me in the past, I remained at home while my braver and calmer half went on the shopping mission. In case you didn't readily recognize him by the description I just gave, this is a story about Joe. It begins like this:

My brave (and sometimes ridiculous) husband, Joe, walks into our local Walmart. It's about a twenty minute drive from our house through sucky traffic and with convenient but frustrating parking (as in, parking is conveniently right out front but frustratingly difficult to find). He bravely enters the store, acquiring a loaf of bread and stands in an endless line to check out and beg for a roll of quarters. He's standing in his line, minding his own business, when, out of nowhere, he is approached by an elderly Asian woman. Pretend you are listening to Joe recount this next part in Elderly Asian Woman's voice.

"Oh, you are so handsome. Are they treating you well?" asks Elderly Asian Woman, looking around to indicate the store.

"Yes, thank you very much," laughs Joe.

"You have to spend a lot of money or they won't let you out of here," says Elderly Asian Lady conspiratorially, and then begins to walk away. After a moment she pauses, looks back at Joe with a sincere look of concern, and says, "I'm only kidding."

I can only image that at that moment, Joe let out a huge sigh of relief, and that Elderly Asian Woman, relieved that she has set the record straight about Walmart, continues on her way.

Happy shopping.

Reality Check: A Man and a Duck Walk into Waikiki

This sounds like the beginning to a joke, but let me assure you, I am not kidding. I'm laying on the beach, and I just happen to sit up for some reason, maybe I was going to flip over, maybe I was reaching for my water bottle. Whatever the reason, it was instantly forgotten when I spotted the duck sitting on the edge of the trash can. The duck wearing the tiny lei. The duck wearing the tiny lei that a man then picked up and placed on his shoulder as he began to walk away. I did the only reasonable thing I could do: I reached over and tapped Ray, pointing silently to the scene before us, then grabbed my phone and attempted to snap a photo. I then asked Ray if that had really just happened, he assured me that it had and then laid back down to return to his tanning.

About 20 minutes later as we are walking back through Waikiki on our journey home from the beach we once again spot the man and his feathered friend. Lucky for us he was walking in the same direction as us, chatting up some tourists who were eager to know if the duck was trained and if it could do anything else. I'm thinking to myself "Does it need to do anything else? It's wearing a tiny lei and riding on a human like he's a pack horse." This duck has his own transportation and a stylin' look. What else does he need to do?

The man responds: "Well, I can put him on my head and dance around."

Now that is something I'd like to see. Good work, duck. Make that guy dance for you.

Ducks are so clever.

Airplane

"When on an adventure and standing at the top of a hill there is only one thing to do:"

No imaginary adversaries were harmed during the imaginary shooting

"Airplane!"
-The Indomitable Joe Winskye

Reality Check: Driving

Imagine this:

You are driving to work. It's oh, say, 10:30am, traffic is moving along at about 45 mph, because the speed limit on the freeway is only 50 mph, but you are enjoying your drive. You see a pick-up truck to your right, let's say it looks something like this:

Totally normal, right?

Now picture a leg sticking out of that window on the side. The driver's window. Not a foot. An entire leg. Someone was driving with their entire left leg out their window. Ah, Hawaii.

Redecorating!

Our apartment is lovely, but it has one major flaw (well, two: we have no oven, either):

Joe, being from Massachusetts, cannot abide having this in our home

There were two of those; one was in the bedroom and the other in the bathroom. They were invading the private, safe spaces of our home. Something had to be done:

Bedroom

One by one, I began recovering all of our wall plates with vintage Hawaii photos found in an old guide book that I got at a Friends of Kaneohe Library sale. Helping the community and ridding our home of the Yankees at the same time? Yes, please! Here is how the rest turned out:

Bedroom

Bathroom

Bathroom detail

Lava flow!

Ancient and clunky fixtures in Joe's workspace...

Are replaced with images of young tribesmen..

...helping a chief with his ceremonial dress

 By my desk

The living room

Kitchen counter

Yes, this is supposed to be sideways- refrigerator plug

Kitchen light detail

See how this livens up our kitchen?!