Parental Visit

We have a winner! My mom was the first out to visit us, proving she loves us the most and therefore winning the 'Who Gets to Hold Our Baby First' contest. Congrats mom!

Ha ha, just kidding.

Sort of.

(Actually, I found this hilarious picture on the internet, and was going to superimpose our faces on it - but, unfortunately, it looks like I am a photoshop retard, bc I couldn't figure it out. I gave up, so you get a cheesy pose shot instead.)

So my mom came to visit, randomly, for a week - which turned out to be great timing, as my temp job suddenly ended the week before she showed up. Which was maybe the only silver lining of that whole situation. Court took off work, so we had the whole week together. Before any of you reading this who know my mom and sister start asking, yes, they managed not to strangle each other. Progress!

So after the joy of seeing mom again died down, Courtney and I took stock and realized here was our mom, in Hawaii, with long johns. Her excuse was, "it's winter!" Yes, but it's winter in HAWAII, not Wisconsin. I tried to warn her of this before she came. This woman brought 1 pair of shorts and 1 short-sleeved t-shirt. So we spent the first day at Wal-Mart, buying mom appropriate island wear for her trip. The highlight of the shopping trip was seeing mom in one of those horrible local dresses that looks like it was sewn by 8 year old girls. She actually looked pretty good. Apparently theatrical local dress is good to her.

After, we headed over to Auntie Pastos, which is where my sister works some nights, for lunch. Mom wanted to see where we worked, which is why we ended up......

Laughing our asses off while hanging around the local high school, which is where my sister works during the day as a substitute teacher. Originally, Courtney and I had a full itinerary for her, of which we probably did less than half. It was a good balance between our 'let's show her everything in 6 days' and her 'just pretend like I'm a neighbor that happened to wander over.' (She actually said that to us)

So this ended up being of the best diversions from The Plan. It was here that I was offered my first in-depth view of the school system.

I haven't laughed so hard in ages.

Mom and I somehow ended up wandering into an English classroom for juniors and seniors - below is an actual representation of a story posted on the wall, written by a student who was somewhere around 17 years old.



I sincerely hope you clicked on this picture and blew it up so you could read it. I mean, REALLY!? Wow.

And people ask why we won't have kids over here. Other offerings included the subjects of princes slipping on diamonds, and how being in a gang sucks, but it keeps them out of Child Protective Services - all with a hefty dose of grammatical suicide. Maybe you had to be there, but we were glad it was after school and no one was around to watch us laughing.

Below, Courtney gets some inspiration from the story and works it into the classroom. Maybe she is trying to connect with the students on their level.



The day was rounded out with a game of Settlers of Cataan. The first time I played this was with some friends (the Dyes and Saugiers) and we were trounced so quickly and soundly by the Dyes that I thought this game was stupid. I have since reversed this decision, and now have the strategy of Get the Longest Road which always leads to Tiffany Winning. It's like a constant. As you can see, below is a proper representation of how most games end. (Mom's mustache is 2 road pieces - cute mom!)



We had such fun, we decided to play again the following night - and mom decided to adopt my strategy of 'get longest road'. It was cutthroat, dear readers. Mom and I stubbornly fought each other while Courtney quietly kicked our asses. I learned it's not as much fun when you don't win.
The next day we headed out to the North Shore, with the Dole Plantation detour, of course. Below is a picture I will treasure forever. Mom as a giant pineapple and not disguising her disgust. Classic. She spent most of her time at the plantation communing with the birds nearby.

However, she did emerge to come look at the pineapple growing in the sample garden. They always look weird to me - like someone saw a bush and placed a pineapple in it, not that it grew there naturally. I wonder if, secretly, employees wander around the garden at night with giant jugs of super-glue.

That just doesn't look natural.

We stopped at the outdoor shopping area in Halewia, which has some great things in it. Having lost track of mom, we wandered over to a section of the area that I've never seen - and there she was, making best friends with strangers. It was actually an outdoor music studio, and they were playing jazz. Only Mom could find jazz in Hawaii. We left with new friends and a personalized CD they recorded while we were there.

Overjoyed that Giovanni's Shrimp Shack was parked nearby, we pounded yummy plates of fresh-caught shrimp and took in some local entertainment, which I won't go into here for the sake of that poor girl.

Here we are at Papioloa Beach - which doubles as the set of Lost, which David and I found extremely cool.

It is kinda weird to see a place you watch on TV in real life. This was a pretty, deserted beach, where I had fun watching Mom break several environmental laws. It was kind of like having a little kid, "Oh no Nancy! We stay away from the pretty turtles!"

There are a lot of turtles napping on the beach, and it is illegal to get within 50 ft (I believe) to to walk between them and the ocean.

So Courtney and Mom did God knows what for a long time while David and I amused ourselves with the sets. They were all wrapped up in plastic, so it wasn't perfect, but you could see everything just fine. Giant security guys were lurking around making sure we didn't take an souvenirs, so it was mildly creepy - they kinda stalked us up the beach. At least it seemed that way to me. David would probably say I was being silly.

The main camp.

The kitchen! You can see the Dharma symbols on everything

The unfinished Church

Mom and Court bonding over shell-searching

Of course, no trip to the North Shore is complete without at stop at Matsumoto's - as you can see, usually everyone else has the same idea. But the line moves pretty quick.

One day, we went on a hike - Maunawili Falls.

It was a great hike, and to the waterfall it was fairly uneventful. Court climbed up and jumped off the falls - I attempted to tape it on her camera, but as you can see, I apparently suffer from Parkinson's.

However, on the way home I never saw mom. Apparently someone at some point said something to mom about being old(?) or slow(?) or something, and she was all about showing them wrong. So she was basically racing back to the car. It got to the point where I was stopping random people coming the other direction and asking if they had passed a crazy old lady power-walking (running like a dork) at high speed.

"Yeah, she was really moving!"

So, thank god we eventually caught up, and mom hadn't fallen on the rocks or anything. She's a spry old lady. And she'll kill herself proving it to you.

Afterward, we went and hung out at Lanikai - Mom went off along the beach by herself, so I just went wading in the water,

and my dog ate sand. I feel like I have a retarded child or something. And I used to laugh at tourists who couldn't keep their kids from shoveling handfuls of it in their mouths. Serves me right.

Mom's trip was pretty low-key, which is what I think she wanted. She cooked one night, we hung out, no crazy adventures.

Mom apparently loves Don Ho

Attempting to steal food from David - never a good idea. David makes good use of his Chopstick Defense.

An Amicable Conclusion

Dinner at our sushi place - Kuhio Sushi

So, her time here ended and she went home. It was wonderful to see her, and I wish it could happen more often. Thanks for coming out, Mom!

When Thugs Forget Raincoats

Today's Forecast: 70% chance of a shoot up.

My Dog is Mentally Unbalanced

You've gotta love dogs - they don't need much to joyfully entertain themselves.

We have recently discovered that sand is acceptable in it's beach form, but small clots must be immediately destroyed. The new beach game is to fling compacted handfuls of sand in the air and watch Lily fling herself at them. It is quite hysterical in real life. Maybe I'll film it so I can post it and satiate my new video craze. Until then, here are some pics:

Note the clots of sand around her head.

The incentive

She wore herself out.

David loved this picture, because it reminds him of those cat pictures on the internet. He thought this one was a good 'invisible bike'. I think it looks like 'an invisible giant has her by the scruff of the neck'. But that is too long of a title to be funny. Oh well. See below.

Immaturity Reigns

When I saw these, they made me laugh.

Further proof I'm not ready for motherhood.

I spend a fair amount of time on the internet perusing its truly disturbing depths, so I think I'm going to start having a random internet wackyness post every now and then. Share the madness.

Take Cover

Have you ever been in a war zone?

Of course, I haven’t either, but I got as close as possible this weekend. NEW YEARS! Which, over here, is apparently synonymous with spending 2 month’s salary on fireworks. David and I prepared in our normal way – going out to buy some fun sparklies to ring in the New Year. After that year David set an artillery shell off in his face and I thought I was going to be married to a blind man, there has been a ban on anything larger than a bottle rocket.

Back to the story: for weeks everywhere we went there were firecracker sections – Wal-Mart, Sears, I even saw one in Macy’s. Not to mention Sams and Costco – the giant bins that previously held enormous packages of fireworks were pathetically empty by Saturday. David had people pull him aside at work and solemnly ask him if he knew what a big deal firecrackers were over here, and I heard stories from my boss about firecrackers he has bought that 2 grown men could not get their arms around. I’m not even sure you can call them firecrackers at that point – more like FireBombs. Is that even legal? I honestly think that maybe a full 1/3 of the fireworks supply consumed by our great nation was concentrated on Oahu. Some of you are wondering why we never go down to Waikiki for big celebrations. While I am sure that it would have been cool for our first New Years here, we have a fervent wish to not die on the roadways. I will explain sometime later when things quit happening to us, and I have space for some misguided opinions on Hawaii in general. Get excited. When New Years itself finally rolled around, we were fairly low-key. Having family around that you can hold hostage to hang out with you comes in pretty handy, so we planned on hanging out together later that evening. However, over here partying starts at 10 am, which was when we started hearing the sonic booms and pops of the fireworks. Court actually had to work that night, so we dropped by to have dinner while she was still on shift. After, I needed to run by the store, which was where I came upon the Last Scrambling. In truth, it really wasn’t that bad, but David got into the spirit with his timeless logic that he should be given everything on sale, because in a few hours, what were they going to do with any leftovers?

David's flair for the dramatic

One thing that I noticed while there was the smoke. Courtney works in an area called Waipahu, and while it is still on the outskirts, there are a fair amount of people living there. By 8:00pm the smoke from all the firecrackers was already so thick, I was starting to cough. By 8:00, people. It felt like you were in a giant chimney. Naturally, we felt the need to add to the general smog, so around 10 we headed out to do our part in destroying the ozone layer.

I like sparklers.

But first, Paul decided now would be a good time to test his new spear using a hapless Taco Bell cup as skeet. Please, don't drink and spear. I stayed well out of the way.

Manly triumph

I was actually kind of impressed. I think he got it the first try. After hiking into the wilderness for what felt like forever, we finally found a clear spot where we had a better chance of not burning the whole place down to the ground. We had fun; Courtney and I dancing like idiots with our sparklers, the boys naturally freaking the hell out of us by throwing smoke bombs at our feet – of course, you couldn’t tell they were smoke bombs – all we saw was a lighted fuse heading your way. There was much high-pitched screeching, and your basic young-people hijinks. If you look closely, you can see David throwing the firework in the right-hand corner.

You know those tiny fireworks that come packed in sawdust and pop on impact? We are going all Riverdance on a bunch of those in this picture.

Running from a boy-propelled firework

Best of all, the night produced this awesome video below:




If you don't recognize the totally boss theme music, you have not seen Arrested Development – for shame. You must head out immediately and mend the error of your ways.

Our booty spent, we reached a rise in the hike back to the house just as midnight hit; I’m not sure I can even describe what happened next. One important thing to note is that there are practically no fireworks restrictions – just about anyone can set off fireworks in their front yards. So, that small detail combined with the housing reaching back into the sloping hills gave us a great view. It was like Stadium Seating for fireworks. You know that scene in the movie where Armageddon has hit, and the main character looks out over the vast land/city -scape and you can see bombs going off everywhere? It was just like that. But with less death and slightly less destruction. It was incredible.

After the finales, which never actually ended until a few hours later, we traipsed home to match our wits: Girls Against Boys Cranium. Without saying, we absolutely crushed the boys… twice. It was almost sad. David claims lucky rolls and easy questions…. I say the questions were only so easy in the shadow of our stunning brain power. Even though watching David act out ‘Cocktail Dress’ was pretty humorous, I sadly take the cake with my mind-bending interpretation of ‘Butternut Squash’. I think the closest Courtney got was ‘Butternibble Crush”. Who came up with these dumbass words? Did they actually let the people out of the sanitarium, or was it done all in-house? I looked ridiculous. Thank God we didn’t have the camera rolling for that one.

Notice David's happy face. This must have been taken before we destroyed them.