Very deep inhale….

We played in the pool as much as we needed to to keep ourselves from melting into little sweaty puddles during the later part of last week. I’m not kidding, temperatures in the high eighties with humidity in the high eighties to mid nineties and absolutely DEAD still air. Sweltering. The Kona winds started picking up a little bit early this week, but were only hitting the leeward side of the island. It was still stinking hot in Kailua, but Honolulu was quite pleasant.
So Andrew and I packed up and went with Joan to Foster Botanical Gardens of which I will publish pictures as soon as I can pull them off the camera.
Lovely gardens (not that I’m prejudiced or anything) with some really remarkable trees and a WONDERFUL breeze.
One quiet Monday evening later, and Andrew and I were up and about on Tuesday doing a bit of house cleaning. What with the lack of windows, the constant (so to speak) breeze, Joan’s front garden, two children and a dog, the house gets a little grimy. Joan and Tony have a cleaning lady that comes in regularly, but she’d spent all her previous visit cleaning up the lanai so Meg & Rad could sleep there so Andrew and I took on the main house. All. Freakin’. Day.
Sweeping, dusting, mopping, laundering, vacuuming… House looks lovely, but Andrew and I spent the day cleaning for a while then overheating and falling into the pool, then sitting pool side to dry out for a while, going back in, changing clothes, and going back to cleaning again. We each had two pairs of shorts that we would switch in and out of. By the time we got overheated and had to fall into the pool the trade out pair of shorts would be dry so we’d swim, change into the dry pair, then go and clean and get hot again. Worked out very nicely.
Best teriyaki ever for dinner at a local place , Tokoname Sushi Bar and Restaurant. It was quite busy when we got there, so we sat at the sushi bar which provided some really decent entertainment. The sushi chef was good company which was fortunate because while Andrew’s sushi was prompt, due to a computer glitch my order for teriyaki didn’t get sent into the kitchen so I sat and watched Andrew eat and the production of additional sushi while I was waiting. Best teriyaki EVER! Marinated in a wonderful tart sauce that was just sweet enough but wasn’t sticky, great sticky rice…. Really a remarkable meal, and they comped us our drinks as well as purchasing us the green tea ice cream for dessert in compensation for the delay. All around a class act.

I got Kona winds for my birthday. Wednesday morning was cool and breezy. Andrew had been fussing for about the last week about whether or not I’d like my birthday present, whether it was my style or not. Andrew purchased me a new wallet, something I’d desperately been needing. The wallet is lovely, it’s very much my style and as an added bonus when I opened it up to start putting my wallet gunk in their new places, the following card was in the translucent driver’s license pocket. I have a photo, but, again, I’m not sure how to suck it off the camera. It’s business card size, cream colored with rust brown script reading “Fossil”.

If I were a different sort of person I’d be offended to have received such for any birthday after my 40th, but as it is I find the whole thing absolutely damn funny.

We took a circle island tour for my birthday. We love going out to the North Shore, and Haleiwa is always fun. We ate at the best burger joint on the island, Kua’aina, which doesn’t have its own website. Always way crowded, but we discovered that the best time to get there is about 15 minutes after they open. This was the only time we’ve been there that we haven’t had to wait for a table.
We didn’t plan on taking the whole circle island tour, but we ran across a least four separate places along the Kamehameha highway where there was roadwork and the highway was squished down to one lane. It was much easier, though absolutely less scenic, to drive through Wahiawa and Honolulu.
Quiet family dinner at home with chocolate cake from Agnes’ in Kailua. I am not, repeat NOT going to post the photo that Andrew took of me blowing out my birthday candles. Lucy very kindly read us The Story of Ping, did you have that book when you were a kid? Raise your hand. I thought so.
Anyway Lucy read Ping to us accompanied by Caitlin’s interpretive dance which wasn’t really supposed to be for our entertainment, but was mostly designed to make her sister laugh and stop reading. It didn’t work, but it was entertaining.

Thursday the onslaught began. Andrew and I went to pick up David and his new lady Dawn. Dawn is a charming woman who drives an elementary school bus in Kingman Arizona which seems to have prepared her well for dealing with a house full of SEVEN THOUSAND LENZERS. I’ll say it again. I love Andrew’s side of the family, but they’re all large, opinionated, and not shy about expressing same. A little overwhelming all at once.
Since this is Dawn’s first trip to Hawaii we puttered around the island a bit on our way home, got here, unloaded, then immediately went back out to get some stuffs for dinner. Astonishingly, except for the bags of (ergh) poi, the Safeway in Kailua is exactly like every single other Safeway that Dawn has ever visited. Joan was absolutely certain that the Safeway would be a new and exotic experience for Dawn.
Meg & Rad showed up later that evening, punchy and hungry since they’d been on an airplane or in an airport for nearly twelve hours. I’m REALLY happy we live right on a coast.
Yesterday we did some more island puttering with David, Dawn, and Caitlin, who has grown up into a charming young woman and is currently Andrew’s favorite toy. There’s just something about her that brings out the tease in her uncle and the pair of them together are just flat out funny. We went to Ala Moana, the major tourist mall in Honolulu, so David & Dawn could visit Crazy Shirts and so Andrew could make a pilgrimage to Shirokiya with which he has been enamored since we went there in 1992 and he found a massaging recliner that he’s waxed poetic about ever since. We went to Manoa so David could introduce Dawn to manapua and other esoteric okazu at Island Manapua Factory. We ended the tour driving up to the Pali lookout, getting damn near blown off the mountain, and wandering a short way down the Old Pali Highway. Absolutely stunning gorgeous, fascinating to see how the jungle is reclaiming this roadway along the side of the mountain that’s really only about 60 years old, and winds literally that we had to struggle against.
Sara came in yesterday evening bringing the total to nine people in the main house (three bedrooms, two baths) and four in the attached apartment (three bedrooms two baths). We had a very late, raucous, and thoroughly overdue dinner of Peppino’s pizza (Peppino’s also doesn’t have its own website, it’s barely got it’s own phone line). The pizza was superb, but it took TWO FREAKIN’ HOURS to make five pizzas. Andrew is absolutely enamored of the place, I’m a little lukewarm but mostly because I was quite hungry by the time we ate.
I’ll encourage Andrew to post the Peppino’s photo since it is very artistic.
We’ve mostly just been hanging today. I scored a trio of nice sparkly bracelets at an estate sale this morning and we amused the heck out of the people at most of the sales we went to this morning by having an entire van full of people. We really did look like a clown car.
The theory is that there are more people and more fish coming for dinner this evening. It’s a lovely pleasant mid-seventies with only about forty percent humidity and Andrew has been asleep for the entire two hours that I’ve been writing this. After the moon rises we’re probably going to go out to Lanikai and watch the moon over the Mokuluas.
Y’all really gotta try this sometime.