From time to time I’ll take a bunch of pictures and splice them into a panoramic picture. To date I don’t think I’ve posted many, if any, of them here.

Here is one that I did a little while ago and just found again yesterday. This is the view from Makapu’u Lighthouse looking towards Waimanalo, on the eastern side of the island. There is a hiking trail that gets you there that only takes about 20 minutes. Really amazing view.

I have been extremely lax in my posting, so I’ll start with some baby steps.

I bought this surfboard in San Diego over two years ago and and finally used it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It was a little dinged up when I bought it, so it required a bit of rehab before I could use it. It remained in that state for quite sometime, until just recently, when I finally got around to fixing it.

Surfing is no joke I am finding, this being the first time I’ve used a hard top (all fiberglass) versus the soft top (foamy top, slick bottom) and after a few hours, my chest was freakin’ sore.  We went out to White Plains Beach, which is on the other side of the island from us, but has more consistent waves. My performance was…lets just say it was a humble beginning.

Here is a pic of the finishing touches. It wasn’t quite seaworthy until it had it’s skull and cross-bones.

Before I go on, let me take a moment to mention that I do not know exactly when I became a foodie, but looking at the percentage of kitchen/cooking items we had on our wedding registry, I’d say we are certified now.

Anyway, so we get to talking about sharing recipes. Kathleen goes back up to LA, and within a few days, has taken things into her own hands and created FEED THE EMPIRE. It’s a great idea, and between a few of us, we’ve already got 10 posts in two weeks. Be sure to check it out and add it to your RSS feed so you can get all of our great updates.

Well today, that changes. You will notice to the left, there is now a food category. Not that I’m catching up quite yet, but last week we had some food that was blog-worthy. While in Hawaii we found shark steaks at the grocery store. Having never heard of, or tried such a thing, we bough two and did some internet searching and asking around on how to prepare them. We decided on a baked, lemon-ginger with pepper recipe which was really good. Served with couscous and salad it was a delicious dinner. Two steaks was pretty ambitious though, so we had enough for leftovers. I’m pretty please with what we did.

We reheated the shark and toasted some bread. We had some avocados that we added along with some lettuce, tomato and balsamic vinegar. Here is the final result, which I must say, was better than the first night we had it.

Shark bite.

Mr. Burns: "You dolt, use an opened-faced club, a sandwedge." Homer: "Hmm, opened-faced club sandwitch."

How awesome is  Hawaii? well the other day I was driving down the road and what did I have to stop for?

That’s right, peacocks. Three of them, just hanging out in the middle of the road. When was the last time you even A) saw a peacock B) saw multiple peacocks C) saw multiple peacocks in the wild D) had to stop your car due to peacocks in the road.

Personally I’ve never had to stop my car for anything other than a squirrel, dog, maybe a cat, or an animal- like person. I imagine in some parts of the world stopping for cows or sheep is common, but a peacock? that’s just crazy.

Another kind of odd thing we came upon in Hawaii was this, though as a designer, my mention of this is not in a good way:

I'm blue blah bloo ble blah bo blah.

A blue stop sign? really? I’m not even sure what that means. You can have a red octagon that doesn’t have any words on it and people know that it means “stop”, but this? it’s like changing the colors of a traffic light to purple, orange, and aquamarine. Weird. There were also several of these in this mall parking lot, so it was cleary intentional and not a mistake.

Even with these crazy blue stop signs, we’re pretty pumped to be moving there and calling this place home for a while.

Who got da keys to ma beemah

I have to say, our apartment is pretty sweet, and in a great part of town. We’re in Kailua, which is a cool little beach town on the east side of the island, or as they call it here, the windward side. Our criteria for finding a place was walking distance to the beach, a bar or three, a coffee shop and a supermarket. It was ambitious, but the town of Kailua said “I’ll see your criteria and I’ll raise you several bars, restaurants, and some other good stuff”. One of the bars is a Karaoke bar, which is major points, our new landlord took us to a great Chinese restaurant yesterday, there is  a Safeway practically next door, a hardware store, a sushi place, a book store…the list goes on.

Close to beach, bars, supermarket, etc.

Now all I need is a bike with a surfboard rack , and we’ll be all set.

More to come on the inside of the apartment, and our painting or the walls.

I was able to score a beach cottage at Bellows Air Force Base which, honestly isn’t much of a base, except for some sweet beach-side cottages. I’m not sure how I managed to get us a spot in one of these cottages on such short notice, because they are apparently pretty high demand (especially for weekends), but one way or another, it happened. Now that we are here, I can see why they are so coveted. They are freaking amazing. We got one that is called a “Un-renovated Cottage”, which would imply that there are also, better, recently renovated, cottages as well. This place has a full kitchen a really nice living room, full bath, a room with two twin beds and another room with queen size bed.

Oh and the view isn’t so bad either:

Step out our from door, and this is what you got.

Our view out the back, our cottage being the one on the left.

It’s amazingly beautiful here, and since we so diligent in finding an  awesome apartment, we get to just hang out and enjoy the scenery for a few more days. Oh, and I’m pretty sure finding an apartment in a day and a half is a new record, at least for me.

More to follow on the apartment itself, which if you have the grace of knowing us, you will have to come and see personally. So start planning those trips now. You pay the airfare, we’ll provide the bed and maybe some waffles.

Another scenery shot.

Here are a couple of random pictures from the drive we took last week from New Orleans to San Diego.

Pausing for a pit stop and a scenery shot.

I always watch for snakes Mr. Sign, but thank you for reminding me.

Those crazy Texas, so clever.

I mean, who can drive through Texas without seeing something silly.

The long road.

We bid farewell to New Orleans, yet again, last Friday, which sucked as usual. Generally speaking, things get easier the more times you do them, like say, typing, or re-shingling a roof. The experience of doing something over and over makes it less strenuous. This is not true, however, for leaving or moving, which I have had the fortune of doing practically annually for the last six years.  True, I am damn-good at packing, and stacking boxes in an efficient manner, but the act of leaving good friends and family behind, has not been getting any easier. In fact, it is getting harder.

I’m not going to to lie, it’s great to meet new friends, but I’m realizing more and more that the friends we made in college are really a great group of people. That sets the bar pretty high for all subsequent friend encounters. Some people can hold up to the precedent, others, not so much. Knowing that we’ve found some great people makes leaving hard, every single time. We leave New Orleans knowing that the next time we move back, its will be for good.

Ok, so enough crying in my beer, lets talk about his drive. It was pretty ambitious, and though google quotes us as 1,835 miles, the odometer on our Honda read 1,943 after the three day journey. We left New Orleans around 1 pm on Friday, and arrived on Sunday at about 10:30 pm.  According to google, here is the breakdown:

• New Orleans, LA to Austin, TX– 533 mi – about 8 hours 36 mins
• Austin, TX to Deming, NM– 677 mi – about 9 hours 54 mins
• Deming, NM to San Diego, CA– 624 mi – about 8 hours 54 mins

It was a pretty ambitious drive, and we did it with a small trailer attached to the Accord, ta boot. We listened to books on tape (or ipod, rather) most of the drive, which made it go pretty smoothly. As far as drives go, it was not bad at all.

There was also no tire blow-outs, or car flipping, so that was a plus as well.