WEEDING THE GARDEN

Aloha! Jackie and I have spent the better part of today working in our garden. Wow I know you probably won't believe this but snorkeling is a lot more fun than weeding! My back and fingers are killing me and the worst part of it is that we are only a little more than halfway done. I firmly believe that if more people had to pull weeds from the garden the world would have a lot fewer vegetarians! I know today I feel let the cows eat the weeds and the vegetables then I will be more than happy to eat the cows! But I guess I shouldn't complain as we have had a gorgeous day...beautiful blue skies with large puffy white clouds and temps in the upper 70's and I do remember how Mom always seemed to enjoy pulling weeds. I think she liked to have something to do to take her mind off what ever was bothering her. I just feel bad that too many times what was bothering her was me. Of course I'm not crazy enough to think I was the only one she was stressing about even if my grandkids do call me Crazy-Joe! The video I posted is some more of our snorkel from yesterday. About half of it is a close-up of a moorish idol. I think the markings on their face are really cool. Tomorrow we will try to finish the garden...that is if I can drag my self out of bed!

MORNING SNORKEL

Aloha! Jackie and I have enjoyed another great day here on Kauai. The weather has been awesome with temps in the mid 70's and patchy clouds. We took advantage of this weather and headed to Anini. The beach was all most deserted. There were a few couples strolling along the beach and a few people spread out along the shore but Jackie and I had the water all to ourselves and it was awesome, flat as a lake with very little current and great visibility. We saw our usual friends all except Mr. Honu. We swam to his usual hangouts but no luck. We did run across a very odd looking thing though. It must have been some kind of invertebrate. It was red and about 4 inches wide, 12 inches long and about 1 inch thick. It looked like a cows tongue with two small eyes!

SLOWLY BACK TO NORMAL

Aloha! Jackie and I have enjoyed a very quiet day here on Kauai. We washed the car this morning and made a trip into Princeville to get a few groceries with stops at the bank and at the post office on the way. Other than that it has been very laid back, at least for me. Jackie has been a bit busier but that is normally how it is. Today she was kind enough to get our taxes figured out and filed. While she was doing this I headed down to Cory's to watch a little tv and talk story with him and Alex. The weather has been great...blue skies and temps in the mid 70's. It was pretty cold last night though. The weather man said it got down to 58 in Lihue. Not sure how cold it was here but cold enough that we kept the blankets on all night although we did have the door open! Tomorrow we are hoping to get back into the water. It seems like it's been a lot longer than a couple of weeks since we have snorkeled yet those same two weeks just flew by when we were at home. Funny the way that works!

IT'S NICE TO BE HOME

Aloha! Jackie and I are glad to be back to sunny Kauai! Our flight got here at about 4 this afternoon. Wow...what a difference a few hours and a couple of thousand miles can make! It was a bone chilling 22 when we left Pasco this morning at 6:30 and not much better in Seattle where it was 33 and snowing. Things did improve when we got to Honolulu though where it was mid 70's and overcast. Nice but not nearly as nice as it was here. We arrived to sunny skies and temps near 80. We were even able to see a whale breaching at Kealia beach on the way home. He was about 300 yards off shore and made a huge splash when he breached. We thought about stopping at the overlook to see if we could catch a little bit more of the show he was putting on but decided that a cup of coffee and a chance to stretch our legs at home was a better idea! We had so much fun on our trip home and we already miss everybody. I can't ever remember two weeks passing so quickly. I wish it was where we could have slow time down some so we could have visited more but this trip just went by too quick. Hopefully we can make it back over in the not too distant future.

ITS COLD

Aloha! Jackie and I enjoyed a very nice flight. Everything was on time, no hitches, no drama. All in all, as pleasant a flight as anyone could hope for. We arrived in Pasco at 11 pm to foggy skies and temps in the upper 20's...you know the typical January night for eastern Washington! Jackie and I were waiting on the tarmack for Horizon Air to bring over the courtesy cart with our carry ons. We had been there for maybe 2 minutes when Jackie turned to me and said now I remember why we moved to Hawaii...I'm freezing my okole off! I told her she shouldn't feel like the Lone Ranger and we grabbed our bags and made a mad dash for the warmth of the terminal. This was the first time in over 3 years that Jackie and I have been anywhere where it has been cold enough to see your breath! I think Jackie and I are going to head to Grandview this morning while the kids are in school. We have so many things we want to get to and we can already feel the two weeks slipping away fast.

ALMOST READY

Aloha! Jackie and have been getting all the last minute details out of the way in preparation for our trip. We fly out of Lihue in the morning at 9:42 and we won't be arriving in Pasco until 11:00 tomorrow night so we have a full day of sitting on planes and waiting in airports to look foward to. Of course we also have 3 precious grandsons and other friends and family we are dying to see waiting on the other end so the reward will more than make up for any sacrifices we will have to make! Our last full day here on Kauai has been beautiful...mostly sunny skies, lite trades and temps in the mid 70's. We took advantage of this nice weather and took sandwiches to the beach. The surf is on the rise and today the waves looked to be in the 10 to 12 foot range. We sat in our chairs watching the waves break over the reef at Anini for about an hour. Guess we should have taken a few videos but it seems the video never captures the waves like they are in person. Maybe some day you all can come to Hawaii and see what it is I'm talking about!

SUNNY SATURDAY

Aloha! It has been a very nice day...the temps have been in the mid 70's with mostly sunny skies and lite winds. Not sure how much longer this weather is going to last though as they are predicting heavy rain for later tonight and Sunday. Jackie and I took advantage of this wonderful weather and headed to the beach. This will probably be our last chance to snorkel as we will be flying out Tuesday. We had a real nice snorkel and saw a new eel. As close as we could tell from our book this is some kind of snake eel. They only have pictures of 2 varieties in our book and this guy was neither one but the book also said there are 17 different varieties with 6 of them only being found in Hawaii. This guy was pretty cool. He was almost 4 feet long but real skinny and round almost like a garden hose. The book also says these guys are rarely seen by divers and snorkelers and as you can watch him disappear into the sand you will understand why. After we got home from the beach I took a very long nap and Jackie worked with the scanner. She scanned the pics from our wedding and we put them in a web album on Picassa. Neither Jackie or I have worked with Picassa very much and we are slowly learning some of the things it will let you do.

NEW SCANNER

Aloha! Well it has been another exciting day for Jackie and I. We started our day off by taking Cory's car into Kapa'a to renew his safety sticker. Jackie and I had a blast! It has been awhile since I have driven a car that sounded so cool! It just kind of rumbles...not real loud like some of the imports but that real low throaty rumble we used to enjoy hearing when we cruised the gut as a young punk kids out looking for trouble. It was probally a lucky break for Jackie and I that we didn't see anything wilder than a V6 Mustang today otherwise we might have had to see just what that Camaro has for go! PS Cory doesn't read our blog so Jackie and I might just be able to sneak off with his car again unless one of you guys rats us out! After we got home from Kapa'a it was so nice out that we decided to head to Anini. The conditions were ideal. We snorkeled all the way out to the outer reef and saw a lot of fish, only coming in because we were both starved. We dried off and headed home in search of some vittles, stopping at the post office on the way. Good thing that we did as our new scanner was there. We weren't looking for it to arrive before Monday but so glad that it did. I have turfed the job of getting our photos scanned to Jackie and I will act as her assistant! She scanned these pics in for me so Icould post them on our blog. The first one was taken at our wedding over 35 years ago. That's Vernon and Sue Sartain standing up with us at a small wedding chapel in Vancouver WA. The next photo was taken at Newport Beach in Oregon 1983 I think.The next photo was taken at our house on Olmstead the same year. The last photo was taken in 2001 at Brian's. Brent is only a few days old in this pic.

BACK IN THE WATER

Aloha! Jackie and I have had an awesome day. We began the day with a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee on the lanai. It was very nice...the birds were jabbering up a storm and the sky was blue. Cory got home from his night shift at about 8:30 so we talked story with him until he decided that a little sleep would be nice. He headed on into his room for a little shut eye and Jackie and I decided to head to town. Jackie wanted to get her hair cut and I needed to check on some tires at Costco for Cory's car. Jackie's hair cut was no problem, she was in and out in no time. Costco was about the same thing. The tires Cory wants aren't on hand but Costco will order them and have them here in about a week. We ran into at least 3 different rain showers on the way home but decided that we were going to get in the water after lunch regardless! We were both glad that we did. We had an awesome snorkel...saw a ton of fish, swam with our friend Mr. Honu and even ran across a pair of flying gurnards. One small one about 6 or 7 inches long...he was pretty boring and just sat there. The larger one was about a foot long and he was very active. He is the one in the clip. If you will look you can see a cornetfish in this video. He stayed about 3 feet behind this gurnard. Not sure what he was doing, maybe hoping the gurnard would scare him up some lunch! We also saw a stripebelly puffer. He was asleep on the bottom. I shot a few picks of him also but will wait for another post to show you them. This guy was sleeping so soundly! I nudged him with my fin just to see if I could get him to blow up like a ball for you guys but he just swam about 3 feet and settled back to the bottom, fast asleep! We left him alone as Jackie and I both know how it feels to be that tired and we didn't want to torture him. While we were in the water it rained on us a couple of times. Nothing very hard but enough that it produced a beautiful rainbow. I took a short clip of it and also a still but as my camera was all wet it didn't turn out too great. Seems there were a few water droplets on the lens! We did get some of a rainbow after Jackie and I got out of the water. We used our little Flip camera and it came out ok. We put them at the start of our little video.

RAINBOWS

Aloha...Jackie and I have had a day that is very hard to describe. It has been filled with both tears and laughter. Mom's funeral was today and even though we decided to stay in Hawaii thanks to my beautiful neices Cindi and Jodi, both my great nephew Ryan who is in Baghdad at the moment and myself were able to be there thru the use of the internet. Cindi called and talked with Jackie last night. She was able to explain to us what steps we needed to take so we could watch and listen to everything. Not sure what all the steps were...all I know is everything worked great. Jackie, Cory and I were able to be there seated in the front row. We were able to talk with a lot of the family and even though they couldn't see us, we could see and hear them. I don't know how I will ever be able to thank them enough for taking a day that was going to be filled with nothing but sadness for Cory, Jackie and I and making it a day that was also filled with joy. I was so proud of all my family and the courage they showed by standing up and honoring our Mom. All of the many memories they shared went a long way towards healing our loss.

TRIP TO TOWN

Aloha! It has been another wet and cloudy day here on Kauai. The temperature topped out somewhere in the low 70's so Jackie and I have spent a good deal of the day inside going over are old photos. We have a lot of pictures of when the kids were small and we always said that someday we would go thru them, putting them on cds so they would be protected and easier to access. Well it finally dawned on these two simpletons we have the time now to do this. It only took us about 3 years to discover this and as soon as we get back from our trip we should be able to start. We wanted to start today and even made the trip to town looking for a decent scanner but that was a bust. It did get us out of the house for awhile though and we found what we wanted on the web after we got back. Our new scanner should arrive on the 12th but as were flying out on the 13th doubt if we will get much done with the pictures before we leave.

SUNDAY

Aloha! It has been a soggy day for Jackie and I with just enough sun to entice us to the beach but more than enough rain to insure that we stayed in the car! Lucky for us we had stopped at Subway so we had plenty to eat while we watched the waves. Other than our beach trip it has been a day spent watching tv and talking story. We are really looking foward to our visit and a lot of our conversation has been centered around what we want to do when we get there. I know the two weeks are going to speed by and Jackie and I want to see and spend some time with as many of our friends and family as possible. The video I posted today was taken yesterday. Jackie and I had driven in to Walmart pick-up a few items and we stopped at McDonalds on the way home for hot fudge sundaes. Aren't those things amazing? We were able to take ours from McDonalds, drive 20 minutes thru stop and go traffic to an overlook just before you come to Kealia beach and when we arrived there and took off the lids the sundaes were just as good as if we had eaten them at the store!

ALOHA

Aloha...That's a word that means both hello and goodbye and I feel it's a good word to describe what happened last night...Mom bid us aloha. We are all going to miss her and that empty space in our hearts will never be refilled at least not here on earth but I also feel that when mom bid us aloha at the same time she was saying aloha to Dad and to her parents and the rest of her family and friends and that empty space their passing left in her heart was being refilled to over flowing.

FRIDAY

Aloha! It has been a very wet day for Jackie and I. It has rained for almost the entire day so that has meant another day of watching tv and talking story. Jackie did talk with family in Grandview today and Mom is about the same. The medications are keeping her comfortable and that is a real blessing. We are hoping the weather men are correct when they say we have drier weather to look foward to as the lawn is ready to be mowed again and more important we need to get back in the water! The last time we snorkeled we found a new spot a little further out on the reef and we are anxious to see if the yellow tangs are still there.

THE FIRST DAY OF A GOOD YEAR (THINK POSITIVE)

Aloha...Jackie and I haven't done a whole lot today...mostly just sitting in front of the tv or looking at the computer. We did get news from home but not the news we wanted to hear. Mom is slipping further away. The hospice nurses are making sure she is comfortable but that is all anyone down here can do for her. The family is staying close beside her but now it's just a matter of when God has her room ready. The family has told me that the people from hospice have been such a blessing and have made this emotional time as easy as they possibly can. We also wanted to say that Fred Cohu has been a great help. We talked for a little while today and we are thankful that he is there offering as much support as he can. My nephew Jeff has posted a slideshow on his blog that is beautiful. You can link to his blog from the links section on mine. It is under Jeff and Jayma. You should check it out as they did a real good job.