Mission Accomplished

It’s a funny old Sunday for me; had to get up and out the door this morning by 4: 30am to get my husband David off to O’Hare for his flight to Orlando for a technical conference. He’s there, he’s run into some of his list members, he’s That Mailing List Guy.  He runs a lot of mailing lists that cover areas of expertise that are mostly to do with the AS/400 iSeries Systemi whatever IBM calls their midrange computing platform this week.

He got all packed last night, including the traditional “I can’t find my pants” crisis which fortunately was solved easily. Last time this happened, he had packed a brand new dress suit carefully in his suit bag, got to the conference, crashed in a friend’s room before his room was ready, then could not find his pants about an hour before the very important presentation.

He called me demanding to know if I had packed his dress pants. “Where are my PANTS?!? Did you pack them?”

It was the stress, really. He was nervous about the possibility of picking up a very prestigious award, and about maybe having to make an acceptance speech.

I reminded him that he’d packed up his suit bag very methodically with the brand new suit, and while I was checking the closet here just in case, he remembered the part about the friend’s room, tracked him down, and found his pants hanging in the closet.

Pants crisis: resolved.

Last night, it was more of a laundry/underwear crisis, much more easily fixed. There was clean laundry in baskets, but none of them seemed to contain socks and underwear. Keep in mind that we just got moved back into the master bedroom after more than 3 weeks, camping out in the guest room while we worked on our “3 day flooring project.” Our first night back in our own bed was Saturday, and the drawers which had been stacked up in the middle of the room had all be replaced in the dressers, thank GAWD, but there were still several laundry baskets that needed to be folded and put away.

There always are, I think they breed.

Anyway, David had clearly been searching frantically for his oddments of male netherwear when he shouted down from above “I can’t find any UNDERPANTS! ARRRGH!”

Stress, again: this time, it’s the plain old “early flight tomorrow, don’t want to forget anything, meanwhile I’m giving a presentation before the opening session” variety.

Soon enough, after we went through some baskets and checked the dresser drawers (which may have had stuff misfiled in them during the time they were stacked in the middle of the room), the Great Underpants Crisis of Nought ’10 was over. It was nervewracking and there was the distinct possibility that one of us would have to run out and get a 3-pack of white knittery, but fortunately it wasn’t necessary.

So David is off in Orlando, and I’m here for the beginning of the work week thinking about tasks and chores that I’d like to do, but that will probably get blown off if I’m not careful.

Believe it or not, blogging is a task AND a chore, because I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging lately what with how easy it is to just tweet something, and how hard it is to blog something with the iPhone now that both of my little bookmarklets stopped working. Anything seen during the normal workday is either a quick and easy tweet, a moblog picture (another dead easy function set up via Flickr), a del.icio.us link, or not at all, as it’s no longer a simple thing to pick up a link with WordPress’ “Press This” javascript functionality on the iPhone (although it still works perfectly on a desktop machine). I’m not sure why, actually; it may be a security “feature” stemming from some update or other. I didn’t want to bother David with it yesterday since he was trying to get all his stuff ready and packed, and it can certainly wait for his return.

Anyway, there it is; it’s not easy to blog using WordPress’ own iPhone app, as I just commented on Tiny Screenfuls, yet it’s easy to send a post to WordPress via Flickr, del.icio.us, or Google Reader if you set them up with the right permissions (and in Flickr’s case, a template that applies my beloved CSS drop shadows).

Why can’t WordPress’s app grab a link, for gosh sakes? Why did my handy Press This app stop working right? Grr.

Anyway, my hour of blogging is over, but there’s still a bit more to discuss: my accomplishment of mission.

We had a family member’s discarded laptop, which David got several weeks ago at a family gathering, that he was going to “part out.” After some tinkering around, however, he got it working, but we forgot to take it with us a couple of weekends ago when we met up as a family to visit our young nephew in college for lunch. Darn! So after missing another opportunity to get the now-working laptop back to its home, I managed to meet up this morning after church, although it might have worked to drop it off in the down time I had between O’Hare (5:15 AM) and church (8:15 AM). But no, it worked out fine to meet afterwards, although to make it happen I had to navigate to a shopping mall in Vernon Hills… AND deal with an escalator (I have a weird perception problem that makes it hard to use down escalators, and I tend to balk and head for the nearest elevator to avoid it). Found my family members at the designated drop point, exchanged signs and countersigns (“Hi, you guys!” and “Hey, you made it”), and handed over the laptop.

I thought I had a schedule conflict and couldn’t stay for lunch, but the conflict evaporated, drat it. So: Noodles & Company for me. Later tonight, leftovers. And that’s a little over an hour of righteous, linky-loving blogging.

And thus endeth the post, thanks be to Gawd.

Day One In Paradise

After yesterday’s comic misadventures in travel, today was an easy, perfect day in paradise. We’re not a big couple for grand gestures and super-elaborate plans; we’re more in the “play it by ear” mode of operations. But David had tucked a Valentine’s Day card in his bag and this morning he made coffee and brought me “breakfast in bed.”

Happy Valentine's Day from Maui

 

Okay, so it was a breakfast bar, because we got in so late last night we didn’t want to take the time to go to the grocery store to stock up.

We woke up relatively late for the first morning in Maui; must have been our very late arrival the night before. Just now David remarked that he already felt acclimated to the time; it’s after 1am Chicago time, and we’re still going strong.

Anyway, we got pulled together and went for a nice long walk up the beach, toward Wailea, enjoying the warm breezes and the soft sand on our bare feet (and picking our way around the occasional outcrops of lava and coral). Everybody and their dog were out today, and in fact it seemed like it was Golden Lab Play Day.

We came off the beach feeling like it was time for Second Breakfast, and I asked a local lady for an “anything but Denny’s” recommendation. She said “Mana Kai Maui,” or the Five Palms, a place we’ve been to before for dinner but not breakfast. She thought it was peaceful there, and you could see the water.

More Than Five Palms 

Good enough, so we walked back to pick up the car.

 

Five Palms Breakfast

 

And a fine breakfast it was – we sat indoors, which isn’t really indoors as they had the huge teak shutters folded open all around (they’re about 12 feet high). While eating, David spotted a paraglider coming down right over the beach in front of us, and we watched him spiral around and around before landing perfectly on the dry sand. A few minutes later, a second paraglider came down, same spot.

After breakfast, we walked up the beach a while, and ran into the paragliders, who had gathered up their chutes and thrown them over their shoulders to haul them back to their cars.

BIG laundry day

It looked like a gigantic load of laundry.

Then we got back in the car and headed off to Safeway’s to stock up for the first week, and even though we thought we were being conservative about buying small amounts and trying to keep it simple, we still ended up spending $200, even with a pretty good discount going with our Dominick’s card, which is part of the Safeway’s chain.

Once back, we spent some time relaxing on the lanai, I fooled with my new tripod, and David tried to do a reverse update on his iPhone. Then we had lunch – our favorite kind of tuna poke, some tako poke, and I had poi. Yes, I’m weird like that.

Otherwise, it was the typical Sunday afternoon stuff, except with a view of…

 

O HAI I IZ UR LOLWHALE

LOLWhales! O HAI!

Tail Lesson

And then there was some fun tail-slapping featuring a mama whale and her calf.

Flotilla

After that, the Fleet was on maneuvers…

In Formation

and then passed in review.

After all that, I went across the street and wonder of wonders, found two pair of board shorts, to replace the pair I seem to have lost on a previous trip. And these fit me better, being (rather large) men’s shorts and also I’ve lost weight from my hips (yay) although I still have more to lose.

David was still working on his iPhone software reversal thing, so I went down and got in the water, both in the surf a little and in the pool, which was just the right temperature. With all the walking, had a pretty good workout today.

David had spent some time photographing and just hanging out on the lanai and downstairs on the lawn, so it’s been a nice relaxing day for both of us.

Dinner was grilled tuna with rice and steamed veggies (and beer and snacks) and so here we are. It’s the first time I’ve uploaded anything substantive to Flickr in a while, other than mobile pictures, and clearly my skills are rusty. But I also took some photos I’ll be using for textures in Second Life, so it’s been quite a productive lazy day, too.

Think it’s time to call it “another shitty day in paradise.”

Work and Play

Back at work after a somewhat-fragmented work week last week, I managed to get everything done (or contented myself with what I was able to get done) for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day…

I had to work to the bitter end on Christmas Eve, after getting off early a couple of days in a row, but still I managed to fly home, put up the tree, decorate it, and wrap the gadgetty little gifts I’d gotten for the small number of family members that came over on Christmas Day. I didn’t make pancakes, as we already had plenty of food out (got a really good spiral-cut ham at Dominick’s, they had it on sale).

Because it’s been snowy and icy all week, I haven’t been wearing my orthotics, and finally paid for it on Friday because all the standing and singing on Thursday put me through such a workout that I was one big ache the next day.

The rest of the weekend was spend lying around, or doing stuff online learning how to make stuff to sell on Second Life. I’ll go into more, mind-numbingly boring detail on my SL blog later, but even if I don’t break even selling stuff, I figured out how to fund my monthly “virtual land” fees from a reloadable incentive card that I have from work.

For instance, a couple of bookings on the incentive program translates to about a dollar, or approximately $L275. That’s about as much as my weekly “paid Resident” stipend. Not too shabby.

David is home this week, doing upgrades, and I’m stuck at work for the duration until New Year’s Day. We’ll celebrate a Newfie New Year’s Eve (earlier time zone in Newfoundland means we all go home early) and the next day we’ll be down at David’s parents’ place.

And after that, the long boring months of winter ensue until at least April. Whee!

The Legendary Week From Hell Is Not Over Yet

@dropdeadchris, this post’s for you! Thanks for the kick in the butt. It is indeed high time I got back to REAL blogging and not just Tweeting, Google-sharing, or posting del.icio.us links here at Blogula Rasa.

My team at work has been decimated by whatever bug is going around the office; my supervisor noted on Tuesday that we were going to have a “legendary” week.

There’s a slight chance there could be one of us at work tomorrow on my team: me. But only if my only other healthy team-mate has some emergency problem with her mom, who’s had some health problems lately. We’ve been joking all week about our not-very-wonderful, really-quite-awful “legendary” week, and it would really make a better story if there was one heroic l’il travel agent struggling to keep up. But more than likely, there will be two of us to open at 7am, and two of us to close at 5pm. It’s going to be a long day.

Here’s the setup: Friday of last week, one teammate went out sick, probably with the flu. We knew Monday we’d be down 2, because another teammate had scheduled that day off for a long weekend. But when I got in, we were down 4, because a third member of our little working group was ALSO out sick, and the fourth was dealing with an ill family member who’d been hospitalized in the middle of the night (nothing to do with flu, but serious).

When I walked in, there was only one person, the only other “early shift” agent. The phone lines were backed up to hell and gone, and it stayed that way almost the entire day. Miraculously, things eased up toward the end, we caught up on tasks that we handle via queues and email, and there were no “whammies” at the end (calls that come in late enough that you’re held over after closing time to finish up). Our supervisor congratulated us both on getting through the day and said something about how it was going to be a legendary day.

Well, it’s already shaping up to be a week of legendary, even epic proportions of suck.

Tuesday, we were eventually up by two; one sicko was in, but not feeling all that well, and my former team leader/now teammate was in, after getting her relative settled with tests at the hospital. But we should have been up by three; turned out that my newest “teamie” got sick over the weekend, and her nice Monday off turned out to be just the first of 4 sick days this week. But the miracle held; at the end of the day, in spite of all, we were caught up and had nothing pending at Blessed Logoff time. Woo-hoo!

Wednesday, we were briefly cheered by the sight of our original sicko, who hadn’t seen the doctor yet, was still sick, and was sent home until he was clear of The Pestilence. Le sigh, we were back to… (counts on fingers)… 4 including me. That night, another lucky Blessed Logoff, and I got out in plenty of time for my Wednesday night ritual of Sierra Turkey and soup at Panera before choir practice. But then I got stuck in the most baffling traffic jam I’d seen in a while; ALL directions, ALL arterials, all jammed up and barely moving. I got to the restaurant in time to hang out with my iPhone reading and sharing via Google Reader, but had to gobble my food to get to St Nick’s in time.

Choir went well, by the way, and we’re working on Christmas music, of course. Yours truly got tapped to sing like a li’l angel in a short section of one piece with our newest soprano, a funny and acerbic woman named Cindy G. We’ll see if I continue to be allowed to sing like a l’il angel, as both Cindy G and I noted that our halos are held up by our cute l’il devil horns. It was a fun end to the day, as we all laughed a lot and got a lot of work done. The bishop’s visitation is Sunday Dec. 6, St Nicholas’ Day, and we’re planning on a lot of music for every Sunday in Advent in addition to the Christmas Eve musical blowout we’re hatching.

Anyway, that brings us up to today.

Thursday, today, Original Sicko was out and being implored to see a doctor or nurse and quit farting around with over-the-counter remedies. He’s being stubborn and is trying to tough it out, which is just asking for more trouble. I don’t expect he’ll be in tomorrow, either. And we were back down to three, because the other two sickos were still out.

It was a busy enough day, with a lot of emails and queued records (they come from the client’s online booking tool) to process in addition to calls coming in steadily all day. I volunteered to sit on the email inbox, which mostly yielded file attachments that get turned into booking shells, mostly for recruits. I guess it’s a positive sign that we’re seeing a big spike in “interviewees,” for freedom and LOLs! But handling the bookings takes a lot of extra steps, and the travelers are usually unsure of what they need at first, although very pleasant to talk to for the most part. Things went steadily enough, but got piled up at the end of the day. Meanwhile, the air quality in the office was terrible – not only my usual complaint about scented hair stuff and perfume, but also there was a controlled burn at the nearby forest preserve, and a lot of the smoky air made it into the building. Yep, lovely day. And then it worked out that I and the other lone “closer” got late hits on records in the queues, so we got out about half an hour late.

Tomorrow: will be horrible. Because there will just be two of us, me and my fellow closer – as the only other person that wasn’t out at all this week is taking tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday off.

Oh boy! Tomorrow will be a legendary, epic, architecturally significant Tower of Suckitude! Because due to the way our schedules worked out, I’ll go in and open with my former leader at 7am, we’ll take staggered but long lunches probably, and then we’ll both close. And then as soon as Blessed Logoff finally comes, I’ll go downstairs, work out if I feel like it, and then meet my husband David for some carbonized ruminant protein (and quite possibly wine for me, YAAAY!).

That pretty much covers the week as far as work goes. Home and its entertainmental charms is a whole other post, as is workout-related stuff.

So thanks to Chris, that’s my week, all documented and written up tidy-like.

Maybe now I’ll get around to tweeting that haiku that occured to me on my way to work one morning this week… maybe.

Time and Doing Things

March 7
March is the homeowner’s month.
It is time to put away the snow shovel,
but not yet time to get out the lawnmower.

For the first time in… probably a year or more, the dining room table is cleared off as a friend is coming over so David can take a look at his laptop. The stuff that was on there was a mish-mosh of things that Timmy sent me from Mom’s house; I’ve successfully ignored them all this time because I’d unpacked them with the vague idea of organizing, sorting, and tossing junk and only got 3/4 through the task. It wasn’t especially painful looking at the things, but I tended to get lost in remembrance.

But the occasional visitor can do wonders for lack of motivation here at Chez Gique, and so not only is the table cleared off, but the console table in the living room has been tidied, dusted, and rearranged (though not the lower shelf) and the coffee table has also been cleared of clutter (framed pictures, junk) and dusted.

I moved some of Mom’s tchotchkes onto my desk with yet another vague idea: actually paying more attention to them now and then. Mom had a funny little calendar thing that she got as a table favor at a luncheon years ago that someone made that has a little quote or aphorism for every day of the year, and Mom had kind of used it as a rotating reminder of birthdays, anniversaries, her weight, and funny little notes. Just this morning, my husband David asked me if he should put the snowblower away for the season (fold the handle, shove it under the workbench) and I said I thought we’d get one more big storm. Even though yesterday was unseasonably warm – more than 60F – and we had a big booming rainstorm last night and today, my instinct was to assume that winter isn’t quite done screwing us over here in the Midwest.

And then when I was going through the Mom stuff and looked at her little date thing for today, there it was: her commentary on the changing season. It appears likely that it may be time after all to put away the snow shovel, at least according to this conveniently timed little message from Mom.

She may be trying to tell me to keep the house in its newly less-cluttered state, too, but let’s not get carried away here.

Trouble in Paradise

Trouble in paradise: Cash-strapped tourists avoid Hawaii – USATODAY.com

LAHAINA, Maui — Every winter, scores of humpback whales trade the Gulf of Alaska for a few months of breeding, birthing and basking in Hawaii — a follow-the-sun migration that fuels much of the tourism industry in this former 19th-century whaling town.

But while the marine giants are returning right on schedule this year, their cash-strapped human admirers are not. And the effect of that absence is, “in a four-letter word, ugly,” says Bill Seidl, a boat captain who peddles whale-watch trips on the Lahaina waterfront.

We seem to have fallen into a fair deal at our condo in the Poipu Beach area, and there are certainly empty storefronts in tourist-ready towns like Hanapepe, the “home of Lilo and Stitch.” We went there to do a little geocaching today and have lunch after browsing the galleries. The business loop that goes through “Historic Hanapepe” had a distinctly sad air, although there were some wonderful things to see and buy in a number of charming galleries. We were greeted by owners warmly, if rather wistfully; one thing we haven’t seen is a lot of tour buses full of retirees and travelers from Japan and other countries. We’ve seen a couple of small vans, but that’s about it.

It seems like Hanapepe would be an ideal place for a bus tour to stop for lunch; we had delicious sandwiches at the Hanapepe Cafe’ and Bakery, a lovely large lunchroom that had local art and crafts for sale, a small stage for the occasional musical performance, and really nice ambiance. The owner there also spoke warmly to us and I hope that she and her staff continue to do well feeding tasty, healthy food to travelers. They seemed to be doing a pretty good business when we left. The waiter, on seeing how much we liked the hibiscus herbal iced tea, put some in “to-go” cups for us unasked, which was wonderful to have along as we went to the geocache site near the Swinging Bridge, though not so wonderful to try to hang on to while crossing said bridge. Still, it was a short but hot hike to the spot, as the red dirt of the trail seems to really hang on to heat and pump it out as you walk along.

Time to figure out something to eat. More, much more, later.

Kohola Kama’aina

We went on Captain Andy’s Na Pali Adventure cruise yesterday – billed as a snorkel trip, but too rough to actually go in. But we were happy to see all the dolphins (spinner and bottlenose) and whales.

kohola-kamaaina

I didn’t get very many good fluke shots, but I’m happy with this one. I have another one that’s more suitable for researchers who identify individual whales by the unique patterns on the undersides of their tails.

The day started VERY early, but not horribly early. We just had to be about 30 minutes down the road before 7:15 am, which is not too unreasonable. Like most mornings here, it was cloudy and actually raining gently, but our experience at the North Shore the day before taught us that the weather often clears in the afternoon, especialy if you go “around the corner” of the island.

We found the office of Captain Andy’s down in the Ele’ele Harbor, also known as Port Allen, which probably was a lot busier during WWII and the height of the sugar days. Like many places in the Hawaiian Islands, there’s a slightly raffish air to industrial buildings, but Andy’s office was in a brand-new complex, across from the Red Dirt Shirt factory, which seemed to be working noisily.

A crowd of adventurers in various kinds of sun/fun/rain/swim togs waited to be escorted down to the boat by the lovely crewmember, Stephanie, who was completely encased in foul-weather gear except for her tanned, shapely legs. Off we went down to the slip, along a pier criss-crossed with old donkey rail lines from the days when more cargo moved in and out of there. The boat was an attractive catamaran, captained not by Andy but by one of his other captains (Bernard).

We met up with a few companions for the day, Jennifer from Michigan and Nigel and Caroline from Yorkshire, and had great fun laughing and talking while we motored up around the point by the missile range station and on to the wild cliffs of the Na Pali coast. It was quite rough but the weather was clearing, so we tended to stay in the cabin and watch ahead through the forward windows.

At one point a number of people were seated on the two “trampolines” strung between the hulls, getting plenty of fresh air. Even though they’d been warned they’d get wet, they were betting that that just meant a little spray now and then. Invigorating, right? No, more like irrigating. A few good solid waves came up from in front and in the final indignity, from below, thoroughly drenching everybody from all sides. Fortunately for them, they couldn’t hear us laughing hysterically at their plight.

We slowed first to see some turtles, but they were so close to the side that I couldn’t get them framed right, as I had the long lens on. Soon enough, we slowed down to see something… which turned out to be DOLPHINS!!! YAAAY!!!

dolphins

There were whales there too – but the dolphins were doing everything they could to get our attention, including slapping their tails with a light clapping sound, as in “Hey! Lookit meee! Don’t look at the stupid big whale, silly humans! I’M the star of the show!” There were even little pups. So cute. Here’s an example of interspecies friendship:

whale-and-dolphin-pals

This shows a Pacific Humpback whale swimming on the surface with his (or her) head out of the water, with a spinner dolphin riding the bow wave. This is cropped down a lot and I used a telephoto, but they were pretty close to the boat. The legal limit the boat may approach is 100 yards, but quite often the animals encroach on their own so you get the thrilling close-in experience now and then.

spinner

Yeah, these guys were having a blast. The whales were more active while they were around. Nigel joked that we were on the human tour for the cetacean tourists.

This guy was getting pretty big air.

air-spinner

Yeah, they were having big fun.

This is about the only usable picture for whale researchers, I’ll be uploading this one to Flickr first.

fluke-off-kauai-missle-range-18feb09

I didn’t take any pictures of the Na Pali cliffs because the sun was right behind them and the lighting wasn’t going to be good for me, and also I would have had to change lenses and possibly miss a wildlife shot. David stayed with a single lens that’s kind of intermediate between my short lens and my long lens – he could get better wide shots and closeups but not zoom quite as far as I could. He’s already updated his blog banner with one of his shots…

When we got off the boat, we headed back home feeling tired even though we hadn’t snorkeled – it was so bouncy that just maintaining balance against the railings when we were photographing was quite a workout for the entire body. We lounged for a while drinking ginger-mint iced tea that I made, and then went out for a few groceries and sundries. For dinner, we marinated some chicken breasts in thick teriyaki sauce, Maui onion, lime juice, POG, and ginger, and then grilled them. Had rice and locally grown green beans. YUM. Also Kaua’i Ale. YUM.

Today: late start, obviously. Going out geocaching and looking for “treasure” left by a friend of ours who was on the island week before last.

Singapore Style Noodle: Seven Luck NOM NOM NOM

We order from this Chinese restaurant that’s about the only one in the area that will deliver. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall kind of place that doesn’t really have seating beyond maybe a couple of small tables. It’s a takeout/delivery place, but we were delighted to find that what they don’t expend on ambiance, they put into the food.

The poor guy that delivers for them knows our address by heart, and tonight being so cold I made him come inside to finalize payment – usually he stands outside the door and we watch to make sure Rileycat doesn’t get too curious about the open entryway. He was absurdly grateful to come in for a couple of minutes, so he’s probably been delivering all evening.

We tend to stick to the same few favorites; David likes shrimp with lobster sauce, and I’m generally having Happy Family Chow Fun because I like the tender noodles and the savory gravory. But tonight I’m having Singapore Style Noodle, which is just spicy enough to be what I call “authoritative” without being overpowering or even imperialistic. I felt the need to pack a little interior heat, if you get my drift.

See their website at Seven Luck Restaurant. It’s a little wacky, with animated graphics on the splash page, but kind of endearingly so. They’re in a strip mall on Roselle Road in Schaumburg, right behind some outlier chain restaurant – Taco Bell? They’re well worth a try if you’re in their delivery area.