Island of the Primitives

So we're here in Kalihi. We thought we'd be fairly "off the wired grid" for the duration of our weddings going vacation, but we first took advantage of the open wireless at the Apple store and procured the information needed to get free internet at the Kalihi house. That is to say, we got the UH dial-up information.

That's right, dial-up. I haven't been on a connection this slow since I got cable in early 2000. In fact, since I had 56k dial-up for a couple years before that, I actually haven't been on a connection this slow in almost 7 years. That's right, I'm on a 28.8k connection. Yikes. You'd think that UH would maybe upgrade their modem pool to 56k sometime, but on the other hand, you'd also expect them to clear out the usernames and passwords of people who haven't been at their school for 5 years.

Thank you, nameless bureaucracy and laziness for the free dial-up, however slow it may be.

Anyway, we did pretty much all the wedding related shopping we needed to do yesterday and today (after Mike gets his requisite amount of work done) we'll see a movie, probably Jarhead, and have dinner at Dixie with the Febenitos to get acquainted with my niece to be.

Tomorrow is wedding number one.

...

it's amazing how much things change when you're not looking.

When you're here in my childhood home, you can see all the way up into the verdant crack of the mountains all the way down to the sea on the other side. it's a breathtaking view if you're not accustomed to it. While Washington is a very green state (well, it is the Evergreen State, it's not this green, this jungle lushness that thirsts for sunbursts of showers and afternoons of uninterrupted heat. I suppose I miss that.

I miss the effortless "gardening" that mostly involved planting what you wanted where you wanted it to grow and waiting for it to be done. I miss the eight kinds of fruit that I could go outside to just grab off a tree — mango, avocado, pommelo, mountain apple, jackfruit, tamarind, guava, banana, and avocado again. To be fair, we never ate those bananas, so I'll call it seven.

Here in the valley, things seem pretty much the same. They've added a traffic light down by the shopping center, but other than that, it seems about the same. I can't say the same for the town areas. As we were driving around yesterday and the day before, the things we said we as much "That place used to be..." as "That's where we used to..."

. . .

It's kind of funny the way you see things with new eyes when you've been away for a long time. Neither of us had noticed before that the building across the street from the Zippy's by Washington Intermediate was the Miss Hawaii Building. And why would we?

To make a long story less long, it's good to be home again. I've missed you.