Not much new has been going on here. We finally received our household goods last week, but that'll be a separate post. We survived a hurricane, which turned out to be a little rain and a six-hour power outage. We're still waiting on Jay's car to arrive, which limits Evie and I to walking everywhere. Luckily we live close to a lot of things and I've been too preoccupied with unpacking to think about going out anywhere.
The weekend before our household goods came we took a drive to the North Shore, which will probably be the beaches we go to as they are closer to us than Honolulu or the other beaches. We passed fields of sugar and the Dole Plantation, and once we crested a hill we saw the beautiful ocean in the distance. Unfortunately, we didn't plan ahead and got so frustrated with tourist traffic that we ended up turning around and coming home.
We had our first experience with letting the neighborhood kids do yard work for us. Ten bucks and our backyard was mowed/weeded. They were so cute and did a really good job, although I was a little nervous watching the little one use the weedwacker...
Evie figured out how to climb the steps one night. I turned my eyes for ten seconds and when I looked back, she was no longer sitting at the base of the stairs, but was sitting on the first step, going for the second! The baby gates went up quickly after.
The commissary has a lot of neat foods that I've never seen before, especially Asian foods. I love cooking with ginger but hate buying ginger root; it's a pain in the butt peeling/grating it yourself and I always end up throwing out most of it. Imagine my delight when I found minced ginger in a jar! It's been great for cooking fish, which there are all kinds of here at great prices (thick ahi steaks are $4.99). Our only surprise so far has been buying sweet potatoes. Apparently, they're white here, not orange like we're used to buying back home. We've messed up twice now, buying and cooking the white ones. They don't cook like the kind we eat back home, but instead turn out dry and mealy. I've recently cooked ahi belly, swordfish, and opah (aka moonfish, starfish). All were very tasty and I look forward to really learning how to cook them while we're here.
Last weekend we had Tropical Storm Iselle come through. It hit the big island and Maui harder than us, and some people on the big island are still without power. We had a little wind and rain, but nothing big. We had worse thunderstorms in MD than this tropical storm! We lost power for about six hours, but with all the unpacking we had to do we kept very busy. We had plenty of water and canned foods stocked just in case, and we ended up eating Vienna sausages and fruit for lunch. The sausages gave me a stomach ache and I'm glad I won't have to eat them again for a while. At about hour four without power, we scrambled to get our fridge foods in a cooler, and luckily everything was just fine.
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| A hurricane-style lunch |
We're still getting settled in the house, but we have a daily routine and have almost found a place for all of our stuff. Now, if we can just get Jay's car here, Evie and I can start exploring!
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| Helping to un-organize the hangers |
