this dress is amazing

I take it all back. If Ava and I both had this dress I would insist on wearing them everywhere. It's available here.

a commemorative haiku

Thanks, mom. Thanks for visiting, and for the suitcase full of prizes that you brought. Thank you for buying donuts, and for walking Ava to the park. Sorry we all got sick, and that Ava couldn't get in the water. It was fun learning more about the stringing pattern of ukuleles. And remember the time we offered thoughtful insight to the local newspaper reporter? Man, what fun! I've decided to commemorate your visit with the following haiku...feel free to have it made into a scrapbook.

Bearer of ponies,
Sing your ukulele song,
Sleep on the plane home.

In case you are not taken with the first one, I've also created an alternate. Choose the one you feel best embodies the essence of your vacation.

You came bearing gifts;
You left with a sunburn and
a ukulele.

Also, I've decided to offer these services to all future house guests. Starting today, at least one very lovely literary gem will be written to commemorate the stay of each visitor we get. So, if a vacation in Hawaii is not a big enough draw...there you go.

just call me touristy touristerson

My mom is in town for the next few days so we'll be running about hitting up all the tourist hot spots. Today we headed up to Waimea Valley Park on the north shore. The biggest draw for this beautiful 1800-acre park are the falls where there would normally be cliff diving going on. However, it's been so dry this summer that the resevoirs have dried up and there were no falls to be found. The rest of the park had all but shut down as a result.

It was still a beautiful walk through the park with a lot of plants and birds to gander at, but the usual available activities (Hawaiian games, story telling, etc.) were nowhere to be found. We did learn how to make leis, and Ava had part of her lunch stolen by a very brazen peacock...so the day wasn't completely devoid of excitement.

coming soon...

a little preview of the red hot vintage set to hit the shop this week

manoa falls hike

Yesterday we did a short hike up to Manoa Falls amidst buckets of pouring rain. It was so bad that we didn't dare get the camera out of the car to take with us. Be assured, though, that the views and the waterfall were beautiful. By the time we got back down the rain had slowed a bit, but by that point we all looked a mess....a dirty, muddy, wet, see through mess.

bay of broken promises (part deux)

We went back to Hanauma Bay today to do some beaching and snorkeling. The water was tremendously silty due, I'm sure, to the droves of people in the water making it difficult to see very much of anything. Boo. We forgot to take the camera so there is no photographic log of the day's activities. Double boo. To top it all off, we left the sunscreen in the car and everyone got burned (Ryan especially). Seldom uttered but often feared triple boo.

We do have a photo of what we were doing before the beach:

troll in the attic

While sorting through more boxes yesterday evening (a seemingly never-ending process), I came across the following literary thriller. It has been reprinted here, with permission from the author, for your amusement. I should add that the events depicted are ficitional, and any resemblence to actual events is purely coincidental.

Troll in the Attic

Once in an old brick house in American Fork, there lived a family of ten-toed people. There was a ten-toed father, a ten-toed mother, a ten-toed sister and an itsy-bitsy ten-toed brother.

Well, one day the mother stood up, put on her coat and hat, and said, "I have to go to my bridge club meeting to decide how the new bridge should be built. You kids be good. Your father will take care of you while I'm away," and she left.

The father, brother and sister all sat down to watch "Duck Tales." It wasn't long before the father fell asleep. He snored happily as the brother and sister watched "Rescue Rangers." But during a commercial for Pop Tarts something strange happened. They heard a noise. First it went thump and bump and thump and crackle. Then it went CRASH! The brother and sister looked at each other.

"What was that?" asked the sister.

"I don't know," said the brother.

"Maybe we should go investigate," said the sister.

"Good idea," said the brother and he crawled under the couch.

So the brave ten-toed sister went by herself to see what she could discover. Thump went the noise, again. "That sounds like it's coming from upstairs," said the sister, so she began to tiptoe quietly up the stairs. She went up and up and up, etc. All the time she was listening to the strange thumps and bumps. So when she finally reached the top of the stairs, she listened again and it sounded like it was coming from the attic.

So she opened the attic door and went up and up and up and up and up, etc., and when she finally got to the top (again), out jumped a big, green, slimey troll! And he said, in a very deep voice, "Give me your TV Guide!"

The sister said, "What?"

"I said, 'Give me your TV Guide!'" the troll hollered.

The sister thought about it a while, but she knew she couldn't give him their TV Guide, because their father wouldn't know when a football game would come on, her mother wouldn't know when the news came on, her brother wouldn't know when cartoons came on, and she wouldn't know when "Full House" came on. So she said, "I can't give you our TV Guide. It's at the cleaners."

"Give me your TV Guide!" the troll screamed.

"I can't give you our TV Guide." she said. "The dog ate it."

"Give me your TV Guide!" he yelled with his eyes popping out of his head.

"What kind of creature are you, anyway?" the sister asked quietly.

"I'm a troll," he said. "Now give me your TV Guide!"

"You don't look like a troll," the sister said.

"But my mother and father were trolls." said the troll.

"Well, you don't look anything like a troll," said the sister.

"Well, I went to Troll Elementary," he said proudly.

"I read once that a real troll can easily do handstands," said the sister, "so if you're a real troll, show me your handstand."

"Oh, that's simple. I can beat you at a handstanding contest any old day," the troll boasted. He cleared his throat, he flexed his muscles, he beat his chest, and said, "Stand back, little girl." He raised his arms, stepped out, flipped up, and plopped on his bald, green head. Immediately, he jumped up and said, "I meant to do that." Again, he raised his arms, leaned back, kicked out his foot, flipped up and flew all the way over, landing on his back.

The sister said, "Hmmmm."

The troll said, in a puzzled sort of way, "That's funny. I thought I was a troll. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not a troll after all." He picked up a nearby piece of chalk and an eraser, left the house, became a school teacher, and lived happily ever after.

Later, when the ten-toed mother came home, she asked, "Did anything happen while I was gone?"

"No, nothing unusual," said the ten-toed children.

The ten-toed father said, "Zzzzzzzzzz."

written by: Caroline Roberts
Dec. 13, 1990

lucky or ominous....you be the judge

When I woke up this morning the very first thing I laid eyes on was a cloud that looked like a bunny. By the time I rolled out of bed and snatched up the camera, it had moved enough to only look vaguely like a bunny, and had mostly disappeared by the time I was done with the photo. It struck me (in my groggy state) as quite beautiful and wonderful - made even more so by the fact that it was so fleeting (as bunny sightings often are). Now, though, I'm wondering if bunnies are a good or a bad sign. Methinks some further research is in order.

Editor's Note: I've done some checking, and it would seem that there is no clear consensus for rabbit symbolism. Thanks to wikipedia I know that rabbits often appear in folklore as clever tricksters. In Aztec mythology rabbits can mean fertility, parties and drunkeness (a bad combination if ever there was one). And my absolute favorite thing I learned is that in Japanese tradition rabbits live on the moon and make mochi.

Also, I found a site that taught me several ways to make a rabbit using the keyboard. Surely this will come in handy:

(\_/)
(^_^)
(___)o
U U

(Y)
( .. )
(")(")

bay of broken promises

Have you ever wanted to try your hand at night snorkeling? If you're in the vicinity of the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve during the second or fourth Saturday of the month, you'd be welcome to give it a go. I must warn, however, that you should plan on either arriving before it starts to get dark or plan on bringing your own underwater flashlight. If you do not heed this warning, you could easily end up sitting on a dark beach all night waiting for a flashlight to become available for rent and not get a chance to actually snorkel at all. I assure you, this is not something you would like to have happen to you. Take it from someone who knows.

So, to conclude: b-o-o. h-o-o.

I've always wanted to be painfully hip

Thanks to the uber hip twins behind the (oh so rightly named) Painfully Hip for featuring yours truly as a Thrift Star of the Day. This is one of my favorite fashion blogs and a daily read for me. Plus they always feature the most amazing and covetable outfits...so it's a huge deal. I'm ever so flattered that the outfit pictured here caught their attention! You can see the full post right here.

As to the outfit, I really can't take all the (any?) credit, so I feel as if some more thank yous are in order:

to Grace for deciding she needed a more modest wardrobe several years back and heaving that tube top my way,

to my mom for passing on her hoarding genes thereby giving me the innate desire to hold onto things (like this tube top) that I rarely use and/or need just incase the right circumstances arise,

to JJ for finding those most delectable yellow shoes in my very size at the DI,

and to the very kind lady who helped me at the Salvation Army the other day for throwing that belt into the bag as a freebie even when I offered up the cash.

Three cheers for all of you!

makiki loop hike (part deux)

Today we hit up the Makiki Loop Trail again to tackle it the opposite way around. It is incredibly beautiful, and magical, and amazing thanks to the lush growth and myriad of streams and brooks. Also, props to Ryan who flew by me through the hardest parts with 30 pounds of small blonde cracker-eater on his back. I mean, I know I'm out of shape, but sheesh!

jungle gym

Today Ryan taught Ava how to climb to the top of this on her own (kind of), we completed two very excellent goodwiu photo sessions, and we ordered pizza for dinner. Hooray for today!

mini me oh my

I have long been a firm believer that matching mother-daughter outfits have no place in the world of fashion (or anywhere else). I remember being somewhat disgusted when a kindergarten friend and her sister were made to routinely wear the same mini version of their mother's dress to church, and I tend to keep the rolling mechanism in my eyes at the ready for current versions I might come across.

Recently, my passion on the subject has been fueled by stumbling upon this article discussing the reasons for a recent (2006) increase in the popularity of the mom-daughter look-a-like trend. Therein the author cites the fact that today's moms are cooler than they used to be as one of the contributing factors - to whit I responded "um...WHAT?" Then I read the credentials and realized that the author of said article also owns an online boutique that offers mom-daughter outfit sets (this would explain her desire to talk about how popular they are).

I really thought something should be done to stop this ridiculousness. That is, however, until today. As I was going through some recently uploaded photos I noticed that many of the colors and details in my own outfit were being eerily and similarly repeated in the way that I had dressed Ava. Now I'm scrambling through older photos hoping that it was a fluke and not something I do on a regular basis. I would hate to have to rescind my eye rolls!

at the beach

fashion forward

I just love it when Ava picks out her own clothes.

makiki loop hike

Today we went for a hike on the Makiki Loop Trail. The whole loop is only supposed to be about 2.5 miles, but the steep changes in elevation made it seem much longer. Also we're not positive that we stayed on the right trail the entire time due to some somewhat confusing signage - so who knows how far we actually went. It took us almost two hours to complete, and we were all worn out by the time we were done (even Ava who only carried herself about 2% of the way).

If you want to see more photos of this or other outings you can find them on my Flickr photostream. The link is on that side --->

p.s. Does anyone else think that Ryan makes the best photo faces?

origami to the max

(photo via Verum Serum)

I found a blog that gives step by step instructios for making your very own extreme origami. Directions for this little guy are not posted (yet), but you can follow the nine pages of diagrams to make an equally impressive ant. So cool.

hurrah for fireworks!

Independence Day is hands down my favorite holiday of all time. I love everything about it - the heat, the crowds, the food, and of course the fireworks.

a little about love

Photo via Electricity & Lust

Tonight we saw Wall-E. Robot love is adorable (albeit a titch boring). I recommend going, but if you do don't get popcorn.

beach bbq

For the past two weeks Ryan has been doing annual training with his new Hawaii National Guard unit. It's been nice having him do it here because they didn't leave the state so he was able to come home every night. However, it also means that he hasn't had a day off in two weeks. Today they finished up, and the FRG sponsored a barbeque on the beach for the troops and their families.

There were kayak races which Ryan and a friend joined in. They won in three heats snagging them the rights to a (um...) impressive trophy.


They also had a giant blow up bouncer set up for the kids. Ava could not get enough of this.

cruisin'....

My new favorite purchase
(Thirteen Leaf Clover)