Christmas Decorations!

We set up pretty much all of our Christmas lights and decorations over the past two days.  Yesterday we got all the outside lights up, the tree, and miscellaneous indoor decorations.  Much like getting the boat in and out of the water, and packing the car for trips – setting up Christmas lights always seems to bring out the worst and best in everyone.  We had our traditional fake champagne while setting everything up and had Christmas music rollin the whole time.  This year, instead of changing through all of the CDs, I put all of our Christmas songs onto my PSP, threw it on shuffle mode, and hooked it up to the speakers in the family room.

Today we started putting ornaments on the tree.  We never finish that in one night, but we got pretty far today.  It’ll probably be finished over the next couple of days.

Christmas Theme

I just changed the look of the site for Christmas, as I’m sure you can see. I’ll probably be making a few more changes to it, but I think this will do for now. I might add some music too. Some Trans-Siberian Orchestra most likely.

Back Home

We got back from Hawaii today. We left Friday, 5:30 pm Hawaii time, and got home Saturday, at about 11:00 am our time. Actually, we landed in Chicago at about 5:30 am, and had to sit there until 8:40 to fly home. Why we didn’t just take the hour and a half drive, I don’t know. But that’s what we did. As a little bonus, we saw Mike Ditka at the airport. If you don’t know who that is (you know who you are), read this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Ditka

It’s sad and nice at the same time to be home. I loved Hawaii, but there’s no place like home. For some reason, whenever we get back from a trip, it always hits me that we are home when I walk into the bathroom.

Catamaran Ride

Yesterday, Wednesday, we went for a ride on a catamaran. It was a lot of fun. You could either sit in the back on seats, or in the front on a net type thing. We sat in front. And since it’s a net, we got soaked when we went over the waves, which was cool.  And you could look straight down into the water, which was the bluest water I’ve ever seen. We didn’t have a camera (remember the waves), so we didn’t take any pictures, but it was awesome. While we were sailing out to sea, we passed another boat that apparently had a passenger fall overboard. But he got back on just fine.

Earthquake!

There was an earthquake on the Kona Coast of the Big Island, Hawaii, at 9:20 am.  There isn’t any damage reported so far, and no danger of tsunamis.  On the TV they just showed a warning announcement for several of the surrounding areas, including Honolulu, where we are.  I don’t really know what the danger would be, but that’s what it said.  My mom said she felt her bed shake a little, but I didn’t feel anything.

So I guess that’s pretty cool.  As long as nothing too bad happens.

Pictures

I ran out of time to jazz it up a little, but I said I’d put some up, so I did.

Click Here To See The Pictures

Luau!

We are now back on Oahu.  We got here yesterday, Monday.  We decided to jump right into the remaining activities and went to a luau.  Not just any luau though, it was at a place called Sea Life Park.  Which is kind of like Sea World.  We got went a little early so we could look around the park.  We saw sting rays, sea turtles, dolphins, penguins (only two of the seventeen species of penguins are exclusive to the antarctic), and all that cool sea stuff.  And then when the actual luau program started, we got to see a dolphin show, and they showed us some stuff with a few penguins and some sea lions.  After all of that, was the actual luau, which was great.  I was a little skeptical at first, but once it got going it was really fun.

There was of course the music, and the dancers, and the food (the best part).  I was, inevitably, asked to go up and dance with the guys (not even the girl hula-ers, the guys).  I think that whole part was caught on tape, and there are some pictures too, which I will be posting.  For real this time.  I just loaded 394 onto the computer.

More Volcanoes

Tonight we went to the volcano park again (we didn’t do it yesterday like I said in that other post). This time we could actually see hot lava, or magma. We couldn’t really get too close, because to do that we would have had to walk over two and a half miles of lava (cooled) that was very reminiscent of Mordor. When you have two four year olds with you, traversing razor sharp lava rock with lots of large cracks and crevices isn’t very fun and takes a really long time. So we opted to look at it from a distance. Once I get the pictures (along with all the other pictures we’re talking on this trip), I’ll show what we could see, but what it was, was lava flowing into the ocean. When the lava hits the water, it explodes. We could see the explosions.

While we were leaving the volcano (you have to park very far away for safety), Bill would not get off my back to race him back to the car. He was doing the same thing the other day on Oahu, but this time I couldn’t take the badgering any more and gave in. I beat him. But he did put up a good effort.

I really do want to get some pictures up here, tomorrow I think we’re kind of going to be chilling, so hopefully I’ll be able to get them then.

Mahi Mahi

Rianne: “What’s Mahi Mahi?”

All at the same time -
Me: “Shark”

Katie: “Shark”

Mom: “Dolphin”

Dad: “Tuna”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahi_Mahi

I think my dad was most right.

Switching Islands

Today we switched to the island called Hawaii (we were on Oahu before, and are actually going back there, but we wanted to spend a few days here too). It’s a little different then Oahu. There aren’t really any beaches that you’d go swimming at, or places to go snorkeling or stuff like that. It’s a lot more scenery – volcanoes, black sand beaches, waterfalls and the like.

Pretty much right after we got here, we drove to the black sand beach (there are several, I think, but only one is still accessible). It was really cool. The sand was black of course. And there were a lot of little black crabs, and we saw five or six sea turtles.

After the beach, we went to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (I think that’s what it’s called). You can go up onto the mountains, and see where they have erupted in the past. We walked on the solid lava, and saw the steam vents. It’s neat, where some of the older eruptions happened, the ground grows stuff very well. So in one of the craters there is a rain forest. Actually, I’m not sure if the rainforest grows good because there was an eruption there, or because of its tactical position on the mountain that allows it to get the 200 in. of rain each year that is required for a rain forest. Either way, there is a rain forest there, and we walked through part of it.

Tomorrow we are going to go back again, I think (as you can probably tell, I really don’t know anything about when we’re doing stuff), and try to see some magma flowing into the ocean.