Vacation in Hawaii

I took this picture @ a luau on Kauai back in 2003. It rained C&D all day so we hung around at the mall till 5:30 or so when the luau began. Good food, especially the Kalua Pig they took out of the pit in the ground. I tried the poi, which looked like pudding, but tasted kind of like dirt. I wouldn't buy the stuff if Vons carried it, but I knew I'd regret it if I didn't try it while I was there. Good show too; lots of hula girls and music. This picture is pretty much self explanatory. The crowd ate it up.

I'll be leaving tomorrow morning for a trip to the "Big Island". I hope to have access to a computer I can use to post a picture from my digital each day and a brief run-down of the day's adventures. I'll be back late on the tenth of March... aloha till then,

Steve

"That's Nothing!"

Don't ever tell a group of two or more people that you've got a paper cut on your finger... why?
Because the odds are somewhere between 99.85% and 100% that someone else in the group has had a paper cut on their tongue "that really hurt!" and an amazing 75% that all the others have had one as well... what are the odds? Maybe it was some strange form of hazing ritual during the 80s. I firmly believe that it's as reflexive as the knee-jerk for people to transform most ordinary conversations into an impromptu game of "Can You Top This?".
Once you know this to be the case, the game becomes fun rather than being a desperate attempt to seem extraordinary. Granted, most guys' self images are fragile enough to need a good boost now and then, but really, what better way to do it than to make someone else look foolish trying to salve their own ego? Hmmmm, something about that seems vaguely "jerky" but I can't quite put my finger on why.
Remember, hyperbole is your friend. YOUR paper cut severed your tongue requiring the Heimlich, and caused such excessive bleeding that it ruined your autographed Frampton Comes Alive concert shirt. Anyone willing to tell you "Nuh-Uh" is also your friend by the way; "what, you don't BELIEVE me?".
Someone always gets up earlier, drives further/faster, or ate worse food. Mom's fried liver used to be my "purple heart" food story... way too pedestrian. The piece I hid in the leg brace of the dinner table and forgot about for a year is usually good for a laugh though. When I tell people about Dad's peanut butter and MiracleWhip sandwiches however, the most common response is "Dude they were clearly trying to kill you."

Humpback near Kona

Ok, here's a picture I took with my 35mm SLR. Film speed 800, 300mm telephoto lens. the Gray whale was shot with a 5mp 3x optical zoom digital. Where 1 in 8 might turn out with the digital, 1 in 10 film shots dont work out -mostly due to pilot error.

A digital SLR would work much better than a point & shoot, but then your looking at $1000 plus for a good camera & lens. I hope Film isn't really going away.

By the way, should you get the chance to go whale watching in Hawaii, I recommend it.

Gray whale off Point Loma

It recently occurred to me that with this blog I can post pictures I've taken. It takes forever to download on dial-up from home, but I may at last be forking out for DSL sometime soon.
The other day I went whale watching. This picture was taken about 2 miles off Point Loma - that's Mexico in the background. A word of advice; if you find yourself whale watching, don't expect much from your point & shoot digital camera. They take so long to focus you loose your shot. Even worse, they don't take the same amount of time to focus for every shot. As a whale surfaces to breathe, you must anticipate the timing of your camera with the timing of the tail breaking the surface. The result is a lot of pictures of where a whale recently was, or shots of the arch of it's back. You do get lucky on a few (like this one), but mostly you just drain your camera batteries. For comparison I'll post an SLR film picture I took off the coast of Kona (probably tomorrow).

A Story about Dad

I always hated telling Dad that I had done something wrong when we were kids. I guess it was because his opinion of me meant so much., it used to tear me up when I had failed him.
I remember something that happened when I was five or six years old. Back then another thing I just couldn't bring myself to do was go straight home after school. There was always an invitation to go to my friend Kipper's house to play, and the canyon nearby always held infinite irresistible promises of fun and adventure. The "flats", the "ditch" and an unusually large population of "horny toads".
After being told time and again that I had better get home before sunset, one evening as I was walking up to our front door it dawned on me that I was in trouble... it was dark! Just barely dark, but definitely not light anymore. On top of that, I was covered head to toe in kid-magnetic dirt from the great outdoors. I stopped in my tracks. I could hear the family having dinner in the house. If I went inside Dad would be angry, so I sat down on the brick planter just outside the front door to think through my options... sometimes I wonder if I'm mildly autistic; I can spend an hour looking at every brand of cereal, coffee or juice in the store trying to decide which one I should buy, and constantly changing my mind. I've had to work at reminding myself in such situations that the stakes are low. I'll really be okay if I don't choose today the cereal I feel like eating tomorrow morning.
When I'd first come home I was probably pretty close to being on time. However, I sat, worried and thought about things long enough to realize that dinner had ended and it had become even darker than when I first got to the front door. I was one forlorn little boy and I started to cry. After a little while Dad heard me, came out to get me, and laughed at how ridiculous I looked. He wiped the tears from my face and sent me to get a bath and had dinner on the table for me when I was clean.
Dad wasn't waiting for me to come home so he could snap my head off. I've ended up seeing God pretty much the same way. Because of that I consider it one of the big lessons I've learned in life and I'm grateful I didn't forget that night before I could learn from it.