Fear the Crab

I have a sty in my eyelid. It’s very irritating. I’m supposed to apply warm moist compresses to the area for about 5 minutes, then repeat every 10-15 minutes. Unfortunately, I’m in school practically all day, so where will I be able to apply compresses? The most I can do is wait until I get home to start relieving the irritation.

This sty is also making my eye hurt, probably due to the slight swelling. What that does is make me feel like I’m really tired, like when I stay up too late or watch too much tv. Not a good feeling when there’s 10 more hours in school to take care of.

Today is the first day of the fall semester. I’ll be taking ICS 321 and 331 this year. Only two classes, but they span four days out of the week, including Saturday. This means I’ll only be able to work at The Lab two days, but hopefully they’ll let me stay longer so I can earn more money and not worry about making enough hours to qualify for medical. Best case scenario is to work 6-7 hours a day at The Lab, while pulling in 20 hours a week at The Office. I should still have enough time to get any homework done, since there will be time at the Office to take care of stuff.

Parking is going to be a problem for many people, so I will have to revert back to my original schedule. I think waking up at 0500 is worth the ease in traffic and the bounty of parking stalls at the structure, so long as I manage to leave the house by 0545.

I’ve decided to start work at The Office an hour later, at 0800, so that I can grab some breakfast at the caf when it opens at 0700. I do this because I’m not particularly enthused about tummy-rumbles during work. It’s very uncomfortable.

Bought a new game called Black & White the other day. It’s some sort of god-type game where you micromanage villages and people, flaunt your godly powers, and control some kind of magical giant creature to act as an Avatar. Seems a simple concept, one that’s been used for many years, but this time there’s a level of complication that isn’t advertised in the fine print. For one thing, each village and your creature have minds of their own, and if you leave them alone for a bit they’ll do their own thing. In terms of villages the effects of this aren’t that earth-shattering, stuff like eating too much food or breeding like rabbits and sucking the earth dry, but the creature can do things that you might not like, such as eating the villagers or pooping on the temple. Training the creature is not unlike housebreaking a pet; you give it love when it does something good, and slap it around when it does something bad. I was going over some gameplay tips online and the sheer amount of tasks one must accomplish to have a “decent” game is staggering. I don’t think I’ll be playing it with much enthusiasm, especially with school.

In the meantime I drink coffee to stay awake and ponder how much notes I will have to take with just binder paper. I seem to have forgotten my new notebook at home.

Today I’ll be taking Maile and Malia (sp?) home today. Since parking is an issue, they’ll be dropped off and I’ll drive them home. This won’t happen every day, of course, since schedules are so different. It’s too bad they can’t reserve a parking permit right now, since they’re not that high up on the registration scale, but I believe after a couple of semesters they’ll be able to. Otherwise they’ll get the hang of finding free parking around the Manoa area. I found some numbers for alternate parking that they can try to take advantage of.

Last full day on Maui. Met up with Crystal and her family for a hike to the Twin Falls, but unfortunately Maile and I weren’t dressed for the occasion. We wore jeans and boots, which you would normally expect to use on hikes. Turns out that the hike was really easy, and the hot weather made jeans and boots ill-advised. Then to get to one of the falls we had to wade through thigh-deep water. Not something you want to do with shoes and socks.

After the hike we went back to the hotel for a quick nap, then rejoined Crystal for dinner at the Palm Court, a restaurant at one of the Wailea hotels. Her husband Brian is a chef there, and our meal was comped, so it was really a wonderful surprise and a pleasant occasion. One of the specialties at the restaurant was their handmade pizza, topped to order. The service was excellent, though part of me wonders if it was because of Brian and Crystal. In the end, Maile and I ate too much and felt very uncomfortable, but it’s nice being full.

Tomorrow we head out to the airport for our trip home. We’ll be riding one of those turboprop airplanes, so it’ll be an experience.

Had a strange dream the other night, of horses and camels at my high school. Most definitely a result of the memorable ride yesterday.

I keep hitting my fingers in the hotel ceiling fan.

Well, today was the day of the cave tour. The rain from yesterday prompted a flash flood warning, so we decided to call the tour to see if everything was still a go. No news was good news in this case. Still feeling sore from yesterday, we took some aspirin to ease the pain and started the 3 hour drive to Hana. I decided that I’d rather walk the lava tube in a bit of soreness than wimp out and skip the whole thing. Plus I might regret it later.

Damn, I hate Hana highway as much as I hate the Kula highway. Too many winding turns, and each one reminded me of a desert; every time you think that the end is just after the next turn, but it ends up going forever. 3 hours and 31 miles (!) later, we arrived at the Ka’eleku Caverns in Hana. Met up with the guide and got set up for our part of the tour.

Seems there are two parts of the tour. The “walking” tour which everyone goes on is a 1-hour journey down the lava tube, with the guide describing the various features and geological trivia associated with molten rock. The “wild” tour then starts where the walking tour ends, as the first group turns around and exits while the rest of us continue on down the tube. Turned out that Maile and I were the only ones on the wild tour.

That tour certainly is wild. We had to climb over boulders, shimmy up small crevices lined with jagged lava, crawl into tiny passages lined with ice-smooth lava, and all the while wearing bump hats and carrying large flashlights. Thankfully we had kevlar gloves to protect our hands, but my elbows and knees got scratched up. We really got a workout from all the climbing, but it was worth it.

This lava tube wasn’t like others I had seen, and I actually learned more about lava here than in school. For example, the lava in the tube had “frozen” so quickly that splash marks could be seen where rock from the ceiling fell. There was a “lava pearl,” a perfectly formed sphere of molten rock that fell from the ceiling, hardened, then stuck to still-soft lava on the wall. And I had no idea that lava could harden so smoothly that it was like running your hand over ice. There’s more, but I’m so caught up in the whole experience that I can’t explain it all. I mean, Sara Lee cupcakes, corncob stalagmites, lava layers, the Devil’s Mask, lava pearls, upflows and cave-ins make for some pretty intense excitement.

I can’t even remember where we ate dinner afterward.

Today was the horseback crater ride. We had to check into the ranch headquarters by 0915, and since it was a two hour drive from the airport, we left at 0700 without eating breakfast. We ended up arriving way early, like at 0830, and that was even after stopping to call for directions because we thought we had passed the headquarters (turned out that we were just down the road). Continued up the slope, stopping off at the small visitor’s center about halfway up. All during the drive it was nice and sunny, rather cool, so we felt we were in for a nice ride.

Then we got up to the top, and the cloud cover was so thick that everything was just a blur. There was a continual drizzle of rain surrounding us, and as we talked to the guide it seemed as though the ride was going to be canceled. However, the weather cleared a bit, so we all mounted up and took off.

Going down the slope, the scenery was picturesque. The landscape inside the crater is like being in another world, filled with features you don’t normally see on a day-to-day basis. In fact we saw this one flock of birds called chuckers (at least, that’s what the guide called them). Small birds, they run around the crater and glide off of ridges. I guess they’re so used to human activity that they even ran under our horses to get from one side of the trail to the other.

At the bottom of the crater we stopped for lunch, after a two-hour ride. Getting back to ground was rather wobbly, and our knees ached. Every so often during the ride the clouds would roll in and we’d get rained on, but it wasn’t anything bad.

We had spoken too soon, though, as the weather turned worse during the ride up. The clouds fell and the rain and wind came rushing in, making life pretty miserable. Thankfully we were given rain gear before we started the ride, so our clothes weren’t soaked. Much. The wind was so strong that rain came in horizontal, stinging our eyes and cheeks. The clouds were so thick that you couldn’t see the horse in front of you. The horses themselves felt as miserable as us, turning their heads away from the rain and sometimes having to walk sideways to get back up the trail. Maile and I got windburn.

When we got out of the crater, I discovered that the disposable camera we brought had been sitting in a small puddle in my pocket. Water drained out of it when I pulled it out, and we were really worried that the film had been damaged beyond recovery. I decided to try and develop the roll anyway, and hope for the best.

Butt and back sore, we ate dinner at Canoes, and contemplated the prospect of doing more “adventure” the next day, at the lava tube in Hana.

I have to say, though, that I really liked the horseback ride. Yes, the weather sucked, yes it was cold, but I think it would have been worse had it been hot and sunny. The sunburn would not have been bearable. And I felt like I was finally roughing it outdoors. All in all, I wouldn’t trade that ride in for any other.

Maile and I woke up at 0430 to get ready for our trip to Maui. Our flight wasn’t until 0630, but with all the new security measures in place (and the fact that we hadn’t taken a trip in 3 years), we decided it’d be better to be early than late. Arrived at the airport at 0510, so we grabbed some breakfast after we checked in. Still had about an hour to kill.

Landed on Maui around 0715, got the rental car and drove the 45 minutes from the airport to the hotel, the Royal Lahaina Resort. Unfortunately, we couldn’t check in until 1500, so we held our baggage at the concierge and drove back out to visit the Maui Ocean Center.

The MOC was a pleasant experience, and a good start to the vacation. Their indoor reef displays are, apparently, the largest in the nation. There were tons of sea life, and not just limited to the reef, neither. We got to the open sea exhibit where they were holding a shark week event, so the tanks were full of black tips and makos, and lots of rays. Maile got freaked out each time a shark swam out from behind the wall. My favorite exhibit, though, was the jellyfish tank. It looked like a giant lava lamp with florescent colors and a slow current to move the jellyfish along. It was quite surreal, and I wouldn’t mind having something like that in my house.

After the aquarium, we still had hours to kill, so we decided to visit the Maui Winery, which was about a 1-2 hour drive down the scary Kula Highway. People say that the Hana Highway, with its twists and turns, is stressful, but it’s nothing compared to Kula. Kula has its own twists, but what makes the road more nerve-wracking is the hilly terrain, such that as you’re taking a turn you can’t see where the road is going, much less if an oncoming car has crossed the center line. That two-lane road is even more dangerous when the clouds roll down from Haleakala, but thankfully our journey was sunlit.

The Maui Winery was celebrating its 30th anniversary, so there were a lot of tourists and locals. It was so crowded that we couldn’t partake in the tasting of the various wines, and even then, I was doubtful of my ability to drive that damn highway with just a smidgen of alcohol in my system. We wanted to take the tour through the grounds, but because of the anniversary celebration, all the winemakers and cellar masters were there to conduct. And they were a long-winded bunch. Standing in the sun listening to the various planting of grapes and all sorts of technical details was too much for us. Top it off with a bunch of wine geeks asking all kinds of questions and the tour just dragged. Maile and I left after the third stop; we didn’t even get to the cellar. We did buy some pineapple wine before we left, for gifts.

By the time we left the winery and drove the rest of the afternoon to the hotel, our room was ready. We checked in and promptly fell asleep.

Later in the evening we visited Crystal and her two children, Justin and Skye. Skye was rather shy, but she was only 5. Justin, 13, used to be like that when he was 5, too.