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where our wasted time becomes your wasted time

brad

Cheese Plate

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A few days ago -or maybe last week, everything is running together- we went to a new supermarket in Lincoln. It was called Fresh Thyme, and I had heard that the produce was good and that the produce was cheap. Lauren was skeptical, but we went to check it out. The produce was as rumored. Nectarines, Peaches and plums for under $1.00 per pound.

Unfortunately, we ended up spending $41.37 because we were hungry and weak, and the only thing that was cheap was the produce.

Fortunately, they had some of the fancy cheeses that I had been sporadically looking for since Will and Grace’s wedding [warning: both of those links go to the same place, so don’t click on both of them].

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I diligently cut them up into little pieces and placed them on a plate. Lauren was having none of the cheese, but Brad made little noises that seemed to indicate that he liked them.

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Thinkin’ ahead

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A couple of weekends ago Lloyd and I cooked some brats on the grill when it was so blasted hot and our air conditioner hadn’t been fixed yet.. (Y’know, ‘brat’ should really be spelled differently. The way it stands now I just see/imagine naughty children getting a good sear.) Anyway, I came up with a brilliant idea for those ancient chicken tenders cluttering up the freezer: cook them!

Yessir, I actually cooked them, and for the next couple of meals, half the work was already done. “What are we going to eat? Well, how about some vegetables and chicken that is ready, you crazy genius!” or “Just a delicious salad with pre-cooked chicken!” I felt so amazing!

While Lloyd’s been gone, I grilled another batch, minus the children sausages. It has been a life saver.

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Hawaii Update

Curt’s first day on Maui started off, as every day in Maui should start off, with a sunrise walk on the beach. It was a lot of fun with Curt, because I have been having beautiful sunrise walks on the beach for almost a week and had forgotten a little bit howreally amazing they were.

I had decided yesterday that today would be my first sunrise swim on the beach and Curt was happy to jump right in with me. The air is just a little cool in the morning, but that just makes the ocean seem warmer and we stayed out for about 30 minutes. That brings total Sunrise Walk On The Beach time to just under 2 hours son were back just

before 7:00. We putzed around the house a little more than usual this morning before getting started. Brad, Curt and Samith all had work related things to do. I played mother hen and packed our bags for the day.

We went up to the big tourist town (I’m sure Brad will supply all of the actual names in his post) and there wassome souvenir shopping done. We also went into a couple of art galleries. I’m not sure how we ended up in them, but everyone seemed to enjoy a little time looking at art. It was strange.

Next came my reason for jumping in the car this morning. The largest Banyan tree in the United States. The main trunk is huge and there are about 20 other trunks (it’s that tree that sends down roots from the air and they form new trunks). It covers just under an acre of land. We got there about lunch time, but I wasn’t hungry, so while everyone else went to eat at Cheeseburger in Paradise I camped out under the tree and communed with nature.

After that got old I scoped out 7 shave ice places to decide which one would be Curt’s first shave ice. It is unfortunate that they had just eaten as we just got small ones. To really appreciate them you need more.

Next a quick trip up the beach to the Hyatt Sheraton because they have a really nice beach and there is, legally speaking, no such thing as a private beach in Hawaii. The beach was amazing and the waves were huge. This is evidently not normal, but the waves were ten feet high if they were an inch.

It was great fun to play in them, but I got rolled over the wrong way by a really big one and ended up hurting my neck. I’m currently taking Advil and Rum and am beginning to feel better. By tomorrow I hope to be able to turn my head for the helicopter ride.

We ate dinner at the wide spot on the side of the road that Brad found via Yelp months ago. It is. Little chicken stand. We each got a quarter bird with corn and rice.

Curt and I ended the day the way we stated it; at the beach. I have not gotten the prerequisite amount of reading at the beach in yet and since it didn’t hurt to read, and only hurt a little bit to walk, we want down to the beach and read and/or slept until sunset. There are more pictures on Flickr now, including ones from the Snorkeling Trip.

Maui Day 4

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Lauren here. Lloyd and I are not doing well in our coordinating of information. Here is his write-up of a couple of days ago.

Lauren out.

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If you’d like to read about Maui Day Three, Brad has a nice write up.

Today started out like every other day in Maui with a refreshing morning walk on the beach. I’ve done this enough that I recognize some of the other people who walk on the beach at the same time I do (about 5:30am). One guy I’ve stopped and talked to twice now is interesting. He’s from Denmark and retired to Maui about 5 years ago. I can’t recall his name, but he said it means ocean (I have to way to verify this). I suspect I will see him tomorrow as well.

I got back to Brad’s about 7:00 and Samith had been up since 3:00am working. I’m not really sure when Samith sleeps. He is always up when I go to bed and usually up when I get up. I had a traditional Hawaiian breakfast of Special K Red Berry and when 8:00 rolled around we went snorkeling.

Brad’s fellow teacher Paul and Paul’s brother Jim took us snorkeling. They are really great people and it was good to go with people who knew that they were doing (and who had equipment that we could borrow).

Snorkeling started out poorly for me. Everyone else had experience snorkeling and I think Paul thought that I did as well. I thought I made it readily apparent from my ineptness that I had not, but when were were all done and eating lunch he was surprised and said that wasn’t a great spot to do your first snorkeling.

But it was a great spot to snorkel, and by the time we were nearly finished I was no longer worried that I would die with each passing moments. This was sort of a new experience for me. I’m more used to convincing other people to do things that they are scared to do rather than being the reluctant participant. Samith did a nice job of making sure I was still alive and I would probably have turned back if it wasn’t for him. One of the first fish I saw looked up at me with a look that seemed to say, “Dude, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, do you?” I’m not sure if that look was meant for me specifically or if he gave it to all the snorkelers.

But I did eventually figure out, more or less, what I was doing. And even while I was terrified, everything was beautiful and interesting. Just about the time I was scared I was going to die we saw a sea turtle. They are really amazing. Jim touched it, and I think Brad got really close too.

There were some underwater tunnels and Paul and Jim swam through them. I didn’t realize that the hole I was looking into was a tunnel, and I was more than a little surprised when Paul came swimming out of it. Samith purchased a disposable camera in a waterproof case so there should be some snorkeling pictures tomorrow.

We snorkeled for a couple of hours then went out to eat at a fish place. It was very good (Brad has not yet steered us wrong on eating establishments). I had the Fish Tacos, because they were the specialty of this little shop. The owner came out and explained the 17 ingredients in the taco and how to best eat it. The advice was necessary.

After that we headed off for the mandatory shave ice followed by the mandatory afternoon nap.

In the afternoon we drove up the Iao valley which is right up the road from Brad’s school. Surprisingly, he had never been there before. It was a beautiful rain forest. There are other parts of Maui that are rain forests,  but we have not been there yet. We will probably go back up the valley when Curt gets here. He’s more of a hiker than Samith is. Instead, we walked around about a mile of paved trail. It was nice that Brad knew a lot about plants, because we saw a lot of them.  We saw both a cat and a chicken.

The evening was finished up with another wonderful meal (this time at an Asian noodle place) after which we went to Costco to drop off Samith’s film. We will pick up the film tomorrow and then I can put up some snorkeling pictures.

In the mean time, here are the rest of today’s pictures. Oh, and I washed my colors and whites together and now have pink underwear and socks.

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Lauren here again. At the time of this writing, Curt is well on his way to Maui. Happy traveling!

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Hawaii, Part One

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Lauren here. Before Lloyd types up his stuff, I just want to complain that even though he is on vacation, I will be doing half the work for his posts. “I can’t upload pictures from my iPhone,” he says. Grumble grumble.

So I will open the photo texts he sent to my iPad, mail them to myself, download them from my e-mail to iPhoto, resize them, export them to the desktop, then upload them to the website. But I shall do so grudgingly. (But not too grudgingly, because I really like getting all those photo texts! Keep those coming!)

Ok, Lloyd. Fill this up with some text.

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Okay, so I didn’t know what pictures Lauren would post, and I don’t know what part of the adventure she wants me to write about, and I don’t know if she will want me to write about each day and since we, for some reason, only communicated in texts today I’ll just start with these pictures and then ramble on from there.

airport

This is the airport in Maui. I was initially not very impressed with it, but when we walked through the doors that directed us to baggage claim, we were outside. The whole baggage claim area was in this ‘open on one side to the outside’ huge vaulted space. It was impressive, but Samith decided that he couldn’t wait there for the three hours that it would take for Brad to arrive.

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Instead we rented a car and drove to the beach. We could have walked to the beach, but we wouldn’t have had any place to put our luggage. So it was more like we were renting a trunk. We went to the beach (this is not difficult on an island; just pick a direction and drive). But it was very  dark. Still, a nice start to any trip: a midnight walk on the beach. Then Samith got himself a tropical drink and we drove back to the car rental place 2 hours later, returned the car and retrieved our luggage from the trunk.

We got to Brad’s house and settled in for bed. We all woke up around 4:30am, because we were mistakenly under the assumption that it was 9:30 and a reasonable time to get up. Clearly this called for a sunrise walk on the beach…

boys on porch

But when we got outside Brad saw that they were burning cane in the distance. As he had always wanted to see a good old cane burning, but hadn’t the chance afore. So we got in the car and proceeded toward the burning cane. But then Brad noticed that the smoke was too high in the sky and the cane burning was well over. So we proceeded to the beach anyway, but too late for the sunrise.

After a pleasant walk on the beach where I started my sea glass collection, we loaded back in the car to go get some breakfast. Brad took us to a wonderful little place where I had an omelet with 3 things I’d never had before and Brad and Samith had banana pancakes. We also tried a fruit whose actual name I can’t seem to remember, but that I’ve been mistakenly calling papyrus all day.

Next stop: Walmart where we load up on all of the things that three guys who don’t really cook think they might eat over the course of the next few days. Peanut butter: creamy. Jelly: raspberry.  Total bill: $130. Oh, and there was a package of powdered doughnuts for $12.00.

After that went back to Brad’s house to unload out goods. It being 9:30 in the morning at this point we decided that naps were in order. Samith took his at Brad’s place. Brad and I waked to the beach. It is a grueling 5 minute walk, but well worth it. I built a little sand chair and put a towel over it and Brad setup his beach chair. We were about 20 feet from the water and under a beautiful shade tree. I read a bit and Brad worked on more insurance things. But we were only there for about an hour, because there were little gnats that found me attractive in a somewhat unwholesome way.

More napping ensued back at Brad’s place and at about 1:00 we fixed some ham sandwiches, ate them, and headed across the island so that Brad could deposit a check at the bank and visit his school to pick up a pay stub (more insurance business).

Then back across the island to Big Beach. It was great. Beautiful sand. Fun surf. Good Company. We were there for a couple of hours and then drove back. On the way back we stopped off for Shave Ice. It was to a snow cone as snow cones are to ice cubes. The Ice is like snow is supposed to be. The flavors were diverse and incredible (you could have up to three). There was ice cream on the bottom and cream on the top. We will have to go there again.

Next was a pizza place where we had some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. Is this starting to sound over the top? It really was a good day.

On the way home Brad and Samith dropped me off at the beach and I walked the last couple of miles while the sun went down and the stars came out. If you’ve been counting, that was 5 trips to the beach in the last 24 hours. I highly recommend Maui.

Now, at 9:30 we are watching Django Unchained.

Honeymoon

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Well, I’m finally leaving on my honeymoon. It’s a shame that Lauren can’t come along. Samith, Curt and I are going out to see Brad in Hawaii. Well, maybe technically Brad is coming to see me in Hawaii, because my flight gets there first.

For those of you living under a rock, Brad has been doing a long term substitute teacher gig in Hawaii for the past few months and his time there is almost over, so we had to go out to see him. Lauren would have gone, but apparently Hawaii is an island and is surrounded by ocean. Lauren has decided that she wants no part of the ocean, so it’s just the boys going out to see Brad.

Lauren did take care of all of my packing needs. I think she likes to pack for trips as much as she likes taking them. So it was a win-win here. She was a little disappointed with how much I packed. I think her words were, “You need three shirts: the one you’re wearing, the one you’re washing, and the one that’s drying.”

Packed Hat

I think she especially liked packing the hat.

Hat out

Brad’s here

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So, Brad’s (and Beth’s) grandma passed away this week, and the funeral was yesterday. You can read about it once Brad writes his post. (That lazybones.)

Speaking of lazy, it just goes to show that Laziness Always Wins. When Lloyd and I were in Omaha weeks ago, we found the perfect present for Brad, but I never got around to getting it in the mail. Turns out – he can just carry it back to Baltimore with him!

It’s a Disappearing Civil Liberties Mug. It has Amendments I – X on it, and when you add hot water, Amendments I, IV, most of V, VI, a bit of VII, VIII, and IX disappear. It was perfect for the boy who gets extremely upset about government issues – now he can have a hot cup of joe to illustrate his point.

What?? My liberties!!