#52 - hanauma bay

oops, i almost forgot about these pics! this is from the first day of pre-wedding week fun, a day at hanauma bay. it was a real nice day, weather-wise, and pretty cool to play tourist for a day, hopefully i'll get to do that a lot more before work starts up again in.... sigh... july.

anyway, click here for the pics

#51 - Neil & Nicole's Wedding

here you go guys, some pics from Neil & Nicole's wedding. unfortunately, i couldn't get a lot of good pics inside the church and reception because it was so dark and i was too far away for the flash to work. but i figured that they've got the professional photographers going so i didn't take a lot of pictures anyway. but if you wanna see my pics... click here anyway, it was a real nice time for everyone i think. i had a blast hanging out with all of neil's family and friends and meeting new people, plus melissa is tons of fun so it was nice having her back for a week too.

but that means another one down... would you guys just cool it already with all the weddings and babies? take it easy huh? slow down a sec and wait for the rest of us to catch up already!

#50 - five-o with taiko

happy 50th post birthday to me! i thought i'd cap off 50 posts to this blog by reminding myself why i started it in the first place. looking back at my first post, i started this blog to faciliate the expansion of my life. a way to make a symbolic turn away from everyday monotony and encourage myself to discover what life has to offer and to decide which elements of that i want in my life. so far i think i'm on the right track... ready to move out of the parents' house, feeling comfortable and confident in my career, got my ambitions pointed in the right directions (even if i'm not quite there yet). so this post is about something that i've wanted to do for a long time and finally worked up the courage to do so.

as a kid my parents wanted me in sports (actually, i think they were really worried that since i was such a small kid that i wouldn't be able to "fend for myself" if they didn't breed me into competition or martial arts or something like that, bs), and even though i loved playing sports, i didn't like competition or coaches or a lot of the other kids (they were all mililani brats, haha). so even though i had fun in each sport, i grew tired of them very quickly because of all that other stuff that came along with playing (i.e. potlucks, getting yelled at, mosquito bites). therefore i was shuttled through all the major sports between kindergarten and 7th grade, soccer, baseball, basketball, aikido, korean karate, and finally tennis (which i regret was the last sport i learned and not the first).

but i had this lingering interest in taiko, well, i didn't see it very often, just once in awhile and then right after seeing it i'd tell my parents i wanted to do it, but they'd tell me that i couldn't because of soccer practice or aikido (which backfired on them because then i grew to hate those sports even more, up to the point where it was an all-out screaming match every tuesday/thursday when it was time for practice... grr.. i'm getting mad even thinking about it, this was a serious parenting error on their part as far as i'm concerned because i've developed a great deal of animosity toward them and their authority because of this conflict... in fact, i probably joined marching band just because practices were on the same nights as korean karate class and by that time i HATED anything that my parents wanted me to do and they forced me to go to that class). hmm... okay, so now i'm kinda p.o.ed and off-topic... but anyway, my advice to future parents: follow your kid's interests. it's no use fighting them on what they want to do with their life, you can only force your will on them so much. and kids won't understand that you're just trying to look out for them by making them take marital arts because they need to protect themselves, they'll just see that you're making them do something against their will when you should be fostering their variety of interests. i'm glad that i learned a bunch of different sports and i sure feel more well-rounded having at least a basic knowledge and skill level in each, but i wish that i had been allowed to explore a lot more different interests and was not forced (tooth and nail, for years) to do those that i had lost interest in.

GRR! okay, now that i'm trying to get back to the topic of this post, so now i'm taking taiko (finally) and it's completely awkward to me right now. granted, it's only my first couple of classes, but i feel like i've suddenly grown two new arms and i have no idea what to do with them. but, at least the class is pretty non-intimidating so i don't mind looking like an idiot, ha, and hopefully i'll get the hang of it soon. well, let's stop writing now before i get angry again... it's a good thing to learn something new. new hobbies, new people to interact with, this is the direction that i'd like my life to go.

next up: nicole & neil's wedding

#49 - pigeon-ocide

TARGET: Spotted Nape Dove

OBJECTIVE: Total Exterminationi've been waiting for summertime to come along again since it ended last year. beach weather, no work, get to sleep in late. but every single frickin' day of my summer so far has been maliciously ravaged by these fat, lazy bastards. every single day between 5:45 and 6:00 am i've been jarred awake by their constant, blaring, and insanely metronomic COOING!!! GRRR!!! it's destroyed any hope i've have this summer for catching up on my sleep and restoring some type of normalcy in my sleeping patterns.see this? see that little shit hidding behind the fern? that's my neighbor's roof and it's right outside my damn window. there the jackass sits cooing insanely all morning. and it's not like i hate all birds chirpping. hell, i had parakeets growing up, but this bastard is different. it coos LOUD and in maniacal intervals. it's like, "COOOOO!!!" and then i'm like, "crap, shut the hell up," and then i actually have to wait for the next "COOOO!!!" and then i don't hear anything so i'm like, "okay, it's ov.." "COOO!!!" grr, so irritating! so, every morning i lie in bed and seethe hatred until i'm finally forced to get up out of bed and pound on the windows to scare them away, by the way, the other morning when i did that i hit the windows so hard in frustration that i knocked a glass jalousie out. but recently, the little creeps have gotten bold and aren't scared away by noise anymore, so then i gotta leave the warmth and comfort of my bed at 6:00 in the morning, put my clothes on, and go outside in the cold to find and throw rocks at the bastards. GRR!
and i swear it's only those doves, because even those these zebra doves (above) do that annoying mating dance thing where they lift their disgusting tail feathers and coo, the frickin' spotted doves are ten times louder and a ga-zillion times more insane-making.

and so now, my mission for this summer is to hunt down and kill every single one of these little f***ers on my street. i sit outside and wait for their feathery asses to land on my roof and pelt them with as many rocks as i can fit in my hand. but the damn things are bold frickin' idiots. they come and fly right back into the strike zone.

so, to help you identify (and subsequently kick, run over, or stone to death) these birds, here's what the experts say about these bastards:

"Adults are brownish-colored with a pinky hue all over, but slightly paler below. The tail is darker and quite wide. On the neck there is a band of black which is covered in white spots and extends from the fore-neck right around the back of the neck. Juveniles similar but lack neck collar. (12 inches) Calls: Three or four "coo"s but lower pitched and louder than Zebra Dove."

by the way, although not part of the original plan, please feel free to rid the earth of any zebra doves you may come across as well (just for good measure), here's what the experts say about them:

Sexes similar. Pale gray below with a pinky wash and gray above with dark barring. Barring below varies but can be restricted to the neck sides or can cover the entire underparts. The upper breast and neck are often tinged blue.Dark eye and small pale bill. (8 inches) Calls: Series of staccato "coo"s given rapidly. Also when displaying more drawn-out deeper "coo", accompanied by tail fanning and cocking.

although they don't bug me as much, they use the wall outside my bedroom window for their "tail fanning and cocking," (haha!) which grosses me out.

but there must be a better way to get those pigeons besides throwing handfuls of rocks at them. yesterday i tried to build one of those traps with box, a twig and some string, but that didn't fool 'em, and bear grylls hasn't taught me how to catch birds yet so i'll have to wait for another episode of man vs. wild to tell me how to get those damn birds. so please, tell everyone you know about Operation: Pigeon-ocide. we must spread the word! PIGEONS BEWARE!!

#48 - Nu'uanu Trail

ask and ye shall receive....

so here we go, first "adventure" of the summer was hiking up the nu'uanu trail. it was a really nice day, clear skies all around which made for very nice (and very dry) hiking. the views from up top were pretty nice, camera doesn't really do them justice though. anyway, i took a bunch of continuous shutter shots to try and catch some of the action so you can check out all of those pics (warning: there are loads of pics) here via snapfish.

we started on the judd trail, which turned into the nu'uanu trail about halfway in
i thought i flipped these pics, but i guess it didn't work, and now i'm too lazy to go back and fix it, so flip your heads to the side to see jeremy and keane...
and elizabeth and spencer
at the end of the trail was this swimming hole, lots of people there already, they had a rope swing for catapulting yourself into the water... this one drew a collective "oww" from everyone watching.

coming up next... my master plan for total pidgeon extermination, stay tuned!