Sunday, March 22, 2009

This Post Is For My Mom


This Post is for my Mom. It is an array of Flora and Fauna that I've managed to capture on film. I have no idea what most of these are, Mom, so I'm not even going to pretend to try and name them. The few pictures that i feel need explanation will get them :) You would love it here, Mom.




At my friend Brice's new house they're doing some landscaping and we found both of these. The centipede was fast as lighting, super freaky and homicidal.



The above picture is a banyon tree. They have them all around the island. They're huge and have hundreds of branches that reach out from the main trunk, plant themselves in the ground several feet away and start new trunks which are part of the same tree. It's awesome.





Papaya




Lemons




Plumeria




















Buddhist temple down near Baby Beach.



There are geckos EVERYWHERE. We have two that live in our house named Gary and Vlad.



Ok so there's this lady who lives in a house on Baby Beach who has this cockatoo and she brings it out to hang out with her on the beach. What makes it especially wierd though is that she'll sit there and use it as a pillow sometimes and rub her face in the bird. Very strange.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Still Alive!... but busy.


So I’m working on a couple good posts right now. I understand that I haven’t updated this in a while, but I work 3 jobs now and I’m working on it. So, you know, work with me here haha. There are several posts forthcoming so be prepared for the picture/video onslaught to follow :)



Friday, February 13, 2009

Oh! I completely forgot!

I uploaded another video! Here!

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Barack Ohana lives in a Yellow Submarine

Hello again! i know i KNOW i don't update this thing very often. It's a somewhat time intensive process and frankly, I'm lazy. So anyway here's some more pictures and tidbits about my life here.


So there's a boat that you can always see out in the water that i think looks just like the freaking Yellow Submarine from the beatles cartoon movie. Don't you think??


I thought the island of Lanai'i looked pretty cool this day with the clouds and water being so calm.


Another shot of Lanai'i being eaten by clouds.

Ok so I'm not very domestic. Big shocker, I know. But the only way to eat on a budget here is to buy what's on sale. So by virtue of being limited to the foods that are on sale, I've been forced to cook things I'd never tried cooking before. Last week Potroast beef was on sale. So i made a potroast! I'm very proud of myself and i think it came out really well.

I started out by taking the big giant hunk of meat and stabbing it like 15 times with my knife. I then took minced garlic and shoved it in the stabby spot in the meat and did a dry rub with some spices we had in our pantry. I seared it for 3 minutes on each side and then simmered it with a can of tomato sauce, an onion and a bunch more spices for like 3 hours on the stove.

Asparagus was also on sale so i cooked those and then made some spaghetti to go with the leftover potroast/onion tomato sauce in the pot. It looked like this.... it was AMAZING



Ok so little bit of trivia. When you're laying all quiet like on the beach under a palm tree and the dry palm leaves rattle together in the wind... it sounds just like rain.


I was down on waihikuli beach with liz and i found these two things about 10 feet from each other. One is a piece of volcanic rock, the other a piece of coral.


I thought the sizes were just perfect and the volcanic rock made a perfect base to sit the corral on. This now sits on my dresser :) I still need to get some super glue or something to really attach it to the base.



Up at the end of Kaanapali Beach is this big rock called Black Rock. It's about 20 or 30ft above the water and you can climb up there from the water. Liz and i jumped off this rock. Apparently i've formed a fear of climbing somewhere along the way and i about had a heart attack. But i did it and i jumped off and then when we got back to the beach i took these pictures.




Our neighborhood is patterened pretty much like any other neighborhood, in a big grid. We live at the top of the grid on the very last street up the mountain. From my street this is a picture all the way down to the ocean. The gradation of the incline on this side isnt super intense but it's such a long way at a solid incline that biking up this hill is virtually impossible. I will be forthcoming soon with another picture of the hill coming in from the other side. That hill is, in fact, intense. Be rest assured, though, that either way you come to get to my house you better be prepared to sweat it if you're not in a car.


The moon looked cool the other night through the clouds and i wondered if i could get a good shot with my camera. Not bad, but this picture doesnt do it justice.


So i bought my first t-shirt in hawaii. It says Barack on the front.


and Ohana (hawaiian for Family) on the back with an outline of the islands... it's political AND hawaiian!!! Everyone here loves President Obama. He's from here, he supports social programs, he recognizes hawaii as a contributor to the U.S. economy. The only obama haters here are republicans on vacation... and frankly... i could care less what they say because they get to go home to Wisconsin or South Dakota or whatever freezing tundra they came from and I enjoy my tropical obama loving paradise.


Anyway i'll try to be more fastidious about updating the blog in the future. I'm not making any promises though :)