HOTEL WAIKIKI

From the South Pole

....website

An aberration of the expression, "it's the thought that counts."  It could happen to you, you could be a recipient.  These kind of re-people fuck up our culture.  Re-gifting wouldn't be half as bad if re-gifters actually used new gift wrapping paper.  On the opposite extreme, remember that anonymous person who secretly deposits Krugerrands in Salvation Army kettles every Christmas season.  Should that same benefactor send you a Krugerrand, by all means, regift the Krugerrand coin and send it to me, and I'll be a convert.

Wednesday's Midweek

I've mentioned that I've been working 10-hr. days.   So why then not get home even latter by talking story with random people shopping at Ala Moana Shopping Center.  Truth be told, it was the passerby's who struck up the conversation.  See, I was in the zone fixing my motorbike in one of the shopping center parking stalls with the tools that I had just bought from Sears, then these people came by to watch, at which point, my obliviousness to everything else happening around me became subdued, and protocol took precendence, zen and the art of motorbike maintainence was put on hold.  Yeah we talked about the pros and cons of riding a bike with much camarderie until it was dark.  How was your drive home?

Tuesday's In the Process

The nature of tonight's topic might turn you off, in that event, if instead you visited this site to be turned on to the latest revolutionary gadget or idea that your humble correspondent recently discovered and posted to enlight you with, you might never visit this website ever again, having been arguably grossed out.  I came across an advertisement on the Internet expousing the benefits of prosthetics.  Artifical limbs.  You've seen stories on the TV of injured soldiers having been fitted with artificial legs and arms to replace amputeed ones, and how well the military receipients were doing.

Well, this prosthesis advertisement was directed at people with fully intact limbs, not amputees, however, people whose limbs that through age or disease barely function normally.  The thrust was whether an individual in that physically incapcitated group (extreme cases) would not be better off removing the bad limb and replacing it with an artifical prosthetic limb.  Internal prosthesis like hip joints replacements....are almost popular....so why not it's counterpart external prosthesis, arms and legs?  For one, prosthetic arms and legs look robotic.  The biggest issue, you're discarding your living human flesh and bone, not for the sake of vanity, but that still poses a question.

Monday's Menu

Daily Dish

Sunday's Breeze

wahine windsurfer, Diamondhead Lookout

Surfing, Pre-Internet

 

Nocturnal Tuesday

Me mind is on the blink because I haven't slept but for a few minutes these past two nights.  2 days without sleep doesn't bother me that much at work, even with my current 10-hr. work days, but another day of this involuntary awakeness, I struggle with intermittent insomnia, then groggyness is into bonus round, yeah.  Inexplicably, this past Saturday my metabolism was in a Rip Van Winkle mode and I woke up at 4pm in the late afternoon.  Sunday night, the train to morning town never arrived.  Monday night, too. 

Anyways, a curious thing happened to me while I was only a block away from home.  I started suddenly choking, coughing, and my eyes started watering from the lack of oxygen, then my eyes started to sting with the same sensation like when smoke gets in your eyes.  The more my eyes continued stinging, the more my eyes watered, and all the meanwhile, I barely could make out the opaque objects on the street that I was riding my motorbike on.  Almost had to pullover.  Apparently, pulling over would be like slicing the turkey to sneak yourself a turkey sandwich before the guests arrived.

Fast Saturday

18th hole, Ala Wai Golf Course, on the other side of the Ala Wai canal that separates Waikiki from the rest of Honolulu town.

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If Friday is dubbed "Aloha Friday," then Saturday should be called "sunshine Saturday," or something along those lines, pending that you didn't wake up at 4pm in the afternoon, as I did today. And I dunno why, too. Almost dusk. If I squinted, I could make out some of the constellations in the sky. They held a demonstration today at the State Capitol to protest Hawaii's smoking ban, Friday marked the first anniversary of the non-smoking ordinance banning lighting up cigarettes in restaurants and bars. They prefer us smokers to switch to chewing tobacca instead, and spit on the floor?

Thursday's Hard Day's Night

For those who can't wait to shop at the nearly finished Nordstrom store, your 2 year wait is officially over.  I'm inviting you inside Nordstrom as my special guest.  A minor detail....you'll have to wear a hard hat as Nordstrom currently has a dress code. At any rate....

Didn't I state somewhere that this was a special showing?

One of the store's fixtures I'm assembling. This picture's worth enlarging.

Yours Truly

We switched to working 10-hr days beginning today, starting an hour earlier and finishing an hour later, but that's not all, I forgot completely about the reschedule until I was already on my way to work this morning.  It dawned upon me, so to speak.  I was an hour late.  However, I experienced an up note upon reaching home I found that my lolo computer had regained its cognizance, and now it acknowledges that, indeed, it always had that missing memory slot, for the SD-card, that allows me to import photos from my camera to finally post on my blog.  Anyways, without further ado....

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Exhibit B....compare the pulitzer photo above with the photo directly below, an example of the inferior junk you get off the Internet. My kind photo is definitely superior....you, agree?

Sunday's Nostradamus

Is there anyone who still believes that crude oil won't rise to $100 a barrel?  Or that the price of a barrel of oil couldn't escalate to $120.  Or more.  A few weeks from now, a $100 for a barrel of oil may sound like a Nigerian scam.  And you thought raindeers could soar.  A while back, I kid you not, we use to have Xmas lights strung across various main streets in Honolulu, then the oil embargo in the 80's triggered a spike in the price of oil, which in turn drastically increased the cost of generating electricity locally, and the annual Xmas street lights program was axed.  Classic case of a grinch if there ever was one.  Perhaps, what's in store for the 2007 Xmas season is that the grinch will manifest itself in a law prohibiting Xmas light-displays outside your house or your apartment in an effort to conserve energy.  No can, you say.  Okay.

Friday's On the Internet

....a martini with a lychee instead of an olive.

Happy Aloha Friday where ever you're at.  Still unable to import my own pictures from my own camera to my own computer to post on my own blog, thus I clipped the above picture from a blog that I read regularly daily.  Just between you and me, I didn't attain or even request prior permission from the author, although, I watermarked the author's Internet name onto the photo itself for attribution.  In the whole scheme of things Internet-wise, she, the author, was Canada's #1 Diarist blogger last year in 2006 and probably wouldn't give a hoot, plus I just voted for her as the top Canack diarist in 2007.  Anyways, I'm presuming that both of us have bigger things to worry about.  *I can't seem to suppress the urge to mention that a martini lychee should be previously frozen to chill the gin while also preventing the garnish from murking up the alcohol.

....I start work on Monday at the brand new Nordstrom at the Ala Moana Shopping Center.  I've been having bouts with my insomnia resulting in me being on and off work recently on top of not being fully "on" when I was actually workin'.  We'll be working on the interior design phase of the Nordstrom store.  The "I" part of the "we" insofar as my insomnia permits, that is.  At any rate it is costing me $200 take-home pay each and every day that I'm off from work so things start to add up in that respects.  Yawn.

Wednesday's Monday

I received a call-back involving the Moana Hotel this Monday.  Some of the shutters that we weren't able to install were, well, needed to be installed pronto, because guest staying at the elite hotel on the supposedly now finished rooms, well, don't necessary appreciate their rooms having no shutters, rooms there start at $280/day.  The company called me from the mainland asking me to install the missing shutters.  The Moana is just a few blocks from where I live, so okay.  Only problemo....the prized shutters couldn't be found.  Suppose to be, but who knows, stored in one of the four rooms that were non-completed?  Or, the shutters weren't delivered quite yet?  So, I ended up packing up my tools and leaving.

The very moment I stepped outta the hotel, there's this huge downpour.  Had to wait it out, couldn't even cross Kalakaua Ave., the main drag.  Started jibber jabbering with this carpenter I knew but employed by a different company.  There's a brief lull in the deluge, and we both scamper to the garage across the street where we were parked.  Anyways, what do you think is the big story on the local 6 o'clock newscast that night.  It's about the wet weather.  Bad weather is big news locally....extra, extra, read all about it.  If snowflakes actually fell, we'd declare a holiday.  This anomaly may astonish newbies to the island and I don't blame them if they're puzzled when they discover that 20-minutes of a half-hour tv newscast is dedicated to bad weather.  I suppose it's sharing in the overall mood that the ogre of bad weather subjugated island people to.

Monday's Vroom

A biker who lives in my apartment building, previously an editor of a local biker newsletter, e-mailed me several photos of the choppers he use to ride, he don't ride anymore.  At any rate, what in tarnation is that he's sitting on, besides awesome?  I think former biker lives on the 6th floor.  That's the way it is for our apartment building, and perhaps characteristic of any city in general.  You don't necessarily make it a point to know which floor much less which particular apartment someone lives in, and that's observed amicably on a mutual basis.

If you're in the elevator, the next person presses the button to his/her floor, and you press your own button, except for the people who have been living in my building for a while.  Pursuant to people we like that is.  But the likable person above parks his moped next to my motorcycle in the building's garage, and we were discussing motorbikes.  The thought might have occured that he could have as easily printed out pictures of his motorcycles and left them in my saddlebags, but what's living in the same apartment building if you can't e-mail each other for this sort of thing.  It's even possible that people who live together in the same two-bedroom apartment e-mail each other while they're at home.

Sunday's Weather and Some.

On a dark and stormy night, I've just discovered to my utter chagrin that my computer is currently incapable of importing pictures from my digital camera.  In fact, the computer doesn't even list a slot for my camera's SD chip.  It's as if the slot for the camera chip doesn't exist anymore even although I have the SD chip inserted into the alledged slot.  Which as far as tonight, at least, isn't such big deal because I was solely in the process of downloading stormy weather photos to post on my blog for tonight's post, and what kind of uplifting story could possibly flow from a picture of bad weather anyways?

Incidentally, the very thought of attempting to fix this latest computer glitch.  Fuck.  Thunder, outside.  Another thunder.  Thunder is mood music to write by, or blog by.  Just thought of something, the ducks in the Ala Wai canal, just below me, must be getting a kick out of the wet weather.  It's indeed a fine and dandy night to be a duck, I suppose.

The ahh da day, I saw this customer trying to exit a store.  Generally speaking, you either "push" or "pull" on a door.  Well the customer was pushing the door to leave.  Which he had right.  But the person was pushing on the hinged side of the door.  I passed this parent and a couple of kids together on a bicycle-for-two, alas, it was to my total amazement....a bicylce-for-three.  I was unaware that those kind of bicycles even exited.  I beeped my motorcycle's horn as I passed the triumvirate.  In response, the bicyclists honked back with an ahooga.

It you didn't know already, today, we're a year away from the day of the 2008 presidential election.  Which to me couldn't arrive a day sooner, albeit, 2008 is a leap year.

Friday Aloha's

We were supposedly on a bad weather alert today.  The bad weather never arrived.  A swell was suppose to hit the south shore.  That never happened.  As a consolation, we had instead the pleasure of excellent weather, albeit just a bump in the surf zone.  Today's photos were taken at the Diamond Head scenic lookout.  Located by the Diamond Head lighthouse, not to be confused with the scenic lookout on the promontory, itself, of Diamond Head volcanic crater.  I actually don't know the official name of this scenic lookout.  Do you know the official names and designations of all the famous spots in your neck of the woods?

At the risk of sounding like a tour guide, on the right-middle of the top photo is Doris Duke's Shangri La mansion.  No one lives there anymore, it's been converted into a museum.  Enlarge the photo to get a better view.  Or you can visit Shangri La in person yourself and take in the full experience.  In other news, an acquaintance of mine metioned that they're kicking the homesteaders off the streets in Waikiki.  Remember that lady I noted in earlier posts that camps out just where I kick back on Kuhio Ave.?  Just drove pass that spot on my way home and she's not there, ditto for her mountain of personal belongs.  Wahoo.  Or, was that, whoo-hoo?

Thursday's Hydrology

While you were at the grand opening of the very first Walgreens in Honolulu, was Santa there, this surfer propelled by a kite was putting on a show at the Diamond Head Crater scenic lookout in extra windy conditions.  I believe it's the same person these past few days.  Different kite today though, but same trademark maneuvers.  Skoots 400 yards out, then u-turns back to shore, riding on the faces of any waves that he overtakes from behind.

To put it mildly, the sailboarders were left in his dust.  Obviously, kite man wasn't humming "he rather be sailing" to himself.  Or maybe he was if you get the gist.  Which leads me to believe that sailboards have seen its days.  For one, surf kites are compact enough to stash into a car's backseat, while the mast and the board of a sailboard have to be transported on the rooftop.  With kite surfing, too, you can carve on either the waves or the flats, akin to snow boarding, but no need the slope.  Caveat....you better have Popeye arms.