Jersey Boys

Happy belated Valentine’s Day; that is if you are into that kind of “hallmark” holiday.  Since I am a good husband, I did pick up a gift for the CFO while we were in Hawaii.  (I bought it while she was busy with the conference and then hid it in one of our bags for the trip home)  We didn’t do much for the holiday, because Bunko night fell on V Day and the neighborhood ladies didn't want to reschedule (or spend the evening with their husbands?), so she went out to play with them.  That was fine with me, it gave me time to catch up on a couple TV shows that she doesn’t like but I really enjoy.

On Friday night, we drove west to Peoria to go see the show Jersey Boys.  She saw the ad for the show back in September and I gave her the tickets as a Christmas present.  She wanted to go out for a nice dinner beforehand, but then we found out that a Chick-fil-a had opened up in Peoria.  Hello combo #1 with lemonade for dinner! Nothing says romantic dinner like Chick-fil-a!  At the show, our age bracket was definitely in the minority, there was way more gray hairs (or should be gray if not for a bad dye job) in the audience.  We enjoyed the show, but it left me wondering how accurately the show portrays the life of the group, the Four Seasons?

We had talked about spending the night in Peoria and then driving another 45 minutes north on Saturday morning to go to the huge furniture store in Kewannee, IL.  However, I couldn’t find a decent room that we were willing to pay for… it was either a crappy $69 motel 6 (she has minimum standards that this doesn’t meet) or over $150 for a nice room downtown (which to me, is way too much to spend on a room 45 minutes from home).  We did the math and decided to just head home and decide on Saturday morning if we were going to drive to the furniture store.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to the question of, “are you ready to go couch shopping?”  That meant that we were turning around and heading back to where we came from the night before.  However, for me, the more important morning question was “what are we doing for breakfast?”  I was thinking getting some donuts on our way out of town, but she sweetened the idea of a return trip to Peoria by offering up a return trip to Chick-fil-a  for breakfast.  How could I pass that up???  Furniture shopping here we come.

Nothing says love like a heart shaped biscuit

We’ve been to this particular furniture store once before, and I might have written about it then.  This is no ordinary furniture store, it is a destination.  It is in a historic downtown area and the store fills several blocks worth of multi-story buildings.  It even has a “skywalk” over Main Street so that you can walk to the buildings on the other side of the street without going outside and it also has a restaurant in the basement.   The place is huge and it is very easy to get turned around and lost in it.

We walked around for over 2.5 hours with a sales person (YES, that long!), took a break for lunch, walked around some more on our own and then paged the sales person to finalize things.  We got there a little after 10am and left just before 4pm.  Crazy. The good news is that we found a couch that we could both agree on.  The bad news is that we wanted it in a different material/color, so we will have to wait 6-12 weeks to get it.   To finish off the trip, we swung back by Chick-fil-a for a chocolate shake… Yes, we visited Chick-fil-a 3 times in less than 24 hours.  Delicious.

The CFO wanted a couch that would "pop" in the room.  How about green with star fish accent pillows?  It is hard to tell how these things will turn out when you are making decisions based on small swatches of fabric...Our fingers are crossed.  You'd think we were decorating a house with a view of the ocean, not a corn field. 

 

Sunday was pretty quiet; we went to church and then out to run some errands.  We were just wrapping up our grocery shopping at Kroger when we heard an announcement on the P.A. system, “Ladies and Gentlemen, there is an odor of gas in the store so we need to evacuate the building immediately.”  Seriously?  We just finished filling our cart and we are ready to check out!  We parked our car near the registers, along with 10-15 other people’s carts, and walked outside.  It didn’t look like the situation would be resolved anytime soon, so we decided not to wait and walked to our car.  Evidently we weren’t the only ones who didn’t think it was worth waiting, there was a mini-traffic jam exiting the parking lot.  I kind of feel bad for whoever had to put away all those carts of un-purchased groceries... at least nothing in our cart was perrishable.

Neither of us felt like repeating the shopping process at another store, so we grabbed some lunch and went back to the house.  We will make due with what ever food is in the pantry and freezer this week.  It was sunny, clear and a balmy 30 degrees outside, so I decided to go out and cut back all of my native grasses with the weed eater.  I was only out there for about an hour, but it was so nice to be outside, even though it was a little cold.  I can’t wait until spring; I am tired of being inside all the time!

Super bowl catch up

I was so focused on finishing the Hawaii update that I forgot to mention the Superbowl party a couple weekends ago.  This was the third time that we have hosted the party and I think this was the largest crowd yet.  The CFO said that the final count was 21 people, which is a lot of people to add to our quiet house.  Included in that count were 7 kids, ranging from under 2 to 15 years old… not good since I wouldn't exactly call our house "kid friendly." If the crowd for future super bowl parties gets any bigger, I'm going to have to get a bigger TV, OR set up a projector and screen in the basement and start building a home theatre down there.  Hmm... I really like the sound of that idea!

I have been trying to do different food “themes” each year and this year it was “taco bar.”  This turned out to be a good, relatively easy self-serve meal; I prepared traditional ground beef and chicken for meats and we had a counter covered with possible toppings.  We seriously overestimated the amount of tacos that people would consume after they finished grazing through a table full of appetizers and finger foods that our guests brought with them. I am sure that no one left the house hungry and those who wanted to take some left overs home were able to.  Even after sending food home with people, we still ate tacos for a few days afterwards, but I guess it is better to have too much than not enough.    Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the event, I guess I was too busy making sure there were warm shells and tortillas for our guests.  That is the one problem with hosting the super bowl party, you don’t get to sit and watch the whole game.

I also decided that this was the year to introduce some low stakes wagering on the game, so we did a cheap game of super bowl squares.  I say "cheap" because we only charging 25 cents per square, for a total pot of $25.  I did a low buy in so that we were certain that we would sell all of the squares... I think I will at least double the buy in for next year. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the football squares game, you set up a 10x10 grid and people write their names in the squares that they purchase.  After the grid is full, you randomly draw the numbers 0-9 for across the top and then again along one side.  One set of numbers is for one team and the other set is for the other team.  At the end of each quarter, you take the last digit of each team's score and whoever has the square at the intersection of those two numbers wins.  Since our pot was small, the payouts were low ($3 for the first quarter, $6 for half time, $4 for the third and $12 for the final score), but it added some interest to the evening.  Of course, the hosts did not win anything… one couple won the first and second quarters, and other people won the third and fourth quarters.  It seems like everyone enjoyed this addition to the party, so I am sure it will return next year.

I took this photo outside our house after a light, early morning rain.  I was taken by how the sun was reflecting off the rain, creating a ring around the sun.

Last weekend was quiet and, after hosting the big party, we enjoyed the quietness.  I hit the gym 6 times last week and the CFO managed to roll out of bed to go 5 times.  I hopped on the scale last Saturday and was happy to finally see a little bit of progress.  I have dropped almost 5 pounds since setting my all-time high weight when we were on our cruise over thanksgiving.  I only have about another 10-15 more pounds to lose to be back down to where I want to be.  The CFO did not get on the scale, so I don’t know how her progress is going… and I’m not sure that she would want me to write about it anyway.  So far, the Mon. spin, Tues. weights (upper body), Weds. spin, Thurs. weights (upper body), Fri. spin, and Sat. weights (legs) schedule seems to be working well for me and I’m not getting bored with the routine yet.  Getting up when the alarm goes off at 4:40am to go to the gym has gotten a lot easier for me too…  Seriously, it isn't that bad.  The only negative side effect of it is that I am now nodding off at 9:45-10pm while watching TV.  No more late night TV for me.

Aloha! Part 2

We also made a trip down to the southeast side of the island to visit the volcano.  Every piece of advertising literature that you see for the island has a picture of molten lava bubbling up out of a volcano or sheets of red lava flowing into the sea. I really wanted to see some lava.

 

You don't typically see road signs with distances to a Volcano on them.  Also note the lava rock wall behind it.  There are a lot of walls like this around the island.

Before I delve further into the volcano trip, let me talk about the beaches, or lack thereof.  This was yet another of my pre-visit images that didn’t quite pan out. Because of the young volcanic nature of the big island, a lot of the shoreline isn't the soft white/yellow sand beaches that I am used to from growing up on the east coast.  Instead, a lot of the shore line is just volcanic rock right up to the ocean.  However, dispersed around the island were small pockets of beaches that were closer to what I am used to. We found a pebble beach covered with small, smooth pebbles and we also spent a few hours sitting on a more typical plain sand beach. When I was reviewing our route to the volcano, and I saw locations for black sand and green sand beaches along the way, so I decided that we would stop at each of those along the way.

The pebble beach

The map showed that the green sand beach was near the southern most point in the USA, so we decided to check that out too. I was expecting some sort of bronze marker or monument, but there wasn’t any that we could see.  We improvised and just made a SWAG (Scientific Wild A$$ Guess) about where it looked like it was the most southern point. Not very precise, but neat to say that we were there. We then drove over to the nearby parking lot for the green sand beach, only to find out that it was an additional 3 miles of hiking or 4x4 driving to get to the beach. The econo-can chevy sonic that we rented wasn’t going to handle the off road driving and I, of course, had scheduled a lot of stuff to see into that day's itinerary, so we decided that there wasn't time for a 6 mile round trip hike. We passed on the hike and got back into the car to continue on towards our other points of interest, the black sand beach and the volcano. You’d think that they would tell you in the travel books that it wasn’t that easy to get to the green sand beach, but I digress…

The southern most point in the USofA

After passing the “southern most” bar and the “southern most” post office in the USA, we decided to stop at the “southern most” bakery in the USA for lunch. After lunch we continued on towards the black sand beach.

 

We found the black sand beach and went for a quick stroll… the CFO proclaimed that it looked “dirty” and I could tell that she wasn’t impressed.  I thought it was pretty cool, but raised another question for me:  I don’t quite understand how the regular sand all ends up on one beach, all the pebbles on another, the black on another and the green on yet another location?You’d think they would all just get mixed up together, into a mish-mash of baby poop colored sand, but somehow nature has managed to segregate them all. I find that very fascinating, but maybe that’s just me. I didn’t realize there was such racism in beaches… can’t the sands all just get along?

 

The black sand beach

 

We loaded back into the car and continued on towards the volcano… I was starting to get excited, I could almost smell the lava.  Then, as we started climbing up in elevation from sea level, the skies started to darken.  Then it started to mist and, by the time we had climbed up to about 3,500 feet above sea level, it was raining, foggy and cold. According to the car's display, the outside temperature had dropped from 76 degrees to 55 degrees. This was not looking good for our volcano visit…

We went ahead and paid the $10 to get into the national park and drove up to the visitor’s center. We ran through the rain into the building and talked with one of the rangers. She confirmed that it didn’t look like the weather was going to lift, so hiking the lava fields was out. Bummer. She suggested that we at least go up to the museum that was perched on the rim of the crater, so we got back into the car and drove up to that building.

That is when the disappointment really started to set in, as the clouds and fog pretty much fully obscured the entire view into the crater. I was totally bummed because we had travelled all this way (about 2.5 hour drive), and forgone the hike to the green sand beach so that we could get there, and all we could see was clouds, fog and rain. The CFO opted to stay inside the building while I ventured out into the rain and onto the overlook, just to see if I could see anything of interest. I caught a couple of short, 2-3 second breaks in the passing clouds where I could see some steam rising up, but not much else.    I walked back into the building and was greeted by the CFO giggling.  Yes, she was laughing at the situation and my visible disappointment.  This kind crap (freak weather, bad timing, etc.) always to happens to me when I really want to see or do something and she seems to find that amusing. Isn't she sweet?

Who ordered up the rain and clouds?!?!   Where is the crater?

We had seen a lot of photos of lava flowing into the ocean, so we looked at some maps and informational signage at the visitors center to see where we needed to go to see that.  We knew that it wasn't raining at the lower elevations, so there was still a chance to salvage the day and see some lava.  OR NOT.  It turns out that the closest that you can get to that spectacle is about 1 mile away, so all you really see is a red glow over the horizon. SERIOUSLY??? I see all of these advertising photos of molten rock oozing into the sea and the closest that I can actually get to it about 1 mile away??? If I didn't know that the National Parks System was so dramatically underfunded, I would have asked for freakin money back!   I'll just consider it a charitable donation, because I definitely didn't get my moneys worth out of it.  They seriously need to revamp their advertising, because it is totally false.  I really do understand the safety issues in letting people get too close to 2000 degree liquid earth, but 1 mile seems a little excessive. We made one last stop at a nearby “steam vent” where you could stand in the warm steam that was coming out of an opening in the rock. That was neat to experience, but it sure wasn’t the molten lava flow that I was hoping for. At this point, she was cold and I was disappointed, so we headed back to our hotel.

Steam venting out of the earth (they built an ugly railing around it)

We bought a few souvenirs along the way, including our traditional Christmas ornament souvenir. At the rate that we are going, our tree will eventually be decorated entirely with souvenir ornaments from all of our trips.  I will admit that it is fun to reminisce about our travels every time we decorate the tree.  We also purchased a glass piece that was made by a local artist. She makes molds of interesting lava flows and then casts colorful glass into the molds. The face of the end product takes on the texture of the lava and looks/feels interesting. 

Even though the volcano excursion was a bust, and even though the island didn’t match up with some of my preconceived ideas, we had a really nice trip. I would like to go back to the big island again, just to try to see the volcano on a clear day and to go star gazing at the observatory on top of the mountain.  Unfortunately for me, our next planned vacation isn't until November... I'm not sure I can go that long without another trip!