Me and my bright ideas!

Now that Hawaii is behind me (*sniff*) I decided to take on a project. Somewhere in my tiny little mind, I decided that my house should no longer be white inside, and that I needed to paint. Instead of buying a gallon of paint and just hitting my kitchen as a small project, I decided to buy 5 gallons of paint and try to do the whole lower half of my house, up the stairs, and in the landing. You know how you can get a hairbrained idea to do something and it seems so do-able before you start it, and then you get in the middle of your project and wish you were dead? Welcome to my world! Here are a few of the "before" pictures, and hopefully before I die, there will be some "after" pictures to post along with them!

Living Room and Kitchen

The city of Kihei in Maui

Here in the top 2 pictures, you can see the view we had from our balcony in our hotel room. The bottom picture was in front of the hotel looking out over the ocean. Rough life huh? :)

Turtles and Seals....

Are these little guys cute or what??? On Sunday we went to turtle beach. When we got down near the shore, there were 4 turtles up on the sand, and there were bunches of turtles just swimming around in the water near the shore. It was cute to watch them swim around, and every once in a while you'd see this little head poke out of the water and look around. They have volunteers on the beach to keep people from bugging the turtles too much. It's actually a $2,000 fine if you are caught picking up or even touching a sea turtle. Just south of Turtle Beach a few miles is Sunset Beach, and they had a Monk Seal up on the shore. She had been there for about 3 days just napping in the sun. They say there are propbably only about 1,800 Monk Seals left in the world. They can be a little agressive if you bother them, so when they are on the beach the park volunteers put up yellow tape to keep people away from them.

More Aloha....

Last Thursday we got up at the very buttcrack of dawn, (3:30 to be exact) and drove to Honolulu to get on the ferry and go to Maui for 2 days. Lets first talk about the ferry. Who invented that thing? It was such a rough ride, I was absolutely green the whole way, and my good friend Lelia was a lot worse off than I was. The ride out was so bad, that it made us dread the trip back. (Although our fear of seasickness made us come up with quite the anti-nausea cocktail, and we did great!) Our main purpose for going to Maui was to drive the road to Hana. Its a 52 mile road that took us about 3 hours to drive due to the fact that the road is very narrow and winding, having 620 curves, 59 bridges-46 of which are one way so you have to take turns crossing. You drive through rainforest's, get to see waterfalls along the way, and there is a black sand beach that we were able to stop at.

Aloha!!

I'm back from Hawaii, I know you all missed me. We had a great trip!! My friend Lelia and I went to visit our friend Julieanne in La'ie on Oahu. We were there for 8 days, but it seemed more like 8 hours. Here are my partners in crime. Lelia is on the left and Julieanne is on the right. Aren't they cute?? This picture was taken at the Polynesian Cultural Center right before we went to our Luau for dinner. MMMMMM, delicious!

Here to the right is a guy that was passing the sacrament on sunday, then we ran into him again at his work. Quite a change I must say! After watching these students in their performances, you know they love their jobs. They were fun to watch.

Here is a little waterfall at the Polynesian Cultural Center that I thought was kind of pretty. Everything there was so beautiful, it was nice to just walk around and enjoy the landscaping as well as going to the different shows. We got to watch them climb a coconut tree, make coconut bread, and I even learned to dance in the Fiji section.....I'm sure it wasn't a pretty sight.