It's been a while!

So, it's late Saturday afternoon, and Jeanie is working and I am making big plans for the night...post on my blog, add pictures to facebook, walk on the beach, cook something, write, read, make a CD mix. It's a strange shift in gears now that we are working almost full time (and on different days, too, it seems). It's definitely real life. What's a bummer is that when we finally do both have a full day off, it rains, so we can't go to the beach or take a surfing lesson or go for a hike or do any of the fun stuff we want to do. On Wednesday, it was pouring, and we went to see Benjamin Button, which was really good...but no surfing lesson.

Work is going well. In a way, it was nice to just get thrown into it, because it makes me learn things much more quickly. Working in a coffee shop is infinitely better than working in a restaurant--not only are people more laid back (I work closing shifts, as opposed to the business lunches I served at Axel's), but it's actually fun to make the coffee drinks. It gets busy and a little stressful, but I think the part that's actually most stressful for me is trying to close in an hour with only two people. We have to be let out by a manager, so we only have a certain amount of time to get everything done, and we can't start early because we're both busy taking orders and making drinks until the last minute. It's ridiculous.

I found out that both Luke and Owen Wilson were in Paia in the last month. So were Carlos Santana and Lenny Kravitz. How do I miss these things? I'm actually quite disappointed about Luke and Owen...though I also found out which house is theirs, so I can wait outside the gate in my free time, hoping they'll come back for a visit. (I'm KIDDING.)

I updated my facebook album with some pictures of the bamboo hike:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034249&l=ea731&id=110900370

Bamboo forest

Today after cleaning for a bit, Jeanie, David, and I hiked through this awesome bamboo forest on the way to Hana. It was a pretty intense at times, slippery and steep, and we had to use ropes and ladders and stuff. I'm still new enough to the island that I think bamboo forests are one of the coolest things in the entire world, the way they are so dense and have bizarre angles. The best part of the hike was swimming up a river between rock walls, climbing up a mini waterfall, and cliff-jumping off rocks into a pool. It was freezing but so exhilerating! I'll add pics in a bit.

Some Pretty Pictures!

My parents are leaving for Kenya in THREE days! My dad's on sabbatical and my mom got the semester off work, too, so they'll be in Kenya for a month and here on Maui for three months, doing various intercultural things. I'm crazy jealous about the Kenya part, but even more than that, I'm excited they have the chance to go back together, finally.

A new girl is living in our old room at Maria's. Her name's Victoria and she came from North Carolina on her own, which impresses me greatly, especially since she's only 20. She has connections at Anthony's Coffee Shop and will be working there. It's nice to have another person close by to hang out with.

I added some more pictures:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2034249&l=ea731&id=110900370

Full-Time Work Blues

This week has ended up being pretty exhausting! We are still having fun, but all the drink recipes are getting overwhelming, and we haven't even started putting drinks into the register (every drink, flavored syrup, addition, modification, etc. has its own number). We open to the public on Monday, and I'm nervous that I won't be ready by then. It's awesome to learn all about coffee, though--it's like we're learning secrets that the average person doesn't know. There are endless possibilities of drinks to make!

Border's gets a lot of weird people who come in (because about two-thirds of the people who live on the north shore are weird). There's the crack dealer who has strange twitches, and there's the guy who always comes in with a cooler, and the guy who brought a pile of pebbles over to us and tried to make us wave our hands over them.... That last man we have seen everywhere; last night he was on our doorstep with a drunk guy when we got back from work. Thankfully our friend David happened to be there, too, and he was in the process of getting rid of them. Another drunk guy hung out at our corner later that night and screamed profanities at no one for about half an hour, then tried to open our door (which thankfully I had just locked) and our window. We were a little freaked out, but there are plenty of people who live nearby, so it wasn't really dangerous. I really feel like I'm in Kenya sometimes.

Busy-ness (is that even a word?)

Life has actually picked up speed quite a bit, and I am—dare I say it?—busy. It’s nice to feel like my days have purpose, but I miss having endless time to lie on the beach and read books and ponder stuff.

We had a good time with Lauren…. Well, it was good to see her, but her time here was maybe not ideal. She came at the beginning of a massive wind storm, in which 50-60 mph wind off the ocean blew for two days straight, brought frequent bursts of rain, and literally began to tear our roof off. Her first morning, a cane spider joined us in the kitchen for breakfast. (We thoroughly killed this one, after screaming, running away from it, dousing it in bleach spray, and throwing a flip flop at it. Jeanie’s better with the actual killing of insects, but I am not squeamish about wiping up the guts afterwards. We make a good team.) On Friday, we had to work from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., between our two jobs, so Lauren entertained herself around Kahului and Paia.

We did have some fun while she was here. We went to the Grand Wailea beach, where it was windy but sunny, and Jeanie and I boogie boarded and got murdered by the waves—at one point, for a brief second, after being shoved and thrown about under water by a wave, I was sure I had broken my neck (obviously I didn’t, but my back hurt really bad for a few days and still kinda hurts). I can’t believe people surf waves larger than those. Lauren left Sunday night, and we were glad to have had our first visitor to show off our little life to.

Training at Seattle’s Best has been really pleasant so far. We have this smokin’ trainer from the mainland, Raphael, who is both energetic and laid back, and we’ve all been having fun getting to know each other. There are nine of us, eight women and one 20-something guy: Michael, our supervisor; Mae, Pat, Sanoe, and Jeffree, who worked at the Border’s Café before it became a Starbucks; Sunny, who is white but was born and raised in HI; Melissa, who has lived here three years; and us. It’s cool to feel an equal sense of ownership in the café, since we’re all starting together, and I haven’t gotten too overwhelmed, even after we started talking about recipes for all the drinks. I made an awesome latte today, my first ever :). We’ve been doing a lot of coffee tasting, and I’m SO wired from it, I hardly slept last night (not to mention Jeanie and I got up at 6:30 this morning to watch the presidential inauguration at Charley’s…. We missed most of it, but it was still fun to join the huge crowd for the tail end of it). I’m almost set on uniforms—we have to wear black or khaki pants or capris, and white or black collared shirts. It’s not too bad, though they have a lot of nit-picky specifications within that, like you have to wear a belt if your pants have belt loops, and your socks have to match your pants.

Oh, one annoying thing is that for working in food service, I have to get a TB test—not such a huge deal except that I was immunized against it as a baby, so a skin test is likely to be positive. I went to the free clinic today to ask about a chest x-ray, and they said I had to get the skin test first…. So I got the shot, will go back on Friday to get it checked, and then I might have to still get the x-ray. What a hassle.

I know this is getting long, but one final thing: Yesterday we were stopped at a red light, and this elderly man in the car next to us starts talking to me out his window. Turns out he needed directions somewhere, and who better to ask than the two girls driving the crappy car? I’ve been asked for directions quite a bit, but I’ve never given them as smoothly as I did right then. I almost felt like a local.

First Visitor!

Our friend Lauren is coming from Wisconsin tonight! Her mom works for Northwest, so she gets great deals on flights and spontaneously booked a flight out here. It'll be awesome to have our very first guest :)

The memoir editing is going very slowly, not because there's tons of stuff to change, but for some reason it's a lot more time-consuming than I realized. In the end, I'll probably have made about $3 an hour. Awesome.

That pro surfer, Keala, introduced herself to me today. I get star-struck so easily, but I like to pretend I don't know people are famous, maybe because I think they must get sick of people making a big deal out of them.

It is SUPER windy today, and the town has a pleasant (not) scent of sugar cane factory. I worriedly asked a couple people if there was going to be a hurricane, but they assured me that because Maui is between other islands, it hardly ever gets hit, and if it does, there's plenty of warning. Maui has these tremendous, massive clouds that in MN would indicate tornados but here are just cool to look at.

Volcano Peaks and Famous Surfers

I'm on my way to being a Hawaii resident! Jeanie and I went to get our state ID cards today, and after a detour to some official building to register to vote (we needed that to prove we live here) and maybe an hour of waiting, we got them! They are pretty :) I didn't really like Wailuku, the city all the government stuff is in, when I first went there, but this time it reminded me a lot of Mombasa--something about how colorful it is, and how the buildings look like they've aged too quickly because they've embraced the sun and heat--and now I'm kind of in love with it.

Yesterday we got up at 5 a.m. and drove up the peak of Haleakala to see the sun rise. It was pretty awesome and beautiful, though being cold and tired isn't my favorite thing. We came back and took a nap, had a crepe breakfast at Cafe Des Amis, and went over to Kihei to try out our boogie boards (since the surf here on the north shore is kind of terrifying--I'm serious, a lot of the time I'm too scared to even swim in it). It was a lot of fun, and I'm sore today! That evening we filled out paperwork at Border's, which took a ridiculously long time, and met our new coworkers. They seem nice, not extremely interesting, but you can't always tell from first impressions.

Retha just told us there's a famous surfer staying at the Lodge, Keala Kennelly. I saw her come in, though of course I didn't know who she was. She's here to surf Jaws. Cool, but if I'm going to see another celebrity, I still want it to be Owen Wilson.

I discovered that Pa'ia means "noise." It is a good name for this town.

I'm sorry, I feel like this post is particularly lame (and my writing style is particularly flat). I've been working a tiny bit on a little personal essay thing, and maybe it's sucked my creative juices out of me.