Now that my mustache is established..

Maybe I should learn to speak Italian.  I need a hobby, right?  Cheers.

I think I missed a killer sunset tonight..

..and that really grinds my gears because I wasn't doing anything of consequence.  I got out of work at five and had some dinner (well, really it's lunch because I eat breakfast around 9am and then don't eat again until after I get off the floor, then have more to eat around 8 or 9pm..) and then rode home.  When I got up the hill I ride every day that overlooks the golf course I saw that it was kind of cloudy  over the water so I made a mental note to check out the sunset...then promptly forgot once I walked in the door.  A little after six thirty I looked out the balcony window and saw pinks and purples through the clouds and said, "Shit."  I grabbed my camera and hopped on my bike to ride down to the park to get a good view but the sun was already well down and the sunset was over with.  Shucks.  Sometimes you take things for granted out here.  The sunset is nice every day, especially the days I'm getting paid to watch it, but it really grinds my gears when I miss a good one.  I still haven't got a mind-blowing one on camera yet.  Maybe tomorrow..

I'm talking to my manager tomorrow about getting time off for Liam's wedding.  I think I need two weeks.  That makes sense for a wedding, right?  I'll make it happen.  Barring a catastrophe or a delay I'll be back at Gipper's on Thursday, October 14.  Write it down.  Also, I threw this out on the facebook and I don't think many people read this because I post so infrequently but I'm planning to head to Burlington to catch The Black Crowes' two night stand at Higher Ground on Tuesday, Oct. 19 & Wednesday, Oct.20.  If you want to see some killer music then let me know pretty soon; some of you may be getting a friendly inquiry from me.  I get paid Thursday of this week so after I buy my plane ticket home I'll be scooping tickets so let me know if you're in.  Sounds like they're playing two sets a night - one electric and one acoustic.  While this is their 20th anniversary it's also sounding more and more like a farewell tour as things progress so I don't plan to miss out.  An "indefinite haitus" is scheduled following the tour's conclusion in San Fran.

If you live in or around Burlington expect some contact from me, too.  I plan to neither sleep in a car nor a hotel so someone hook a brother up!

These guys are the "Most 'Rock & Roll' Rock & Roll Band of all time!"  What's not to like?  Cheers.

I don't know why I haven't posted these earlier..

Straight off the rock...Hawaii's not so subtle ad campaign against teen meth use..

Yikes.  Stuff sounds pretty serious.  Don't do meth, kids.  NOT EVEN ONCE..

I know these both say Montana Meth Project at the end, but trust me when I say these are the same commercials that come on during my Family Guy and South Park shows.  Quite a downer.  They put posters up all over the place, too.  Pleasant.  It sounds like it's working, though.  Shocking what happens when you just try to scare the shit out of kids.  This is like D.A.R.E. on steroids: instead of threatening kids with incarceration these folks just cut to the chase and show the tweakers.  Novel concept: "Hey kid: Don't be that guy, alright?"

Enough of this negativity...time for a good, ol' reliable knee slapper:

Cheers.

Out of it..

The last day or two I've been in a pretty good funk.  I think it started Wednesday.  I was working a dinner shift, just kind of going through the motions doing my thing clearing a table and a server came over and just said thanks for doing a good job and always being in a good mood and I just kind of laughed it off and said something along the lines of, "Let's be serious, it's just wiping up dirty tables."  And for whatever reason my own sentiment on my job has sort of been sticking in my craw for the last couple days.  And it's pretty silly because, yeah, in the whole scheme of things I get paid to clean up tables.  But at the same time I get paid more than well enough to get by, and I get to live in a pretty nice setting.  So while I was at my job when I came to a realization that something (or things, I suppose..) in my life are making me feel not quite right, I'm fairly certain that my discontent does not stem directly from my job.  Which is good, I guess?

At the same time I have sort of been in mercenary mode recently.  Well, I didn't know I was in mercenary mode until I coined the term while I was on the john earlier today.  Basically, I came back with a goal to make some moo-la-moo between landing back on the rock at the end of July and leaving the rock in October for Liam's wedding and I've sort of become consumed with that goal, which is kind of silly.  Dollars are useful from time to time but I need to start living by the other tenants of the TS Restaurants mission statement, which include having fun and with aloha.  Yep, that sounds nice.  Hell, the last two days I didn't work and I didn't make it out of the apartment I'm staying in.  How lame is that?  I live on the beach, gosh darn it, and I'm pretty pasty white right now.  This [apathy] cannot stand, man..

In other news I went through some old drafts of posts I had started but never finished and these videos were from back in January.  I guess I thought they were funny back then.  The first one is hilarious and one we used to listen to all the time back in the day and laugh pretty hard to.  The other two aren't as funny as I remembered them to be.  Well, the last one is funny, because most Family Guy is funny.  The Muppets tried the corner and missed.  Just a bit outside, in my humble opinion.  They're no Wayne, Garth, & Co.  But still use them to waste a few minutes of your day.  Carry on.  Cheers.

The WEED Man.

Muppets do Bohemian Rhapsody.

Family Guy Plywood Cutouts:

Baywatch is on Comedy Central tonight..

I have nothing better to do, so I'm watching an episode right now.  I don't ever recall seeing an episode before.  This is hilarious.  The Hoff just saved some buxom surfer's life in six feet of water.  She had on a wet suit, but when he got to her it was necessary to remove said wet suit to reveal a thong bikini.  Well played, David.

Next scene is the two of them in a room filling out an incident report.  The Hoff has redressed.  The blond is still letting her puppies breathe.  It began:

Hoff: Okay, what's your name, miss?
Girl: Destiny.
Hoff: And your last name?
Girl: Just Destiny.
Hoff: Oh, that's an unusual name..
Girl: Not if it's meant to be...

HAH.  These writers were gold.  I don't see how this show isn't still on today, like Law & Order.  I can't for the life of me figure out what went wrong.

The show was also cool because it had a three minute intro.  That's genius.  If you waste three minutes just running through the credits then that's three less minutes you have to fill dialogue and plot.  It's the female asses that put the asses in the seats, not the talkie talkie.  Another brilliant move, gentlemen.

Side note: Blogger doesn't recognize "dialogue" as a word.  Are you kidding me?  That's farting ridiculous...

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I spent a bunch of time (wasted a bunch of time..) making another animated film but it's taking a long gosh darn time to load or process or whatever.  So I guess a replay of my first goofiness will have to do for now.

Hopefully things will be shipshape tomorrow.  I'm confident it'll be the nuts.  TTFN.  Cheers.

Odd thought..

I guess I have a lot of odd thoughts, but just had to get this bit of pondering out there.  Came to my while on my two wheeler last night headed home:

You know how sometimes you start drinking and just sit there for awhile drinking, usually in a bar or a basement or on a deck (lanai for some..).  Somewhere that you luck out and someone else is always fetching the beers so you don't have to get up for like, two or three hours straight.  And you just started drinking then so you don't have to get up to pee pee for a long time (unless your Sam or Camps, this really can't apply to you since you guys go every 10 minutes when you're sipping..).  Then after all that time and all that booze you stand up and get all stumbly and realize: "Holy smokes...I'm pretty shitcanned right now."

Your night can never quite rebound from there because the hooch snuck up on ya Ashton Kutcher top-rope Punk'd style.  It's not necessarily a bad night, it's just a night that the booze snuck up on ya.

Well, what happens with people in wheelchairs...do they ever know they're drunk?  Is remaining seated alcohol's kryptonite?  If you never get up, do you never get drunk?  I may need a bed pan and a bottle of Jack to test this hypothesis..

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In other news...I started working again yesterday.  I work eleven hours (ya...double digit hours..) today alone.  I think four weeks may have been a bit too much to take off...I really didn't want to go back to work.  I suppose no one really wants to work.  My Grandpa would always say, "Work ain't work unless you don't like what you're doing."  Truer words have never been spoken..

I more or less have to work now, as Liam and Rachel's wedding is in just over two months.  Man, that date crept up.  Maybe because invitations still haven't been mailed out...then again maybe it's just because 30 days aren't as long as they used to be.  It'll be nice to be in Maine during the fall, though.  Good call, guys.  It wouldn't be a real fall if I was without Wallingford's cider donuts and a leaf peeping hike or two and a chilly (but not too chilly..) trip to the ocean and going to one of Skip's fooseball games.  All should be able to be squeezed in, if all goes well...Cheers.

Big Island, big view..

As today is my last day before I return to work I just kind of felt like hanging out all day.  I may go for a jog later on, but we'll have to see about that.  Each day I've been back on Maui I've been saying I'm going to run...and it hasn't really happened yet.  I seem to be lacking a routine...maybe I just need a good kick in the ass.  That's neither here nor there right now because it's hot out and I'm going to wait until the sun starts to go down before I reconsider that whole "exercising" thing.  Right now I've got the Big Island back on my mind.

I had been mulling over the best way to recap this trip and I was struggling because even as I was taking pictures I knew none of them really did this location its due justice.  This place was, to sum: unreal.  I've been to a couple of picturesque oceanfront houses in Maine and neither of these really hold a candle to where I lived for three days, in my humble opinion.   I guess the only place I've been that I could try to compare and contrast would be Haggerty's grandparents' place off the coast of Harpswell.  Literally off the coast of Harpswell, on an island.  Long Island.  Long Island, Maine.  Not that other, shittier, longer Long Island.  And at the northern end of Long Island, away from the other houses and buildings and roads so the only way there is by boat.  That's how you "get away from it all."  

But this post isn't about Long Island, it's about Keaau, Hawaii.  So let me narrate a bit as to how this all transpired.  About the only person I still talk to from my coaching days at Bates is the women's track coach, Jay.  Jay's husband has pretty deep Hawaiian roots.  Haole roots, but roots all the same.  Jay's husband, Andy, had a great great great (I think that's enough greats..) grandpappy who was a missionary headed to Micronesia but stopped in Lahaina so his wife could give birth.  They ended up moving to the Big Island, Hawaii, rather than continuing on so this guy's son, William H. Shipman, grew up on Hawaii, went to the mainland to be educated, then headed back to Hawaii to begin business enterprises.  In the 1880's he and two other guys bought up 70,000 acres that were being sold by a recently deceased Hawaiian king for $20,000 and within two years this Shipman fellow bought out his two partners.  Crafty, crafty.  This land was super fertile so he leased much of it to farmers and he and his family have more or less been reaping the rewards ever since.  

This land also had a killer beach, Haena Beach,and nice beaches are few and far between on the east side of Hawaii.  It's a lot like Hana on Maui as it has a rocky, jagged coastline.  So this land is pretty posh.  This all relates to me because in the very early 1900's this Shipman guy built a couple of houses on the ocean shore deep within his land, just behind this beautiful Haena Beach.  I've been told the land looks like a pizza slice, and the houses are at the center of the crust.  Hawaii has a state law that all beaches are public so people can get to the beach, but they have to walk three or four miles in along the shore and the rest of the land is private.  In one house resides Andy's uncle who is now the president of W.H. Shipman, Ltd., and the other house is known as the Shipman Beach House and anyone who has Shipman blood running through their veins can book it out.  And since there are six bedrooms in this house and I was already in the Hawaiian Islands I got the invite over to spend some days there.  Lucky me.  

I spent some time trying to find a way to show this on a map and wikipedia hooked it up the easiest.  For whatever reason when I typed in "auburn, me" it wasn't a location, but Haena Beach (And the Shipman Puna properties..) both were.  So on a very vanilla scale this is what I was looking at:

From Hilo, the biggest city on Hawaii's east side, you headed south seven or eight miles and then banged a left onto two or three miles of gates, gravel backroads through macadamia nut trees, banana trees, papaya trees, etc, then through another gate and onto a mile or two of paved (ya...paved.  Blacktop.  Let's just say a couple miles of blacktop isn't cheap and just leave it at that..) road through a gosh darn jungle until you pop out onto the Shipman property.  From here I'll leave you with pictures and captions.  I spent a little time in Volcanoes National Park and a little time in Hilo at a farmer's market and at Akaka Falls a little north of Hilo, but other than that I hung out here.  I think I got my money's worth..

There she is: The Shipman Beach House..

207 Recapped in word, picture, and musical tributes..

I haven't worked since July 13th.  That seems so long ago.  It is so long ago.  Damn near a month.  But things start back up tomorrow.  Here are some things that occurred while I was in the 207 for a couple of weeks...I don't have a lot of pictures from my two weeks but the highlight was a Maine steamed dinner with my folks and Mr. Gallagher, who always seems to find his way to my house when the Capone's chow down on lobstah..

It wasn't totally traditional: we didn't have corn on the cob but but did have plenty of Marie's kick ass 'tater salad, but a good time was had by all and at the end of the afternoon we all had full bellies.  As I sit back and reflect on my time in Vacationland it appears that, while I was home for two weeks, the days went by in the blink of an eye (a young girl's eye, that is..).

Aloha: 2.0

Traveling by plane weirds me out to a certain extent.  When I was taking the red eye back home a couple of weeks ago after about four hours of flight time it occured to me that flying in a plane is almost like time travel.  I mean, I don't travel a lot but when I think about traveling 6000 miles in less than a day my brain kind of turns to mush.  It just says," Okay...if you say so."  It just doesn't compute.  Sci-Fi stuff.  I brought this up to a couple of people back home and was met with laughs and shoulder shrugs.  I may be alone on this one.  This feeling of incomprehensibility may also relate to the fact for the previous six-ish months prior to my trip home I could count the number of times I've been in a car on my fingers and toes, without re-counting fingers or toes.  That means I was in a car less than 20 times.  I can't put my finger on what makes foot and bike travel different, it was just a little weird to me.  Perhaps I just feel more comfortable traveling a bit slower than most.  Perhaps I just failed in an attempt to come off as profound.  Either way, flying's pretty silly.


My ma asked me yesterday what it was like to fly over tons and tons of water and I told her I didn't know because my first trip over I sat in the middle aisle without a view outside and my trip back was a red eye and by the time the sun came up we were already back on land.  Watching the sun come up over the desert and mountains and clouds was pretty intsense on that occasion, I must say, but that doesn't really relate to what I was talking about.  As I'm now traveling back across the open ocean and I have a view outside I really don't see a whole lot of difference.  Clouds block most of your view of the ground so for the most part it looks the same as traveling over land.  The was a few minutes where I looked up and the clouds were quite thin so much of the blue from the ocean (remember, I'm in the Pacific now so I don't worry about tar balls.  Just giant conglomerations of plastic that collects miles wide...but again, stories for another day..) and I thought it looked similar to what people might see if they flew in a puddle jumper over much of the Arctic.  Big chunks of ice separated by deep, blue ocean.  I, however, have never been anywhere remotely close to the Arctic so this is really just the Discovery Channel talking.  This does make me want to check out Alaska, though.  That'd be a good time, I reckon.

It also kind of looks like you're looking down at the sky.  This is also a bit disconcerting as you can't actually look down at the sky.  But the clouds are there, and you're over the clouds and underneath is blue ocean but it looks like blue sky.  WILD AND CRAZY.

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In other news, while I'm coming back to the islands after a two week trip home I still have another week before I start work up again.  I've got a couple days to hang out before I'm taking a trip over to the Big Island to meet up with my friend Jay and her family.  Her husband has family on the big island and (from what I've been told..) they have a rather large plantation house where I can lay my head for a couple of days before I have to get back to the office.  I expect a swell time, and you should expect some pictures of a new locale.  I think it'll be the perfect vacation before I have to get back to work.  This will also be my first inter-island travel, so I've got that going for me...which is nice.  While this was my first "vacation," I'd be pretty bummed if I had to go back to work the day after a serious flight (Like from Maine...not from the Big Island..) after taking time away from work.  I think a vacaction after your vacation is the way I'm going to try to do things for a little while.  And by a little while I mean as long as I can, haha.  At worst I plan to leave at least a day off upon my return to the island prior to returning to work, just to make sure I've had time to shake the rust off.  Going home was stressful, lemme tell ya..

Slight diversion here: As I sit on this 777 typing while I head back to my island I've just begun to realize that while I'm going back to what I call home I don't actually have a home there.  I'll be couch crashing for at least a few days and I have no difinitive plan on where I'll be staying.  I laughed this off when I was packing up my little bits of junk and storing them at friends' places, but now it's starting to hit me that quite soon I'll need to figure out a place to live.  In a perfect world I hoped to be coming back to a 3 bedroom place ready for an August 1 move in...but this does not seem to be perfect world as I have no 3 bedroom place to move into.  Zoinks!  Could be looking for another room in a random house quite soon, which would really make me feel flat.  It'll all get sorted out though, I'm sure.  Right?

On the work subject you should all be happy to know that, much to my dismay, I was named Hula's employee of the month for June.  Luckily I was in Maine when this occured as I don't enjoy attention being drawn to me in professional settings.  Only social settings, I suppose, and that's not so much because I enjoy it but because I tend to be a little bit more ridiculous than most and for whatever reason that seems to attract stares from time to time.  So it goes.  Anyways, I don't like the idea of coming in and rocking the boat; I just enjoy going about my business under the radar.   The book I'm reading is a memoir of sorts of a Brit who drove around backwater towns in America and wrote what he saw.  In one Louisiana town he stopped and met a prision inmate who was the editor of the prision's monthly (or bi-monthly...I don't recall at this moment..) magazine, a magazine that, over his time as editor, had been responsible for yard-sale positive changes within the prision, firings of certain people of power within the prison, and the release of innocent inmates.  The magazine had an outside subscription of close to 30,000 people around the country (as of the year 2000-ish..), including many journalists looking for leads to stories for themselves.  Anywhoo this guy has been locked up for quite some time and has seen many people who committed the same crime he did (murder in the first degree) have their life sentences commuted and parole granted.  He felt that he had no chance of being released due to the notoriety he had gained as the edior of the magazine.  He feels that to have any success in getting out of prison you have to basically be annonymous within the system.

Man, how I wanted to remain annonymous within the Hula Grill.  As Bob Dylan sang awhile back: " 'It's my work,' he'd say.  'I do it for pay.  And when it's over I'd just as soon go on my way.' "  It's not like I wanted to skate by or anything; it may sound sick and twisted but I do enjoy what I do and have never had a problem working hard.  I just don't like people talking about the fact I tend to work fairly hard.  I don't sweat it too much if I work with other people who are fine skating by and I have to do more than my share of the work, as has happened in other professions over my years in various crumby jobs.  I just do what I do, you just do what you do, and everything's gravy.  Hopefully when I return to work August 6th everyone will have forgotten about little, old me.  JAG: just another guy.  That would be tremendous.

The $100 gift certificate is a nice touch, though.  As is the longboard trophy for my mantle...Cheers.