Aloha!

Much has happened since last I wrote and I could make several blogs out of what I have to tell, so here we go.

We have a home! And stuff to put in it! The movers showed up 10 days ago and delivered all of our goods. It all got here in one piece save for our microwave, which they busted in. They're supposed to refund us for it. It feels so nice to have our stuff; it makes this place more like home.

 

Once our stuff arrived we were a little overwhelmed at the amount of furniture we had to buy. We didn't have a desk, bookshelf, table, sofa, chairs, coffee table, patio furntiture, or dresser. We either didn't have those things when we were living in Oregon or we tossed most of it because it was cheap. Well, we got home from church a week ago and our neighbors were PCSing out, so they gave us their new grill, patio furniture (with a beautiful stone table!), a weedeater and a desk. A day later a friend in the ward gave us their couch and love seat. We didn't have to pay a dime for any of it. What a blessing.

Those pillows actually belong on our bed. The original brown pillows are back on it now. I was trying to see what would look good- trying to brighten up the color.  Any thoughts?

The chairs are beat up, so I'm reupholstering the chair seat and sanding/spray painting the metal. I think it's gonna look great.

This is Sam's project. He spray painted the doors and is polishing off the rusted top.

This is my favorite spot in the house.

People leave tons of garbage on the side of the road, and I found this and took it. I spray painted it for a pop of color- it was free, so if didn't turn out then no harm to me!

I'm going to paint this wall a light green.

Last week Sam had a retreat (bivouac- hard word to spell, let me tell you) at Bellows. It's a camp site right on the beach for military members. He spent a few days practicing mock deployment work and then I came up and joined him for the last day. It made me really excited to go camping later. There are more pines on the island than I first realized. Seeing them made me think of camping in Oregon.

Another hard day in the Air Force.

We finally made it out to the Dole Plantation. There isn't much to do there besides eating and shopping. They have a train tour and a maze, but I heard the train is really boring, and it was raining so we didn't feel like getting lost in a maze (although, their maze is famous for being really elaborate- might be fun to do with younger kids). That being said, I would happily drive out to Dole just eat their pineapple soft serve. It's the same soft serve you can find at Dole stands in Disneyland, except without the crazy long wait in the hot sun like you have at Disneyland.

We bought some Dole t-shirts and then walked through some of the pineapple fields. I didn't realize there were so many varieties of pineapple! The one we eat is a Somoan Cayenne pineapple. There's a bright red pineapple called a "Ruby" that I would love to try someday. It takes pineapple between 18-24 months to grow, so from one pineapple bush you can get 2 pineapples every 4 years or 3 every 5 years. No wonder pineapples are so expensive- they take forever to grow! That being said, pineapples are supposed to be really easy to grow. We saw a demo on planting a pineapple and it's pretty cool.

Spam update!

This isn't the demo we saw, but one I found on youtube (surprisingly hard to find a good pineapple planting video. Must be a dole conspiracy).

And for my doctor friends out there, I found this amusing. This little pineapple is about the size of my fist.

Sam wanted to feed the fish.

We'd love to get a Hawaiian quilt to put up on our wall, but they are expensive. A full size quilt was $800 and this one was $100 with military discount. This is the prettiest one I've seen. Maybe I'll get lucky and Sam will get it for me *cough*.

 I'm going to have to divide this post up into two. I'll tell you about memorial day and fruit hunting later!