Hawaii, Etc.

The brain has been out on a vacation of its own since we came back from Maui, which is why there hasn't been much posted here. I've been trying for two days to come up with two paragraphs of text to summarize my teaching experience and style and have basically nothing to show for the effort. So maybe doing a real blog post will shake something loose.

Part of the problem is the strange weather we've been having here in Prescott, AZ. Usually, things are getting hot, sunny and dry this time of year, but instead there has been thunderstorms rolling around pretty much all week. That's kept us inside when I really want to go out and walk around. Things are supposed to clear out this afternoon, so maybe we'll spend a few hours tomorrow out walking and getting some sun and fresh air. In the meantime, we've both been kind of lethargic.

But enough of that; Hawaii was in the title and so I should probably talk about our trip a little bit. We stayed on the island of Maui the entire time. At first, we thought that we would run out of things to do with a full week in such a small place, but that turned out to not be a problem. In fact, there was one whole section of the island we didn't even get to. Part of the problem is that the topography of the island makes getting places difficult. On a map, the straight-line distance from Point A to Point B may only be 20 miles, but the road distance may be three or four times that as the road zig-zags back and forth, either because it goes up the side of a near-vertical cliff or is following the contour of the coastline. Add in that the speed limit in many places is 15 or 20 MPH (and that's often optimistic), and you have what looks like it should be a couple hour drive turning into an all-day road trip. The other problem is that we have a very different take on what is or isn't interesting. Something that is supposed to only take a couple hours will keep us occupied for an entire day, and something that people tell us to plan a whole day for will only hold our interest for about five minutes. Now that we know what's what, we could probably go back for another week and do things right.

Speaking of roads and driving in Hawaii, the locals seem to do their best to make getting around as interesting as possible. First, signage sucks. Most streets don't even have road signs and the ones that do are often overgrown with vegetation of some sort. And there is no such thing as a good map of Maui. We had three or four different maps and none of them were what I would call "good" as in having correct names, sufficient detail, etc. And I'm not sure why, but the speed limit on any given road changes about every 20 feet for no apparent reason: 35MPH, 45MPH and 55MPH signs are posted completely at random along one stretch of 4-lane divided highway that was probably the only flat, level piece of road on Maui. Not that any of it matters, as everyone just ignores them and drives 80MPH.

Which brings me to the local drivers. Everyone expects fudgies to be bad drivers; sudden inexplicable stops, turns and lane changes just go with the territory when you have large numbers of drivers who don't know where they are going trying to follow instructions being shouted at them from the passenger seat by someone who is directionally challenged. But the locals really take the cake: Hawaiians seem to have an intense interest in everything except where they are going. They are either half out of the side window waving and conversing with someone behind them, looking around in the back seat, looking around on the floor; in short, their eyes are everywhere except on the road in front of them. So it came as no surprise to us when the local paper had a front-page article declaring Hawaiian drivers the third-worst in the nation. Our only surprise was that there were places where people were even worse drivers than Hawaii. Combine this with the narrow, twisting roads with few or no guardrails running along the edge of 1,000-foot cliffs, and that the local cars are only capable of two speeds (0MPH and 80MPH), its a miracle there are any Hawaiians left. No wonder they have to keep importing people from the mainland.

Anyway, we have lots of pictures; I've made the first pass through them and will probably make another pass through some time this afternoon. It will probably take the better part of a day to upload them (about 650 images in total) given that our upload speed is less than 1 Mbps. I'll post something here when they are all uploaded.

And another thunderstorm just rolled through. Blue sky and sun, loud clap of thunder, completely black sky, rain, hail, then blue sky and sun; all in about three minutes. This has to be one of the strangest places on the planet.

Whenever this guy gets tired of being an Olympic gymnast, he can be the next James Bond:



Holy Crap.

HCHSBTSPODTUTBGTUTHADHOI: cold is a much bigger problem than a couple degrees of warming, which is why we have no plans of moving out of the most southern states. I remember the 1970's.

If you combine household debt with the federal debt, the number is $668,621 per American household ($546,668 per household in federal debt plus $121,953 per household in personal debt). At a mere 3% interest, it would take $2,818.93 a month for 30 years to pay that off, assuming we also triple federal taxes in order to eliminate the yearly deficits. "Houston, we have a problem."

Government bond holders are flexing their muscle. Let's see Obama throw these guys under the bus like he tried to do to the bond holders for GM and Chrysler.

Well, enough happy thoughts for one day. I need to stare at the computer some more and try to crank out those couple paragraphs. Don't want the entire day to be a write-off.