heather, marc, wren & z mroz

we are officially homeowners. we closed on our house on friday. everything went fine. we did the final walk through with the previous owner and he explained all the little idiosyncrasies and junk about the house. it was very nice to be able to talk with and deal with the owner directly since the house was for sale by owner. the closing went smooth except for our real estate lawyer showed up like 15 minutes late and then did basically nothing except tell us where to sign (like we couldn’t do that on our own). all and all the home buying experience was fairly painless even without a real estate agent, despite what they will tell ya, that you shouldn’t do it alone.

we’ve spent 3 nights in the house, haven’t unpacked fully yet, but so far so good.

i got offered a new role this past week when we came back from hawaii. i accepted it on friday. i used to be a team lead and now i am a group lead, which means i have other team leads on my team. its very exciting, kind of scary, and a lot of responsibility. i hope i do good. (there were a whole lot of i’s in that, sorry.)

we just got back yesterday from our trip to hawaii. a hospital on hawaii was going live with my work’s software, so i went out for the golive, brought heather along, and we made it a vacation. we took about 4 days off before i had to start working and got a sweet cottage on the north shore of oahu. our cottage had a great view of the crashing waves right off of waimea beach park. the waves were so loud, that is all you could hear all day, it was awesome. we were within walking distance to waimea beach park. the waimea beach had some crazy waves that if you weren’t careful would slap you back toward the beach and fill your pants with sand (literally my shorts would fill with sand as the waves slid me on my back up the beach) it was cool.

we are so glad we went to the north shore, most of the time the beaches and trails had few people on them. one of the beaches, malaekahana beach, was just about deserted, we only saw like 3 other people on the beach while we were there over a couple hour period. this beach was cool beacuse just 600 feet offshore is an island called moku auia seabird sanctuary (goat island), which is home to over 10 species of seabirds. heather and i braved the rough water and big waves and swam across the ocean to the island. you can see our war wounds in the photo section. it was a little scary swimming over there but once we got to the beach of the island there was tons of sharp coral reef and stones. getting on the island wasn’t so bad it just hurt a little. trying to get off the island and swim back was horrible. we tried to go back in the water the way we came in, but no matter which way we tried, standing, sitting, crawling, the waves would just push us back toward the beach cutting up our hands and feet as we flailed. after about 10 minutes of getting no where and feeling hopeless we made our way backwards to the beach we were trying to get off of. during all this the sky was starting to get darker, the waves seemed to get bigger, and we thought a storm was going to come. heather and i were a little scared. we eventually found a different part of the island that looked rockier but was really really super easy to leave from, and so feeling silly that we didn’t try this spot in the first place, we swam back. it took us a lot longer to swim back but we made it safely.
our cottage was just 5 minutes from waimea valley audubon center. at the end of the paved trails was the waimea falls where we were able to swim around the waterfall and even go under the falls. this was tons of fun, i wish we found some more waterfalls while we were in hawaii. the grounds of the waimea valley audubon center were nice but a little run down. they did have a place setup in the park were you could play “authentic” hawaiian games. heather and i had fun playing ‘ulu maika (breadfruit) a bowling game with disks and moa pahe’e (chicken darts) both games you had to get the disk or dart in between two stick goals. it was pretty much like horseshoes with out the horse or the shoes. we also played some other rock bowling game on a crescent shaped rock course, but i can’t find out what the name of that game was.
heather and i also did some hiking. we hiked the hau’ula loop trail which took us way up on the top of some mountain type hill thing it was pretty awesome. at the top you felt like you were practically in the clouds.

since we stayed on the north shore we were about 10 minutes from the legendary surf town of haleiwa, where there were tons of shops, resturants, and my favorite favorite hot day treat: hawaiian shave ice. i didn’t really realize that hawaiian shave ice was a thing that came from hawaii. i thought it was just a dumb name someone gave to a fancy sno-cone. however i was wrong it really does come from hawaii, or at least its from hawaii via the sizeable nikkei population who brought with them the tradition of kakigori (delicately flavored japanese shaved ice) and the filipino halo-halo (a parfait containing crushed iced, tropical fruits, sweetened beans, and ice cream). anyways shave ice (not shaved ice like i thought before i went to hawaii) is freaking awesome, its a billion times better then any crappy sno-cone. the ice is very finely shaved like snow flakes on a hot summer time morning, and then its covered with all kinds of sugary goodness syrup flavorings. in hawaii you can actually get your shave ice with ice cream at the bottom which makes the most magnificent surprise of melted ice, ice cream, and syrup when you finish eating the shave ice from the top. or you can get it with these “sweet” black beans at the bottom of your shave ice. heather was brave enough to try her shave ice this way, she was also brave enough to dump her beans in the garbage when she realized just because you put the word “sweet” before bean it doesn’t make it stop tasting like a bean. that is unless of course instead of calling jelly beans by their given name you like to call them jelly sweet beans, then you would be okay, but come to think about it jelly beans don’t really taste like beans anyways, so you can ignore my before mentioned rambling.
after our wonderful vacation on the north shore i had to go to work. my work put us up at the hawaii prince hotel waikiki, in downtown honolulu. it was like culture shock to come from the laid back very small beach towns of the north shore, to the ubercity of honolulu. downtown honolulu has tons of resturants, fancy fancy stores of designers i can’t remember the names for, and beaches. i never actually made it to waikiki beach since i was working 13 hours of the day, but heather said it was nice but over crowded. the pictures of the sunsets she saw look amazing. our hotel room was nice. all the rooms in our hotel faced the ocean and had big picture windows that actually opened up all the way. the sunrises and sunsets from our hotel window were amazing (maybe it wasn’t a sunrise… maybe a moonset?).
the night before i started work, heather and i went to a luau. germaine’s luau to be exact. we had fun but it was definatly not worth the price. it was a very very very manufactured luau (not that i’ve been to another one but you know). they picked us up on a big tour bus to drive us to the place on the west side of the island. our “escort” georgie was over the top. they want you to feel like a family at the luau and on the bus so they make you do all kinds of silly ice-breaker games and junk to get you to talk to the other people on the bus. once you get there they have a ton of picnic tables and smaller tables where you can sit on matts on the beach. the food was a buffett and not very authentic. the did have pork that came from a pig they cooked there in an underground oven pit on the beach. heather and i hoped the show would be a ton more authentic, but it was a lot of crappy hill billy, hawaiian, lounge singing mixed in with, audience participation, and what seemed to be some slightly authentic-ish polynesian dancing. oh yeah you can’t forget the guys from the audience who got suckered into wearing grass skirts and coconuts, because it wouldn’t be a luau without that. later we found out that the lady who started this company is actually a native of chicago, go figure. i’m not sure if it was so commercialized when marcia germain was alive and running the place but now it seems very commercialzed and very manufactured. we had fun, but the only reason we are glad we did it was that we would have thought it was something super cool that we missed if we hadn’t done it.
so that accounts our awesome trip to hawaii, heather and i had tons of fun, it was totally worth the long flights and 5 hour time zone changes. if we go back again i would like to go to one of the other islands that has volcanos on them. thanks kaiser permanente for having a hospital on the great island of oahu, hawaii.