Sunday, October 23, 2011

A little bit of everything...

Aloha! Here's a visual update of what I've been up to the past couple of weeks.

A few Friday's ago, Olivia headed over to the west side to attend the weekly art walk in Hanapepe. I'd gone once before with the couchsurfers. It's a relaxing atmosphere. All of the art galleries have their doors open with little plates of food (mostly sweets) inside, live music on the sidewalks, and food vendors set up all along the street. Here's a pic of an amazing string quartet.



The next day, my friend Chris and I went zip-lining a couple of weekends ago at Kauai Backcountry Adventures on the south side. It rained during the drive there, and I was reward with a giant rainbow that landed right in the field behind the checkin building.




The views while zip-lining were incredible. The tour started at the top of a jungle valley, and we zipped our way to the bottom via seven separate lines. After figuring out how to steer (or spin) using the harness on the first line, Chris and I got creative and zipped upside down, twirling, with no hands on some of the longer lines. Once we landed at the valley floor where the jeep met us with all of our bags, I retrieved my phone and snapped a picture of the final line we had just zipped. It does nothing to demonstrate the beauty of the scenery, but hey, blog posts are better with pictures.




The tour ended after we ate lunch on a riverbank, but Chris and I then met up with some other couchsurfers and headed west to Waimea Canyon for the day. The annual Queen Emma Festival  going on at Koke'e, so we stopped there briefly on our way back.



On Friday nights, our church does a beach outreach at Hanalei, which I always attend. (Excepting the night Liv and I went to Hanapepe.) The sunsets at Hanalei are gorgeous, especially in the summer when the sun descents on the water. Now that winter is approaching, the sun goes down behind the mountains, but the sight is still a nightly masterpiece. This picture is from this past Friday (taken with the 8 megapixel iPhone 4S); note that there are literally rays of pink.




The last event I'd like to make note of is the gruesome slaughter of this cane spider:




To be fair, it's one of the smaller ones I've come up against, but only the second that I've succeeded in killing. (The first was in my bathroom, on my bath towel, which I had just wrapped around my body... how have I not blogged about that?! The killing of that spider involved two hours of laundry piles, salad tongs, and tennis shoes. But that's another story.) The spider was in the gym, and I threw over 30 tennis shoes at it. They were the same four pairs of shoes; I would retrieve them each time the spider scampered to a different corner. I tried to force myself to use a broom, but my body involuntarily spasms if I'm touching any object that is also touching a can spider. So it was with thrown shoes that I finally wounded the spider. When they die, cane spiders shrivel up into tiny balls of furry leg. This picture was taken after the spider had faked it's death and freaked me out by starting to crawl up the wall again after I thought it had been dead for a good four minutes and tried to pick up a shoe near it. The legs are all wonky because he's starting to shrivel. (For size reference, note that the the electrical outlet is standard size without the plastic box around it.)



And that's all for now. Aloha!

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