Presenting LTC Luis Rodriguez

With the tropical sun beating down and the eyes of over 100 soldiers on him, Luis was promoted on Friday to Lieutenant Colonel.
The ceremony took place in the grassy area outside of the office where Luis works. It was well attended because Luis, or El Fuego, is well loved in the ranks.














To my surprise and horror, I had to stand next to Luis during the dog and pony show and even had a small role. Luis' boss, LTC Sims, gave an entertaining if lengthy summary of Luis' storied career starting with his first job at age 12 as a political cartoonist. It was touching and funny and would have been more appreciated if I had a hat or was standing in the shade or hearing it without all those people staring in my general direction. How I suffer for my country.














My job, besides standing there nodding and smiling like a political wife, was to remove the velcroed major patch and replace it with the new patch. The new patch looks exactly the same as the old one except it has a black leaf instead of a gold one. It looks kind of like a star but as Luis emphatically told me once, it is NOT a star, it's a leaf. Okay.
















Finally, LTC Sims and Luis did the oath thing and it was over. Or so I thought. Afterwards there was a receiving line where all 100 plus people came through and shook both of our hands. Almost every one of them looked me in the eye and said, "congratulations" as if I had done something more significant than pick a good man to marry. Despite the fact that I congratulate myself every day for making such an excellent choice, I didn't know how to respond other than an awkward "thank you?" It was a lovely ceremony and I am very proud of my husband.

Big plants on the big island

Shark Boy and Lava Girl

We spent Memorial weekend on the Big Island and it's true, it is a big island. The other Hawaiian islands can all fit in the big island with room to spare. It is even getting bigger all the time since an active volcano is regularly spewing lava and adding new territory.

We flew into Hilo on Thursday night and spent the first night there. Hilo is a lovely small city with limited tourist presence. Apparently cruise ships dock there but because it is on the rainy side of the island and the coastline is mostly rocky, most of the tourists stay on the west coast and only visit Hilo on circle drives. Luis and I liked the Hilo area because we had nice weather and if there's anything that fills us with more ennui, it's another beautiful white sand beach.

We drove up the coast the first day and saw the rugged cliffs and waterfalls then backtracked and headed to the volcano.






























We stayed at the Kilauea Military Camp which is located within Volcano National Park. The camp is yet another military only enclave and it was perfectly functional if a little spartan. It was originally built by Buffalo soldiers to intern Japanese citizens during World War II. Now I am benefiting from oppression layered upon more oppression, what next? At this rate, I'll be shopping at Wal-Mart and voting Republican by fall.

The volcano crater was continuously spewing forth clouds of sulfuric gases that added to the surreal lunar look of the place. We hiked around the craters, including the Thurston lava tube pictured below, then drove down the Chain of Craters road through the lava flows of years past.














































After getting our fill of volcano related activities, we spent Sunday on the Kona side where we snorkeled and spent some time at a beach. We snorkeled at a place Honaunau Bay which had some excellent coral and all sorts of fish. We even saw a shark. I have some issues about sharks ever since seeing Jaws as a kid. That movie scared me out of the ocean, pools, and baths. Even closing my eyes in the shower was scary after seeing that movie. I didn't freak out though since the shark, which was about 5 feet long and was probably a reef shark, was about 100 feet away and moving in the other direction.

As it turns out, Luis saw a shark while snorkeling with my brothers in November near where we live. It was a big one and he didn't tell me about it at the time because he assumed, correctly, that I wouldn't snorkel there if I knew. He was going to tell me on the plane trip back to Kansas City but I found out from my brother on the phone last week, thanks Doug. No more snorkeling at Electric Beach for me.

On Monday we went back to the Hilo area for the day since our flight left that evening. We visited the Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden which is the absolute best botanical garden I have ever visited. It has waterfalls, giant plants, coastline, landscaped tropicals, everything. It has ruined me for any other kind of garden.

Happy 43rd birthday, Doug Moyer

Senator Fong's Plantation and Gardens

I took the 1:00 tour of the Senator's gardens but it was more like a jungle. The Senator bought the property in 1950 and spent the subsequent 50 years planting anything and everything until he died in 2004. Grant, one of the gardeners, led the tour. He has worked for the Senator or his family on and off since he was 12 years old.




This is called a cannonball tree for obvious reasons. The fruit or nut or whatever it is is very heavy and, according to Grant, has no real use other than as a ball in a rousing game of lawn bowling.









The mountains in the distance were very hazy due to vog conditions. Once the tradewinds stop blowing, the immense amounts of ash and sulfur being spewed from the volcano on the big island settle around the entire island chain. It's been like this for a couple of days now and some portions of the population are reporting respiratory problems. The winds are supposed to pick up again tomorrow or the next day and all should be well. Unless, of course, this is a precursor for the big one, and Hawaii is about to become the Pompeii of 2008.

The Byodo-In Temple

Yesterday I traveled to the eastern side of the island to take in Senator Fong's Plantation and Gardens with the goal of hitting one of the garden tours. I arrived much too early and had about an hour and a half to kill. Luckily Oahu is composed almost entirely of sites to see so I consulted my tourist map and drove 5 minutes away to see the Valley of the Temples Memorial Park. It is basically a huge cemetery with a buffet of different houses of worship to choose from including the Byodo-In Temple. The temple is home to Amida, a golden Buddha over 18 feet tall.




















There were, of course, plenty of koi in the ponds around the temple and you could buy food to feed them. It's just like feeding carp at the lake except these are prettier. Luis and I have been watching a lot of Japanese programming on one of the stations here (with subtitles, of course, hai!) and we learned that in Japan, some of these fish can cost over $1000. It seems a little much to pay for an animal that you can't pet, ride, or eat.














The bell pictured here is five feet high and weighs three tons. The bell is supposed to be rung before one enters the temple to spread the eternal teachings of Buddha. I didn't ring it but others did and it's a soft boom that travels quite a distance.

Luis bakes his first apple pie

Luis asked me to show him how to bake an apple pie. I said I would only if he agreed to put a little beefcake into it. What do you think of his efforts?

Haleakala on Maui

The Hawaiian islands were formed by volcanoes. Haleakala is one of the volcanoes that formed Maui. Although it is classified as an active volcano, the last volcanic activity occurred about 200 years ago. While we were visiting Maui in February, we drove up the volcano and had a look around. It doesn't look like anywhere else in Hawaii or really anywhere else on earth. The crater looks more like the moon.

We stopped at one of the visitor centers on the way up the mountain and we were already above the clouds. The next photos are of the crater itself. You can hike throughout the crater on the trails but I would imagine you would want to take plenty of supplies and be mindful of the time. It doesn't look like a place you want to get stuck when the park closes. The snowcapped mountains in the distance are on the big island. The bird in the last photo is a chukar and we know that because Luis asked a park ranger at one of the visitor centers what it was. He also asked her what it tasted like and she said it tasted like chicken. Seriously.

Photos from Haleakala on Maui

More photos from Lahaina Town in Maui

Maui

Luis and I went to Maui for a long weekend in February. There are some hazards to traveling to Neighbor Islands as we've discovered. I had originally booked us on the Super Ferry which had recently begun service to Maui. The Super Ferry is a very controversial topic in the islands because they apparently failed to obtain the proper impact statements before beginning service. There were claims that it would adversely affect the environment, that it would bring more unwelcome visitors to places like Kauai, that it would spread invasive species from one island to another.

The Ferry began service anyway but encountered one obstacle after another including a run of bad weather and mechanical problems. I ignored all of this because I selfishly wanted to take a fun boat ride to another island and take our car with us. I got my comeuppance when I received an e-mail less than one week before our trip advising us that the Super Ferry was going into dry dock for an extended period and did we want our money back or a trip at a later time? Since we had to scramble to get plane tickets and rent a car, I chose to get a refund.

We are planning on a weekend trip to Molokai starting tomorrow and the hotel I had intended to book closed the day I was going to call for reservations. The hotel was owned, like half the businesses on the island, by a vindictive out of state corporation that closed everything in a fit of pique over the island's resistance to the corporation's plan to build luxury vacation homes in a culturally and environmentally sensitive area. My inconvenience in having to find another hotel is less than nothing compared to the difficulties on Molokai as a result of the biggest employer on the island shutting down.

We are also planning a trip to the Big Island over Memorial weekend but the place we plan to stay is within a park where a volcano is spewing ever increasing amounts of sulfur that has caused repeated evacuations. At least we didn't book any airline tickets with Aloha or ATA which just went under. Oh, the people in Myanmar would long for the troubles I face.

Let's talk about Maui. It's a beautiful island and the highlights of our trip were the nonstop whale sightings and a visit to the volcano, Haleakala. More on the volcano in the next post. I also plan to post some photos from our snorkeling but the disposable underwater camera that we used requires actually getting the photos developed, so old school.














Maui is shaped like a big blob with a small head attached to its upper left side. We stayed on the west side of the head part in an area called Napili Bay. We stayed at the Napili Surf which was clearly built in the style I'll call Sixties Motor Hotel. Despite the unfashionably retro outside appearance, the accommodations were lovely. We were in an ocean front unit and we did some serious whale watching from the balcony.















Also in the head of the island is a town called Lahaina which was once a whaling village known for its sinful excesses. It's now completely touristy with no sailors or prostitutes in sight. There was an art fair in the center of town under this ginormous tree.














I can't say enough about the whales. We saw whales on Oahu, including from our own balcony there, but nothing like on Maui. There are just so many of them. The channel between the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai is filled with whales during the entire winter season. I had the binoculars in hand during the whole trip. The whales look as happy as any tourist to be in Hawaii and they spend their time breaching and flapping their tails and just cruising along the coasts.














It's not easy to get a good photo of a whale since most of the body is usually under water. You never know when they are going to breach and they always seem to do it just when you put the camera down. Assholes. This photo was along a highway as you go from the main blob to the head part of Maui. This whale was doing slow lazy rolls and the part that is showing is one of the massive flippers.














On our last night in Maui, we took a bottle of wine to the beach in front of the hotel and watched the sun set over Molokai.

A short film by Olivia Rodriguez

A few weeks before we arrived in the Kansas City area for our visit, one of my parents' horses, Comanche, had a tragic run in with a barbed wire fence. He sustained a laceration in his hind area, his horse's ass, if you will. This laceration required some continued doctoring by my mother and she had a helpful assistant in Caroline who maintains a fierce interest in all things related to bathroom functions. Caroline watched closely and with great attention as my mom syringed water all over the aforementioned nether region. Then Caroline learned first hand about the drawbacks of getting too close to the back end of a horse. Watch and enjoy but if you are surreptitiously watching this at work, be warned that there is audio.

Kansas Gothic