Adios, amigas.

In honor of friendships chock full of late night chats, nail-parties, lots of laughing, lots of eating, beach Fridays and night-swimming, among many, many other things, two of my favorite people and I did a little photo session last Saturday.

To make the photos a little more interesting (because we can be pretty boring people, y'know!), we had classy, classy cardstock mustaches.
To make the world a more entertaining, when we were done, we stuck them to a handrail on campus and drew faces. Last I checked, they were still there, a week and some change later.

 

The cheese-tastic, requisite photos with the school motto were also done, in the most serious manner possible. Clearly, we were all meant to be models. 

(Somehow I conned my roommate into taking some photos for us, even though she had a full day of studying planned. She is wonderful, clearly.)

I've been preparing myself for a life of solitude and study once both of these lovely ladies leave, I think it'll work out quite well for me. 

Mmmm, mmmm, good.

Certainly there are incredible, awe-inspiring, adventurous ways to start a day off. Today, making a avocado, cheese, tomato, lettuce mustard sammich on a whole grain bagel (and having friends around to laugh at my camera in hand through the whole process) was a pretty good way to welcome in the weekend.

I might've mentioned this before, but I am one lucky girl.

Sometimes I forget this. I enjoy school immensely, but I do tend to get caught up and stress out about it a little more than is probably good for me. (Was I up until two last night rewriting a paper that I rewrote completely again, for the third time, after I woke up? Yes. Yes, I was. Am I going to get an A on that dang paper? You bet I am.)

Those times are when I need little reminders of how lucky I actually am.

Reminders like this:

I wish I'd thought to bring along my wide-angle lens, which would've made for a much better photo, but that will have to wait for another day.

Early last week, after a two hour long Astronomy lecture that dragged on for what felt like five hours, I decided that being productive was overrated. With a little bit of time to kill before I had to be at work, I threw on my swimsuit, grabbed my towel and a book and walked three minutes to the beach, to sit in the shade and ignore the fact that I had chapters of studying to do and pages of papers waiting to be written. It was one of the best decisions I made all week.

I'm bad a resolutions.

...Clearly, seeing as I resolved to be better at posting and then this poor little blog has sat ignored for the past two months.

I've certainly been busy, with both work and school as well as taking advantage of all the rad things there are to do as a college kid in Hawaii. I've even been photo-documenting most things, but most of those photos have simply sat in a folder on my desktop.

To try to make amends, I'll share a picture of one of the most beautiful sights to ever been seen by these two eyes of mine. Feel free to be as jealous as you'd like.

Thank goodness for summer!

Spring term just ended last week, and already summer has been full of night-swimming, a multitude of four am chats with friends, trips to town, nail painting parties, afternoon beach hours, reading for fun, field trips about food sovereignty and makin' money. I'm living in what is probably the best house in this little town with some wonderful roommates and am just so glad to have this six week break free of homework, quizzes, exams, three hour lectures and all those other school things. I now have a chance to immerse myself in nerdiness for sheer enjoyment without concerns about deadlines and bedtimes and such.

I make no guarantees about posting at any interval, but I do promise that I think about posting at least twenty-seven times for every time that I do actually find myself wandering onto blogger, and all of those thoughts are deep and awe-inspiring, of course.

As for a picture this post... On Memorial Day, some friends and I drove down to town to check out the Lantern Floating Festival without any real idea of what it would be. We certainly weren't expecting the thousands of people that were packed into Ala Moana Beach Park, or the huge projection screens showing what was going down on the stage. Needless to say, we were a little surprised upon arrival. There was a bit of a concert before the speeches and ceremony and all that and then the two thousand lanterns were set out on the water. I wish I had more mad skillz as a writer so that you all could feel it, but I don't, and this picture will have to suffice. Trust me, it was beautiful.

 

And now, off I go to get some sleep before a very early wake-up to go catch the first game of the World Cup. I think I'm rooting for South Africa in this game, and for Brazil in general. 

Somehow in the past three weeks, I managed to survive finals, work approximately a million hours, go to graduation, go to a funeral, go to a wedding reception, start classes again, finally get some beach time, some rest time, some friend time and visit Waikiki for the first time.

With all of those activities going down, I haven't been doing too much with my camera. I did go and take some engagements for friends up at Pupukea, but that was pretty much it.

After this past semester, I needed a break and am taking fewer classes and working fewer hours this term, which should hopefully translate into more blog posts.

For now, a favorite from last summer.

Here's to another summer of rest, fun, music and adventures with friends.

Elfelejtettem!

Some how I missed posting about Culture Night.

It was epic.
The end.





...Just kidding.

I took pictures, lots and lots and lots of pictures. I'm mentioned it a bajillion times, but I love my school, and I love the diversity and the cultures and the opportunities it presents for us to learn. Totally rad.

Fijian Club always tells a folktale with their dances, and this time they had some adorable kids with them. 

I was planning on dancing with African club, but the semester was a bit busier than I'd anticipated. They did an awesome job!

For the last few performances on Saturday night, I handed my camera over to a friend. Samoan Club ended the night, and there couldn't have been a better way to finish the event off. 

There's one week left in the semester. This past week, I had one of the more miserable days of my school career, but to make up for it, I also had one of the best, that just so happened to include two incredibly successful presentations.

Um, thanks?

So last night, one of my housemates handed me a couple of packages. One was from Amazon (Got the book, ma, I'll read it over break.), the other was this rather innocuous looking flat rate box sent from home.

 

Harmless, right? Let's take a look inside:

 

Things are a little stranger now. It was filled with a gummy hand (with real crunchy bones inside!), a couple of mustaches, an emergency blanket, lots and lots of napkins and no note. To say the least, I was a little confused. I texted my sister and the conversation went a little like this:

Me: Any explanation for this box I just got?

Sister: Ummmmmmmmm... merry christmas?

Me: Theme gifts?

Sister: Yep.

Me: Who is the hand from?

Sister: Uncle 3's theme.

Me: The napkins? And the Christmas napkins?

Sister: Lol step dad was out of packing peanuts.

Me: And popcorn? I have to say those were the most confusing part. Did you do the mustaches?

Sister: I don't know about the popcorn and yep.

My mom's side of the family has this super fun tradition were we all try to spend the least on the strangest or most entertaining gifts for the whole family. I remember blinking red noses one year, pencils with "1998 theem gift" on them, and some interesting band-aids, among others things. This exchange happens whenever most of us can get together. My mom and two uncles are all in the same general vicinity, so it's usually them now and I think they had Christmas sometime in mid-January, and naturally, the box just got here at the end of March. I had kind of guessed that's what it was, and wasn't the least surprised by most of the contents, but the napkins threw me off a bit, those aren't typical theme gift things. My family is awesome. My housemate who brought me the box also witnessed me opening it and is probably convinced that side of my family is on the top ten list of "Strangest Families in the World who Don't Participate in Illegal Activities."

Also, this is the closest thing I will ever get to one of those mirror self portraits with a big camera type shot. I call it "The artist as an angry mustachioed man." I even wore my man glasses for the occasion. Actually, I wear my man glasses a lot, so that's not really a big surprise. 

I have several posts that are sitting half-way written that will hopefully be posted soon. Maybe even sometime today seeing as I have been meaning to go hang out at the library to get a couple of papers written and now it's three and that still hasn't happened. 

Portrait of a Pineapple

I'm feeling the need for a little more positive in my life right now and thought I would write an ode to the farmers market, (Kid you not. I'm such a hippie child.) but didn't know which form would do such a thing the most justice (my iambic pentameter is a little rusty), because farmers markets are indeed things of beauty. 

Instead, you will get to look at portraits of the deliciously fresh pineapple I purchased that were taken shortly after said product of paradise came into my possession. 

I'm such a sucker for texture. 

We have an on campus farmers market every other Friday where we can get locally grown produce for a heckuva lot cheaper than Foodland offers. I may have gotten a little spoiled while I was home last summer because most dinners included at least a couple of veggies that were grown in the back yard or purchased at the farmers market, and I miss that. My diet is lacking in awesome most of the time, but for a couple of times every month I can enjoy fresh pineapple, pears, peas, tomatoes and whatever else catches my eye and I am happy. There are very few things in the world that beat fresh produce, and none of those are other food items. 

Almost.

It's hitting that point in the semester again where I have an easily quantifiable list of things I need to get done before finals, and there really aren't that many things, but what is left is BIG. And it might be just a teeny-tiny bit stressful. And I may have been walking down the hallway on my way home while thinking about things that still need to get done and haven't been going as well as I would have hoped when I fell and hurt my knee and it just topped everything off and I might have been very grateful to have a good friend with me who didn't mind that it took twenty minutes to walk home when it usually takes five. And it may be one in the morning and I am still up because my knee hurts and I want to get a paper written before I go to class tomorrow.

Thank goodness that there are only three weeks left and then I can finally breath again.

 

Right now I want nothing more than to sit and watch the waves at Pupukea, and I'd totally take a trip down Kam Highway this weekend to do it, except I have a meeting all of Saturday morning and a couple more papers due next week that need to get written. Someday.