Lazy Update

I've not been motivated to blog lately, but some fun stuff has gone on in the last couple of weeks. We went to the big island to meet up with my parents (dave has chronicled this see his page for all of his awesome pictures - I'm too lazy right now to copy his over to here). After that we all came back over to Oahu and have been being very silly since.

My dad in particular has had an exciting vacation since he has had a successful time getting his tinnitus effected by acupuncture! This is super happy exciting news for all of us and I'm hoping he'll take this opportunity to come back and stay for a while and work on it. I'll get Dad bonding time and he'll get to (hopefully) get rid of the noise that has been driving him crazy for 50 years.

My mom and I had a fun day shopping yesterday (I got some new shoes and a couple new pieces of clothes.. oo!) and will be continuing that tomorrow with a nice trip to the swap meet. Hopefully it doesn't rain!

And... today I have passed my Clean Needle Technique exams.. (not too difficult, but I was nervous) and now I will get to be helpful and take out needles at the clinic.

Cupping!!

Being in acupuncture school has a number of perks. One of those perks is free student intern treatments. Today I needed some extra special help so I asked for some cupping from our resident cupping expert Carl!



Carl got some excellent suction going on those cups (as you can see) - please don't be frightened, it doesn't hurt, but it breaks up knots.



I've declared war on this knot I have on my left shoulder blade - it's been there for ~ 6 years (since my Grandma Ross's funeral).

I had thought I'd done really well, but it's still kinda kicking back there.

Hopefully it doesn't look too scary!!

According to myspace...

I'm not a existentialist, but if I was, apparently I'd be this guy...

You scored as Albert Camus. You are Albert Camus, so you are one sweet absurdist. He built largely upon the framework of existentialists before him, but introduced the concept that life is absurd, but that we should continue living anyway. You have strong liberal leanings, although you annoy the Communists. You are susceptible to driving fast, and possibly crashing into a tree. Albert Camus 57% Martin Heidegger 43% Not An Existentialist 43% Friedrich Nietzsche 39% Soren Kierkegaard 36% Jean-Paul Sartre 36% Which Existentialist Philosopher Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

Nothern Lights

Bowen, Kyoko, and I had a nice little chat about the Norhtern Lights yesterday at Clinic after asking Bowen about his recent (last week) trip to Iceland (bastard!). I was saying that the lights are one of the things I miis the most about the UP since moving here... seeing them is never an experience you take lightly and even though you might be super tired, you have to stay up and watch at least for a little while and then when you finally have to call it quits and go to bed, you go with a feeling like you're probably going to miss something really amazing, and resolve to last longer next time (at least I did).


I found these pics at Nordlys website:

The one on the left here was taken in Northern Michigan.















And for some reason I just love these pictures of the magnetic fields.. they're so cool!

Kayaking and BBQ

Yesterday I got Lucia to go kayaking with me! We managed to get up and going early and down to Kaimana Beach by about 10am. By the time we found parking and got the kayak off the car and on the beach we were on the water by (+/- 15 mins) 11am.


First, we headed out towards Diamond Head (to the east) hoping to go around. The waves out there were bigger than I was expecting and after hearing Kim and Lyndles story of getting flipped,

I wasn't as excited about that as I could have been.

We picked up miscellaneous garbage floating in the water and consequently met a new friend - a baby squid (we took pics with Lucia's camera so I don't have the pics yet).

The water was amazingly clear and ridiculously blue, except in a couple of areas where it was kinda green and yucky looking.

We found an area with a bunch of live coral and wanted to jump off and snorkel, but that was when we found the squid and we got distracted trying to get him back into the water. We missed our opportunity and couldn't find the spot again.


We got back to the beach, and rested for a few hours before heading back out - this time towards town. We had a photo op. with Diamond Head and then rigged our leash to the boat and snorked around for a while until we got too close to shore and the visibility got crappy. We saw a number of fish, but I couldn't help thinking about how many more there must have been about 50 years ago.

We also saw a couple of turtles out there and found a lei we donated to the birthday party which was just getting going when we got back to the beach.


We got Carl to help us drag the kayak over then gave the go -ahead to play while we went and picked up my cupcakes and her bottle of Sake from Lucias and discovered the real extent of our sunburns - pretty bad on my back, and it looked like Lucia's whole body =) but luckily she's more bown than me and I'm sure she's not hurting like I am today.

The party was in full swing when we got back to the beach, and we ate lots of good food - especially the soba noodles!! yum.


The Japanese contingent found my head lamp especially amusing (more so when I told them it was also my reading lamp before bed) but it was very helpful getting dinner and again when Jorge and Shane whipped out travel scrabble.

We had played yesterday with Ele, and she again kicked our butts even though she had to play using that horrible American English....

We also lucked out and managed to get some strong boys to put the kayak back on the roof of the car before they all left - that made the end of the night much easier since we were all getting
tired quickly.


Overall, it was an awesome day. I had a ton of fun - just what I needed. I don't know if I've spent the whole day in the hot sun since school started. I was getting a little to pale for life on the islands - and we have visitors coming in 2 weeks - I have to fit the part, right? =)

More pics from yesterday are HERE!

The Fungus Amongus

I hate to tell such a bad and off repeated joke, but it's so fitting!

This past Sunday we had our last fresh herbs class for the semester. We met up at Aiea Loop Trail and learned how to cure cancer while it rained.

Then during our sort lunch break Zach got me to take some pics of a crazy mushroom he found. As you can see it's pretty crazy.

Shifu later told us that it was a "heiau mushroom" a "devil mushroom" and a mushroom that the

Hawaiians used to talk to the dead or something to that effect.

It certainly looks scary.

On a related note, I succeeded in distracting our biomed class for a little but today by bringing up the Humongous Fungus - which everyone who took botany at Michigan Tech knows - is located in the UP.

Apparently, there is some consent about which humongous fungus really is the most humongous... looking around for this little blurb I found this - a much larger humongous fungus!