Welcome to Hawaii!

Well, I know it has been a little while since I have written here. Honestly, there had not been a lot to write about until we got here to Hawaii.

I was flying standby (thanks to Brynn's grandpa for that), and as such was subject to the whims of other people not buying tickets or showing up. The hope had been at the beginning of the process that I might be able to get into first class.

Once they posted the standby list, it became clear it might be a close call whether or not I would get on the flight. As they were nearing the end of general boarding, I was still standing there, hoping. I had nearly thrown in the towel, as my name was still 5th on the standby list, but it also said only 1 seat remained.

I was saved! I am not sure entirely how it happened, but my name was called! I rushed up to the counter and collected my ticket. I was on the plane! I ended up in a middle seat, but t was of no concern as long as I was on my way.

Upon arriving, I stopped long enough to purchase a flower lei, a standard greeting for travelers, for my wife. I gave it to her when her flight arrived, and my uncle was kind enough to take us out to lunch (at Zippy's!) and drop us off at our apartment.

Finding housing that was in our price range had been no small feat, as we are going to be riding the bus here, and needed to be near a route that would take her to the hospital.

I would say that we did fairly well for ourselves.






We are within easy walking distance of Waikiki beach, and many of the tourist attractions witin Waikiki. In addition, we can take the bus to nearly anywhere we desire on the island. Life's hard, I know.

Today is King Kamehameha Day here in Hawaii, a state holiday. I am hoping to have a post up about that and the Pan-Pacific Festival going on all weekend in celebration. The parade is tomorrow and will be going down the next street over. We won't be able to see it from the apartment, but it's only a 2 block walk to see it.

I am hoping to have a few more posts up about some of the things we're seeing in the coming week.

Slow Writing and What's Next

Well, it has been a couple of weeks since I wrote here, mostly because we've been busy and not really with doing anything that has been particularly exciting. We've been to another SandGnats game, which they proceeded to lose pretty handily. I have been doing a lot of writing over at both my baseball blog and at FakeTeams, and that's been keeping me busy. We did go to Atlanta last weekend and saw the Braves play the Astros. They have a very nice stadium, and comes complete with an advertisement for Chick-Fil-A which does the Tomahawk Chop (very slowly).

So we're a little over a month until Brynn's assignment here in Savannah ends, and we started making our plans to return to California at the end of the assignment. I booked my plane ticket home for both my cousin's wedding and to start searching for a permanent job. This was when Brynn's company called.

They knew that we had been wanting to go back to California, but had one assignment that they wanted to discuss with her. Well, she discussed it with them, interviewed for it, and actually landed it. So, instead of going to California for this next assignment, we are instead headed here:

Yup, we are headed to Oahu from early June until September! There's obviously a lot of advantages to having 3 months in Hawaii, but for me, the one that is really the most important is that my wife gets to me all these family members I have been telling her exist that are over in Hawaii. Needless to say, we're very excited about this. We've been spending the better part of the last week working to get things in order so that this is somewhat stress free, hence the "not very much going-on".

Charleston, South Carolina

We spent the majority of yesterday visiting the Charleston, South Carolina area. It is about a 2-2.5 hour drive from Savannah, and is actually an older city than Savannah.

We had scheduled ourselves for a tour of the historical district, and the tour guide was extremely knowledgable.

• Probably one of the most unexpected things that we learned about Charleston is that they are built on top of an earthquake fault, which is fairly active. That was a bit of a rude surprise.
• We went to Southend Brewery for lunch, which was not too bad. They were pretty busy, as well as the entire downtown for that matter as a result of this:

These are the Blue Angels. Who we weren't aware were in town until we spoke to the tour guide to schedule the tour.  They were scheduled to be there all weekend, and their show on Saturday was scheduled for 2 PM, which was the same time as our tour.

The tour guide really worked around the fact that they were buzzing the majority of the downtown area we were touring. Some of the things we saw:

This particular house was built in the early 18th century, and is one of the oldest dwellings in town.

This building is home to one of the oldest theaters in the United States, and was the first theater built specifically for live performances in the colonies.

Savannah still has a reasonably large street in their downtown area which is entirely cobblestone. Apparently it's not particularly pleasant for anyone but the people who live on the street.

This is the city hall building in Charleston.












Overall, the tour was very interesting, and ended up showing us some unusual places in Charleston. They have alleys, which are named and are considered to be similar to street in spite of their inability to fit a car down them. There are also numerous historic houses and buildings, many of which have been there for more than 200 years. We also nearly jumped out of our skins when the Blue Angels buzzed the downtown with what felt like a sonic boom, but must have been slightly lower than Mach due to the potential to break windows with the sound.

You could also see Fort Sumter, one of the starting sites of the Civil War, out on the islands in the distance from the coast in Charleston. It was a bit surprising that the Blue Angels show only lasted for about an hour, but they were definitely busy during that time. All in all a very fun day in town.

Weekend Thoughts for 4/10/10

Baseball season is about to complete its' first full week, and already I've seen a fair amount of it. Mostly on tv of course, but we have already attended a local game.

• Here in Savannah are the Single-A affiliate of the New York Mets, the Savannah Sand Gnats. Their opening night was on Thursday, which we went to. The stadium is a much older park, probably built sometime in the 40s or 50s if I were to guess. 
• The Sand Gnats won the game, although we left during a rain delay. We had known that there was a likelihood of rain, as there was a massive thunderstorm front that would be coming through the area sometime in the late evening.
• The rain was not a huge deal, as nearly the entire seating area has a full roof covering it, and we had chosen an excellent location to sit.
• The weather here, with the exception of that set of storms on Thursday night, has been clear and nice, with temps in the high 70s and low 80s pretty much every day.
• We made a trip out yesterday to the Strawberry Festival out at Ottawa Farms in nearby Bloomingdale. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite the entertainment we thought it would be. Shortly after we got there, the transformer powering nearly everything blew out, and the one thing we had really been looking forward to (strawberry ice cream) could not be dispensed unfortunately, since the machine had no power to give ice cream. 
• You could hear in the background the Civil War re-enacters, but they didn't really appear to have a set schedule as to when they were going to be doing things, so we didn't really see any of them.

We are also looking for older photos of the Savannah area for a project we're thinking of trying out. If you know where we can get some photos that are public domain, please let us know!

Weekend Thoughts for 4/3/10

Not a whole lot has been going on around here, but there's always something to write about...

• Congrats to Dale and Sara. We went to their wedding last night out on Tybee Island, and had the most amazing meal afterward. 
• The weather out here has been extremely nice for the past week. Unseasonably warm they say, but I will take temps in the 80's every day.
• I have been tinkering with some new recipes, and found a really great recipe for calzones. So wonderful.
• We went over to Beaufort, South Carolina today. It's a little over an hour away from Savannah, and is a decent size town. Out at the edge of the city is Hunting Island, which is home to a state park with a very nice beach. 
• Nearly all of the beaches here have been very busy over the last week because of the nice weather, and the added free time of all the Savannah students on Spring Break. To the point of causing massive traffic coming back off of Tybee Island.
• Our home theater system that we received as a wedding gift has the ability to stream Netflix directly over the internet. It is a WONDERFUL feature. Well worth the monthly cost of Netflix at this point to use it for as much programming as is available.
• Baseball season starts officially on Sunday, and it feels like it has been a long time coming at this point. Go A's!

St. Patrick's Day in Savannah

As I mentioned before, St. Patrick's Day is one of the most celebrated holidays in Savannah. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but at some point a rather large Irish population took up residence in Savannah, and they've been celebrating ever since.

Some facts about the celebration:

• The parade has been run 186 times since its' inception.
• They have a grand marshal of the parade, who is selected by the St. Patrick's Day parade committee.
• A majority of the schools in the area close as there are quite a few students that are in the parade.
• Many of the more well-known Irish families will march in the parade as a group.
• The parade's planning and organization goes on for nearly the entire year through.

St. Patrick's Day coverage on the TV started with the Catholic Mass at St. John the Baptist church in downtown Savannah, which also is the starting point for the parade afterward. This year, they also had some church members who were attending from a parish in Ireland. The father giving the service was making jokes about the difficulty they were having in getting there due to inclement weather and flights.

Once the service was over, the parade started about 15 minutes later. I decided to watch it on television instead of going down there, as it would have been a huge hassle to get down there and find parking since almost all of the main streets were blocked off for the parade itself.

The channel I was watching had two commentators, both of whom have been attending the parade for quite a long time. They were actually set up with their booth right on the parade route, so that they could converse back and forth with the marchers as they went by.  The weather was overcast for most of the parade, but the rain didn't come until after the parade had long been over.

Some of the highlights of the parade itself:

• There was a man marching in his 80th parade. He is 96 years old.
• There were marching bands from all over Georgia, Florida, and even one from Virginia.
• There was a float for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who were in uniform as well.
• A majority of the Rangers stationed at Hunter Army Air Field marched, along with both their outgoing and incoming commanding officers.
• Wells Fargo had their stagecoach, along with Clydesdale horses pulling it.
• Based on the commentary, it seemed like the broadcasters had already started drinking despite the early hour.

Once the parade was over, the party pretty much continued the rest of the evening in downtown, with nearly all the main streets remaining closed until the following morning. For a lot of people in the town, it really seemed like St. Patrick's Day was the start to their weekend, despite it being on a Wednesday. It was a very interesting experience, and maybe someday I will have to go to the parade itself.

Weekend Thoughts for 3/14/2010

The city is in full-fledged St. Patrick's Day celebration mode, as the first sets of activities were yesterday. They were not kidding when they said that they celebrate St. Patrick's day like nobody else.

Some thoughts from this weekend:

• We went downtown on Saturday night with some of Brynn's co-workers, and the downtown was about as busy as I would have expected for a Saturday night. The part I was not expecting was how decked out in green everyone already was.
• We decided to walk around early Sunday afternoon downtown, and did our first exploring of River St. As you might expect, this is the road that is directly adjacent to the Savannah River. Lots of little shops and restaurants, with a feel similar to the one given off by Old Sacramento. In nearly every store front: St. Patrick's Day garb.
• Many of the fountains in the downtown area, including the large one in Forsyth Park, have already been dyed green in anticipation of Wednesday.
• The actual parade through downtown Savannah will start at 10 AM on Wednesday. As a result of this, many downtown businesses that will not profit from being open that day will be closed or on reduced hours (as is the case with Regions Bank, who will be open from 9 AM to 10 AM that day.)
• For the most part, the weather here has been pretty sunny this week. The humidity is slowly starting to pick up, and I can feel it when I walk out of the house if it's higher than I expected. A lot of it reminds me of the weather in Hawaii, but not quite as warm necessarily.
• I attended an orientation meeting with the Savannah chapter of the Red Cross so that I could start doing some volunteer work here. They need volunteers a lot more than my previous chapter in Murray did(not that Murray doesn't). I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but the Savannah chapter is responsible for an area from the Florida border south to the South Carolina border in the north east, and part of the way across the state back towards Atlanta. This area includes over 1.1 million residents. So it sounds like they're going to have a lot of good work for me to do.
• I am also waiting to hear back from Accountemps about some short-term accounting work here as well. The city of Savannah has almost 300,000 people, so they are in need of some accounting temps as well. Wish me luck on that one.
• As you probably read last week, I've started writing for a fantasy sports blog called FakeTeams. If fantasy baseball is something that interests you, check it out, as we're gearing up for the start of the season with our positional rankings.