Category — Hawaii

For the first time in years, the holidays are going to be blissfully simple. Travel-free, present-free, stress-free beautiful simplicity. Brian and I are staying here in Hawaii, and my family is coming to us to celebrate. My parents just left after a fantastic and far-too-short visit, and Melia and Darren are staying through Christmas (cheers to work-from-home buddies).

Matsumoto’s shave ice in Haleiwa

We all agreed that we don’t need to spend more money or receive more things, so instead of exchanging gifts we have been treating ourselves to some amazing meals together. It’s a tradition we’ve been moving toward the last few years, and I fully support all future gifts being offered in caloric form.

Yet another classy toothless photo of Brian

I’m a little bit sad I won’t be in Sonoma for Christmas (through all my moves over the years, I have always made it home), but I’m mostly relieved to be able to stay put for once. No flying from coast to coast or trying to pack a dozen dinners and happy hours into one week; no frantically shopping for gifts at the last minute because I am a horrible, horrible procrastinator. Just taking it easy in my new home with some of my favorite people.

The biggest challenge of spending Christmas in Hawaii will probably be convincing myself that it is, in fact, Christmas. It’s a bit of a tough sell when it’s 80 degrees out, I’m planning a boating trip for next weekend and Brian recently got a vicious sunburn at the beach.

And no, I am not complaining about living in a tropical paradise; I am not a cold weather person, and I am absolutely OK with wearing flip-flops (I’m sorry… “slippers”) in the dead of winter. But there is something a little off about decorating a tree, listening to “White Christmas” and drinking egg nog when every fan in the house is on full blast and I’m in a full-body sweat. It’s already December 15 and I am nowhere near the holiday spirit. This will not stand, man. I need some Christmas cheer and fast. I propose a three-pronged plan of action:

• Carols. Lots of ‘em. There is nothing like “All I Want for Christmas is You” and “Santa Baby” on loop to set the mood. Melia brought our family staple, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” and I just purchased our childhood favorite, New Kids on the Block’s “Merry, Merry Christmas” (we have it on cassette back home). We may or may not dance and sing along to “Funky, Funky Xmas” every single time it comes on. Brian and Darren are in for quite a treat.

• Cookies. Our mom makes some unbelievably delicious Christmas cookies every year (one recipe is called “butter dream cookies” if that is any indication) and brought a huge container of them all the way to Hawaii for us. Brian and I got a KitchenAid mixer (read: the appliance I have lusted after for years) as a wedding present, which means I can finally make Lil Mom’s crack-filled cookies away from home for the first time ever. Good thing we burn so many calories dancing to NKOTB.

• Decorations. Brian’s parents sent us a beautiful wreath for our door, and every time I walk by it, I have to bury my nose in it and breathe in that glorious pine smell. My neighbors are starting to ask questions. I absolutely need to buy a Christmas tree that I can sniff to my heart’s content and decorate with the pipe-cleaner-and-clothespin ornaments I made in elementary school and have been saving until I had a tree of my own someday.

It’ll be a blend of new and old traditions this year, which I suppose is fitting for my first year as a bona fide grown-up married lady. Happy holidays, everyone. I’ll be sure to drink a mai tai and have an extra funky, funky Christmas for those of you who are far away.

It’s been awhile since I’ve made time to blog, which I blame on two reasons:

No, a different two reasons…

Reason #1. I’ve been living the dream in Hawaii. Yes, you’re probably all sick of hearing about how beautiful and wonderful it is here, but well… I’m sorry, the truth hurts. I love the weather and the laidback pace of life and the postcard-worthy backdrop of mountains and sea. I love that I now have a list of friends I can call when I want to work/watch YouTube videos in a coffee shop or see the latest chick flick or declare “Margarita Wednesday” a legitimate staple of each week. I love that I’ve already had three fabulous visitors this summer, with many more to come in the next few months. I’m happy here, and now that Brian is home from deployment, life isn’t too shabby. There is still so much to see and explore, and it’s exciting to know we won’t have to move again for at least another year.

Reason #2. This summer has been a series of events I like to call “Teach Gill to be more Zen and less attached to material possessions.” In the course of a few months, I lost three cameras (including my beloved old Canon DSLR) and an iPod in an auto theft and my MacBook hard drive in a devastating computer crash. I lost a lot of photos and music, shed a few tears and wallowed in self-pity a bit, but I’m trying to bounce back and move on. The silver lining is that our renters’ insurance covered the cost of my stolen camera equipment, so I was able to buy a newer, more awesome camera (RIP, 10-D). I’m hoping it’ll motivate me to document more of our life here.

I may be missing a few snapshots from the last few months, but that doesn’t make those months any less fabulous. Here’s to happy times and fresh starts…

The YouthNoise ladies have a work retreat… and snorkel the heck out of Hanauma Bay

Kathleen and I have eight years of pictures of us making these faces

Tracey takes her BFF Molly out for a beer

OMG, Kenny Rogers goes to Creekside!

Chafee homecoming! Flowers for everyone

We get to celebrate Nicole’s birthday and the fact that we’re all on the same coast

Bad Lisa, no licking

We show that “Real World: D.C.” crew how it’s done

Beautiful wedding, beautiful couple

But not as beautiful as this couple

Brian and I bust a move at the first wedding we’ve been to besides our own

The after-party rages on in the hotel lobby

Margarita Wednesday on the beach

Tiff and Zac’s wine tasting party o’ fun (not to brag, but our wine may have won the grand prize)

It’s hot as hell on the way up Diamond Head, but the view is worth it

I am a couple of steps closer to thinking of Kailua as home, and it is a damn good feeling.

I spent two weeks on the mainland in June– two glorious weeks with family and friends in the Bay Area and Portland that made me wish more than once that I had extended my trip. Hey, I work from home; what’s stopping me from escaping reality for two months instead of two weeks? I could easily get used to going to movies at the Sebastiani Theatre with my parents, eating my mom’s home cooking, grabbing beers with my fantastic high school friends and San Francisco posse.

Painting the town red with the ‘Noma crew

It wouldn’t be a night out in SF without one of these pictures

It felt so comfortable and safe to go home, and I could have coasted through an entire summer in Sonoma. It was tempting, but I knew staying longer would just be an attempt at avoiding starting my life in my new home. I already have a strong support network in California that I can go back to whenever I want; I needed to start building a new one in Hawaii.

In the end, I came back to Kailua just in time for the long Fourth of July weekend, and I’m glad I did. That weekend was a turning point for me– a wonderful balance of outings with new friends and time alone to finish settling into our apartment. Since I got back, I’ve gone sailing in Kaneohe Bay, hosted the first dinner party in the new place (on the table I repainted myself… I’m awfully proud of it and will probably start carrying photos in my wallet) and attended a writers’ group in Honolulu. Life here is pretty good.

Sailing on the Fourth of July

I still have rough patches when I all I want to do is throw some clothes in a bag and fly to San Francisco or New Orleans or whatever port city Brian is in at the moment, but they’re not as frequent as they used to be. I have a mental list of healthy ways of coping with stress or homesickness or general unhappiness (for example, drinking a bottle of Jim Beam and sobbing over the “Army Wives” marathon would not qualify) that I pull from when needed, but I decided to write them out into a physical list. I started this as a project for a friend going through a break-up, and I’ve been expanding it gradually. I’d love to hear more ideas from everyone else.

1. Connecting with my people back home.

After my last post, I received an outpouring of supportive comments and IMs and emails and phone calls from friends and family far away, and I was reminded again just how lucky I am to have these relationships and how important it is to maintain them. The little connections throughout the day– Facebook wall posts, Twitter replies and Google chats (can you tell I work for a Web site?)– keep me sane. The bigger ones– emails, phone calls and, my favorite, video Skype chats– make me bow down and give thanks to the Internet gods. Because of Skype’s magic, I can show Melia in Jackson how we’ve decorated the new apartment and have a good old-fashioned sobfest with Kaila and Jenna in New Orleans.

2. Spending time with new friends.

This transition would have been much harder if I hadn’t met some awesome people right off the bat through Brian’s ship and the few friends we already had here. They have been nothing but welcoming, and it’s pretty amazing to have fun, like-minded friends who are always up for an afternoon at the beach or a night of pizza and sangria.

3. Exercising.

This one doesn’t always happen as much as it should, but getting my heart rate up is the easiest way for me to stop feeling crazy (remember that logic from “Legally Blonde”? “Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands.” Word, Elle.). If I go for a swim or a walk at the beach or punch out my aggression with Billy Blanks in Tae-Bo, everything seems a little more manageable.

4. Taking a class or picking up a new hobby.

In the past, I’ve tried to be flexible enough for yoga and responsible enough for financial planning (neither is an easy task for me). Now I’m trying to learn a few chords on the guitar and searching for the right halau to start up hula after an eight-year hiatus. I find the challenge of learning something new, especially something a little difficult for me, is a good way to keep my mind occupied.

5. Doing something creative.

I’m not quite at the point where I use pinking shears and puffy paints for scrapbooking projects, but I do turn to writing and photography and ReadyMade-style decorating when I need a creative outlet. Making something from scratch, even if it’s not a work of art, is cathartic.

6. Exploring.

No matter how homesick I get, I can take comfort in the fact that I keep moving to really cool places. Bottom line: I live in Hawaii and there is no shortage of places to explore. Beaches, art galleries, hiking trails, farmers’ markets, restaurants, dive bars… I’ve got my work cut out for me.

For the first month or so after we got married, Brian and I had a habit of elbowing each other and saying, “Hey, you know what?… We’re married.” The novelty of that hasn’t quite worn off, but now we’ve moved on to a new catchphrase: “Hey, you know what? We live here.”

We are officially residents of Kailua, Hawaii. We signed the lease on our place last week and have been just tickled pink with it (one of us is pinker than the other).

Sometimes we just need to lie on the living room floor and love our new apartment

After more than a year of separations, cross-country/cross-continent moves and stints of living out of a suitcase, we are finally going to have a real home. Together. I won’t even know what to do with all that time I used to spend pining. Some ideas:

1. Painting our awesome apartment
2. Refurbishing furniture and being generally crafty with decorating
3. Using every single kitchen gadget, utensil and dish we got for our wedding
4. Planting vegetables and herbs in boxes on the lanai and trying not to kill them (this is where Brian comes in)
5. Grilling every kind of fish and crustacean we can get our hands on (our first culinary experiment with shark went swimmingly… tee hee)
6. Becoming masters of urban composting
7. Finally printing, framing and hanging photos of our friends and family from the last five years
8. Turning our second bedroom into a sweet-tastic office, silkscreening studio and guest room

Oh, you want to see photos of where you’ll be staying when you come visit? If you insist.

Front door: Soon our New Orleans flag will be proudly waving there 

Kitchen: Flat-top range and a dishwasher? Could life get any better?

Living room/dining room: Where our dining table, sectional sofa and future flat-screen TV (the first TV I will have ever bought myself after years of using hand-me-downs) will reside

Living room looking out onto the lanai: We’ll be leaving that door open a lot to let in the ocean breeze

Lanai: Brian contemplates where the grill and the hammock will go

Master bedroom: Large closet and a door out onto the lanai

Master bathroom: It’s not huge, but it has two sinks, so I am stoked

Since we found the place so early in our week-long stay, we decided to get a jump-start on painting before our furniture arrives. We discovered there is a Hardware Hawaii just down the street from us (a fact that made Brian downright giddy), so we picked out some colors, bought supplies and got to work. Gray-blue for the master bedroom, warm cream for most of the living room and kitchen and dark red for two small accent walls in the living room. We’re still accepting suggestions for the bathrooms, the hallway and the office.

I am an artiste 

I graciously allow Brian to do the meticulous ceiling work

It looks as though a terrible crime were committed in our living room

Awesome! Our landlady was a little skeptical of the red, but she relented, saying red is a “good Chinese color”… and then later asking us if we will paint over it before we move

The finished product in the living room (and our new sofa in boxes)

This is what the sofa will look like when it’s put together…oooh (minus the pillows)

Look at that beautiful masking…

Victory! Our first meal in our new place, courtesy of Chef Papa John

“So how’s married life?”

This is a question Brian and I seem to be getting a lot, and I’m not sure how to answer it yet. I’m pretty sure, “Oh, you know, we lived with a college buddy of ours in New Orleans for the first month of being married and then drove our stuff 2,000 miles to spend a month in San Diego before going to Virginia for two months and then moving to Hawaii. Just your standard newlywed couple stuff… I won’t bore you with the details,” is not exactly what normal people say. But then, when have we ever been normal?

It was Mardi Gras. Mustaches and silly hats are almost required. 

We’re going through some pretty major life changes right now, so I guess it’s fitting that No Dowry is going to evolve right along with us. I’ve given it a lot of thought, and although I started this blog to record the journey of planning a wedding without selling my soul or my firstborn, I’d like to think our wedding day won’t be the happiest day of our lives and that this is just the beginning of the journey.

I have loved keeping this blog over the course of the last year. It’s an amazing way for me to process what’s going on in my life and keep in touch with everyone from Lil Laverne (hi, Mom) to friends scattered across the country. I hope y’all have enjoyed reading and will continue to follow my shenanigans as a, ahem, Navy wife (yeah, yeah, laugh it up).

The Short Version of What’s Going On

1. Gypsy Travels: Leaving the South

If I haven’t told you my new mailing address, it’s because I don’t have one yet. We left New Orleans on Friday, February 27 and drove like crazy to make it to San Diego late on Sunday, March 1. It wasn’t the most relaxing road trip we’ve ever taken, but it also didn’t result in a flipped car and a trip to the ER, so I count it as a victory (read more about the trip in Brian’s blog).

It was unbelievably hard to leave our friends and New Orleans again. We keep leaving (this is the third time I’ve moved away) and we keep coming back, and dammit, the next time we move back, it’s for good. There are a lot of amazing places to live, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have tried out a good number of them, but everywhere we go, we compare it to New Orleans. No place has the food, the drinks, the people or the culture quite right in comparison, and we can’t think of anywhere else we want to settle down. You’d better believe we’ll be invading the Dirty South again in a few years, buying a kickass house with a big porch and a roomy yard for crawfish boils and eventually raising a couple of loud, crafty, costume-party-loving hapa kids.

Breakin’ it down in the S. Liberty house for our going-away/Rubik’s cube party

2. Gypsy Travels: Moving to Hawaii

Until we move back to NOLA, I am stoked to live in Hawaii. Brian transfers to a new ship based in Pearl Harbor in May, and we are on Oahu right now house hunting. My mom was born here, her parents and their parents grew up here, and we have tons of aunties and uncles and cousins scattered throughout the islands. I have wanted to live here since I was a little girl, and the Navy, in a strange, out-of-character move, has granted my wish. I will spend the next year and a half picking up hula again and spending as much time as I can swimming in the Pacific.

Where we’re staying at the moment (Bellows Air Force Base): the view out the back window…

…and the front

We arrived on Friday, looked at a bunch of apartments right away and found the perfect one on our second day. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a big lanai (which we’ve learned is a back porch/balcony area) where we can grill and grow vegetables, tons of storage space and our trifecta of perfection: dishwasher, washer and dryer. It’s also in the center of Kailua, within walking distance of coffee shops, restaurants, bars, grocery stores and the beach. Oh, and a karaoke bar. We already checked it out, and though it did not have “The Humpty Dance,” it did provide “Shoop,” “Baby Got Back” and “Bust a Move.” Sold.

Our friend Heather and I made Salt ‘n’ Pepa proud

We got the apartment almost solely because I am hapa and remind our landlady of her daughter (this is the second time my hapaness has gotten me an apartment– Melia and I shamelessly milked it in San Francisco when we discovered our property manager had a half-Japanese son) and because Brian is an adorable Navy boy who can charm any Chinese auntie.

The complex where we will be living has a KOI POND… for serious

This is going to be sweet.

3. Being a Navy Housewife

OK, not a housewife. I’m taking my sweet Interweb-based job with me so I can continue to work from home, God willing, but we are getting pretty darn domestic. I am positively giddy at the thought of using all of the awesome kitchen toys we got as wedding presents (Salad spinner? Pastry blender? KitchenAid mixer?!), and we’re already planning on going all ReadyMade on our new place. The words “aluminum-lined planter boxes” may or may not have come up in conversation. We might have to give in and buy a Wii, if only to remind ourselves that we are not too old to trash-talk while duking it out on Mario Cart.

Brian hearts mattress shopping

This is all new territory, and it’s a little scary, but mostly just exciting. We’re almost real grown ups! (Bob keeps telling me that if I use the term “grown up,” I am not one yet. Whatever.) I’ll post pictures of our new place later this week, which I hope will inspire you to come visit as soon as possible. Those mai tais aren’t going to drink themselves, people.