Hey everyone, Christmas is coming quickly and there's a lot going on, including this weekend. I'll start with a little thing that started the weekend out. I have some vacation days I have to use up so I took Friday off and mskate and I spent the day with my almost grandparents (tanman's grandparents who we're still close with), the accordion friends. Since they're into music we watched the new John Williams documentary with them on disney plus and they really liked it. I also set up a call blocker on their phones since they get a lot of spam calls. After the movie we went to PF Chang's. It was a good meal. Great little day.
Now for the main-er events. The University of Michigan gymnastics is starting up again and we went to the first exhibition match just between the UofM team. If you've been paying attention, we never JUST go to the meet, we also go to Blimpy Burger. This time it wasn't just Blimpy Burger though, we also met up with my old highschool friend mbinski. He met up with us at Blimpy Burger and it was great fun catching up. He's doing HAM radio and vintage computer collecting, which was fun just talking about experiences with broadcast standards. At Blimpy Burger I got a double with grilled onions and banana peppers, and raw onions, lettuce, and pickles. and finally on a pumpernickel bun (I like pumpernickel and they advertise having it, but they never seem to have it). I also had fried broccoli because they have good fried broccoli and I like to justify it by saying "it's a vegetable so it's some kind of healthy" (I know not really, but I think it does have some fiber and vitamins). Mskate did some shopping while mbinski and I talked about our interests. After Blimpy we went to a coffee place and visited some more. After about an hour we had to get to the gymnastics meet, so we said our goodbyes and went on our way.
Time for gymnastics. Since Fred Richard and Paul Juda competed in the 2024 Olympics and the gymnasts sometimes sign things after the meets, mskate brought her 2024 Olympics shirt for them to sign. As I said, this was just an exhibition match within the UofM team, one was team blue and the other was team maize (the school colors). They split the Olympians between the teams to make it "fair." They also didn't do all 6 events, just floor routine, pommel horse, vault, and parallel bars. They also didn't have everyone compete, just split the teams. The first even was floor routine, and we were sitting in the front row and got some close up pictures. They also now do a new balance technique when doing floor, one of them is a splits like thing where you grab your foot and raise it up to your head, the other is standing on one foot and doing like an airplane pose. Because I took karate for many years and am very good at balance, I said "I bet I could do that," and yes, I can (maybe not with great form, but I can do it for about as long as they did).
After the floor routine it was pommel horse. It was fun because we got to see Fred compete. The somewhat annoying thing was that there was always someone standing in the way of us having a clear view. You could tell this was a little more relaxed of a match because there was a lot more falling. There was some with the floor routine, but we saw the most with pommel (they dismounted prematurely and some just fell on their butts). There were some chants when the freshmen did well (everyone chanted "he's a fresh-man" clap, clap, clap clap clap X3), and that happened maybe 3 or 4 times. I did get some pictures.
Between events they tossed free T-shirts. We won one another time and it was mskate's size, and this time the one we got ended up being my size. We didn't get one from the first give away, but after the second event we got one from "Chicken Nugget." I don't know if he remembered us from last year or not, but it wouldn't surprise me if we got it because "oh those 2" (because I do have a somewhat memorable/unique look). The next event was vault, and thankfully no one fell this time (or if they did it wasn't that big like the other events). After the vault they did the parallel bars, and that was pretty good but again there were some falls. What was really fun though is they had a lot of team comradery, team maize had a cape from last year that they made a flag out of (taped it to a dowel) they'd wave after victory, and they had an oversized novelty UofM hat that would be worn by the guy that did well. Team blue didn't have too much of that kind of thing, but they did cheer. Funny thing was because they were the same school and same team, they would cheer for either side whenever they did well.
After the meet they did a little ceremony to award victory, and there was a little trophy that the winning captains (or someone) signed. Afterwards the team did come out and sign autographs, and we got Fred and Paul to sign the shirt. We hope to get 2 more Olympians to sign that might show up at other events, but even if we don't it's still great. At some point we need to frame and display all the autographs that mskate gets at different sports things, because she has quite the collection and they're kind of just sitting in different places. Rest of the day was calm, just getting ready for the Sunday.
Now for Sunday. We started out by getting coffee and donuts ready for after mass (because we are one of the groups that does that semi-ministry, after the 9AM mass our church has coffee and donuts for fellowship and socialization). Nothing super spectacular, but our maintenance guy did end up setting up a lot of things "because he was bored." Since we were early and had a lot of things for the giving tree (a thing many churches do where parishioners buy things for children in need so they can have a good Christmas). We had a pokemon kid, lego kid, batteries kid, pajamas kid, and then some odds and ends that we picked up from closing rite aids (diapers, pull ups, pacifiers, bath tub cups, and some other toddler things). Mskate wasn't exactly happy when I filled carts and baskets with baby things at the going out of business sales since our condo was kind of full, but I knew it was going to end up at a good place.
Later in the afternoon my parents came down for the Christmas concert at our church. Before the concert we went out to an Italian restaurant that gets decorated nicely for Christmas, and is quite good as well. Dad and I each had ravioli, mskate had salmon, and mom had pasta alfredo. After lunch we went to the Christmas concert. It was like 1 hour before the show started, and it was already really pretty full. The concert was really great, lots of great Christmas music with some Trans Siberian Orchestra rock music. Really fun time. After the concert we went to the county lights. I've done this multiple other times, it's something mskate and I have done basically every year since we got married. It's typically the same thing every year, but they had some new light displays, things were in slightly different locations, and this year my dad was there. I didn't take any pictures since I've done that a lot already.
It was fun packed weekend, with lots of things. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
Hey everyone, my how time flies, it's already Thanksgiving. I got an email from dogechain saying they were going to shut down completely and I had to back up my wallet or else I'll lose about $100 worth of doge I got back in college. I set-up my old college laptop, installed dogecoin core, and loaded my wallet information into it to import there. This required updating the blockchain, and it's been going for about a week now and isn't even 70% done. Whatever, time for the holiday. This year was kind of different due to my grandpa passing and aunt going to her brother's out of state instead of staying home, and my grandma no longer living independent and having even more mobility problems than normal, but even then a lot of things stayed the same. Wednesday was a normal work day, and then we went to the in-laws for the evening so we would be ready for the fun of the weekend. Pretty basic day, just spent a lot of the evening going through online black friday ads and watching some tv. Got a pretty good list ready. Something that caught my attention was Target selling an XBOX 360 for $75. I called IRA to see it since it was so weird, and he got excited since his 360 red ringed and he wanted a new one. OK add Xbox 360 to the list.
Thursday Thanksgiving day. I bought a news paper to get the black friday ads because I like to have the physical paper, but I think this will be the last time I do this because it didn't have any of the big players like walmart, target, meijer (I'm mid-west), BJs, gamestop, or others and that was kind of the same as last year. Oh well. About 1PM we went to my parents house for the party. Because of nursing home preferences and rules, we had dinner and celebrating a little early. Normally dinner is around 4PM and accordion sing along is around 6PM, but this year we shifted everything forward by about 1.5 hours. The moving is where things got kind of complicated. My grandma had broken her hip earlier this year and it just made it harder to move, and the dementia makes it all the harder to have her move herself properly (don't grab the walker handle, grab the arm rest, I said don't grab the walker handle, OK I guess we're using the walker but don't fight too much when we have to lift your arms). God bless her but it does complicate things by a lot. Dinner was great, ham and green beans for me, everyone else enjoyed that and turkey and stuffing and such. Great meal. Getting grandma back to her chair for the sing along was hard too, but this time we remembered that we had a wheel chair from my grandpa after he passed.
The sing along was fun like always, over the river, apple peaches pumpkin pie, and some other fun songs. After the sing along it was time for desert. Time for some comical problems. The accordion friend likes to bake and always makes a cake and a pie, and she forgot the pie at home; there was some confusion or something and the pie was left on the table in the garage. Whoops, oh well. There was some more visiting and after a while it was time for everyone to leave. Getting my grandma back in the car was a major production. We got her into the wheel chair and just walked her to the back door where it's easier to move, and then we just picked her up in the chair and carried her down the steps, just like what we'd do with my uncle who was always in a wheel chair. Brought back a lot of memories for us. Once we got her in the car we brought up my parent's Christmas decorations and assembled the tree. After that it was a calm early night at the in-laws because IRA and I had black friday shopping to do early in the morning.
OK, now it's the heavy time, early morning shopping. IRA woke me up at 4:30 so we could get to stores when they opened. Basically everything opened at 6AM except for gamestop opening at 5AM, so first stop on our loop was gamestop. We went to one that was somewhat close that had a target really close (same shopping district) at about 5:15, but when we got there they didn't have any of the games I was looking for, and directed us to go to a store that was further away on the rout but not exactly close. Change of plans, went to that store and found 2/3 of the games I was looking for (Hogwarts Legacy and Tomb Raider Anniversary). Score. Afterwards we went to the target that was fairly close and only had to wait in the cold for about 15 minutes. Because there was some big Taylor Swift promotion they had to have an employee come out and give us directions on what the limits are. Wild thing is the employee was someone I went to highschool with, He was one of vikingpolak's friends and I didn't really recognize him (and he didn't remember my first name, just my last), but it was pretty funny. I had no need for the Taylor Swift stuff, but the CD was under $20 and she's really popular right now, so I picked up a copy to try to resell later. I also picked up Kirby Forgotten Land, a pop socket for mom in law, and a bullseye squishmellow for mskate. We couldn't find the squishmellow and so we asked the highschool friend where it was, so that was pretty cool. As for the XBOX, when I asked the employee in electronics he said "we haven't sold xbox 360 in years, we're stopping XBOX ONE even, you'll have to go to a retro store for that." I then said "the ad lied to me, it said you had XBOX 360s for $75." It wasn't a console, it was a megablocks building set. Why the confusion? It shipped in a box that was a replica of the xbox 360 box, looks extremely close to an xbox 360 in a low resolution scan, and comes with a replica copy of halo 3. The employee said "yeah if we had them I'd get one just for nostalgia." Oh well. After Target we went to Walmart, I was looking for the basically half off gaming laptop since I need a new laptop (my current laptop is about 8 years old and is starting to fail, and I want a computer that can actually play all the games I get for free with prime), a cheap dresser unit, and a wire rack. All of them were online deals, dang, that was a waste.
We decided to give one more gamestop a try since I still was looking for roller coaster tycoon adventures delux, and so IRA looked up where the next closest gamestop was. He gave me the directions and when I got close I'm like "wait a minute, I know which gamestop we're going to, it's the gamestop right by where my grandma used to live, we'd go here back when it was funcoland." They had Roller Coaster Tycoon for PS4. I was hoping for switch, but PS4 works for me since I have a PS4. Since we were in a neighborhood I knew, we went to the dollar general that used to be the family video we'd rent movies from on Friday nights. I got us dawn soap, command hooks, pedialyte (mskate needs it for her electrolyte deficiency), and garbage bags. Since it was now like 9AM and were close to where the accordion friend lives, we called to see if they were up and able to give us the pie (they wanted us to have it to share with everyone). They were and we got the pie. After that we went to my grandma's condo just to look around since my mom had the house completely redone (new paint, no carpet, no furniture), and go to the bathroom. It was pretty surreal; it was familiar but completely foreign. Walked the house probably 1 last time. There was one more place, we went to the shopping center about a mile down the road from my grandma's house to go to 5 below to see if we could do the squishmellow $20 bag. They were completely out, it was just something for the first 100 people, but that's OK because we still have a big bag of stuffed animals from other big sales. That was OK though because there was a new retro store in the shopping center and they had some black friday deals. For me it was the buy 2 get 1 free on games, so I picked up 6 PS2 games and IRA got some movies on buy 2 get 2 free. On the way back we stopped at BJs where I got a new TV for the bedroom (our TV was the TV I bought for my dorm room years ago, and it's not very good) and some gift cards on discount (I think it was subway, disney, and uber). Once we got back I unloaded the car and took a nap.
Later in the day mskate wanted to do some shopping with us, and so we went out again in the afternoon. We went to bath and bodyworks, CVS, bjs, and the retro store again (because IRA decided he wanted to get an $80 used xbox 360 from them). At CVS we got a peanuts cookie tin for my dad since he likes Charlie Brown and Snoopy. BJs was just a couple more gift cards and filling gas. When we went to the mall with bath and bodyworks we found a store that was just gochapon. I looked for a machine with figures I would be interested in, but didn't find anything too interesting. IRA decided to though and got a digimon figure. At bath and bodyworks we got soaps and lotions for the moms on buy 3 get 3, and then got hand sanitizers for the workers at grandma's assisted living center. This is when we discovered that IRA didn't have his debit card, meaning he lost it. That was pretty bad, but we retraced our steps and went to the retro store where he last used it. That's where it was, and apparently he wasn't the first to do it. He got his xbox and some more movies, so crisis averted. Rest of the day was pretty low key.
Saturday was a simple day. We went to my grandma's assisted living to get her apartment all decorated and just visit. We already had a little tree set up, but it didn't have a lot of ornaments and we bought some garland to hang on the wall and put some ornaments on it. I'm glad I bought the command hooks because we needed them for the garland. We got it all set up while she was still at lunch, and once it was decorated we brought her to her apartment and just visited. We didn't have a lot to do with her, so I put on the wedding video I made for my cousin (the one we saw in Hawaii earlier this year). She doesn't know him, he's on my dad's side and she's my mom's mom, but she really likes little kids and half the video is just my 2 year old niece-cousin being cute, so it was a great little thing and she especially liked watching the part where we went to Disney Aulani for the character breakfast. After that we just walked her around her floor until it was time for their activity. It was a good little visit. The rest of the day was pretty calm, just unpacking the stuff and trying to find places for it. Later in the evening we went to a drive in theater to watch The Polar Express and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. We saw Red One and Elf the week prior, and figured out how to keep warm without turning the car on better than we did that time. It was a good fun time.
Well that was Thanksgiving weekend. Glad I can finally get this out at a reasonable time this year. This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
Aloha, it's Pokematic and I just got back from Hawaii. About 3 months ago my cousin Edwards who lives in Japan invited mskate and I to his wedding ceremony in Hawaii. Why Hawaii? He's from the US and all of his family lives in the continental 48 (specifically eastern time zone), his wife is from Japan and all her family lives in Japan, Hawaii is halfway between the 2 (pretty much evenly, it's a 6 hour time difference for us and a 6 hour time difference in the other way for him). This did end up mean I wasn't going to be at my grandma's 90th birthday party (where everyone on her side of the family was going to be there), but I never see this side of the family (like ever) and I saw everyone at the other party 6 years ago in Tennessee. Plus, my cousin has a 2 year old daughter that we were going to have a lot of fun with with opportunities to take video for my grandpa whose only bright thing in life is pictures and videos of his great grandkids, so I made sure to take a lot of video of my niece for him and my aunt. Even though I wasn't able to be at my grandma's birthday party, I was still there in spirit after spending 2 months working on a birthday video for her (the reason I've been a bit distant from my normal posting) that cataloged her entire life (with all the photos that we had), with a special at the end where I sang many of her favorite sing-along songs with all the left over pictures. My aunt told my one cousin's boyfriend "it's too bad you won't get to meet Pokematic, because he's quite a character that needs to be experienced in person." When they got to the sing along part of the video, she told the boyfriend "OK you now have some idea of what Pokematic is like." We also face timed everyone at the party, so we did get to say aloha to everyone. Before I get to the vacation adventure, one last "getting ready" detail. Given the time difference I considered changing the time on my watch to local time (because I have a dumb analog watch that I continue to wear even with cell phones), but I decided to leave it at "home time" because I wanted to make it easy to know what time it was back home and if it was too late to call or text people (because they wanted to see all that we were doing and see the baby).
Time for the "first day" and prepping. Hawaii is expensive, so we planned on eating in at least 1 meal a day. For me this meant coffee maker ramen and for mskate this meant coffee maker gluten free easy mac. Also with the 11 hours of flying there and 8 hours flying back (we had a lay over on the way there, and had a direct on the way back), we wanted to make sure we had food to eat since it was going to get expensive if we had to buy in-flight food or airport food. This meant pop-tarts, peanuts, almonds, pistachios, cookies, and some other things. We went to Ollie's and the grocery, and I gathered some plastic wear and chopsticks for the meals. We also pulled out our refillable water bottles and got them prepped for the trip. For my birthday my father-in-law bought me a Tommy Bahama outfit (hat, belt, shirt, shorts, and flip-flops) for the wedding, and mskate had a Tommy Bahama dress that she wore to the wedding. We packed basically every other island shirt I had and 4 pairs of sunglasses (because if something happened to my 1 pair I didn't want to have to buy an expensive tourist pair). We were also going to do a Disney experience and I wasn't sure if they would have pin trading, so I brought all the trader pins I have. I also tossed our amazon fire stick in the bag since it's nice having our streaming services readily available and doesn't take up much space. We managed to fit everything in 2 carry-on suit cases and 2 backpacks, it was tight but it worked out. Oh yeah, there's also a small saga with my video camera. On Monday I checked my camera and found that the battery wasn't working (wouldn't hold a charge), so I had to find another one in the next 3 days because we were leaving on Friday. I checked the battery stores (because I have some dedicated battery stores by me), but they didn't have the battery for my video camera. Thankfully Amazon prime 2 day shipping was able to save me with an aftermarket battery that got me through the trip, because that would have been REALLY bad if my video camera didn't work; my brother has a DSLR he would have let me borrow if needed, but I would have felt better with my 8 year old compact digital camcorder that I know very well. I also got 2 new games for my switch, South Park Snow Day and Pikmin 4. I played a lot of Pikmin 4 because I love the other 3 Pikmin games.
Travel day wasn't that big a thing, but there was kind of a crazy thing. We packed up all our stuff and got ready to go. This is when we notice a paper taped to our door, it's the condo association saying "we're going to redo the asphalt pavement, you need to disengage your garage door or else we'll be forced to get a locksmith to go in your unit and open the garage door." It kind of sucked having to leave the garage unlocked for basically a week, but the door from the garage to the condo locks like the normal door to the outside and there isn't much of value in the garage, so not preferable but not exactly different from leaving the car locked on the driveway. I'm glad we got the notice when we did because that could have been very frustrating and expensive. Oh well, hopefully it'll be done by the time we got back (spoiler, it wasn't). Our plane left at like 11AM so it wasn't like "we had to get up super early." Security wasn't a big deal, though I did keep messing up with taking my shoes off and such. We found our gate and just kind of waited for the plane. On the way there I watched Friday, Migration and Loud House season 6 episode 1-5. I heard Friday is one of the funniest movies some people had said, and while it was good it wasn't amazing. Migration was "an Illumination movie;" very safe, very paint by numbers, nothing spectacular but nothing terrible. Loud House episodes were Loud House episodes. We sat in the emergency exit row, which was kind of neat (a little extra space and responsibility). I also took some video of the take off and landing, uploading with creative commons attribution (like always).
We're now somewhere in Washington state and have a 1 hour layover, about the perfect amount of time (enough to go from 1 gate to the other stress free, not too much to get bored waiting for the next plane, like when we went to Arizona). I got a cheese burger from the Greedy Cow, and mskate got cheese fries. Burger was pretty good, not exactly worth the $20 I paid for airport food, but something different from standard fast food. This was now time for the crossing the Pacific flight. Since we're delta members mskate gets free inflight wifi and uses it every time. However, because this was crossing an ocean with no cell towers she wasn't able to get it. Didn't matter to me, I always get watch the movies or tv shows. This had a pretty good set-up, where you could add movies and tv shows to a watch list, and it had more movies than what was on the other flight. I watched Veggie Tales Abe and the Amazing Promise, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything movie, The Dark Side of Chocolate, Her (the movie about a man who falls in love with his operating system), and part of Napoleon Dynamite. I was REALLY curious how they were going to handle the story of Abraham since that story is "you struggled to get a child, when you did get a son God commanded you to sacrifice the boy to Him, and right before you were about to kill the boy an angel said 'don't kill him, I see you're a faithful servant' and then sacrificed a wild ram instead," a pretty brutal story for children. Well this was just an episode about patience and how Abraham was so old when he had his son, and only after being very patient did he get his son. Pirates Who Don't Do Anything was pretty fun, not much biblical that I'm aware of, but a fun story about how the trio were low level employees at a dinner theater who are pulled into a rescue mission, actually entertaining story. The Dark Side of Chocolate was an interesting documentary, basically "look how the sausage is made," and I guess it's pretty damning but it wasn't "I will never eat chocolate again." Her was a pretty wild movie to watch now; 10 years ago it was "a quirky romance movie that shows you the perspective of the weirdo that falls in love with his computer, what a crazy concept," today with AI being the big thing every tech company is chasing and how popular AI companions are it's pretty scary. I need to do a podcast review of it. Then Napoleon Dynamite was "I have 45 minutes left in the flight, I'll watch something I'm familiar." We also had to fill out a customs declaration form type thing, which was kind of weird but I guess makes sense since they are an island separated by thousands of miles of water so it's kind of like going to a foreign country. We had to use one of our sharpee markers because they aren't allowed to distribute pens, and when we asked the flight attendant if we could use a marker she said "since we can't hand out pens they'll have to accept the marker." Flying over the open ocean was pretty cool. Here's some more video I took.
By the time we got there it was like 7PM Hawaii time but 1 AM our time, so needless to say we were pretty tired. The airport was really cool though, like everything was open to the outside, and birds were flying into the terminal (birds are going to be a running theme btw). They no longer lei you when you get off the plane (or at least Delta doesn't do that), but you could buy a lei from the store that was right outside our gate. We didn't spend much time in the airport and found our way to rideshare pick-up (because we were going to uber to the hotel). The ride was pretty uneventful, just looked out the window and saw the scenery. Unfortunately the video didn't turn out, but take my word it looked great. Getting to the hotel was a little challenging, because they were doing construction and didn't have a good drop-off location. So while I'm half asleep mskate has me calling the hotel trying to find where we should be dropped off, but it's not the hotel directly it's a help line because it's a local chain of like a dozen hotels on the islands so the woman I'm talking to someone who isn't even directly familiar with the hotel situation in question, and all the streets are Hawaiian names of which they're all spelled phonetically in English but I'm still not used to these sounds going together, and I don't even have access to the GPS map so I don't really know why I was the one who had to do all of this, but whatever. Eventually we figured out that we should get dropped off on the other side of the closed off sidewalk, so we walked along the street to get to the lobby. The hotel kind of reminded me of a hotel I stayed at in DC where there isn't much of a lobby, just a front desk and an elevator to the rooms since the ground floor space was rented out to retailers. Here the ground floor space was just to the parking structure, which I think also went underground. The cool thing was the pool was on the 3rd floor, which didn't have any rooms that I'm aware of, but it did have office space. Our room was on the 5th floor, and it had a nice view of the pool. The hotel was also undergoing renovations and we were in a room that wasn't yet renovated. Mskate thought the room was kind of sketchy, so the first night we put a chair in front of the door for extra security. Basically we just got to the room, showered, and went to bed before they had to shut the water off for the renovation maintenance.
Here's some pictures of the airport and
Time for the first real day. Mskate and I woke up before 6AM because of the time difference. We tried sleeping in but it didn't exactly work (I was wide awake at 6AM). We did a little walking around to get acclimated to the city and where things are. We went to one of the many ABC stores; a local convenience and souvenir chain that is basically everywhere. And when I say "everywhere," I mean these stores are just as common as the Kelp Shake stores in that one Spongebob episode, there's like one on every block. Anyway, the thing we got was the surf board cutting boards we were going to get autographs on at our Disney breakfast, one for us and one for the cousin and niece. We walked around until the grocery store across from the hotel opened. We got sunscreen (because the stuff we bought on the mainland isn't reef safe and therefore is illegal in Hawaii), juice for mskate's diabetes, and Hawaiian hard cider (dragon fruit and raspberry). I'm not the biggest drinker but I wanted to get some local alcohol (maybe a pineapple drink). This was quite good, not exactly my preferred flavors but still good. I knew I wouldn't drink the whole 6-pack and would be sharing with my family, so I'm glad it was good to share. After the shopping we didn't do much except work on getting in contact with my relatives (because that was the primary reason we were there) and unpack. I set up our dirty clothes bag, organized all the food we brought, set-up the refrigerator stuff and charging cubes, and that kind of stuff. I also wore my night driving blue light filter glasses with my hat and mskate thought I looked like a famous person. You see for yourself, I think it looks like something out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Here's the cider.
After getting in contact Edwards invited us to go to the zoo with him, wife, niece, and wife's mom (grandma), and we said yes. We met them at their hotel around 10:00 AM. Mskate said "this is the first time meeting them, don't pull out the video camera yet." It was a good introduction, and they liked the presents we got them (niece got an Elmo doll, gold fish crackers, and headband mskate knitted for her, cousins got the birth year penny rolls I give my newly wed family members). They also got us some presents, a deck of Pokemon cards for me and dry seaweed for mskate. The zoo was pretty fun, small and a little limited, but fun. Niece took some warming up to getting active, but once we went to the koi pond with a tunnel to crawl through and pop-up in the middle to see the fish up close she was happy. I went through the tunnel first, because I'm the quirky kind of guy to try it out, and when she saw that she was all "dad take me through the tunnel." She did it like 4 times before we went on. We made it to the farm area and niece really liked the goat petting zoo part. What was great for her is the zoo keeper was brushing the goats at the time and she was able to brush the goats too. She has a large stuffed pony toy that she will brush with her mom's hairbrush every so often, and now she was able to brush a real animal using an animal brush. Mskate and grandma watched us from the lookout tower while we were petting the goats. There were 2 main things the cousins wanted to see, a pig and a zebra since those are niece's favorite animals and zebras aren't in the Japanese zoos. Unfortunately the zebras weren't out so no zebras for niece. There was a park where she was able to play at, mskate, wife, and grandma watched niece while Edwards and I explored the zoo looking for the zebras. We didn't find the zebras but did watch a tortoise climb a hill to the little shelter. It was a fun outing, and I liked grandma because she also likes to take a lot of pictures. She didn't speak much English but she spoke the language of "take lots of pictures to save the moment." Also when I first pulled out my camera wife asked "how old is that camera?" It's like 8 years old. After the zoo we went to a breakfast place for lunch, like right before they closed for the day. We had to wait around for like 45 minutes but it gave us some time to play with the baby and just talk. Edwards got waffles and the presentation was on point (like there was a pineapple made of whipped cream on top of the waffles). After lunch we just hung out in the room for a little while, mskate watched some Olympic Trials and I played Pikmin. We also did some exploring and there was a sizable outdoor mall by us. One of the stores was all about virtual reality and had some Japanese capsule gachapon machines. I wanted to do this because those are cool, and there was a pokemon machine. I went to the vendor, got my tokens, put them in, and got a rowlet. Unfortunately there wasn't much to assemble unlike meowth and pikachu (just put his feet in the holes), but mskate likes owls so having an owl pokemon on display in the house is an easier sell than other pokemon.
Later in the evening we met up with my aunt and uncle to have dinner with them and watched a presentation of Pacific Island dances from different Pacific Island nations. It wasn't "hula" since it wasn't Hawaiian, but it had a lot of similar elements which was pretty cool. I'll post some video below. For dinner back at their hotel I got a dinner sausage with grilled onions and fancy spicy mustard, it was really good. It was really fun spending time with them. Timeline is a little fuzzy, but I think this is also the night where I met up Edwards's other cousins (on his mom's side) and their husbands, and his best man and niece's godfather. I really enjoyed his company since he enjoys the nerdier stuff. We had some fun conversations about star wars and videogames. This was also when mskate's sunburn started to set in (because she has very fair skin and we forgot to put on sunscreen), so we bought some aloe from the grocery store and applied it multiple times while we were there.
One more thing, Toonami on Adult Swim. I've been watching it since it came back when I was in college, but I can't really watch it now that I have a normal time job and can't stay up past midnight on Saturdays. Well, Hawaii doesn't have it's own feed and coincidentally uses the east coast feed. I was able to watch toonami at 8PM, watching One Piece and Naruto Shippuden as they air instead of on DVR. It was pretty weird having nick at night and adult swim play so early in the day, but whatever works for me.
OK, now it's wedding day. We woke up early and went to church at 6AM (because mass is at 6AM and 8AM). It was a church that was right on the beach. We took a "back route" to the church and saw some "inner city" bits of Waikiki. It was a little uncomfortable since we're used to "big city dangers" and it was 5:30AM when there were very few people on the street, but we made it to mass without any problem. It was pretty cool because I got to hear a wild rooster crow (which I recorded for my audio library), and got close to a bunch of birds. The wild thing is the wild birds aren't scared of humans, just aware that "I should get out of the way of the titan that's getting too close to me." Mass was pretty standard, but there were some Hawaiian twists. First off, the priest received leis before mass and gave mass wearing them, and one of the prayers he said in Hawaiian. After mass we went to a Starbucks where I got a local pastry (it was a pineapple cake with a pineapple jelly thing). We saw they had that at another Starbucks and I wanted to try it for breakfast. It was good, definitely recommend it if you go to Hawaii. We walked around the city before heading back to the hotel and wait for the wedding.
We met up at their hotel since they have a wedding chapel venue thing and were having the wedding there. The dress code was island shirts, so it was when I wore my Tommy Bahama outfit. There was a lot of uncertainty on if I should record the ceremony or not (cousin was into it but the venue said "no pictures," godfather said it would be OK but he was making assumptions like us). I turned off the sounds on my camera and stealthfully took video, hopefully it turned out well because I was filming off the hip and didn't have the view finder angled toward me. It was a short but good ceremony. Niece was the flower girl, and being 2 she didn't fully understand what she had to do; she kind of walked some, stopped, grabbed a handful of petals and threw them on the ground, and then got confused of what to do next. The venue was very pretty, as is everything in Hawaii. I swear, everything is a screen saver in Hawaii. After the ceremony we got pictures with the bride and groom. One thing they did was give everyone leis for some pictures. I survived 2 pictures before my allergies took over and said "you can't wear this anymore." We were about to take the third then I had to take it off and run off to get some air. The cousins were a little concerned since it was a bit of a scene, but I assured them "it's just how I get with flowers, 30 more seconds and the allergens will have left my system." Once it left my system I was all good. 2/3 group photos with the leis, and mskate doubled up. For family privacy I can't share them here, but let me just say that they look amazing because the entire island is a screen saver.
After all the photos we had lunch at the hotel restaurant. This is also when people gave speeches, and I was there to video them. As we were waiting for the food niece was getting bored and was running around the table while one of her aunts chased her. I started joining in by reaching my arm out, pulling her in and tickling her. She started slowing down when she got close to me because I was playing too. The meal was...something. It was a 5 course meal; tomato bisque, seared scallop, some kind of fish, beef tenderloin, and an assortment of deserts (a macaroon, a flawn, a moose tart thing, and some other stuff). It was very "Michelin star" in both presentation and portion size. I didn't like the seafood, but I did like the tomato soup, beef, and desert. Mskate had my seafood. I also got a picture of my aunt and Edwards with me and a "big cousin hand-me-down" tie (because her sons are an average 8 years older than us, she'd send hand-me-down clothes to us and it was such a fun thing to wear the hand-me-downs when we saw them to see if they'd remember, close to 20 years later they had forgotten but I didn't). There wasn't much else from that day. Mskate and I swam in our pool, bought her new crocks, walked the beach some, and had our coffee pot food. We put our leis on the Olympian surfer statue since she is a big Olympics fan and it's a tradition to put the lei on a statue when you're done with it. His statue was like the most decorated one by the way.
This is the statue we put our leis on.
Our drinks from the wedding.
Before getting to Monday morning, another TV thing. Ever since I was in college I've watched Animation Domination on FOX, and have been doing that for about 13 years now. As I said in the Toonami part, Hawaii doesn't really have a "local time zone" feed, so their 10 o'clock news airs at 4PM, and animation domination starts at 2PM. Also, the current season is over so it's either reruns or sports events, so it's not like I was going to miss much if anything if I couldn't see it. This week was one of those "sports Sundays" and the local FOX affiliate wasn't showing any cartoons. That's the end of it, no FOX cartoons for me this week, right? Well not quite, sling allows me to watch like 8 different FOX affiliates with my subscription, so I'm scrolling through the FOX affiliates until I found like FOX Albuquerque that had Grimsberg at "9:30PM affiliate local time, 3:30PM Hawaiian time." To most people this wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm kind of a fan of broadcast television so oddities like this fascinate me.
Now it's Monday, the day where we were going to go to the Disney Aulani resort for a character breakfast. Mskate REALLY wanted to do this because she loves Disney parks and resorts. We were going to do this regardless of who wanted to go because she wanted pictures with the characters in their island outfits, get autographs on the surf board cutting board we bought, and eat the gourmet food. Because Edwards has a 2 year old we figured we'd see if they wanted to come. They wanted to come and boy did they get their money's worth. But first, how to get there. For people that don't need car seats it's easy (get an uber), and for people that need a car seat that typically just means "put the car seat you're traveling with in the uber." Well when the child is from a major city where's it's all public transit and car seats are unnecessary, that complicates things a little. Edwards did some research and found that uber requires car seats because they're private vehicles but taxis don't because they're commercial, so the plan is "get a taxi." Mskate found a "car sharing daily rental of consumer cars" thing (basically uber but you're the driver) that seemed like a great deal ($35-55 for 8 hours with the option to get a car seat for an additional $10); it would give us the opportunity to drive to the resort and then anywhere else, so we made a plan to go to the Dole plantation and a Chuck E Cheese since we have a summer pass and would want to see what kind of games and prizes they had, and if there were any special Hawaii menu items (because that sometimes happens), and to avoid parking fees we were just going to stay out the entire time of the rental (3 hours at Disney, 2 hours at Dole, 1 hour at CEC, 2 hours or so driving, give or take to get home in time). Cousins would only go to the breakfast with us and then we would do the rest of the day ourselves Unfortunately that was "the base price" and didn't include the gas fee, insurance fee, convienence fee, and everything else that would make the rental like $300, so we went with "taxi there, uber back" (because mskate and I were going to spend more time at the resort). The ride there was a little eventful, because niece gets car sick and this was no exception. I also brought my trading pins in case they did pin trading (because everywhere in Disney World does pin trading). They didn't have it here but I did let my cousin get any pin he wanted since I was just going to trade them away anyway. I did take some video of the landscape as we were driving and my cousin asked if I video everything. I said yes because when I'm old and likely losing my memory I want to be able to remember. I didn't mention that it's also because I like taking creative commons stock footage though. By the way, did I mention that this entire island is a screen saver?
When we got to the hotel I went to the front desk to see if I could get some celebration buttons (just married for the married couple, happy birthday for me, and first visit for niece). They were only supposed to give the to guests but I was charismatic enough that the front desk lady gave me them anyway. Mskate also got a first visit button since everyone else got a button. Things got really magical when we checked in. At Aulani for the character breakfast, you check in and get a ticket to meet Micky Mouse before the breakfast. Niece is a fan of classic Disney and likes Micky and Minnie, so she REALLY liked meeting Micky. She walked up to him not really sure what to make of it, and then realized it was Micky Mouse and gave him a kiss on the nose. We got some great photos and video of it, and then we got group photos and autographs on the surf boards, I did my Micky Mouse impression and got the "haha, love it" hand gestures, and the whole thing was like 10 minutes since we were the only people in line. Wife was so impressed with this because in Tokyo Disney parks the character lines are super long and all you can do is get a quick hug and photo (no autographs). After Micky we went to the waiting benches where the characters walk in and out and waited for our table. Pluto came through and niece went to give him a high five, but he bent down to give her a hug and that startled her and she ran to her mom. Pluto then sulked as he walked away.
Now it's time for our breakfast, our name was called and we get escorted in where we meet Goofy. He was dressed as a chef which was fun. He signed our surfboards, took pictures, and liked my Goofy impression. Our table was also in great view of Goofy so niece was able to watch him as people came in, and he did some other fun things when people weren't coming in. At one point he started drumming with a whisk and wooden spoon and encouraged niece to join in. When she did Edwards and wife had to say "now this is something you only do here." I had a Hawaiian Moco Loco, which is basically a thick burger patty on a bed of rice with an egg on it. It was REALLY good, and a malasada (a donut type thing) which was also really good. We had Pluto and Max Goof join us as they walked around. We got our pictures and autographs, and it was even more fun. There was also a ukulele player that was doing live performances walking around singing different songs. It was a great meal. After breakfast we walked around the resort some and saw Minnie Mouse with the resort guests. Since we weren't staying there we weren't able to get our picture with her, and niece was a little disappointed. She walked up to the ropes and were yelling "hi Minnie." The characters don't acknowledge people who aren't "their current customer," so she didn't get a wave or anything like that. Oh well it was still magical to see everyone. Once we got to the beach we split up to do our own things; them go back to the hotel and us still walking around. I did get a video of them saying hello to Grandpa and Aunt back home, which is going to warm their hearts.
Mskate and I walked down to the beach which was public where we looked for shells. Unfortunately for mskate, no shells, but it was pretty cool because they had big wave breakers to make it a lagoon and stop the surf from being big like at the other beach where we saw surfers. We also walked around some other parts of the public beach area and the grass was putting green grass. Like, it looked artificial but it was real. There were also some great palm trees. This place is a screen saver. We walked around the Disney pools and got shaved ice in the shape of Micky's head (cherry, blue raspberry, and pineapple). While we were eating our shaved ice we saw Goofy by the pool and he was signing some oar paddles. We weren't the only people that thought "let's have them sign something else." When we got too hot we went into the hotel and just sat at one of the chairs and ate our shaved ice. With our treat done we went to the gift shops to do some shopping. Mskate wanted a Olu stuffed animal (the mascot of the hotel), so we got a big one for her and a small one for my grandma and IRA (because they both like Disney stuffed animals). I got a 2024 Hawaii pin. I also found the medallions and got a full set. I wanted to get smashed pennies but unfortunately the hotel doesn't do them (despite employees saying "we've been suggesting that for years"). When we were done we ubered back to our hotel and our driver happened to be a Disney musician for the shows there. If I was more prepared I would have seen if he would be up for an interview, but I wasn't prepared so that didn't happen. Oh well, still cool.
After the Disney hotel we were slowing down on things to do. The rest of the family did a Luau that evening but it was going to be really expensive and there wouldn't be much on the menu for us, and it was the last full day on the island so we had to start doing some packing. We did do 1 last big like thing, and that was getting dinner at the Tommy Bahama restaurant. Since my father-in-law spent so much on our different clothes he got vouchers for a free appetizer or desert at any of the restaurants. Since we were in a location where they had a restaurant we decided to have dinner there using a coupon. Earlier that morning before the breakfast we walked to the Tommy Bahama restaurant to see how far it was from the hotel, and explore another part of the city where we saw a unique McDonalds. It wasn't that far away so we decided to go there for dinner. Mskate was kind of tired and not fully up for it, but I said "it's now or never, we don't have any of these restaurants anywhere near us or anywhere we plan on traveling before they expire," and that convinced her. I had the ribs entre and she had the poke appetizer, which was enough for a meal. It basically made the meal 33% off, which was great. Because it's a tropical paradise the windows were wide open without screens, so we had some birds fly in. I tried to get some video of the bird on the ledge right next to our table, but it was camera shy.
Of course Pokematic had to get a picture with the Pokebar.
Tuesday is our final day on the island. We finished packing up all our stuff and got ready for when we had to check out. Before we did the checkout we went to our family's hotel and had breakfast with my aunt and uncle. It was a breakfast buffet and I filled up to be ready for the flight home. I had bacon, pickled vegetables and rice, breakfast potatoes, a small waffle, and an omelet with breakfast tea and a glass of pineapple juice. I filled up really well and only needed a side of onion rings later in the day. I had 2 ciders left and gave them to my aunt. I said "feel free to share them" and she said "oh no I love ciders, I'm keeping both of these," and since they were staying some more days we gave them the other Tommy Bahama coupon since we weren't going to be able to use it. Hopefully they enjoyed both of them. Also when I went to the bathroom there was a very pretty rainbow on the beach and everyone was taking pictures. Hawaii is so pretty.
After breakfast Edwards invited us up to their hotel room to say goodbye one last time and give us another present, a jar of macha milk jam. We'll have to try that soon, the pokemon cards and seaweed were specifically requested, this was a surprise. I tried to get niece to say "hi grandpa" to the camera, but she was being shy and done with people. We went back to our hotel and watched Disney channel until it was time to leave. We watched Bluey and Kiff (and I added Kiff to my disney plus watch list, another cartoon to watch before work). There was also a bible study thing that happened on the pool deck with some worship songs played on the ukulele. I sat on my balcony and joined in where I could. Since we were kind of full and didn't eat in the room as often as we expected, we left a lot of our food behind for the maids, along with the pineapple juice we bought for the diabetes lows that didn't happen and the rest of the aloe lotion that was more than 3 ounces. Hopefully the maids appreciated it. We ubered to the airport right after checkout. It was like 3 hours early but we weren't doing anything else and figured we might as well hang out in the terminal since it's not that different from hanging out in the hotel room. Here's the final bit of stock footage I took.
Getting through security was interesting. Before we could go in we had to have our bags scanned for customs and natural materials. Like, I guess there are plants that can't be brought back to the mainland. One of our bags got the "inspected and safe" sticker tag, which I like and am planning to keep on there. TSA was kind of busy, we waited in line for maybe an hour so because the line was so long, and since the airport was under construction finding TSA wasn't exactly easy (like, we had to go around different temporary walls). We were happy we went so early because then there was no worry about getting stuck in TSA and missing our flight. The TSA agent in our line was "very stereotypical, grouchy, I hate my job" kind of guy, so thankfully we didn't have to interact with him much. Getting through wasn't a big deal though. Once we got through TSA I went to the duty free store to see if I could find Hawaiian alcohol to take home. I wanted to get a little bottle of Hawaiian vodka in a cute little ball bottle, but unfortunately the duty free store is only for international travelers. Lame. After that we went to the cultural garden. I'll just let the video speak for itself.
After the garden we went to our gate and got situated, with like an hour left before the plane started boarding. Mskate was content to just hang out at the gate, but I wanted to walk around the terminal. It was pretty cool, most airports have gates separated by a tunnel or something along that line, and this one had some gates separated by an open air walking bridge. Like, there was a ledge and outside was the airplanes. Here's some video.
As I mentioned earlier, I got a side of onion rings from burger king for lunch, I just wanted a little something and I had a gift card. I also found a store that was selling pokemon toys, so I got one. It was a mystery toy in a pokeball, so I bought it and stuck it in my cargo shorts pocket. Now's about as good of a time as any to talk about the Hawaiian bathroom signs at the airport and I think in some other places; the man and woman icons have Hawaiian print shirts and dresses. So cool.
The gate was interesting, because it was in a climate controlled room that required going through sliding doors. When we got on the plane we got all situated ready for the next 8 hours. This was a jumbo jet, like the kind with 7 people per row with 2 aisles that does the cross atlantic flights. We had the 2 seats on the end of the row. The safety video was interesting, because instead of showing plane seats for the demonstrations people were sitting on wooden chairs in like an island environment, pretty weird but creative for "tropical island flight." Because it was an 8 hour flight we were fed by the airplane. Mskate got the gluten free option and I got the child option (because the kid's meal would have been something I liked). Since we were special orders, we got ours first. It was surprisingly good, not super high quality but passable. My meal was mostaccioli and also came with a small sleeve of oreo cookies (like 5 or 6), a roll, and a side of vegitables (carrots and celery). I saved the veggies to add to soup stock when I got home. Mskate got meatballs and a salad, and she liked it too. I watched Game Changers, a documentary about game show hosts, and Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary about Reading Rainbow. Those were the only movies I watched because we were going to try to sleep on the plane. I brought one of my sleep masks and it worked pretty well. I did have to kind of crawl into my chair because sleeping sitting up was hurting my butt, but mskate and I put up our arm rest and kind of snuggled. About 6 hours later we got breakfast. I had some kind of ham on toast sandwich and mskate had an egg sandwich. Mine was OK but not that great, I ate about 2/3 of it, but mskate's was not good and she didn't eat much of any of it. I'm glad we had snacks because we ate a number of those to supplement the breakfast. There was about 40 minutes left in the flight so I just looked out the window and enjoyed the sunrise. Enjoy the different video that I took.
When we got back home it was like 6AM. The drive back was pretty uneventful, but we were very tired and the parking garage gate wasn't exactly working, so that was a frustration. We got home and we basically went right to bed. I slept for about 4 more hours, and then spent the rest of the day getting back to normal schedule. I spent time writing this blog, unpacking, and relaxing. Mskate and I went to chuck e cheese since we have the summer pass. Thursday was another day at home. We organized our souveniers and did some more unpacking. We also went to see Inside Out 2, which will get a review soon if it's not uploaded by the time I post the blog, and we went to chuck e cheese again after the movie.
Before I finish the blog, I just want to talk about some miscilaneous stuff that didn't exactly fit into specific events. First off, the birds are like REALLY friendly. I guess there aren't a lot of predators on the islands which cause them to be very afraid of people. Pigeons, sparrows, doves, and wild chickens, they would move out of the way if you got within 2 feet of them because you're like 100+ times their size, but it wasn't like with mainland birds where they fly away if you get within 10 feet of them, or get really aggressive like geese or turkeys if you get too close. It was pretty cool and I got some bird sounds for my audio library. Second, the surf culture is real. Like, I kind of assumed "everyone surfs in Hawaii, it's all about surfing" as a stereotype, but like 5% of the pedestrians were carrying a surfboard, the public beaches and hotels had places where you could lock up your surfboard and they were all filled, and if you look out into the ocean there were always a bunch of people out catching waves. If I had the time I would have liked to take a surf lesson because it seems cool and I remember always trying to surf on my friend's boogie board in lakes without much success (because those waves weren't very big), but we didn't have the time so I didn't do it. Hopefully in the future but not this time. Third, there is a sizable homeless population. I guess that just happens in all major American cities, but it is interesting. Thankfully they weren't aggressive panhandlers like in New York or San Diego, some had signs but most just kept to themselves. There was one guy with a sign that said "need money 4 weed," which got a chuckle. Fourth, the cross walks in some areas are really weird. Like the way I learned traffic safety as a kid is to cross the street parallel to traffic, if the light is green then you cross the street. In some parts of Waikiki it's "1 flow of vehicles goes, the other flow of vehicles goes, all pedestrians go in any direction." It was weird and I wish I took some video of it, but whenever we at that kind of intersection we had to cross. Fifth, everything is like dual language English and Japanese. I guess since Hawaii is halfway between Japan and the continental 48 it's a very popular place for Japanese tourists to go or Japanese immigrants to settle. This came in handy for the Japanese people in the wedding because there were times where they would talk to the employees of different places in Japanese without any "second language" barriers.
An example of "both English and Japanese"
Now for 2 things that I don't remember where they happened in the trip, but know they happened because of the souvenirs. First, at some point we got some custom ornaments. We got a 2024 Hawaii ornament with our names on pineapples, and we got Delilah a dog ornament. There was also a day where I got SPAM sushi. It was a piece of SPAM on a ball of rice with a sushi seaweed wrap. They were selling them at the ABC stores and there was also a Micky Mouse version at the Disney hotel. Also, the jet lag wasn't that bad. I'm sure part of that was because we only shifted our schedules by like 3 hours instead of 6, but it wasn't that bad to get back on track. Overall great trip. REALLY glad we went. Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.
Now just some random pictures.
The pool view from our hotel room. It says "come be here," and I thought it said "come better."
