Gracie and Jon's Great Hawaiian Escapade 2012

We have been so lucky this past month! We have had not one, but two of our favorite couples out here to visit! Gracie and Jon stayed for a few days at the end of October and Peter and Gemma just left yesterday!
I know that we just love having people in our house. Being so far away from all of our family and "Mainland" friends, it gets a little lonely out here. Having some familiar faces around makes it feel more like home.

Here's a little re-cap of Gracie and Jon's trip! Look out for Peter and Gemma's soon!

Gracie and Jon!
We spent our first morning hiking Diamond Head a.k.a Death Hike. Sorry Gracie! hehe In the afternoon we went swimming at Waikiki Beach, had drinks @ Duke's and hit up my favorite Happy Hour @ The Shorebird.

Random Fun Fact: Gracie and I met my first day of 6th grade when the teacher asked the class if anybody would like to show me around. Gracie raised her hand and the rest is history! 

We spent the next day showing them around Aulani and checking out our secret turtle lagoon. We saw at least 3 turtles that afternoon! That night we went to Germaines Luau. The luau was awesome until we were notified that a tsunami was coming and that they were evacuating the luau and we all needed to move to higher ground! We rushed home, loaded up the car including water, warm blankets and box-o-wine. :) We made it about 2 miles down the road after an hour of driving. We pulled into a Zippy's parking lot and counted down to the 2 foot tsunami! hehe Oh well...It was an exciting day.

TSUNAMI SURVIVOR 2012!

The ended the trip with a day @ Pearl Harbor and Kualoa Ranch. We decided to take the movie set tour and we were the only one's on the bus! The tour guide let us get off the bus and run around a field that was in  Lost! 

We had an amazing time and as Jon/Jack Shepherd once said "We have to go back!" and we hope you do! 

Happy Halloween!

I realize that it has been forever since our last post, and from now on I am going to try and do smaller posts so it's not so overwhelming! This past month has been fun-filled to say the least. We spent the last week of September back home in California. We had an amazing time and we were lucky enough to meet up with almost everybody. I have to check but I may have written a blog post about the trip and forgot to post it. I'll have to check on that. :)

The Fall/Halloween craziness has hit Hawaii. People LOVE Halloween here and our neighborhood goes all out with the decorations. Tegan ate our scarecrow from last year so all we have is a nice welcome pumpkin out on the porch. :)

This past weekend we tried a hike recommended to us called Manana Trail. It's a steep walk down from a ridge into valley and at the bottom you hit a waterfall and a couple of pools. Alex was the brave one on this trip and tried out some the jumps.  The walk back up is called Heart Attack hill but luckily we survived!

In 3 days we have 2 of our best friends, Gracie and Jon, coming to visit! That trip should make for a good post. It's been almost 3 whole weeks since we last parted!

Happy Halloween!
xoxoxo-D

Awesome Friends, More weekend fun & "Greening" our home

Welcome back!

 It's been nice and hot here in Hawaii. We never use our air conditioner here in the house, so we get creative with ways to stay cool. Recently, I have just been carrying a fan with me everywhere I go! Tegan's favorite treat for a hot day is a nice big ice cube. We have such a high maintanence dog! Other than that, we have been spending our extra time planning out our trip back home to California next month. We haven't been home since our wedding, so it will be nice to catch up and spend some quality time with people. Speaking of people, have we mentioned that we have the most awesome friends in the world? Look what we got in the mail recently...

They are coasters from Peter and Gemma! They say "Hurst Brewing Co." and they have 4 different types of beer! I love them! Such a thoughtful gift and totally us. They also kinda match the bowls they gave us at our bridal shower. These are going to get plently of use.

We spent last afternoon at Tegan's favortie beach on Oahu. It's right by our house and because most "haoles" think it's sketchy, we usually have the whole place to ourselves which means we can just let Tegan frolic off-leash. How did we get so lucky to have a dog that absolutely loves the ocean? She understands waves and everything. :) Here's a pic of me and my baby girl from last night. This was about an hour before her big bath/brushing/butt hair trimming, haha.

We woke up this morning at about 5:30 AM to gear up for this hike that was right behind my house when I lived in Hawaii Kai. It's a good workout, and I have been telling Alex about this hike for years. It's called Koko Head Crater, and you hike up an abandoned tram line. It's practically straight up the whole way. The views from the top are amazing though. I am sitting here 7 hours later and my legs are still trembling!

We made it to the top! This picture is looking down into the crater that has a nice botanical garden inside.

Here is the view from the top of the tram line looking down.

We spent the rest of the morning at Waimanalo Bay Beach Park, which is an amazing beach that was recommended to me by my friend Raffy. It would be a great place to bring a BBQ and just relax all day. We then traveled up the coast a bit to He'eia Kea General Store. We have been trying to get there ever since my dad saw it on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. It was definitely worth the trip! Another great weekend here in Hawaii!

So I talked in an earlier post about working towards making our house and our lives more green. We are trying to do this a bit at a time. Here are a few things that we have done and we would love any recommendations. What do you guys do? Living in a rental home makes it a little difficult. Solar panels are a big deal out here because of all the sun, but unfortunatly we can't do that. Here is a list of the things that we have been doing:
1) Changed out all the lights in the house to CFLs. City Mill had an incredble sale this month: 12 bulbs for just over a buck.  We stocked up.
2) Started buying things in bulk and planning out our menus in order to save excess packaging.
3) Taking cold showers (we have it easy since it's so hot here anyways).
4) Not eating out/getting coffee out during the week
5) Doing a lot of upcycling to decorate our house. Have you guys seen this? Toilet Paper Art I don't have a picture of mine at the moment.
6) Stopped using paper towels. This was a hard one since I am kind of a clean freak!

Well, it's Sunday night and time to relax after a long day. Thanks for reading!

xoxox-D



Alex's B-day and Pupukea

Hey all!

We have had a busy couple of weeks. We have a lot of changes coming up at Aulani, so work has been pretty crazy. Here's the link if you wanna know what I am talking about. I guess change is just a part of life, especially when you are part of the opening team of a brand new resort. Even though we are sad to be losing Makai Preserve, we are excited about what the future has to offer. I don't know too much ye,t but I wanted to let you all know what's going on.

In other news, my wonderful husband turned 26 a couple weeks ago! Can you guess where he decided we should go? The zoo, of course! Are any of you really surprised? We are animal freaks, and somehow it took us a whole year to get around to going to the zoo. We actually decided to just buy a pass after seeing all the interesting animals they have there. However, my standards might be low since I am a little "land animal" deprived living here in Hawaii. Our friends Jen and Jacob met up with us there, but unfortunately I didn't get any pictures with them!

 We finished off the evening with martinis and dinner at Cheesecake Factory and a stroll though Waikiki. We won't tell you the part about how we found our car battery dead and had to find some random drunk guy to give us a jump... but it all worked out!

This past weekend we decided to embark on a 9 mile summit hike in Pupukea. We had tried to hike this a couple of times but got rained out. On this nice, dry day we woke up at the butt crack of dawn (7 AM!) and packed a lunch for our adventure. Pupukea is located on the North Shore of Oahu and was recommended by some friends at Kahuku Farms. The hike itself was amazing. We had guessed that it would take us about 3 hours and in reality it took us about 3 hours and 15 minutes, so not too bad. Alex and I love the time that we spend together hiking. Sometimes we just get going on the most random subjects, but we get to learn even more about each other each and every hike.

Sorry for the close up face shot but I only took 4 pictures on this hike!

This was the first summit we hit, looking down at Turtle Bay Resort. My camera died by the time we hit the very top.

We hope you enjoy reading this blog as much as I like writing it. I have never really been much into writing but the more you write the easier it gets, right?

P.S We bought a new coffee table from Goodwill that I am planning on re-furnishing at some point...but somebody thinks it is her new bed. :)

xoxoxo-D 

Kitchen Chalkboard Project

Hi guys!

Happy Sunday evening! We hope you all had an amazing summer weekend. We spent our weekend visiting an arts festival, having a movie night in, doing some shopping for the house and working on a couple of home "projects."

I wanted to share our latest project with you all since it was super easy/cheap and made a big difference in our kitchen. Since we are renting, we are very limited on what we can actually do to the house. It's been fun trying to figure new and innovative ways to decorate and not violate our lease.


Here is a picture of what our stove looked like before. Notice the pink laminate behind the stove...UGLY!

I figured that I needed to either take down the laminate or cover it up. I wasn't sure if taking it down would go over so well with the landlord so...it must be covered! Chalkboards seem to be a new trend in home decorating, and we felt it would be the perfect material for our kitchen.

I went to Home Depot and bought a sheet of wood for about $5, and cut it to the right dimensions. I then sanded the wood piece and applied a primer. I bought chalkboard paint from Wal-Mart which was also about $5, and painted 2 coats and let it dry for 24 hours. I got some sidewalk chalk from Target which was about $4, and drew a free hand design. We used some industrial strength tape, and there you go! We now have a cute piece of artwork over our stove that we feel will be very useful. We thought it could be used for listing family meals, making a grocery list, etc.

What do you guys think?

xoxoxo-D

Let's see how this goes....

Aloha!
We thought that this blog would be a great place to let everybody know what's going on in our lives and also a great creative output for us. This past year, since the wedding, we have really started to settle in and we are finally starting to think of Hawaii as home (at least for the time being). We have seen/done most of the big and touristy things here on the island and now we are beginning to put some roots down and enjoy the simple things in life.

In the past year we have:
- Moved into a cute 3 bedroom townhouse (rental) in Ewa Beach which is on the west side of Oahu.

- Alex got a job as a graphic designer/sign production and installation guru downtown.
- Darnell is still working as a water scientist at Disney's Aulani Resort.
- Tegan made her grand voyage across the Pacific last November and is loving her new life in Hawaii.

- Celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas in our new house and made enough food for 20 people...both times!
- Been visited by both sets of parents, Gloria (Alex's lil sis),  and Mike (Alex's friend).

- Had a little weekend "getaway" for our 1 year anniversary in the far off land of Honolulu. :)

- Hiked many trails, ate at many restaurants, drank at many bars, snorkeled many reefs etc.

For the future we have been working on:
- Making our home more home-y...lots of projects in the works. Since our house is a rental we have to be creative with what we can do with it.
- Trying to see everything we can on this island.
- Trying to make our house more "green" and live a more eco-friendly lifestyle.
- Trying to set a budget and live more frugal so that we can have more financial security and start working on that "nest egg."
- Planning a trip back home to California in September.
- Continuing to grow together and enjoy each other everyday!

Well I hope you all enjoy this blog. We plan to post about whatever comes to mind so I apologize if this blog is all over the place. This is our first time doing this and it might take a while to get the hang of it.