Friday, October 7, 2005WFH (Work from Home)Wendy and I recently purchased a "Human Touch" Massage Chair from The Sharper Image. It really makes working at home *nice*. I need to get a Plantronics Headset for home use, because the new YM (Yahoo! Messenger) has now got voice capabilities that are really decent. It'll save a lot of minutes on my wireless bill & is really great for conference calling coworkers. posted @ 03:19 PM PST [link] Thursday, October 6, 2005BloggingI just finished talking with Jenny and realized that my blog has totally stagnated! Must post new content!! So, for those of you that don't know, I just got back a few weeks ago from a trip to Maui. It's the second trip I took this year to the Hawaiian islands. The first was in late June to check out potential wedding locations in Kauai. Kauai was fairly nice but somewhat boring. Whereas most of the inhabitants of Maui are Pacific Islanders, Kauai was mostly retired old people from the "mainland." Basically lots of sun-burned old ppl on the beach. So how was the experience? Kauai was kinda chill, not all that much to do there as compared to some of the other islands, but we did go to the Guava Plantation and the Hindu Temple. The Hindu temple was pretty neat! Oddly enough it was founded by a famous Caucasian dancer who decided that he wanted to pursue eastern spirituality and proceeded to begin funding for a monastery on the Hawaiian islands. The place was *amazingly* beautiful and tranquil. The monks there showed us around the grounds and ended the "tour" with a showcase of the temple that they were still attempting to build and fund from donations. The stone temple was entirely hand carved with no metal at all. Instead, all the stones are carved to such perfection that they interlock together without even strong adhesive! The stones are chipped from huge blocks in India and then shipped halfway across the world to these monks in Kauai who then have a team that assemble the carved block as a piece of the grand temple. I donated at the end of the tour and even got to chip away at some of the practice stones. Utterly breathtaking and amazing! Aside from the temple and guava which really stood out in my mind, we also took a catamaran tour, snorkelled, swam and worked on our tans at the beach :D. Food. I'd say Kauai has better food than Maui on the whole, although Oahu (being mostly Japanese) beats the other two islands hands down. If you ever visit Kauai I would recommend eating at their sushi restaurant Kintaro (yum yum), if you want cheap asian eats, I'd either go for a plate lunch @ pretty much any grocery store or Korean BBQ (yes that's the name of the restaurant, yes I don't need to give more specifics since there's only one). We also ate at this Saimin place but Saimin just doesn't do it for me. Souvenirs? I bought Wendy a double stranded nihau shell bracelet with a Sunrise shell. Mucho mucho dollares! I was completely floored by the price, but they're really beautiful and were originally cherished by Hawaiian royalty. Just for kicks, we went looking for Sunrise sea shells on the beach. After *hours* of searching every inch of the beach, we were so luck to find just one! We're thinking of getting it made into a necklace to match Wendy's bracelet. So, back to wedding planning. While Kauai was beautiful, it simply didn't resonate with Wendy or me. We decided Kauai wasn't the right place for us. Then we looked at several places in northern California! The Ritz in Monterey, the Hyatt in Carmel, etc. etc. etc. All ended up being not as appealing as the Hawaiian islands. So we went back to Maui. In late August, we returned to the island where I proposed on Mt. Haleakala crater and tried find a suitable wedding location. Boy did going back bring memories! Maui was just beautiful. After looking at several places we finally put a deposit down on a nice private estate right across from the beach in between Kihei and Wailea. By right across I mean, six to eight feet from the water, with just beach between us. The place is beautiful (pictures to come). We also met florists and lots of photographers as well as a caterer. Looks like the wedding is finally coming together! We even took photographs on the beach during sunset for our invitation. The coolest thing is that many of the people we're hiring have worked closely together for events at the Four Seasons, and the Ritz Carleton and Grand Wailea, so hopefully things on the wedding day will go smoothly. I really hope so! Wendy's planning on lots of cool tidbits, like a dove release among other things. Invitations, I hope, should be going out within a few months since we'll want people to save the date early on so we get a good headcount. Aside from the wedding, or perhaps because of it, I've decided that I'm going to try to restart the workout regimen. But this time, I've got a goal, that I hope is achievable. I've started slowly training to run a half marathon after being inspired by a certain coworker of mine. I'm not entirely sure how quickly I've got to scale my running to get into half-marathon shape, but he lent me what he said was a great book on marathon running by Jeff Galloway, appropriately titled "Marathon!". Last week I ran about 2.15 miles a day for 4 days, and this week I've only run about 2 days so far (gonna try again after this message) for 2.15 and 2.34 mi respectively. I calculated that I should be increasing at least .2 miles a week otherwise I'll never hit my goal :/ Tough!! Wish me luck! posted @ 08:42 PM PST [link] |
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