Hair Advice

I just applied for a new passport as my current one is about to expire, which meant getting passport photos taken. (I need the passport for travelling to the states – no exotic trips planned!) Let me first describe what happened when I got my last set of passport photos taken 5 years ago.  I had biked to the photographer’s on a warm, July day. At the shop I took off my helmet, ran my fingers through my hair and sat down on the stool. The photographer looked at me then said with a thick, Eastern European accent, “Fix your hair some more please.” I started to laugh and did as he requested. Then he said, “No smiling please.” Right, can’t be looking happy in a passport photo. And we ended up with this:

This time I planned ahead and even washed my hair the night before so it would be dry and nice-looking when I got the photos done in the morning. Yes, I do have a hairdryer but I rarely use it and, believe it or not, didn’t even think of just using it to dry my hair in the morning. I woke up with nice dry hair … that was going in every direction because of sleeping on it wet! Oops. I solved this problem by pulling half of my hair back away from my face, the way I’ve worn it at least 75% of the time all my life. I got to the photographer's (different photographer, different accent), gave my hair the pat down and sat on the stool. He looked at me and said, “Pull your hair in front more, over your ears.” I did, and he said, “That looks better.” That looks better?! I’ve been wearing my hair that way for years! I won’t need another passport for 5 years so now I’m going to have to wait 5 years to get more unsolicited hair advice!

Holiday Hangover

Randy and I are suffering from a holiday hangover now that we're back in the city and our view is of this:                                                instead of this:









The day after we arrived back from Maui was Randy's birthday - not a good day for a first day back in reality. Well, sort of back in reality. I went into school that morning, socialized at Friday morning doughnut and coffee-time, had a meeting about my thesis where I received my first set of reviews, then ... took off and went windsurfing in Squamish. (Good thing my supervisor doesn't read this.) Randy had been working from home and the wind was just too tempting on a sunny birthday afternoon. And of course I didn't want him to spend his birthday alone. But in Squamish I had to wrestle myself into my thick wetsuit to go in the cold, brownish water, and there were no turtles. I have a feeling I'm not getting any sympathy here...

The next day we just couldn't get motivated and didn't leave our apartment until 9 pm when we finally went out for a walk! The following week the hangover continued as we struggled to get into the swing of things at work and adjust to the time change. Still no sympathy?

Then in the middle of the week I got a migraine. How about a little bit of sympathy now? It wasn't a bad one - I get a visual migraine followed by a little bit of headache and nausea - but it knocked me out for the evening. I did manage to cook dinner that night (thought I should get that on record); we had mushrooms with sausage and gnocchi. I list the mushrooms first because they were the main ingredient. I meant to put some of them in the pan but I was distracted by not being able to see properly while I was chopping and managed to chop a whole bag of them. When I get a migraine everything in the centre of my vision looks pixelated and shifted around. During my first migraine I was only seeing in 2D! That was kind of neat. I was sitting on a bench outside during my lunch break watching people walk by and when they went behind a lamppost it looked like they were disappearing <poof> then reappearing on the other side. I was enjoying the show for a while then I started to get worried about what was wrong with me. Was I having a stroke? I went inside to google my symptoms, as you do when you think you're having a stroke, but I couldn't log into my computer because half of the screen was blank. What were the chances of my computer malfunctioning while I was having a stroke? Then I realized that I was just not aware of anything on my left side. With each migraine the fun, visual aura part seems to be decreasing and the pain and nausea increasing. Luckily I only get one or two a year.

The Friday of that first, long week back I went to school but forgot my computer at home. Some days that wouldn't be a big deal but my latest copy of my thesis was only on that computer so ... back home I went. (Note to self: back up files more often.) By that afternoon my productivity on my never-ending thesis had ground to a halt and my spirits were low. It was definitely time for a pick-me-up! No, not alcohol, something even better: cleaning while listening and singing along to Garth Brooks! I followed that up with some zumba in the living room (which I love - separate blog on that another day) and I was good to go. Randy came home from work while I was in the middle of a zumba dance - lucky for him the Garth Brooks was over.

Hawaii

I handed in a draft of my thesis to my supervisor on a Friday, finished sewing a bikini on the Saturday, and hopped on a plane to Hawaii on the Sunday! We spent 2.5 wonderful weeks in Maui for a windsurfing holiday with a honeymoon finale.

For the first two weeks we rented a house in the hippie beach town of Paia with 5 friends and travelled around in an increasingly sandy minivan. We managed to get 7 people, 6 windsurfing rigs and one set of kiting gear in/on the van thanks to an engineer's organizational planning.

I bought a new bikini for the trip but wanted a second one to wear under my wetsuit so I sewed one. The top part was a breeze after my bra experience but the bottoms were an experiment. They fit well enough to wear in public but were slightly diaper-like in the bum, especially when they got wet. I had joked with my friend Kelly about making thong bottoms without knowing that in Maui thongs (not quite string thongs but definitely thongs) are in. In style, that is. I was happy with my bikini but on our last day I bent over to pick something up and everything went sproing. Well, some things didn't exactly sproing (see previous post) but the plastic piece fastening the bikini top snapped. Luckily I was in our condo at the time so Randy was the only witness.

We didn't have quite as many windy days as we wanted but happily filled the non-windy days with snorkelling, stand up paddling (SUP), surfing and hiking to waterfalls and a volcano. SUPing in waves (like surfing, but standing and with a paddle) was especially fun - if only we had waves in Vancouver! The water was so warm and it was such a treat to windsurf without a thick wetsuit! And instead of seeing seals we saw sea turtles!

The local creatures caused some excitement (besides the girls in thongs). We had some big, nasty cane spiders (aka harvestman) in the house that had left the sugarcane fields looking for a new home. There were a lot of geckos around and one ended up in our van. First it ran up Heather's arm then got flung onto me in the excitement and ran up my arm. His little feet felt pretty neat when he was running. Randy and one of our friends both had a run-in with a sea urchin. Randy's was minor; I picked some spine tips out of his foot with a needle and it was a little bit itchy. Our friend swiped the urchin with his hand and broke off a lot of spines. An antidote for the pain from its poison is vinegar but who has vinegar with them at the beach? His girlfriend was kind enough to supply some nice, warm acidic substance (since he was out) to stop the pain.

Then there are the green sea turtles. We saw so many of them! They really are gentle giants and they let you get quite close to them when you're snorkelling. We had a quite a few close encounters and watched them eating in the water. On our last day, Randy and I were snorkelling and I was looking at a big rock on the bottom that had some shells on it such that it looked like a giant flat fish that was looking right at me. I had been imagining this rock/fish coming to life then had just started to swim on when a giant creature moved into my field of view from down behind me. I screamed. Then I realized it was a turtle right below me and laughed at my jumpiness. Randy heard my snorkel scream then saw the turtle. I gave the poor turtle a fright too - when I screamed it flinched and swam away.


And saving the best for last, we saw wild goats on one of our drives!

We ate lots of fresh fruit, freshly-baked banana bread, and had happy-hour mai tais. The guys harvested some coconuts so we had fresh coconut too. They didn't use the mainstream technique for harvesting but instead developed their own which involved a tree branch as a battering ram, brute force and a windsurfing helmet for safety.

We topped off our holiday with our honeymoon in sunny West Maui at Kahana. We stayed in a condo that was 20 feet from the ocean with a lanai (balcony) overlooking the water where we could watch the turtles and the sunset. We left the lanai door open at night so we could hear the surf. It wasn't windy during those last days so we SUPed, snorkelled, swam, went to a luau, ate gelato and shaved ice, and enjoyed the view from our lanai. And we started plotting our return.