For those of you who like photos, I put a lot of them up last night.  A hundred and twenty-four to be exact.  I decided at the beginning of the month that I’d hold off putting up photos until the end of the month, rather than making lots of “heylookit new pictures!” posts every week.

There are pictures from our trip to Tampa, Florida to spend Independence Day with Stephanie’s sister and her family.  We went to the beach and Emma was OK with getting in the water this time (unlike last time).  There are also some pictures from my brother’s wedding, in which I was the best man.  Then there are some professional photos of Emma that we had made last week.  And finally, there are a bunch of Emma pictures from the last month that didn’t really go with any of the others.

Enjoy!

P.S.  I changed a lot of code on my website, but you shouldn’t visibly see any changes.  Let me know if something doesn’t seem to work like it used to.

Last Sunday was our first anniversary (it’s is crazy to think it’s been a year already!).  We spent the weekend at my uncle’s mountain house on Roan Mountain.  It was a nice break from Charlotte.  It was also my first time there since almost six years ago.  I put up a set of pictures from the trip, for all who may care to see them.  One thing I need to comment on is the year old cake that we ate for our anniversary.  Amazingly, it was still moist and tasted good.  Stephanie’s mom did a good job of wrapping it up somehow so that it didn’t get freezer burn.  I was pretty scared before taking the first bite.

Well I thought I had more to say about the trip but I guess not.. enjoy the photos!

We got older but we’re still young

I finally got around to piecing together some of my Hawai’i photos into panoramics.  You can view them on my photos page.

Photos from the wedding and the wedding showers are now up on the photos page.  I got the pictures from my mom’s camera this weekend.  Most of the ones from my camera came out blurry.  If you were there and have any other pictures in digital format I’d appreciate if you’d send them my way.  And if you want any of these pictures in 3-4 megapixel size just let me know.

I’m babysitting a few compiles right now, so I’ve got a few minutes to kill..  This weekend Stephanie and I finally got around to watching the wedding video, which turned out pretty great.  We did realize one thing that we might have changed:  after The Important People had left the church (by which I mean the people who were either on stage or in the first row or two), the music just kinda stopped and there was an uneasy silence for a few minutes before everyone started talking.  The other thing is that we made people wait way too long at the reception before we came out there.  This was due to: 1) The photographer taking about fifty “one more shot” photos; 2) Stephanie’s dress needing to be rebustled (which ended up taking something like thirty minutes).  So we’re sorry about all that.  Otherwise, people seemed to have a good time, at least in front of the camera.

The compiler just spit out an error saying “1 future error(s) were detected and suppressed.”  The compiler can tell the future!

In other news, I now have Vonage.  Unlimited calls to the US and Canada for $25/month (came out to something like $27.xx with those stupid taxes).  This means we no longer have to wait until after 9pm to make long distance calls.  Which is good since pretty much all of our calls are long distance.  If you’re thinking about getting it, you get a better deal if you do it at BestBuy.  We were just there to buy a new phone, because we wanted a cordless phone one with two handsets but one base.  You see, I can’t sleep without a phone in the bedroom.  You have to have one in case there’s a phone call at four in the morning.  And calls at 4am are never good news but never news that you want to delay till morning either.  We also have nice features like Call Waiting, Call Return, Three-Way Call, and Caller ID, all for no extra cost.

So anyway, we’re looking at phones and the guy asks us who we have for phone service and I say “BellSouth” and he’s like “How much are you paying?” “Twenty-five dollars a month” “Really?  That’s low”  “We don’t have a long distance carrier, we use cell phones and calling cards for that”.  Then he starts talking about Vonage, which I had already been looking into, and he says that we can get $20 off our phone if we sign up for Vonage (that’s $20 instantly, not a rebate).  And you can transfer your existing number for free.  There’s no BS “set up” fee for someone at Vonage to click on a button.  The only thing is you have to buy the adapter, which is essentially a Linksys router with two phone jacks on the back of it.  We decided to get the 802.11g wireless router instead of the regular one, because when I get a laptop it’ll be nice.  And I can use my PDA with it right now.  So if you’re curious, the router was $130 with a $10, $20, and $50 rebate (bringing the actual cost down to $50, which is pretty reasonable I thought).

My biggest concern is that if I’m maxing out my bandwidth I won’t get a very clear phone signal.  I’m planning on testing that out soon.  But so far it’s been very clear, definitely much better than any cell phone I’ve ever talked on.

Oh and I am soon ridding myself of my cell phone.  I hate talking on it, and I have no real need for one now.  We’re keeping Stephanie’s, and I live within walking distance of work (not that I do walk, but if I had car trouble I could).  And otherwise I’ll either be with Stephanie, at the apartment or at work.  If not, I’ll just take Stephanie’s phone with me.  It’s a nice system.

Compiling on UNIX takes forever!  I’m gonna get back to work, I thought after fifteen minutes these compiles would be done but I guess not.

Snorkelling pictures added to my photos page.

Quick rant- Google needs to make their translate page as good as everything else they make.  They’re not any better than Babelfish/Altavista were six years ago.  This is kind of annoying because I occasionally get e-mails in French and Google’s phrases like “the blow is to here” don’t mean much to me.  I know that translation isn’t an easy problem to solve, but neither is searching the entire internet in under a second and they’ve managed to solve that one better than anyone else.

All my pictures are finally up except for the snorkelling ones, since I have to get film developed for those.  You can see them on my photos page.  I don’t have a link on my navigation bar to that yet.. it’s coming..

In my last post for the day we went home I said “Flight home.  Left at noon.  Yadda yadda yadda got back to Charlotte at 7:30 Monday morning.”  I left out that I thought I was going to die on the plane.  When I flew back from New York last summer I thought we hit some bad turbulence.  So when the captain said as we were leaving San Francisco that there was a funnel system over the midwest that we might run into, I thought “no big deal, I’ve done that before.”  Well, this turbulence was a whole lot worse.  From talking to people at work who’ve flown a lot I guess it’s not all that uncommon, but there was one bounce where I felt like the plane’s wings were perpendicular to the earth.  Probably wasn’t that bad, but still frightening.

One other thing I wanted to add:

Hawaiian Language 101
You may have noticed that in my posts I have been spelling that state I went to “Hawai’i”.  That is actually the correct spelling in Hawaiian.  There is no written Hawaiian language, but it can be transliterated to English with only the addition of the ‘onika (represented by an apostrophe).  When you see that in a Hawaiian word (always between two vowels or at the beginning of a word starting with a vowel), it means you kinda stop making a vowel sound there.  Like the way you say “uh-oh” as in “uh-oh spaghettios”.  Also, each vowel in Hawaiian only has one sound, so you’ve probably been pronouncing Ukulele incorrectly.  It’s really more like “ook oo lay lay”.  Both u’s make the same sound.  So anyway, I spelled all the words in Hawaiian.  Well technically I also need to put bars over some vowels to indicate where a non-standard stress is placed, but I didn’t know how to type that so I left it off on a few words.

Okay, time for bed.

Well the honeymoon in Hawai’i is now over.  It was lots of fun and we did lots of stuff.  Since everyone is going to ask me what all we did, I’m blogging the trip and all the events that others may want to read about.  Pictures will come later.

Saturday
We get married on the same day that the Pope dies.  Doesn’t really have so much to do with the honeymoon but I thought I’d mention it.  The ceremony went off pretty much without a hitch as far as we’re concerned.  Certainly way better than those kinds of things could have gone.

Sunday
Daylight Saving Time begins (stupid missing hour).  We have to get up at what feels like four in the morning.  See my previous post for more on that.  So we’re up well before the sun and board an airplane headed for San Francisco.  This is about a five and a half hour flight, in an Airbus A320.  Our single-serving friend for this flight was a guy going back home who works for a public relations company (firm?).  They do lots of PR for San Francisco area (i.e. Silicon Valley) companies, including some video game developers.  He’d been to GDC and was excited about going to E3 and apparently has developer’s versions of all the major consoles and he can get copies of games still in development sometimes.  So that was pretty cool.

After a short wait in San Francisco, we boarded a flight to Kailua Kona, Hawai’i.  This flight was on a Boeing 757.  For future reference, the Airbus A320 was much more comfortable (it’s amazing how much an extra inch or two between you and the seat in front of you can make).  So that was another five and a half hours, but seemed like twenty because all you could look at was ocean.  As the plane is landing we see this pretty ugly black ash field that we’re pretty much landing in.  Picture a fireplace (wood not gas) after a huge fire.  It was something like that.  We were like “where are the palm trees...”.  Turns out you have to go about ten miles south of the airport and you’re in super tropical paradise land.  Scattered all over the island are ashy looking places (volcanic rock actually.. it takes a few thousand years for the lava rock to get eroded enough and covered with enough dirt for plants to grow on it).

When we get to the resort it is only four in the afternoon but we think it’s ten o’clock and I’ve never traveled more than one time zone away so that was really new to me.  Oh before I go on I should mention the airport.  This airport had a very open architecture.  By which I mean, it didn’t really have walls.  Birds would fly through.  Since it never really gets below 60 degrees there (that’s in a really bad cold snap) and they only get about 20 inches of rain a year, they can get away with that.  Really made up for the first impression given by the land around the runway (they did landscape the terminals of course).  Speaking of the weather, every afternoon if you would look mauka (toward the mountain) you would see these heavy, gray looking rain clouds, but if you would look makai (toward the ocean), the skies would be clear, and it would never rain (it kinda misted a few days).  Once the clouds come over the mountain they’ve had all their rain squeezed out of them on the rain forest side, leaving the dry side of the island.. dry.

Anyway, due to jet lag, we ended that day by falling asleep about the same time as the sun, about six thirty.

Monday
We woke up super early (at like five thirty) and went out and watched the sun rise over the mountain.  Well actually it was taking too long so we ended up going back inside before it actually rose.  We pretty much got up before six o’clock and went to bed before nine all but the last two days of our trip.  Anyway we went to an island orientation thing at the resort that had free food and we met lots of nice people.  Next we went swimming at Kahalu’u Bay, and decided we needed to rent snorkeling equipment to really enjoy it.  Now, a word about the beaches in Hawai’i:  they are not really anything like the beaches in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida that I am accustomed to.  For one thing, you’re on a mountain in Hawai’i, even though most of it is submerged, so the coastline is pretty steep for the most part.  No continental shelf, so to speak.  And most of that coastline is made of rocks or reefs.  There are not that many beaches as far as stretches of sand are concerned, and where there are they are not the six mile long stretches I’m used to.  On the other hand, the water is less salty and a lot cleaner.  I was actually able to open my eyes under this water, something I wouldn’t dare to attempt off the North Carolina coast.  Plus, you could be in water up to your neck and still see your feet.  That being said, I learned very quickly that reefs and lava rocks are really sharp when I made a cut about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide in the bottom of my right foot.  Fortunately, most of what was cut was that thick skin on the bottom of your foot so it wasn’t too terribly bad (which I suppose is why you have such thick skin there anyway..).

So after doctoring my foot, we went to a lu’au type thing at the resort (not quite a lu’au because there was no pig cooked in a pit, just light refreshments).  Everyone learned a hula (yes, even Hawaiian men did hula dances.. they just aren’t as sexy so it’s probably not quite as familiar to you).  I guess that was most of that day.

Tuesday
Stephanie got up early and went to a short sarong-tying class at the resort while I went to rent snorkeling equipment.  Turns out that they have to fit the masks and fins to your face and feet (I was accustomed to the Wal-Mart variety of masks and fins that are one size fits [some]).  So I had to go get Stephanie and bring her down there, but it was just down the street from the resort so that was okay.  The people at Miller’s Snorkel And Surf were very nice people.  In fact the only people we met on our whole trip who weren’t really nice and friendly were other tourists.

Next we headed north about thirty miles to go on a helicopter ride with Blue Hawaiian Helicopters.  We got to see Kohala Mountain valleys and waterfalls, which were really pretty and we got some great pictures and video.  However, neither of us feels the need to go on a helicopter ride again.  By the end we were just waiting for it to be over with because we were getting pretty sick.

After that, we headed up the road a little further to Hapuna Beach, voted #1 in the world by some travel magazine last year (I’ve been told).  Very pretty beach, we did some snorkeling but this was a beach that was actually not all that rocky or reefy, so there wasn’t much to see.  But the beach was really nice.  Another thing I’m not used to is getting out of the ocean and not having the place I’m staying at right there, so I can rinse off but still feel sticky all day until I get back to the resort to take a shower.

Anyway we next headed to Waimea.  This town is also called Kamuela because there are three Waimea’s in Hawai’i and the post office wasn’t cool with that so they made the one on Big Island go by Kamuela, but it was still marked on the map and on my signs as Waimea so that’s what I’ll call it from here on out.  It wasn’t a very touristy town, up higher on the mountain so it was pretty cool and damp.  There were lots of little shops there and we looked in several of them but didn’t really find anything we wanted to buy.  Then as we were leaving I spotted a music shop and decided I’d go in there to see if they had ukuleles.  I had been planning on getting one as a souvenir while I was there, since they are pretty cheap as far as musical instruments go.  We got to talking with Paul, the shop owner, and it turns out he is from the same town as Stephanie (Coffeyville, Kansas; population: 11,021).  As an interesting aside if you just go to Google Maps and zoom in almost all the way, Coffeyville is the town the map is centered on.  Anyway he was a really nice guy (like I said, the only rude people there were other tourists) and I said I wanted a cheap ukulele and he obliged, giving me one that the school kids use there (lots more fun than a recorder I’m sure).  So after we get back to the resort and I start trying to play it, I find that the intonation is terrible on it.  More on that later.

Wednesday
We intentionally didn’t plan too much this day to get a break.  We decided to go back to Kahalu’u Bay (where I cut my foot on Monday) since we now had snorkeling equipment.  When we got there, there was a sea turtle just hanging out on the beach (which was really cool).  When we got out in the water we saw all these fish that we had no idea were even there on Monday.  I even saw an octopus!  He was blended into the rocks until I got close to him, them all of a sudden the “rock” jumped up and sped away, leaving a trail of ink in my face.  Scared me because I didn’t even know he was there in the first place!  When we got out of the water I saw another guy with a bloody knee and elbow, and a kid with a bloody foot, so apparently I’m not the only idiot who underestimates how sharp rocks and reefs can be.

Next we decided to go back to Waimea to see Paul again so that I could spend a little more money on a nicer ukulele.  I got one that actually had proper intonation and he didn’t have any problem with that.  Not much else to say about that trip..

When we got back to Kailua Kona we decided we would eat out that night, and we went to the Kona Inn Restaurant.  If you ever go there, I’d highly recommend it.  Especially at sunset.  It’s another one of those places that doesn’t have walls on one side of the building.  In this case, the west side, that overlooks the ocean where the sun sets.  It was a really nice place to eat and the food was great.  I had Hawaiian Chicken and Steph had the Scampi & Calamari.  It was a little pricey but I can’t complain too much.

Thursday
This was the day for our trip to O’ahu.  That’s the island that Honolulu is in (and eighty percent of the people in Hawai’i).  We went to see the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor (since you really can’t go to Hawai’i and not go there).  It was a really nice thing to see, except that it was hindered by post-nine-eleven security restrictions.  Almost as bad as the Statue of Liberty, except they weren’t making people take off their belts.  And while the memorial was free to see, you couldn’t bring any bags with you, and you had to pay three dollars for a locker thing to store them in while you went out to the memorial.

After that we headed over to Waikiki and decided to go see the Honolulu Zoo.  It wasn’t exactly the best zoo I’ve ever been to.  But like the sign said, it was the best zoo for 2300 miles!  All in all it was a kind of rushed day because of the traffic in Honolulu, and we’re both glad we opted for a stay on Big Island instead of O’ahu.

Friday
Day started with an awful timeshare presentation that we had to attend.  Not quite as bad as I had expected but still they were pushing pretty hard for me to spend money that I simply don’t have or foresee having in the near future.  After that we headed off on the two and a half hour drive to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.  On the way we stopped at the Punalu’u Black Sands Beach for a picnic and some swimming.  This place was really really cool.  I had never seen a black sands beach before (they don’t have them in North Carolina, obviously).  There are all these cool formations where lava has poured into the ocean there not too long ago (the black sand is actually eroded lava rock that fell into the ocean and washed back up there).  You’ll have to check out the pictures whenever I get around to posting them.  The beach is also a place where sea turtles like to hang out.  A wave nearly threw one into my face at one point!  There was definitely no snorkeling here (too many waves), but it was amazing.

Once we were done there we made our way on up to the currently erupting volcano.  If you’re picturing something like a second grade science experiment you’re a little off, and if you’re picturing something like Mount St. Helens or Pompeii you’re also a little off.  In Hawai’i, it’s more like a slow and steady flow that occasionally changes where it is flowing out of.  The current eruption has been going on continuously since 1983.  So anyway when you get to the end of the road that is now covered by lava rock (I got a great picture of a speed limit sign that was swallowed by lava rock) you have to hike for about two and a half hours to where the lava is at right now, and that hike is over extremely uneven lava rock and there’s not really a trail.  We ended up getting there just before sunset and I think I got some great pictures and video of the lava pools.  If you ever go, I’d suggest bringing marshmallows and some sticks.  Everyone there was like “I wish I had thought to do that.”  As far as I know there are no regulations against it (but I could be wrong).  We didn’t get to see any lava pouring into the ocean, but at least we got to see it as the sun set.. after dark it glows orange and it is really cool.  I don’t think my camera could quite capture the orange color correctly though.  But then when we were about to leave it started raining, and it was already pretty cool and windy (this isn’t the desert side of the island).  And that volcanic rock gets very slippery when wet, as a cut on Stephanie’s leg and my elbow can attest to.  Fortunately we got flashlights, because once the sun is down it is pitch black out there.

As an aside, I should mention that all of the street lights on the Big Island are yellow.  Part of an effort to reduce light pollution for all the telescopes on top of the mountain (which was still slightly snow-capped).  No businesses are allowed to have lit signs (not even the Wal-Mart!) and there are regulations about all kinds of other lights I’m sure.

Back to the volcano- after the long wet cold and dark walk back to the car, we had to drive two and a half hours back to the condo which was really really difficult because I was really close to falling asleep.  Oh and there was a sign that read “Donkey Balls Factory Outlet” on the way but I didn’t snag a picture of it and I’m kicking myself for it now.  Apparently “donkey balls” are chocolate covered macadamia nuts.

Saturday
Last day.  I’m getting tired of typing all this so I’ll be a little more brief (that’s the plan anyway).  I wrote up an outline for this blog post last night during a three hour layover in San Francisco.

Anyway, Saturday morning we went on a snorkeling trip with Dolphin Discoveries.  This was really fun.  First we went to Kealakua Bay (which we were told is a top 20 snorkeling location in the world and the best in Hawai’i).  I can’t really describe it very well, but we bought a waterproof funsaver camera so I’ll eventually get those pictures online.  Next they took us over to Honaunau Bay (a.k.a. Turtle Bay).  This place had lots of sea turtles.  They come to this bay to get cleaned: these little yellow fish will come up and eat the algae off of the turtles’ shells.  It was pretty neat, and it was a huge reef area.  At one point I got pictures of three turtles together.  Can’t wait to see how they turn out (since you can’t really preview on a non-digital camera).

Finally for our last excursion of the honeymoon we went on a sunset horseback ride on the Kohala mountain (the oldest volcano on the island and hence the smoothest and most green) with Paniolo Adventures.  This was another really pretty sight, and I got a few great pictures of the sunset.  The only problem was that it got pretty cold when the sun went down, and it was misty the whole time, which didn’t feel so great (I didn’t expect to be cold so many nights in Hawai’i!).  But overall I’d still recommend it.

Sunday
Flight home.  Left at noon.  Yadda yadda yadda got back to Charlotte at 7:30 Monday morning.

Pictures coming soon!

I thought I’d make a quick post this morning, before I head to Laurinburg.  There’s a lot going on but not much I feel like blogging about.. I’m getting married tomorrow, in case you read this but don’t know me that well.  Then we get to go to Hawaii for a week.  Check out the awesome weather there.  I’m super excited, even though we have to get up at practically four in the morning.  We need to leave the apartment by six, so we probably need to get up by like five, and since time springs forward that night it’ll be like getting up at four.  That’s crazy early.

Well I guess I’ll close with a quote from a Yellowcard song that I sorta like for a very, very, incredibly corny reason, which you shall see in a moment.

Headed west to get the best of what we all knew then
One ocean to another waves come crashing down
Carrying just me and Stephanie, she held my hand
Told me why I was

The wedding is close now.  So close I can represent the number of days remaining with one base-ten digit (9).  And that’s pretty close.  We had our last wedding shower this past weekend, and now it’s all just last-minute rushing to get things done.  I’ve noticed that people who have gotten married tend to say things like “don’t stress out, at the end of the day you’ll be married and the things that go wrong are just the funny stories you can tell for the rest of your life”, while people who haven’t say things like “you should have done ____ instead of ____.”  We also got our new bed delivered yesterday.  It’s very big.  The matress is fifteen inches thick because it has a pillow top thing on it.  That makes it so that when you lay down you feel like you’re being eaten by a cloud (that’s a good thing).  It seems like there was something else I was going to talk about in my post besides wedding stuff, but I don’t quite remember.

Oh yes, a movie review.  Stephanie and I went to see Hitch on Sunday.  Hitch is a romantic comedy, and follows the formula very closely.  Let’s just say you’re not gonna walk out of the theater saying “Holy crap!  I didn’t see that coming!”  Within the confines of the genre it was quite average.  I still think Adam Sandler does the best romantic comedies I’ve seen.  Keeping in mind that it was what it claimed to be but nothing more, I’d give it about a five.

So this was an uneventful post.  Bummer dude.  You’ve just wasted five minutes of your life.  Better luck next time.