Author: Laura & Brett

Sunday

Monday

Friday

We had some pretty sunsets this past week!

Good morning!

Happy birthday today to our son, M (his birthday is already over now in Japan though)! He has been a delight since the moment he was born, was pretty much the world’s easiest child to raise, and we couldn’t be prouder of him if we tried for all he has accomplished both personally and professionally, as well as for being such a great husband and father. One of the very cool things he does every year is walk the Komazawa Challenge to raise funds for a charity in Japan that supports and assists children with terminal or incurable diseases and their families. He believes this year he will go over $30,000 total that he’s personally raised for the charity during the five years since he founded the walk in 2017. He usually holds the event in June, but because of Covid-19 it was postponed until September this year (the walk is next Saturday). We’re not-so-secretly hoping he’ll do the same in 2022 when we’re in Japan so we can walk with him, for at least part of the distance anyway as the total walk is near marathon length.

I have now grown sick to death of the scent of guava, something I never believed could happen. Guava have a naturally sweet, perfumed aroma that I used to love, and in the past we’d set a bowl of ripe guava out on the counter in the kitchen (we had a guava tree in the back at our old house that produced about six to ten fruit per year) and it would perfume the whole house for a short period every year – it was lovely. With the daily bags of fruit now coming off our tree, the scent in the house is ever present and getting into everything, and the aroma now is overly cloying and overly sweet. Brett took two huge bags of fruit up to Monkeypod this past week, but the ripe fruit just keeps on coming. I love the jam we made, and Monkeypod is happy to receive all of our excess fruit, but the amount the tree keeps putting out has almost been overwhelming. Even the birds seem to have had enough.

Brett received a notice this week that beginning January 1 he will be charged $25/month for our Tricare Standard insurance, the same insurance that was guaranteed to be free for life when Brett enlisted in the navy in 1970 as well as when he retired in 1992. We have to have a Tricare Standard policy to cover YaYu until she graduates in 2022, but thankfully our separate Tricare for Life insurance remains no cost, for now anyway, but we expect that will soon change as well. While it’s frustrating to see our benefits erode, the $300 dollars/year will be thankfully much, much less than Bryn Mawr’s mandatory health insurance cost. This year was the first where students could opt out of that insurance if they could show proof that their personal insurance was as good or better than what the college offered. Health insurance in this country is a flat-out mess, and I am hoping in the next few years that something similar to our military plan will be made available for everyone. Having lived with “government insurance” for over forty years, I can attest that it works well and beats anything else currently out there. 

Chatterbox walking over to say hello

Mr. Beautiful heading around our car

General Custer

None of these guys wanted their picture taken – they never stopped moving!

It would be easy for us to take chickens for granted here on Kaua’i, and most of the time we do, but others times some will surprise and amuse us. We’ve been walking long enough up at Kukuiula Park now that we can recognize different roosters and chickens and have gotten to a point that we look for the ones we know. We’ve also started to give some of them names (perhaps an early sign of insanity?). One of our favorites these days is a rooster we’ve named Chatterbox, that will occasionally walk along the path with us for a while, singing/chatting the entire way, or if he doesn’t walk with us, will just come over and greet us and chatter a bit as we walk past. Another rooster we always look for is General Custer, named for the blonde feathers that cascade down his neck and gold feathers on the back of his body. Both Chatterbox and the General are wild jungle fowl and they hang out up in the park. The most stunning rooster I have ever seen though is one we’ve spotted in the parking lot at the bottom entrance to the park. We’ve named him Mr. Beautiful because he is simply gorgeous (and he knows it). He is large, and perfectly proportioned from the comb on his head to the tip of his beautiful brown tail feathers. His other feathers are in blocks of tan, rust, burgundy, and gold and are beautifully glossy – he’s just something else to look at. We don’t get to see him very often, but when we do he always has large harem milling around him. Several of the other regular walkers feed the chickens in the park from time to time with stale bread, but we haven’t gone that far yet (mainly because we never have leftover bread), but that doesn’t keep most of the chickens from running up to us almost daily to make sure.

This morning I am:

• Reading: I finished Breasts and Eggs mid-week and got it back to the library on time, and am now reading Love and Other Consolation Prizes because of positive comments from two readers. It’s an interesting book, based on a true story, and a fairly quick read. I’ll be on to Sex and Vanity in a few more days.
• Listening to: It’s deliciously cool this morning, and I’m listening to the drip, drip, drip of rain outside as I write and sip my coffee. The rain started last night and is supposed to continue throughout the day, and will most likely make this the first time in weeks that we don’t get to go out for a walk. Otherwise, it’s very quiet inside – Brett’s reading – but I’m going to get up in a short while and make us a bacon and eggs breakfast.
• Watching: We’re still watching Bordertown and One Foot In the Grave. Bordertown has been “interesting” – the story lines are good and keep our interest, but the show comes from Finland and has been both dubbed and given close-captioning. Those two rarely match so it can get confusing at times as to just what’s really being said or inferred. Also, the dubbing is terrible – the voices for each character basically just read a script – there’s no emotion or “acting” whatsoever, or no real effort to match the words to the actors’ lips moving. It’s funny to listen to if I close my eyes for a moment as it sounds almost robotic at times and nothing like a television show.
• Cooking/baking: We had a change of plans mid-week when we couldn’t find eggplant at the farmers’ market and therefore couldn’t make mabo nasu. I had some stuffed bell peppers in the freezer so we had those instead, and will keep our fingers crossed that we can find eggplants and have mabo nasu this week. Coming up later in the week will be a Mississippi pot roast and then French dip sandwiches made from the leftovers. Tonight we’re having Cuban beans and rice along with sautéed green beans, and we still have one serving left of ice cream for dessert. I’ll be making the Bacardi rum cake tomorrow. The ice cream has been a lovely treat though. I’m already thinking that after we finish the rum cake I should make a British coffee walnut cake – it was my favorite when we were in England – and then we’ll go for a pumpkin pie from Costco. Having a small, sweet treat after dinner each evening has been so nice to look forward to, and helped both of us each less during the day.
  

  Hellwalk Part 1 and . . .

  

  . . . Hellwalk Part 2

The most hellish part of our daily walk are these two sections where the sun beats down and the breeze/wind stops. Thankfully they don’t take too long to get through, but we do each of them three times and dread them.

• Happy I accomplished this past week: I moved up to Level 4 Japanese in Memrise! I scored 100% on the review questions for Level 3 and got a notice that I had completed the course. Yeah me! I hope to see the kanji and grammar patterns I learned repeated from time to time in Level 4 so that I don’t forget them. Brett and I again walked over three miles every day this past week. It was difficult at times because temperatures were up this past week as was the humidity at times, especially yesterday as we walked right after some rain. The hand weights seem to get lighter every day.
• Looking forward to next week: Brett and I have been talking about visiting Waimea Canyon and Kokee State Park this coming week but haven’t decided which day yet. We have another food shopping trip to make on Wednesday so will work around that. Otherwise it’s a pretty ho-hum week.
• Thinking of good things that happened: 1)WenYu finished her first paid commission, an amazing piece of animation to accompany a recording of a poem! Her animation is lovely, moving pencil sketches that highlight scenes and words in the poem, and gratifying to see because animation is what she loves and wants to do. We think this is how things are going to go for a while, that she’ll freelance and wait tables before finding something more permanent. 2) Our back yard got a trim this past week – it always looks good to me, but it’s still amazing what a difference a quick visit from the yard crew makes. 3) Although temperatures have been higher this week, the weather has mostly been lovely, although it was exceptionally windy on Friday morning and rained yesterday afternoon (and today).

  

• Thinking of frugal things we did: 1) We put an amazing $31.20 into our travel savings this past week thanks to a successful and frugal food shopping trip last week. 2) I clipped two ferns from the back yard to put in a vase that sits on our bathroom sink. I had been thinking I was going to have to buy something artificial as nothing else I tried from the yard seemed to last more than a day, but the ferns have been holding their own for days now, are pretty and tropical, and of course were free (and there’s a HUGE supply in the yard). 3) I earned 2,206 Swagbucks, another very good week. 4) It’s been the same-old, same-old eating all the leftovers and not throwing away any food. One of my leftover creations this week was loco moco made with leftover hamburger patties – easy to put together and we loved it!  5) Other than our food shopping and the farmers’ market on Wednesday, it was a no-spend week.
• Grateful for: I have been profoundly saddened by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg but am beyond grateful for her many years of service to our country and her work for women’s equality. So many of the rights many women take for granted today are there because of her, including the right to sign a mortgage without a man; the right to have a bank account without a male co-signer; the right to have a job without being discriminated based on gender; and the right for women to be pregnant and/or have kids and work. The second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, RBG had a powerful legal mind and was a brilliant jurist who fought not just for gender equality but for equality, justice, and fairness for everyone. My favorite quote from the Notorious RBG was I’m sometimes asked: when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say, when there are nine. People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody raised a question about that. Justice Ginsberg wrote to her granddaughter shortly before her death, My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new President is installed, but it now remains to be seen if the Senate will follow the rule they imposed on President Obama and not push through the nomination of a new justice before either the election or next year’s inauguration.
• Bonus question: What’s something you were expected to be good at but weren’t/aren’t? What’s something you were/are good at that was completely unexpected? From an early age I was told that I was “artistic” which is funny to me because I can barely draw a stick figure. Where the “artistic” came from, I think, is that I was quite good at a young age at coloring inside the lines, and using the “right” colors. Anyway, I am not artistic but I am good at arranging colors and things . . . Brett calls it “doing installations.” He, along with Meiling and WenYu are the true artists in our family. Something I turned out to do quite well that surprised both me and everyone else was that I actually had some musical talent. I learned to play the clarinet at age nine, played for just over four years, and entered and won several superior awards at solo festivals before I turned 14. However, I never came to love playing the clarinet or developed any real belief in my musical ability – my parents had chosen the instrument for me (I wanted to play the flute) and I absolutely hated having to play in the school’s marching band, which was a requirement if you played an instrument other than strings. I quit before I entered high school so I could take art classes (and did poorly at those). I finally learned to play the flute in my late 30s, and was told by my teacher then, a professional flutist, that I had genuine musical talent, but at that point I thought I was too old to pursue it and eventually quit that as well. I can still read music but that’s as far as it goes these days.

I seem to be entering another one of my biannual rounds of insomnia, but in a somewhat different way. This past week I have been waking up early, very early sometimes. In the past my insomnia caused an inability to fall asleep at night, but with all the walking we’re doing now I’m not having any trouble with that – these days I put my head on the pillow and I am out like a light, and I sleep deeply through the night. However, waking up at 6:00 in the morning like I have on a few mornings is definitely weird (and annoying). I wear earplugs and a sleep mask at night so I know it’s not the light coming through the windows in the morning nor noise from the birds or wind that’s waking me, so am not sure what’s going on. Hopefully this is something temporary because I dislike feeling sleepy in the afternoons, especially right before it’s time to head out for our daily walk.

Also, the past couple of weeks I’ve been able to comment on a couple of Blogger-platformed blogs using my phone, but with others comments from my still vanish into the Internet ether. I still have no idea why that is or how to fix it, but I keep trying!

What a year this week has been! Actually, we’ve personally had another good week, but it’s been a strange and sad one in other ways. Hopefully it was a positive week for all of you, and you had several good things happen for you. I glad we got through it, and I’m looking forward for all of us to the week coming up!

Thursday – to the west . . .

. . . and to the north.

This week gave us one sunset with some color. Otherwise there were either dark gray clouds or nothing.

Good morning!

The surf at Barking Sands was fierce

Rain clouds to the back, high water mark halfway up the beach

Large pond left on the beach

Brett and got in a long walk

Squalls out at sea

We’ve finished up another very nice week which included not only going out for breakfast one morning, but getting in two trips to the beach. We enjoyed ourselves both times, but seemed to be cloud magnets for some reason. Last Sunday, when the skies clouded over at the apartment, we decided to head down to the beach at Barking Sands for some sunshine. Hah! It was sunny the whole way down, but when we arrived at the beach it was dark and gloomy with heavy clouds overhead, squalls out at sea in front of us, and low, dark rain clouds behind us. It was also obvious there had been some less than ideal weather there recently as the high water mark from the waves was halfway up the beach and there were still large ponds of water in places on the beach. We didn’t even bother to take our umbrella out of the car, but set up our chairs and nibbled our lunches, then took a l-o-n-g walk down the beach and back before calling it quits. We got in our car just as the rain finally arrived. Ironically, there was barely a cloud in the sky the entire way home once we left Barking Sands!

Blue sky to the left of us . . .

. . . blue sky to the right . . .

. . . but this cloud parked itself right on top of us.

Friday looked like another a perfect day for a beach visit so we headed back to Salt Pond Beach Park. We set up our umbrella, and had just settled ourselves in our beach chairs when a large, dark cloud moved overhead and parked itself right above us! There was sun to the left of us, and sun to the right, but our location was in shade the entire time (we took the umbrella down after a few minutes). There had been a brush fire burning on our way into Salt Pond that was producing a lot of smoke, and while we were on the beach we watched a helicopter fly in to pick up water from the ocean to help fight the fire – that was interesting to watch. After a while we couldn’t see any more smoke, but as we left to come home we noticed there were still plenty of fire and police personnel and trucks/cars around, and fire trucks were still arriving so apparently the fire was still burning or smoldering somewhere.

Our guava tree continues to produce amazing amounts of ripe fruit every day. Brett goes out and picks as much as he can, and has been taking at least a full shopping bag of the fruit up to Monkeypod Jam each week for the past three weeks (and will do the same probably for the next two, at least). MJ has been happy to take the guava as they use only local fruit for their jams, preserves, and baked goods. Our lilikoi are coming along but won’t be ready for another month or two, and we’ve noticed the oranges are starting to change color. They’re not close to orange yet, but have been turning a lighter shade of green getting ready to go in that direction. The orange tree is loaded with fruit as well, which makes us happy as it produces very sweet and juicy oranges. The first ones should be ripe by late November, and the tree will continue producing into spring.

This morning I am:

• Reading: Breasts and Eggs has turned out to be a longer book that I initially thought. I have been reading lots every day but am just barely over 55% of the way through. I’m enjoying it though, especially since the protagonist lives in Sangenjaya, the same place we stayed on our past two visits, and I can recognize many of the places she visits and the train lines she rides on. Anyway, I’ve only got eight days left from the library so the push is on to get it finished before it has to go back.
• Listening to: The usual cool morning breeze is blowing through the yard and the trees. Brett is making our morning coffee and taking care of his morning chores (putting away the dishes, getting the trash ready to go out) and making a bit more noise than usual for some reason! There were also blue skies when we got up, but in the last hour the sky has filled with clouds and now it’s raining! One of the things I love about living here is that we can always hear the rain arriving as it moves across from the mountains.
• Watching: We finished both Mindhunter and Hinterland this past week and have started watching Bordertown, a Finnish detective show, and are (re)watching One Foot In the Grave on BritBox. We loved that show and how much it makes us laugh (still does). The actor who plays Victor Meldrew is a gem.
• Cooking/baking: Although we’re going food shopping this week, it will be minimal as the freezer and fridge are still quite full. Tonight’s another beans and rice dinner though – we’re having A Dozen Cousins curried chickpeas (our favorite) over brown rice along with some cucumber. This week we’re also planning to have grilled burgers; fettuccini with pesto; and grilled teriyaki chicken and zaru soba, but otherwise it will be leftovers or whatever else we can pull together to use things up. I was going to get fancy and make a Bacardi rum cake this past week, but when we bought our gin last week we noticed Safeway was also having a big ice cream sale, so we went back and picked up two containers: Blue Bunny Banana Split and Tillamook Mountain Huckleberry. We’re enjoying a small scoop of each now for our after-dinner treat.

  

• Happy I accomplished this past week: I’m not sure how long we walked on the beach last Sunday, but it was a workout. In some places our feet were sinking into the sand almost up to our knees! We walked 3+ miles every other day at the park last week and will be sticking with this distance for the next two weeks before pushing ourselves to do closer to four miles per day. I’d like to say that carrying the hand weights is getting easier, but at least it’s not getting more difficult. I found a great step-by-step guide for preparing for long-distance walks (10-16 miles) that we can use once we get our daily distance up to five miles, so we’re now very motivated to work toward that. We still have the window cleaning to look forward to – if it stays overcast this would be a good day for it – and nothing much else got accomplished either.
• Looking forward to next week: We have no plans at all for next week. Every day will be a blank canvas for us to fill however we wish.
  

  Brett dreams of starting his waffle

  

  I had a super delicious smoked salmon egg Benedict and fruit salad

Breakfast date at the Kalaheo Cafe

• Thinking of good things that happened: Brett and I had a lovely breakfast date on Thursday morning at the Kalaheo Cafe. We ate outside on the lanai because the weather was so nice and because there were hardly any people out there. Brett broke with tradition and ordered a Belgian waffle instead of French toast, and I enjoyed a smoked salmon Egg Benedict – very yummy. Brett picked up his new glasses on Thursday afternoon – a new look for him (and I like it!). This past week I discovered a company that offers great walking tours throughout Japan, both guided and self-guided, and we have been going through them wondering which one we should do first (whenever we can get back to Japan). Our DIL sent us loads of grandkid pictures again this week – we miss those two so much. They’re both enjoying being back at school. K loves her preschool, and C has moved over to the “big kids” building at his school this year.

  

• Thinking of frugal things we did: This was not the most frugal of weeks, although we did keep our spending (ice cream, gasoline fill-up, Brita filters, and breakfast out) as low as possible. Having to buy the Brita filters was frustrating because we ended up having to get an expensive 10-pack at Costco as we couldn’t find them anywhere else (on the plus side we’re good for filters for at least the next two years, if not longer). We put $3.60 into the change/$1 bill jar this past week. We sure don’t seem to get much change these days as we haven’t amassed enough of any coins to roll since we’ve been here. I earned an amazing 1,912 Swagbucks this week (!!!) and have decided that rather than redeem for $100 gift cards I am going to work toward earning as many $250/$500 Delta and Southwest gift cards as I can before we travel in 2022 to help keep our costs down. I have a nice system now for earning Swagbucks, nothing that requires a lot of my time, and so far it’s been working better than expected. On the food front, we currently have a few leftovers to finish, but we’re keeping up with them, and no food has been thrown out. I recently discovered that I can fix just a half-cup of rice in our rice cooker, which is perfect for just Brett and I, and creates fewer leftovers.
• Grateful for: I am very thankful right now that we stocked up our food supplies the last couple of months because this month we don’t need to purchase much. We have plenty of protein on hand and a good variety as well, so our focus this month will be more on fruits and vegetables from the farmers’ market and pantry staples. Anything we don’t spend out of our grocery budget will go into travel savings!

  

• Bonus question: Do you enjoy doing any sorts of arts or crafts? These days my answer would be no, but I used to enjoy doing artsy/craftsy things. I have done sewing, embroidery, tea box covering, quilting (by hand), knitting, and scrapbooking, well enough that I could use/wear/gift the things I made but these days I have no interest. My final fling with crafting was making kimekomi temari, or traditional hand balls, which I learned to do during our second tour in Japan. Kimekomi is the process of pushing and glueing fabric into grooves carved into a compressed wooden shape to create a smooth surface – it is most often used to make dolls. My daughter-in-law helped me get supplies from Japan, and I sold them through a Japanese goods shop in Seattle – they went for more than I imagined and also sold more quickly than I imagined they might. A few of my temari were also exhibited in Japan as my Western style and color choices are very different from traditional Japanese kimekomi, and besides using only traditional satin brocades I also had covered a few temari with vintage Japanese cotton indigo fabrics. I stopped making the balls when the girls’ schedules became so crazy that I had no time to make anything but dinner. It’s the one craft I’d love to go back to but I haven’t taken that last step yet to start it up again.

  

Finally, a goal I set for myself earlier this year was to get in shape enough to fit back into my white linen capris once again. The last time I had worn them was in January of 2019, when we visited the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. I faithfully carried them around with me after that, but couldn’t squeeze myself back into them last summer in Portland, and I was in even worse shape when we arrived back here in March. However, with all the walking we’ve been doing I’ve been changing shape, and along with 14 pounds lost I decided to give them a try again this past Friday and . . . voilà! They were actually easier to put on then they were in 2019! That gave me a happy feeling, and another goal has been met!

Even with our less than perfect beach days, we had a very enjoyable week and accomplished (most) of what needed doing. Good things happened, we ate well, and I hope the same happened for everyone as well. Here’s to good weather this coming week to help to tamp down or eliminate the fires raging in the West – my goodness, it’s awful in California in Oregon, and my heart aches for all those affected in any way. I’m hoping for a good or better week for all.

Saturday

Tuesday

Thursday

Most evenings the sky just went gray, then dark, but a couple of times . . . oh my!

Good morning!

Made me wish we ate more bread

The westernmost bookstore in the U.S.

My favorite section

Storybook children’s theater

The Hanapepe Swinging Bridge

The town of Eleele is on top of the bluff overlooking the Hanapepe Stream

It was quite hot when we visited Hanapepe but our masks stayed on the entire time.

We’ve had a lovely week with errands run, visited nearby Hanapepe, and had a beach day at Salt Pond. We did a small-ish food shopping at Walmart and Costco on Tuesday, went to Hanapepe on Wednesday afternoon, and spent Thursday afternoon on the beach. Several businesses have reopened in Hanapepe, but many still only open by appointment only. While it was quite hot there and not all that nice to be outside (especially wearing a mask), we still managed to look around the Talk Story Bookstore, stop in a couple of other shops and chat with the salespersons, look through windows at the art galleries (and learn paintings by our favorite local artist go for over $2000 – yikes!), and share a Meyer lemon danish at the Midnight Bear bakery. Before we left we took an obligatory walk over Hanapepe’s historic swinging bridge and back, always an enjoyable (but shaky) experience. There’s a walking path up on top of the levee that runs alongside the Hanapepe Stream, so we’re going to investigate and see how long that is and hopefully get out there for a long walk some day (when it’s cooler).

We also made a trip to my happy place this week. We went to Salt Pond Beach Park on Thursday. It was my first time to the Salt Pond beach, and in spite of some very strong winds I really liked it there and look forward to going back. It was nice enough that I even went out in the water for a while! Salt Pond has beautiful, clear water and a protected area that’s perfect for little kids, so I’m already looking forward to visiting there with the grandkids in the future. We had hoped to go over to Barking Sands yesterday, but the weather didn’t cooperate so we’re going to try and go today (although the weather still isn’t that great).

Salt Pond Beach Park

Looking west from the enclosed “pool”

The water in the pool was exceptionally clear

It was very windy the day we went to Salt Pond Beach Park, but still sunny and warm.

WenYu called early last week to let us know she had been hired as a waitress in a high-end Italian restaurant near where she lives. She had been looking for work since she graduated last May, but hadn’t been feeling all that enthusiastic as jobs in her field are pretty much all in Boston, over an hour’s commute for her each way. So, when this local position was advertised she decided to go for it as it’s close to where she lives, will provide her with a cash flow, and gives her time to work on her portfolio, figure out what she really wants to do, and spend time with her boyfriend. The wait staff position was apparently highly competitive, but we felt somewhat confident when we learned she was made the cut for an in-person interview. She’s that person everyone enjoys having around and wants to have on their team, the one who can always find the positive any situation (plus she has waitressing experience). She always interviews well, and she’s a hard worker who always puts in extra effort. Anyway, she’s happy and we’re happy for her. We know she’ll eventually find a place where she can use her considerable artistic talents, but for now this is a good place for her.

This morning I am:

• Reading: I almost halfway through Breasts and Eggs. I am enjoying it, but it’s very Japanese, both the topic and the writing, and it sometimes jumps around a bit. I’ve put Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on hold at the library – almost can’t believe I just have one more in the series to go. The books have gotten so much better, exciting, and enjoyable as the series goes along.
• Listening to: Brett is puttering around in the kitchen (putting dishes away, making coffee), and outside there’s a soft breeze blowing through the palms, birds are singing, and a couple of roosters are doing their thing off in the distance now and again. In other words, it’s a lovely morning in spite of the sky being filled with clouds. Hopefully they’ll clear out in the new few hours so we can go to the beach!
• Watching: We’ve had a few nights where we couldn’t get into Netflix because the girls were all watching something (Netflix is provided by our phone plan so they all can access it as well), so Brett and I watched some other shows on Amazon and Britbox (Wild Bill, with Rob Lowe) those evenings. One favorite was A Suitable Girl on Amazon, a documentary about three young women in India and their quests to find a suitable husband and get married. It was fascinating and we enjoyed seeing scenes of India again. WenYu has recommended Indian Matchmaking on Netflix as a complement to that show, as well as a couple of others we now have on our list. When we can get on Netflix we’re still watching Mindhunter and Hinterland, but we should finish those this week.
• Cooking/baking: We’ll be having be another (A Dozen Cousins’) beans and brown rice dinner tonight – tonight it will be Mexican Cowboy pinto beans. Other dishes on the this week’s menu are chicken adobo with bok choy; grilled ribeye steaks one night; and chicken and vegetable curry. Leftovers will fill in the gaps. I didn’t end up making the lemon cake last week because there were no lemon cake mixes at Walmart, and I refuse to pay nearly $4 to buy one elsewhere. I would have made the lemon cake from scratch except that we unfortunately didn’t have any lemons! I instead made a vanilla cake which we’re topping with apple pie filling. It’s not as good as the cherries and chocolate cake, but still very tasty and a nice sweet treat to end the day. I’ve promised myself though that our next cake will be something a bit more spectacular.

  

• Happy I accomplished this past week: I feel like I turned a corner this week with Japanese. It was easier for some reason to read and remember kanji, and even though I still made mistakes, there were no where near as many of them as before. Before it often took me several tries for me to get things like the sentence above correct, but this past week I was able to get through review exercises without an error, a big step for me. We again walked every day (and got soaked on Monday – the rain started before we were able to get back to the car), and had five 3+-mile days. I’ve started carrying hand weights along when I walk. It’s been a bit of a challenge though as I thought I ordered two one-pound weights but instead ordered two two-pound weights. I know it won’t take long until they start to feel lighter. We didn’t get any of the windows washed this past week, so that job has been moved to this week, although we need to have a day when the sun is not shining brightly. We also did not get to see our friend on the north side as she was having a difficult week recovery-wise, so that’s been postponed until she’s feeling better.
• Looking forward to next week: Brett and I are planning to go out on a breakfast date this week, to the Kalaheo Cafe just down the road. They do several different Eggs Benedict variations, so I know I will find something I like (and Brett will no doubt have French toast). Weather permitting, we also plan to get back to the beach, starting today, and hopefully get to go more than once. Otherwise, we have no specific plans for the week.

  

• Thinking of good things that happened: Costco got flats of peaches in once again, and we found one with ripe peaches (soft to the touch and smelled like peaches versus hard as a baseball and no aroma). My idea of heaven for breakfast is nonfat vanilla yogurt topped with a fresh peach and a sprinkle of Anahola Granola, so getting to have peaches one more time is a wonderful thing in my book. Ally the cat continues to come by each day for water and a little attention. I never thought I’d say this, but we actually got worried one day when she didn’t come until late afternoon.

  

• Thinking of frugal things we did: We stayed right on budget with our food shopping this week – I actually put a few things back at Costco just so we wouldn’t go over. We put $15.27 into the change/$1 jar. Our only other spending this week was the farmers’ market, the shared pastry at the Midnight Bear Cafe in Hanapepe, and some gin. Brett and I are not big drinkers – we only have one gin & tonic three evenings a week – but Safeway recently remodeled their liquor department and currently have a big wine and liquor sale going on, so this past week we stocked up on some small batch/specialty gins we’ve been wanting to try: Hendrick’s Midsummer Solstice, Roku Gin from Japan, and Aviation Gin, distilled in Portland. Safeway’s prices were good to begin with, but we saved an addition $40 on top of those! We have enough gin now to last us for months. Otherwise in frugality, our travel savings balance at the end of August was $853. I got lucky and did several high-SB surveys, and along with receiving my monthly bonus award, I earned 1,854 Swagbucks this past week! Without YaYu here the amount of leftovers has dropped considerably, and all were quickly eaten. No food was thrown away this week as well.

  

• Grateful for: We’re thankful that all three of our girls is settled and healthy. Meiling is working (still full time from home) and she and her boyfriend moved this past week into a larger apartment (still in Manhattan); WenYu is now employed, and is otherwise happy and doing well; and YaYu is back at school and ready to start classes tomorrow. We couldn’t ask for more.
• Bonus question: Where do you get your news these days? We don’t have cable TV, nor receive any local channels, and don’t currently subscribe to any newspapers. These days I keep up with what’s going on via Twitter. It may be seen as a strange source, but I have a highly curated list of (trusted) people I follow and I skim though tweets from them a couple of times a day to see what people are talking about and what issues, if any, I want to find out more about. Some of the stuff being put up on Twitter is frankly silly, and not worth my time, but there are other issues appearing almost daily where a tip from someone posting on Twitter gets me digging deeper. I then try to read articles from a variety of sources, and hear and weigh different viewpoints. At the same time I almost always refuse to read comments on Twitter because those can easily devolve into a trip down the rabbit hole or a bunch of name-calling or worse. Almost nobody follows me on Twitter because I rarely if ever tweet anything myself. I actually had one tweet of mine go viral last year, but it wasn’t enough to make me want to keep trying for that again.

We are so accustomed now to seeing everyone here wearing a mask that when we spot someone who isn’t it’s both shocking and maddening. The other day at the farmers’ market a women with five kids (definitely visitors) was shopping without a mask but instead had it dangling around her wrist. I guess she couldn’t be bothered to put it on, or though masks were for suckers or something. There are tons of signs throughout the market too reminding people that mask wearing is mandatory. I’m hoping someone eventually stopped her and told her to put it on. We also received an email from Bryn Mawr letting us know that apparently last weekend there were indoor gatherings on campus with no one wearing a mask, and several people had left campus to head into Philadelphia and elsewhere. Both activities are in violation of the agreement that students were required to sign before being allowed to return to campus. Being that the Honor Code at Bryn Mawr is a BIG DEAL, apparently these students are being dealt with individually, but the campus has gone into serious shutdown mode as well with ALL classes now online for the next week or so. YaYu says that almost everyone is trying very hard to stay safe and healthy, and everyone she knows is pretty upset about the actions of the few who chose to break the agreement and possibly endanger other students. The campus is also having issues with outsiders (not wearing masks, of course) wanting to walk their dogs on campus, etc. even though there are lots of signs posted that no visitor are allowed

That’s a wrap for this week. It was a very nice one for us, and moved along fairly quickly. Hope all of your weeks were good ones as well, and that you’re looking forward to the one coming up!