Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A few days before Christmas, Cole had his inaugural ride on the tandem. So it won't be long now before he'll be up on the quad with all of us on some longer rides. If you click on the picture below, you can see the HUGE grin he has on his face. He loved it. Now he asks Dan all the time to take him out on the tandem.
We had a very nice holiday. Christmas Eve we opened presents from each other and of course the kids had a blast opening presents. Then on Christmas morning they opened presents from Santa. We spent Christmas Day over at a friends house for our Christmas dinner and had a very nice and relaxing time. The kids all played well together and the grownups got to have a nice meal and conversation. So one more Christmas holiday is behind us.






I think it was the day after Christmas that we had an island-wide power outage. They had a thunderstorm move in and it knocked out some big power lines. The power was out where we were for about 24 hours. At least it was warm...

New Year's Eve was certainly something to see here in Hawaii. People told us about it but it was pretty unbelievable. I guess that firecrackers and fireworks are supposed to chase out the bad spirits or something like that in the Chinese tradition. The Hawaiians have apparently adopted that theory too (probably from the large Chinese immigration early in the century). But anyways, from dusk until midnight the only time the constant barrage of fireworks slowed down was when it started pouring rain for a little while. I watched the neighbor for a while as he unrolled a string of firecrackers that was tied to a pole about 8 feet off the ground, the string of firecrackers went down to the ground and across the pavement maybe another 6 feet! The haze was simply unbelievable from all the fireworks all around. I couldn't even see clearly to the shed in our backyard, it was like a thick fog. I saw the neighbors in the cul-de-sac who were lighting them off were holding their shirts up over their faces so it must have been pretty bad out there.

I went to bed before midnight, but I had no problem telling when midnight was. I got up and watched for a while out our back windows. I had a 180 degree view from the back corner of the house. For at least 15-20 minutes the show in the neighborhood was non-stop with huge fireworks displays in all directions. (remember,these are all the neighbors - no municipal displays from where I was watching!) I went back to bed and the fireworks continued at a slower pace for a long time after that.

I guess I should have known it was going to be a big display, here are a couple pictures I took at Walmart a few days before New Year's. It shows all the fireworks they had stocked. There were a couple of aisles packed from floor to top with boxes of fireworks, and every cart in the checkout was loaded with fireworks.

So if you want to see a good New Year's display, come to Hawaii!