When we decided to go fishing in Hawaii, I thought it would be a quiet activity. The kind where you rent a private boat, go out to sea and sit with a rod, watching your bobber bop about in the waves. That's fishing. Maybe you catch something, maybe you don't. The fun is in watching the bobber in
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12/31/2011
When you're tired of romantic moonlight dinners on the ocean, try Merriman's Cafe at King's Shops in Waikola. Because instead of dancing barefoot in the sand to some Hawaiian crooner, you can walk around the shops to admire outrageously expensive trinkets. We stopped at Coach bags so I could stro
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12/30/2011
I couldn't get my purple shorts on. That was an astounding discovery to make only halfway through our Hawaiian vacation. I tried them on before we left home and they fit. It's not so much that I couldn't get them on exactly as I could not fasten them. There is one sure cure for that. Fewer desser
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12/29/2011
I once put a hole in my eardrum by diving into a pool too quickly. So much for SCUBA lessons when I was younger. Never even made it into the ocean. Nope, I managed to mess up in 8 feet of water. That's what happens when you don't equalize -- which made me a little bit concerned about diving 100 f
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12/28/2011
Where does coffee come from? That sort of question is right up there with why is the sky blue? And who put the salt in the ocean? You know the answers but who cares? Really. It doesn't make any difference in our normal day-to-day lives, if you're like me, a Sacramento short sale agent focused on
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12/27/2011
My sister asked me whether I had received everything I wanted for Christmas. Then she answered her own text message with: "Of course you did; you're in Hawaii." But that's only because she did not know about the email from a buyer's agent sent on Christmas Eve and received on Christmas Day. Some
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12/26/2011
Natives from this part of the world were incredibly smart. Did you know 300 years ago Hawaiians raised fish in ponds? If it was up to me, I'd take my Tom Hanks' volleyball, wade out in the water and try to bash them to death. But these people figured out it was smarter to build fish ponds and fis
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12/25/2011
I am so glad that I covered up the cactus garden before we left Sacramento. I pondered whether it was worse that they be deprived of sunlight and then decided if the alternative was death-by-frost it was better to starve them from the sun. They seem to be pretty much dormant in the winter anyway.
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12/24/2011
Kids are like TV commercials. There is no reason for them to be so unnaturally loud. Government is passing a law to tone down the commercials, but nobody is doing anything about the kids. They have a law in some states that your boom-boom car stereo can't be audible from 50-feet away, and they sh
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12/23/2011
When you get crummy service people often repeat that you "get what you paid for." They mean you didn't pay enough to get good service. There are some things that if you pay enough for people to fawn over your every need, they will. My husband hates being fawned over. I don't mind it so much becau
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12/22/2011