japan

lets start from the beginning:

yesterday : i finished my cleaning and packing madness, and a friend came by to take my couch, other (generous) friends came and took all my boxes 'o-crap that they are storing in their garage for me while i'm away. so all that was left was what i was taking. the downside was that i had no bed to sleep in last night (my couch folded out into my bed) so i spent the night on the (the actual living room) couch.

today (24th) : i woke up and ate a HUGE bowl of rice chex with LOTS of milk. it is going to be a long 5 months without homogenized american 2% bovine goodness. sigh. then i started to try to cram my pillow in my suitcase. hmmm. failure. plan b, try to zip carryon bag closed. (note: carryon bag was purchased for under $10 in urumqi street market in 2007. it made the following trip sequence: urumqi-beijing-tokyo-mineapolis-ohare-kelsey's house-florida-return from florida-beijing-hefei-guangzhou-hong kong-ohare-kelsey's house-florida-return from florida-hawaii move #1-hawaii move #2-hawaii move #3.) so i was trying to squeeze one more trip out of it, and it just wouldn't squeeze. instead it ripped.

so i called heather & petey g (ride to airport) and suggested we leave a tad bit early and stop by the outlet mall and find me a new carryon. i also requested petey g's assistance in zipping my bag, which he accomplished with great skill and agility. so then we visited the outlet mall, where i spent $35 (really breaking the bank since i could have got a suitcase 6 times that size for half the price in the mother country...) on a new carryon. it is actually quite slick and i like it alot. at the same time it had better last me YEARS of international travel, though, just saying. but all my stuff fit and it actually zipped up pretty easily.

luggage crisis solved, we were airport bound. i knew we had reached the airport when the throngs of japanese tourists became visible. it didn't help that i flew japan airlines. i could count the number of non-asians on that flight with my one hand. needless to say, some flight updates were given without translations to any other language. BUT somehow i managed to be sitting next to a chinese family. finally someone i could eavesdrop on... because let me tell you, i cannot even tell where japanese words/sentences start and stop. it's yamayamayama to me :).

(somewhere in here we crossed the international dateline into the 25th of august) : before today, i had never flown japan airlines. i really doubt if i'll ever fly another airline. jal rocks. first, they have the sweetest flight crew ever. no overweight middle-aged fake-blonde woman barking at you to get your toddler OUT OF BUSINESS CLASS NOW OR ELSE. jal attendants walked around periodically handing out hot towels, random beverages, etc. and, although the japanese are not known for their physical largeness, they have the most space for economy passengers i've experienced recently (perhaps you remember my rant from our to-china-for-aurora trip?) but you want to know the kicker? the aspect that wins my loyalty probably forever?

they. served. us. ice cream.

and my little heart melted.

jal has this amazing feature: they have a little camera in the cockpit area (maybe it's on top of the plane?) and one underneath the plane. so they "televise" the take off and landing which is really, really cool. then, every passenger (even those of us in economy!) gets their own tv screen on the seat back in front of them, with their own handy dandy remote, and they can watch the "action" from these cameras between showings of their favorite movies :).

i managed to watch 2 movies, take a nap, eat, read 'confessions of a counterfeit farm girl' which you've gotta read if you are from the midwest and/or pity those of us who live(d) there. it is an absolutely hilarious work of genius, i couldn't stop smiling and snickering (and yes i was in public!) it was all so true!

ok, and here's one last nice thing. the flight was just under 8 hours. EIGHT. this is a plus of living on the tiny tropical island in the middle of the pacific ocean. travel to asia just got a lot faster. no more 15 hours of hell between hong kong and ohare! i got off the 7 hour 45 minute flight and i wasn't a complete zombie. i'm blaming my feeling of bliss on the ice cream for sure.

so i got off the plane, got through customs and stuff and the helpful girl at the info desk managed to direct me (and my complete lack of direction self) to the appropriate bus (33) to get to my hotel.

when i dreamed of my ventures into japan i thought "oooohhhh a hotel in an urban area where i can poke around and buy something very "japanese" that i will treasure and use to wow my friends for years to come. so when we started driving through this bamboo forest i was like "what?"

sure enough, the nikko narita is in the middle of a forest. not even a mcdonalds or sushi joint around. so, instead of throwing down thousands of japanese yen (i exchanged for some japanese and chinese money at the honolulu airport) on one of their nice asian restaurants (which is what i will be eating for the next 5 months) i went to the convienience store and for a mere 600 yen (no idea how many american dollars that is, but i'm betting $7-10) i acquired:

-a carton of grapefruit juice
-cheap japanese version of pringles
-one individually packaged banana
-2 string cheeses
-a blueberry yogurt with mystery chewy pieces in it. it was the only one of the "yogurt-looking-ish" containers with any english on it. so of course i bought it.

i suppose soon i'll be heading off to bed. i have no idea what time it is here (it is dark, though), but i'm going to call down for a wake up call in the morning so that i am not late for my flight to the motherland. it is almost midnight in hawaii which means kelsey's body is about ready to crash. (another plus about living in hawaii is that it's actually only 4 hours ahead of japan, 6 for china i think, and technically one day :)... but it makes the jet lag transition a ton easier going this way!)

stay tuned & aloha.

15 things

things i love about living alone:

a while back, i heard someone say that living alone is one of the most dangerous things you will do. not in the sense of physical danger: i live in a gated complex and lock my doors; but more of the effects of not having to deal with people. i have lived alone since june 15. and i have loved every minute. here’s the list of some of my favorite features of the last few months:

1. not feeling bad when it’s late at night and i get home and want to cook food and watch tv. there’s no one to wake up!
2. leaving random stuff all over the house (purses, books, dirty laundry, dishes, grapes, papers…)
3. breaking out into song. whatever i want, whenever i want.
4. watching whatever i want on tv whenever i want to, at any volume.
5. getting dressed in any room, at any time.
6. letting the dirty dishes pile up until there are no clean dishes. same goes for piles of laundry until i have no clean clothes left.
7. the only stuff on the counter/couch/floor is my stuff and it is there because i want it there.
8. as soon as my most recent roommate left, the obnoxious knick knacks were gone and the loud wind chime put away.
9. 5 words : because. i. feel. like. it.
10. peace and quiet. all the time.
11. i am in charge of getting the mail! every time i go to the box, i say, today could be the day when i receive the envelope that will change my life. hasn’t happened yet, but it has compelled me to go get the mail when i got home really late and didn’t really want to walk all the way to the mailbox.
12. when preparing to move again, you can throw half full boxes/suitcases all over the place.
13. i put only stuff i deemed worthy (trace & jade’s artwork) on the refrigerator.
14. no one tempts me by buying ice cream and putting it in the freezer.
15. i don’t have to be nice to my roommate’s cat if she is not here to protect it.

tomorrow i will depart from this glorious bubble of aloneness and go to china, where i will be introduced to a new roommate. and we will have to share a bathroom. wish her luck…

3-5 months

so i'm one of those junkies who needs some new life change every 3-5 months.

i moved here in january.

within 3 weeks i'd moved across the island and started a new job.

4 months after that, i moved to a new house, got a new roommate.

and now, 3 months later, having lived on the same island for 8 months, it's past time for a change. 

so i am moving to china.

on monday.

news from the family

first, we have some newer pictures of trace with some of his favorite people (today mama told me that both trace and trent have grown 2 inches since june). a week or so ago, trace lost his first tooth: middle of the bottom row. the new tooth is down there, waiting to come in. jade doesn't have any loose teeth yet, and her physical growth has been proportional :).

next, a few new videos from trevor:


(pulling his truck in the cass county fair)

(riding his snowmobile across a pond)

waterfalls

last weekend, a few friends and i hiked up the side of a mountain to see waterfalls. it was muddy so we hiked the 2 miles barefoot. once we got up to the waterfalls (there were two, only one is pictured) we jumped off the sides and into the water below.

21st bday : north shore (sunset)

21st bday : north shore (random things)

21st bday : north shore (temple/cliff)

21st bday : north shore (personal island)

21st bday : north shore (turtles)

twister

i’ve always kinda had this thing for tornadoes. maybe it’s part of growing up in the midwest, where we actually have them. it seemed like at least once every summer we’d get the eagerly anticipated tornado warning (best if heard via radio). the wind would pick up (or die down and give us the eery calm) and it would rain or hail or just remain eerily still. and we would go to the basement.

my friend natalie and i went to the central library (in downtown honolulu) and we were browsing the new books. there was this particular book that was basically all tornado shots taken by storm chasers.  and it reminded me of all those storms i’d seen, running around outside, putting the bikes and four-wheelers and floaty noodles and cars away as my dad and brother turned off the irrigations. although the rain may or may not come, the lightening would.

i remember the way the wind whipped the dirt from the field up and around one summer where a stranger ended up in our basement because he didn’t want to be outside in it. or the time we could barely see the driveway, except that my dad and his employee were in his big white truck, out there on it, and were convinced that the only way they weren’t blowing away was that the employee was quite… well rounded.

within the first week of 7^th grade we were in the hallway, only this time it wasn’t a drill: it was real.  of course, we were no more serious than we were during the drills. we knelt there, math books (biggest book we had in our repertoires) over our heads, waiting for the ceilings to collapse. and we laughed, “we are going to die!” after a while, realizing that to kneel with a math textbook over your head for long periods of time is dreadfully uncomfortable, the teachers (who had been walking around monitoring and critiquing our kneeling- closer to the wall!; surely not letting any bare small of the back show- why isn’t your undershirt tucked in?) allowed us to sit, in a row, against the wall, in the hallways. it is actually one of my more fond memories of my scholastic experience.

today i was sitting , reading a book, at the kapolei transit center, awaiting the bus to target. and i looked up and noticed that there is something different in the sky. there was this odd brown streak. now, if i had been in china, there would be no reason for alarm, as the air quality is generally quite poor and the atmosphere is usually brown and/or gray. but this is hawaii, renown for it’s blue skies (and bluer water).  so the fact that there is brown in our air is unusual at best. then i really start to see it: a dust-devil. the biggest dust devil i have ever seen. it went all the way to the sky (most dust devils i’ve seen are rather short). but it was very faint, very loose.

we had a big black lab named harley. i remember seeing him get trapped in dust devils.  his tail would be twisted around and he’d get this look like, “what?!”

i love the dust devils: they remind me of tornadoes. i used to have (haven’t had in a long while) dreams about tornadoes. they usually hit our house; i would watch them approach. i was never really scared: just intrigued. i didn’t care that the tornado was going to rip our house and all our possession up, mix them around in the sky, and drop them back down a few miles away. all i wanted to do was see the tornado. don’t know why this was such a deep desire, but it was and is.

i suppose unless i move back to the midwest or to texas, my chances of seeing a tornado are rather slim.

but you can always dream.

dreams

i had a scary dream the other night.

it wasn't like a nightmare. no one was chasing me, nor did it involve fire, eggplant, death, spiders, lack of good reading material, spooky lighting or any other terrifying phenomenon.

my mom was pregnant.

with another! boy.

and we had to find another tr- name.

i woke up in a cold sweat.

growth

i started a garden.

i figured it was as little commitment as possible, while still supporting something living (the other options were acquiring a pet and/or child- neither of these options sounded particularly attractive). i have no idea why i decided i needed to support something living, except to keep myself from turning into a totally-self-serving jerk while living alone (my roommate and i have very different schedules, so we actually don’t see each other very often).

when i moved to my current residence, i noticed that there was a garden area in front of the apartment. my roommate (and probably her prior roommate) had tried their hand at gardening; i felt the call and challenge to give it a try myself.

i grew up on a corn-and-bean farm. farming has been the profession of choice on both sides of my family. hypothetically, the skills are in my blood.

in the same strip mall as my old navy is a lowe’s. so one day after work i went to lowe’s, threw down $3, and left with corn and green bean seeds as well as a pepper plant.

that very night, i put some dirt (i dug it out of the garden with a spoon) in some tupperware containers and planted my seeds. a few days later, when i had time, i cultivated (proper farming terminology) a swath of ground and planted my seedlings.

and they grew. i am quite certain i am the only resident of my apartment complex to have corn growing in their patch-‘o-ground.

and for the record, it is not field corn or seed corn, it is sweet corn. i decided that (a) delay planting male rows wasn’t exactly going to fit into my work schedule and (b) i really had no desire to go out trying to find illegal immigrants to do my detasseling. thus, sweet corn was deemed best option. and i can eat it myself, as apposed to feeding it to a cow. i don’t think we are allowed farm animals in this gated community.

the most recent newsflash in kelsey’s garden world is that i have constructed bean poles out of cheap chopsticks and busted hair ties. innovation at it’s best. the beans are starting to flower, as is the pepper plant, which means that soon, i should be harvesting the fruits of my labor.

summer

the sound of my childhood summers is, without question, the irrigation pump. because rains were always few and far between during the heat of the summer, the time when corn grows the most, water was always being pumped to some irrigation, somewhere on our land.

you knew it was summer when to my father’s dinner-time prayer the phrase, “and God please bring the rains” was added. he never prayed for any other weather phenomenon that i remember (although in the middle of february, in a seasonal-depression induced slump my mother and i prayed fervently for a variety of weather phenomenon and i knew my brother prayed for snow so he could snowmobile. i wondered how God handled it when He was getting conflicting prayers from under the same roof).

the irrigation pump was at the end of our long driveway. once someone told me that i lived “in the house with the leaky irrigation pump at the end of the dirt driveway.” yes, that was it. forget all the trees or the windmill or any other landmarks, the leaky irrigation was forever the marker of our residence. although the pump never broke, it always leaked, so we always had a puddle in the grassy (or it would have been grassy had it not been so perpetually wet) space between the driveway and the next field. in the heat and humidity of july and august, this pool of water became a stagnant breeding ground for all types of algae, slime and scum.

it didn’t matter where you were in the house, as long as a window somewhere was open, you could hear the pump’s constant whirr. it never wavered, never clicked, never squeaked, never changed. twenty years i listened to the pump and nothing about it ever faltered. the same parts were always rusted (nothing new or different decided it needed to rust, too) it never faded or a new leak never came to be. whatever leaked had simply leaked since the beginning of time.

i wonder how many hours of his life my dad spent at that pump: turning it on and off, using the water from it to fill his sprayer, turning a knob to change the water’s flow. it was his home office, the place where he took a lot of cell phone calls and helped his assets- his corn- to grow.

summer was over when the pump turned off for the last time. when its whirr wasn’t in the air, it was deathly quiet- the quiet of fall and winter. it always astonished me how silent winter was outside if you just stood there. then i realized that if you just stood there in summer you would hear birds, frogs, insects and a steady irrigation pump that never slept.

one year ago today

we met aurora for the first time.

32 steps

32 simple steps to a fabulous day off:

1. awaken without the aid of alarm clock.
2. eat a large breakfast of cornflakes, banana and ½ a chocolate chip cookie.
3. prepare self for entry into public (fashion hair, put on clothes, etc)
4. realize the medicated shampoo you ordered arrived!!
5. walk to bus stop, stopping to gaze in wonder at the hibiscus along the sidewalk.
6. board the e bus.
7. ride e bus for a while.
8. disembark e bus.
9. find public restroom (macy’s).
10. find self in chinatown.
11. locate chinese bookstore. get discount because you are buying for your sister, adopted from china.
12. find chinese veggie sellers.
13. realize that produce is so much cheaper in chinatown: must come more often! find green beans, broccoli and papaya all very affordably priced. also locate fresh sweet cherries for the can’t-beat-it- price of $1.79/lb.
14. catch bus to ala moana shopping center.
15. enter ala moana shopping center and manage not to get lost immediately.
16. find that aeropostale has opened. score affordably priced shorts that fit (not expensive and they fit? must be dreaming!)
17. walk across the street from ala moana shopping center to ala moana beach park.
18. find slighty (but not overwhelmingly) fragrant beach restroom. change into new shorts.
19. find shade under palm tree with nice view of the ocean.
20. eat cherries, read highly amusing j. maarten troost travelogue.
21. realize the sun is moving so the shade has moved: now the shady spot offers no view of the ocean.
22. realize if you stay here all afternoon you will fry to a crisp.
23. dip toes, feet and ankles in ocean.
24. grab belongings (produce, clothes and purse, together weighing no less than 20 lbs), walk to foot-rinsing-shower-thingie, rinse feet.
25. walk to bus stop.
26. catch e bus home.
27. arrive home, eat another cookie and a papaya, have roommate tell you that she has killed lots of spiders residing in our garden (what?!) with this amazing spray. this spray will forever be on hand in residence. it kills bugs, of which we are both terrified. the garden is looking lovely.
28. take leisurely bike ride around neighborhood. bike pedal looses a screw and falls off.
29. refrain from using improper language- the bike is inanimate anyways- and survey bike pedal situation.
30. put bike pedal in purse. one good thing about working next door to lowe’s… the availability of such necessary nuts and bolts. hopefully this can be fixed with limited fix-it abilities.
31. consume evening meal.
32. retire for the evening.

5-30

today i went to the beach with some friends. the water was finally warm enough for me to venture out and see if i remembered how to surf... unfortunately the water was really choppy and the wind was blowing the wrong way, so i only really caught 2 waves :(. and now i am sore and tired... BUT my sinuses have been thoroughly cleansed by the salt water.

on another note, today was old navy's $3 graphic tshirt sale. add in my fabulous employee discounts, and that's 5 shirts for under $12. guess who's a happy camper?

plans for this week? work and a trip down to chinatown on my day off :).

t&j in trevor's truck

beware : wild animals

waipahu transit center

mornings

i do not wake up happy. ever.

it’s not that i hate my life, i just do not enjoy being awakened in after a long (or too short) sleep. especially if you are a telemarketer calling from the mainland. because it’s 4am here. and i don’t even own a car, so don’t call to tell me my warranty has expired.

but there is one thing that will give me some desire to arise from the warmth of my air mattress.

it is square.

crisp.

especially tasty when paired with fresh, sliced fruit and 2% milk.

rice chex.


one facet of my current financial situation is the inability to afford cereals that are not on sale. hence, i do not get rice chex every week. a few weeks ago, i got three huge boxes of corn flakes for $10, then a gallon of milk for a mere $.99. so i have been eating corn flakes every morning for some time.

corn flakes are fine, right up my alley actually. they’re bland and mix pretty well with bananas and milk. but they are not rice chex.

last week i went to long’s before church because when i arrived i promptly realized that i never ate lunch (details!). not only were craisins on sale (craisins and sermons mix nicely) but rice chex were on sale! and better yet, i had a coupon for rice chex in my purse.

jade has become my source: since my parents get the weekly paper (and i don’t), she clips the coupons and sends them to me.

finally, the other day i finished my last box of corn flakes. the bliss i have felt the last few mornings has been beyond explanation. it has been almost enough to wake up smiling and bound into the kitchen for.

almost.

camera's back

newsflash

1. i moved (again). fourth address of the year; i'm getting the "change of address" process down to an exact science.

2. i found my camera battery charger during the move :).

3. happy mother's day!

pix from home

after some pretty intense pestering on my part, trent has started sending me random pictures from home. enjoy!

trace & jade and a tasty-looking strawberry cake.

i am really surprised that the pic of trent (above) was not caught/denied by my virus 

protection software.

trent (on the dirt bike) and his friend patrick (on the ground).

trevor and jade before the prom.

aurora :)