Tag Archives: A Maui Blog

Mahalos

Posted on by
2

Aloha All,

In Hawaii people speak pidgin (well, at least the ones who grew up here) and it’s a kind of shorthand English, a mashup of languages constructed during the reign of sugar plantation days when workers were brought from Japan and the Phillipines and no one could communicate with each other.

So most people know that “Mahalo” means thank you. But “Mahalos” is pidgin, it’s like the shaka sign of thank yous. It shows you’re local and you know what you’re talking about, i.e. “Mahalos, man.” I know this because Mike grew up here and it is truly like living with a foreigner to have a girl from the midwest and a haole boy from Hawaii living in the same house. This man would eat fish three times a day. I’m a good cook, and it will never matter how great my French cooking skills become, that man is gonna want fish, preferably on the grill…or raw.

I remember the first time he came home with a big ahi tuna he’d caught it off the boat. He threw it , still flopping, down on the patio and I watched him carve that thing up so fast I thought I hope I never get on the wrong side of him, because he has some serious knife skills. I was to find out he has some serious survival skills, period. Like he could have been the original “Survivor” but without the ego or attitude.

As far as the pidgin, when Mike was in the fire department, the firemen used to tease him that as a haole boy he was more Hawaiian than they were. That was the highest compliment they could give.

I got to watch the pidgin in action when we built our house. Mike would send me down to Kahului for a plumbing part (I was the “Runner”–that was my official title and I took it very seriously!) or a pile of wood or whatever.Now you’ve gotta realize I’m Swedish-Irish with blondish hair and blue-green eyes. And I would gamely go into the plumbing supply store and try to get waited on. And I waited. And I waited. And I would be routinely ignored by the guys in there and come home without the part, no matter how politely I asked.

Mike would be quite aggravated that I hadn’t accomplished this simple mission. So we would jump in the truck together, drive back down the hill and go to the same place. He would speak pidgin. And in two minutes he’d have his plumbing part. Like magic.

Anybody out there had a similar experience? Because my friend in Kula looks pretty much like me, except she was a model so she’s much taller and stunning (okay, maybe she doesn’t look like me) and she had all the same problems when they were building their house. No pidgin, no part.

I write this to say “Mahalos” to all of you who have written to tell me how much you’re enjoying the blog. That rocks, to know that the time I put in is worth it. I hope to bring a little bit of Hawaii to you all as often as I can. But on that note, it might be a short while before I can blog again. Those of you who follow the blog know that I was gone from Maui for five months last year because my stepdad was dying of cancer and I went to California to care for him. Well, now my mom just had major surgery so I’m back on a plane to CA tomorrow to care for her. Once I know Mom is good, I’ll be back at this, I promise.

So Mahalos and Aloha for now. See you real soon! If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button on the right.

Jamaica

Is Hawaii Worth It?

Posted on by
4

Aloha,

In the brand new issue of “Honolulu Magazine” that just hit newstands here, the cover asks this question: Is Hawaii Worth it?

It then cleverly lists the pros and cons:

Sunshine……………………………..$5.00 gallon milk

3rd Safest City in the U.S………Solid Gold Electric Bill

Mangoes from Neighbors……….Living w/ your parents till age 35

Surf’s Up!…………………………….You just can’t get there from here (anywhere!)

Then: “I Stay Broke” (local pidgin for I’m always broke!)

And: Median Single-Family Home Price: $597,000. ($625,00 Honolulu). Cost in Witchita? $155,200. In St. Louis: $126,800.

From Editor A. Kam Napier’s Page in Honolulu Magazine, Titled “Paying the Paradise Tax:

“Unlike the residents of 49 other states, who can only dream of living in Hawaii, we actually know what it’s like to live here. While there’s much to be grateful for, we know that Hawaii is not always a bed of roses, or even a lei of plumeria. Mainly, this is because we have what a friend of mine calls America’s “most expensive ordinary life.” According to MetroTrends, an online publication from the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Urban Institute, Honolulu lost more residents between 2004 and 2010 through out-migration to other U.S. cities than it gained from in-migration. (Top three places to which Honoluluans fled: Los Angeles, San Diego and—shocking, I know—Las Vegas.) We also earned a D grade from MetroTrends for economic security, mainly for housing unaffordability.”

 So what do you think? Is Hawaii really worth it? Would it be worth it to you?

A hui hou! (til next time). If you’d like to subscibe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button to the right.

Aloha, Jamaica

Does ‘Oprah’s Farm’ mean Winfrey’s moving to Maui?

Posted on by
Reply

Aloha!

Oprah Winfrey’s Maui house is just fifteen minutes from mine. She built a pretty unassuming farm-style house in Kula, after buying out the rancher.

Kula is in “Upcountry” Maui, on the slopes of Haleakala mountain. In January, several websites quoted a story in the National Enquirer saying that Winfrey had joked that she’d move to the Valley Isle to run an organic farm if her new cable channel didn’t work out. An article at:http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/blog/2012/04/does-oprahs-farm-mean-winfreys.html also commented on this. Interesting. Oprah also had land in Indiana, not far from where I grew up, which she sold. The last issue of her magazine said she loves to cook. I wonder if she’ll start showing up at the Upcountry Farmer’s Market that we frequent at the crack of dawn every Saturday morning, selling veggies and herbs? Well, sure!

Doing the drive up to see Oprah’s house has become “the thing to do” for tourists. Oprah should have someone sell tickets at the gate and charge for tourists to snap photos. She’d make a bundle.

Oprah has hired celebrity chef Bev Gannon of Hali’imaile General Store(www.bevgannonrestaurants.com) to cook for her on occasion when she’s here visiting. I know this because my friend Wendy knows Bev. A saying you hear all the time on Maui is, “It’s a small island.” This means rumors fly, and also that you’d better mind your P’s&Q’s because someone you know just saw what you did.

The reason for the low (almost non-existent) rate of rape and murder on Maui? Because whatever you do, your Auntie or Uncle or “cuz” will know about it. And let’s face it…there’s no escaping off an island. They just simply shut down the airport.

It’s a small island. So how come I haven’t run into Oprah?

A hui hou! (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button to the right.

Aloha, Jamaica

Copyright Jamaica Michaels 2012. All rights reserved. May not be reblogged or reprinted without express written permission of author.

Moving to Maui, Part Three

Posted on by
7

Aloha,

So I now had a part-time job on Maui and a place to live, at the Aston Maui Kaanapali Villas, which is a combination of hotel and condos:

I had brought along one suitcase and my bicycle. The condo I was renting had four plates, four forks, four glasses. Life was simple, and I was discovering I liked it this way. No boxes of unorganized Christmas decorations haunting me from the attic. No closet full of winter clothes. No grandmother’s china gathering dust.

Actually, my design clients in Maui tell me that that’s the very best part about a vacation home on Maui: no stuff. So if that’s what we all aspire to, why do we own so much stuff? The truth is, it owns us…

Anyway, I was settling in, and deciding what to do about my life back in California. Condo life was agreeing with me. Until, that is, the night of the infamous late-night condo cleaning incident. I’m pretty sure they still talk about it at the front desk there.

Here’s the scene: it’s HOT in Maui. So once the sun went down and it cooled off, I decided to do a little cleaning. I put on a thin white t-shirt. And that was all. Get the picture? Hold that thought.

I opened the door to the condo and tossed out the throw rugs to shake later. Now there are fire codes in hotels, and safety codes, and these all conspire to create self-closing doors. Big, heavy, metal self-closing doors. A huge gust of wind blew through and WHAM! The saying “don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out” was suddenly reality.

Except that now I was out. Locked out of my condo on the outside walkway three floors up in nothing but a see-through t-shirt.The only thing that could have made it worse would have been if I was out on a tiny ledge, like in the movies. If there was ever a time I wished to be beamed up, Scotty, it was now.

What to do, what to do?

I yanked my t-shirt down over what  I could cover, got into the (now functioning) elevator and rode downstairs. I moved like a lady in a too-tight skirt, mincing my way to the front desk. I stopped just short of it and called around a support beam: “Hey, excuse me! I’ve lost my key and I’m locked out.”

The night clerk was named Mary. Mary was suspected of doing a little nipping at the bottle she kept stashed behind the desk (actually, a lot of nipping) because the boss wasn’t there at night to know the difference. Mary looked over in a fog and tried to focus on me.

“Who’s that? Who’s there?”

I called out my name. I told her which condo I was in. But Mary didn’t know me from a tourist.

“Well, what do you want? I can’t hear you. Come over here to the front desk!”

I sighed, clutched my shirt, and began my slow journey into the middle of the lobby. At just the same moment that a tourist couple entered and wanted to check in. I sidled up to the front desk, turned my back to them and whispered loudly,  “I’m locked out. I can’t get in. Do you have a spare key to my apartment?”

“Well no, of course not. I’ll have to call the maintenance guys. I don’t know who’s on duty.”

The maintenance GUYS? Great. Just great. The gods who had come out of the sky in my deux a machina moment and given me a great apartment and a job were now extracting their pound of flesh. Literally. I was sure I could hear them laughing up there.

I yanked my t-shirt down as hard as I could as the tired tourists glared at me. I steeled myself for the moment my Savior With a Key would get his eye-full. Luckily he was a gentleman, and pretended that it was common-place for him to have to have to let stranded women in see-through t-shirts and no bottoms into their apartments. Let me tell you though, I made sure he walked ahead of me on my walk of shame.

Like I said, I’m pretty sure they still talk about this at the front desk, because let’s not forget, I NOW WORKED THERE!  And I know I made the maintenance guys’ Hall of Fame for stupid guest tricks at the hotel. Except, that is, that just the week before I had dropped my key down the teeny little crack in the elevator shaft and they had to rescue me from that.

What are the chances? And how could a woman who was smart enough to own a home and manage a business keep pulling these incredibly dumb stunts? Deux a machina.

And the gods laughed.

A hui hou! (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button to the right.

Aloha, Jamaica

Copyright Jamaica Michaels, 2012. All rights reserved. May not be reblogged or reprinted without express written permission of the author.

The Smell of Chicken, Not Frying

Posted on by
2

Aloha,

That’s Tallulah and Moose above. We interrupt our normally scheduled programming to ponder how it was that today I found myself drying a chicken’s butt with my blow dryer.

Actually, I know the answer to that. There was a time that  I worked as a veterinary surgical tech. I thought I wanted to be a vet, so I assisted in animal surgeries. Good thing I test-drove that career first…if the science tests hadn’t killed me, my allergies to animal dander would have. I could barely get my work done, I was so busy blowing my nose.

The point is, I know my way around animals pretty well, and Tallulah has been sick off and on for eight months now. She’s been to see Dr. Allan Kaufman, Maui’s chicken vet (Okay, so I know that some of you have stopped reading because you think I’m crazy. Who takes a chicken to the vet?) You’d be surprised. In addition to providing breakfast eggs and garden manure, they are ace pest and bug control agents. And chickens are like dogs. They have distinct personalities and you get attached. Moose is a brat and Tallulah is loveable and likes to be held:

And she gets so relaxed, she’ll fall alseep in your arms…

But last August some wild chickens, the “Wild Women” we called them, showed up on the property and it took us three weeks of running all over the place to catch them, because they were expert at survival and hiding in the bushes. And Hello, chickens can FLY! If they got cornered, they just flew up to the roof and sat there and laughed at us. We finally nabbed them with a swimming pool net on a pole, of all things. In the meantime, they infected our flock with some kind of crud. Just about the time I think I have them well, it starts all over again.

A bed in a box in the garage. A hot water bottle. Antibiotics administered with an eye dropper that look and smell like bananas. They love bananas, but do you think they’ll take the medicine without a fight? Noooo. Hand feeding, hand-watering…I’m exhausted. So why won’t they get well?

Today Tallulah got a warm bath. Again, not crazy, you can google it. Sometimes an egg gets caught in the chute and that can make them sick. The bath is supposed to dislodge the egg, except there wasn’t one. But who knew that chickens won’t dry once they’re wet? It’s hot, it’s Maui, I thought what the heck? But by bedtime, she was still soaking wet, so out came the blow dryer. She was not happy about going to the beauty parlor and I got pecked for my efforts.

Let me tell you, the smell of chicken, drying, is not something you want to live through twice.

A hui hou!  (til next time)…when we’ll pick back up with the move to Maui. If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button to the right.

Aloha, Jamaica

Copyright Jamaica Michaels, 2012. All rights reservevd. May not be reblogged or reprinted without permission of the author.

Moving to Maui, Part Two

Posted on by
2

Aloha!

So here I was in Maui on somewhat of a permanent vacation. I was ignoring the calls from clients back home and getting in a little Margaritaville time. Jimmy Buffet played on a loop in my brain as I sat in my lounge chair. Oh, this was SO not me.

I strolled through the lobby of the condo/hotel on my way back to the apartment I was sub-letting, and noticed The Concierge sitting in the lobby. Check this out: an open-air lobby with balmy breezes blowing through. A mango-wood desk and a job where she got to sit down all day. Working with tourists so very happy to be on vacation in Hawaii, helping them plan their fun activities. A breathtaking vase of tropical flowers nearby.

I did a double-take and thought: I want her job.

No more demanding clients, legal contracts, furniture orders gone missing! No more commuting with 4 zillion other people in the Bay area. No more lying awake at night, worrying that I’d gotten a measurement wrong or put in an erroneous product number?

This was sounding better every minute. Jimmy Buffet sang louder.

And then a miracle happened.

Okay, I’m a screenwriter, and when you go to film school the first thing they teach you is this: at all costs you are to avoid writing the deux a machina. This is Latin, and means: “god out of the machine.” Wikipedia says “It is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.” You know, a “miracle.”

In other words, the Calvary can’t suddenly ride in and save you like in an old Western.

So how do we explain the fact that the Concierge spontaneously invited me to an art show, and she then out of the blue asked me if I was looking for a job, because they needed someone to fill in? Deux a machina, baby. Box office poison, but so golden in real life.

I now had a job.

A hui hou! (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button to the right.

Aloha, Jamaica

Copyright Jamaica Michaels, 2012. All rights reserved. May not be reblogged or reprinted without written permission of the author.

Centipedes and Cockroaches and Rats, oh my!

Posted on by
1

Aloha!

So a group of us Maui ladies got together last night at a little restaurant to catch up on each other’s lives. What I’d like to ask you is this: Is it normal for a group of adult women to sit around and compare notes about how big the centipede was that we found in our kitchen?  Or under the bath mat?  To compare the color, the length, the width? I can’t be sure, but women in other parts of the country (especially the contingent that made the movie “Bridesmaids” a smash hit ) probably discuss other things at length. But there we were, like a bunch of guys after a day of fishing, where the fish just gets bigger as the discussion goes on.

But I held the trump card.

“Any of you ladies ever opened up your gas grill on your lanai and had a rat running around in there?” I asked. “Because that’s what happened to me Sunday evening.”  Lots of gasps followed. I’m not talking a mouse. It was a rat, with a nice long tail, and he wasn’t Ratatouille.  And I’m not ashamed to admit that while watching that stunned rat careen around on top of the grate that was supposed to then hold my steak, my appetite went right with him as he plunged off the grill and over the side of the porch rail. That sucker could move.

My friend Wendy spoke up: “I knew when I moved to Maui that I’d have to make peace with the bugs. I mean, really make peace with them. But a rat in the grill? No way.”

These things didn’t happen on the mainland.

I remember the first night I stayed in my new Maui rental, shared with two other roommates, who happened to be at work.  A green creature went running up the side of the bedroom wall and across the ceiling. I screeched.  It then made a weird chirping sound, and I was convinced it was a battle cry. I didn’t sleep that night, afraid it would run across the bed, afraid it would bite. I had no idea what it was. The next morning I described it in detail to my roommate, and insisted that he catch it and remove it from the house. He laughed so hard his eyes watered.  “That was a gecko.  They’re supposed to be good luck. Someday you’ll laugh about this.”

I didn’t believe him, but of course I did eventually laugh about it, kind of in the same spirit that Crocodile Dundee pulled out his knife and said, “That’s not a knife, THIS is a knife.” Because the gecko was nothing compared to all the other creatures I was going to have to learn to live with. I even went on to have a Jackson chameleon as a pet, and a Jackson is really just a bigger gecko with horns, which turns blue when it’s mad.

For now, just after the rat incident, I’m going to go have a nice green salad and think about how long I can go without grilling a piece of meat.

A hui hou! (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the “Follow” button to the right.

Aloha, Jamaica

Copyright Jamaica Michaels, 2012. All rights reserved. May not be reblogged or reprinted without  written permission of the author.