Restaurant Review: Colleen’s at the Cannery

Posted on August 18, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Restaurant Review: Colleen’s at the Cannery

Aloha!

Colleen’s at the Haiku Cannery http://colleensinhaiku.com/location.html is an out-of-the-way gem mostly frequented by the locals, but it would be an excellent stopping-off point on a trip back from Hana for the tourists. When you come to the Haiku Community Center, make a left and then another left onto Haiku Road, and up to the Cannery, which will be on your left also. It’s across from the Haiku Post Office. On our visit for Mike’s birthday, we saw one tourist couple waving a Maui driving map about, but other than that it was an interesting mix of locals who could have been doctors or windsurfers, sitting next to the guy with hair halfway down his back….and bare feet. Only in Hawaii.

We went on a Friday night and waited about thirty minutes for our food, but the service was good and the wait staff attentive with refilling water glasses. Colleen’s ambience reminds me of something you would find in Berkeley or Benicia, the town I was from in California. It has a restful vibe and they’re doing it right with the portions and flavors. The the only thing missing for me is artwork–a place for the eye to land. So I had to content myself with people-watching.

The place was packed and all tables full during the dinner hour (we arrived at 7 pm, with no reservation). Don’t stand at the door and wait, because it’s seat-yourself. Mike had the special: mahi-mahi with tiger prawns in a beautiful beure-blanc sauce that was excellent. We detected a hint of saffron. It came with a large scoop of fluffy, not gummy, rice and asparagus, for $25.00.

I had the Warm Bacon Spinach Salad for $14.00. It was quite large, had crispy potatoes, carmelized onions, cherry tomatoes, fresh bleu cheese and white truffle vinaigrette. If anything there was a little too much dressing and bacon in it (full slices, unusual for this salad.) In addition to their full pizza menu, the dinner menu is imaginative and it would appear there is something for everyone: BBQ Baby Back Ribs in a Maker’s Mark Honey sauce, a Shrimp and Garlic Linguine, Wild Mushroom Ravioli for the vegetarians (very important in Haiku) and a Vodka Penne Pasta, in addition to the Burgers and Fresh Daily Catch. I saw a number of Fish and Chips baskets come out, so they must be worth trying, if that’s your thing.

We were too full for dessert. We grabbed their breakfast and lunch menus also and plan to go again soon. The breakfast menu is typical and includes an Organic Tofu Vegetable Wrap. For the vegetarians, lunch includes a Grilled Ono and Avocado Wrap (if you eat fish) and a Roasted Vegetable Wrap.

The place is clean, comfortable (lots of booths, a biggie for me) and the noise level surprisingly low for concrete floors and high ceilings with an open-kitchen plan.

Give Colleen’s a try if you venture to Hana, or make it a destination with a pretty drive and side trip to Paia or Makawao. I think you’ll be pleased.

Colleen’s at the Cannery: 810 Haiku Rd., Haiku, HI 96708. 808-575-9211

Zagat Rating: 21/30.

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

Aloha, Jamaica

You Asked for It

Posted on August 17, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today High 84, Low 72

You Asked for It

Aloha!
It seems we’ve been on a food theme for the last few blog posts. I have asked readers what they would like to see in this blog, and the answers came back, “Restaurant reviews.” Being that I lived for 20 years right next to the Napa Valley in California, and did Interior Design work there, I will provide some
restaurant reviews in this blog. I’m a pretty good cook, but I LOVE to eat out.

First of all, I don’t know how any restaurant survives these days. Especially on Maui, with the price of food. We used to buy the good canned crab meat
at Costco on a somewhat regular basis, and it was $ 8.99 per can. (I make a mean crabcake.) Then the price went to $9.99 then $12.99 then $15.99 and the last I saw, it was at $18 can. We stopped buying it. So if crab has doubled on the shelf at Costco, how much are restaurateurs having to pay? The same with our electric bill; it’s doubled on Maui in the last few years. Business people are paying those same rates.

When you come to Maui on vacation, you are in vacation mode. You have set a certain amount of money set aside to spend… and do so gladly. We are the same way when we go on vacation, our filters are different. We just go with the flow and if we want something, or want to eat out, we do it. It’s just the price of taking a vacation.

Not so when you live in a place. So eating out on Maui can be a minefield… We don’t have it in the budget to eat at the normal tourist places. And when we do eat out, we are more critical than a normal tourist would be.I laugh when I remember the time my stepdad John was here visiting from California, and one day we went to Ruby’s http://rubys.com/ in the Kaahamanu shopping center for lunch. It’s a hamburger place mostly, with a 1950’s diner vibe. John and I spent a lot of time in California comparing hamburger joints. There is so much to choose from there, with Nation’s, and In-and-Out Burger. The first thing we would do when he picked me up at the Oakland airport was go straight to Nation’s for a cheeseburger. It was our ritual. You can get out of In-and-Out Burger with a nice freshly made cheeseburger, fries, and a drink for around five bucks. It’s an eat- in restaurant, and has booths, the same as Ruby’s. And when we opened up the menu at Rubys, and John saw that the hamburgers were going to be about $12 a piece, I thought he was going to fall out of the booth. (He was a big guy, so that would’ve been quite difficult for him to do.) I ordered a cheeseburger and a drink. He ordered a bowl of chili, onion rings, and a shake.

The bill came to somewhere in the neighborhood of $27. He talked about that bill at Ruby’s for the next three years. To anyone who would listen, he said, “How in the world does anyone afford to live on Maui? When you can’t even go out for a cheeseburger….”
And I agree.

Just going out and having a good time without worrying about the tab can be a real challenge on Maui. I remember when I first moved here and was working at the hotel, I met one of the maintenance guys who had also recently moved here from Northern California. He had a good job at the hotel, his wife also worked. But they were moving back to the mainland. I questioned him, but you just got here, why are you leaving? His answer: “Because we are so
spoiled with going out to eat in Northern California, and we simply can’t afford
to do it here.”It was their thing, and it just wasn’t going to fly in Maui.

It does become a bit of of “look, but don’t touch.” I know there are a lot of nice restaurants at the hotels in Wailea and also in Lahaina, but we just don’t go eat there, because it’s not in the budget. This was a huge
adjustment for me, being from Northern California, and having Napa Valley right there at my disposal.

You can find good, honest chef-prepared food in Napa Valley for not much money. Also, a few years ago we went to LA to the Great American Pitchfest, with one of my scripts. Afterward, we drove to Santa Barbara to stay for a couple of nights. This was going to be the “vacation” portion of the trip. And because we were on vacation, I was prepared to pay good money to eat out. We got some recommendations from the concierge and headed downtown.

And were blown away. First, by all that there was to choose from. It was like its own little Napa Valley right there on the main street of Santa Barbara. Once we chose a restaurant (not an easy feat), we were treated to some of the most mouthwatering, gourmet food I have ever had for such a good price. I still think about that meal. We had an appetizer and entrées; I had one glass of wine and we shared a dessert, and were out the door for about 60 bucks. Amazing!
This is never going to happen on Maui. So, any restaurant reviews that I do on this blog will be through the eyes of hard-working Maui people with normal working people’s budgets. Not a tourist’s budget. Forewarned is forearmed.

You asked for it!

Let the games begin.

A hui hou (til next time). if you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

Hawaiian Airlines Adds Local Food, Free Wine

Posted on August 14, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today: High 85, Low 73

Hawaiian Airlines Adds Local Food, Free Wine

Aloha!

This just in: Hawaiian Airlines has added kalua pork and free wine in economy class. Seems my post on ono (good) food was a little early.

Hawaiian Airlines is revamping the service on its mainland-to-Hawaii
routes by introducing more local foods and free wine in
economy class.The airline has started serving foods such as kalua pork
sandwiches and sweet Hawaiian bread with cream cheese and guava jelly in its free in-flight meals. In addition, it’s selling Spam musubi, ramen noodles and other snacks through a new feature called the Pau Hana (quit work) Snack Bar. Economy-class passengers 21 and older are being offered a
complimentary glass of red or white wine selected by Hawaii master sommelier Chuck Furuya. The wine comes with lunch or dinner.

Makes me wonder if Hawaiian is feeling the squeeze from Alaska Airlines on its Hawaii flights. Otherwise, in this age when airlines are cutting back and adding fees, why would Hawaiian make anything free? Alaska is using smaller planes (737’s) to move into Hawaiian’s turf, the Pacific Coast to Hawaii. And Alaska’s 737’s are approximately one-third more fuel-efficient than Hawaiian’s new A330’s, so Hawaiian may be offering free services to make sure its planes stay full. At this website http://airlines.findthebest.com/compare/7-13/Alaska-Airlines-vs-Hawaiian-Airlines these comparisons are offered:

Hawaiian Airlines Travel and Leisure Rating was 78.58 compared to Alaska’s 74.24. But wait, it’s about to get interesting with the other fees. Baggage fees for Hawaiian are $25.00 for the first bag, $35.00 for the second bag, and $125.00 for the third bag!–while Alaska offers all three for only $20.00 each. Then, an unaccompanied minor is charged $100.00 on Hawaiian but only $75.00 on Alaska.

But here’s where Alaska will really make a traveler’s heart sing: carry-on baggage. I have to say that when traveling on Hawaiian it’s always frustrating that my carry-on that I can get into a bin on other airlines, is a no-go on Hawaiian. It just won’t fit in there. Here’s why:

Both have a weight limit of 25 lbs. Hawaiian’s length is 14 inches, Alaska’s is 24 inches. Hawaiian’s width is 22 inches and Alaska’s 17 inches. But Hawaiian’s bag size cubed was 2,227 inches, while Alaska’s is 4,080 cubed.

Pets were listed at $100. on Alaska and not listed at all for Hawaiian. Cancellation 12-month average was 0.08 on Hawaiian and 0.6 on Alaska. And perhaps most important of all: complaints were at 1.17 per 100k passengers on Hawaiian, and at 0.44 on Alaska.

We are always happy with the service, the leg room, and the food on Alaska. We signed up for the Alaska Awards program because they are a sister airline to Air France and we would love to go see our friends in France by using only points. So our end-game might be a little different than yours.

So I’m curious. Which airline do you use to fly to Hawaii, and why?

A hui hou (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

The Beach Blues

Posted on August 12, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

Hoo-boy, I am so glad that they didn’t burn the sugarcane yesterday. They burn the cane in the wee hours of the morning, and I know they’ve burnt before I ever get out of bed. I have a sinus headache, my body aches, and there’s just a weirdness about it all. I thought maybe it was just me, but other people say the same thing. They have been burning for months now.

But yesterday they didn’t burn, and I had a nearly perfect day. I made all the stop-lights on my way downtown to take a course. When I got out of the car at the UH Maui campus, the salt air was pristine with a gentle breeze blowing. I had a spring in my step. I just never, ever feel this way when they burn cane, because the smoke is so full of toxins. Not at all what I expected when I moved Maui, let me tell you.

Anyway, I was down at the campus taking an I-pad course. A number of years ago at a writers conference they told us the best way to accomplish our goals was to limit our screen time. For years I have dutifully spent hardly any time watching television. I watch maybe two movies a week, and other than that I work. The only way to write screenplays, market screenplays and sell them, is to keep your butt in the seat. That’s not my line, I stole it from Neil Simon. But it’s true.

I also dutifully avoided getting caught up in having to have the newest technology. For one thing, I just didn’t have the time to put into the learning curves. I didn’t get a BlackBerry. I didn’t get an iPhone. And the purpose of this new iPad was so I could dictate my blog posts and emails, because my elbow is shot from typing all these years. Well I have to tell you, now I know why they called them CrackBerries. When you have a tiny screen sitting on the counter- top that’s on at all times, the pull to check emails and go online is enormous. I will glance up, and 90 minutes will be proof! Gone.

I don’t know about you, but lately I’ve been feeling like I spend more time with my inboxes than I do with the people in my life. Then I started this blog, and every morning I have to wade through and eliminate all of the German and porn site spam associated with it. Somehow these people just track you down. It’s disheartening. One more inbox to keep cleaned out. 20 minutes that I won’t be relaxing on the porch reading a novel.

Did you know that in the 1950s the government was actually worried that people were going to have too much leisure time? With all of the time-saving devices like washing machines and dishwashers, and cars to take people places, and lawnmowers to mow their lawns, people were getting just a little bit too leisure-minded for their own good. I am the last person to discuss conspiracy theories or government mind control, but you have to wonder… I mean, how much leisure does ANYONE have now? I am really just joking, but there are days when it gives me pause. I envy the older generation that just doesn’t have to bother with computers, email etc. Our parents (Mike’s and mine) simply refuse, and they have all kinds of leisure time. They call up the travel agent and do it the old-fashioned way instead of sitting online booking their own airline reservations. They get on the phone and have a conversation if they want to talk to someone, instead of waiting to see if an email that went out into the ether actually reached it’s destination. What a concept. My mother asks me how many movies I’ve seen lately, and I say none. She’s 78 and she goes to the movies every week…do we see a pattern here?

This isn’t at all how I pictured spending my time when I moved to Maui–breathing sugarcane smoke and cleaning out inboxes. Can’t remember the last time I went to the beach. Yesterday was a crystal-clear perfect day, and I spent three hours in a classroom learning the latest technology, along with 20 other very baffled people.

I used to know what leisure was. I just haven’t figured out how to get it back.
How about you?

Got the Beach Blues…

A hui hou ( till next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Homepage.
Aloha, Jamaica

Sign-Wavers in Hawaii

Posted on August 4, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today: high of 86, Low of 70

Sign-Wavers in Hawaii

Aloha!

The first time I saw the quaint practice of political sign-waving in Hawaii, I almost wrecked the car. I was tooling down Hana Highway ready to round the corner up to Haleakala Highway, and a group of nutty people were by the side of the road, waving signs, leaning in toward my car and generally making a nuisance of themselves to an unsuspecting driver. The next time I saw them was on the other side of the road in the morning on my way to work. Once I slowed enough to read the sign I thought this was perhaps a rogue political candidate who had come up with a way to make himself stand out in the crowd. But no, this is business as usual for politicians in Hawaii. You can view it on you tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZRMHa1jQnk in relation to safety concerns raised. And I think it does slow traffic down.

Richard Borreca of the Honoulu Star-Advertiser said today:

“I have a theory about why we get the political leaders we get.

It is because of sign waving.

What is it that takes the normal, akamai, pleasant Hawaii citizen and turns him or her into the perennial lei-wearing, egomaniacal, self-promoting politician capable of raising your taxes, sewer fees and bus rates while cutting government services, shutting schools on Fridays and skulking around the state Capitol and City Hall?

It’s those hours out in the sun and traffic, I tell you.

First they have not the sense to stand back from the traffic. The sign wavers are right on the curb, the signs are out into the traffic and they are waving frantically.

Hawaii has a strict sign-waving protocol that all politicians must observe. Supporters assemble wearing their candidate’s T-shirt. The candidate wears a red carnation lei. There has been some deviation in recent years away from red carnations, but the pros stick with what works.A veteran legislative staffer admits she has been waving signs for candidates for 25 years — a quarter century baking in the sun, inhaling traffic fumes and still not hallucinating.”

Herbert A. Sample / Associated Press, said: “Unlike most of the country, it is against the law in Hawaii for politicians to plaster their faces, names and slogans on billboards or utility poles.

So the three major candidates…for congressional election here are taking to busy rush-hour intersections—or the sidewalks, actually—to become living ads by waving signs and hoping drivers notice the hoopla.”

It is a decades-old, low-cost tradition that has been replicated in few other places in the U.S., at least to the extent that Hawaii politicians do it.

“I’m not sure if sign waving actually causes anybody to vote for a particular candidate,” said Honolulu Councilman Charles Djou. “But I will tell you that people won’t vote for a candidate if they don’t sign-wave,” he added.

SignWave

Above: Senator Inouye waves a campaign sign with Colleen Hanabusa in Honolulu. (Photo: Crystal Kua)

Ed Case, in regard to his 2010 campaign, said that because he was out before dawn, voters could witness a measure of his commitment, character and hard work. “It’s not the be all and end all, obviously, of a campaign, but it’s an important part of it,” said Case while sign waving along an eastern Honolulu thoroughfare.

The practice has become a must-do for candidates, said Hanabusa. “I think that (voters) begin to expect it, and they are not surprised to see it,” she said while standing in front of her “Hanabusa for Hawaii” sign near a busy central Honolulu intersection.

Our French visitors who were just here found the practice odd and laughed about it. It does have a way of making the candidate look like something of a baffoon. But then after a while it kind of grows on you. Hawaii is always surprising in the way it’s unlike anywhere else in the country, and the elections are no exception.

Perhaps the most over-the-top sign waver was former state Sen. Steve Cobb, who would start sign-waving in the early morning darkness. To be seen, Cobb would wrap himself up in Christmas tree lights and plug himself into a portable generator.

Good thing I didn’t see that one first, or I might really have wrecked the car.

A hui hou (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

Affordable Housing in Maui

Posted on July 28, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today…More of the same.

Affordable Housing in Maui

Aloha!

People write to ask me about living in Maui, and how to afford it. One of the ways that many locals make it work is to build an Ohana. “Ohana” means family in Hawaiian, but in this case refers to a living space, technically attached to the main house. Like an in-law unit.

When we built our house we added an attached ohana. It’s one-bedroom with a nice sized covered lanai, and it shares one wall with our part of the house, which makes the main house more like a duplex. This is a smart move in Hawaii, as many people can’t afford to buy, so it’s a win-win for everybody.

Until it’s not. We got spoiled with our very first tenant, a woman with a big Labrador. She also loved our cat, Lili, and was in fact a vet tech. “Auntie Amy” as we called her, was heaven sent: she was quiet, clean, and loved to take care of Lili if we had to leave the island (and even took it upon herself to vacuum the house because Lili has allergies to dust and red dirt). I am not making this up. Auntie Amy was with us for five years. I kinda hoped she’d stay till she was eighty.

But then Auntie Amy got cancer and was down for about a year. Then it came back, and she decided she had to move. That’s when we found out about Crazy Tenants.

Crazy Tenants are people who look good on paper but in fact will make you question your own sanity for renting to them.There was Bernard, the old Japanese carpenter who was from Oahu and wanted a temporary place to live while he built a house on Maui. He signed the lease and the next thing we knew he had covered up all the windows with brown paper grocery bags and the place was emitting a very strange odor, like fish left out for two weeks. Then Mike came around the corner and found Bernard changing the locks. A no-no, and against the lease (how can a landlord get in if there’s a fire or a dead person in there?) He muttered something and Mike realized he was paranoid and possibly schizophrenic. His daughter threatened to sue us because there was a spot in the sidewalk that was raised a quarter of an inch and he might trip on it. Bernard moved out.

Then there was the Maui fireman (Mike was a fireman, so we figured this was a sure bet) who lived in the unit for almost six weeks. Then, when the yearly influx of German cockroaches began (it was a particularly bad year) he accused us of hiding them from him. Um…so we were like keeping them in a cardboard box and only released them once he’d lived there six weeks? Another one moved out.

Then there was Crazy Katie. She promptly moved a boyfriend in (breaking the lease) and then got a cat without permission. We are animal people…we just told her she’d need a pet addendum to the lease. She refused. She started sending strange emails and quoting landlord/tenant code to us. About the time it appeared she was going to spin out, she moved. We breathed a sigh of relief.

After that came a girl who shall remain nameless because she was so scary. I thought I was going to spin out with that one. And each time we said, “We sure miss Auntie Amy.” And we surely did.

These people all appeared normal and looked great on paper. Appearances are deceiving.

This last go-round, we gave up on Maui people and imported a couple from Alaska. Mike teases that he had to import me from California…so we figured it could work with tenants, too. They are a joy. They are quiet and polite and we are happy. They tell us they are happy too.

Affordable housing in Maui? An ohana really only makes your mortgage more affordable if you aren’t putting up with Crazy Tenants.

A hui hou (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

Progress

Posted on July 23, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Progress

Aloha!

There have been lots of changes in the 12 years since I began going to Oahu’s North Shore. So much of what passes for progress is really just a tearing down of the old and established.

In the old days people build a simple beach shack on the waterfront. Now those shacks are being torn down and fancy mansions are going in. This is all outside money, locals can’t afford to buy beachfront anymore. Just as anywhere, someone will always have deeper pockets. But the simple, laid-back beach lifestyle seems to be disappearing. Any given weekend on the North Shore shows cars lined up, jockeying for positions to park. People who own land get aggravated, trying to keep tourists from parking on their lawns, and in their driveways. Mike finally had to sink posts and string chain across his mom’s lawn to keep Tourist’s off it. There is a 30-year-old avocado tree in her yard there with the best avocados I’ve ever had. The pit is small, and the flesh is like butter. People come along and pick the avocados without asking, and one girl was picking so many she was reselling them at a fruit-stand. Not cool.

Here is a before photo of a beach shack on the North Shore, right at waterfront:

North Shore Beach Shack

They tore down the house next to it, and here is the brand new one being built:

New Beachfront House, North Shore

It may become a vacation rental, which will mean a clash of the old and the new, with lots of people, cars and loud parties.

Mike has three brothers and someday they will be faced with the decision to keep the beach house or sell for a tidy sum. I don’t know which way it will go, but I do know the North Shore is not the laid-back place it was. And people from thirty or fifty years ago would really have some stories to tell.

As Carly Simon sang, These are the Good Old Days.

A hui hou (til next time) . If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow Button on the Homepage.

Aloha, Jamaica

What is Pono?

Posted on July 23, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today: High 85, Low 70

What is Pono?

Aloha!

While visiting the North Shore, we ate at Ola’s Restaurant. It’s at the Turtle Bay Resort, http://www.turtlebayresort.com, the only hotel on Oahu’s North Shore. It’s also the only restaurant on the sand on Oahu. We like it because the food is good, and we go order from the bar menu which keeps the price down. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t beat it for the killer view.

Turns out a guy we know is now managing the restaurant. We were happily surprised to see him there, and then he told us how he got the job. They asked him three questions:
What is Ohana?
What is Pono?
And what is Aloha?

Can you answer these questions? Being able to answer these questions will give you a huge leg-up in Hawaii. I feel like an outsider here, always. And after thirteen years, I really don’t think that’s ever going to change. However, understanding what is important to the Hawaiian people makes a difference. You will see the bumper stickers: Respect the Culture. They had a monarchy and it was overthrown and they have never forgotten. Activists in the 1970’s revived the issues and there is a contingent pushing for seceeding from the U.S. Did you know that? When you live here, you are well aware of it.

Living Upcountry, we see far fewer tourists. Friends who are visiting go to the Foodland Center in Pukalani and come home and say, “Why are the locals so unfriendly? Why doesn’t anybody smile?” This is because they don’t have their “luau” faces on. This is their daily lives, they don’t have to be “on.”

What is Pono? Do what is right.

And what is right? Respect.

A hui hou ( till next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Homepage.

Aloha, Jamaica

Where you stay?

Posted on July 12, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather today: don’t care what they say…it’s windy, chilly and looks like RAIN Upcountry! A very unusual summer.

Where you stay?

Aloha!

In pidgin, “Where you stay?” means where are you…or where do you live? We got invited to a friends’ house for dinner Sunday night. They live near Makawao, and I started thinking about why people live where they do on Maui, and on the way I snapped these horses:

Makawao Horses

And then the rainbow behind them got brighter:

Maui Horses

When I moved to Maui I had only been Upcountry once, on vacation. “Upcountry” refers to the area at the base of Haleakala mountain and includes the communities of Kula, Pukalani, Olinda, Makawao and Haiku, plus surrounding areas. When I vacationed here, someone told me it was where the “normal” people lived (whatever normal is!) meaning full-time Maui residents who wanted to buy a house and not live in a condo. Other than that, I had no idea that there were cowboys and horses and ranches and a Polo Club http://www.mauipoloclub.com/. up here. We went one Sunday to watch Polo and it was a lot of fun.

Makes sense that the country music station is out of Makawao. You see cowboys and cowgirls in boots and Western wear here in this cowpoke town. I thought for a brief moment that it might be fun to own a horse until my friend Jody, who had a horse, clued me in on what it costs to keep one fed on Maui. Nev-er mind. People who live Upcountry are different from those who live in say, Lahaina, and usually the twain shall never meet. Friends we knew from when we lived on the Westside have never been to our home Upcountry, including the formal invite to our Hawaiian house-blessing that we had with a Kumu presiding, complete with maile lei. The general attitude seems to be “We live in Lahaina, we don’t GO Upcountry.” (We don’t need no stinkin’ Upcountry!)

I did an informal poll at the dinner gathering Sunday night. Why do you live where you live on Maui? Our group included a guy who lives in Kihei to be near his job, but is from Madison, WI. (Shout out to my sister Marcia and her husband Richard in Madison!) He said when you’re from the Midwest, the pull to Maui is agricultural. That a Japanese farmer in Maui is no different from a strapping German farmer in Wisconsin. As I toured my friend Wendy’s property that evening I was struck again by how much Makawao looks like Indiana, where I was a kid. Horses and cows and fields. Rapsberry bushes running wild along Wendy’s fence row, just like in Michigan, where she grew up. They say you can never go home again…but do you think we try to recreate what we had as children? It that really why I live Upcountry?

What about you…if you moved to Maui, where would you choose to live and why? The real question is: how would you design your life? Many who live on Maui wish they had a place at the beach for in the winter and a place Upcountry for in the summer when it’s hot. In our dreams!

I saw a funny Facebook post the other day. Someone was vacationing on Maui and said, “I didn’t know until this trip that there was any hiking at all on Maui! I was always all about, ‘Why would anyone ever leave the beach?'”

Exactly. The reasons are as many and varied as the people. The carpenter from Kula who helped us build our house, in referring to Lahaina said, “That’s Disneyland down there.” Another friend who’d lived in Lahaina but moved Upcountry said that she “grew weary of the transience: everyone’s just there for a year or two…there’s no real sense of community”. And yet the Lahaina people can’t understand why Upcountry people would ever live away from the ocean. For Mike and me, it was a matter of 1) being better able to afford a house, 2) cooler weather (he napped all the time when we lived down there, it was SO hot, he never naps Upcountry and 3) we eventually got our fill of the crowds. Especially Mike. I thought maybe a vein was going to pop in his head or something…

Example: you go to Safeway in Lahaina and the tourists, who have no idea where anything is, have their carts parked sideways, blocking the aisles. And they drive sooo slowly. Looking at the scenery, or more likely, lost. And clueless that we need to be somewhere, like now. I totally understand this, because as a tourist in Napa Valley a couple of years ago, I nonchalantly headed out from my hotel onto the old two-lane highway for breakfast one morning, and when I glanced in my rearview mirror, a local girl was making a rude gesture and pounding her fist on her watch. Then she sped around me. Stupid tourist, indeed. Yes, they have jobs and time schedules, but don’t they know I’m on vacation?

On Maui, do tourists realize we have jobs, doctor’s appts and dentist appts. to get to, kids to pick up from school…just like they do back at home? Vacation is a bubble people live in for a brief moment that they wish could last and last…so they stretch it out. Slowwwllly.

I find it one of the most interesting phenomenoms that people stake out their little corner of Maui and don’t leave it. You tell yourself you won’t do that when you move here…but somehow it happens. Maybe it’s the winding road into Lahaina that keeps people from going over there. And then you certainly don’t want to drink at a restaurant and then drive that road back home. Or maybe it’s that people work over there and don’t want to drive back over for entertainment? But how does that explain that Lahaina people who don’t want to leave there? Seriously.

Here’s my parting story: when I began my women’s group on Maui, the group of women met for the first time. The idea was to rotate houses for the meetings. There was one girl, April, who lived in Kihei. The rest of us were Upcountry folk. When Karen heard that April was from Kihei she said heatedly, “I am NOT driving to Kihei.” This, my friends, is is a thirty-minute drive, and no one wants to do it. Don’t ask me why, I can’t explain it. I lived in the corn fields of Indiana where we drove thirty minutes for a gallon of milk.

They say there are beach people and mountain people. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

Where you stay?

A hui hou (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

The Road not Taken

Posted on July 6, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today: High of 85. Low of 72.

The Road Not Taken…in Maui

Aloha!

My niece Alyssa just graduated from high school. This is what I will tell her:

When you move to Maui, it’s a pretty sure bet that you are not one to follow the crowd. This sounds counter-intuitive, I know, since the crowd thinks it wants to live here. But to actually leave your home, your family, and move to Maui is something entirely different. Now you’re walking the walk, not just talking the talk. I sorta envy those who grew up here..they have such close family ties. I miss my family and thought they would visit much more often than they do. But it’s a different world now, it’s expensive to fly, it’s expensive just to get by.

All I knew was that I wanted to live somewhere warm. I was sick of being cold my whole childhood and I was determined to do whatever it took to leave the Chicago area. First I moved to California. Then to Hawaii. Everyone wants to know: how can you afford to live there? How can you own a house? They write to me and ask me that. I once saw an interview with Michael J. Fox where he talked about the concept of “selling your twenties to buy your thirties”. While my friends were grooving at concerts, going on cruises and living the good life in their twenties, I was saving money, then building a house and delaying gratification.

It’s about choices.

I have a friend who built a house and also bought a bookstore in Mexico. People ask her, too, how did you afford to do this? Her answer: sacrifice. She and her husband lived in the Bay area, worked very hard, and saved every penny they could. They chose not to have children. They bought the land, then built the house with cash, little by little, making trips to Mexico to do the work themselves. Choices.

Today the choices are even less clear: technology whispers from every corner “buy me, buy me”. Eric Gilliom http://ericgilliom.com/and Willi K http://www.barefootnatives.com/ from Maui did a song about Maui where they talk about not owning a cell phone and driving a Maui cruiser (junk) car. The Road Not Taken is often a beater car covered with red dirt in Maui. It’s often a cinder-block house with jalousie windows. It’s often a bunch of roomates.

My Kenmore dishwasher is 33 years old. I am not making this up. It came with the house we tore down to build this one. It looks like someone tied it to the bumper of a car and dragged it behind. The racks inside are broken and rusting. It’s quite noisy. But is still works. So we are not rushing out to replace it to the tune of $700-$1,000. Every single thing on Maui is expensive.

I was in Foodland in Pukalani yesterday and they have hit a new personal best of $6.49 for a loaf of rye bread. I will soon not be buying bread! Also, our coconut tree in the front yard was dying, so we had to have it removed. The Samoan guy wanted $200. but Mike talked him down to $150. plus all the tangerines he wanted off our tree. The Ironwood tree is enormous and was threatening our roof. It was going to be a King’s ransom to get it trimmed, so Mike shaped a surfboard, had it glassed, and traded the tree trimmer for the board. (A Mike Turkington surfboard is a coveted item: www.amazon.com/The-Curt-Mastalka-Collection…/B002M4NM0M or https://www.google.com/search?q=mike+turkington+surfer&hl=en&prmd). Every day now it seems we say “There is more going out than coming in.” I know it is the same across the country…but what is the cost of living where you live?

Between the cost of gas, and food (bread!) and electricity on Maui, I don’t know how people with three children are keeping up. A commentary by Lisa Darcy in the Maui Weekly http://mauiweekly.com/ Executive Director of the Ho’omoana Foundation, talked about how she is “witnessing more people in need who are doing everything right and still unable to meet their basic needs or their family’s basic needs” because so many agencies have had to make cutbacks. Lisa ended with these words: “As long as I have (dental) floss, I am in a socioecnomic bracket well ahead of most of the world. This is not something I take for granted, nor that fact that I have a warm, safe place to sleep tonight.”

Moving to Maui is The Road Not Taken. It’s well and good to tell yourself the beaches and warm weather will make up for not having “things.” It’s another to be able to afford bread and to be able to put gas in your car.

A hui hou (Til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

End of an Era

Posted on June 27, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

If you follow this blog, you know that I worked part-time as a concierge/Activities Coordinator at the Maui Kaanapali Villas (http://astonmauikaanapalivillas.3dhawaii.com/ for about ten years. I loved my job. I was good at my job. I really enjoyed meeting tourists from all over the world, and the best day ever was meeting some folks from France whom I invited up to the house, we became friends, and then they invited us to France. We went and it was fabulous. Wow.

I began my job at the Villas in 1999. The main reason I took the job was to have someting to do while I built my interior design business in Hawaii. Also, with that job, we’d get to do the Activities on Maui for free (a major perk). So about once a year we could go do something fun with each company, and we’d also get a discount for our guests who were visiting. This job was totally commission-based and that’s something people need to understand about jobs in Hawaii. They are low-paying or commission unless you have a great office job, or a job in the medical profession, law profession, etc.

There are also instances of people being private or sub-contractors, which is what Mike is as a Captain on the Scoth Mist out of Lahaina. He doesn’t make a great wage and then must pay self-employment tax on that. So people like him, in edition to waiters, waitresses and bartenders, rely on tips.

At my job, two things happened: the first was September 11th, which absolutely froze tourism to Hawaii. My take-home pay dipped dramatically. Very slowly people started coming back to Hawaii, and then we got the second hit: the stock market plunge of late 2007. No tourists. When they did finally start coming, we saw a shift: people who before would have stayed at a resort such as the Four Seasons were looking for less-expensive places to stay. Or, people were coming who were getting killer deals on airlines that wanted to fill seats, and these people just wanted a place to stay.

But people weren’t coming to Maui to spend any extra money, so my pay dipped again. And again. By the time it was all said and done, I was making one-half to one-third what I had been when I started there. At the same time our gas prices on Maui shot to the highest in the nation, so it was no longer feasible for me to drive all the way to Lahaina for what little pay I was making. I simply couldn’t stay in a job where I was making less than the kid at McDonald’s.

In these low-paying Maui jobs, you hope for tips. But I can count on ten fingers the number of times I was tipped in ten years, and I was someone who bent over backwards for people and always has a smile on my face. I made sure people were going to have the time of their lives in Maui. So why didn’t people think to tip? Because they assumed I was getting a per-hour wage.

I addition to what has gone on in our nation’s economy, Hawaii’s economy is tourist-based. We also took some very hard hits as both Aloha Airlines went under, and then Maui Land and Pine. I have a friend who worked at ML&P for years and retired with the understanding that she would have health insurance forever. When they went under, there went her health insurance.

When you come to Hawaii and are wondering whether to tip, consider this: hotel bellhops and Skycaps at the airport see turnover all day long. We know a Skycap who owns a large house on Kaanapali hillside, he does so well. But I would spend a minimum of an hour and and a quarter with guests planning their vacations, sometimes two hours. In an eight hour day, how many people could I really serve? When things slowed down, sometimes I would sit all day with no one. Tips would have helped bridge the pay gap, but I served far fewer people than most tip-related jobs. Every once in a while a guest would ask “Am I allowed to tip you?” and I would say “Of course!” So if can afford to tip when you come to Maui, please do. Please realize that workers here depend on it. If you can afford to tip well, all the better.

I will now get down off my soap box.

As it turns out, the company I worked for all those years just lost their contract with that hotel. Owners bid on the opportunity to have thier Activity company at a hotel, and if they have a monopoly of many Activity Desks in hotels, they can bid more. That’s what happened. So sad to say, the company will no longer be there. And the women I worked with are now out of jobs, because the new company has their own workers. Takeovers happen even in Paradise.

I am sad for my former co-workers and can’t really believe that an Activity company that has been there for 30 years is no more.

A hui hou (til later). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

Name that Wind

Posted on June 24, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

Many people write to tell me they want to move to Maui. One of the ways to be sure where you want to live is to sleep around (the island, that is). I have friends who came to Maui on vacation numerous times and each time stayed on a different part of the island to get a feel for where they would want to live. Seemed like a good plan. When I met them, they said they had ruled out Pukalani because it has “wind like a freight train.” I just wish I’d met them before I moved to Pukalani.

The Italians have eight words for wind. Vento is one of them. Then there is the French mistral. What we need is a name like that just for the Pukalani wind. Pukalani means “hole in the sky” or literally, beautiful hole in the sky…which means we get lots of sunshine, as opposed to Kula and Olinda (up the mountain) which are often shrouded in the clouds, and I love that about Pukalani. When I met Mike he owned a house in Kula and when you opened the windows up there, the clouds literally blew right through the house. It was beautiful to watch them. The downside to that was that everything he had smelled like mold, and he had bronchitis repeatedly. I said no thank you.

When we built our house in Pukalani, we lived first in a rental, and it was a mile away. Talk about micro-climates…I didn’t know Pukalani had the wind (please name that wind) because the rental was one mile up, toward Kula. (There is also a wind line in Kaanapali, right at the stoplight at Kai Ala drive. Anything north of there means wind. Like Kapalua.) So we built, and one of the guys we hired to help work on the house casually mentioned the wind. As in “It’s gonna blow every single day because of the convection effect with the mountain.” Seems that the mountain literally pulls the wind up, my guess is from Maalaea (which deserves it’s own special name for wind down there, whatever Hawaiian words that mean “wind from hell’.) I just didn’t realize this was going to be a daily occurance, I thought it was a fluke type of thing.

My next door neighbor said it blew so long one time he thought he was going to lose his mind. I understand now, having lived here since 2002. If I known I would have positioned the overhead garage door differently, it’s just a big open invitation to red dirt every time we open it. That goes for our front door as well as the kitchen door…each time they’re opened everything on the kitchen table, on the counter, on the desk, blows all over tarnation. It’s a paper chase to pin things down, paper weight them. It’s like a sitcom where the same thing happens over and over. And if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I guess I’m insane.

Or need to stop going in and out of my house.

A hui hou, (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

Try Wait

Posted on June 23, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!
I’m writing this tonight with a glass of champage and a shot of St. Germain by my side, so we’ll see how it goes. I discovered that stuff in France. Need I say more?

The need for alcoholic assistance came in the form of a trip to the Maui DMV today. Need I say more? Also, Mike is off-island on Oahu visiting his mother, who just flew in from Savannah to spend the summer (not winter) in Hawaii.

Huh? That’s the reaction I get when I tell them she has a house here that she only uses in the summer, but the mosquitos in Savannah are the size of Volkswagens and there’s a long tradition there of leaving in the summer to escape the heat. So she heads to the North Shore, and Mike heads over there to see her. I’m a big believer in the relationship adage “If you don’t go away, how can I miss you?” so I’m a happy camper as I tuck into a huge stacks of books while he’s gone.

Normally I don’t break out the bubbly, but like I said, I visited the DMV after dropping him at the Kahului airport this morning. The DMV is right next to IHOP, so I had a game plan: get my new driver’s license and then hop over to IHOP for breakfast. So I didn’t eat. Then I left my cup of coffee on the kitchen counter as I was rushed out the door because Mike was gonna be late. Those who know me know I don’t function in the morning, especially without coffee. Quote:”I’m incapable of anything other than marmalade and mumbling before noon. ” (10 am for me.)

Here’s the thing about the Maui DMV. They lie. Right to your face! I got there at 8:50 am and there was NO ONE in line ahead of me. There were about fifteen people seated, but I told myself that they were there to do everything from pay their Real Propery Taxes (as opposed to their phoney ones?) to registering their Maui cruisers. So when the girl at the front desk told me “It’ll be forty-five minutes, tops” I, like an idiot, believed her. I’d brought “Blogging For Dummies” along (I have the computer skills of a rock) and pretty little stick’em notes to notate stuff. I was all set.

Except I hadn’t had any breakfast. And I’d only had a half-cup of coffee. And there are all these new RULES in our increasingly bizarre post 9-11 world, the least of which is you have to bring your passport to the DMV now. Passport, check. (Put it in the car the night before). Then she told me I needed my Social Security card. Would you believe I’d put that sucker in the car to take it to the safety deposit box, unbeknownst to me that I’d be needing it? I jogged back out to the car, afterall, I only had 45 minutes. …

An hour and ten minutes in, I had to pee. I watched the marquee anxiously and the “A” window where I was supposed to appear wasn’t budging. In fact I began to suspect that whoever was in charge of the “A” window had gone to pee herself, because there is NO bathroom in the DMV. I had a dilemma. Do I jog halfway acaross the mall to the bathroom and lose my place in line, or do I risk leaving a puddle on the seat (I have a bladder the size of a gnat. My Mom and I are affectionately called “Tiny Tank” and “Tiny Tank 2”. We are loads of fun to take on car trips, especially together.)

I careened up to Window “C” as soon as someone left it and asked the VISW (Very Important State Worker) if I could be excused. I felt like I was back in school and needed a hall pass. Now I had been there an hour and fifteen minutes. She checked her screen and admonished me to “hurry.”

EXCUSE ME. Isn’t the fact of them not hurrying what had put me in this pickle to begin with? And wasn’t I told 45 minutes, which I accepted in good faith? I ran. All around the building and through the mall, like the wind, which is tough with a full gnat’s bladder. I made it just in time, then ran all the way back, puffing in my rubbah slippahs. I screeched back into the DMV.

“Try wait”. It’s a bumper sticker you’ll see a lot here, along with “Slow down, this ain’t the mainland.” There is nothing that will hurry them up. They are on island time, which, just in case you were wondering, is not a myth.

An hour and a half later, hungry and cranky, I got my shot at the “A” window. The VISW took one look at my paperwork and rejected it. Seems in all the confusion of “Where’s your passport? Where’s your social security card? Please deposit your firstborn at the next window”…I hadn’t filled out my application for a new license.

The VISW was not amused.

In all, it took an hour and forty minutes, but I now have a new Hawaii State driver’s license and my hair looks Mah-ve-lous, darling. Happens about twice a year on Maui. Must have been the wind-blown look from all the running.

Disclainer: All errors and typos on this page are entirelt the fault of the St. Grermain.

A hui hou (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

You know you live in Hawaii when…

Posted on June 19, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

You know you live in Hawaii when…

You find a dead gecko in your toaster in the morning and a slimy black lizard in your bed at night. The lizard was the hardest. I was dead asleep and felt something in the small of my back. Groggily I put my hand under there and it came up full of lizard. The geckos I don’t mind, but those black lizards look and move like snakes. I screeched loud enough to wake Pele.
You get into your closed car on a summer day and your sunglasses steam up when you put them on. Now that’s hot.
If the menu lists macaroni salad as a vegetable, you know you’re in Hawaii. Locals go to the mainland and complain, “How come they no get plate lunch heah?” Plate lunches (with minor variations of meat) are: teriyaki beef or teriyaki chicken with two large scoops of rice and macaroni salad. They LOVE their starch.
You’re at the beach and there are chickens running around.
Everywhere you go people are eating and partying in their garages and car ports, not inside the house.
A local family has built a barn, planted a large tree or otherwise blocked out entirely their stunning view, completely oblivious. Meanwhile, the haoles are howling if someone plants a twig in front of a view they paid dearly for.
Termites are eating everything you own no matter what “guaranteed” method you used to control them. Our neighbors down the street tore down their thirty-year-old house and built another right on the same spot because the termites were eating it to the ground. Also, there are no Antiques stores on Maui. There’s a reason for that: the termites ate everything long ago.

A hui hou! (til next time). Thought for the day: There are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going.

Aloha, Jamaica

The Art of the Staycation – Part Two

Posted on June 17, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

As I told you in my last post, we took a Staycation to the Wailea Marriott on Maui this past weekend. Here are a few things we spotted on our morning walk:

It is so evident here that Maui is just one big hunk of lava. This is facing the West Maui mountains. Then there were these guys out enjoying a stand-up paddle:

That is Molokini crater behind them, the one that is shaped like a horseshoe, though you can’t tell it from here. It’s good they were out there early, because shortly after this the wind came up and it felt like a hurricane was coming. We exited poolside and headed back to our room. On the way we passed the other two pools at the Marriott, the ones for kids and families:

As far as Staycating, there is a poolside bar and grill here that charges $18.00 for a hamburger. That is simply not in the budget. Knowing this, I shopped then packed a cooler and food for the room. I took everything we would need for breakfast and lunch, plus drinks, snacks, etc. It was a pain to get it all together, but I kept my eyes on the prize: no credit card bill for anything other than dinners out.

I also challenged myself. What would my favorite Food Network chefs do to keep it interesting? I packed a breakfast basket, lined with a good linen napkin, and added Biscotti, and small jars of regular and decaf Kona coffee. I got fresh bluberries and papayas, and blueberry muffins. I put organic yogurt in the cooler, and packed nice small china bowls to eat it from. The point was to not feel cheated by eating in the room, making things pretty and interesting.

I also discovered the beauty of small party trays at Safeway. Instead of having to haul along all the fixings for sandwiches, I got the tray, which had individual packages of crackers, cheese already cut into bite-size pieces, and the honey ham was shaped into small ovals (I don’t want to think about how they do that). All I added was a teeny jar of mustard and a knife. Also a five-layer bean dip, already in a nice sized tub, and blue corn chips. Hummus. Spiced almonds. Things we could eat in the room or take down to the pool.

All in all, it was a lovely time. And we didn’t have to pay the prices at the bar because I’d gotten a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin at Costco and carefully wrapped champagne flutes in the linen napkins and put them in the basket. I really like the looks of that bar, though. They did a nice job:

FYI: We’ve heard some disappointing things about the “Mala” Restaurant on site, such as bad service, long waits and the food not great for the price. If anyone has had a good experience there, let me know. It’s a shame because Marc Ellman and his wife Judy own Maui Tacos (nine locations), Penne Pasta in Lahaina and Mala Ocean Tavern in Lahaina. http://malaoceantavern.com/markellman.html Though I find Mala in Lahaina overpriced, the food is good and it sits right on the water. Not so the “Mala” at the Marriott, and it’s curious to me since ownership includes Clint Eastwood and Alice Cooper. Does anyone know if Clint still owns the Hog’s Breath Inn Restaurant in Carmel, California? I loved my dinner there, so cozy with the cool temperatures, yet the fire was blazing outside on the patio…

Okay, I admit it’s been really hot here on Maui and I’m daydreaming of being nice and cool somewhere…

Thought for the day: Apprearances can be deceiving. Riches can be temporary. Look for someone who makes you laugh because sometimes that’s all you’ll have to brighten a dark day. That laughter will make your heart sing.

I have someone who makes me laugh every day, and I am grateful.

A hui hou (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the Follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

The Art of the Staycation – Part 1

Posted on June 14, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

This is where I spent the weekend. Nice? It’s the Wailea Marriott on Maui. http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/hnmmc-wailea-beach-marriott-resort-and-spa/. Check out their website for great photos. Anyway, it took me years to convince Mike that there was any value in staying at a hotel on Maui when we already lived on Maui. In fact, he flatly refused to spend the money. So that left me bereft for the days when I used to come to Maui to vacation and just reeellaaaaxx.

In his defense, his parents had a home on the North Shore of Oahu near the beach and we used to go over there about three times a year, so I did have a getaway. Then a few things happened to knock the stuffing out of vacationing over there: Aloha Airlines went belly up and took all of our hard-earned points with them. No more free flights. Grrrr. And what used to be a $25.00 flight interisland became a $50.00 flight, then a $70.00 flight. Mesa Airlines http://iflygo.com/ started the airline wars in Hawaii and they are the only ones who won. The people who live here can’t afford to “go interisland” anymore because a round-trip is now $160-$190 depending on the time of day. Times that by two people, and suddenly a Staycation was more in the budget than a flight. Mike said yes! Especially after his bout with blood poisoning…he knows I’ve been up to my a%* in alligators around here for a long time. We both were in need of a break.

I chose the Marriott for a number of reasons. Most of all, their Infinity pool

is to die for, and the best part is, it’s kid-free. They don’t call it the “Serenity Pool” for nothing. Also the Marriott is very small in comparison to say the Grand Wailea http://www.grandwailea.com/ or The Fairmont Kea Lani http://www.fairmont.com/kealani/. We took the walking path in Wailea, which is another reason I love to stay down there (Mike can walk again, yay!) and went by the Grand Wailea. It was just wall-to-wall chairs by the pool all the way out to the pathway. Way too crowded for me. I love vistas and open space, but that’s not to say those hotels might not be perfect for you. Here’s the path:

and also the tree in front of the Marriott on the path. What a great spot.

I used to attend the Maui Writer’s Conference every year here, but they did a major, very expensive overhaul since then. I remember taking my lunch and sitting under this tree when it felt like my brain was going to explode from classes (particularly the Screenwriting Retreat,where they basically locked us inside and wouldn’t let us out!) From that retreat though I met a wonderful writer and true friend, who is now a bestselling author: Graham Brown. http://grahambrownthrillers.com/ Start with “Black Rain” and work your way through. You won’t be disappointed. He’s just a stand-up guy and so humble, and the best part is, no matter how big he gets (co-writing with Clive Cussler now, ahem!) he still reads my scripts! Highly unusual in my business. Thanks, Graham!

Another reason I love the Marriott is it’s within walking distance of the Shops at Wailea http://theshopsatwailea.com/ and that means restaurants, and that meant we didn’t have to get in the car for three days. We discovered too late that there is cart that makes a loop to the hotel and back, which would have been nice to know. I can’t get enough of the Crab Bisque at Tommy Bahama’s Restaurant http://www.tommybahama.com/TBG/Stores_Restaurants/Wailea.jsp Actually, I take that back. I order the cup of soup because it’s so rich. A bowl is too much!

I will be sharing more with you more about this trip in the next couple of posts. People have written asking for restaurant reviews and hotel suggestions, so here you go. All from a local-yokel.

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

Aloha, Jamaica

No Worries

Posted on June 13, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

I’m reading a novel and there’s a character in it that asks, “Do you think people on an island ever worry?” Her father answers: “They fish a lot. How much can you worry if you fish?”

Nice thought. Wish it were true. I have a friend who is considering a move to Maui, but says it’s “the last bastion I have where I truly relax, and I fear that if I move there, that will be that.”

And it is. I used to really be able to relax when I vacationed on Maui. It would take almost a week, far away from my super-busy California lifestyle, but eventually I’d sink down into relaxation, and like most people, I hoped it would carry over when I moved here.

In the beginning, every single time my mother called, she asked: “Are you at the beach?” with this hopeful giddiness in her voice (obviously living vicariously). I hated to burst her bubble with No, Mom, I’m in the grocery store. I’m at the bank, post office, work…fill in the blank. But she really wanted to believe I was running around in a bathing suit all the time, living the good life. And perhaps if you are 20, don’t own a home (or have any aspirations to), if you are living in a three-bedroom house with five room mates, you could possibly have that life in Maui. But people quickly grow tired of that. Lahaina is a party town full of young people who don’t even own cars, just bicycles. But age keeps creeping, and eventually they wake up and realize they want more. So they move home.

The current state of agitation taking me away from the “No worries” island lifestyle is a tax issue. (Yes, there really is a tax man everywhere, Virginia). Last year my accountant told me not to make a quarterly payment to the State of Hawaii because I was getting a refund, and she’d just roll it over. I told her this made me nervous, and she assured me she does this with “hundreds of clients!” That little voice inside nagged at me, but I said okay.

To muddle things further, I shredded my bank account statements this year for the first time ever, after reading yet another get organized article that stated “When did you last need a bank statement? And even if you did, the bank could provide it, right?” Yes, of course!

Guess what was the very first thing my accountant asked for when things went haywire with the State of Hawaii tax system? (COMPUTERS WILL BE THE DEATH OF US. Just sayin’.)

So yes, we can dream that life would be very different in Maui. And it is. Just not in the ways we thought!

A hui hou (til next time).

Aloha, Jamaica

Working on Maui

Posted on June 6, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

A picture perfect day on Maui this morning. Sometimes when I ponder what to write, I wish you guys would write and tell me what you’d like to know more about. Daily life? Moving here?

This past weekend I attended a symposium with Maui filmmakers at the college. One of the speakers said he’d like to create a group of people who got together to support each other in their creative endeavors. He’s been trying to do that, but it’s a challenge on Maui. Why? As he said, when everybody’s working two and three jobs, how do you get people together? It makes for a fractured society.

One of the biggest surprises for me when I moved here: 75% of the population works in the hotel/visitor industry. In California, almost every weekend my group of friends got together for brunch, games, or dinners. Here, unless you work a 9-5 job, you are working evenings and weekends. How do you plan a group dinner when both wife and husband are working the night shift, or weekend shift? I spent a year working at a law firm on Maui.Those people had a normal schedule, but if you’re in the medical field you are on call for nights and weekends. So there goes another big segment of the population. That leaves government or city workers with 9-5 jobs. Otherwise, it’s like Mike and me. He’s a boat captain, so he works the sunset sail and is home around 9 pm. I was a concierge, which gave me 9-5 hours, but I worked weekends. We rarely had the same days off or the same schedules.

There are the waitresses and bartenders, boat crew, massage therapists (quote: “you can’t throw a rock on Maui without hitting a massage therapist), the hotel front desk worker and housekeepers, the grounds and maintenance guys for the hotels and condos, realtors…the list is endless, and all of them have non 9-5 jobs. And guess what? They all work holidays! Guests come to Maui specifically for holidays, so everyone must work. Again, a fractured society, when families can’t even be together for holidays.

Then there is the phenomenon of being “off-island.” I am part of two different groups of women who meet once a month, and am amazed at how hard it is to get five women together in one place. When you live on an island, as nice as it is, one of the goals is to get off the island. It’s a rock in the middle of the Pacific,and it can get small after a while. Those who can, leave as often as they can. Also, so many people are from somewhere else…and they go there to be with their families. So you call them to get together and they are “off-island.”

The island lifestyle sounds good to many who want to live here. The reality is, you have a heck of a time getting together with your friends.

A hui hou! (til next time). If you’d like to subscribe to this blog, please click the follow button on the Home Page.

Aloha, Jamaica

Castles in the Sand

Posted on May 28, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

Ultimate_Sand_Castle

Castles in the sand…castles in the air…I am daydreaming. Isn’t this gorgeous? They have sand castle contests all the time on Maui. My dad was quite good at it and I remember him making a mermaid when I was a kid that just blew me away.

I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in a while.We thought we had Mike’s foot all healed up and the blood poisoning under control, then BAM, it was back with a vengeance. This is not something you want to mess around with, especially in the tropics. Friends write with well-wishes and since he’s a boat Captain, say things like “Pirates have peglegs, likely from trying to use crutches on a boat” and “We don’t want to have to call him “Hopalong.” Thanks, guys. :)Then there was the doctor friend who wrote to warn of flesh-eating bacteria in a case like this.

Wow, I hadn’t even GONE there in my head.

Anyway, I am still quite busy waiting on him hand and foot (har, har). I mean, the guy can’t even whip up his own breakfast. So until life calms down around here, this blog will most likely suffer.

Just visit among yourselves and I’ll be back soon!

A hui hou (til next time),

Jamaica

Stuff and Nonsense

Posted on May 4, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

All the guys I know on Maui who are homeowners, are hoarders. There’s something about living on an island that does this, and I kept trying to put my finger on it. Now, I know. THE BOAT MIGHT NOT COME IN!

When I first moved to the island and was living at the condo (see the previous “Moving to Maui” posts) I loved that I had brought only my bicycle and one suitcase. I felt free and unburdened from all my stuff back in California.I could really get used to this lifestyle, I thought. Then I met Mike.

I honestly think he kept it from me as long as he could. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” he was hiding from me wasn’t another woman, oh, no…it was his collection of “stuff.” A lifetime’s worth. The detritus of an adrenaline junkie’s sports equipment, to start with: About a dozen surfboards (google “Mike Turkington” or www.imdb.com and you’ll know why). He surfed professionally, and is an acclaimed board shaper. He co-owned “Country Surfboards”, the first surf shop on the North Shore of Oahu. Okay, so I’ll give him the surfboards.

But then he raised me the windsurfing equipment, enough to outfit six people. And the two motorcycles. And the two bicycles. AND a shop full (three bays worth) of tools, board-shaping equipment, and things I don’t even know the name of. I just know it takes up lots of room. What happened to my zen-like lifestyle? Gone, baby, gone.

When you’ve grown up on an island, you have lived through the reality of “the boat didn’t come in” through dock-workers strikes, hurricanes, etc. You have lived through the infamous toilet paper and rice shortaages. You also know how expensive everything is to replace, so you never, ever throw anything away. In short, you hoard.

I had this illustrated to me personally during one Christmas, when I wanted to bake Christmas cookies and went to Safeway to get butter. I looked all over the store, and finally asked the produce guy: “Where’s the butter?” He answered in pidgin, with a straight face: “da boat tip ovah.” I just stared at him, expecting him to laugh. “No, really,” I said. “Where’s the butter?”

“DA BOAT TIP OVAH!” he said, more loudly than necessary, like I was deaf or something, and mimed a big ship going over.

I blinked. So this was how it was going to be.

Then there was the empty shelf at Long’s in Lahaina when there wasn’t a single envelope to be had. And the Foster Farms chicken shipment that never came in when I had planned to feed Mike’s visiting folks honey-drizzled almond chicken. Lesson learned: always go to the grocery store with a back-up plan. The shelves could be empty, and they often are.

I think I’m missing a huge opportunity here. I should create a new reality show: “Hawaii’s Hoarders”. I’d be willing to bet that the stuff they hoard on an island would be more interesting than the stuff mainlander’s hoard, and the islander’s stuff gets passed down from generation to generation, because they all know that boat might not come in.

Do you know where your backup stash of toilet paper is??

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

Aloha, Jamaica

Moving to Maui- Part Four

Posted on April 23, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

I figured after the embarrassment and absurdity of the late night cleaning incident (see The Move to Maui, Part Three) things were bound to calm down for a little while. Right?

People often ask me if it’s true that you must work two jobs to afford to live on Maui. The truth: it depends on what those jobs are. The General Manager of the hotel is obviously not going to need a second job. The waitress, bartender, or lowly concierge working part-time (Me!)…probably yes. It also depends on how lavish a lifestyle you’re used to, what you like to eat, where you want to live, how extensive your vices….pretty much like anywhere else.

I took a second job as a Tennis Court Supervisor at another hotel. This sounds important,doesn’t it? But all I did was check players in, sweep the courts twice a day (by hand) and haul five-gallon jugs of ice-water out to the courts and hoist them up to waist-high stands out there. (Arrrggh! He-man style.) Being that I weighed 100 pounds dripping wet, this was not the wisest thing to be doing, which came back to haunt me, more on that later…but in the meantime I looked for a job in my own field of interior design.

As I’ve said in earlier posts,it’s pretty unusual to be able to move to Hawaii and keep your former lifestyle…unless that former lifestyle involves a hefty trust fund or you need a Brinks truck to move your bank account.

Since I had been in business for myself as a stressed-out designer, I thought it was time to go to work for someone else. (This was back when the idea of finding another job was not absurd.) I got a job nailed down with a place that imported Balinese and Thai furniture. The owner was leaving on a buying trip and said I could start work when she got back. Whoo-hoo! A job! Then she got back and said she’d “changed her mind.” That was all. No other reason given.

This was my first of many lessons about Maui-ites. They are….different. (Disclaimer: obviously this does not mean everybody, it just seems like it when you live here.)

I’m trying to figure out how to put it delicately. I guess I’ll go with “quirky” as a nice way to say spacy, flaky, and unpredictable in one all-purpose word. It’s as if all the disenfranchised and disenchanted people in the world who can’t quite seem to pull it together in other places all wake up at some point and say, “I know! I’ll move to Paradise! That will solve everything.” So they do. But then everybody else is expected to deal with their… eccentricities.

Case in point: My next job interview was with a design firm (I’ll never tell!) that was owned by a husband-and-wife. I wore a silk dress, looked and acted professional, and was told I had the job. But whoa, nelly! Not so fast. The husband had interviewed me. Then the wife entered the room and the whole climate changed from warm Hawaii breezes to Iceland.

Turns out they were divorced but still in business together. And she saw me as some sort of competition for her husband (therapy, anyone?) but of course I was ten steps behind, my head swiveling from one to the other as they argued. I was trying to make sense of all this as a scene from Jerry Springer erupted and I thought they were going to come to blows right there on the floor. The last thing I heard as I hoofed it out of there in my high heels was her screaming at him, all the way out to the parking lot.

For the record, I didn’t want the job. I had asked a simple question: “Since you have to order all the furniture sight-unseen to get it to the island, what happens when it gets here and it’s hard a rock?” Their answer: “You lie through your teeth and tell them it’s the most comfortable couch you’ve ever sat on.” So I was out of there anyway, even before they went at each other’s jugulars. Not the way I do business, folks. And good luck with those anger management issues.

So I kept working my manini (small) jobs, learning that nothing in Paradise was as it had seemed when I had come here on vacation, and wondered what was in store for me next.

Whatever it was, I was hoping it wouldn’t involve Jerry Springer.

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

Aloha, Jamaica

Mahalos

Posted on April 19, 2012 by jamaicawtr

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

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

Posted on April 5, 2012 by jamaicawtr

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

Moving to Maui, Part Three

Posted on April 5, 2012 by jamaicawtr

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

The Smell of Chicken, Not Frying

Posted on April 3, 2012 by jamaicawtr

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 April 1, 2012 by jamaicawtr

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

Moving to Maui, Part One

Image

Maui Kaanapali Villas

Aloha!

Would you like to move to Maui? Ever wonder what it’s really like?

Here’s how I got here: I fractured my tailbone and then had a small stroke. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

An acquaintance owned a lovely condo at the Maui Kaanapali Villas, www.astonmauikaanapalivillas.com with a little bit of an ocean view and a short walk to the beach. Her mother on the mainland had cancer, and she needed to go care for her. She asked me if I’d like to stay in the condo and pay her mortgage (there are no free lunches.)

I was running my interior design business in the San Francisco Bay area and wearing high heels to work every day. The first thing that happened was I fell down a full flight of stairs. A client’s carpet was worn out (duh…part of why I was there) and my slick heel slid off the top step and I flew through the air, legs over my head, to land at the bottom in a heap. Result? A fractured tailbone. The doc said the only thing he knew to help that was to swim in warm salt water. Reason to say yes, #1.

Then I was leaving another client’s home and things got a little wonky with my vision. I chalked it up to fatigue and stress. The next thing I knew, I was driving on the sidewalk on a very busy main thoroughfare. Oh, this was not good at all. I could have taken out a light post; heck, I could have taken out a pedestrian, several, in fact.

I shakily drove on to the store to order furniture for my client, and when I opened my mouth to speak to the salesman, gibberish came out. Needing to recuperate from a small stroke: reason #2.

So I found myself on Maui, basically in the lap of luxury, see above. (Except for the pesky elevator that broke down and they had to bring a guy in from Oahu to fix it, but he kept not showing up. Little did I know this is how EVERYTHING works on Maui. In other words, it doesn’t.) Then, they raised the condo fees to pay for the elevator, so my acquaintance raised my rent. But the beach made up for it:

I talked the guy at the beach shack into renting me a chaise lounge by the month, with two pads instead of one, for my poor tailbone.I spent every day at the beach. I walked, swam, sunned, ate, and slept. I got better. I contemplated my life back home and saw that I’d been driving myself into the ground like a crazy person. You know the old saying: self-employment is where you go from working 40 hours a week to 80 hours a week for half the pay? It’s so true.

I started thinking about running away from home. Permanently.

But how in the world would I make a living?

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

Banana Harvest and Muffin Recipe

Posted on March 25, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

So, it’s banana harvest time. Where you’re so excited to see those beautiful little nubs growing, then turning yellow. Until you realize they will ALL turn yellow AT ONCE. And suddenly you’re in the kitchen pulling out every banana recipe you have. Bananas flambe. Banana cake. Peanut butter on bananas (now you’re desperate.) We have apple-bananas, which I didn’t know existed until I moved to Maui, just like so many other things. They taste a little bit like a pear to me, so I don’t know how they got their name.

Did you know that you can freeze bananas? If they are starting to get too ripe, wrap them in a brown paper bag and put them in your freezer just like that. We also like the “Green Bags” for helping them stay fresh longer on the counter.

Bananas take LOTS of water, so they aren’t exactly free when you grow them. That water is in the tree, and when you cut it down with a big cane knife, the water pours out of the stalk.

Here’s my favorite recipe for using up bananas. The muffins freeze well.

BANANA CRUNCH MUFFINS

3 C flour

2 C sugar

2 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1/2 t salt

Sift the above together. Wet ingredients to be mixed separately:

2 eggs

3/4 C milk

2 t vanilla

1/2 lb. melted butter

Add to dry ingredients. DO NOT OVERMIX. Then add:

2 mashed bananas

1 C granola or bran, ground fine

1 C nuts

1 C coconut

Put into muffin tin or paper muffin cups. Sprinkle some extra coconut on top, it will brown nicely. Bake 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Enjoy!

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

Aloha, Jamaica

Centipedes and Cockroaches and Rats, oh my!

Posted on March 8, 2012 by jamaicawtr

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

High-Heel Blowout (A Maui Valentine’s Day Story)

Posted on February 16, 2012 by jamaicawtr

If you move to Maui and try to bring your mainland lifestyle with you, you are in for a rude surprise. Nothing translates the same in Maui: not your job, not the money you’re used to making. Not your level of cleanliness—whether personal (three showers a day are the norm in Maui) or in your living space — wind, red dirt off the fields, and the persistent mold will see to that.

And then there are the other unexpected things, like your underwear rotting out in the blink of an eye, and the High-Heel Blowout. On Valentine’s Day, this year, for me.

You see, things rot here. Don’t ask me why. I grew up in the Midwest where the humidity could suck the life out of you in the summer, and we never had this problem. All I can think is that the ten feet of snow in the winter there kills off the mold so it never gains a permanent foothold.

Not so in Maui.

My friend Rita was a former New York model who moved to Maui with a whole cache of expensive La Perla underwear. One day she took what should have been a teeny, tiny pair of bikinis out of her drawer, and to her horror, found that when she held them up, they were about a foot wide. The elastic had rotted and stretched them out enough to fit a football player with the UH Rainbow Warriors.

All my underwear did the same thing, the difference was, mine hadn’t cost a hundred dollars apiece. Still, you get attached, and I was, and I mourned that underwear, especially when I realized I couldn’t even replace it on Maui. I had to fly to the Mainland to get new underwear! (Actually I went to visit Mom, but believe me, I stocked up on my favorite brand of underwear.) And don’t even get me started on how long an $80.00 swimsuit will last here, which is about two minutes longer than the underwear. You don’t even have to take it out of your drawer, or ever get in the water. It just magically disintegrates, right there in your dresser drawer.

So all of you guys out there…do you like shiny things, like cars? Expensive toys? Electronics, photography equipment? Better lock it all in a vault, and kiss that shiny car goodbye, because the red dirt in Maui will own you. Between that and the humidity, you can spend the rest of your life trying to protect things from damage and keep things clean. First piece of advice I got in Maui? “You will spend your life cleaning.”

Ha! I’m gonna spend my life at the beach, sister.

Right. That worked out well. Tourists who visit Maui have no idea, because they check into a hotel room that has been cleaned by a professional Maui hotel housekeeper, whose main objective in life is to make you believe that red dirt does not exist, so you will bring your tourist dollars right back here next year. So she shines and sweeps and wipes down every inch of the lanai furniture so you can sit out there in your nice white shorts. There’s a reason why you don’t see white shorts on locals.

Red dirt+wind+humidity=mold. Commit this to memory.

So where was I? Oh, right: Valentine’s Day. I pulled out my red high heels to wear to the restaurant. Haven’t had them on in a year, of course. Slipped them on, took two steps from the closet and almost fell flat on my face. The straps had started the rotting process and had stretched out so much they wouldn’t stay on my feet. This is not the first time this has happened. There was the unfortunate Upcountry farmer’s market incident with a pair of clogs, where I was just walking along minding my own business and my entire shoe collapsed like a mini atomic mushroom cloud. I had no other shoes with me. Now, I’m wiser, I’m a local, and there’s always a spare pair in the car.

The next incident was rather more embarrassing and significantly more important. I was at the Maui Writer’s Conference (I’m a writer other than this blog–we’ll talk more about that another time) and it was my turn to get up in front of an auditorium full of people and give my presentation. I got out of my seat, made my way up front, and… Pow! Blowout. My cute little kitten-heel black sandals had chosen this moment to succumb to the Maui humidity curse. I stumbled, my ankle twisted, I turned all shades of red. After I’d righted myself, I galumped up to the podium, one shoe on and one shoe off, pretending that nothing had happened. Because everyone in that audience was from the Mainland, and who would believe that my heel had just rotted off, simply from living in Paradise?

It’s just a darned good thing my underwear didn’t choose to give out at the exact same moment.

Aloha till next time, and hope you had a Happy Valentine’s Day.

P.S. These were NOT my black kitten heels, but they’re cute, don’t you think?

Your Daily Dose of Paradise with Jamaica Michaels–A Maui Blog

Sharing what it's really like to live on Maui, for those who love to visit and those who dream of living here.

Tag Archives: Maui Blog

Restaurant Review: Colleen’s at the Cannery

You Asked for It

Hawaiian Airlines Adds Local Food, Free Wine

The Beach Blues

Sign-Wavers in Hawaii

Affordable Housing in Maui

Progress

What is Pono?

Where you stay?

The Road not Taken

End of an Era

Name that Wind

Try Wait

You know you live in Hawaii when…

The Art of the Staycation – Part Two

The Art of the Staycation – Part 1

No Worries

Working on Maui

Castles in the Sand

Stuff and Nonsense

Moving to Maui- Part Four

Mahalos

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

Moving to Maui, Part Three

The Smell of Chicken, Not Frying

Moving to Maui, Part Two

Moving to Maui, Part One

Image

Banana Harvest and Muffin Recipe

Centipedes and Cockroaches and Rats, oh my!

High-Heel Blowout (A Maui Valentine’s Day Story)