A Passion for Passionfruit

Posted on August 9, 2012 by jamaicawtr

A Passion for Passionfruit

Aloha!

I think one my very favorite things about living on Maui is the Passionfruit, also known as Lilikoi. We grow vines on our fences in the purple, orange and yellow varieties. Here is a Passionfruit flower:

And here are the fruit on the vine:

Photo of Lilikois

Lilikoi juice can be substituted for anything you can make with lemon juice: lemon meringue pie, lemon squares, lemon tarts…I make them all with Lilikoi.

Lilikoi juice is tart, tangy and sweet all at the same time, but I don’t find it as acidic as lemon juice.

Photo of Lilikoi Fruit Seeds

If you have a chance to get your hands on some juice, try it. You can also look for Perfect Puree of Napa Valley lilikoi puree in your gourmet grocer’s freezer. But it’s expensive because it’s so much work to extract the seeds from the flesh. We tried everything and finally discovered that an old-fashioned food mill works best.

Look for Passionfruit in the cocktails on drinks menus in restaurants on Maui.

Here is the easiest recipe I’ve ever found to use lemon or Lilikoi juice in a baked good: Recipe for Lilikoi Tart (also called Lilikoi Cream pie)

1 (8 oz.) pkg of cream cheese, softened

1 (14 oz.) can of sweetened condensed milk

1/2 Cup of Lilikoi juice (or lemon juice)

Pre-baked tart shell or pie shell. Note: May also use the filling as a mousse with no shell.

With a mixer, combine the three ingredients and beat till very smooth. Spoon into pre-baked shell. Refrigerate till set. Garnish with mint leaves if desired.

Lilikoi Cream Pie

More simple yet: drizzle pure Lilikoi juice over store-bought angel food cake. If you really want to get wild and crazy, top that with hot fudge sauce. A passion for passionfruit. YUM!

Thought for the Day: The best things in life…aren’t things.

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 Paradox of Paradise

Posted on August 7, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Hawaii Weather Today: High 86, Low 71

The Paradox of Paradise

(Thanks for today’s title, Marianne!)

Aloha!

Last Sunday The Maui News http://mauinews.com/ ran an article about how the country of France has decided its people are too rude. They have begun a billboard campaign in bus and train stations to encourage people to be more courteous. It cited the statistic that France is the world’s most visited country (I didn’t know that, did you?) and the French needed to step up their game with the tourists. We just happened to have French friends staying here. I asked Maxim what he thought. He said he agreed with the article and that basically it was a sad commentary on their nation.

At least the French know they have a problem, and they are, afterall, mostly French. Here in Hawaii the lines are blurred, in that it’s a melting-pot of cultures, with each being represented at roughly ten percent. I didn’t know that before I moved here. Did you?

Today I was at Kaiser for a doctors appointment. I have a wicked tennis elbow and in fact can barely type anymore. (I got an I-Pad and am learning to dictate to it, so there’s hope for this blog). Anyway, as the nurse’s aide was taking my vitals she looked me up and down and said in pidgin, “So where you from…Wailea?”

Well. You have to live here to know how rude that was. She might just as well have said, “How much money you got, Haole lady?” And the silly part was I was wearing a $29 dress off a sale rack that was missing it’s belt, and a pair of $22 sandals from Marshall’s. I had on no jewelry, no usual markers of wealth or status, (though it’s normal to see local girls/women with 3-5 gold bracelets piled up their arms, with Hawaiian words carved into them…words like kuuipo; sweetheart). Because I am haole and I’m not in shorts and a tank top, the aide assumes I’m prosperous. She thinks I live in Wailea, also known as Haolewood. But I just smile, because she doesn’t even realize how rude it is.

This is part of the paradox, this type of racism. After all these years, it still catches me by surprise. If a Filipino lady had come in with her Chanel bag and large diamond the question never would have been asked. Case in point: the “local” lady in a blue silk dress and high heels at Taco Bell today. No one is ever going to ask her if she’s from Wailea. (If you haven’t been to Maui, Wailea is the chi-chi area. Except I can’t really say that, because in Hawaii chi-chi means “to go potty”.) Go figure.

Until you have lived in Hawaii these nuances are hard to fathom. People think they know what it’s like here because they vacation here. But until you live it day to day, year after year, and experience the many, many layers, and realize it’s pretty much a foreign country, it’s hard to explain to someone else. Just like anywhere I suppose, except I don’t think a New Yorker is going to say to every Black person, “So you live in Harlem right?”

I was in LA one time and a waiter in a coffee shop said he could tell I wasn’t from there. How? Because I had short hair at the time and wasn’t carrying a $1,200 bag? Elsewhere, it’s considered wise to always look your best. For a haole in Maui, it’s a minefield…if you’re not careful you’ll be taken for a tourist, or worse, a realtor!

And if luck is really against you, you’ll be accused of being from Wailea. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a really nice place. I have done lots of interior design work there in high-end homes. Clint Eastwood has a home on the beach there. It’s that kind of place.

In her book “The Descendants,” set in Hawaii, Kaui Hart Hemmings describes an encounter between the main character and a Chinese gift shop owner. It says, “A Chinese woman enters the shop and stands behind the register…She is wearing a muumuu over navy polyester pants. She looks like she has escaped from an insane asylum.”

With what seems like about nineteen cultures represented in full force in Hawaii, it’s hard to know what’s considered normal for each culture. A neighbor girl moved here from the Phillipines and plied me with questions about daily life in Maui. She made this observation about Maui: “No one dresses here when they leave the house. They all look like slobs. Where I’m from, you have clothes you wear at home and clothes you wear out. Why don’t they do that here?” I couldn’t answer her question, but apparently, a cotton dress and sandals were too much for this haole girl’s doctor’s appointment.

Silly me!

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

Moving to Maui Advice

Posted on August 2, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today: High 86, Low 70

Moving to Maui Advice

Aloha!

Maui is an island paradise for most people who visit, and some decide to come back–permanently. For many people, moving to Maui is a dream come true. But sometimes we need to look at our own situations through a different set of eyes. Sometimes, we need to realize the great things that we might already have. For instance, are you close to your family? Can you really picture leaving them behind? I know a girl with two children, a husband and a business here in Maui, but she just can’t seem to leave her East Coast roots behind. She complains all year and then spends the summer “at home” as soon as the kids are out of school. Her husband is a bit adrift all summer while she’s gone, and misses his kids. But this is what she has to do to make Maui work for her.

Here are my suggestions for a move to Maui:

1) Line up a job. The job market is very tough everywhere, but even more so on Maui. It’s a very small island and the good jobs get handed down–someone who knows someone/is related to someone, etc. I would not move thinking you can get a job once you get here.

2) Save as much money as you can. Moving to Maui will cost several thousand dollars, and you will want to have at least a few month’s worth of living expenses saved up in case of emergencies. Work overtime, cut expenses, do everything you can to save as much money as possible.

3) Take a trip to Maui, and drive around the island. Better yet, stay in all the areas you are considering moving to. Get a feel for the weather, etc. by talking to the locals. For instance, it rains in Haiku ALL the time. Is that really the weather you want in your own Paradise? Also take into consideration what activities fit your lifestyle. Are you a surfer, a windsurfer, or just a beach-goer? The beaches on the Kahului side of the island are windy most of the time, great for windsurfing, not fun at all if the sand is between your teeth as you try to lie in the sun.

4) Secure housing. Check craigslist.com. The rental market is very tight right now because so many people have lost their houses. It can take a while to beat out all the others wanting to rent in the same area you are looking at. Be patient and realize the timeline might be longer than you’d like for both a job and housing.

5) Once you have both a job and a housing lined up, decide which items you want to move. One friend called this “making the cut” as in “That book didn’t make the cut when I moved.” It’s much easier to find things on Maui than it used to be, however one of the hardest items is a sofa. The furniture stores don’t like to pay to ship furniture to Maui that may not sell, so when you go into a furniture showroom (Latitudes http://www.latitudesinhawaii.com/) in Kahului, Home World in Kahului (formerly BJ’s,it just got bought out) or Moore’s Interiors in Lahaina http://www.mooreinteriorsmaui.com/index.htm , etc.,realize that all the sofas you are seeing could have a five-month wait once you order them. So if you have no patience or really, really, love your sofa, consider bringing it with you. Otherwise there are always garage sales, or Costco!

A word about sofas: As a designer, I alway found sofas a dichotomy on Maui. I covered my sofas up with slipcovers, thinking this was the best way to handle the red dirt. The other day I removed the slipcovers to wash them, and there is mold under the sofa cushions from being covered up in a humid climate! Another option is leather, which never makes sense to me in a hot climate, because your bare skin sticks to them. But… you can wash the mold off. So, maybe a leather sofa with some type of slipcover or even a sheet thrown over it when you are relaxing….and then rattan sofas tend to be hard as rocks and not cushy or comfortable to lean against.

If I had it to do over I would probably buy a daybed from someplace like Bali (called a puune, poo-nay, in Hawaiian) with one large mattress that could be replaced, and a ton of pillows to lean against.From the website http://www.discoveringhawaii.com/Living_Hawaiian_Style: “The Hawaiian pune`e is essentially a daybed, traditional in Hawaii Living since
the time of ali`i. Usually the size of a full bed mattress, it is placed in the
living space rather than the bedroom, as it is meant for lounging alone or with
company. Visit James T. Ferla’s delectable website to view his hand-crafted Hawaiian furniture. He also lists two books that I am very familiar with and can endorse:

Under The Hula Moon, by Jocelyn Fujii is a priceless and endless source of inspiration, as most of the photos in this beautiful book are of local houses of every style, from surfers’ crash pads to Plantation Boss Mansions.

Hawaii, A Sense Of Place by Mary Philpotts McGrath features the gorgeous homes of the rich and famous, but even if you’re poor, you’ll find a lot on island decorating ideas here.

So when you’re finally ready to buy that one-way ticket to Maui, ideas abound!

Thought for the day:The world is full of cactus, but you don’t have to sit on it.

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

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

North Shore Oahu

Posted on July 17, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

Today this blog is coming to you from the North Shore of Oahu:

Ke’Iki Beach, North Shore

Always when we get to Mike’s Mom’s North Shore house, I am struck by how moldy everything is. When a house is a half-block from the beach, there is salt spray, then dirt and mold grows on top of that .Also, the house sits in the trees

North Shore House

which keeps it cool, but the mold likes that even better. If no one has been here in months it can take a week to clean it all, easy (the geckos think they own the place, and gecko poop is like cement) but the beauty of having the beach a half block away usually makes it all worth it. I love this beach because it has trees that overhang it.

Ke’Iki Beach. North Shore

Someone told me when I first moved to Hawaii that Hawaii is best done in the shade. I thought they were crazy. Now I crave the shade, especially after having a suspicious spot removed twice from my nose. One friend calls living in Hawaii the “20 year skin-cancer plan.”

Last night there was a wedding at the beach. The groomsmen all wore long-sleeved white dress shirts with khaki pants which they rolled up to keep them out of the surf and sand. The bridesmaids all wore bright yellow sundresses. The ringbearer, who was about three years old, also had a white long sleeve shirt, khaki pants and a teeny tiny yellow tie that matched the sundresses. It appeared to be a destination wedding but where were the parents? There were no parents or grandparents in evidence. To me that is not a wedding.

One of the things I love about the North Shore is a hike in the mountains where I rarely see anyone else. A problem on Maui at times is that it has become so overrun with tourists. When you vacation on Maui it is not so obvious, but when you live here and have guests and want to take them hiking, it’s frustrating.

In the same way that Maui has many different personalities each island has a distinct personality. So within Oahu are many different personalities also. The North Shore is determined to retain its laid-back charm. The motto here is “Keep the Country country.” Currently there are plans to build an old-style hotel in downtown Haliewa. If you Google photos of Haliewa, the old hotel on the river was spectacular. Andy Anderson wants to re-create that, however the locals want a Beachpark and restrooms. I don’t live here; who am I to say who is right or wrong?
It is easy to get worked up about issues like this on Maui but as a tourist to a Oahu, it doesn’t affect my day-to-day life. Isn’t this true no matter where you live?

I would say in all the years I’ve been coming to the North Shore, the biggest change has been the traffic, it used to feel like the Country, and the traffic was in “town.” But that was BTB: “Before The Book” that changed everything. In Maui, it was “Maui Revealed“, then the other islands got their own versions. At my job we called it “that damn book”, because it gave every last secret away…every hiking spot, every waterfall. It made the locals crazy, there was no place left for just us. On Oahu they must have written about the turtles on the North Shore, because the tourists swarm the spot on the highway where the turtles are on the beach, darting across the highway at every point helter-skelter, and tying up traffic into an irritating snarl. What should be a ten-minute trip into Haleiwa Town becomes 30 minutes or an hour…just what we want to do on vacation. Then winter comes with the big swells, and more traffic from the surf contests. There is no escaping it now
I am here, resting and playing and hiking…and sitting in traffic. Not the North Shore we all used to know.

Thought for the day: All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.

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

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

Your Opinion, Please

Posted on July 7, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Maui Weather Today: High of 84, Low of 72

Your Opinion, Please

Aloha!

Sociologists tell us that the reason we are never quite satisfied is in our hunting and gathering DNA. If our ancestors had been satisfied after finding those first berries, they would not have kept looking for more, and would have starved to death.

So here in Paradise, the something more that many of us wish for is 1) A Target store (it’s in talks) 2) a Trader Joe’s (will never happen) and 3) lower prices (ain’t never gonna happen.) Or is it?

There is something all over the Maui news sources now that I wanted to get your opinion on. A developer from the Mainland is trying to build a huge Outlet Mall in Kihei. Many locals don’t want it, they say it will just cause traffic and congestion. One of our biggest concerns here on Maui is that we don’t want to become Oahu. If we wanted to live on Oahu, we’d move there. The developers maintain that it will be good for the economy here and create jobs.

The people on both sides of the argument seem to be missing the bigger picture:

1) how are they going to keep prices low, at Outlet Store prices, when they have paid to ship this merchandise across the ocean? and

2) Who is really going to shop there?

Your opinion please: Would you spend your time shopping at an Outlet Mall on Maui?

What do you mainly come to Maui to do? Relax? Swim/go to the beach? Boating/Diving/Water activities? Hiking? Driving around to see the scenery?

Shopping on Maui? And if so, what do you buy? Souveniers? Clothing?

My experience with Outlet Malls is limited, though I do know people who are addicted to them and basically plan their trips to the East coast around them. It seems these malls are always full of merchandise that didn’t sell well otherwise. And here’s something I’ve always wondered about chain stores in Maui in general: how do they move the Winter merchandise? If you walk into the Gap or Banana Republic in the Shops at Wailea and see boots and hats in there, are you moved to buy them and take them home? Because I know the Mauians aren’t buying them. Unless of course someone is making a trip to cold country, but my experience has been that when I really needed something like that, it wasn’t in the stores right then anyway.

So let’s say the Outlet Mall goes in. Who is really going to buy those winter goods and haul them home, when they can get them back in Milwaukee just fine? Also, and this is the biggee for me–airlines now charge good money for bags that used to be free.

So are you really going to come to Maui and fill up a suitcase at an Outlet Mall and pay to haul the stuff home? Are you going to spend your time on Maui shopping at an Outlet Mall, or will you think “I could do this back home”? I will tally the responses I get and submit them as a Letter to the Editor of both The Maui News http://mauinews.com/ and The Maui Weekly http://mauiweekly.com/ Your opinion, please…

And if you are local, are you in favor of the Outlet Mall?

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

It’s a Whole Different World in Hawaii

Posted on June 30, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Weather in Maui today: Abundant sunshine. High around 85F. Winds NE at 20 to 30 mph

It’s a Whole Different World in Hawaii

Please Note: This post was published two days before Andy Griffith passed away. Weird timing. RIP, Ange. “Andy Griffith Dead at 86”.

Aloha!

Recognize the guy in the image above? Good ol’ Barney from the Andy Griffith show. There’s a magic show in Lahaina called Warren and Annabelle’s, and the magician, Warren, is from North Carolina. So the running schtick of the evening is that we are in “Mayberry” and he assigns show names to audience members who participate, such as “Goober” “Andy” and “Ain’t Bee” (sic). To show you that it’s a whole different world in Hawaii http://www.warrenandannabelles.com/ I will tell you about our time there. First of all, Warren is an amazing magician and great comedian. As a concierge, I sent guests from the hotel there constantly, telling them. “you will laugh till your sides hurt.” The first time Mike and I went, I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes as Warren managed to make the Goober character look ridiculous, and Aunt Bee found someone else’s watch in her purse from across the room.

I noticed as the evening went on that Mike wasn’t laughing. I thought maybe he didn’t feel well. The whole audience would erupt and he would just sit there, stony faced. I decided to not let it bother me and just enjoy the evening. Afterwards as we were walking out I said, “Don’t you feel well?” No, he felt fine. “Then why weren’t you laughing with the rest of us?” He looked at me with a strange expresion and said he had no idea what Warren was talking about up there. “What’s a Goober?” he asked.

It took a moment for this to compute. “You mean you never saw The Andy Griffith Show? http://www.imayberry.com/. Uncomfortable silence. Andy? Barney? Opie? You know, Ron Howard as a kid? http://twitter.com/RealRonHoward/ By now he had that deer in the headlights look which I had come to know meant I was traveling dangerous ground that was no doubt rooted in a Hawaii upbringing. He does not find this amusing.

After a little more careful prodding he admitted: “We didn’t get TV out on the North Shore.” (He grew up on Oahu.) “The mountains were in the way and we couldn’t get the signal.”

You know the sound of a needle scratching across a record? That was my brain. I had been together with this man for how many years now….and hadn’t managed to stumble across this piece of information? Don’t get me wrong…Mike has been around the world twice, surfing (it didn’t hurt that he had a brother who worked for Pan Am and back then immediate family could fly for free!) so it isn’t like he’d never been off the island. It’s just his experience of living on an island and the gaps in his popular culture knowledge that amaze me. “What the heck did you do at night?” I asked. “Slept!” he said. “I’d been up since dawn surfing.”

I envy Mike his childhood in Hawaii. It’s as near-perfect a childhood I’ve ever heard anyone describe, filled with the ocean, water sports, sunshine, cutting school to go surfing (with little to no reprecussions!) going barefoot to school, and sneaking out at night to go down to the beach. He has an impressive collection of “floats” : Japanese fishing floats made of what we think of today as sea-glass, light blue and sea-green, some of them still wrapped in the thick twine used to hold them to the line. http://www.glassfloatjunkie.com/They are some of his most precious possesions, and it’s rare to find them intact anymore, at least in Hawaii. Note the rolling pin shape, or “roller”:

Mike found these on the beach in Kailua, where he grew up. If you’d like to learn more about these floats, go to http://home.comcast.net/~4miller/aboutfloats/about.html

In the inverse of the way Mike’s never seen a raccoon, chipmunk or snake (three staples of my Indiana upbringing) he can go into the jungle in Hawaii and name every tree, plant and berry…and know which ones are safe to eat. If I were ever to get shipwrecked on a deserted island, he’s the guy I’d want to have along. He’d have a wild pig caught and roasting over a fire on a spit in the time it would take me to figure out which way was North.

Just don’t ask him to name the guy in the picture at the top of this post.

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

Thanks for stopping by!

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

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

Maui Visitor’s Bureau: Got Maui?

Posted on June 5, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

Just wondering, guys and gals, if you need to be “reminded” about Maui. The reason I’m asking: in yesterday’s Maui News, www.mauinews.com there was a letter to the Editor commenting on the battle that is always raging here between those who think we need to spend more money on Tourism (Maui Visiors Bureau, et al) and those who feel we’ve already spent quite enough, thank you.

The letter writer (Bob Pure) stated that “residents seem to forget that 75 percent of all jobs on Maui are directly or indirectly related to the visitor industry. They either believe we have too many tourists or everybody already knows about Maui so we don’t have to spend any more money to promote tourism to our island.” He went on to say that the complaint that the MVB spends too much is “the same logic that says that Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Toyota and Apple should reduce their advertising because everybody already knows who they are. It doesn’t work that way. Vacationers need reminders.”

So I ask you…is that true?

Bob stated that “if we get smug and complacent and reduce our promotional footprint, vacationers, will, assuredly, go elsewhere.”

I know when I lived in California and was coming to Maui on vacations, I was saving my pennies to do so. I didn’t need any reminders that Maui was here. I will say that every time a commercial for Hawaii came on, it just reinforced my resolve to save more. So, what about you? Does a promtional advertisement with stunning photograpy and the message of Aloha get you off your seat and to the computer to start booking reservations?

I’m interested to see if the assertions of this letter writer are true, or if you already have your tickets to Maui bought for next year.

A hui hou (til next time). If you would 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 you probably didn’t know

Posted on May 13, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

I met my first fan. How cool is that? I was seated on an airplane when the lady next to me asked what I did and I said I was a writer…she asked, “what do you write?” and then she said, “I read your blog!” It was one of those warm moments that I’m sure Jennifer Aniston gets to have about 800,000 times per day (more on the embarrasing way I met her in another blog) and hopes to never have again as long as she lives. http://www.people.com/people/jennifer_aniston/0,,,00.html

I have been MIA from this blog because life intruded in the form of blood poisoning…Mike’s, not mine. I got on that plane in California and left taking care of my mom to come home to Maui and take care of him. The blood poisoning is not unusual in Hawaii. It’s a warm climate and cruddy stuff thrives. Mike’s a boat captain http://scotchmistsailingcharters.com/ and got a splinter in his bare foot off the dock in Lahaina. It festered and the blood poisoning moved to knee-high, as well as a strep infection in the foot. Not fun, and he’s been on crutches for over a week so far.

Another really fun thing that people get in Hawaii is Ciguatera poisoning: Ciguatera (say: “seeg-wha-terra”) poisoning: This happens when you eat a reef fish (any fish living in warm tropical water) that has eaten a certain poisonous food. This poison does not go away when the fish is cooked or frozen. The first symptoms of ciguatera poisoning include abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Symptoms can then progress to headache, muscle aches and skin that is itchy, numb or tingly. You may notice a change in your ability to feel hot or cold temperatures. For example, you may think something feels hot when it is actually cold.

The lady on the plane was named Lisa and she asked lots of questions about what it’s really like to live in Hawaii. I also went to a BBQ while in California, and there was this guy there from Winnepeg. While not one person asked him “So what’s it really like to live in Winnepeg?”,they asked me so many questions about Hawaii, it got to be embarrassing that all the attention centered on me.

As our converstaion went on, I found myself sharing things like, “did you know that when they burn the sugar cane in Maui that they also burn the PVC pipe used for irrigation? Here’s a photo of the burning cane by Amanda Brightbill:

Approximately 32,900 children and 72,700 adults living in Hawaii currently have asthma.

• It costs Hawaii’s economy approximately $43 million each year to control this complicated disease.

• Each year approximately 4,000 people in Hawaii are rushed to the emergency department because of asthma.

• Infants and very young children (0-4 years of age) in Hawaii continue to make up the majority of hospitalizations caused by asthma.

• The asthma death rate in Hawaii remains above the national average.

I have asthma. I did not have it before moving to Hawaii. Just sayin’.

And the people at the BBQ were surprised that we don’t drink the water. “Why not?” they asked. “Because all the chemicals used to fertilize the sugar cane and pineapple run-off right into our water table.””And people think that Hawaii is such a pristine place to live,” they said.

I was especially naive when I moved here because I didn’t even know they burned the sugar cane. How could I not know that? Well, they only burn ten months out of the year, skipping January and February historically. Guess which months I had always vacationed in Maui before moving here?

Well, I have a guy on crutches to attend to. One thing about it, living in Hawaii is never boring.

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

Aloha, Jamaica

Differences Too

Posted on May 2, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha,

Happy May Day, which is “Lei Day” in Hawaii. The origins of Hawaii’s celebration of May Day as Lei Day date back to 1927, when Honolulu Star-Bulletin writer Don Blanding advocated for the creation of a day dedicated to honoring lei-making and the custom of wearing lei. Blanding’s co-worker at the newspaper, columnist Grace Tower Warren, suggested holding the celebration on May 1 and coined the phrase “May Day is Lei Day.” (HawaiiMagazine.com) Hawaiians stay busy trying to keep all the holidays straight such as King Kamehameha Day, Prince Kuhio Day, Statehood Day ( ironic, since Hawaiians didn’t want to be part of the States to begin with). Employers go nuts trying to decide whether employees should get Hawaii State holidays or Federal holidays off work.

So on this May Day, when I went to put my tennis shoes on this morning, I stuck my foot in without hesitation. I did not pick it up and turn it over, trying to shake out whatever critter might have made a home in there. Critter, meaning the lizard that one time, and the threat of centipedes, always. I have nightmares about sticking my foot in a shoe with a centipede in it. Don’t judge me till you’ve had one slither over your foot at the dinner table.

The reason for this shoe confidence is that I am in Northern California, not Maui. I’m here taking care of Mom after surgery. So I was reflecting this morning on some of the differences, so far away from home. Home being relative, because Northern California will really always be “home.” Home is where the family is, and this is where I spent a pretty happy 17 years.

Difference One: stuff dries here in this hot dry climate, unlike Maui’s hot humid climate. I hung stuff on the clothesline at 9 am this morning and it was totally dry by noon. In Maui that takes until 5 pm, and you’re lucky if it’s dry by then.

Difference Two: Allergies. California? Zip. Happy camper. Maui? Whoa. I really should buy stock in kleenex.

Difference Three: Seeing the apricot and peach trees setting fruit on the tree in Mom’s yard. I can’t wait for my first juicy tree-ripened apricot for the first time in years. Don’t ever bother buying a peach or apricot in Maui. You’ll be supremely disappointed. The papayas on the other hand, no contest. One time my stepdad and I decided to do a swap. He sent me a box of apricots and I sent him a box of papayas. We were really hoping they’d get through the post office, but I’m still waiting on those apricots and it’s been four years.

Difference Four: Heat. I’m always in CA in the wintertime (Thanksgiving, Christmas and Vog season in Maui) so I almost forgot what it’s like be hot, yet not sweat. I tool around all day without soaking through my clothes once. Bliss.

Difference Five: A completely different social life. It’s very hard to “break in” in Maui. I wondered why for a long time until my first Maui friend finally explained it to me: “the mainlanders move here and you get close to them, and then they break your heart by moving back. Most people don’t last two years. It’s happened over and over. After a while people just stop trying.” She also told me she’d lived in Maui for 20 years and had NEVER been invited over to someone’s house for dinner. This just made my head spin. Why?? I asked her, as she sat at my dinner table, her first dinner invite. “Food is very expensive here. Maybe someone will do a barbeque pot-luck, but a sit-down dinner, no.” Since I’d been the queen of the dinner party and brunch in CA, this blew me away. But it has held true. The thing I look most forward to when I get back to CA is getting invited over to my friend’s houses for dinner!

Difference Six: You can get your fashion on here! Women in Maui have no reason to dress up. It’s so casual you can wear shorts to the nicest restaurant, and I mean really, how many ways are there to wear a sundress? Jewelry is just hot and scarves are a joke. And the women all complain that the guys in Maui dress like dirtbags. Surf shorts and ratty t-shirts. When you live in Maui you can spot a tourist because they are dressed nicely. I can practically pick them out in Costco with my eyes closed. Expensive purses, matching ensembles, and nice jewelry (which they will then wear in the ocean and lose. People have metal-detecting businesses in Maui just to recover tourist’s jewelry.) It does get boring after a while that most everybody dresses alike in Maui. So I come to California and get my fashion on.

And lastly:

Difference Seven: Noise and Safety. Maui is so quiet.And safe. I truly love that. This part of CA is a cacaphony of sirens, the boom-boom-boom of car stereos, and even gunshots at night. I’m talking close by, too. Mike worries about me while I’m here. He’s afraid I’ll come home dead.

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 Five

Posted on April 28, 2012 by jamaicawtr

And the gods kept laughing…

About the time I really relaxed into Maui mode and thought if I just had some friends (Lahaina was a lonely place unless you hung out at bars, one of it’s mottos is: “Lahaina– a drinking town with a fishing problem”)… the owner of the condo I was renting from informed me that she was selling.

Would I like to buy it? she asked. YES, I’d love to buy it– but I still had a house back in California to deal with. Purchase price wasn’t even the big issue, things were cheap then. It was the bleepin’ Homeowner’s Fees. For a one-bedroom condo: $1,200 month. I almost swallowed my chewing gum.

So I started searching for a place to live. I looked in the paper–this should be a piece of cake, right? Right. Maui was in the middle of a housing crisis in 1999 and there were no rentals. Craigslist didn’t exist yet, so the newspaper was the only resource.

The reason there was a housing crisis, ironically, was that things WERE so cheap. People from the mainland (listen closely here, because it’s the reason Hawaiians have no time for mainlanders) were coming to the island and buying things up faster than Lindsey Lohan lands in jail. So all the condos were disapperaing from the rental market, because the owners were buying them and them leaving them sit empty. They had been taken out of the rental pool and turned into vacation homes, effectively leaving the locals no place to rent.

I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I just couldn’t understand why every time I called on a unit it was already gone. ALWAYS. But I had about a month to look, so I wasn’t panicking. Yet.

The panic was to come later.

An acquaintance recommended a room-mate situation, and starting to get savvy to the way things worked on Maui, I saw that word of mouth would probably be my only hope. Getting desperate, I said yes. The guy offering the room was a well-known Lahaina realtor, about 65 years old, and the place had a view, was gorgeous, and cheap. (This should have been my clue.) I thought, why not? It’s an adventure, right?

The adventure turned to oh, *&%*! when I stumbled out of my room that first morning and found him standing facing the kitchen sink, STARK NAKED. I tried to flee, but not fast enough, because he turned around in all his glory.

I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee for the morning, and I was faced with a room-mate who was not only a pervert but a nudist. I had already signed a lease.

The smile on his face said it all.

My cute house back on the mainland where I had a business, and friends, and family was sounding better all the time. Maybe I was supposed to just cash in my chips and go home…

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

Language Skills

Posted on April 26, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha!

If you’ve been to Hawaii, you know that there are only thirteen letters in the Hawaiian alphabet. So they had to get really creative and repeat the letters, which led to each word being about sixteen syllables long. Street names you eventually get used to: Kamehameha, Lahainaluna. The language itself and how it’s used casually was another thing entirely when I moved here.

For instance, at the end of my first day of work at the tennis courts, my boss showed up and said, “You’re all pow.” I’m what? Is this a way of saying I did a good job? I’m fired? What?” I must have had a stupid look on my face because she repeated it. Again, me, with the stupid look. Boss: “Pow. Pow. All done.”

So after work, I asked an aquaintance. “The word for all done is Pow? Like, bang, zoom?” She laughed. “No, it’s P-A-U. All pau means “all done.” Pau hana means “work is over.” Hana, like the town? Oh my, this was confusing. Then the next day my boss said she was going to run the marathon on the Pauley, and to be prepared for extra traffic. Okay, I really suck at this. This time I just asked her, because she apparently was going to just keep speaking this foreign language and expecting me to keep up.

Pauley was actually Pali, and it means “Cliffs” in Hawaiian. So the place on the road into Lahaina (where the tunnel is) has cliffs on either side of it. So that’s the Pali, the name of the road. There is also a Pali on Oahu, but there it goes over the mountain, and the superstition is: “You don’t take pork over the Pali after dark, or something bad will happen, like you’ll wreak your car.” Okay, so I guess you need to get your grocery shopping done and high-tail it back over the mountain pass before the sun goes down.

That, or you just don’t eat pork.

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

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

Is Hawaii Worth It?

Posted on April 12, 2012 by jamaicawtr

Aloha,

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

It then cleverly lists the pros and cons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aloha, Jamaica

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

Posted on 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

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

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: tips on how to move to Maui

A Passion for Passionfruit

The Paradox of Paradise

Moving to Maui Advice

Affordable Housing in Maui

Progress

What is Pono?

North Shore Oahu

Where you stay?

Your Opinion, Please

The Road not Taken

It’s a Whole Different World in Hawaii

Name that Wind

Try Wait

You know you live in Hawaii when…

The Art of the Staycation – Part Two

No Worries

Working on Maui

Maui Visitor’s Bureau: Got Maui?

Castles in the Sand

Stuff you probably didn’t know

Differences Too

Moving to Maui– Part Five

Language Skills

Mahalos

Is Hawaii Worth It?

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

Moving to Maui, Part Three

Moving to Maui, Part Two