Time for a full-blown entry!


You live too far away
your voice rings like a bell anyway
don't give up your independence
unless it feels so right
nothing good comes easily
sometimes you gotta fight

Whoa, Amber is the color of your energy
whoa, shades of gold displayed naturally
launched a thousand ships in my heart, so easy
still it's fine from afar, and you know that
whoa, brainstorm take me away from the norm
whoa, I got to tell you something
--"Amber" by 311

First off, I am completely and utterly thrilled to have a song with my name in it. And to top it off, it's a nice song too. Hoooray!!!

Secondly, Monday was very very slow, and I can't say there's much to relay about it. Mondays are mondays, even in paradise.

Tuesday, which is still today as I'm writing this, has been a productive if somewhat tiring day. Got up at 8:30AM, came to work, and looked out the window from my lab bench to see parked in the parkinglot beyond a Bacardi Truck. After raising my hands to the sky in a cheerleader sort of motion to praise the sight, I decided that it was a good omen for the day. Well, it wasn't the harbinger of drunken merriment of any kind in the lab, at least not this time. After a phone call from her cousin, Cheryl asked me if it was ok if one of their family friends, a 40 year-old man from Europe who had recently been through a painful seperation from his wife, stayed in the master bedroom while I was there. Well, if I was all by myself and had no one to turn to, I'd have very large doubts about this, but if anything gets weird, I can go to Cheryl. She assures me he's a sweet, if somewhat chatty person. Well, we'll see how it goes.

I was busy aaaaalll day on several projects, and I was really a trooper up until 7PM, when I started to forget numbers Cheryl had given me and made several glaring, but not disasterous errors. Oh well, soon the day was done eh?

We didn't get out till about 8 something. . .blarg. .. but to celebrate our stint of living together and also my surviving ten days in Oahu, we went to a DELECTABLE Indian restaurant ( I can't spell that word) and had our fill of Chicken Curry and Dahl (a dish of lentils and potatoes mixed in a gravy with cilantro and many many spices. And to drink we had Mango lassi, a fruit yogurt drink which cools the tongue after all that spice. What makes Indian food so wonderful is that warm, rich mix of spices. Warm is definitely important.

It always suprises me how useful talking to Cheryl is, as I often forget that she's been in my shoes, and has had to make alot of the decisions I'm facing right now. We talked about alot of things: relationships, careers, siblings, etc. And it was good. I'm glad I'm making friends here, even if they aren't wild crazy ones like at home. Nobody could replace them :)

Already, I feel like I've come full circle in my life, living here in Hawaii. I mean, for starters, I was born by the ocean. I lived by the ocean. I grew up for four years in a surfer/hippy town (Santa Monica) walking hand in hand with my dad. This feels alot like home, in that sense. I wish I had time to learn to surf, and I wish I had the skin for it too. One day of snorkelling and I'm already hooked. I want to take those fins and glide about for hours. But more than all this ocean stuff. . . I'm actually really happy. The weather is beautiful, the plants are amazing, the wildlife--aside from the cockroaches--is intriguing, the people are friendly and calm, the food is. . . well you've already heard about the food :) The lab is wonderful. The work I'm doing is interesting, and I understand so much of it this time around. I'm interacting with people, interesting people who have interesting things to say, on a daily basis. Sometimes I even get a compliment on my work, and that makes my day. Research maybe isn't so scary. .. . ok, it still is.

For so long, I've felt like half of me, like there were little gears in my head that were broken or failing. But I feel a bit healed, and alot rested. And it is good. Time is so important, and we should never forget that.

Tomorrow, I think, I move into the house I'll be house-sitting for. Wish me luck and I'll let you know how it goes!