Weekend Recap

The weather was kind of blah (by Hawaii standards) on Friday and Saturday, with dark clouds and sporadic showers, so I didn't get out hiking or snorkeling like I had wanted to. Besides the Pacific Aviation Museum and jogging the bike path that I wrote about on Friday, we played some video games and I managed to finish watching Season 2 of HIMYM on DVD and caught up on Heroes on the NBC website.

Saturday, LW went on a shopping marathon and out to dinner with her friend L. While LW was gone, I took the boys on a bike ride out on the bike path. ES rode his own bike and I pulled YS in the trailer behind my bike. We rode out 1.5 miles to a park with a playground where the boys played for a little while. Then we rode half a mile to Best Buy to get some replacement headsets for our XBox. Then we rode the last mile home for a total of 3 miles.

I think ES is ready to have the training wheels removed from his bicycle. I really don't think he needs them anymore, and they're pretty beat-up and about to fall off on their own. I've been trying to talk him into letting me take them off, but he hasn't gone for it yet.

After we got back from the bike ride, I had a family movie night with the boys and we watched Over the Hedge. The boys had seen it before, but I had not, and L's husband keeps telling me funny scenes from the movie. I really liked it and laughed a lot. "Hammy" the squirrel was awesome, especially after drinking that fully-caffeinated soda.

Sunday though, the weather was perfect - mostly sunny but not too hot or humid. We loaded up our camelbaks and headed over to the Friendship Park in Kaneohe to hike the upper loop trail (the last blog post I wrote about this park, we only hiked the lower loop).

The boys on the trail.

It was only a one mile hike, but it came with 227 feet of elevation gain. We parked the car at 295 feet and the highest elevation we got to was 522 feet.

Altitude profile from our hike of the upper loop.

There's a beautiful panoramic view of Kaneohe from the top of the Friendship Park upper loop trail.

Me and YS hiking toward the summit.

Gumbo night was tonight at the home of one of my JOs. Mark and Denise took the carcass from our turkey on Thanksgiving home with them and used it to make turkey gumbo tonight for dinner. They invited everyone from the wardroom over and had a pretty large turnout at their place tonight. The gumbo was excellent. I never knew what roux was before Mark explained to me the finer points of making gumbo tonight.

Amazing Race: Man, those African dance-contest judges were just FULL of personality weren't they??? (sarcasm) They weren't exactly Simon, Paula, and Randy. At least Simon and Randy listened to Paula. The two African men judges didn't seem to listen to any of the ladies' opinions - not that any of them were all that talkative. (Note: I wrote this as I was watching the show and BEFORE anyone on the show made any references to American Idol).

Saturday morning odds and ends

A smattering of random items this morning:

• Lord help us! ES has discovered how to Google. I came downstairs this morning to find he typed in "apache helicopter" and was looking at Army websites for pictures of... well... Apache helicopters. After I came down, he asked how to spell "sub hunter" (because we were reading his library book about cruisers and talking about the helicopters that hunt for submarines). I'm very afraid to see where this will go. What pray-tell will he Google next??? It might be time to invest in some parental controls on the computer - anyone got any recommendations?
  
• We went to ES's school fall festival last night. I must say, there were a lot of really well done and cute pirate costumes there - especially my Nav's kids. What threw me for a loop though, was sitting behind us was this family where the mom was cussing at her daughter. I mean, the poor girl looked to be about 8 years old or so, and as far as I could tell she wasn't doing anything egregious or misbehaving (not to imply that it would be okay to cuss at your kid if they WERE misbehaving). I mean, it's a Catholic school for cryin' out loud! (Again, that is not meant to imply that it would be okay to cuss at your kid if it wasn't a Catholic school.)
• I think the highlight of going to the fall festival though was getting to meet Alyssa. Every day, ES comes home from school and we ask what he did at school. Typical response: "Nothing." So we dig a little deeper, "Who did you play with at recess?" Typical response: "Alyssa." A little while back, when he told us he DIDN'T play with Alyssa, we asked why not, and found out some other rotten little boys in his class had been making fun of him for playing with a GIRL, so he wasn't playing with Alyssa anymore. My heart sank. We explained to ES that it's perfectly okay to be friends with a girl and that those boys weren't very nice. We also gave his teacher a heads-up so she would watch out for the teasing, too. Since then, it hasn't been an issue, and we've gone back to "Who did you play with at recess?" "Alyssa." So it was nice to finally meet Alyssa last night. Her dad's in the Air Force and they just moved here from Okinawa, so she and ES both have the "I just moved here" thing in common.
• While my MIL was here visiting, I was going upstairs to watch Heroes on the old TV in our master bedroom. Now she's gone back to Boston and I've started watching Heroes downstairs on the HDTV - OMG what a difference!!!
• We're very excited for the Dish Network installation guy to come on Wednesday. The local cable TV here is super-lame and non-user-friendly. We had Dish Network from 1999 in Monterey all the way up until we left Virginia in June, and we miss it. I'm just worried he won't be able to get a good angle on the satellite from our location in housing. We're on an east-west running street, and slightly downhill from the house to the east of us, so somehow we have to find a way for the satellite dish to look around the house next to us to the east.
  

Okay, ES wants the computer back so he can Google something else. Have a good weekend all!

Chuck

It's nice being back in a regular routine at home (as opposed to being on deployment or our hectic preparations for interfleet transfer or driving the boat halfway around the world, etc). I'm catching up on some old shows and picking up a new one - Chuck.

I thought it was pretty funny when I Googled "Chuck" the top two links that came up were to this new TV show on NBC. Chuck is a regular geek who works at "Buy More" for the "Nerd Herd." I missed the beginning, but somehow he is in an accident that results in the contents of some super-secret national intelligence computer being downloaded to his brain. Now the NSA has put an agent in as a "coworker" of his, and the CIA has put in an smokin-hot blond agent at the nearby Weinerlicious as protection for him. There's all sorts of spy-story action, intrigue, explosions, gun-fights, etc, but all with a geeky sort of slap-stick to it. It's like a geek version of Alias. (I was never a fan of Alias, although LW was an Alias addict). Chuck is actually a pretty darn funny show - check it out!

My other addiction right now is Heroes. Thanks to Bubblehead raving about it, and reading a WIRED magazine article about it while we were on deployment, I decided to pick it up season one on DVD. I've been watching about one episode per night, and LW is being so kind as to set up the DVR to record the new season when it starts.

We've also got the DVR recording our other favorite show, How I Met Your Mother. I'm dying to watch season two on DVD. In case you haven't seen it before, HIMYM is narrated by the main character, Ted, telling his kids about his love-life and how he met their mother. Sounds odd, I know. It's actually really funny. LW sent HIMYM Season One with me on deployment, and we watched it in the wardroom in the evenings after dinner. I got the whole wardroom hooked on it. It became required viewing for newly reporting officers (including the PCO) so that they would understand our vocabulary - for example: "suit up!", "high five!", and "legendary!" Or, when someone is consciously deciding to procrastinate a project, "Let Future-XO and Future-CO worry about that." Then later, when the previous procrastination came back to bite us, "Darn it Past-XO and Past-CO!" Anyway, I was out at sea while season two was on, and it just came out on DVD. I've got it in my hands now, but I'm being good and waiting until we go out to sea this week so we can watch it together in the wardroom (LW already watched season two while we were out at sea). After we get through season two though, I'm not waiting around on the rest of the wardroom to watch season three on the DVR.

Aside for HIMYM fans (skip ahead if you've never watched before): Incidentally, if you are already a HIMYM fan, the DVD has some really cool special features on it. For example, there's one video-collage of Barney's many variations of the "high-five" in rapid succession. High Five! Phone Five! Low Five! Little Five! I was surprised how many there were. There is, likewise, another video collage of all of Barney's different "Suit Up!" moments. In the interviews with the cast, they said that the "legendary" thing was totally unintentional. It looks like they have some similar things on the CBS website for season two, but I'm not going to watch those until I finish watching season two.

Oh, here's a great little 2 minute sample of HIMYM (and some of our wardroom vocabulary):

You gotta love YouTube!

Speaking of DVRs... What on earth did we do before the days of DVRs??? The first time I really realized the impact in had on our lives was when LW flew up to meet me for a port call in Bangor, WA a couple of years ago. My eldest son's favorite cartoon back then was called Max and Ruby (about two rabbits). It came on at like 6 o'clock in the morning, but it didn't matter because the DVR was set to record it, and our eldest could watch it whenever he woke up and whenever else he wanted to during the day. Well... fast forward to us sitting in the Navy Lodge in Bangor. Eldest says, "I want to watch Max and Ruby." LW and I tried to explain to him that it just wasn't on at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. This was just a totally unfathomable concept to the poor boy. "Just push the buttons!" he would say, holding the remote control out for us to do the magic that made Max and Ruby appear on his demand. We quickly learned that when going on trips, we have to bring DVDs of the kids' favorite shows with us.

I must admit, it's rather nice not having to watch commercials anymore... most of the time anyway. There are those annoying times, like tonight, when you catch-up with a live show and can't fast forward anymore, then you have to sit and wait. LW and I have been known to hit the pause button and go do stuff around the house and come back a few minutes later to resume watching time-late so we can fast-forward through the commercials.

We're finding that we miss our Dish Network. LW wasn't sure if it would work in Hawaii, or if Navy Housing would allow us to put up a satellite dish, and thought the local digital cable would be fine. I do NOT criticize her at all for her decision to sign up for the local digital cable while I was gone. Unfortunatly, the cable service here is totally LAME. The DVR is very non-user friendly. It won't auto-tune to the shows you tell it you want to watch, it only flashes a reminder to tell you something is on. When you hit the channel guide, it just shows ALL the channels that exist, regardless whether you subscribe to them or not, and it won't let you set up a short-list of your favorite channels to quickly browse. So I'll skim down the channel list and say, "Oh, I wanna watch that!" and click the button, and an error message will pop up that we don't subscribe to that channel. Gee, thanks. Plus, we have separate DVRs in each room and have to set up each one individually if we want to be able to watch a show in any given room.

So I'm going through the process of getting Navy Housing to approve putting in the Dish Network satellite dish so we can get back to having a favorites-list and a dual-tuner / dual-recorder DVR that'll feed both the family room and the MBR TV. I think the housing office's rules on applying for installation of a dish violates the FCC rules and constitute an "unreasonable delay," but I'm going to try and get it approved peacefully / without raising a ruckus.

It actually comes out to be about the same price per month as the digital cable here, but with so much better functionality. There are some sunk costs in terms of the installation fee for the digital cable, but there was no way for us to know in advance how bad the cable service was here.

I wonder how many states are changing their official "state flower" to the satellite dish? I know I heard the joke in California when we lived there. Then I heard the same joke in Virginia when we lived there. Now we're about to help the "flower" infest Hawaii.