Dinner on Kapahulu

Kapahulu Avenue in Honolulu has a couple places to eat that Joanie and I discovered last time we were here. I finally got away from the hotel tonight for a dinner pilgrimage, and it was a feast.

First to Ono Hawaiian Food, a small hole-in-the-wall family restaurant with 6 or 8 tables and faded pictures taped all across the walls. But it's consistently voted tops for authentic Hawaiian fare. I had the Kalua Pig dinner, which is pulled pork, lomi lomi (a salmon ceviche), pipikaulau (salt pork jerky) with onions and rice on the side. Everything was fresh and excellent. It's a place so authentic they don't even have a website. I got there near closing and as they started cleaning up for the night, the waiter was talking about why they close at 8:00 p.m. — they have to get there at 5 in the morning to start slow cooking the pork for the next day. Never any parking, I had to find a spot two streets away.

On to Leonard's Bakery down the street for malasadas — Portuguese donuts. They're baseball-sized balls of fried dough, pumped with custard and rolled in sugar. They have three flavors: "custard" (vanilla), chocolate, and the flavor of the month, which is banana. I ordered one of each, which took about 5 minutes as they ran into the back and cooked them up fresh. "Be careful, they're hot," the lady told me. I'm so glad I can drive with one hand. Nobody in their right mind should eat three, but I've been good all week. Again, another dive of a place, and again, never any parking.

I'm so full. Who knows if I'll ever make it to Honolulu again, but I'm really glad I got to visit these places tonight.

Hi from HI

Just a quick note to say I'm in Hawaii — I've not had a lot of time on my hands to check in the last few days.

I'm working at this year's National Veterans Golden Age Games in Honolulu. We have over 800 military veterans from all over the U.S. age 55 and older competing in athletic and other competitions. I'm in charge of the daily newsletter for the week.

It's totally ambitious to put together stories and photography for a full color 8-page newsletter every day, and make it on deadline for printing and delivery overnight. The first day was intense: I worked 12 hours straight, skipped lunch, took no breaks. My head was spinning by the end.

Luckily we have an excellent group of public affairs staff from VA hospitals around the country here to write and photograph. We've had great reviews from the veterans who get the newsletter at breakfast each morning. And it's so rewarding to hear the impact the Games have made in their lives — we hear stories of how it has given them renewed confidence and purpose, the will to make the best of their later years. Tuesday we'll run a story on a 100-year-old and the medals he picked up this week.

I sent one of our reporters out to Pearl Harbor this morning on a tour with a group of our veterans, on the eve of Memorial Day 70 years later. He came back talking about how moved they were, how many tears were shed, how moved he was. It's going to be a great story tomorrow.

See the 2011 National Veterans Golden Age Games newsletters on our website.

Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me

This is at STS Steel, just on the Schenectady side of Freeman's Bridge on Erie Boulevard. I see this place every day on my way to and from work. There are details everywhere; I've thought about shooting photos there for years. Last week I saw a demolishing truck starting to pull down the old building, so it was time to grab the camera and finally take action.

Surely it's an eyesore and the old part's got to go, but I love the industrial history locked up in this place. To me the factory windows are the most interesting part. Some are broken, some panes have fallen away. They hold a million colors.

Parts of the buildings shown here are already gone as of my pass tonight.

Phoenix

Despite the standing water on the lawn in spots, and the sky spitting on me for the final half hour, I splashed my way through mowing today in a desperate attempt to recover after a week or rain.

When I dropped my first load of clippings in the forest out back I found these unusual brown mushrooms growing up out of my squishy, rotting grass pile. Usually I see the white ones, but these were a lot funkier.

Taking a picture was really hard — I had to get low to the ground with my macro gear and watch out for being carried away by six swarming squadrons of 'shroom-swooping 'squitoes.

Gritty City

Last month I had a presentation to give in New York City. I went down the night before and stayed in New Jersey; all hotels in the city were booked up for spring break. So I took a bus into the city for the evening to take some street scenes and get a slab of Junior's cheesecake. This view was from the trip in.

The Best Stuff 9: iPod + MP3

My graduation present from high school was one of the first CD players. Small portables weren't out yet, so this was a component to put on the shelf next to your amp, and it was a heavy beast, shielded to protect users against the laser inside. I spent a good chunk of my paychecks on music; by the time I was 19 a couple years later I had almost 200 discs.

I can remember sitting at my first color Mac several years later wondering how you could hook the computer to a CD jukebox and pick song names from the computer and not need the jewel cases to know what song number you wanted.

Around 2000 Greg Peterson from church didn't know any other Mac users and had an extra copy of SoundJam MP (later sold to Apple to become iTunes). MP3 was impressive, but on my 250 MB hard drive I could rip a couple albums and fill what was left of my hard disk. When 20 gigabyte hard disks became common a few years later MP3 started to make sense. Mixtapes no longer took hours to make.

When the iPod came out I jumped on one of the first models — before they worked easily with Windows, before the iTunes Music Store, back when Apple was a computer company on the rocks and might not survive the next quarter.

The 1G/2G iPod and its interface (photo center) were fantastic. I could be driving and change the volume or skip songs without looking. I could follow a reference in one song (Stevie Wonder Master Blaster) to another song by a different artist (Bob Marley Jammin'). I'd be by myself listening to it and say out loud, "This is the best thing I ever bought."

Apple went to touch buttons and screens and wrecked the iPod's usability as strictly a music player. But they're so rich now they can pretty much do what they want.

This photo of our family's iPods (Madeleine's green Nano and Touch are missing) took a lot of tries because iPods are so dang reflective. I took this photo at night in the dark, manually popping a flash about 20 times around the perimeter of the scene. My beloved old school 2G iPod in the center looks chunkier ... because it is. Plus it's closer to camera, balanced on a toilet paper tube. Compared to today's slender, shiny iPods, this is Christopher Pike's communicator.

Flatiron 1

While on a NYC trip last month I made a long hike through the city to take this building specifically.

I took loads of photos from afar, but they looked like everyone else's pictures. None were as striking as this.

Adirondack

Claire loves being outdoors. If she sees daylight through an open house door or garage door, she's out. If you've been inside our house you'll see the doorknobs covered with spinning kid-proof covers just like on prescription bottles. She's the reason.

Often when I mow the front yard I see these giant strips of bark around one of our trees. Squirrels, I thought.

I just figured it out last week with my giant spy lens — look at that fresh bald spot on the tree behind Claire. Naughty!

This little girl can't help it. We live on the edge of the Adirondack forest; the word Adirondack means tree eaters and describes earlier Native Americans in this area who lived off pine bark in the winters.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

I did a double-take looking at the weather forecast on my phone today, every day for the foreseeable future calls for rain. Here are my next-door neighbor Sandy's tulips to beat the clouds away.

Safety

Five years ago I was sitting in the back of the church for a Saturday night session of stake conference. I was alone, as Joanie and our three kids were driving the 8 hours home from Canada after a visit her parents over spring break.

Partway into my church meeting someone rushed up to the front of the chapel to give a message to the stake president on the stand. Somebody left their lights on in the parking lot, I thought. Instead the messenger found me in the back and said there was an important phone call for me.

It was the hospital on the line, my family had been in an accident on the highway. Several combinations of how many and who in my family had been killed flooded my mind as I rushed to take the call. I got to the phone and it was a nurse at St. Something’s hospital I'd never heard of, she didn't name the city. I had to actually ask if everyone was alright. (Shouldn't these have been her first words?)

Relief — everyone was fine, though a little shaken up. Did they know my wife was pregnant? Yes, they were checking her for internal injuries. I had to ask what city there were in, they could have been 8 hours away for all I knew. They were in Amsterdam, pretty close. I was shaky when I hung up; my bishop took my keys and drove me in the pouring rain.

I got to the hospital and found everyone was fine, with bruises where the seatbelts held them in. Our unborn baby was fine.

What happened: a delivery truck was having major engine trouble on the Interstate, it was either slowed or stopped and spewing loads of smoke. Joanie slammed right into the back of him, she never saw him through the smoke; moments after the accident she still was wondering what happened. The cars trailing her rapidly-stopped Honda CR-V took evasive action and swerved around her, one of them slid and scraped most of the way down the right side of her car.

While we were at the hospital we heard there was another accident that night, and the same truck was involved. After the first accident, the driver pulled out onto the road again, still with engine problems, and another car smashed into him. This time a passenger in the second car was killed. We were so lucky.

When I saw our car at the salvage yard the next day I couldn't believe my family survived. All airbags had deployed and there was glass everywhere. The engine compartment had crumpled around the impact and it smelled like burnt brake fluid. The hood had been pushed through the right side of the windshield, where Malcolm’s head should have been, except he had tipped the seat back for a rest. Everything in the trunk was now in the front seats. The thick, flat metal clip that secured Carter’s seatbelt around his car seat had a half inch bend in it from the force of the high-speed stop, but it held fast.

It was a miracle everyone made it through. For all the times we had asked for safety as one of those habitual requests during mealtime prayers over the years … I couldn’t help but think we got a definite answer that day.

Unsalted Butter Runs In Our Blood

Joanie has two new pastry cookbooks and has been going through flour and unsalted butter without restraint. She's actually marking in her brand new books in pen — she's the Half-Blood Prince of our kitchen.

After mastering croissants a couple weeks ago (OK, have you ever eaten a croissant just out of the oven?) she put together these cream cheese danishes topped with apricot glaze tonight. Unbelievable. So much for all the swimming I did last week.

Dubbie

Spending this week working in Washington, DC. Heroic statue of George Washington I've been passing each morning on my walk to work.

A Fresh Start

Our maples are doubling in greenness with each passing day. My sinuses can tell, I'm sneezing like mad.

Speaking of new beginnings, I just unboxed my new keyboard. I've switched from pollen to that new tech smell under my nose.

I sloshed a big glass of water into my last 'board, wiping out the shift, option, command keys plus the space bar. Kind of tough to limp through without that combo.

I hobbled for a couple days using Microsoft Word's Insert > Symbol: frustrating, but less so than texting on my wife's clunky cell.