Saturday – July 18: Another lazy day, decided to see a movie and go to the beach.

Went to see the movie “The Hangover”. It was a Douglas type film, a little crude but funny.

Decided to check out the beaches near the airport but we ended up at A Bay in the late afternoon. Douglas and Mom went in and Sandy soon found a turtle swimming by and Douglas saw a baby stingray, the barb being longer than the actual stingray’s body!

For dinner, we BBQ’d some Ahi tuna, with Costco mango relish, excellent.

Played some more gin rummy and I seem to be on a losing streak!

Friday, July 17: Helicopter tour with Paradise helicopters from the Hilo airport at 9:30 a.m. Took the coast route for our reservation. We left at 7:25 assuming 1.5 hours as most folks told us. The GPS told us 9:14, which I didn’t believe. Well, there are very few passing zones and people don’t move over to let other cars pass, just going with the flow. Rainy and foggy on the way and in Hilo as well. I was wondering if the flight was going to go.We arrrived at 9:15, we were supposed to be there between 8:45 and 9:00 a.m., oops!

The flight was fantastic and spectacular as mother nature usually is. Great photos!

We hoped to hang out in Hilo and were ready to go the beach but it was still rainy and foggy. Breakfast was at Ken’s Pancake House. Fair, written up in the “Hawaii, The Big Island Revealed” book, but recommended by the staff at Paradise Helicopter. Fair was the review from us, the pancakes were lacking taste.

We took the Saddle Road back over to Waikoloa because of the weather in Hilo. It felt like a shorter drive, but people tell us, the 2 roads are within 15 minutes of each other, depending on traffic. The views on Saddle Road are spectacular, especially at the crest of the road, between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. The road on the west side IS rough, at the crest is a NEW freeway and is undulating, up and down on the Hilo, wet side. I think I prefer it to Highway 19, through the north shore.

Did the pool pupus at 5:00 p.m. for dinner. Sandy made her 7-layer bean dip, good stuff!

Thursday, July 16: Lazy morning getting Douglas adjusted to the time zone and new place.

Harry Potter afternoon movie day. All 4 of us went to see Harry Potter, the half-blood prince down in Kona. Great movie, a little long but entertaining. Went after the movie to the Kona Brewing Company for pizza and my favorite brew. We picked up a growler of Wailua Wheat for later consumption as well.

Wednesday – July 15: Douglas is coming, we are all looking forward to having him here. We talked with him this morning and his flight from San Jose to LAX is on time, but the flight from LAX to Kona is delayed from 1:00 to 3:43 p.m.. Instead of arriving at 3:45, he will be coming in at 6:13 on Delta 1767. It’s OK, but Rosie is REALLY anxious to see the new Harry Potter movie with him. He agreed to wait and see it with us as well, after he teased Rosie that he was going to see it with Julia last night at midnight.

Well, things change. Douglas’ flight has been delayed from 1:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m Hawaii time. We have been just hanging out waiting it out with him. He is due to arrive at 11:00 p.m., instead of 6:45 p.m. or so. I am sure that he is tired, but we are anxious to have him here for a while. It is a good thing we didn’t plan anything for tomorrow so that he can relax!

Tuesday – July 14: Slow day, took my walk and tracked it with the GPS-X application on the iPhone. After you create a track, the software lets you upload it to your Facebook or Twitter account, it is very seemless integration and quite kool.

The afternoon was spent playing with my website and converting it to the “Piece of Paper” template from jmjetten@home.nl (henkvreissler). After I was all done, I’m not sure that I like the new look any more than the existing one.

Dinner was chicken tacos, home-made beans and mango-peach salsa from Costco. Excellent, better than last night’s Prime Rib dinner at the Marriott!

We talked with Douglas and he is ready to come over tomorrow, hopefully everything will be smooth.

Monday – July 13: Took the Subaru to service down in Kona to replace the a wiper linkage that was broken during the last service inspection. I waited for about an hour and they were prompt and on time. On the way back, stopped by Home Depot to check out marble refinishing – with no luck. I need to do some more research.

The afternoon was nice and relaxing with dinner at the Hilton Waikoloa for their Monday 50% off specials. The restaurant is good at 50% off, I’m not sure that it is worth full price.

Using the new Handbrake version 0.9.3, you can rip and convert non DVDs. I took the Quicktime mov files created with the Mimo Recorder and fed them to Handbrake for conversion to 640×480 format for playback with Quicktime on PC/Mac or for importing to iTunes. A 42 meg file was reduced to 8 megs, quite tolerable for student downloads. 8 megs is about 1 song at 192 kbit AAC format. The 42 meg file is about my upper limit in detail and length.

Sunday – July 12: Went to Church in Waimea and we dragged Rosie with us. The hula “Our Father” was the highlight and we wanted Rosie to see and experience it.

Had breakfast at the Paniolo Country Inn again. Afterwards, we explored the Parker Ranch store and Rosie picked up a cowboy hat fror her Chico farm work. She does look like a wrangler now!

We explored the north part of the island via highways 250 and 270. These are different parts with many weather contrasts. Stopped by the Lapakahi hisorical site to check out the native people and their livelihood. Rosie was bored.

The afternoon was nice and quiet. Tomorrow, the Subaru goes to service a broken wiper link.

We used Netflicks to steam a movie over the TV, worked quite well!

Saturday – July 11: Went down to Kona to visit a Christmas in July craft show at the King Kamehameha hotel at the intersection of Panali and Alii drives. Cute show, not too large.

Drove down around Alii and stopped at Don’s MaiTai Bar for lunch, again. Good stuff!!

Came back around, stopped at Costco for dinner, we had the pre-cooked ribs, yummy!

Noticed this morning that this blog didn’t have the random photos on the right hand sidebar, they disappeared when I updated from WordPress 2.8. to 2.8.1. The RSS plugin did not catch the changed folder for the Smugmug thumbnails, fixed that and we are back in business. For the record, the path is ../blog/wp-content/plugins/photo_sb_cache. Make sure you change that in the plugin settings from /photo-sb/ and everything is good.

Finally, with the Freshy 2 theme, don’t forget to edit the my_footer.php file in the theme editor to modify the footer of each page to your liking.

Friday – July 10: Day for relaxing, nice and slow. Did a few more math lessons, I am up to Chapter 3, Lesson 6. It is proceeding, but I keep getting distracted by other stuff. I am not sure what the other stuff is, but I ended up reading the Hawaii Underground Guide for a while.

We have to go to the Volcano Park and go to the sea area where the lava is expanding the island. Maybe hike to the Green Beach again too.

Looking around for themes for the daveesquer.com, nothing from elixer graphics worked out for me. I am back to looking at Blue Ball Design templates.

It is nice to “get in the groove” and not be running around or doing things. We do have Mom’s service firmed up for the the 21st  leavin from the Honokohau marina.

Thurday – July 9: Found this theme called Freshy 2 on the internet. I played around with the Freshy theme for my blog and moved to it. I have added the equations options of ASCIIMath as well. Let’s try it out as `x^2`. I think I like the new look. It is highly customizable. The right sidebar is set to dimension 210 px and the overall dimension of the blog is 800 px. The stylesheet is modified to be “custom_dave_sunset_2”.

Changed from the Picasa photo RSS feed to one for generic RSS feeds. It is from district30, located here. It is actually more flexible that the Picasa plugin I was using. It is picking up the RSS feed from my Hawaii Summer 2009 gallery only and displaying 20 photos at a time.

Went in to Kona to see “Transformers 2” in the afternoon. Great movie, lots of action, the theater has a great surround sound system surprisingly! Stopped by the Kona swap meet down on Alii drive and found some flowers for Mom’s service and a good deal on Mac nuts. The market place is open Wedneday – Sunday from 8:00 to 5:00 pm.

We were craving Mexican food, did a search on google and found just one review of Pancho and Lefties on Alii drive. Comments were not good, free bugs, things like that. So .. Sandy suggested we try that place on the way into Kona, on the left side, before you hit the Costco turnout. It is called TacoDelMar and it was pretty good, right up there with Killer Tacos. Their website is tacodelmar.com. It is located at 74-4038 Hulikoa Drive in Kailua-Kona and their phone number is (808) 331-8226. Their brochure has their address as 74-5452 Makala Blvd #201 however. They have beer, whereas killer tacos does not, and they say … they are cleaner!

Wednesday – July 8: Nice easy slow day. Decided to do my lessons on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the days that Sandy goes to water aerobics from 9:00 to 10:00. I have that quiet time … so I started this morning and got up to Chapter/Lesson 2-8. I am making progress!

Rosie went to get her hair trimmed at the Waikoloa Village beauty place and she was very happy with her new look!

About 11:00, the 3 of us decided to go down to the beach. We ended up at A-Beach, by the Queen’s Marketplace. We had Subway for lunch on the beach and too much sun by 2:00 p.m. Harsh conditions here in Hawaii for unprotected skin, mine included. No more tank-top for a while.

Picked up a few supplies at the Aloha market, their Ahi tuna was 8.99 dollars/pound, better than the Waikoloa Village Market and larger pieces. It was great again, this time with a little ginger marinade.

Tuesday – July 7: Attacked the shower door this afternoon with the chemical … makes NO difference, I surrender to the calcium!

Spent some time researching Mom’s ash scattering. Search google for “ash scattering hawaii” and I found 2 sites. One subcontracts to the other for the island of Hawaii. We may go directly with the local guy out of Honokohau harbor above Kona. I’ll talk with Anna about this soon and firm up a date.

I can’t remember what other evenets of the day except that I did see the ISS pass by overhead about 8:00 p.m. again.

Yesterday, Monday the 6th was our 1/4 (14th day – 14 x 4 = 56 total days we are here) milestone. So far, so good.

Monday – July 6: Finally, got motivated to start my homework problem lessons for Algebra. Sat down in the morning and worked on lessons from Chapter 1 and FINALLY finished them all. They are recorded as *.mov files and I have to figure out a way to shrink them down and convert them to *avi files for Windoze users.

In the afternoon, we went down to Kona to do some errands, beach chairs, chicken from Costco, new sliders for sliding screen doors, new plastic glassware for pool activities … It never stops.

Had dinner at the Kona Brewing Company, pizza and beer. The pizza is excellent and the beer is as well. We are figuring out where everything is. We have a Walmart, Longs, Safeway, Ross for Less, First Hawaiian Bank, Lowe’s, Barnes and Noble, the Brewery and Target all within close proximity off Palani and Henry streets and the Queen’s highway. Next to the Costco is the Home Depot.

I picked up some chemicals for the shower doors, that is my project for tomorrow. Picked up a shop-vac too, to keep everything tip-top too!

Worked on this blog to add pictures from smugmug.com. I needed a plug-in, like I had for Picasa and found this one that works quite well. It is located here.

I feel better that at least Chapter 1 is finished!!