This has nothing to do with the election...

Seriously -- I'm all politics'd out right now...

Instead, since I seem to finally be over my jet lag (and have also managed to get used to the daylight savings time change), I can reflect on vacation... We had a great week with mom, dad, Aunt Carol and (Aunt-in-law?) Carol-Lee -- and Bob and Jeanie joined us on Wednesday, after they spent a few days on Molokai. Some thoughts from the week:

Things to be Thankful For

After our first full day on Maui, we sat down for a nice dinner at one of the restaurants at the resort. Right before dessert, my dad got a call on his cell from Bob -- he and Jeanie were renting a house right on the beach in Molokai, and they'd just gotten word about an earthquake in Canada that was sending a 600-mile-per-hour tsunami wave directly toward us. Not two minutes later, we heard the sirens sounding on Maui. The wait staff at the restaurant assured us that they'd been through the exact same thing many times before, and most of the time it amounted to nothing. But it still made for a rather dramatic evening. The lower levels of the hotel were evacuated, sirens continued to sound, the water was shut off (and, consequently, the water-cooled air conditioning), and the Hawaiian news stations really had a field day milking the tsunami warning for all it was worth. They kept airing a graphic that showed how the tsunami energy was aimed directly at Hawaii... and they emphasized the fact that there's nothing between the Canadian coast and Hawaii to slow down massive killer waves. Fortunately, they were only estimating a wave between 3 and 7 feet, but that didn't stop the newscasters from ominously portending unexpected calamity. Live webcams of the shoreline kept a vigilant lookout for the inevitable wave, which was estimated to arrive at 10:30, so we watched the TV in our room to see what happened... and then 10:30 came and went... and then 10:45 (the newscasters reminded us: "it's not an exact science -- the time was just an estimate."). By 11:00, I was getting tired of staring at the live webcam of a totally calm beach and decided to go to bed in my waterless, air condition-less hotel room...

In the morning, we found out that the biggest "wave" to hit Maui was about two feet high (although apparently they had a slightly larger wave over on Molokai). We also started hearing about friends and family dealing with Hurricane Sandy over on the east coast, and we realized how fortunate we were that our "emergency" turned out to be nothing.

If You Want to Kill Him, You'll Have to Try Harder

There was more unwelcome excitement after Bob and Jeanie arrived. We all met up for dinner at one of the resort restaurants one evening, where Bob ordered some kind of fish entree. Bob happens to be extremely allergic to specific kinds of ocean-dwellers -- anything that lives in the sea and turns red when it's cooked is totally off-limits. So lobster, crab and shrimp are all on his "do not eat" list. However, any kind of white fish is perfectly fine. So he ordered his white fish, and when it arrived, took a small bite... I was sitting at the opposite end of the table, so I didn't realize anything was amiss until I noticed that Bob and Jeanie were both frantically attempting to flag down the waiter. When he arrived at the table, they asked him if the entree had any sort of shrimp in it -- apparently Bob had taken one bite, and immediately felt the tingling of an allergic reaction. The worst part is that the waiter then came back and said, "no, there's no shrimp in it -- perfectly safe," so Bob took another tiny tentative bite... just as a busboy rushed over and told him there WAS shrimp broth in the dish. The chef actually wasn't SURE about what was in the broth in the entree, so he had to double-check. (I will leave out the various exclamations that were uttered at this point... let's just say that Bob was NOT happy...) The manager was summoned, I ran out to the little general store in the lobby to buy Benadryl, and Aunt Carol offered her epi-pen (which she has in case of bee stings) at the ready. Fortunately, since Bob was so suspicious of the entree to begin with, he'd only had a tiny bit... so the allergic reaction never accelerated into anything dangerous. And I have to give credit to the restaurant manager, who was extremely apologetic... and hopefully this was a lesson to the restaurant staff about being more aware of allergens...

Time Zones are Fun

Random comment: It's really weird to wake up at 8 a.m. on a Sunday in Hawaii and immediately find football on TV. I just consider football more of an afternoon sport... I can't deal with football before breakfast. Just saying...

Some Things are Better Left Unsaid

After our plane backed away from the gate at the Maui airport the day we left, the pilot announced to everyone, "folks, we're going to have to return to the gate... we're having trouble getting our left engine started..." Which, of course, is always something you want to hear when you're on a plane. He then went into an explanation about how sometimes ("actually, it's pretty rare") when planes have been flying at high altitudes for a while (our plane had arrived to Maui from Dallas, and we were making the return trip), some valve in the engine can get sticky and cause the engine to freeze up. But supposedly it was an "easy fix" and the maintenance guys would have us on our way as soon as possible. And then the pilot said, "we'll just try to start it one last time, to see what happens... oh, there it goes!" So, amid the nervous laughter of passengers (who, it ended up, didn't even need to hear about the malfunctioning engine), we backed away from the gate again and were on our way. Seriously, couldn't they have tried starting that engine "one last time" before they told us that they couldn't start it??

Of course, the majority of our time was spent listening to waves on the beach, taking pictures of green mountains and eating as much Hula Pie as we could get our hands on (thank goodness no one is allergic to Hula Pie -- that would be a serious tragedy :)). And now I have to get used to this cold Chicago weather (and by the way, did you know it's almost Thanksgiving??? As usual, the year is going by way too quickly...). But I can't complain -- in fact, now that I've had a Hawaii fix, I can say: bring on the snow!