Napili - Part I

Welcome to Napili!

We have been in our new home for going on four months now, and I think I'm unpacked...maybe. But I didn't say organized.

Don and I took over this place from the dear couple who had our dog, jeep, and snorkel gear (all important yet not interchangeable) the last week of September, and we have been busy nesting ever since. This nest - the latest in a series of a few nests - is a bit smaller than what our last homes have been. At least long term homes, and oh please God let this be a long term home. Anyway, it is not as big as our furniture is used to. This was made abundantly, dramatically clear as we hit our moving day. The guys we hired were a tough, fast moving, and very competent crew, but the floor ran out before the furniture did. The movers wanted to place furniture as it was going to be placed, but we just looked on them fondly...and laughed. It isn't even the slightest bit of hyperbole to say that every bit of space was filled with furniture and boxes. The piece de resistance was the sofa set between the fridge and the kitchen island, thus making them both useless. I wonder if Weightwatchers ever thought of this...??? Anyway, we had to crawl on top of things to get to our air mattress bed in the guest room. Tonight on "Hoarders": The Daltons Move to Napili.

Before we did the actual moving in part, came the painting part - always a big favorite of Don's. But he knows that his wife has an allergy to Navajo White in spaces larger than three square feet. By and large, this place is just such a pasty beige-y white - with a couple of notable exceptions: the front bathroom was pained a cheery pastel green, and one of the secondary bedrooms, that served as a nursery for their ADORABLE baby girl, Selah, was painted a pink-coral color, with pastel stripes on one wall (including pinstripes done to OCD perfection). The bathroom we left as is, but while the pinky-coral striped room was every little keiki wahine's dream, for an office...not so much. There were also a couple of accent walls - a dark brown one in the living room behind where the tv goes...theoretically, and an aubergine (browny-eggplanty-purply) at the end of the hallway. We opted to leave those as they were, also, but chose a nice sage green for living room, dining room, foyer, and family room. Fortunately, they are all in the same room. We chose a warm camel (the color, not the beast) for the office, and a cinnamon brown for the bedroom (makes it very cocoony). We also decided to extend the green into the hallway and leave the kitchen area the boring white. So why am I telling you all that?!!? So I can tell you this:

Painting any place, large or small, can be a daunting task, so we enlisted the help of a good friend from church. Justin handled all the tedious stuff - removing switchplates, removing drapery and blinds and their hardware, taping off, and painting the 17 coats of primer needed for the baby room turned office. Our furniture and boxes were coming two days after we started painting. We figured we would have plenty of time. We were wrong. The problem with choosing darker colors is that it takes more than just one coat - and I do NOT care what they say on the ads!!! The problem with painting in a more rainy climate like we have here in Napili is that nothing dries as quickly as you would like. On top of that, we were three grown people trying to share two ladders, move around paint cans/trays/rollers/brushes, step lightly on drop cloths, and try to stay out of each other's way. What made it more adventurous is our very narrow hallway that is only one-and-a-half super models wide. None of us are super models. When it came time to work on said hallway, we at first attempted politeness and deference. When it was obvious that time was running short and the movers would be there before we knew it, we became Laurel and Hardy plus one. Or, more aptly, as my husband pointed out, the Three Stooges. As movers were arriving with our stuff, Justin was getting the window treatments back on and switchplates on, I was pulling miles of tape, and Don was still doing touchup. I felt like one of those home improvement shows where the object is to redecorate a fifteen bedroom mansion with a budget of $28.57 and a time frame of six hours. We lost. But ultimately, it got done. Praise God.

Movers gone and walls painted, I began to wrap my mind around the task at hand. I think I described it as trying to fit a size ten foot into a size six stiletto. Of course, I only know about such things in the abstract.... Moving on. You know those frustrating little tile puzzles, where you have to move those sticky squares of cheap plastic, that have either tongues or grooves on their sides, trying to make a picture of a car or some kind of creepy face?!?! Well, that is pretty much what we were trying to do - except the creepy face part. Of course, with those little plastic tile puzzles, one could always cheat by prying the little tiles out then popping them back in to make the desired picture of the man with the unfortunate features. No such cheating possible here. We would move things around, from place to place, slipping things around until all found a home. Sometimes, it meant that the dining table was in the living room and the dining chairs were dangling from the chandelier. Of top importance was getting access to our fridge which I had to convince my beloved was more urgent than getting the big tv set up. We actually killed two birds with one stone - we slid boxes and occasional tables toward the sliding glass door, making a spot for the sofa, which then had to be moved further along to make room for the credenza, upon which stood precious flatscreen, then scooted the sofa back to in front of said television. Right in front. As in squooshed right up to it. Don and I had to access the sofa from either side, avoiding the plastic that was still attached to parts we couldn't reach, then scrunch up together for our tv watching - which consisted of a couple of squiggly channels, since the cable wasn't hooked up yet. I think we should have just read a book instead...

The bedrooms/office were suffering from their own personal brand of lunacy and mayhem. Both the master bed and the guest bed had been completely dissembled. Over a year before. Don and his accomplice- uh, I mean, helpful friend, was a young man from our church. They took apart the 2,045 pieces from each bed and put them in a bag. The bags went...somewhere. Considering that we left with almost the haste of people trying to escape without paying next month's rent. Wait....bad metaphor... Suffice to say, it was not the usual organization with which I like to do things. After having a few nights on a blowup bed, and over a year without my big comfy bed, I was no longer willing to wait until hardware magically appeared, so we began to search in earnest. After a long while of fruitless searching, Don brightened with a silent "aha!" on his face. He went to our good drill, opened the case - EUREKA!! All the AWOL hardware had been discovered - but we still had to assemble the beautiful beast known as our Master Bed.

To be continued...

Land Legs

Way back in the olden days of 2000, Don and I took a cruise to celebrate his 50th birthday. We lived in San Diego at the time, and we found the perfect voyage for us - a repositioning cruise (meaning the ship was changing from its winter Mexican Riviera cruises to its summer Alaska cruises) that would depart from San Diego, then bounce up the coast until we reached Alaska, then scoot around a few ports there. In all, it was about two weeks, and what a trip it promised to be. While not normally prone to seasickness, I had a terrible bout of it on our one and only family cruise a few years previous (a four-day, three-night trip to the Bahamas through a tropical depression. Who navigates these things!?!?), and I was determined to not repeat it. Ever. My doctor prescribed a magical little dot - or, more precisely, a few magical little dots - to place behind my ear, so as to prevent my repeat the scenario of me lying on a bed, praying for death, watching the little weather nav thing they had on the ship's t.v., and cursing all on the crew who refused to GO AROUND THE BLESSED THING!!! I still shudder a little at the memory....but I digress.

So, now armed with a little dot behind my ear, and a few more dots in my luggage, Don and I made our way on to this adventure on the high seas. Lo and behold, the magical dots worked!! Even when things got a little gnarly between Seattle and Victoria, I was good. I was smoooooooth. After thirteen plus days, we landed in Vancouver and were met by friends who would be entertaining us for a couple of days until we flew back to San Diego. I had felt nary an ounce of queasy - until we hit land. It seems that my entire system, from my toes to my nose - and particularly my inner ears - had gotten so used to the motion of the ocean that it was now traumatized by the...stand of the land. Okay. It sounded better in my head. Point being, I was now ground-sick. I not only was completely nauseous, I wobbled like a party girl on a Friday night. It's amazing how many walls and columns kept leaping in front of me. My mother said that I needed to find my land legs again. It took me a few days, but by the time we landed back in San Diego, I was all better and could actually pass a field sobriety test.

I have found myself in just such a metaphorical predicament the last few months. If you are a regular reader, then you know all the craziness and ups and downs of our life the past 16 months. If you are not....well, ya gotta read the stuff to catch up with the rest of the class!! Anyway, God took us on that difficult voyage - and while we never, ever stopped longing for home, we got our sea legs and learned how to get by and be grateful for His provision. When God did bring us back, and put us in this home, we got knocked sideways again by the death of my mom. The land legs I was just gaining were all skewiffy (one of my mom's favorite made-up words) again. I was still unpacking, then packing to go back to the mainland, returning home to the considerable chaos that exists with a new move, and rolling headlong into the holidays. Egad. Writing didn't just take a backseat, it was left somewhere on the curb.

While all this sounds like a fancy, wordy way to make excuses....it is just that. I told Don recently that if I am going to identify myself as a writer, then I'd best get to writin'! Don't know if sounding folksy makes me more creative sounding, but it just seemed to fit at the time. All this is to serve fair warning: the next chapter - however long God has designed it to be - will be flooding your inboxes in the next few days, with more to follow. I pray that God will use these words to serve some kind of purpose, and for His glory - not mine. It blesses me when I hear from many of you, but I will try to keep my ego in check. I can't promise that they will all be succinct. In fact, it's a good bet that NONE of them will be so. But remember....

You have been warned...