Happy New Year Brudda!

Happy Holidays everybody! Well, Christmas and New Years have already slid by and it's still sunny and 80 everyday...brrr... Personally, I can't wait until it warms back up to 85 everyday come March.

So, we haven't posted much in a while, but I'll just let the pictures do the talking with some narration to show you some of the stuff that we're up to.

So, we drove to see the fresh lava twice during the past week. The first time, we brought hiking shoes and lights, and then we were only allowed to walk within about 400 meters of it...a little dissapointing. But, this last trip we made was a lot better. While we didn't bring the lights and wore flip-flops, we were allowed to get within about 20 feet of the fresh lava, it was pretty cool.

Here are all the people looking at the lava from the viewing area on the first trip we made. We were both bummed we couldn't get any closer...but at least we only had to drive 30 minutes to get home and then try on a different day.


On New Year's Day we hiked to Shipman's Beach, which is this isolated little beach on the eastern side of the island and it was awesome. It took about 45 minutes to hike to along the coast through some really incredible forest along an old Hawaiian road. The beach is right in front of this amazing house that is still owned by the Shipman family (old money). They have fought to make it a private beach, but all the beaches in Hawaii are public...haha.


Woohoo!

Here we are at the fresh lava area. A house was burned down about a month ago out here, where people built on land that was freshly covered with lava only about 10 years ago...next to the world's most constantly active volcano...kinda makes it hard to really feel bad for them.


A few weeks ago we went to this show and silent auction for a fundraiser for BJ Penn's charity, an Ultimate Fighter that lives on our block. It was quite a cultural experience. The comedian opened with a range of Portuguese and Filipino jokes...didn't really expect that. Then we were regaled with the musical stylings of Melveen Leed, the first Hawaiian to perform at the Grand Ole Opry (which she made sure to inform of us in the first minutes of her performance). She spent most of the time harassing the DJ (a kid with an Ipod in the back of the room) to skip through songs and yell the titles to her because she couldn't recognize the tunes.


Christmas Day we went over to our friend Hillary and Steven's house. It was really nice to get together and have a little potluck and play some music! I got a little carried away with the blue outfit though.


This was our first attempt at making Finish Tarts and they turned out really well...mmm. Thanks for sending the cutout Becky!

Binzer made me add this one in the revision stage. "That's not normal!" she said. I guess I just forget that everyone else isn't surrounded by huge Asian bells and bamboo forests.