Welcome back to winter! The one jarring thing about going to any tropical place in the dead of winter is the return home. You sit in a flying metal tube for some amount of hours, and when you exit it’s a drastically different atmosphere than the one you experienced when you entered that tube. I got home at around 6:00 a.m. on Monday morning and had nothing more than a windbreaker for warmth. Seeing my breath on the jet bridge was my welcome back to Minnesota.
Aloha from paradise, once again. Today is Day 10 on Kauai, if you count the original Tuesday when I spent the whole day flying and didn’t get to the condo until 9:00 that night. Today, with a nod to John Cleese, I can write these words: “And now for something completely different.” I guess you’d have to be a Monty Python fan to get that. What’s different? I’m attempting to write this blog on my iPad. S0, if this effort is successful, this is apt to be pretty short. If it’s not, it will be because my patience ran out and I quit trying.
Aloha everyone, from the shores of Kapa’a on the island of Kauai. It’s a tough and challenging life here. Sometimes the sand gets stuck between your foot and your flip-flop, and that is so annoying. Or there’s the incessant sound of the Pacific Ocean lapping against the shore. And don’t even get me started on those obnoxious trade winds rocking the towering coconut palm trees. Those trees should be a lot shorter. C’mon, who needs trees that tall? Or the food here. How much fresh fish that was just caught today can one guy eat? I can’t believe I signed up for this!
So there’s big news to divulge in this Thursday Blog Day installment. Did you know the Super Bowl is here in the Twin Cities this weekend? Oh, you knew that? OK, but that wasn’t the big news anyway. Did you know I accepted a position as house-sitter and cat-sitter for my sister Mary, and that difficult assignment begins on Tuesday, and it’s for nearly two weeks? Some of you knew that. For those of you who didn’t, perhaps you know where my sister Mary lives. Yes, you do. She lives on Kauai, of course. Aloha! Mary and Lonnie are doing a Mainland tour to see their kids and grandkids, and that means leaving their condo, along with kitties Maxie and Biscuit, empty and without human interaction. So I volunteered to come hang out with the felines and keep an eye on the place. This has been leaked on social media and other places, and it’s been in the works since right after we got back from our Christmas visit, but now it’s almost here. Can’t wait, but that’s not really the big news either.