Elastic Basket for my Peaches

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Monday, March 01, 2010

"TsuNotmi

Hey Beloved Blog Readers,
I still exist. It’s about time for one of these. I might as well tell you about our “tsunami” scare this weekend.

On Saturday morning, I was supposed to go surfing with some friends and some of the DTS students. In the middle of the night I woke up to use the restroom and checked the time on my phone. I noticed that I had several messages starting at 3am. One of my friends had texted me that a tsunami was supposed to hit Hawaii around 11am. Since it was still early I decided to just try to go back to sleep. Around 8am, I started hearing people in our kitchen since my room shares a wall with it. I checked my phone again and I had several missed calls and texts from people warning me of the tsunami.

I stumbled into the kitchen, half asleep and asked what was going on. We started checking the internet and saw that a tsunami was supposed to hit. I called my friend, Kristy to make sure she’d heard and tell her that it looked like we wouldn’t be surfing. She was already in the know after being awakened to a tsunami siren at 6am. She lives in Paia, which is right on the coast. The police started evacuating all the people on the coast. Kristy and all our students and staff in Paia came up to our base in Haiku. Our house quickly began to look like a refugee camp. It reminded me of my experience during Hurricane Ike.

Our base is pretty high up and not very close to the ocean so we knew we were safe. We didn’t know what to do so we started playing horseshoes in the yard. Apparently I am awful at horseshoes but it was still a good way to pass some time as we awaited impending doom.

Someone got the idea that we should find a place to watch the tsunami. Someone suggested we go to Pauwela Point, a cliff nearby. Kristy called her parents to see if it was a good idea only to find that they were already there. Most parents are more cautious than their kids but definitely not Kristy’s parents. A bunch of us piled in the back of a pickup truck and headed to Pauwela Point. There were tons of other people there, sitting in lawn chairs and drinking beer. It was like an impromptu tailgate party.

We sat out there for several hours calling home periodically to find out the tsunami’s progress. The whales were definitely acting strange but other than that nothing seemed out of place. Finally after we’d stayed long after the predicted impact time, we decided to go back home. It was pretty anticlimactic, which was good and bad. I am glad nothing really bad happened but it would have been cool to see a huge wave. The only bad thing that happened was that a lot of people got really sunburned waiting outside trying to see the tsunami. I like to call it a “tsunami burn.” I had put sunscreen on my face but I did get an odd oval-shaped burn on my leg from sitting cross-legged so long. I’m thinking of calling FEMA to demand some aloe vera gel.

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