Friday mornings are always a bit hectic. I have my work meeting at 7 am. Holly has to be at work at 7:30 am. Gavin’s Tae Kwon Do starts at 8 am. It’s usually a bit crazy in the morning trying to get everyone up, fed, dressed, and ready to go. But today we did it in a reasonable manner. No scolding, rushing, aggravations, screaming kids (Gavin is innocent), distracted kids (Gavin is guilty), or anything of the sort. This put me in a good mood for the day.

We drove Holly to work and arrived to Tae Kwon Do 15 minutes early. The kids got out of the car and spent their time waiting over on the playground. Leif was in a good mood and was running all over the field as more kids showed up. The instructor’s car pulled into the driveway as I was talking to a new parent. She hopped out of the car, greeted us and we continued chatting. The instructor then remembered that she had to take her dog, Oprah, out of the car. It was at this time when Leif realized she was here.

Leif knows and loves Oprah. Oprah is really good around kids and Leif cracks up when she licks his face. He loves to pet and kiss Oprah. So when he noticed that Oprah was there, he started to head over to where the cars, and Oprah, were. I squatted down to say hi to Oprah. She was full of energy and wanted to greet everyone at the same time. She didn’t know which way to run. As I was petting her, she noticed the kids over on the playground and bolted to say hi. On the way, she noticed Leif coming to say hi and quickly ad suddenly altered her path of jubilation. Not realizing how close Leif was, Oprah crashed right into him. I watched as Leif was knocked off his feet, did a 360 in the air and landed flat on his face in the grass. It made him look so light. I ran over to him to pick him up as he immediately started to cry. He didn’t seem to be hurt, but I’d freak out too if I was flung into the air by a fast moving animal that was twice my size. Poor kid.

I think I was the only one to actually see the impact. I felt a pang of pain when I saw it. Oprah didn’t seem to be at all effected by the impact. She did get a good scolding though. Meanwhile, poor Leif cried into my shoulders for a few minutes until he became reoriented. He was a little wary of Oprah for a bit after that, but by the end of class, she was following her around looking for hugs, kisses, and wet slobbery kisses.

It looked something like this

“Holly, what do you want for dinner?” says I.
“I want meats. Make me meats.” says Holly.
“Ok then, I will be manly and make you manly meats.” says I.

Poof! Dinner is done. I am manly.

So with my money all spent by someone else, Holly and I only had enough money for one ticket to Oahu for the Scottish Festival. Since I was the one dancing in the demo, I was the one who ended up with the ticket.

Thursday night, I hopped on my motorcycle, fingers crossed, to ride up to the airport. My luck was fantastic. There was no rain the whole way, thought the roads were damp from mist. I made it to the airport as fast as I could have expected. Unfortunately, when I walked up to the gate, I was able to wave to the pilot as he taxied to the runway. That’s what I get for taking the extra minute to put a cover on my motorcycle.

I called Mary right away since she was supposed to pick me up, but the phone rang and rang. No answer. I called again. No answer. I called again. No answer. The one time that Mary leaves her phone at home, I miss my flight. She eventually figured it out and drove back home. She picked me up again 2 hours later.

Friday was simple. I got some work done and replaced the passenger seat on Mary’s motorcycle while she was out to the doctor and lunch with a friend.  Friday night was the ceilidh. As thanks for doing work on the HSA website, I was given two free tickets. Sweet. These gave me access to a night full of dancers, bagpipers, live bands, scottish bangers, fish and chips, American “Haggis” (aka meatloaf), Guinness, Scotch, and of course friends.

During the evening, Mary’s sister showed up in a fantastic mood. She’s been pretty excited at the notion of being husbandless for a bit. She was all dressed up pretty-like and came with a lady friend. She had one or two drinks and seemed to have a wonderful time. It was nice to see her relaxed and having fun.

Saturday was fairly simple as well. We arrived at Kapiolani Park later than we had planned. I don’t feel so bad about it because there wasn’t a lack of things to help with. Before I knew it, it was time to go up and dance. I was not as prepared as I wanted to be and was very nervous. It seemed I wasn’t the only one, because all the other dancers seemed to all be on edge a bit. For one reason or another, it was impossible to get everyone together to walk through our dances before we had to go up on stage. We only got through three or four dances. It didn’t help that during the first dance walk-through, Mary’s dance shoe completely fell apart. The base of the shoe completely peeled apart from the rest of the shoe so that only the top part of shoe was left. Fortunately, the sound crew had gaffer’s tape.

The performance went as I thought it would. I missed a few formations and got a little lost. My partners were awesome and totally helped me through a few parts. Overall, not our best, not our worst. As usual, we all agreed we’d dance better the next day.

Dancing made us very hungry. Mary and I quickly changed and went to find the food vendors. I was snagged before I could get there though. I was handed the RSCDS banner and shooed off to march in the opening ceremony parade. I’m proud to hold that banner.

While I marched, Mary did us the favor of ordering our food. They have been know to have a 15-30  minute wait for some of the plates. After the opening ceremony, there was an order of scotch eggs for me to eat. That was not enough though. We went back and grabbed a plate of scottish stew and fish and chips to fill us up. Now that we had danced and stuffed ourselves, we spent the remainder of our time there working the tea tent selling hot tea, scones, whiskey cake, and haggis.

At two o’clock, Mary told me it was time to go. She was supposed to take her eye drops at this time, but left them at home. So we left early.

It was only 3pm when we got home and we had the whole evening to kill. I needed to find a way to get money for various things; like a plane ticket home. Mary was kind enough to lend me some money, so we drove off to Long’s to buy cat food and get cash back. We walked out with cat food, popcorn, individual packages of mint marshmallow candy things, extra money, and a bottle of 1800 tequila. The plan was to go home, watch District 9 (which was awesome), eat popcorn, and drink margaritas. Other than setting two bags of microwavable popcorn on fire, we were quite successful. We ended the night with a night cap.

Sunday was fairly similar to Saturday. We drove off to Kapiolani park for the Scottish festival around 7:30, helped set up and run the tea tent, dance our dances on the main stage at 11 (much better than the previous day), ate delicious scottish type food, and helped more with the tea tent. Where the day differs is the part where I had to go to the airport. Mary drove me over at 3:30. Because I had just helped to short demonstration on the smaller stage, I didn’t quite have time to change out of my kilt and other fancy-like attire.

I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to check in and pass security. I said my goodbyes to Mary and headed for the check-in counter with my two backpacks and motorcycle jacket. Why were people staring at me?

I sent my backpacks, jacket, sporran, boots, and wallet through the x-ray machine. I knew the alarm would go off as I stepped through the metal detecter because of the built in buckles on my kilt. The TSA lady asked me about my belt. Doh! I removed that and walked through again with the same results. She had me step aside and called another TSA person to come pat me down. I explained about my buckles. What I forgot was that I was also wearing my flashes, which also have metal buckles, and a safety pin. I was searched up and down with his little handheld blinky device. He patted all places where it lit up and made noise. “You’ve done this before, right?”, he asked me. I guess I seemed like I knew what I was doing as he scooted his blinky toy between my legs. After he cleared me he told me that I was the first real life person in a kilt he’d ever seen. Good. My work was done then.

The rest of the trip went by without a hitch. I changed while waiting for my plane. I listened to headphones. Sat at the back of the plane all by myself while the chipper flight attendent cracked her jokes and laughed at the tourists in the front of the plane. If I hadn’t had to ride my motorcycle home, I would have taken advantage of their $2 happy hour drinks.

I arrived home after my rainless 2 hour ride home. It was dark, Gavin was on the couch watching tv, and Holly was laying in bed with Leif putting him to sleep. Gavin gave me a warm welcome which included a hug and kiss. Leif looked at me, smiled, then pushed me away deliberately so he could focus on important things. Nursing and sleep. Smart child.

P.S. If I see Weird Al around town, I’m supposed to tell him to write a song about the Kapiolani Park hose.

Also, I was invited to a red-head contest by someone who may or may not have been up to no good. I didn’t see any red-head contest on the festival itinerary.

Before buying my plane tickets to Oahu yesterday, I had to check my account balance to make sure I had enough money for my bills and what not. Have to pay rent doncha know. This is where the problem came in. Instead of the expected amount to be shown in my account, it was about $800 less. I looked at the recent transactions and found 5 charges that I didn’t make. One was a charge to a UK based website for $748. Added to the other smaller charges, the total unauthorized charges came to $798.99. Ahhhhhh! WTF?

I was totally stunned and couldn’t even open my mouth to tell Holly what happened for at least 60 seconds. When I finally came to, and explained this to Holly, I immediately called my bank and also tried to find the phone number to the place the charges were made. I succeeded with the bank and halfway with the UK website. I filed a dispute with the bank and they cancelled my debit card. That is the 2nd time in the past 3 months that I’ve had to have my debit card replaced. I also had to have my CC replaced because some unknown person changed the billing address on the card. How the hell did they do that? And why would someone want to receive my bills? So yeah. It’s crazy.

This morning, I got in touch with the UK company where the charges were made. I had to chuckle when all the people I talked to had british accents. I don’t know why I expected anything different from calling the UK.

So here I am with no debit card and no money. I can’t buy anything until I either go to a bank or get my new debit card in the mail. I still have to buy my ticket to Oahu for Friday. I feel so helpless and poor. 🙁

It’s Easter weekend! Yaaay. Yesterday was Easter day at school for Gavin. This included dying eggs, relay races and easter egg hunting. As you can see it was quite fun.

Today was Good Friday and it truly was a good Friday. A perfect Hawaiian day. We spent the morning cleaning house, as we will have guests for Easter. It rained early in the morning, but was sunny and clear the rest of the morning. At around lunch time, we finished our cleaning process. “Gavin! Your room is a mess! You have too many toys! Fill this box with toys to give away! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry. Let’s just push the toys to the side of your room and go get lunch.”

With the cleaning done, we discussed plans for the rest of the day while eating lunch. Yum. This past weekend we drove all the way to Costco to get a lamb roast for easter and forgot to buy mint, so part of our afternoon plans included running to Hasegawa’s to see if they had mint. At the same time, we had 4 bags of recycling we had to do. As Gavin and I were filling the machines with diet soda cans, Holly and Leif went into the store to buy a few goodies, which included banana and strawberry flavored Melona pops. She finished before we did and informed me that Weird Al is back. As I went inside to claim our $3.15, I glanced around. Sure enough there was Weird Al, his wife and daughter walking around Hasegawa’s. I wonder how many tourists, and there were many today, will get home from vacation saying, “I saw Weird Al!!”? Probably a lot.

It being a beautiful day, we forced ourselves to get out and go to the beach. I’m glad we did. It was just so gorgeous out today. Holly sat on the sand and watched Leif eat sand while Gavin and I played out in the waves with a boogie board. The water was crisp, clear,m and felt good on the skin. We spent about 1 1/2 hours there and of course I don’t look any tanner. Might have something to do with the SPF 60 applied 1o minutes prior.

We finish off the day by firing up the grill for the first time of the season. We grilled up some awesome pork chops and cherry tomatos from the local farmer’s market. Delicious. Then we taught Gavin how to play Rummy 500. He liked it well enough, but reverted to playing War afterwards; a classic game. Nobody won. Gavin thew down his cards in favor of watching a new episode of Star Wars: the Clone Wars. All while Holly and I enjoy a few cocktails to top off the night. Now we just have to ride the evening through until the kids go to sleep. It has been a truly Good Friday.