The land in this area are fairly flat, sloping gently towards the west until the mountains rise abruptly high in the sky. This place is also the home of Brigham Young University – Hawaii. The combination results in a lot of young people moving around town and the campus on skateboards. They obviously need a place to store and lock the skateboards while they’re in class … and a skateboard rack definitely fills the bill. I suppose these kinds of racks exist elsewhere in the world, but this is the first place that I’ve seen them.
I also know, without a doubt, that if I tried to ride a skateboard I’d be dead. Almost instantly dead … skull broken wide open as it smacked the pavement as the skateboard went one way and my body went the other, arms flailing. It’d be a pretty fast perishment, though. I go down hard and fast. It’s kind of fun watching the young, not necessarily athletic, folks cruise around the area on their skateboards. That got me to thinking about the energy used on a skateboard vs walking vs riding a bicycle. I think it takes the same amount of energy to move a certain mass a certain distance regardless of the method, so the calorie usage should be the same regardless. I’m thinking that the only difference is calories expended per unit of time. Experts, please clarify / correct my thinking!
The days really do run together here, since most days are pretty much the same as the day before. I was sure that we were assigned to work at the Polynesian Cultural Center this afternoon. When I mentioned it over at the Visitors’ Center, it turned out that the assignment is next Tuesday, not today. I’d have figured it out sooner or later (hopefully before changing clothes and going over to the PCC), but that pointed out the immediate need for an accurate calendar.
One of these days (hopefully sooner than later) my Apple Watch will arrive. It hasn’t been shipped yet since I’ve not gotten an email to that effect and my credit card hasn’t been fully charged. When it arrives I’ll need to clean up the calendars that I have on the computer. Right now everything on my calendar appears two or three times depending on whether I entered it on the Macbook calendar or on Google Calendar. They’re supposed to sync, but that process is quite flawed for some reason. In the meantime, I used a paper calendar. It’s a small spiral-bound booklet published by the Church for use by missionaries. Each booklet covers six weeks. Most of the features (all of which are important to the young missionaries) aren’t necessary as I don’t have the same reporting requirements as the young missionaries. But, it fits nicely in my shirt or back pocket and works very well for my needs.
Since we didn’t have to go to the PCC this afternoon, instead we did some laundry and did a little bit of shopping. After the stop at the drugstore (to buy a new hairdryer for Nina. Her old one lit up like a firecracker this morning showering her with sparks. She yelped pretty loudly…), we stopped for a short walk along the beach. The temperature was just right although it was a bit windy. Nina loves the beach and got a brief “pick me up” as we strolled along a few yards behind a young couple obviously quite taken with each other. I almost wrote “shot in the arm” rather than “pick me up”, but didn’t because we both got a different shot in the arm yesterday when we got the final Hepatitis A and B shots. These are expensive vaccinations, but they’re done and we won’t every have to do them again. Now all they need to do is to be effective.
Nina has posted some pictures on Facebook about seeing various flip-flops on the beach when she does her morning walk. They’re there because people walk down to the beach and shed the flip-flops (the footware for at least 90% of the people here is flip-flops) while they walk along the beach. Nina did the same. She likes the feel of the sand on her feet and between her toes. I don’t. I wear shoes … water shoes, tennis shoes, or just ordinary shoes. I don’t like how the sand stretches the arch of my feet so I want something with more support on my feet. The only place I wear flip-flops is in the shower at a campground as an athlete’s foot preventative measure.
So, tonight before posting this blog entry I put together the new calendar for this six-week span. Missionary transfers happen every six weeks and the Missionary Daily Planners are built for a six-week period of time. Each six weeks starts a new planner. I should have written mine in pencil, though. I started putting the dates at the top of the pages … April and then May. Halfway through I realized that the dates were May and June. Somewhere I’ve lost a month in my memory. Then, as I started correcting that by lining through the wrong dates, I noticed that I had skipped a day, twice. The dates go May 20 followed by May 21, not May 20 followed by May 22nd. So that had to be corrected. Maybe I should buy some white-out….
Life is full of complex minutia….