Too Much Rain in Paradise: May 13 - 19, 2024

 

    

  We were asked to be in charge of this week's Family Home Evening activity.  We chose to do the game Conference Jeopardy.  It's a fun way to review all the talks given at General Conference. 

We have used this version of the game with our Pamela Place group when we were serving there before our mission.  The first round was questions are divided by sessions.  We then had a double jeopardy round with the following categories - What Is the Subject, Words of Wisdom, Funny Things, Stories Told, and This 'n' That.  It culminated in a Final Jeopardy Question.  We had the Elder's Quorum President, Evan, be our game show host.  He was a very good "Alex Trebek".  There weren't as many students there this week, so we only had two teams.  After the final jeopardy question the score was 7000 to 7001.

  The winning team squeaked out a win.  We ended up giving prizes to both teams because the score was so close.  We were only in charge of the activity, but the FHE committee made breakfast sandwiches for the refreshments.  We have decided we should not eat dinner before FHE because they serve a meal afterwards, not just refreshments!

    It was Laie May Day on Tuesday.  All the elementary school children came to perform at the Pacific Theater at the PCC.  It's like BYU-H Cultural Night only with elementary school children.  Sister Tingey and I were allowed to take a break and go watch for about an hour.  The whole theater was full, and we had no place to sit.  All the upper seats were filled with all the students dressed in their costumes.  The parents and family members had filled up the lower portion of the theater.  We had to stand in one of the stairways to watch the performance.  When we arrived, the pre-Kindergarteners were performing (top picture in the collage).  Then the 6th graders performed (bottom right picture in the collage). They were representing Africa.  They did a really good performance, and they were fun to watch.  The kindergartens then performed.  They represented Jamaica (bottom left-hand picture in the collage).

We were also able to see the first graders perform.  They were representing Greece (bottom picture in collage to the left), and the second graders perform.  They represented China.  I spied Brent and Jen Cowley right before the second graders performed and ran over to see them.  Their son, Cohen, was performing with the second graders.

    

  During some of the performances, the children in the other grades who were sitting in the audience would sing and dance along with the kids on stage.  Here are the fifth graders closest in the black and red costumes.  You can see some of them with their hands up and singing along.  

    I really would have liked to have seen the whole thing but had to get back to work.  Tuesday is a pretty busy day for me.

   Another rainy shift of Ask Me at the Marketplace.  My lei from Mother's Day was still looking fresh, so I wore it instead of my kui nut necklace. 

       It has actually been quite rainy since last Thursday.  We've had many downpours and warnings for potential flooding.

      While we were at the PCC, we spied this little guy.  Actually, it's not so little.  It's the biggest snail I have ever seen!  Ugh, but it's the prettiest snail shell I've ever seen as well.  All the rain is bringing out an invasion of snails!

   It wasn't raining Wednesday morning when we got up, so we headed over to BYU-H so I could get in the pool to do water aerobics and Elder Rappleye went to the workout room.  It actually rained on me twice while I was in the pool, but it wasn't a downpour and thankfully it didn't rain for too long.  At least it's warm when it rains here.

Then Elder Rappleye felt like he needed to go into work (even though it was our day off).  I was supposed to have a field trip to Pepsi in Honolulu, but it got postponed because of all the heavy rainfall.  The picture above is flooding on the road we take to get to town. There was a good chance we would have gotten stranded and not been able to get back to Laie if we had gone to Honolulu.  Instead, I stayed home and got some items of business done that I needed to do.  By late morning, it seemed like the weather was not going to clear up, so I got showered and dressed for the day.  About an hour later, the sun came out and it was nice.  I really wanted to go to the beach, but I wasn't sure how long the sunshine was going to last, and I'd already showered.  It turned out that it was nice for about 4 hours.  I regret not dropping what I was doing and heading to the beach.  I didn't know that the rest of the week was going to continue to be rainy.  When it came time to go play pickleball, it was raining at our pad, but we decided to drive up to Laie and see if it was nice enough to play.  Sure enough, by the time to got to BYU-H, just 3 miles down the road, it had stopped raining.  We were able to have a nice evening playing pickleball with the Colemans, Fischers, Elder Rainsdon, and Sister M.

  On Thursdays before we leave the PCC to go to Honolulu to do the town run, we always go to the motor pool because we have to check out and pick up the cargo van.  We usually get delayed there because Elder Rappleye has things he needs to tell the other workers in the motor pool before he is going to be gone all day.  Today, I caught him showing Sister Bates how to do a task on FMX on the computer.  Proof, that despite Elder Rappleye saying that he doesn't know how to do anything they want him to do on the computer, he knows more than he lets on.

   Luckily Thursday wasn't one of the heavy rainfall days and we had no trouble with flooded roads.  We had only 5 stops to make with several of them close together and being stops we were familiar with.  The picture on the right is one of the murals I've been wanting a picture of. We drive by it quite frequently, but it's hard to get a photo of it because we are driving by so fast and it's between highway pillars.  I got most of the mural in the picture.  You can see the raindrops on the car window.

    Driving home we were able to see so many waterfalls cascading down the Ko'olau Mountains.  On our drive into Honolulu the clouds were covering the mountains, but on our drive home the clouds had lifted enough that we could see the many waterfalls that had popped up because of the heavy rainfall we have had for a week. I've tried to find on the internet how much rain we have had here in the Laie area in the last week, and the closest I could find was a reading at Kahana Bay, about 5 miles away of 15.75 inches in the last 7 days.

      Thankfully we got home before the big rainstorm hit.  We hadn't been home very long before it started pouring down rain again.  Here's a couple pictures from our deck of the street gutter in front of our house full of water.  We live near the top of the street by the mountain, and you can see the dirt that is being swept down the street from off the mountain.  Sadly, we don't get any lovely waterfalls coming down the side of our mountain when it rains a lot like we saw coming home.

Thursday night we got a knock on our door.  Our neighbor behind us was at the door.  His wife was having hip replacement surgery the next day.  We had already told him we would fix them dinner Friday night for when they got home from the hospital.  He wanted to ask us if we would also pray for his wife that all would go well with her surgery.  We told him we would love to and most definitely pray for his wife, Lara. 

      Friday morning, we woke up early and watched Elder Young's funeral on You Tube at 6 AM our time. It is wonderful to have the technology to be able to participate in the funeral that was held in Utah, but we are in Hawaii.  They also had a group that performed the haka outside the building after the funeral.  We didn't get to see it, but I bet it was awesome.

     Friday after work, there was a break in the rainy weather, so we decided to chance it and go for a bike ride.  We finally have another bike available for Elder Rappleye to ride so we can both go for a bike ride together.  There is a bike/walking path along the Kamehameha highway starting just north of Laie and going north toward Kahuku.

    A section of the path goes past a horse pasture.  The horses are very friendly and come right up to the fence next to you.  We see people stopping there all the time to feed the horses.  We started our bike ride from the motor pool at the PCC, biked through the town of Laie to get to the start of the bike path, went all the way to the end of the bike path and back again.  It's about a 6-mile round trip.  We are used to longer bike rides, but it's about the only place to ride bikes around here where you don't have to worry about getting hit by a car.

      When we got home from our bike ride, our back neighbors were home from the hospital, so I finished up fixing their dinner, cooked it in the oven (our neighbors don't have an oven in their apartment, so having a home cooked, oven cooked meal was extra special.)  I made them beef and bean enchiladas.  It's one of the few recipes that I can remember without having my recipe card to refer to.  

      Saturday was an all-day rainy day.  We did manage to take a walk in the morning down to the post office to mail a couple of birthday packages to grandchildren before it started to rain.  I kept checking the radar map to see if there was any place on the island that did not have rain, but no such luck.  We just stayed home and had a relaxing day. I was able to get caught up on a few things.

   Sunday at piano lessons, it was my student, Tapu's turn to play the closing song.  Every week the student's take turns playing a closing song of their choosing while everyone else gathers round the piano and sings.  It's good practice for them to get used to playing while people are singing.  They need to learn how to keep the tempo while people are singing and to keep going if they make a mistake instead of stopping and going back and playing it right.  Tapu chose a hymn that was not one she had already learned, but one she figured out on her own during the week that was much harder than the hymn she had been practicing.  The hymn was "Be Thou Humble".  She had taught herself how to play the right hand.  I just helped her smooth over a few rough spots, taught her what to play for the introduction, and sang along while she played to help her get used to playing while people are singing to see where she was too slow and get used to not stopping when she made a mistake. 

  

   The picture above was taken while Tapu was playing, and we were singing.  The picture to the right is Tapu and Krystle playing chopsticks after class was over.  They will both be great piano players someday.

     Sunday is one of our favorite days of the week because we get to spend more time with the students than any other day.  They are all wonderful and amazing!