Category — Hawaii

We were discussing how Christmas cards are so 2005, unless your Heather who makes a super awesome hand-made Christmas card every Christmas. So consider this an electronic Christmas card from Jeff & Lindsay.

Editor’s note: We really didn’t send Christmas cards in 2005….but you get the point.

Yes, we have a Christmas Theme and used the word “Christmas” seven times in the last three sentences. If you don’t like it, move along. Anyway, onto the year …

Editors note: Comments from Lindsay in Red and Jeff in Green.

January

We were flying back from Hawaii (from our honeymoon) on January 1st. Oh Hawaii…What a great way to ring in the New Year!

We went to Sun Peaks for our good Friend Dylan’s 30th birthday (what an old man). It was great times with phenomenal snowboarding at Sun Peaks per usual.

February

The highlight from February was one of the highlights of the entire year: I discovered and solved my migraine mystery. Turns out the thing that was causing my migraines all along was water (or a lack thereof). Not chinooks, hormones, or exercise. Who knew? (I did) If you are reading this and suffer from migraines try drinking a ton of water. I mean drink so much water every day that you pee constantly and feel like barfing from having drank so much liquid. (No seriously, I harped on this for a while)

My migraines caused me extreme pain and suffering for years. I was on every medication under the sun (vioxx, anti-depressants, anti-seizure medication, vitamin B, others…) to prevent my migraines. The medications caused terrible side effects from dizziness, to nausea to numbness in the extremities. Not to mention the potential long-term damage I may have done by taking so much Imitrex and Maxalt to take the migraines away upon onset. They are wonder drugs but not so wonderful.

Now I just drink lots of water everyday (more if I’m exercising) and I’ve had very few migraines. Of the ones I’ve had since February, I can attribute about 90% of them to dehydration.

Anyways, sorry to hi-jack this Christmas post…but this was definitely a highlight when reviewing 2008. I guess my wishbone wish came true!

Also to note was a nice visit from Larry and Brenda in February and my publication in Nature magazine.

March

I started a company! President Jeff just had such a great ring to it that it seemed like a good idea.

He was nice enough to make his loving wife the Vice President.

In March we also attended one of the funnest parties ever: Robert’s 50th. Hard to believe anyone we play ultimate with is even close to 50…maybe in age but not in spirit. I sure hope I’m still running around (or even walking around) when I’m 50 after playing the equivalent of “tackle football without equipment” (as our chiropractor calls it) for so long.

We also welcomed a new family member, our nephew Conrad, on March 11th.

April

as a side note here. Blog’s are awesome. Seriously. The year in review is so easy to do because you can just Michael J. Fox back into time and “remember” what we did. You would think I’d remember but you’d be wrong.

Some people who read this blog may be bored from the repetition. However, those who don’t care to waste their time on our babble can just read this and treat it like the Cole’s Notes of our life recently.

May

Major highlight #2 for Lindsay: Addition to our family. After a lovely visit to see Jeff’s brother and my parents in BC,

May saw our Cat-Dog Willow enter our life. She’s was so little and cute and won my heart over. For the record (ie: Wriggs) I still don’t like cats. I like Cat-Dog’s. We call Willow our Cat-Dog because she really like to be entertained, played with and has a full routine in the morning. Cat-Dog’s are awesome

We ended May with a trip down to Bozeman, MT to have a weekend-long shower. Where we learned the game psychiatrist! So fun!

June

Brief trip to Victoria for work, but other than that, June was really uneventful, except for our Garage Sale and the Toppers Heroes for Hospice Race!

July

We made it through our first entire year of marriage this month. So far so good. That sure flew by. Seems like just yesterday I was cleaning up from the wedding…er…so maybe I was. Still working out what to do with the dress….

Another significant event in July was Regionals.

August

After all the hard work to get to Nationals, we had a disappointing finish, but I guess if you can’t be top 8, you might as well win the Ninals!

I went on a trip to Toronto and had a wonderful visit with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and my mom (who came with me). Luckily all of my extended family (with the exception of my uncle in Australia) lives in Ontario so it’s like one-stop-shopping. I also visited almost every casino in Ontario…(when in Rome).

Went to Golden with some folks for a little disc golf at Infinity’s Sports Ranch.

Also had a second medical breakthrough – discovered I needed orthodics. Solved my ankle problems, back problems and sore foot problem. Guess it makes sense, the backbone is connected to the leg bone.

September

Great times had in September. Quick weekend trip to Fernie (thanks Terri!) for some mountain biking and relaxation. In case you haven’t heard, we also went to Japan. Amazing country, friendly people and a wonderful trip! Japan is seriously cool. Such a unique place and definitely recommended and high on list of places we’d like to visit (again). Highlights include Bullet Trains, Raw Chicken and Beautiful Gardens.

October

I started working part-time at my ‘real-job’ and part-time as President Jeff. We decided that it would be a smart move because I could get a lot more done and hopefully grow the company a bit. The one question I get lots is how’s the company doing. It’s doing fine and I love all the concern people have, however, this is also one of the reasons that I never told people about my sites for quite some time. You see to get indexed in the search engines takes time (makes sense that you just can’t throw something up and be highly ranked in google). So things I’m doing now is really for the future and so it can be slow going while things are growing.

The end of October also brought Halloween, one of our favorite celebrations of the year. This year Lindsay planned a 30 days till I’m 30 party. Man was it fun. Some of the highlights include meeting our neighbours in sock feet, Egg-up, 12 (or was it more?) people shot-gunning beer (including my Pa) and Anasol.

We went to Victoria for Pumpkin Pull. It was the first time I had been back in about 5 years. So much on the UVic Campus had changed but not much around the city felt different. It still really felt like home and was hard to leave.

November

Jeff turns 30! (I’m an old man now)

Oh and squash club is back in full force which is super fun!

December

We’ve been too busy writing this post to have anything exciting happen in December. Luckily we are snowed in right now and have time for blogging.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND ALL THE BEST IN THE NEW YEAR,

LOVE JEFF AND LINDSAY (AND WILLOW)

We have now finished putting all of our Hawaii pictures up on our picasa site (link on right of our homepage, or go to http://picasaweb.google.ca/jeff.sill ). They are in 4 different folders.

The next step will be to put up the highlights of our wedding photos. We have recently been inspired by our friend Samantha who made a wonderful slideshow of her photos and figured we should do something with ours.

That’s all for tonight. Arms are tired from this evening’s training and it actually is challenging to type.

Jeff had a chance to mention his highlights from Hawaii, but I’ve been sick in bed for the last 5 days, so now that I’m feeling better I’ll voice my favorite hawaiian moments (in no particular order):

1.) Swimming with dolphins in the wild. So very cool. Opportunity of a lifetime that we just stumbled upon.

2.) Trying to surf for my first time ever. Very tough, but very fun. Even caught a wave or two.

3.) Snorkeling in about 10 different places on 3 different islands. We saw so many different fish and GROSS eels (which I was afraid of, but not as afraid of as snakes so that’s good).

4.) The weather. Sunshine and average temperatures of 25 degrees. Even when it rained it was warm.

5.) Volcano National Park on the big island.

6.) Nice steak dinner and Canuck’s jersey for my birthday from Jeff, and to top it all off I was in Maui!

7.) Driving through the lush rainforest and seeing all sorts of cool vegetation and flowers.

8.) Learning how to boogie board and doing it every day. So much fun!  Way easier to learn than surfing and way less work (oh, and cheaper too!)

9.) Hacking in Hawaii.

Lowlights:

1.) Getting sick and spending my last two days there sick in bed (luckily it rained).

2.) Trying Kona coffee and finding out that it was put on a pedistool all this time and its not as good as I thought it was going to be.

3.) Seeing sea turtles twice and not being able to get to them because of sharp, shallow coral separating us from them!

4.) Near death experiences driving the road to Hana and getting to the end (finally) at the seven sacred pools and not being able to swim in them because of all the recent rainfall.

5.) Having to come back to snowy Calgary and “back to reality” 

Lindsay and I have a saying after vacations, “Back to reality”. It’s actually quite a great saying when you prolonge the sentence just a little bit. Try it… you might like it. Anyway, now that we’re back we can tell a few stories. Here are a couple funny / unusual ones while I try to arrange the pictures.

On the way over to Hawaii we flew from San Fransico to Honolulu on United Airlines. On the plane they had a little contest to guess the time of the geographical midpoint of the flight. The co-pilot came on the microphone and gave everyone tons of details of the flight: elevation, cruising speed, time to reach elevation, headwind speed, start time, estimated end time, estimated flight time, etc… Tons of details, which we jotted all down. We then started to discuss and figured that an educated guess was the best way to go. Anyway, we ended up with a time of 6:02:02pm. Turns out the time was 6:01:58. Yeah, that’s 4 seconds off! Anyway, we ended up with the ‘grand prize’ of three containers of Macadamian nuts!

Funny thing is the stewardess came back during the flight and said. “Can I see your time and the actual time? Because we have someone challenging your time.” Nothing ever came of it so I’m guessing 4 seconds was a good guess.

Day 5 (or something like that) we were at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park looking at the steam vents. We were just on the way back to our car and a family unloaded from a mini-van. The kid was obviously full of energy and bolted from the van. As he was running over to the steam vents he sees a mud-puddle, takes one look at it and then starts yelling at his dad.

“Dad, Dad, this puddle looks like a taco!”

Dec 24th – Buying groceries at the Star Market in Kihei, Maui. As the grocery lady is scanning the groceries she asks the usual,

“How are you doing today?”

To which we answer,

“Fine, just got to Maui today and are pretty excited to look around.”

Then about 2-3 minutes later,

“How are you doing today?”

To which we answer,

“Um, good. Enjoying the weather. “

And, about 2 minutes later,

“How are you doing today?”

To which we answered,

“Ummm, uh. Good.”

Why were we at the counter for so long? I’m paying with a travelers check. So I fill in the usual signature and date. The checkout lady says,

“You have to star mark it.”

To which I answer,

“Uh, what?”

“Star Market”

“Umm, what?”

To which the lady behind us in line and the checkout lady helps out by saying

“STAR MARKET”

Lindsay finally helped out by saying,

“Write Star Market here” – pointing to the ‘payee’ point on the check.

Aloha in Hawaiian means Hello and Goodbye. Aloha, Hawaii. Although, I must say that I really wish it was Aloha, Hawaii!  Oh well. 

So our two week vacation is coming to an end with a MARATHON trip home.  *Sarcasm warning*   Luckily, Lindsay has come down with the annual Christmas/New Year Flu/Cold so the trip home should be really fun!     Oh wait.   Maybe not.    Luckily, because we’re flying the security won’t let her bring the NyQuil on the plane.   Oh fun!   *End sarcasm warning*

Enough of about us leaving.   We’ve had a great time and have probably done as much as humanily possible in the past two weeks.  While at the same time being able to relax.   Although, ‘apparently’ we haven’t done enough sitting on the beach doing ‘nothing’.   

The last week we’ve driven the road to Hana and beyond.  Don’t do it.  Ever.  Seriously.  If a friend says “hey, wanna go to Hana?”  Immediately stop being their friend.    We’ve boogie-boarded (duh), relaxed, tried to find turtles and just enjoyed Maui.  

Well, I’m off now.  Time to start this 23 hour trip home.  Happy New Year all! 

Love Jeff & Lindsay

Since we are staying at such a remote place in the middle of nowhere and it gets pitch dark at 6pm and everything closes sharply at dark and we have internet but no cable tv, we had time to put up some pictures last night!!! http://picasaweb.google.ca/jeff.sill/Hawaii

Enjoy. We’re off to the beach!!

xoxo,

L & J

Hey all,

So, funny enough we’re kind of in the middle of no-where on the Big Island of Hawaii. We’re located 30 miles from Hilo and 96 miles from Kona, however, we have wireless internet. Go figure. Anyway, time for a bit of a longer blog.

Today, we headed to the Dormant Volcanoes Mauna Loa and Kilauea. What an amazing experience… The first thing we did was drive up a road to 6000+ ft. The volcano tops out at around ~13,000 feet so not really that close to the top. The road was kinda neat as it was paved but one lane and SUPER curvy with tons of blind corners for about 10 miles. When we got to the top we were a bit disappointed with the view. We’d like to hike the other 7,000 ft but ‘apparently’ it’s a 3-4 day hike.

The rest of the day we toured around Kilauea and saw Steam Vents (which occur when the rain water seeps through the earth, reaches hot rocks, evaporates, creates steam and comes out the cracks in the earth.  See I even learned something today). We also saw some sulfur something or other… I’d give more details but let’s just say it didn’t smell like roses and we didn’t do much reading. We also drove down this road to the ocean where lava used to flow. Unfortunately no lava is flowing right now but we were able to see all the destruction of the lava. It’s so neat the way the lava just goes and takes out whatever is in it’s way (roads, trees, vegetation, signs, etc…). At one point a road used to be where the lava flows and you can see exactly where the lava just flowed right over the road and kept on going.

Yesterday, we went to the black sand beach of Punalu’u. The beach is apparently visited by turtles quite often but no turtles for us. We’ll check it out tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, we’re off to Kona. It’s a bit of a drive at ~ 100 miles but we really want to snorkel, explore, see the coffee plantations and do some xmas shopping. Yes, xmas shopping. The plan is to set a time (30 minutes), price ($30) and quality (no useless sH$t) for our xmas exchange. Kinda like me, simple but fun. That’s our plan for our first Mele Kalikikmaka.

The place we’re staying is called the Crater Rim Cabin and let’s just say the name doesn’t really disappoint. We’re literally on the edge of the national park and volcano fault lines go through the property. They have a fault line crack that is about 15ft deep, let’s just say it’s not ‘kid’ friendly. The place even has a lava tube that you can shimmy your way down to go through the tube. Not sure if we’ll find time to get in the tube as we’ve jam packed our “relaxation.”
OH! and don’t ask us why we’re not ‘more tanned’ or ‘browner’ we’re in the middle of a rain forest, can see snow on the top of the volcano and haven’t been to the beach in two days. Rough I know… but it’s a pretty chilly 15C. We even have the propane fireplace going in the cabin.

Lots of love,

Jeff & Lindsay

ps. Pics are on their way (hopefully tonight).

Aloha everyone!

We’re just in the airport heading to Hilo right now.  Hilo is on the big island so we’ll be seeing some volcanoes, playing disc golf and hanging out at the beach.

Oahu, the island we are just leaving, was terrific.   We had a great time and in true Sill style cram-packed as much as humanly possible in the last 3 days.   Climbed Diamond Head (dormant volcano), surfed (Lindsay did really well and got up on her own!), boogie-boarded (bought one to ’save’ money from Jeff being out for too long) and toured around the island.  Yesterday we spent the day in a rental vehicle (convertible) driving around the island.  So many things to see and do but not enough time as usual.  Next time (yes, we’re already talking about next time) we’ll do portions of the island at a time.

Many more stories to tell and pictures to see.  However, we have to go catch our flight.  Hope everyone is cold and missing us. 

Oh and to our faithful blog readers, sorry for the lack of posts but our computer isn’t waterproof.

Mele Kalikimaka,

Jeff & Linds

All is well so far without Jeff. Speaking of which, got news this morning that he arrived safely and was off to the pub for a beer. Traveling for 14 hours mixed with jetlag, a beer sounds like a fabulous idea!

But enough about him, because this is an update from the Sill house.

The big news here is that I won $50 on a lottery ticket this week!! I had a bought a ticket this week as part of my plan to retire ASAP after the sad news that our “invention club” might not actually take off. My win wasn’t quite enough to retire on, but I was really happy to win something, and I reinvested $3 for a chance to win again.

I’m off to go swimming today. Jeff and I hit the pool the other night, to get in swimming shape for Hawaii. What a humbling experience! Swimming is hard work. Good thing we have a membership at the university and didn’t pay because I would have felt ripped off. I swam a total of 400m before my legs were absolute jello. Not to mention my arms or my lungs. On one lap I timed myself and 50m took just under a minute (for all you swimmers out there, don’t judge me…it was my first time out and there’s lots of room for improvement before I hit the waves in Hawaii!). So 50 X 8 gives me 400m, so the same math equates to 8 minutes of swimming. Wow, pathetic. Can you see how I would have felt ripped off?

Swimming isn’t the only thing I’m trying to get better at at the moment- our squash club is still holding strong. Last week was definitely a record. We had 12 people out! Since I’m super competitive and always trying to get better, I was reading up on squash and came across the funniest thing on wikipedia: . ‘Once a game has been won, the winner shouts “and thats squash,yeeehaa!” as confirmation of their win. This also signifies the end of the game’. When I went back to Wikipedia to find this today, surprisingly enough it had been edited, and I had to go into the archives to find it, so I’m not sure how much truth there is to it, but I thought it was quite funny!

Well, off to the pool. If you don’t see a post any time soon, send the lifeguard!

Well, as most of you know (and by most of you I mean all 2 of the people who read this blog) Lindsay and I are heading to Hawaii for Christmas! Hawaii at Christmas will mean my first Christmas away from my parents AND the first Christmas for Lindsay that we can GUARANTEE won’t have snow. But it should be a super awesome time so we’re pretty excited. The only problem about going to Hawaii around Christmas time is that it’s ridiculously busy… Busy as in Stampede in Calgary busy. But replace the Rodeo and stampeding with the Ocean and all the Cowboys with Hawaiians. I sound like an expert, I know, but I’ve been there 3 times before.

Anyway, so I thought I’d make 3 posts about the 3 different places were staying while were gone.

The first place were staying is in Waikiki on the island of Oahu, which we learn’t yesterday is said, Oh – a – Hue. In Waikiki we’ll be staying four nights at the ResortQuest Pacific Monarch. We did lots of research on prices and location at Expedia.com and ended up booking with Hotels.com, so we’ll see how that goes. Anyway, I actually stayed here on one of my other trips over there. I remember it being an ok place to stay and it’s a reasonable price.

So what are we going to do in Waikiki? Well, there are lots of things to see and do, just ask my parents who can stay 3 weeks in Waikiki. Here is a list of possible things we’ll get up to, ie: the main attractions

• A hike up diamond head, a dormant volcano.
• Learn to surf
• Boogie-board
• International Market Place – A neat Hawaiian market (read: takky tourist mixed with the odd hawaiian thing … if my memory serves me correctly)
  
• Trip around Oahu to see the North Shore
• See Waimea Bay

Remember that Waimea bay is the lyrics in the Surfin’ USA song by the Beach Boys 4th verse

At Haggartys and Swamis. Pacific Palisades.
San Onofre and Sunset. Redondo Beach, L.A.
All over La Jolla, and Waimea Bay.
Evrybodys gone surfin. Surfin U.S.A.

I’m off on a tangent now. Anyway, it should be fun. Next up we’ll be traveling to the Big Island of Hawaii.