On the Road to Hawaii

I write this with a great deal of anticipation of our vacation. Daniel is working tonight and Darla is finishing up her fourth Silpada party in as many days. We will leave for San Francisco at about 8 PM. We are packed and ready to go.

It is Autumn and the annual deluge of leaves have begun at our humble homestead. It is great most of the time to live across from a public park. The soccer tournaments can be a bit much with traffic clogging the streets and cars parked throughout the neighborhood. That is more of an annoyance. The dropping of leaves from the grove of trees at the park that blow directly into my yard and those of my neighbors is a real pain. I spend hours raking and piling leaves in the street for the city crews to come by with the "claw" and load them into a dump truck for transport to the city mulching facility. The front yard was covered before I cleaned up yesterday and the sad fact is it will be covered again when we return from vacation. The trees are all about sixty feet high.

On top of that, I have four liquid ambers on the side of the house that are all over fifty feet high and those leaves are dropping as well. I don't mind raking those as they actually belong to me. The leaves from the park are public leaves and I feel like handing rakes to people at the park and asking them to pitch in. I don't think I'd get much cooperation though.

I did get the scores from yesterday's tournament posted on the GHIN siet today so I can leave for Hawaii with no guilt now. It was our turkey shoot tournament. I shot 40+43=83 to take third in my 12 person flight. We play for gift certificates to one of the local grocery stores. I paid $15 to play and won $25 toward our holiday turkey. Boyd took low gross in our flight and I should have won that, but stumbled on the back side. Boyd shot 81, which is off of his best. I was beating him 40 to 41 on the front side, but just couldn't keep it together on the back.

The weather has turned here with overnight lows in the 30's and highs in the upper fifties.  We teed off at 9:30 and the temperature was still in the 40's. I warmed up at the range with an ear wrap on my head. The wind was blowing and it was clear. What the wind did during the day was bring in some clouds which actually helped to warm up the air and the sun warmed the day up. I was able to take my coat off about the 8th hole and leave it off the rest of the day.

There will be no golf in Hawaii and I actually plan to take the next three weeks off from the game and completely let my heel heal. Yes I said it, heel heal. It is doing much better, but is still sore when I wake up in the morning or I'm on it a lot like yesterday. I walked the course and then worked on the yard. This is the first week that I have gone all week without my walking boot at work. I just haven't had much pain of late. Hopefully, by staying off the course for these three weeks, I will see some major improvement.

We do have plans to go up to the volcano while we are there to see the plumes of smoke and lava. We will also do some snorkeling and I will get us tickets for a 2 hour ATV tour of the coastline in the Northern Hawaii shore. I told the boys and Darla to pack long pants and old shoes for the trip as we'll be through mud and water. We will get a chance to swim at a waterfall on the trip, which will be nice. The guys will just wear our swimsuits under our pants. Darla will look for a dressing room.

We will stay at the Marriott by the San Francisco airport and take the shuttle at 7 AM for our 9 AM flight to Kona.  We get in about 12:30 and will get our rental car, check into the condo and then head over and get some groceries at the Costco which is close to our condo complex. The condo is about five minutes from Steve and Kristin's house. Steve is Darla's brother. Darla's parents were going to be there as well, but Frances had some back spasms this last week and they decided to cancel their trip. They had cancellation insurance so didn't get hurt on the transaction.

We get back about 8:30 on Monday night the 12th and then have to get our car and drive back to Sacramento. I let Shawna, my assistant, know that I'd be in about 9 AM on Tuesday. I'm sure there isn't a lot of empathy for me coming off vacation. oh well.

Darla and I will celebrate Thanksgiving at home and then leave for a two day trip to Half Moon Bay on the coast south of San Francisco. I bought a Groupon back in January for a two night stay at a 120 year old Victorian Mansion in the old town section of Half Moon Bay. We will relax for a couple of days and eat clam chowder and fish and chips. It will be a fun trip with the boys, but I'm looking forward to a weekend away with my wife when we get back as well.

Things are going well at work. Having a lot of young people on staff is both a blessing and a curse. One of my young, newer employees made a mistake about a month ago and told one of our agents that a canceled file was still in force. That policyholder had a loss last weekend and the loss falls on me as the policy was legally canceled. The young lady feels really bad and I've told her to let it go and we are using it as a training issue in the office. The problem was more one of supervision than anything worse. Shawna was able to take the young lady out for coffee this week and talk it out. She told her that I wasn't mad about it, that I just want to make sure it doesn't happen again. The insured is a tire shop and a wheel came off a vehicle they worked on. The only damage was to the car and there were no injuries. The loss will cost us about $3500, which is not bad all things considered.

Well, I will be back to the blog late next week with pictures and tales from Hawaii. I hope you are all well and looking forward to Thanksgiving. Be well. Ciao.