Christmas Lights and Lawn Ornaments, Oh My!

Before we all left to go home for Christmas (minus our one local friend)--we had a Christmas celebration at my house. We ate frozen pizza, peppermint ice cream with magic shell, mint chocolate brownies and drank hot chocolate. After dinner and a few rounds of our new favorite game Pit, we went driving around the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights. Usually my neighborhood goes nuts for Christmas--i don't know if it was due to the bad weather/rain, or if it was still just a bit too early, but there weren't a lot of houses lit up. Still we made do--and had lots of fun posing with everyone else's decorations. Even the weather was as wintry as can be expected for Hawaii...in some of these pics the rain actually looks like snow!

Chrissy, Carrie, Roni and Hill with the awesome Christmas Tree, that I swear was bigger than their house!

Hugging Frosty with our matching scarfs that we will get much use out of in Chicago for New Years!

Someone's house that we thought looked pretty... and look at the rain/snow!

Chrissy found a snowman her size!

Christmas Bear

Up To No Good

Thanksgiving Recap

I realized I never put anything up about Thanksgiving-- so i would like to share some pictures.

It was a beautiful day in Hawaii--sunny and warm. Hillary, Carrie and I woke up and watched the Macy's Day Parade while drinking frosted mint Kona Coffee. We were invited to a Thanksgiving lunch with a family from church and then we had all our "single married" military wives over for pizza, tiramisu and games. I know that's not quite the traditional meal, but we had such a wonderful Thanksgiving Day last year with the guys home that none of us felt the need to try and recreate it--not to mention us girls wouldn't have been able to eat all that food anyway.



Mike had a pretty good day too. He and his roomie/friend Jordan had the traditional meal at the DFAC and hung out together all day watching episodes of The Office and just relaxing for a change. The picture below is of Mike with 2 Iraqi food servers. They are supposed to be a pilgrim and an indian...pretty funny i think!

"Not So Beautiful Week"

In a place that the weather tends to always be sunny and warm, this week has certainly been an exception. Overall, this season has been much rainier than the past winters we have spent in Hawaii...i knew something was up when i looked down at my skin and noticed it is the whitest i have been in over 2 years!

We had our yearly storm this week..(i say that, because i can count 2 since we have been here). Lightning, thunder,wind and rain...the works, if you can call it that. The same storm at home probably wouldn't have even got anyone talking, but it pretty much devastated the island. The joke is when it rains, life stops. No one knows how to drive in it, and heaven forbid it thunder a few times with some lightning! But all the same, rain here is equivalent to snow in Asheboro--its like they are totally unprepared for it. Of course much of it has to do with the elevation being at sea level --but wow. We have power outages, business and school closings, road collapses and closings, terrible traffic and major flooding all over. Here are some pics.

the road connecting our house to our base...now closed indefinitely

North Shore gas station

North Shore, Haleiwa Boat Harbor

Mudslide on Highway