A Harty Party

Still Alive

2009-09-18T20:52:00.002-11:00

Well it looks like the blog is mine now. Sorry to all of you who were adamant followers of Julia. She obviously is a fantastic blogger. Me - not so much. I am moving to a new apartment this weekend. It is out on the other side of the island, but close to some friend so it should be nice. There are also kids that the boys can play with and there is a pool in the apartment complex so the boys should love it out there. Unfortunately they would not let me take the dog (Ila) with me. Fortunately I was able to get someone to watch him until I get the chance to send him off-island. Hopefully the parents or someone will be able to take him once he gets back state-side.

I am going to New Zealand for a week next month and then on to Chicago for a legal conference. it will be the first time that I have been to the continental U.S. since I moved to American Samoa. It should be a nice break, but it will definitely be very cold for me since I have gotten too used to the weather in Samoa. Also I have absolutely no cold weather clothing. I was cold when I went to Hawaii a few months ago so Chicago in October is making me very nervous. The conference is business casual so I am wondering if Aloha shirts, sandals, and lava lava's will be tolerated. lol.

break it up, people... nothing to see here

2009-07-13T16:24:00.015-11:00

As most of you know, there will be no more Harty partying. My future blogging home will be over here so be sure to stop by! ...not right this minute though. Give me some time to post something!

pity the fool!

2009-05-10T21:09:00.001-11:00

ok, so we're seriously lacking in gold jewelry, but at least we have the hair right!

tropo kid

2009-05-01T20:56:00.003-11:00

One of our little island boys caught a fish in half of a coconut shell. He just scooped it up out of the water. He was so proud of himself.

The coconut shell kept leaking so he transferred it to a bowl we found on the beach.

Easter 2009

2009-04-12T20:03:00.006-11:00

What? You guys had Easter months ago? Overachievers.

so... yeah.

2009-04-10T20:03:00.003-11:00

When you come home and your kid is covered in charcoal and you ask him why his face, chest, arms, and legs are black, you don't really expect to hear, "I was doing it for camouflage because it was dark out, and I went into a dark room and I could hardly see myself."

But I suppose it's as good a reason as any.

Australia

2009-03-21T13:21:00.022-11:00

Clif had a conference in Brisbane for the humane society so I tagged along. We spent a few days in Sydney before the conference. It was so nice to be in a real city again! It was the first time that either of us had been out of the Samoan islands since we moved to American Samoa. I know, life on a tropical island can't be that bad, it's just that the lack of amenities and variety and shopping and fresh fruits (other than bananas and pineapples) and clean sidewalks and... yeah, it gets to you sometimes.

We stayed in a cool old building in the Rocks, with lots of quirks and a fun rooftop garden; we went to see an opera at the Opera House; and mostly, we wandered around the city taking it all in.

We had a couple days to kill and decided that it would be fun to see a bit of Australia outside of the major cities. Instead of flying to Brisbane, we canceled our tickets and drove up the coast. It was beautiful.

Our first stop was Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park where we saw a kangaroo and 2 wallabies! The wallabies are crouched together to the left of the kangaroo.

We went to a Koala Hospital in Port MacQuarie.
At Dorrigo National Park, I was chased by a hungry bird. It really wanted the sandwich I was eating. Dorrigo is a beautiful rainforest with a canopy walkway and lots of birds. I even saw a pademelon.
We stopped in Coff's Harbor hoping to see the thousands of muttonbirds at Muttonbird Island. Unfortunately we had just missed them (damn those migration patterns), but we did see trees full of these colorful parrots.

Then we hit the Gold Coast. It was beautiful! Miles and miles of white sandy beaches.

Most of our time in Brisbane was spent at the conference so we don't have many pictures, but I really enjoyed what I was able to see of the city.

just FYI

2009-03-18T13:26:00.001-11:00

Everett would, "much rather be a fashion model than a yoga instructor."

I have no idea what brought that on, but he is absolutely certain of it.

crabby

2009-03-10T12:34:00.000-11:00

Savai'i

2009-02-15T16:32:00.009-11:00

Thanks to an invite from a colleague, Clif and I spent a weekend in independent Samoa. We went to a concert and were able to see some of Savai'i. It is so different than Tutuila: less development, more land, fewer people... It was beautiful! We definitely need to return with the kids.

We stayed at Stevenson's at Manase right on this gorgeous beach. The water here is so refreshing. There is cold fresh water runoff all along the beach so the top layer of the water is nice and cool, but the saltwater underneath is a balmy 84 degrees. So nice!

Although I don't have pictures of it, I think the true highlight of the trip was staying out late with new friends, drinking and singing whatever we could remember of old songs -with our own accompanist!

more plumeria pictures

2009-01-25T16:00:00.002-11:00

I'm getting caught up so I can post Australia pictures!

So our pink plumerias finally bloomed. We have 5- and 6-petal varieties, although we don't know their technical names because they were taken from cuttings. They are a gorgeous color, but not nearly as fragrant as the white and yellow version.

This next one is really cool; it fades from a vibrant pink to white on each petal. The colors didn't come out exactly right in the picture, but it's really amazing.

The colors are much more vibrant the first day these bloom. Then they start to fade. It's really interesting. We had a rose bush that did the same thing when we lived in Spokane. It was kind of fun to see a red rose next to a peach rose on the same stem.

a boy and his camera

2009-01-03T10:25:00.017-11:00

Everett has always been fascinated by photography. When he was four we let him use our old 35mm point and shoot when we would spend weekends in Yellowstone. I loved seeing his perspective of things. One of my favorites is a picture he took of a field of grass. He was just as tall as the grass and taking the picture from that height completely changed the look of the field.

Over the past couple months, he's been carrying around our old digital camera nonstop. Simon has gotten so sick of living with his own personal paparazzi, that he won't let Everett take pictures of him anymore. So Everett's newest thing are self-portraits. I really like some of them.

Christmas break hike

2008-12-28T10:03:00.005-11:00

Ever since we moved to our house on the beach, we've been a lot less gung-ho about going to other beaches. It's just so easy to go to the one we live by and we've been to so much of the island that the allure of unexplored places doesn't really call to us anymore. So after a few days of relaxing at home and for the first time in months, we went to a different beach.

We hiked to Fagatele Bay. It's always beautiful there and usually too rough to snorkel. Luckily for us it was nice and calm; unluckily for us, everyone knew it was usually rough so no one brought snorkel gear. Oh well, it was still a beautiful place to spend the afternoon.

a very merry Christmas

2008-12-25T11:26:00.002-11:00

In spite of staying up until ten or eleven the night before, Everett and Simon were up at six on Christmas morning. There is nothing quite like the thrill of seeing whether Santa actually made it to our house to get our kids out of bed.

They were both so excited to give the presents they had picked out for the rest of us and to open their presents.

After the gifting, we spent the whole day lounging around the house, playing with presents, doing puzzles, and most importantly, playing Mario Kart on the Wii. I don't really love video games, but Mario Kart is fun!

We hope you all had as wonderful a Christmas as we did - Merry Christmas everyone!

Christmas Eve

2008-12-24T10:41:00.008-11:00

Aaron had a Christmas Eve party again this year with lots of mulled wine, a traditional turkey dinner, and a hilarious gift exchange. It's been one of the highlights of Christmas on the island for us.

The gift exchange never disappoints. The Samoan flag and ukulele were in high demand, meaning they were stolen and re-stolen and re-stolen all night long - no lame "3 steals" rule here! Steal until you get it! Our kids managed to scoop up most of the toys - a light/sound sword, frisbee, star theater, and play-dough. They were pretty happy with it all.

Ned ended up with both floppy hats that made it under the tree. I'm sure that must mean something.
We had a great time - thanks Aaron!

another blog award!

2008-12-23T15:11:00.000-11:00

Wow, thanks again to the Dughallmor Beagles, we have another blog award! It's the Proximidade Award and is for "blogs that are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into the body of their award." Thank you!

I love the award, and I almost hate to poke fun because it really is nice to get them, but I just can't help myself. Because what I love most about this award is that whoever wrote it praises his or her own writing as "cleverly-written" and says that recipients "must" include their language letting the world know how clever he or she is. That's pretty awesome.

So the people I choose to pass on this most clevery-written blog award language and who MUST post it on their blogs are:

Erin's Backwards Life

Granny Nette's Frogs & Friends

The Grow Family

Heather's Clement Life

Jon's Trippin' the Northwest

Kendrick Nut House

Kristin's Adventures in Parenting

Rachel and Ryan

Seriously, people, the rules say you MUST. I didn't make it up.

Manuia le Kerisimasi!

2008-12-23T23:18:00.002-11:00

When it's ninety degrees outside and all you can think about is how awesome the trade winds are and why, oh WHY, don't they blow all year long, it can be a bit hard to get into the typical Christmas spirit. In order to get there, you need lots of Christmas lights. And I mean LOTS of Christmas lights. I know I blogged about this a couple times last year so it's a bit of a repeat, but you really can't have too much of a good thing, can you? Especially when that good thing is Christmas lights!

This church in Leone is covered in Disney-themed characters, and just about every other holiday decoration you can imagine. I love how the nativity scene is surrounded by Mickey Mouse Santas.

There is a family here that does amazing Christmas decorations. Last year, they had the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge in lights. This year, they had a light show where different lights lit up to the beat of the music. It was really incredible. Simon was asleep by the time we got there, but Everett was mesmerized.

Simon is Seven!

2008-12-22T15:17:00.000-11:00

Simon woke up singing "today is my birthday, today is my birthday" over and over, but when people would wish him a happy birthday he got all shy and didn't know what to do. It was kind of cute.

We had a bunch of kids over to properly celebrate. They seemed to have a great time.

bathroom crab

2008-12-21T14:56:00.000-11:00

Remember when I said we had a resident crab in our bathroom? Well, he either grew a lot or he got eaten by this monster.

I used to not mind the crab so much. He only came out at night and seemed fairly harmless, but this guy is a little too big to be a bathroom crab/pet. So Clif took him outside one night. Apparently, he wasn't fit for the wild. I'm pretty sure I found him dead the next morning.

*I don't know why Blogger keeps insisting on putting this picture this direction. I even saved a version half a turn the other way just in case it was having a weird "turning the photos" glitch, but that one posted the same direction as this one. He's a crab.. they walk sideways, his picture is sideways too... idk. I loaded it 3 times 3 different ways and it all came out like this. So I'm done trying to fix it.

things that amuse me, part 6-ish

2008-12-20T14:48:00.000-11:00

You have to look closely to read the fine print on the left. I swear it's worth the extra click.

school Christmas program pictures

2008-12-19T14:22:00.001-11:00

The kids Christmas program at school was interesting this year. Simon's class sang lots of songs about Hanukkah, which seems strange to me since in spite of all the religion on this island, I haven't met any Jewish people. At least he's getting exposed to it now though.

And Everett was learning about the Great Depression this quarter so they dressed up like hobos and sang some folksy songs including "Big Rock Candy Mountain." He was very impressed when I told him I had actually been there!

Pacific Arts Festival Fire Knife Competition!

2008-07-25T11:59:00.020-11:00

After a full afternoon at the Festival Village we headed to the stadium to see the fire knife competition. We were surprised to see that there were other performances in between the fire knife dancing. It made the whole night a bit long for us so we went home before we could see who won, but we loved the parts we saw!

Tahiti started the night off:

Then a Samoan tauluga, followed by part of the fire knife competition.

Yes, it's not just the picture... these kids are really young. I have no idea of their ages, but there was a kids' division in the competition. It was pretty amazing, especially when I considered that both Everett and Simon would probably love to get up on stage and throw around some flaming swords. I'm just not sure that anyone would survive. These kids (and the entire audience) survived and actually did very well.

Then Papau New Guinea:
Rotuma, which is now part of Fiji, but has a different culture:
And Fiji was the last group we saw before we called it a night.

From Here to There

2007-06-08T05:41:00.000-11:00

Since we are moving to Samoa we thought it would be fun to create this blog site. Very unique, huh (we in no way stole, thought of, borrowed, plagarized, copied, or in any other way or means took this idea from current clerks in American Samoa...lol)? Right now we are in the process of fixing up our house.

Well actually, I am in the process of finishing up the work we started. Julia started studying for the bar and the, "Oh crap, I'm in trouble" moment finally hit her. All of the attorneys out there know what Im talking about. I'll post some pictures later showing the progress that we have made on the house.

Anyway, we are going from here:

To There:

Before and After

2007-06-11T16:24:00.000-11:00

I decided I needed a break from studying so here are some before and after pictures of our house. The backyard pictures aren't exactly "before" since we pulled out some of the worst stuff before we thought to take pictures and it doesn't show the beautiful trenches along the sides that were so kindly dug for us by the many dogs who used to live here. But here is what it used to look like:

And here it is now:

Notice how we have lawn instead of clumps of grass - impressive, eh? I especially like how Everett and Simon's front end loader and dump truck were ready to work when we needed them and then started playing soccer once the job was done.

Here's the other major project we've tackled, the bathroom. It went from PINK:

To green(ish) neutral non-color color. Think it's an improvement?

Everett loved the pink, but even he likes the new bathroom better than the old.

something to cry about

2007-06-16T15:52:00.000-11:00

When you find out that you've never ridden in a convertible and your brother has, even though he was too young to remember it and you didn't know what a convertible was until 2 minutes ago, it's probably something to cry about. Don't you think?