Christmas break hike

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

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

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!

Manuia le Kerisimasi!

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.

another blog award!

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.

Simon is Seven!

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

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

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

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!

if only

Everett gets on these kicks where he talks nonstop. It happens a lot: somewhere in the neighborhood of every waking moment. Oddly enough, I tend to tune him out at times. I find myself mindlessly agreeing to all kinds of absurd things, like a plan to build a rocket/submarine in order to explore the depths of the ocean and the far reaches of outer space. And then I have to quickly backtrack.

Anyway, I'm starting to wise up. This morning I was definitely paying attention. I was so amused I wrote the whole thing down while I was driving (Yes, it's entirely safe. Especially when traffic is moving at the furious speed of 15 mph).

So it went like this, "If only I were a better engineer, I could give the people of American Samoa a present - except most people here don't have coats - but I could give them a white Christmas. I'd have to fashion some kind of hyper shield or something to keep the snow from turning back into water. Records indicate there will be lots of water, I just need to make it turn into snow."

"Seriously. All I need to know is how to use some things that I'm not allowed to use yet."

Yes, there you have it. My 9-year old is convinced he can make snow on a tropical island. It's just those pesky adults and their rules that prevent all the fun. Well, and that whole thing about only being an average engineer. He really needs to get on top of that.

a blog award

Thanks to our friends over at Dughallmor Beagles (who, incidentally, have the most adorable prize-winning beagles and post beautiful pictures of Scotland just to make us all jealous), we've been given the "I ♥ your blog" award!

And we're going to pass this award on to the blogs we ♥ too: all of the blogs listed on the right side of the page. 'Cause if we didn't ♥ you we wouldn't link to you!

things that amuse me, part whatever

I don't even know what to say. I'm just wondering how effective all these signs are.

plumerias and posts

When we first went on vacation to Hawaii plumerias (pua in Samoan, or sometimes called frangipani) were our favorite tropical flower. So when we moved here, Clif found out how to grow them and started a tree in a pot. It's now in the biggest pot we can buy and has almost no room left to grow. And that tree started a small obsession. We now have about 10 plumerias growing in pots in front of our house: rainbow, red, orange, white, and dark pink color variations. Because we've started them from cuttings, we don't actually know the real names of them, but they are all beautiful!

Our big tree had this gorgeous bunch of blooms on it the other day.

And by way of an update for those of you crazy folks who don't use RSS feeds, I actually have been blogging a bit even though it doesn't look like it. I've completely given up on posting in chronological order so I've just been doing things as I like and back-dating to the right day. Which means there are some new Arts Festival posts back in July (almost done!) and I finally got around to uploading photos of the Tattoo Fest from October.

things that amuse me, part election

I was going home the other day, which happened to be the evening of the gubernatorial run-off, and drove by a fale with people counting votes on chalkboards.

I guess I expected a different system. It seems fair: people were milling around, it's not like you could cheat easily, but tally marks? on a chalkboard? like we did in yearbook class when we counted up who won most like to succeed, best dressed, worst driver, best smile, etc. at the end of the year? I just wasn't expecting that.

(s)election day

I wasn't expecting election day in American Samoa to be much different than election day everywhere else. I don't know what I was thinking. Everything is different here!

Most residents here are U.S. nationals as opposed to U.S. citizens so they don't get to vote in the presidential election. And in order to vote in the local election, a person has to have lived here for 2 years. Most palagis don't make it that long on our little island paradise since the typical government contract is two years total. So we voted via absentee ballot. This is my favorite part about mine:

Anyway, the local races are very different than a typical U.S. campaign. I heard almost no mud-slinging, heard just a few ads, and most campaigning tended to revolve around free food: have a bbq and talk to the people! It seems very wholesome and old-fashionedy to me. Even though I didn't participate and some see it as a way for the guy with the most money to buy votes by feeding people, I liked it.

On election day, the feeding of the masses was still happening. Our street has a bunch of fales on it. Coming from my house, the first fale on the street was the polling place. They had caution tape around the outside edge to prevent people from coming in the wrong area. And the voting booths were sections separated by fabric wrapped around a few posts of the fale.

Right next to that fale were seven or eight tents set up in front of the other fales with barbeques and sytrofoam containers full of food.

On my way to work (at 7:30am), I turned down at least 5 plates of food, but one place was so insistent I ended up with one. Not that I'm complaining; Samoans definitely know how to barbeque. I've never had better barbequed chicken than the stuff you can get on the side of the road here (and the best part is that when you do have to pay for it, it's only $3 for a plate big enough to feed 2 adults). But I've never seen anything like this in the U.S. In fact, coming from a traditionally red state, I never saw much campaigning at all outside of TV and radio ads. And I was definitely never given a free lunch for breakfast.


Other random tidbits about election day:

- In AS, every government employee who is eligible to vote, gets 2 hours off of work, either at the beginning or ending of the work day so that they can. Cool.

- Simon thinks it's not fair to make the candidates race to become president. Because the fastest will always win and don't we want the smartest?

- Go Obama! I wasn't the biggest Obama fan in the beginning, favoring Hilary to win the Democratic slot, but he grew on me. Even in spite of the fact that every picture of him is shot from below and shows him staring dreamily out into the distance. And I think that even though he has his work cut out for him, there's a great deal of hope resting on his presidency. Which is much more than I can say for the other guy.

ARRRRRG!

On Halloween we hosted a pirate party. Simon, Clif, and I were pirates.

Everett insisted on being the Avatar instead of a pirate. Silly kid thinks he can make his own decisions - pffft. Being the Avatar and getting the arrow right required a fairly drastic move: a hair cut. He was willing to go completely bald to get it right, but I found some of that spray-in hair dye at the last minute.

I went a little overboard with the pirate party preparations. I wrote a pirate invitation poem and sent it out on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. I spent months collecting pirate accessories, and sometimes those accessories just had to be upgraded when I found better things later on. I spent all kinds of time sewing knickers and waistcoats and old fashioned shirts with lace cuffs. The excellent thing is that this island is absolutely full of crazy fabric. Where else can you find black velvet with gold and silver glitter flowers?

So many pirates showed up to the party!

And to top it all off, Alden brought a Tongan fruit bat. I think it was just a diversion so we wouldn't make him walk the plank for not wearing a costume, but it totally worked. The bat was just a few months old so it couldn't fly yet and spent all evening hanging out on everyone. It was definitely the perfect addition to a Halloween party.

Not enough piratey pictures for you? Find more here and here and here and here.

Tisa's Tattoo Fest 2008

Tisa's Tattoo Fest is an annual October event hosted by Tisa's Barefoot Bar. I'm sure her choice of events has nothing to do with the fact that her brother, Wilson, is a big tattoo artist here. :) Regardless of her reason, it's always fun to get out to Tisa's. The tattoos and entertainment are just an added bonus. I'm fascinated by the traditional tap tap tap of boar tusks. The designs that tattoo artists can create out of those tiny carved combs is pretty amazing.

This is Wilson doing a traditional tattoo. The little piece pointing toward the leg is a tiny comb carved out of boar tusk. It's attached to a stick that he taps with another stick. Two assistants strectch the skin straight. If the skin stretchers don't hold still, the lines are crooked and that's no good!

And, of course, the modern method is also available.

Simon chillin' in the rope swing on Alega beach.

Everett started dancing on the stage as the entertainment calmed down and the stage emptied It took a while (nearly an hour), but eventually others joined him. He was so proud of himself and kept telling everyone he had started a dance party!