The Perfect Storm

It all started with an email I received at school on my first day back on Wednesday. The email was warning all teachers that a huge cold front would hit the island on Friday, bringing extremely high winds. The next day, the superintendent decided to shut down all schools in Hawaii on Friday in preparation for the storm.

What a storm it was! It left me with a little bit of a sunburn, tired legs, and one of the best days I've had out on the island so far. As it turns out, this monster storm never actually materialized, and although there were some pretty strong winds on and off all day, the sun was shining and we were left with a free day to enjoy ourselves.

I slept in a little, woke up to blue skies, and took a walk down to the beach with a couple of the roommates to check out the surf. The waves are huge right now and the winds were causing some pretty cool side currents. As it became clearer that the storm wouldn't hit and it was actually just a nice Hawaiian day, the house decided that we wanted to have an active day. There's a pretty awesome park right across the street that's part of a Salvation Army summer camp. We went out there and played football in the sunshine for a couple hours. Then we walked back to the beach and went for a nice swim. The waves were so strong that they were getting past the reef and breaking on the shore, so we did a little bit of body surfing. We turned it into a little competition, our version of The Eddy, in which the person who was able to ride the wave farthest in won. I had a couple successes, but Greg defeated me on the biggest wave of all.

After our swim, we went back to the house, dried off, and returned to the park (it also has a full basketball court). I'm not too sure if it's open to the public, but we spent pretty much all day there today and no one said anything. We played a couple games of two on two and then came home to unwind.

Because I thought the power was going to go out, I had purchased a lot of things to grill on our barbecue. We ended up grilling up a ton of stuff for dinner and turned it into a pretty nice feast. We spent the rest of the evening hanging out and snacking on leftovers.

My roommate Amanda described today as this: "I got to sleep in, which I love. I got to play football, which I also love. I got to shoot hoops, which I love. I got to swim in the ocean, which I love to do. I got to take a nap, which I love. I got to eat all sorts of different meats and drink good beer, which I love. It was a good day."

All in all, not a bad way to spend a Friday.