Birthdays!

This Tuesday marks a month since we first arrived on Oahu and what a wonderful adventure it's been!  Right now it's pouring rain.  And I mean POURING, we don't get rain like this in Utah!  Reminds me of the Taiphoon season in Japan and I love it. :)  Here's a video of it.

Yesterday our Hana turned 7 years old.  We've been celebrating her birthday, along with mine all month and ended the celebrations for her with a little birthday party here at our rental home with her new friends in the neighborhood.  It was very simple but it seemed like everyone had a great time.  We had 7 little girls (including Hana and Aya) and 1 little boy, who is Aya's little friend and the younger brother of one of Hana's friends.  They decorated their own cupcakes and then ate them with ice cream sandwiches  played charades, went on a "lion hunt", painted everyone's nails (even the one little boy who didn't want to be left out!) and then Hana opened some nice gifts.  She was thrilled to get a Princess makeup set, Hello Kitty purse and arts and crafts set.

Painting nails while I tell a story.

Earlier in the month she was thrilled to get birthday cards and presents from family back in Utah.  Aunt Lisa sent her a Build-A-Bear Hello Kitty with a frilly heart dress and red sparkly shoes (just like the ones Hana & Aya wore at Aunt Lisa's wedding!)  With the birthday money Grandma Anderson sent she bought a little gum ball machine, some fuzzy Squinkies and Hello Kitty bubbles (Yes, Hello Kitty is the favorite thing right now!) she was really excited to set aside tithing and savings from her birthday money and use the rest to pick whatever she wanted at the store!  

Speaking of fun gifts, I was so surprised and thrilled to have a package delivered just in time for my birthday on the 15th that was a "birthday in a box" from all of my side of the family!  Hana and I were spoiled with cake mixes, candles, frosting, tiaras, wrapped presents, balloons, signs, party hats...everything we could possibly need for our birthday parties!  I was also given some delicious Godiva chocolate covered strawberries and a Costco gift card!  Spoiled birthday girls for sure :)

Even Mr. Parrot got a birthday hat!

On my actual birthday I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do more than go to our gorgeous beach so that's what we did and it was lovely!  After watching the sun go down (it sets around 6pm here) we went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant.

And if that weren't enough, on the 19th, Matty & Jess came down and Hana, Jessie & I  were all celebrated again.  (Jessie's birthday is on the 20th so she's a January Birthday Princess too.)  I loved the fact that we had birthday hats and crowns waiting when they came and the brought some with them too!  Good to know they know how to celebrate birthdays appropriately!  Once we were all bedecked in our birthday hats and crowns, we all went to a sushi restaurant of my choice, here in Kapolei.  It's the kind like we often saw in Japan where the sushi chefs stand in the middle and place sushi on a conveyor belt that goes around to all the tables so you just pick what you want.  Very fun!

Party!

Matty the cool, birthday dino

We learned this in Japan.

Hana watching the sushi ride by on the conveyor belt at Kazuko Sushi.

I can't end this birthday post with out wishing Happy Birthday to all of the other January birthdays that we usually celebrate with: Little Jake, Mom & Dave (Anderson), Mom (Bushman), BABY OLIVER!, Kimberly, Dallin and Kevin.  Love you all and hope your birthdays were/are just as fabulous!  Don't forget the hats ;)

Scammed, car troubles & the pen is mightier than, well, anything when applied to leather!

Aloha, everyone!  It's been a busy, and eventful week and so lest you think our life is perfect, here in paradise, I thought I would share a few of the crazy stressful things we encountered this week.

First we have to start out with our car that we named "The Panda"...

we found a car on the classified, a Dodge Neon 2005 for $1950 that seemed pretty good and after a few days of being put off by the guy selling the car "for a friend" , re-renting our rental car 2 more times, etc, we finally met up with "John" in Laie.  "John" happened to resemble a panda bear-Roundish, big guy that was nice but didn't like to communicate a whole lot.  In order to make that happen, Geoff drove our rental car to school, then drove it to the car rental place at the airport to drop it off, where cousin Matty so kindly met him after driving the hour down from Laie and then drove Geoff the hour back to Laie to meet with "John" and the car at "Food Land" (as Matty says, "they're really subtle with the names of stores here;) near BYU Hawaii.  "John" wasn't there at the arranged time and didn't get there for several hours!  Finally he showed up with the car and he, Matty & Geoff all loaded in the Neon so Geoff could drive it around the parking lot & test it out.  Geoff informed "John" that he would be breaking and accelerating to try things out but "John" didn't brace himself in anyway & was thrown into the dashboard & then looked at Geoff like he was a maniac!  (It was at this point where we realized "John" probably didn't speak English super well.) Matty was failing at supressing his giggles in the back seat.  Anyway, after all this Geoff decided to buy the car since we really had no choice with our rental car turned in, him an hour away from home & now place to get another car anywhere remotely close by!  He got home late that night.

The next morning & from every day since the car's check engine light flashes & it stalls at stop lights & in the middle of driving down the road!  We've taken it to the same nice mechanic 3 times now & it's been determined that it it was not the easy fixed the mechanic originally thought & will costs more than we bought the car to fix it!  Sigh...looks like we'll be selling it for what we can on the classifieds & finding something else.  Perhaps paying the big bucks to have our car in Utah, that we haven't sold yet, shipped over to us.  Let's just say we're hesitant to buy another car off the Hawaii Craigslist!

Randomly, the Panda came with 2 pairs of stinky shoes in the trunk, and some person's (not "John") paystubs for the past 6 months

If that weren't enough trouble, I also figured out that the vacation rental that I had booked for next month for us (we determined that we needed more time to figure out getting approved for a loan to buy a place & no one would rent to us for a shorter lease than a year, so another monthly vacation rental was what we were left with!  We can't stay in the one we're currently in because someone else has it booked Feb 1st and that would be way too easy!) is a scam!  Luckily I figured it was too late to call my bank & cancel the charges.  I  was worried it might be a scam and so I had the person text me their name, address & bank info so I could verify it with the front desk of the place we would be renting, which happened to be down the road.  Everything checked out & the front desk said it was the real owner but come to find out it was a scammer who just had all that poor owners information!  Anyway, I cancelled the payments through my bank, had someone contact the owner to let him know his information had been stolen and we're back to square one to  figure out where to move to in 9 days!  I do have some excellent leads though, which i didn't as of 10pm last night, so it looks like this cycle of craziness & miracles will continue for a little longer.  Thanks for the prayers!

Last, but not least, Aya, our cuter-than-you-can-imagine 3 year old got a hold of a ball point pen while we were entertaining our very first out of state guests, here in Hawaii (thanks so much for stopping by, Kristen & Brad. You guys are awesome!) she started coloring pictures on paper, which unfortunately was placed directly on top the lovely cream colored Italian leather sectional, that we have here in our vacation rental.  Before I realized any of this was going on she was drawing directly on the couch!  I wasn't too worried because surely trusty google wouldn't fail me on finding a way out of this mess, like it had so many times before...

When Aya saw me scrubbing at this she said "my sea horse!" in a horrified tone.

After 3 scrubbing sessions

Still a few more scrubbing sessions needed

well, I searched high & low & researched & called local cleaning companies & tried the Magic Eraser & Rubbing Alchohol & let me tell you, there is really no way to get out the ink with out discoloring the leather around it.  Sigh.  So, I called the lady we're renting from told her about all of my research and offered to buy the couch.  What else could we do?  The lady we're renting from don't have a lot of money & couldn't just eat the cost of the couch so after she looked into everything for a few days, she agreed that, that was the only thing to do.  Once we paid her for the couch I started scrubbing with the rubbing alcohol & have managed to almost get rid of the pen, after several "treatments" but now there are big white spots.  I'm going to see what I can do about carefully dying it back to the cream color & if it looks fabulous, sell it on Craigslist (yep, that's how we do business here in Hawaii) for what I bought it for, if it looks bad, I'll sell it on Craigslist for whatever we can get!  Anyone have any experience/ideas dealing with this?  (I know there are professional leather cleaners that will come to your home & bleach out the ink & re-stain the leather to match the rest of the couch for some crazy expensive fee, but none of them exist on our island, so that option's out.)

But just so you don't feel totally bad for us, here's a picture of how I got to spend my birthday afternoon! (A blog all about the birthday celebrations will be coming soon.)

Love you all!
p.s. Please forgive the crazy grammar, spelling etc.  I just type these as fast as possible & publish them with out a 2nd look because I just don't have the time to spare right now & my perfectionist self would never let me post them and that would be at odds with my must-keep-in-contact-with-all-the-people-I-love self & would cause extra stress none of us really need in our lives, right?

Life is good in Ko Olina!

One of our gorgeous beaches here in Ko Olina

Picnic at the beach with Momma

Exhausted after playing at the beach with Momma most of the day

The condo complex that we live in called "Hillside"

Hello everyone!  I'm so sorry to hear that for many of you the temperatures have been ridiculously cold!  We are loving the weather here.  It's just about perfect every day, not too cold, not too hot, sometimes a little rain or wind but nothing you would miss the beach over.  Coming from Utah, this is absolutely amazing to us and we've loved it.

I've discovered that I love the beach.  I have always liked it, the times I was fortunate enough to go there on vacations but having it a 10 minute stroll down the road is amazing!  Aya and I seem to love it the most out of the 4 of us and I find myself wanting to go there every day.  The water is so clean and clear and the sand so nice at our beaches here at Ko Olina that it's hard to want to be anywhere else!  On Thursday Aya and I spent several hours there playing in the water, building sand castles and making new friends and it was just perfect.  Hana and Geoff were at school.  And speaking of school, Geoff has really been enjoying UH, even though it is quite the culture shock from his past 3 degrees at BYU.  The faculty he has met in his department are really nice and very accomplished researchers and such.  We feel very blessed that he has the chance to study here.  The drive from our vacation home, here on the west side of the island (leeward side), to UH takes Geoff about 35 minutes but he has to park at a lot down the road to school (where we had to buy a pass for the semester because parking around that area is crazy & expensive!) and walk up to campus and then through the quite large campus to get to his building so all said and done he says his commute takes about 1hr 15min, so not bad at all.  He only has to go to campus Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and doesn't have to leave until after the crazy traffic into town (that's what everyone here calls Honolulu) has cleared so that's a pretty great schedule.

We have absolutely loved having all things Japanese available to us here!  We love that we can buy Japanese food ingredients at Costco or go to one of the many all Japanese grocery stores whenever we want!  On Saturday we went exploring in Honolulu and made a stop at Marukai, which is the equivalent of a Japanese Costco and then a smaller Japanese grocery store called Nijiya which is very close to where Geoff parks for school.  Right next door we found this restaurant, CoCo's Curry, which is one of our favorites in Japan and had to stop for dinner.  Yum!

We all enjoyed a delicious dinner  and felt like we were in Japan!

We have been very blessed to be able to spend some time with some of my favorite people, my cousin Matt & his wife Jess.  They live "way" up in Laie (about 1 hour drive, which is really far for islanders) and we've been able to hang out several times.  So great to have them here to help us out and show us around the island.  They actually had never been to our side of the island the first time they came out though!  We all went to the beach and it was hilarious that the girls and I were wearing swimming suites and getting in the water while Jess was wearing a coat, gloves and hat sitting on the beach!  Let's just say the 70s and 80s feels pretty warm compared to what we left in Utah!

Love you Matty!

Love you, Jes!

They live in the most adorable, robin egg blue, tiny little house right on the beach in Laie.  Hana was absolutely amazed by that and I admit I am too!

Hana started at her new school too, Barbers Point Elementary, in Kapolei, which is the city that the bubble of resort, Ko Olina is officially part of.  Her teacher is a nice, young, good teacher and made Hana feel welcomed right away so that was a huge relief for me!  As we were walking to her classroom a cute little girl walked up and said  enthusiastically "Are you the new girl named Hana?  My name's Katelyn and I'll be showing you around!" and stuck out her hand to shake Hana's hand.  Shy Hana wasn't quite sure what to do but was glad to have a friend.  The schools here are very different than the ones in Utah but we're learning that most of the time different is just fine!  Your child's education is very important here and many parents pay $20,000 or more a year to send their children to private schools.  Our realtor told us in no uncertain terms that we had to chose a home that was in one of the two best elementary school boundaries on the island (1 of which President Obama attended as a child) or send Hana to private school.  He repeated several times that "Your child's education has to come first."  However, we are considering some other areas as well, like right here since we like it here so much and the real estate is a lot more reasonable than in Honolulu and after talking to several parents with children in Hana's current school we feel fine about the school here.  Which reminds me that I have to let you all know that our home in Utah is now under contract!  Another blessing!  We're scheduled to close Feb. 6th.  We hope to find something here, in our price range soon, even if it's not in an area that President Obama grew up in. ;)

 Love you all and miss you!  Please comment if you can, as we would love to hear anything from any and all of you!

First week on Oahu!

We flew into the Honolulu airport late, last Friday night (Dec. 28, 2012) and have had a wonderful, exhausting and amazing time since!  To back up, we only found out 2 months ago that Geoff was accepted to the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Japanese language & linguistics PhD).  Our acceptance letter had gotten lost somehow and the school thought we knew but we didn't.  Needless to say, it's been a whirlwind since then to sell all of our possessions, move out of our house when we no longer had beds to sleep in (Thank you, thank you to Emily & Brandon for letting us stay with them for 3 weeks!), clean our house, list it with a realtor to sell, have Geoff defend and finish his thesis, celebrate Christmas (Thank you Mom & Dad for letting us spend a wonderful Christmas week with you!), pack the 4 suitcases we could take on our flight, fly here and get settled once we landed!  Phew!

Dad drove us to the Sanderson's home on his way to work with all our luggage & Emily very kindly drove us all to the airport in her van.  Kevin & Jared met us at the airport, hauled all of our luggage to baggage claim & then took our car home with them to sell for us on the classifieds since we hadn't been able to do that before we had to fly out!  I think it was at this point that Geoff turned to me and said "What in the world would we do with out all of these nice people helping us right now?!"  I totally agree, thank you so much to all of you who have helped us with all this craziness and really been there for us!

Our flight stopped in Seattle after a 2 hour flight  for a 3 hour lay over and then on to a 6 hour flight to Honolulu.  This was the first time either of the girls had been inside an airport or on a plane so they were really excited!  They did really well too.  We know that Heavenly Father was really blessing us and are thankful the girls were so well behaved!  The even slept the last 3 hours or so of the flight after I told them it was bedtime & got them "snuggled down." Miracles for sure!

The first thing the girls noticed about Hawaii is the gorgeous trees and plants we could see in the airport courtyards.  Hana asked if they were real and was amazed when we told her they were!

We arranged the day before to have Speedishuttle pick us up at the baggage claim, load our 4 huge suitcases and endless carryons and drive us to our hotel for the night.  Money well spent for sure!

The first night we decided to stay at a hotel closer to the airport since we were flying in so late and after searching for that for several days, the week before, I finally found what seemed to be the last available hotel room in Honolulu at the Hyatt Regency Waikiki hotel for $500 a night! We decided to take it and lived it up in luxury the few hours we were there.  The room had a balcony where we watched the sun come up over Waikiki beach!  We also enjoyed a great breakfast in one of the hotel restaurants over looking the ocean.  I loved the coconut syrup on the waffles and the miso soup (Japanese fermented soy bean soup-sounds gross, but is delicious!) We were surrounded by Japanese tourists and loved that.  I knew there were a lot of Japanese tourists in Hawaii but I had no idea that they were like 99.9% of the tourists there!  We felt right at home & loved how you could get really good Japanese food at the breakfast buffet or anywhere you went.  They all seemed to adore Hana & Aya, some of the few blondes in the hotel.

After breakfast we had to check out of our room so Geoff & the girls explored the amazing hotel lobby, shops & courtyards while I sat in the lobby with my lap top in order to track down the last rental car available in Honolulu (you see the pattern here?!) I found one, which was another miracle, and when we go to the car rental place there was actually a mini van available instead of the compact car we had booked so we had enough room for all of our luggage! Hurray! Once we had our nice, silver, new Nissan Quest mini van we were on our way to our first home and that brings me to the next story...

I had frantically been looking for a place to live since we found out we would be moving to Hawaii but with no luck.  The night before we flew out a little ad popped up on craigslist for an available vacation rental condo in Ko Olina, a place we really wanted to be, that was available immediately.  I emailed the person & told them we wanted the rental and heard back the next morning that we could have it! I know this was an answer to a prayer for sure and the lady who posted the ad actually said the same thing.  In her email she said "God is wonderful" and I completely agreed with her.

As we drove into Ko Olina we were amazed!  This place is gorgeous!  It's a beach resort where some people own homes and live here full time along with all of the tourists.  Disney & Marriott both have huge resorts here too.  Everything is landscaped  and made beautifully from the fountains to the black swans living on the golf course to the water falls & palm tree lined streets to the 4 perfectly made lagoon beaches on the shore!  We are renting a nice, newer 2 bedroom 3 bathroom condo until the end of January and have loved it.  We have a pool one street over and can walk to the amazing beaches.  We have been to the beach almost every day and to the pool twice, which I have loved!  We really want to enjoy those things while we're here.

We went to church last Sunday and today (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints http://mormon.org/)at the local building here and everyone was very friendly & welcoming to us. Most of the members of the congregation are Pacific Islanders but there are a handful families "from the mainland" and the all happen to be from Utah too!

Last Monday we drove to Geoff's new school, University of Hawaii at Manoa (UH) so he could meet with some faculty and such and so we got our first glimpse of the campus.  It is in Honolulu city in the very green & lush, Manoa valley.  It's amazing how different the two sides of the island are even though it only took us 35 minutes to drive there!  The side we live on,  is the desert side (though not nearly as dry and barren as Utah!) and the other side reminds us a lot of Japan with lots of rain, green hills, bamboo etc. The roads are also very narrow, crowded and sometimes very steep in the Manoa valley and that reminds us of Japan too.
The campus has some really cool buildings and some kind of run down looking buildings too but overall a pretty cool place.  Geoff says the faculty he has met are all very nice.  He starts classes this Tuesday.

We hoped to start Hana in her new school last Thursday when all the kids returned from Christmas break but were informed that she has to have a TB test that comes out negative before they will let her even step foot in the building.  Hawaii is very strict about immunizations and TB tests, we've found!  Geoff already had one done in Utah since he had to before he could start school but I decided the Aya and I should get ours done the same time as Hana since you can't really do anything here until that's taken care of.  We located the place we had to go to get them done and went on Friday and will have to go back tomorrow to show that we didn't react to the skin prick test.  Anyway, Hana will start school on Tuesday!  We drove by the school and were a little concerned because it is kind of run down looking but some people in the ward assured us that it's a good school and the teachers are great so I feel better about that.  A lot of things in Hawaii seem to be run down and people just don't seem to mind.  Part of that is from the sea air and humidity that rusts and corrodes everything very quickly from what I understand.

Well, this has gotten ridiculously long but it's been an eventful week!  We miss our family and friends back home very much and have had a few bad bouts of discouragement and homesickness but are feeling optimistic and happy to have this amazing opportunity for the most part.  Now to buy a car tomorrow and find a more permanent home to move to at the end of the month!

Happy 2013!  Love the Biesingers