The lighter side of our trip, part 3

I keep thinking of funny things that happened while we were in Colorado. This is the last post on this, I swear!

-At Matt's mom's burial, my back kept spasming to the point that I couldn't even take a step. Once the formal service was over, Matt and I took a walk around the cemetary, looking at headstones and stuff, and then finally decided to sit and wait in the van. Well, we ended up in the backseat and were kissing (that's all, I swear) when Matt's younger sister Stephanie opened the van door and quickly closed it. We really got a kick out of that!

-Later that night, Matt and I were both apparently pretty tired, so we both fell asleep on the couch in the living room. We were both rudely awakened - his older brother, Scott, and older sister, Angela, decided to wake us up by putting ice cubes down our shirts/pants! Yeah, they're just a family full of jokesters.

-Matt's little brother, Zach, is extremely flexible and doesn't hesitate to show everyone. Unlike Matt, he isn't shy at all. He is so flexible that he can basically bend himself in half and put his head on the floor while he's sitting and just lay there. He can also put both of his legs behind his head without any effort. The funniest thing that he does is contort his shoulder blades in a way that he can hold things between them, even something as small as a pen. That's pure talent right there!

The lighter side of our trip, part 2

Here's a couple more stories from our trip to Colorado!

Matt's hair was getting pretty shaggy and his sister Angela reminded him every day that he needed a haircut. I usually cut his hair, so I borrowed their clipper set and we went out on the back porch. The lighting wasn't very good and it was very cold. When I cut his hair at home, I always start with attachment #5, then use a #3 on the middle and #1 on the sides and back. The Navy requires that his haircut be tapered as such. Anyway, without really thinking much about it, I put on the #5 attachment and started to cut his hair. It turned out that #5 on this clipper set was the shortest, so Matt had a really really short streak of hair directly down the middle of the top of his head! I managed to cover it up ok and tried my best to blend the rest of his hair in without totally shaving his head, but you could still see it if you looked hard enough. Everyone got a pretty good laugh out of it and I learned a valuable lesson - always start cutting hair at the back!

The other story that I thought of involves Matt's cousin's kid, who just turned a year old on Jan 1. He is very cute and mild tempered, so we didn't mind having him around a lot. He looks a lot like the baby in the Quiznos commercial. He had apparantly just learned how to make a new frowny face where he would squish up his lips and turn his eyebrows down. Everyone got a good laugh out of this whenever he did it because it was always followed by a big smile and laugh from him. During Matt's mom's funeral, I turned around at one point and saw baby Jacob pointing at me and making the face. It got me laughing during the funeral!

TMI

For those of you that are acronimically challenged, TMI means "too much information". I often wonder if I am some sort of a TMI magnet because people, most often strangers, seem to like to tell me far more information about them than I would like. A great example of this happened to Matt and I when we picked up our cats recently.

We kept the cats with an older lady that advertised in the yellow pages, but she does keep very good care of them. Buffy had a urinary tract infection and her butt area was swollen and sore, and the lady applied cream to it every day and made sure that she got her antibiotics like she was supposed to. Anyway, when we picked them up, she made sure to tell us all of her observations about the cats and their various ailments.

This is all good information that we needed to know. Somehow, however, this turned into her telling us about a rash that she has in her bra area (among other areas of her body) and somehow this conversation also led into us finding out about how she needs to regularly have colonoscopies. It probably would have been amusing to have been an outsider watching this conversation because I'm almost sure that I moved back slightly when she mentioned a rash and both of our faces were probably a little "off" while she was telling us about her colonoscopies. LOL.

Matt vs. the cart people

Every month or so, Matt and I go grocery shopping at the Navy Exchange here in Hawaii. It's a nice place to shop. The prices are more in line with the rest of the country and they offer the more familiar products of the mainland as opposed to some of the other local grocery stores. It's a very large store as well and only people with military IDs (and their families) are allowed to shop there. All is great, except for one part at the end of the shopping experience.

There are local volunteers, usually elderly people, that load up your cart after checkout, push it to your car and help you unload the bags. In return, you are expected to give them a tip. This bothers Matt to no end (and it's quite funny to me to see how riled up he can get about the "cart people"). He would rather push the cart himself and believes that he shouldn't have to tip them because "I didn't ask for their services!". I've heard that just about every time that we've gone grocery shopping. This last time we went shopping, he only tipped the old lady a dollar, which I thought was pretty stingy. He said that he wasn't going to tip her at all. It might not sound that funny, but it sure is if you're there!

The lighter side of our trip

Here's a few funny things that happened while we were in Colorado:

-On the night before we were supposed to leave, Matt hid around a corner to scare his younger sister, Stephanie. He startled her alright, and her shoe went right between his big toe and its toenail. It ripped his nail backwards. His older sister Angela is a physician's assistant, and she decided that she needed to relieve the swelling, so she drilled a hole into his toenail with a cordless drill. She went a little too far, though, and I heard Matt yelp from the next room!

-Matt's sisters think they're funny. One morning, as I opened our door to head to the bathroom, I was greeted by 250 aluminum cans falling into our room. They were really quite clever - they used a large piece of paper to hold the cans against the door. It must have taken them a long time to stack all of them!

We're home!

Matt and I (finally) got home last night. We were supposed to arrive Sunday evening, but thanks to the stupidly-designed Phoenix airport, we missed our connecting flight. Most airports I've been to (which is quite a few by now) don't make you exit and then re-enter security for your connections. Well, the Phoenix airport does. As if that's not bad enough, there are absolutely no signs telling you where to go. It took us a good 20 minutes just to figure out where we were supposed to be. That's bad when you only have an hour to catch your next flight. To make things worse, the airport is actually like 4 separate airports and you have to take a shuttle bus to get from one terminal to the next. We finally found the Hawaiian Airlines desk and checked in. For some reason, they made us do extra security screening (they frisk you and stuff) so we had no chance of catching our plane. I strongly suggest avoiding flying through that airport if you are connecting flights.

We were already pretty peeved, but the runaround that we got from the airlines just added fuel to our fire. Hawaiian Airlines (the one we were supposed to catch) told us that it was United's fault because they only gave us an hour to connect and they should have known better. We didn't really buy this, but we could see that we weren't going to get anywhere with the Hawaiian folks at the airport. So we exited security (again) and took another bus back to United. We had to wait in a line for about 15 or 20 minutes and finally got to talk to someone. As we expected, United couldn't help us, either. They told us to either call Travelocity or talk to Hawaiian. We had anticipated this and told them that Hawaiian was gone for the day, so they gave us a number to call.

We found a relatively quiet place to sit and Matt called Hawaiian Airlines and I called Travelocity. I was hung up on. Matt managed to get through, though, and after talking to two people, we managed to get ourselves booked on a flight for the next day without having to pay an extra fee (which took a while to negotiate). We then rented a car and found a Motel 6. The rest of the day was actually kind of fun because neither of us had ever been to Phoenix. It is a dusty, dirty city in the middle of the desert. Scottsdale was nice, though.

Anyway, it was an adventure to say the least. We were very happy to get home and pick up the cats and sleep in our own bed. Since we live above an Interstate, there is a lot of pollution. Nearly everything in the apartment was covered with a layer of grime, so we spent most of today cleaning. Whew!

Very sad news

Matt's mom, Helen Smith, died yesterday at 10:30AM. She died in her home surrounded by all of her children as she took her last breath. It was very sad for me to see. The rest of the day was full of visitors. I have met so many new people during my time here, and I'm sure to meet even more during the next few days. The funeral is on Friday, and Matt and I are planning to go home on Sunday.

Still in Colorado

We were supposed to fly home yesterday, but we decided to stay for a while longer. Matt's mom is still alive but not doing well. We decided to stay around for the funeral and then go home. Once we get home, we won't have a whole lot of time to relax, because we need to start thinking about moving soon. We have decided to move to Colorado for a few months before heading to Florida. We want to help Matt's family as much as we can while we have the opportunity.

Spirits are fairly high here, though. Tomorrow we are heading to a rodeo in Denver, so I'll be sure to take some pictures. I have a lot of pictures to post when we get home!

It's been a while!

We've been pretty busy traveling over the last couple of weeks, so I really haven't had the regular access to a computer like I usually do. We spent some time (although I would have liked it to be more) with my family in Wisconsin, and we are now currently spending time with Matt's family in Colorado. It is pretty interesting for me to see where Matt grew up and stuff. I also got to see baby pictures of Matt for the first time! He was such a cute kid. The white-capped Rocky Mountains are just amazing to see. We will be living here for a few months before we move to Florida, so I'm sure I'll get plenty of pictures then.

Speaking of pictures, I have a bunch to put up on the site when I get home. There's a lot of other work that I want to do as well. I do have a lot more to say, but I'll save it for future postings, which I promise I'll be posting more regularly. :)