New home!

Yesterday, we spent the whole day moving to a new home! You would think it would be trivial to move since we only came with ourselves and a bunch of suitcases. Somehow, we had ended up accumulating a lot more stuff than we thought though.

Our new apartment is amazing and disappointing at the same time. We have this incredible view. You could sit all day and stare out the window at the beach and the sailboats and the wide expanse of ocean and up to the Diamond Head crater. We look 46 floors below us to the street and the mall and the pool and the tennis courts. We have two balconies and with the doors wide open, we get a nice breeze most of the time that cools us off and eliminates the need for AC. These are twin towers, so we look out across to the sister tower and it feels like you ought to just jump over to the neighboring apartments and say hi to those folks.

It's a new apartment. They joined two regular units to make this giant 2200 sq ft unit. Apparently, they were trying to sell this apartment for $2.5M, but no one bit, so they rented it instead. It's the crappiest $2.5M place I've ever seen, but the nicest place I've ever lived in. The finishing needed help, there's paint on the carpet and the cleaners didn't really clean up after the contractors. They didn't get the window shades up in time, and one entire side of the apartment is floor to ceiling windows, so Leo hasn't been napping and the sun wakes us up in the morning and everyone gets to see us parade around naked. The doors open up into each other in awkward ways. We rented furniture because it came unfurnished (furnished would have been $1000 more each month). So we have some beds and a couch and a kitchen table. It turns out our stuff arrives this week, so the furniture was pretty pricey for a week rental.

Yesterday Leo and I wandered the nearby streets to find lunch. We walked up and down the streets, looking for something suitable. There's a shabu-shabu (hot pot) restaurant that smelled yucky (to Leo), a Japanese grill that was closed, a pancake house, several strip clubs that were open at the time?, and then finally, we found the cheap takeout sushi/convenience store. Woohoo! A fresh tuna poki roll for $2.

Today we shopped AGAIN. The Walmart is a zoo. The Costco is worse. The Target is a lot more reasonable but 10 miles out of town. The Safeway is a zoo, even at 9pm at night, and it has very little worth buying. We've given up on a lot of organics. Parking takes forever even though the big boxes have parking garages. Everything is expensive and its amazing how crowded it is at all times of day and night. Shopping is darn unpleasant. We'll have to start growing our own food. (The Costco did have a Poki bar, however, which was a nice redeeming quality!)

I made the mistake of leaving Leo's chocolate easter bunny in the car while we shopped. Tonight, Leo and Paul scraped the melted bunny off the package and ate it. I'm hoping to redeem myself as a Mommy tomorrow by taking Leo snorkeling out in Hanauma Bay.

We scoped out our pool and recreation deck. There's a small playground structure that occupies Leo for 10-15 minutes. The pool is unheated (unlike the toasty warm pool at the hotel) and quite chilly, but it's big and I did a few laps after forcing myself to jump in. There's a good temperature hot tub that's pretty small. A couple tennis courts, a driving range, a putting green and some BBQs. There is a theatre that we want to reserve at some point soon, just to test out.

We live next to a design store. Fancy furniture and cool design. They have a restaurant too, where you can buy dinner entrees for $40-something.

Happy Easter everyone!
Love, Debbie, Paul and Leo