Produce, rainbows and cushions, oh my!

There's a really great farmer's market held on the UH Manoa campus every Friday, and I finally went this past week. It's all locally grown produce, and it's all really cheap! I spent about $20 and came away with papayas, lettuce, "long beans" (which look like nothing so much as green shoelaces), grape tomatoes, Roma tomatoes, a cucumber, and the cutest watermelon in the entire world. I kid you not, this thing was frickin' adorable:

It's the perfect size for one person!

FYI - I just figured this out - all of the pictures in the blog posts are clickable so you can see them full-size. In my browser, which is Google Chrome (try it if you haven't, by the way - it's great!) they just open in the same window and then you can go back one page to return to the blog. I don't know if they do the same thing in Internet Explorer and Firefox, though.

After the farmer's market I went to the supermarket to get the rest of the groceries I needed, and just after I got home (around 5:00) it started pouring rain. But as is often the way of these tropical showers, the sun was shining brightly - looking west, the raindrops formed this curtain of dazzling crystals as the sun streamed through them. But I instinctively turned my head east and was greeted with a saturated, gorgeous, full-arc rainbow reaching across the entire valley. Where the clouds were heaviest and darkest, the rainbow doubled in a mirror of itself. I dumped the groceries and ran inside to get my camera.

I got this one standing on my lanai. When I was first looking at apartments I considered one without a lanai - the landlord tried to play it down by saying that having usable indoor space was better, and most people just use their lanais to store their bikes. Well, screw that. I can't believe I almost missed out on this!

There were two guys getting into their car in the parking lot next to my building, and I shouted down to the poor, unsuspecting wretches, "Are you seeing this???" I couldn't bear for no one else to witness this miracle unfolding before my very eyes. They looked up and appeared minorly impressed, and I realized I must have sounded slightly crazy. I explained, "Sorry, I only moved here a few weeks ago!" They laughed and one of them said, "Oh, yeah, well, we get those every couple of days." Holy crap! If I ever come close to getting jaded about the beauty of this place, I give each and every person reading this blog full permission to slap me. HARD.

I had to go out to the top of the stairs to get a picture of the makai (seaward) half. It's kind of faint, but you can see that it really is a complete 'bow ;-)

And here's a close-up of the mauka (mountain) end. Look how it even tints the hills behind it!!

Just a few minutes later, both rainbows had faded and my groceries were in danger of spoiling :-) Sigh...

In the continuing saga of organizing and making the apartment feel more like home, I've been searching and searching for floor cushions to arrange around the coffee table for guest seating. There isn't a dining table except for the one out on the lanai, but if I have people over I don't want to make them sit on the lovely but hard stone floor. It's the kind of table that has a shelf underneath it, but the dimensions are kind of odd for most standard cushions, and I wanted them in a shade of red to go with the futon cover I brought from Boston. Mom and I had found some cute ones at Target when we went during the Whirlwind Weekend of Relocation(TM), but they didn't have four of the same kind. Well, I went to Target this past Saturday with a girl I met through the program - she's living with her parents while in grad school, and has use of their car. She had some things to get and asked me if I wanted to come along. Lo and behold, I found four of the same cushions, in a perfect shade of red, and they're exactly the right dimensions to store underneath the table, with just enough space to spare for all my board games!

Here's a picture of the futon with the coffee table and cushions out. I love how well the reds match! Now to find a slipcover for the armchair...I sure hope I can find one I like!

Dell has finally shipped out the CPU for my new desktop (that's the "brains" of the computer). The flatscreen 22" monitor arrived from Newegg.com several weeks ago, but it's taken a long time for the CPU to be built because of the high demand from the new school year starting. It will be arriving much earlier than the most recent ETA, which was the 24th, so I'll give them that. I've been busy enough what with schoolwork and social activities, but I miss my TV shows! See, the CPU has a TV Tuner, so the cable from the wall can plug directly into that and the CPU will hook up to the monitor, but without the CPU, I've been TV-less. I watched the premiere of America's Next Top Model online last week, but if all goes according to plan, I'll be able to watch this week's episode on my beautiful monitor/TV!

Sorry for all the ugly wires and stuff. I've cleaned all of that up since this picture was taken :-)

If you count from the first full day I was here, today marks exactly one month that I've been living in Honolulu. It has gone by really quickly, mostly because it's all been really fun and interesting. I could be sitting in an apartment somewhere near Groton, CT, waiting for Eamon to finish Boot Camp, and then we could live together while he completes training schools, but as much as I miss him and want to be with him more than anything, I know this isn't forever. And I get to live in a beautiful place while I prepare for a career. That's a trade-off I can live with for a little bit.