Bryce Moore's Blog, page 23

Hawaiian Vacation: Mount Haleakala and Iao Valley

Continuing on the report of my trip to Maui, let’s talk about Mount Haleakala. Remember the big volcano I talked about yesterday? That’s Mount Haleakala. It’s also a National Park (so it costs $30 to visit). Now, when I hear “volcano,” I picture lava shooting into the air, with the occasional earthquake for good measure. This one doesn’t have that. In fact, it doesn’t even have a crater. If Frodo was supposed to chuck the ring into Mount Haleakala, he’d have just wandered around for a few days looking for a place to chuck it. (Are you taking notes, Sauron? This is big brain stuff.)

Instead, it’s got what’s called an erosion plain. We stopped by a lookout right before we hiked down into it, and it was pretty awesome looking. It looked like something you might see on the moon. Unfortunately, in the 15 minutes it took us to drive from there to the actual hike, clouds rolled in, and by the time we were hiking, all we could see was mist. It looked like the moon would look in a dense fog. Or what a Walmart parking lot would look like in a dense fog, for that matter, if the parking lot were fairly steep and covered in loose rock.

We drove up to the peak (10,000+ feet above sea level), and that was above the clouds, so had a pretty incredible view, but it was also too packed to park, so instead of watching the sunset from there, we watched it from slightly lower down the volcano, just at a pullout by the side of the road. That was beautiful, and worth the drive by itself. But other than that, there’s not much I can say about the volcano. Next time!

Since that’s not quite enough to justify the blog post, I’ll throw in a brief recap of the Iao Valley. This is a pretty short stop, though you need reservations to get in. It’s got a sharp, steep mountain that’s called the Iao Needle, which is remarkable. Other than that, there’s a short hike up and a short hike down to just sort of look around at the area. High above you, there’s a huge mountain with a long, thin waterfall running all the way down it. It reminded me of Up, honestly.

On the way down from there, we stopped by a fruit stand by the side of the road and had fresh fruit smoothies. Dragon fruit, papaya, bananas, pineapples, and more. They were delicious, and Denisa was very happy with the fruit offerings on the trip. At a later fruit stand, we bought a fresh coconut, which they chopped open for us so we could drink from it through a straw, then hacked it open so we could eat what was inside. The milk was . . . fizzy and a bit bitter. Not my favorite. The coconut meat itself was . . . slimy and kind of disgusting, though Denisa and the girls liked it. Maybe I didn’t like it because I put it in my mouth expecting usual dry, slightly sweet coconut, and instead it was more like a wet, coconut-infused avocado.

Bryces don’t like surprises.

Hawaiian Vacation: The Road to Hana

I’d heard about the road to Hana plenty of times before I actually drove it. “It’s magical.” “It’s the best part of Maui.” “You’ll love it.”

It was odd, since it’s rare to hear so much about a road to a place and so little about the place itself. Now that I’ve actually done the complete loop around the island, I’ve got a better idea about what they’re talking about.

First off, what is it. Maui basically consists of two mountains: a big one (with a volcano at the top) and a smaller one (that I assume also had a volcano at some point, but what do I know?) Most of the people in Maui live in between those two mountains, and along the southern and western sides of the island. There isn’t really much in the way of houses on the interior of the island, because it’s too steep.

Hana is a small town on the far edge of the island that is made from the volcano. There aren’t many people there, and there aren’t many people anywhere on the road to it or from it. There’s not much in the way of a road, either. It’s more a thought than an actual thing. Really narrow in many places (so much so that you’ve got to really work at it to get two cars past each other, and if one were to veer too far off the road, one would be falling down the mountain . . .), and not always even paved. (Word on the street is rental car companies don’t like you to drive the whole loop. I didn’t read that until I’d already done it, and the rental people didn’t seem to care, so . . . win?)

You don’t really go to Hana to see anything there. It’s just the town at the halfway point of the loop. You go on the road to Hana to see all the cool things that are on the road. Waterfalls. Secluded red sand beaches. Gorgeous vistas. You also go to check out some of the touristy things that have developed on that road. (Lots of banana bread, for some reason. Really good, fresh from the oven banana bread . . . ) There are no signs telling you where to stop or what to do. My sister just had experience from doing the drive multiple times, so she’d tell us to pull over at this one random spot that had almost no place to pull over, and then she’d lead us on a trek 800 yards into the jungle, along a very rocky stream bed that seems to go nowhere. Not another soul in sight. Just when I was about to start thinking she might have done this because it’s easier to hide the bodies that way, a waterfall appeared. A huge, hundred foot plus waterfall falling into a picturesque pool. We spent an hour just swimming by ourselves and playing around in the waterfall. (That thing was cold!) At the end of it, another couple of people showed up, so we took off so they could have the spot to themselves.

If you didn’t know it was there, you never would have found it.

The same is true for a red sand beach. (More of a red rock beach, really.) You pull over to the side of a road and walk down a random path that goes along the edge of the shoreline, and just when you wonder why you’re doing it, you come to this cove nestled into the mountain, with shielded waters that offer perfect swimming. (Just watch out for those rocks. I’m not kidding. They’re almost as bad as legos.)

None of it costs anything (except the banana bread). It’s just driving around and seeing cool stuff, but you’d better have a book or a guide, or all you’re going to do is see windy roads. (Seriously windy roads. Switchbacks all over the place, along steep jungle walls. I was surprised Indiana Jones didn’t come swinging by at some point. Or Tarzan.)

Doing the whole loop takes the whole day, and you’re very tired by the end of it. (It’s not easy driving. Did I mention that?) You’re usually not going faster than 15 mph the whole time, and often slower than that. But it was very much worth it.

So. Road to Hana? It really is about the road and not Hana. Talk about an example of journey before destination. Very glad we went.

When Sump Pumps Attack

We interrupt this regularly scheduled post on Hawaii for an emergency bulletin. The day after we came back from Hawaii, the alarm on the sump pump started going off in the basement. This isn’t terribly shocking. The thing is tempermental at best. So I silenced it, and then silenced it again when it went off an hour later. I checked the power breaker to see if maybe something had switched off, and it did seem that something might have. So I made sure all was as it should be, and thought no more of it.

Until it went off again this morning while Denisa was getting ready. I was heading in later for a doctor’s appointment, so I resolved to go down to the basement and find out if something really was wrong. Spoiler alert: something was.

Basically, the pump wasn’t pumping. That’s kind of a problem, since it’s the one thing it’s supposed to do. A bigger problem was that I didn’t know why. I didn’t want to just call a plumber without trying to fix it myself, so I spent an hour and change disassembling the housing so I could get at the pump. Once that was done, I decided that there was no way I knew enough about what I was doing to trust myself to fix the problem. Water in basements is a bad thing, and our basement can get a fair bit of it. That pump needed to work.

Thankfully, a friend came over at lunch and we got it swapped out. The old one was covered in rust and scale to the point that when we bought the new one, I assumed it was a totally different make and model. Nope: just rust-free.

All told, it was a $250 fix, and just took a few hours. Could have been worse, for sure, but it also ate all the time I had for blogging. So . . . this is all you get. PSA: check your sump pumps, people.

Back from Hawaii

I’m back! Hawaii was a complete and utter blast, and I’ll be taking the next few blog posts to catch you all up on what we did while we were there. Nothing like a vacation to give me plenty of blog fodder.

First off, one of the big decisions when you go to Hawaii seems to be “which island should I go to?” I’ve been once before (when I was 19), and went to Oahu and Kauai, but I don’t remember a whole ton of that trip. (I remember Pearl Harbor and the Polynesian Cultural Center, both of which I can definitely recommend, but that’s about it, which makes me wonder how much Daniela and MC will remember of this trip . . .) This time, we went to Maui for the sole reason of that was the island my sister recommended and planned the entire trip around. (She’d been raving about Hawaii for years, always telling me it was the Best Place Ever. I had long resisted going, for the main reason that it takes forever to get there from Maine. In the end, I said I’d go if she planned the whole thing. It was very much worth it.)

Knowing that we were going to Maui, we had to figure out how to get there for as little as possible. At Thanksgiving. Those aren’t generally compatible requirements. However, I turned to my good old reliable “There’s no American Thanksgiving in Canada” trick, which meant we left from Montreal, a 4.5 hour drive away. Of course, if we hadn’t left from there, we would have left from Boston, a 3.5 hour drive away. We could leave from Portland, but that’s going to entail two layovers, and that always seems to be tempting fate too much. Leaving from Montreal saved us around $700 a ticket. Definitely worth it, though it did make the travel more clunky than it had to be. We drove to Montreal, stayed the night at a Doubletree that let us park the car there, and then flew from there to Vancouver (6.5 hours) and from there to Maui (6.5 hours). It’s pretty much the same as flying to Europe. (Also, I used points to get the tickets, so . . . free. Yay!)

Maui just had the severe forest fires in August, so things were different there than they might have been otherwise. We stayed in Ka’anapali, right next to Lahaina, which is the town that burned down. Each time we’d go anywhere, we pretty much drove through a disaster zone. They’ve fixed the roads and made a detour to loop around the worst of it, but you still see the area that the fire swept through. On the one hand, that made me feel pretty bad, being there on vacation while the people who lived there were all struggling so much. On the other, it felt like everyone we interacted with was just ecstatic that we were there. The economy runs on tourism, so if people stay away, things get even worse. And it felt pretty empty to me, honestly. Thanksgiving day itself felt busy at the hotel, but other than that, it was rare that we saw other people around. We had the hot tubs to ourselves most of the time. The roads were traffic free usually. We didn’t have to wait most of the time. So . . . they could definitely use more people coming.

Overall, I was surprised by how expensive food was in Maui. We got groceries, and it felt like everything was at least double the price of what it usually was, sometimes more. Restaurants were also very pricey (with the exception of when we went to one at happy hour, and a bunch of stuff was half off. Definitely something to look into if you’re there.) On the flip side, so much of what there is to do there is free, so you could offset the food price by just going to the beach each day. In other words, Hawaii was more expensive in some ways and less in others.

So would I go back? Yes, even with how big of a pain it was to get there. (Though I’m really curious how Hawaii compares to Caribbean islands. More firsthand research needs to be done . . .) I’ll get into the details in later posts, but the island was stunning, and it felt very different from anything else we’ve done. (Including Puerto Rico. The infrastructure in Maui was just so much better, even with a bunch of it burning down.) We didn’t do some of the very touristy things (no luau, for example: they cost $200+, and we just decided to spend money elsewhere), but there was no lack of great things to do and see. If I go again, I think I’d likely take the direct flight from Boston to Oahu, and then take a short flight from there to Maui.

I’m definitely glad we stayed for a whole week. Anything less would have felt really rushed, and very draining. That said, I know I typically go on longer vacations than many people, so maybe take that into account if you’re planning your own trip. We could have seen more, but I’ll also say that it was a fine time to come home, as well.

So, a fun time had by all, and I look forward to getting into some of the details in the next few days. In the meantime, if you’ve got questions, I’m happy to answer them. Glad to be home! (Especially because we’ve got snow here. I love snow. Daniela went surfing one morning and then went to Nordic ski practice the day after we came home. That’s quite the change . . .

Blogcation

I’m going to be stepping away from the blog for the Thanksgiving break, starting tomorrow. I’ll be traveling, and things will be pretty spotty in terms of down time over the next while. (Well, sort of. I mean, I’ll have tons of down time on the plane on Saturday, but I’m not really in a headspace to blog when I’m on a plane.)

Where am I going?

Off to Hawaii, actually. (Tough life, I know.) I’ve been once before, back when I was 18. I went to Oahu and Kauai back then. This time it’s going to be Maui, so that should be exciting. What am I doing? That’s the best part. I have no idea. My sister’s planned the whole thing, because she’s awesome like that. Hawaii’s her favorite place, and she’s been there many times, so I just said I’d do whatever she said was a good thing to do. I haven’t done any internet searches about restaurants or places to visit or anything at all.

Getting there will be the trick. I’m flying out of Montreal, since the Canadian prices were a steal compared to American prices. (That whole “Thanksgiving in America happens at a different time than Thanksgiving in Canada.) That’ll be a 4.5 hour drive tomorrow. Then it’s a hotel stay (so we don’t have to pay to park the car), followed by a 6.5 hour flight to Vancouver, a 7.5 hour layover, and then a 6.5 hour flight to Maui. So . . . that’ll be a lot, and I’m far from looking forward to it.

Once I’m through with Saturday, though . . . then things should be great.

I hope you all have a lovely break as well, and I’ll catch up when I’m home!

Movie Review: Nightmare on Elm Street 1 vs. 2

I’ve mentioned that I’ve been going through older “classic” horror movies, seeing what might have made them so lasting and popular, and taking note for the way they each approach the genre. Some of these movies have been really impressive. Some of them have turned out to be absolute stinkers. Nightmare on Elm Street 1 and 2 really do a good job of exemplifying this.

The first one was a real surprise. Directed by Wes Craven (and featuring Johnny Depp in his first film), the movie has an engaging plot that creates some real scares. We gradually learn the history of Freddy Krueger: how he was murdered children with a glove he attached razor blades to, was captured, and then got off on a technicality. (So maybe it’s not necessarily the most realistic of films). How the parents of the town decided to take matters into their own hands and burned him to death by tossing him in a furnace. And how he came back as a master of dreams, able to manipulate people as they dreamed (and yet somehow was able to manipulate the real world as well).

Like I said, there are definitely some plot holes, but there’s enough of a story there to give it a pass, especially since Krueger is such a unique bad guy. (Razor blade glove? Who comes up with this stuff?) It goes off the rails now and then (especially at the end, which is sort of a deus ex machina and then a deus ex wrench at the same time. (The problem magically get solved and then magically gets created out of nowhere.) But in the end, you kind of just go along with all of it and enjoy the ride.

The sequel, however . . . left much to be desired. It looked at the crazy plot points of the original, as well as the gory scenes, and then decided plot really didn’t matter at all. There’s no sense to what Freddy can and can’t do. No sense of how to beat him. No sense of what in the world’s going on. I can accept a bit of confusion, but this got to the point where I was no longer scared for the characters, because I just didn’t care about them. They were there for no other reason than be horribly murdered. The movie felt like something I was enduring instead of enjoying at all.

Takeaways for me from the two films are that plot holes sometimes aren’t that big of a deal. Yes, I don’t like them as a watcher or reader, but I can take a few of them without giving up. Second, character matters a ton. Get your audience invested in your character, and everything else clips along just fine. If that gets out of whack, then no amount of effort is going to repair things.

Overall, I gave the first a 7.5/10 and the second a 3/10.

You Get What You Give

I had an unpleasant, random interaction today. I was heading across campus to a meeting, and I came to a crosswalk. So far, so good. A truck was approaching, but it slowed down and stopped. You with me? I proceeded to cross the crosswalk, though I didn’t directly stare at the truck, since I feel like that can be kind of aggressive and taken the wrong way. In the middle of the crosswalk, it sounded like someone was talking to me from the truck. I thought it might turn out to be someone I knew, so I actually looked over at it now and cocked my head in the universal “What did you say?” sign.

It was easier to hear what the guy was saying now, especially since he drove into the crosswalk right behind me. I did not, it turns out, know him. And he was definitely very irate. “Way to just walk out without even looking, moron!”

This (obviously) rubbed me the wrong way, so I said back, “I knew you were there” loud enough that he’d be able to hear it through his rolled down window. (Which he rolled down just to be able to share his message.)

He cursed and floored the gas so he could make it to the stop sign 30 yards away that much faster. I somehow fell back on my German missionary days and just gave him the sign for “you’re an idiot” which is where you wave your hand in front of your face. No idea where that came from. You can tell how often I ever get mad at people in the moment.

I’m not blogging about the event because I feel any remorse over the incident. Angry people are going to angry. But it did make me reflect on how easily things are influenced by the attitude you have when you come into the situation. If you jump into something angrily, you’re that much more likely to make the person you’re yelling at angry in return.

This is true for more than just random interactions in crosswalks. It applies to relationships to family and friends. To how you interact with strangers. To how you approach life in general. I’ve noticed perpetually grumpy people often feel like everyone else is grumpy. While I’ve doubted that, now that I think about it, it might be true. Go around grumpy all the time, and people you’re talking with magically become grumpy whenever they see you . . .

Just a thought for this fine Tuesday. Now you’ll need to excuse me. There’s a crosswalk I have to jump out into the middle of to surprise another car.

Donating My Hair

I’ve been debating donating my hair for the past while, and honestly, I’m still a bit nervous about it. From what I’ve read, you need to have a bare minimum of 8 inches of hair to be able to donate it, and it’s typically more like a foot. Since hair grows on average about a half inch a month, that would mean I’d need to grow my hair for around two years to get there. That’s . . . a long time. And it’s a particularly long time for a person who doesn’t like to do any sort of maintenance at all in terms of caring how I look. I would rather just roll out of bed and be ready to go in as little as time as possible. I don’t know much about having long hair, having never had it, but I do know it seems like it takes a lot of work. Work to wash it. Work to dry it. And work to make it actually look presentable.

I can vouch for some of this personally, as right now my hair is the longest it’s been in . . . ever. I’ve been letting it grow since I last cut it. At first it was for the normal reason (I don’t like hair cuts), but then I started to think about actually donating (more on that in a moment), and so I’ve been letting it get longer. It’s kind of a pain already. I’ve had basically the same hairstyle my entire life (conservative side part), and that hairstyle only works as long as your hair isn’t too long. I don’t really like how my hair looks at the moment, though I can’t tell if that’s because I don’t like it, or if I just am not used to change (always a possibility.)

So to commit to this for another two years or so feels more than a little daunting. And if that’s the case, why in the world do I want to donate my hair?

Cancer.

Two weeks ago, I found out one of my coworker’s children was just diagnosed with cancer. The boy’s only two years old. I’ve been friends with this coworker for . . . a long time. Before he was a coworker, he was a student at UMF way back in the day, and he’s a long time Magic: The Gathering player. I remember him being very kind and encouraging to Tomas right when Tomas was getting into the game, even giving him some nice cards for free to make his deck better. He’s got a young family. None of them deserve this. Chemo treatments will go on for 42 months. That’s almost twice what it will take for me to get my hair long enough to donate.

The older I get, the more people I know whose lives have been affected by cancer. My step-mother lost her life to it in a very abrupt and traumatic fashion about six years ago. My cousin had leukemia. The son of two of my writing group members got it when he was three. Several friends have had it or are going through it right now. A young girl in my local congregation died from it. Cancer is this thing that comes out of nowhere and takes everything you’ve got. You battle it not knowing what the outcome will be. You don’t have a choice.

I have given money to friends who are going through this, and I’ve donated to charities focused on curing cancer, but honestly, that feels like a cop out to me. Like I can just throw some money at the problem and then not worry about it anymore. After all, what else can I do? Well, one thing I can do is donate my hair. I can put up with not liking how it looks every day, and having to take a bit more time to get ready in the morning. These are small, first world problems. It’s still nothing compared to what cancer victims have to go through, but it’s more than just throwing money at it and forgetting about it.

I am expecting a fair number of joking remarks to head my way over the next while. Middle-aged man starts growing his hair long? Especially one who’s never done that before? But that’s okay. I’ll use those opportunities to explain why I’m doing it, and maybe that will make a bit of a difference somehow as well.

Normally I’d rather not make a big deal of something like this. I prefer to do good deeds in private, but in this case, there’s no getting around the public nature of this, so I thought it might be easier to just let as many people know what I’m doing as possible at once. I’d also love to know where a good place to donate hair is. I’d like it to go somewhere that gives wigs away for free, if possible.

Like I said, I’m still kind of nervous about this. That’s honestly one of the reasons that’s also spurring me on to do it. This is a choice. Cancer isn’t. So I think it’s worth a bit of personal discomfort and being self-conscious if it can help someone else. Wish me luck.

Life Hack: Implementation Intentions

I’ve been reading a book for a campus reading group (The Spark of Learning, by Sarah Rose Cavanagh). It’s got a lot of useful information on how to be a better teacher, and it’s also had a few concepts that really resonated with me. They’ve put into words concepts I didn’t really know already had terms applied to them, if that makes sense. One such concept is implementation intentions.

Basically, these boil down to if-then-plans that you make in order to get things done. For example, growing up, I always had the if-then-plan of “If I come home from school, then I will complete all my homework first thing.” These days, I’ve got, “If I come home from work hungry, then I will have a small cup of granola.”

These sound like absolute no-brainers. Like, of course I’m going to eat something. I’m hungry. But it’s more about deciding what I will eat and how much I will eat, so that I ensure I don’t eat too much. If I don’t have that specific plan, then I come home, I’m hungry, and in the moment, I make a decision about what I’m going to eat. That might end up being three Halloween cookies. It hadn’t been my intent to eat those cookies, but I didn’t have an alternative plan in place, and so that’s what I end up doing.

So what you end up doing is making decisions ahead of time, when you can actually think clearly about what would be the best choice, and then when the situation arises, you already know what you’re going to do. Are they the same as just regular old goals? Not quite. My overarching goal might be “I want to write a novel.” My daily goal might be “I want to write 1,000 words each day.” But that’s still just a general desire. If I then add “If I come home and haven’t written 1,000 words, then I will sit down in a chair and not get up until those 1,000 words are finished,” then I have a real plan for completing my goal. I can add onto that “If I am struggling to write normal prose, then I will write about what I want to write about or what I’m struggling with, and that will count toward my 1,000 words.”

I’ve written 20 novels with this basic approach (refined over the years).

I’ve also successfully lost weight with it, when I can stick to my guns. (The biggest weakness to these implementation intentions, personally, is what happens if I don’t actually follow through on them. In that case, I end up doing exactly what I didn’t want to do, usually. That gets me in trouble.)

The bottom line is that if you’re trying to figure out how to get something done in your life, then come up with a very specific if-then-plan. Almost like a computer program, really. You make your mind up ahead of time about what you’re going to do, and then you just stick to the plan. Give it a shot. It might work well for you.

Officially TikTokking

Well, I finally went and did it. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was considering starting a TikTok account as an author, and I decided to follow through on it. Yesterday I put up my first two posts. (I’m @bmoorebooks, in case you want to follow me over there.) This is kind of backward from the way I’d usually approach social media. I like to have a good feel for a platform before I really do anything with it, just to make sure I don’t do or say something that makes me look foolish, since it might be a no-no most people are aware of.

I finally decided I often look foolish anyway, so why put it off any longer?

Already, I’m seeing it might be difficult for me to actually post content. Not because I can’t think of content to post, but rather because I had to do like 1,000 takes of that lousy first video to try and get it right, and in the end I just gave up and posted what I had and moved on. I still feel like it’s pretty drab, and I say “uh” way too many times, but oh well. I’ll survive.

That first intro video has had 791 views, which judging from other TikTok videos I’ve seen, isn’t all that many, but when you compare it to other metrics I see on Facebook or my blog, is a ton. This leads me to believe TikTok is very generous with “views.” Or is it really that there are that many people actively using the platform? (Things on Facebook, meanwhile, feel like they’re getting quieter and quieter.) My “I have no clue what I’m doing” post has had 276 views, but it actually got two comments, so . . . I have no idea. Whatever.

I plan to post short reviews of books and movies, along with discussions of how, what, where, when, and why I write. So the goal is to keep it pretty author-centric. We’ll see how that goes. I really enjoyed putting the Grumpy Old Men TikTok together, so I might do more of that as well. I often think in terms of movie quotes, so it shouldn’t be that hard.

Anyway. That’s all I’ve got for now. Let me know if you see me really sticking my foot in my mouth.