Aloha!

We're in Honolulu and it's 4:40 am local time. We slept as late as we could!

Mountain view from the hotel, huzzah! The ocean's great and all but I'm more of a mountains girl. And they are very neat mountains! It's like someone dropped the fuzzy greenness of the Appalachians onto the jagged edgedness of the Rockies.

Today, we figure out what we're doing and later, I'll register for the conference. I was kinda hoping for an excuse to miss the first sessions, but they look far too awesome. In fact, I'll have a hard time choosing - asteroid deflection, trajectory optimization, autonomous systems? Bwah!

And oh - we picked up the most awesome airport book ever. "The Secret History of the World." ZOMG. Moe's reading it, and the verdict is very well-read, educated total conspiracy mixed nut mix. Eeee!

Scadian powers, activate!

Not only have we found Waikiki's Irish pub, we found it the day they have live Irish music in the afternoon (4pm).

Yeah, I travel halfway around the world and go to a pub sing. I promise we'll do more interesting things later in the week.

Well, we did walk on Waikiki Beach for a bit, coming back from the pub. (We had to test-drive it for lunch, you see. Did you know they brew some good beers in Hawai'i? And a rum, too, although I haven't had that yet.)

It really is amazing. The Pacific Ocean, as viewed from San Francisco, looks remarkably like the Jersey Shore. Out here, it really is aqua blue water, crystal clear up close, blue skies, white clouds and a fine breeze the whole day. The malls are built with the food courts and byways open to the air - try that in December on the East Coast.

Also saw a cool little grey bird with a bright red crest; wonder if it's in the jay/cardinal family? Had the same overall shape, crest aside. One of the neatest but most disorienting things for me about coming West for me is that I don't know any of the flora and fauna. I know most common animals, birds and flowers in the NJ-MD area. I see stuff out here and I have no clue.