First Few Days on Kauai

Aloha! What a week this has been! I arrived on Kauai last Wednesday night, picked up my rental car and drove to the hotel I had reserved. It is not a nice hotel, but it is right on the beach, so I am enjoying it.

I discovered that I need ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support) certification to start my new job here (it was not required at St. Mary's) so I have been VERY busy completing that course. It's been stressful and my brain has felt tired and taxed, but today I finally finished it all. YAY!

I also have spent many hours looking for a place for us to live. The house we thought we were going to rent turned out to be a little disappointing. It was dark and smelled yucky and had an annoying neighbor WAY too close for comfort. I spent a couple of days looking for a place fairly close to my work and I found nothing but yuck, yuck, YUCK! One night I sort of had a panic attack, thinking what the *##(@*$ am I doing here??? I called Mike, even though it was the middle of the night in Colorado, and he talked me down from the edge of the cliff I was on and put things back into perspective for me. We decided to stick to our original plan, the one that brought us to this point in the first place, which was to live in the most beautiful part of the island even though it'll be a longer drive to work. So the next day I set out on a new quest to find us a home in the town we fell in love with when we were here last month.

I have looked at several places and actually found two that I liked and would feel very comfortable in, but there is one more I want to look at before I make a committment, so I am hoping to see that one tomorrow. I'm getting tired of being homeless and living in a very shabby hotel. When the turquoise blue shag carpet (circa 1970) starts to get to me too bad, I walk down the sidewalk to the beach and feel wonderful again.

Tonight I watched several young boys surfing. They were awesome! A few nights ago, I walked down the beach a little ways and sat on some volcanic rocks and watched the surf pound the shore. There were little black crabs on the rocks, which were interesting but a little creepy because they looked like tarantulas.

One morning last week, there was a monk seal on the beach. Monk seals are endangered and are protected in Hawaii. They gorge themselves on food then wash up on the beach, where they rest while they digest their food. Within a few minutes of people discovering it, there were people here from some protection agency surrounding the monk seal with crime scene-type tape so no one could get near it. When I returned to the beach that evening, the seal was gone.

Everyone please send up prayers for me to find a decent place to live, and soon!