Hawaii Part VI

Just a note that if you were looking for the Hawaii part 3 and IV posts, I apologize but they were swallowed up by a hiccup in time and/or space.  Or I got messed up in my counting.  Either way, they don't exist.  :0)

Hawaii Part V

After the beach we took a taxi back to the downtown area to wander through the market and take pictures with the banyon trees.  

Then it was a quick stop at Hilo Hatties (because no trip to Hawaii would be complete without that tourist trap) where I bought way too much macadamia nut candy.  No regrets though.  I was also really excited to find one of these:

I had been craving one for months and finally found it!  

I also crossed off another item on my bucket list by getting a pearl out of an oyster.  I totally wan't going to but then I got a coupon for half off and it seemed like a good thing to do.  I ended up with a big black pearl which was pretty cool.

Back on the ship we had an excellent BBQ and had some fun hanging out.

I felt like I was in Breakfast at Tiffany's (shows you how extensive my imagination is) and took this silly glam pic with Andrea.  :0P

Hawaii Part 2

Unfortunately it was really cold for a while after I got out of the water for lunch.  We were all in our swim suits with no warm clothes and it was raining and windy.  So pathetic.  Luckily, the sun came out after about a half an hour and I went exploring the tide pools and lava rocks on the other side of the beach.  I'm going to celebrate being able to publish unlimited photos by posting way too many.  Even one of grass.  Because I can.

Belated Hawaii Post (Part 1)

First, welcome people from Reddit.  :0)  I missed you guys.  

I survived the many shaky times and essays and made it to beautiful Hawaii!  When we processed through immigration, the lady smiled and said, "welcome home" when she handed my my passport.  It hadn't really hit me until then that I was going to be back in the U.S.  Strange moment.

We really packed the day full with shopping, snorkeling, and buying junk food brands that we recognized.  haha  First stop was to take a shuttle to downtown to get money, rent snorkeling gear and a taxi to the beach. 

 I did some research and found what turned out to be a pretty cool place to snorkel.  Most of the beach was rocky but there was a little black sand beach where we could easily enter the water.  The snorkeling was way better than I expected!  The water was pretty clear and there was some nice coral and colorful fish.  On my second time out I was shlepping along concentrating on the coral bellow me.  I looked up and was a few inches away from the nose of a giant sea turtle!  I screamed which ended up just sounding like an enthusiastic gurgle because I was under the water.  We watched each other for a while before he wandered off to finish his lunch.  I saw another one that was even bigger on my way back in to shore, but it didn't sneak up on me like the first one did.  

It's Like Deja Vu All Over Again

Happy April 20th #2!  How cool is it that I got to celebrate 4-20 twice!  Not that I'm a pot-head.  I'm a POTSie.  There is a big difference there. But I did enjoy the brownies we had for desert because the deans have an amazing sense of humor.  :0P

They really do work with the staff to make these random days special.  Like both April 20ths we were woken up by that song from Groundhog Day.    

I just realized it isn't readily obvious why we repeated a day.  It's because we crossed the international date line with all of these hoarded time changes so we just went ahead and repeated a day.  :0)

It confused my poor computer!  haha  I got several e-mail with the time stamp being "tomorrow."

  

The weak leading up to this, we had Spirit Weak!  There were lots of fundraisers for SAS (it is amazing how many donations the program needs each quarter to keep the prices reasonable.  It costs over $80,000 a day to operate the ship!  If you do the math with out tuition, you'll see there is a while lot extra that donors have covered.  That is even aside from the personal scholarships.)  We have had a drive going on where we can donate from our shipboard account and donate any extra items we have but don't have room to pack.  :0)  Last night there was a silent and live auction with some seriously cool items.  Like a bubble bath in the dean's office! (He wouldn't be there at the time. haha)  or a homestay in Switzerland!   

As part of Spirit Weak, we also had dress up days.  I believe the schedule was PJ day, Sea color day, What in the world are you wearing day, and SAS gear day.  We also had an awesome crew talent show!  Some of those guys have moves!  Oh my!  I only got pictures of a few of the days due to being distracted.  

PJ Day with Breakfast for Dinner!

So we decided that Morgan is a lumberjack.  Just look at his  lumberjack meal!  haha

We also ordered some cookies.  $24 for 50 cookies!  We split it four ways and it was a beautiful thing!

Josh! Why you always have the most awesome photobombs!?!?!

Misc. Shenanigans 

Crew Talent Show

Crew Appreciation Day

The distractions came in the form of manically getting as much time with friends as possible because we have to leave each other soon, fitting in explorer seminars that are interesting, writing hundreds of pages of papers for class (one of my papers was 72 pages double spaced!), and for me, health issues.  A few days ago, I'm kind of forgetting the exact details, I started with the shakes again.  Whatever, happens all the time right,  I did my zombie walk around the boat that day but still got things done.  Then the next day it happened, and the next day, and the next day.  One shaky time isn't all that bad, just annoying, having it almost constantly for three-four days gets to be really bad because it's completely exhausting.  Imagine having to move constantly for all that time.  No bueno!   I started having a bit of memory problems (didn't remember anything from when I was shaking) and my heart was being all irregular so I decided it was to the health center with me.    

Some pictures of shaky time:

Me trying to take a picture of Andrea during shaky time^  haha

 I finally went to my favorite person, Dr. Bill and he was awesome as usual.  He didn't get bogged down by the fact that he probably couldn't diagnose me (UCLA and Mayo couldn't so....) but he would be happy to treat my symptoms.  Those of you not in the rare illness world may not know how rare this is.  I think for the doctor it feels like working in the dark which has to be scary.  Only the really brave doctors will treat us when we have these crazy strange problems.  

 

Anyway, he gave me a liter of saline because I was dehydrated on top of everything else and convinced me to take a muscle relaxant.  Normally I wouldn't want to take something that would make me loopy, but I was so completely exhausted that I wasn't able to get anything done anyway.  So I took the med and in thirty minutes or so something beautiful happened.   I stopped shaking.  I almost heard angels singing I think.  I slept the rest of that evening only taking a break to devour a hamburger the kitchen staff was so kind to bring me, chat with my friends who came to visit me once they found out I was at the health center,  and to have an apparently silly conversation with my roommate and her friend once I got wheeled back to my room.  They were ecstatic to point out that I managed to get high on 4-20.  I laughed, but then again, I think I was laughing at everything.  

I watched about five minutes of the action (still bummed I couldn't go to that) and then passed out for the next SIXTEEN HOURS!  I slept for SIXTEEN HOURS!  I woke up expecting that to make me feel better but within two hours I was shaking again.  So another dose of the muscle relaxants and must have slept some more because my friends woke me up for dinner and it had only been 3:00 the last time I remembered.  I was bummed that I had missed another homework day as well as some filming for a video contest I'm participating in.  But that's life.  I slept some more after (possibly during) dinner and then went to bed rather early again.  

Today I woke up after another excellent nights sleep.  Only 12 hours, but that's not too bad.  So far I only feel a little bit shaky, so hopefully it won't develop into anything.  I think I have enough rest now so that even if I do shake I will be able to not take the muscle relaxant and get some work done.  Dr. Bill wants me to go to a doctor in Hawaii if this doesn't clear up, but I'm pretty determined to go to the beach instead.  As long as I can prevent myself from getting exhausted, I don't see why the shaking should hold me back from having fun on the last week of the ship.