I hear y’all asking.
But wait! Margaret, weren’t you going to post some Hawaii photos? And haven’t you been back for almost a week? And WTF happened with the New Year’s party?

Okay, long story short.
We went to two different Costco-s three separate times in the space of four days.
We cooperatively served Christmas dinner to sixteen people as a part of which I prepared five loaves of rye bread and ten of the most enormous twice baked potatoes that I’ve ever seen. Seriously, each potato had to have weighed something like two pounds.
We drove to two different Koolau Farmer’s Garden Supply stores, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and back and forth all the way across the island to Kaneohe in an attempt to find what we’re now calling The Fish Pot Store which turns out to have been in Salt Lake, home to the only ice skating rink in the Hawaiian islands. (Although as it turns out the flagship Fish Pot Store is in Waimanolo which is on the windward side of the island and would have been much easier to get to if we’d just given up in Kaneohe and gone to Waimanolo, but we were determined to find the one in Salt Lake. It was a long day.) We finally purchased a fish pot, unearthed the old one which had a whacking great hole in the bottom, seated the new one, filled it with fish and a water lily (although the dudes at Koolau said it wasn’t a lily, but a “Yellow Snowflake” whatever that is) and then found out that the bloody thing leaks. Or at least if it doesn’t leak it sure takes up a lot of water, but since neither of us have been up for any prolonged conversations over the last four days we’ve not called to Hawaii to find out if the new fish pot has stopped taking up water.
We had two days of bloody hot with no wind, four days of pounding rain, and relatively decent weather for the rest of the time.
We finally got to take a ride across the Kawainui Swamp which is a lovely bike and running trail across a protected wetland but was a “swamp” before it was a “protected wetland” so it will always be the Kawainui Swamp trail.
We returned the (partially) volcanic sand that my sister found in the donation bin at the Goodwill in Bellingham in a bottle marked “Aloha Maui” to a beach on Oahu. We’re figuring that Madame Pele will be mollified and if she isn’t…… well, it wasn’t us that took the sand from the islands in the first place. It isn’t *our* bad luck.
And we bought the family dinner at the best Chinese restaurant in Kaneohe which had excellent food, but was seriously the loudest place I’ve ever eaten and yes, I’m including the Des Moines Anthony’s Home Port in that list.
I got thoroughly hooked on Candy Crush, got eaten by only one vampire cannibal mosquito from the black lagoon, and no sunburn. There was a lot of loud, a lot of laughing, a lot of argument, and some tears (some bittersweet, some not).

Then we flew across the Pacific, both unknowingly incubating a rampaging case of Sisteritis or Transmissible Airportopathy, and one or both of us has been feeling like death warmed over ever since.

Andrew’s eldest sister and her husband joined the chaos on the evening of the 23rd. They’d been in North Carolina visiting the newest grandbaby (yes, we’ve got another Great Nephew on the ground, Liam Kai born in late November to Andrew’s nephew Sam and his wife). They’d been in Washington DC visiting the two older grandbabies (Ward and Beccah, now 5 and 3, children of Andrew’s oldest niece Julia). And they’d been in California visiting some of Danny’s family. Which means, by my count, they were in four different time zones and at least six different airports in the space of three weeks and when they got to their home in Kona on the 26th they both came down with the raging funk which they’d so generously shared with the rest of us. Or maybe just Andrew and I. Again, we don’t know because neither of us has been able to talk for the last three days without barking up a lung first.

Our flight hit the ground at 10p.m. on 12/28th and we were home and in bed by 11. I was at work at 0900 on the 29th. Andrew was feeling funky, but went out to get groceries for the party anyway.
I was at work at 0700 on the 30th, but Andrew was feeling funky enough to cancel our NYE party which turned out to be a good thing. I got a call from Andrew at about 3p.m. on the 30th. He was funky, having problems breathing, and he’d been running a fever all day. Since Andrew’s bout of The Funk last January turned into pneumonia and his lungs still haven’t fully recovered, I’m a little Extra Sensitive to fever, coughing, and difficulty breathing. I bolted out of work and took Andrew to the local ER where we spent the next five hours arguing with Dr. McBabyface, the ER resident, who was convinced that he was going to admit Andrew for observation overnight.
As it turns out, Dr. McBabyface lost that argument, but we didn’t get home until after 10 and I wasn’t in bed until after 11.
And I was at work again on 12/31st at 0700.
We did have a short day, but since my last client was one of those partially intelligent, partially internet researching whackitrons with a vicious cat, I didn’t manage to chuck him out of the building until half an hour after we’d closed. I went home, put on my jammies, and I haven’t been out of them since.
Our NYE was celebrated with delivery pizza, orange juice, ginger beer, and the Mythbusters Mega Marathon and ended at 9 p.m. when I fell asleep with a cat poultice on my chest.

Since we’ve spent the last three days doing nothing but sitting in our jammies watching Mythbusters, The Simpsons, The Ricky Gervais Show, An Idiot Abroad, listening to the radio, or sleeping, I think we’ve finally convinced the cats that we’re not going to be leaving again anytime soon. Pogo, in fact, has gotten confident enough that he is actually not glued to my lap at the immediate moment.
We managed to get our suitcases unpacked today and (miracle of miracles) I actually got the laundry done.
We haven’t opened any of our Christmas packages and we’ve been subsisting mostly on ramen (which both of us crave when we’re sick), orange juice, chewy ginger candy, and leftover pizza and manapua.

A STELLAR beginning to 2015. I’m not so naive as to say “It can only get better from here”, but just for any of the fates that are listening, I’d sure appreciate it if the rest of January went smoothly.