[I originally wrote this at the Kona Airport on January 2, but due to server problems I was not able to post it at the time. –Andrew]

Hey everyone, welcome to 2008! We spent our New Year’s Eve playing a most hilarious round of Bingo with my sister and brother-in-law’s community of friends, competing for “fabulous prizes” (I myself managed to hide many of them throughout their house before we left this morning) and topping off 2007 with an Earth-shattering kaboom of ten thousand firecrackers. Yee-effin’-haw!

The morning of New Year’s Day was spent at Kahuluu Beach, snorkeling and taking pictures with our (so far) trusty Sony underwater digital camera housing (pictures can be seen here). Most of the photos turned out quite well, though towards the end condensation started forming in the lens housing and stuff started to go blurry, which is a good sign that it’s time to get (the camera, at least) out of the water. We returned to the house to watch the UH Warriors get the almighty piss walloped out of them in the Sugar Bowl. (No, I have not suddenly developed a passion for football like some wildfire brain tumor; it’s just that the TV was right next to the pupus, so really I had no choice but to be within sensory range of the event. Also, I really wanted to see the Warriors do the pregame Haka. [Interesting side note: the officials for the Sugar Bowl warned Warriors coach June Jones that his team would be assigned a fifteen-yard penalty if they performed the haka, because it was determined to be “too intimidating” to the other team {do three-hundred-pound college linebackers really intimidate that easily?}. The Warriors accepted the penalty and did it anyway. Good on ’em!])

Anyway, now we’re chilling in the Kona Airport, waiting for our flight out to Oahu (vamping off of free WiFi at the airport, courtesy of Aloha Airlines. Kudos to them!). Tomorrow we return to the Northwest and commence the arduous three-day process of eroding all the sense of fun and relaxation garnered over a three week vacation. Oh, well; at least we’ll have our photos and our extra Manapua pounds with which to remember our time here.