This is wayyy too much excitement for one day

Hello interweb dwellers (again)!

So, although I am home, the fun and chaos has yet to cease.  My mom offered to pay my sister's boyfriend and I $10 an hour to do some heavy labor in our house at Hickory.  So of course we said we were game.

We drive up there early yesterday morning and are not surprised to find the place ridden with bugs, heat and obscene amounts of moisture.  Mom starts us with some simple weeds and mulching.  After a few hours we break for lunch.  Nothing too eventful except the fact that my nose started gushing blood twice due to my horrible allergies.  It kinda looks like someone or something was murdered on our driveway....

After lunch mom tells us its time for the biggest part.  The people who owned the house before we bought it (it had been vacant for 4 years) had foolishly planted a TON of ivy.  For those of you who don't know, ivy grows and spreads like wildfire.  It's roots are big and everywhere and its a pain to get up.  Especially when its grown around a bunch of rose bushes and other things that can't be touched.  So we start and as soon as we get up the top bit of ivy in one spot, it turns out there are three more layers of roots underneath.  About 30 minutes into this, something jumps out of the bundle of roots presently in my hand.  A snake is on the ground slithering away from me.  We jump back and freak out at this point, because we both saw a rattler and knew that the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake was indigenous to North Carolina.  Snakey slithers into a hole, but we can still see him. At this point my nose starts gushing blood again.  Now, I am all for not killing snakes or any animal that isn't a threat, but we have three cats and two dogs and were not going to take the chance of it biting one of them, or us working in the yard.  We try flushing him out with water, and it did nothing.  So we reluctantly get the gasoline out and sprinkle a bit into the hole.  Gas irritates their skin, so snakey instantly started to slither himself out of the hole.  The guy with me went to town and cut snakey's head off with a shovel.  He didn't quite get the head off, so we sat him in a bucket of water to make sure.  Plus, apparently they are still venomous 30 minutes after death.

Here's the picture:

Upon closer inspection, we actually believe it is a copperhead

We actually ended up burying it right next to where the blood from my nose bleed was, so it kinda looked like we were putting on some sort of a Satanic ritual.

A hard days work

After that fun, we finish up our job (at first wary of the possibility of more snakes or creatures) and go shower off.  We were soooo filthy.  And completely exhausted.  Part of the reason we headed in was actually because a nasty storm was brewing.  Finally all showered and clean, we sit down before we head out and look out our window.  All we saw was a roof floating across the water.  Turns out our dock, adorned with boat, electricity and everything, had become unattached from its pilons.  Luckily we ran out, jumped on, and secured it with three things of rope onto a tree and the remnants of one of the pilons.

So I'm not too sure where that leaves us.  The dock is currently still roped up, but we did get the boat back down and into the marina.  I just hopes it sorts itself out without leaving TOO big of a dent in our wallets...

Our situation reminds me, in part, of the Money Pit (the movie).  Just hope it ends a little happier.  :)

Well, thanks for listening to my woes and I sure hope things slow down soon.  More on Hawaii tomorrow.  Or the next day.  Next time I get some more free time.

I hope you enjoyed the stories as much as we enjoy looking back on that turmoil.

Who is stupid enough to live by "We do not sow" anyway? Rely on the rest of the world's stupidity to survive?  Ha!

:)

The Tales of a Dauntless Journey.

Hello!  I've been away for a while again.  I swear, things just keep coming up....  So much for an lackadaisical summer.  Oh well. :) Back to Hawaii!!!

Still on the island of Kaua'i, and now the real adventures begin.  To the left of the hotel beach begins a path or hiking trail that is supposedly about 2.5 miles there and 2.5 back.  Let me just say that I have run cross country, track and field, countless 5Ks (I have even won a few), and a half marathon.  There was no way that one way was only 2.5 miles.  But I still had a blast.  Although when it was over I had sand in places I didn't know I could get sand in and was so tired and hot that I could do nothing the rest of the day except sleep.  And I am no stranger to lots of exercise and was/am in pretty good shape.  Enough of me telling you about it, I'm just gonna show it to you.  It was so amazingly beautiful the ENTIRE time that I really can't complain because it was so worth it.

Told you the sights were fabulous!

funky root shot

Love this picture!  It makes you think.

I apologize for the weird angel.  Not fond of it myself.

My beau striking a pose! 

BROrathian Hair and House TYYYRELL face.

They are adorable!  Love them!

They are like ducklings! My sister isn't usually the one leading the hike FYI.

I also really love this shot.  The mollusks are everywhere!

This place actually had such good shelling, we came back three other times just to shell!

You can kind of see the local fishing with just a net in the distance.

There were lots of these in this one particular spot.  Not exactly sure why, although someone speculated that it was burial markers.

They felt soooooo accomplished after scaling this wall!  Hear about it the entire rest of the trip....

Probably one of my favorite shots on this trip.  It's breathtaking.

MONK SEAL!!!  The thing on his back is a radio.

Right after this picture he started freaking out and moving toward me, so I literally ran away screaming.

That's it for now, but I hope you all enjoy the beautiful scenery! It's kinda boring in the sense that there is no clear subject and its just landscape after landscape.  Next time there will be more fun stuff.  I think.

Thanks for reading!

I thought you said Winter was Coming???

Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?

Since it is a gloomy day and I had way much coffee, I'm back!  But Allison, that doesn't make any since.  Why would you not find something else to do with all of the energy the coffee gave you?  Well the lesson here is so never drink too much coffee on an empty stomach.  I had three cups, a peach, decided to go upstairs to workout and all of the sudden I felt like I was going to be sick.  And so thus, I am here feeling dog tired and wiry all at once.  I've been trying to give up coffee, but it really doesn't help that my dad has acquired all these wonderfully fancy and delicious types of coffee (some being from Hawaii) and I really have no will power.  So I apologize for my jumpiness in advanced.

Unfortunately, that last post concludes our trip on the Big Island. :( Buuuuuut, now we get to move on to the much more beautiful and exotic portion where we stayed on the Island of Kaua'i!

Kaua'i is actually pretty famous.  Tons of movies were filmed there (Pirates of the Caribean, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park to name a few) because it is just so jaw droppingly beautiful and remote.  It is populated, but even like 5 miles away from the airport is miles of completely undeveloped land. 

So naturally, I had a hay day with picture taking. 

Our hotel happened to be surrounded on either side with miles and miles of trails and beaches.  But this first post is just me exploring the beauty of the hotel.  Not to many, but don't worry - there is plenty more to come.

This is probably my favorite shot out of everything I took this entire trip.

The endangered Monk Seal! There is this really neat foundation there that comes and blocks the Monk Seal off from obnoxious tourists that might get too close (guilty!) whenever there is a sighting.

Just chillin at the hotel.  Like a villain.

Tide Pools

And we are back!  Tropical paradise from the eyes of an armature photographer, novice blogger, and explorer.  Lets get to it:

Although sitting by the pool getting your tan on might be fun for like an hour, I much prefer going out and exploring what we flew 13 hours to visit.  Tide pooling is something my mom actually got my into.  If you are not familiar with the process, it is basically going out during low tide and investigating the little pools of ocean life that are left in the lava by upturning rocks and breaking you back bending over.  It's actually a lot more fun than I am making it out to be, which is why we did it almost every day. 

This sea urchin was astounding just because of the greenish tips of its spikes.  Although, I am assuming mold or fungus was the cause of this. O_o

Black sea urchins are the poisonous ones, but it looked so pretty on the pink rock!

This is a brittle star, they were EVERYWHERE and when you pick them up they wiggle their arms around a lot and kind of squirm.  I always thought starfish were slow moving creatures, but apparently not.  And, in case you couldn't figure it out on your own, the name indicates that they are super fragile, so you have to be very careful picking them up so that you won't break off any of their arms.  We encountered many brittle stars with fewer or half limbs :(

The underside of a sea urchin!

This is a sea snail! Or so I was told by the boyfriend.  And what was so amazing about it was its size.  You can kind of scale it by the boyfriends hand, but to give you another reference, it was about as long as my iPhone. 

He really was super adorable though.

We also encountered lots of sea slugs or sea cucumbers.  When they feel threatened, they squirt their intestines on you!  My poor mother got slug intestines on her and they almost wouldn't come off -_-

The reason I took another shot of a sea urchin was really just because of the cool shadow it created on my mom's hand.

If you click on this pictures and zoom in, you can see all of the tons of sea urchins.  You had to be super careful where you stepped!  And I had to be UBER careful with my camera.  I was tiptoeing around like I was a prima donna. 

Unfortunately, this is the best shot I could get, but that's a moray eel.  He was huge - about four feet long.  Probably the coolest find of the entire trip.  My boyfriend wanted to pick him up, but knew that that would just lead to being bitten, and he couldn't remember if they were poisonous.  But he was really waffling with the idea.  :)

The boyfriend with some sea cucumbers!

Another sea slug!  He was holding on for dear life!! To get this shot, the boyfriend actually had to lift and rotate this rock, which was about half his side, to the sun.  That's the real reason I keep him around ;)

Just so you could see how sea slugs hold on with their little feetsies. 

The boyfriend and my mother.  I told you it was back breaking!

My mother has me take pictures of all of the cool birds so that she can identify them when we get home, and it just so happens I got this awesome pose out of one.  Mom still hasn't gotten around to identifying it, but I'll update this when she does.

That's about it for today! 

Live Long and Prosper, people of the interwebs.