It’s that time of year again, when all the Geminis in the family celebrate their birthdays. My brother and grandson (Pono) both celebrated theirs yesterday and today is my Prodigal son’s birthday. If we were home, we’d probably have a combined party to honor all of them at once.

In a few week my youngest son and youngest aunt will be celebrating our birthdays too. The day after theirs, I’ll be celebrating my 43rd birthday. It’s funny, I mentioned to my hubby that he’ll be 45 this July. Then I went further and told him he’ll be 5 years short of half a century, 5 years before he’s 50 . He had a look of disbelief that he could ever be that old, but I made sure he was well aware of it. It’s one of the duties I have that I genuinely enjoy - - Conducting reality checks. heh.

There are a few local boys on hubby’s ship that come over in so often. I love that they remind me so much of home. Some of them haven’t been in the Navy for too long so they still have the “local” in them. They speak totally pidgin and they call me “Aunty”. They greet with the respectful kiss on the cheek, they look out for each other. Whenever they come over, I feel like I’m back with my sons. I love that they treat my daughter as though she were their little sister. They tease her about anything all the time.

Out here, the single men and women on board the ship are issued color coded Liberty Cards. White cards indicate they need to return to the ship before the midnight curfew and Blue cards means overnight passes so they don’t need to return to the ship.

Anyway, one of the boys has a blue card so he stayed over lastnight. Today, my daughter wanted to practice driving again, so she drove them to the restaurant to have breakfast. Then they stopped at Starbucks to get my fix of frappuccinos. When they returned, I asked if she gave him whiplash. He laughed and said, “No, but she took ALL day to park the car at Starbucks.” Then he continued, “Aunty, we were outside for about half an hour just trying to park the car this time.” Of course he was joking because I heard them driving in but this is a sample of the exaggerated teasing that I love so much about locals. My daughter loves that they remind her of her own brothers, although she denies it. She told me that he said, “We go drive again, when no more people on the road.”

We met up with some of the boys at the NEX and they informed me that there are two new boys from Hawaii that checked onboard the ship so we’ve decided to have a get-together before some of the older boys head home on leave. Today, I went and reserved some places on the base; one at a picnic area if the weather is nice and the other at a party room in case it’s raining or too humid outside. We’ve decided on June 12th since some of them are leaving the following week and won’t be back for a few more weeks.

Also found out that one of the boys is on restriction for not checking in before curfew while they were in Australia. What’s funny is that hubby didn’t even know this until I told him and they’re on the SAME ship. Oh well, hopefully the boy has learned his lesson. I wonder if he listed hubby as his mentor . . .

The Navy has a Mentorship program where the juniors select a senior personnel to be his/her mentor. Usually, it’s someone from their own department. But noooo, not the local boys. They all listed hubby as their mentor and he’s not even in the same Command, let alone department. When their Supervisors explained that they needed to select someone from their own department, they responded with something like, “What - Racist, brah?” That was enough to leave hubby as their selection. Heh.

As much as I need a physical makeover, I don’t mean a makeover for myself (this time). I’m referring to a makeover at this site. I think this template has served it’s purpose and now I’m ready to move on and experiment even further. I don’t know what I have in mind yet, but this gray is beginning to look depressing. The screen of my laptop is a little screwed up, light colors aren’t visible which is why I went with dark colors.

I’ll need to install my photoshop and scanner, then I’ll see if I can work with Front Page for CSS and html editing. I’m not very good but I’m willing to learn all that I can through the various online tutorials. It might take a while as I don’t want to spend more time than I should on it. I just want something simple but still attractive. I’m thinking that I should use three columns instead of two, or keep two columns but just making them wider. I don’t know yet, we’ll see what I end up doing.

Hubby has taken on the job that me and Megs avoided doing - Cleaning Kamalani’s room. It’s not that she sleeps in there, it’s her playroom which is filled with toys. They’re all pretty much stacked in large rubber-maid containers. When her room is cleaned out, she’ll go in there and dump everything in the middle of the room if she’s playing by herself. When it’s time to clean up, she looks for someone else to do it for her, someone other than me. She knows better than to ask me. In fact, she’ll rush upstairs, cut me off and quickly run to close her bedroom door so I won’t see the mess she’s made. If I get to the top of the stairs before her, she’ll smile really sweetly and say, “don’t look in there - k, Grandma?” as if I didn’t know it was trashed. Anyway, hubby is now her favorite person in the world because he cleaned it up for her.

Ack, hubby has confiscated my palm pilot to play games so I’ve not been able to do much reading. When I do, it’s a few pages before I end up falling asleep. I might hide it from him tomorrow. Heh!

One of the search phrases that linked to this site was “Meaning of Kamalani”. Well, I thought I’d answer that question for the person who asked. When I was pregnant with my third son, I hoped for a daughter. Whenever I walked into the baby section of a store, I’d immediately head for the girl’s section because I was so convinced I’d finally have my daughter. I asked a former boss for a Hawaiian name which meant “Child with heavenly beauty”. A few days later, after some thought and prayers, he came to me with Kamalani u’i. Well, I ended up with a boy and since he was my third son, my mother named him Ikaika because she thought I would be disappointed in having another son and she thought he’d need strength. When I did have my daughter, she had an entirely different Hawaiian name so when she became pregnant and gave birth to a girl, I knew she had to be named Kamalani u’i. And YES, I needed to share the story of how we named her.