First Post

Well, trying out this new blog after playing around with the template. It's hard to find a simple and nice template off Blogger, but maybe I'll give this a whirl. Tried the all-black one, but then I got depressed and slept for 10 hours. Anyway, I'm awake now.

Today hasn't been a real productive day. Today, in fact, was a odd sort of day whereby my wife and I were suddenly 3, and decided to abandoned a lot of logical rationale to explore an odd tangent of a thought.

I was finishing up a wedding today, and the bride's Filipino while the groom's Hawaiian. Well, probably not Hawiian per se, but you get the idea. Anyway, it was set to Hawaiian music, and then suddenly I said, "We should move to Hawaii." And like a untamed hungry flame that grew into a wildfire, the idea just took off. We were looking up things on the internet and just really got into it.

Thing was, since we were both somewhat in transition and untethered by a steady job, or a lot of friends or family, there was really not much holding either of us anyway. I mean, sure we had family and friends around here still, but the allure of Hawaii got to us.

We've never been there, and after reading some of the things about Hawaii, from the Aloha culture that's more laid back, a slower pace, beautiful scenery and sunsets, nice sunny weather, beaches, and really, a lower stressed environment and a feeling of community and culture - it was irresistable. We read about the higher cost of living, 7-8 bucks for a gallon of milk, and 800-1200 bucks for a studio apartment, and we were okay with that. Cost of living here in Redmond ain't much lower.

So all night, we were reading accounts of people living in Hawaii, the different islands, looking at photos on Flickr, and it was looking pretty good. We were thinking that when we did move out in a year or two, we'd be going to Hawaii to raise our family.

Then the repetition of certain facts kept coming in. Never mind the centipedes, the huge ass spiders, the volcanoes, and the higher cost of living. The terms "terrible education", "bad public schools", and "lousy schools" came showing up. Turns out privates schools are abundant in Hawaii, but tuition for it wasn't cheap, about 10 grand a year. And having two kids 11 months apart would mean 20 grand more than the higher cost of living. I guess Hawaii doesn't do school districts, and all the schools are controlled by the state. Teachers are severly underpaid, and the reading and math proficiencies are terrible. We were weighing the pros and cons of it, and knowing that the school system was severely flawed and going anyway would just be wrong.

So as fast as the idea become a vision, it returned to being simply just an afterthought. But who knows.

Thing is, moving down south has its benefits and drawbacks. For some reason, the thing I worry about my kids aren't really their education, or what jobs are readily available to them. No, I worry about their safety. All these stories about sexual predators, about pedophiles who kidnap, rape and kill their victims. I worry about their peers, who seem to have substandard morals handed to them from their substandard parents. I worry about the parents who are so wound tightly that all they seem to need is a reason, any reason, to blow up in someone's face. The pace down here is devastatingly detrimental to peoples' anxieties. We're all like red ants, running over each other and once in a while, forgetting who we're stepping on. Granted, I'm not even really in the thick of it, being self-employed, but man, I feel it, and I'm looking for a change of pace. A different window. I don't want my kids to know my fears because they wouldn't even think about leaving the house.

That's why Hawaii didn't seem like such a terrible idea. Well, for now it's shelved.