And So It Begins...

I'm sitting in my room at the Waikiki Gateway Hotel, having arrived about an hour ago for my three-day house-hunting whirlwind. The hotel is in a great location, but it is unquestionably a dump. Tiny room, crappy cheap green(ish) carpet with cigarette burns, furniture that looks like it was purchased at Goodwill, and the requisite synthetic hotel bedspread with the ugly tropical print. When I see a room like this, it reminds me of those episodes of CSI when the investigators are going over the crime scene bed with the black light, looking for spunk or other unsavory substances. They have a laundry on one of the upstairs floors. I'm contemplating washing my sheets.

My shitty room. This picture doesn't really do justice to how dumpy it is.

You're probably asking yourself, who cares? I don't know. Maybe nobody. But I'm on this big kick these days of keeping a journal and taking lots of pictures to remember different points of my life, and as transitions go, this is a big one, so I thought I'd start a blog. Easier than a paper journal, especially because I type so much faster than I write. So in these web-pages, I'll be chronicling the process of our move to, and then our life in, Hawaii.

So, to begin with, being here is sort of surreal. It's very odd to be by myself looking at properties in a strange city that I don't know very well, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I'm tired and hungry right now -- the flight was very long, I didn't sleep (no big surprise), and I didn't eat much -- and it's kind of lonely to be alone over here with no one to even go to dinner with. My mom called me this morning and asked, out of the blue, if she should have planned to come with me. I don't know why neither of us thought of it before, because it would have been nice to have her input, not to mention her wonderful company. At least I know that this will be the only time I have to do this or be here by myself like this. The next time I'm here, Jason and Max will be with me and we'll be setting up our new home.

I'm going to go for a walk, maybe watch the sunset, and then come back and watch a little tube and go to bed. Speaking of tube, prime time starts here at like 6 pm. I definitely have to get TiVo when we come here.