Tornado Central

Well, I FINALLY have my honeymoon pictures processed and ready to be uploaded. Now, I still need to work on honeymoon pictures that Kim took, but that shouldn't take as long. After the honeymoon pictures are up, it's time to work on wedding photos.

Random tidbit: Ernesto fooled everyone.

Interesting tidbit: For whatever reason, someone opted to stay on Wake Island to take observations during a very close call with Ioke. For those who haven't followed Ioke, it has fluctuated between a Cat 4 and Cat 5 for nearly the past week. It crossed the International Dateline a couple of days ago, so it's actually a typhoon (or super typhoon) now. At any rate, Wake Island looked as though it would experience a direct hit from the eye, but it now appears as though it'll just get a glancing blow. Fortunately, someone was crazy enough to stay behind on the very tiny island to take observations. If you follow THIS LINK, you can view the observations, which are being made every 6 minutes! To view the 6-min obs in text format, go to the bottom of that page and click on the "View Data" button. While this is quite fascinating, I'm legitimately concerned for the person providing these data. I should note that the "person stayed behind" is 2nd-hand information (from someone who heard it on the news), so I cannot say with certainty that this is correct (not to imply that I would be able to say with certainty had I heard it on the news myself).

Well, I'm still working on wedding and honeymoon pictures. I've had quite a bit of work/school stuff to get done recently, so I haven't made much progress. We did get the pics back from the photographer, so I'll try to put those up in due time.

Meanwhile... I was able to take some lightning pictures this evening, as a line of storms developed to the northwest of Edmond. I have about 8 that I'll put online tomorrow, but here are two of my favorites:

Well, not enough time to blog again in Hawai'i. We arrived safely Thursday afternoon, after only a slight security-related delay in Seattle Thursday morning. My goal is to get a slew of honeymoon pictures up on this website by next weekend. Between Kim and I, we have about 400-500 honeymoon pictures. I shot all 300-350 of my pictures in RAW format, so I need to thoroughly post-process each and every one of them (or at least all those that I want). About the wedding pictures... Kim's mom has more than 100 of them; my mom has about 75; Nick and Jasmine took a slew of them; the photographer took something like 800; there are 15 rolls of films from the disposable cameras at each table. That's a LOT of pictures. I'll try to pick and choose carefully so as not to end up with a 200 minutes slide-show that nobody will want to watch. My goal is to put up the best 40 or 50. I have full copyright of all of the pictures the photographer took, so I should be able to put those online as well. In the meanwhile, we also need to unpack our apartment stuff, and I really need to make progress on a couple of posters that I'll be presenting at the SLS conference in St. Louis this fall. Oh yeah, school starts back up soon too... I'll post here when I add pictures, but it may be a month before I have wedding and honeymoon pictures online.

We did the island hopping last night, leaving Kahului airport around 8pm and flying the 30 minutes to the Kona airport. Wednesday, we drove the road to Hana, which was very lush and colorful. Unfortunately, most of the waterfalls were not entirely impressive owing to relatively low flow. In actuality, I preferred the drive FROM Hana (the back side of Haelekala) to the drive TO Hana. I really needed a polarizer filter given the massive foliage and full sunshine, so some of the 'lush' pictures turned out a little washed out. Here are two pictures showing the contrast between the windward side ("to Hana") and the leeward side ("from Hana"):





Yesterday, before heading to the airport, we headed to the top of Haelekala (above 10,000 feet). The trip up was a little hairy given the hairpin turns and the fact that an unfortunate swerve would result in a fiery death. But the view from the top was rewarding!

The Hapuna Beach Prince is a nice place, and I prefer it to the Sheraton Maui. We're stuck in a two-queen-bed room until a king-bed room frees itself, but it's a nice place on a fantastic beach. Food is expensive, which is no surprise. The $30/person breakfast buffet was nice... LOL. We've planned out the remainer of our time here, and I'll try to get a couple of pictures up every day or two.

Aloha from near Waimea, Hawaii! Mahalo!

10,000 ft ASL sign near the summit of Haleakala (10,023 ft). It was very windy up there (making it a little chilly too).

Well, the wedding went extremely well, and I'm proud to be the husband of the love of my life. The flight from Minnesota to Maui was uneventful (which is good!), and the check-in process at the Sheraton Maui was pleasant. Today, we walked around the myriad of shops in Lahaina before lounging around the pool at the Sheraton (quite elaborate by my hotel standards). Upon taking an afternoon nap, we headed to Kahana to dine at Roy's. Overall, it was pretty good, though nothing absolutely spectacular; it was about the same price as Deep Fork in OKC, but not as good. Tomorrow, we're heading to Lanai for some snorkeling with Paragon Sailing, followed by dinner at David Paul's in Lahaina. It's Kim's 23rd birthday, so yay for her!

I'll try to get some pictures up every couple of days, but I can't promise anything. Off to enjoy the pleasant night! Mahalo.