A rooster, a garbage truck and sunlight

It's a Saturday. At our house that means only one thing...no sleeping in. It's our 2nd (yes, 2nd!) garbage day of the week. Today they came barreling up the street at 6:15am. When you live in Hawaii where you keep your windows open year-round (unless you are one of the fortunate ones with central air), your sleep is disrupted by odd sounds. At our house, two days a week our dreams are rudely interrupted by the sound of the garbage truck with its loud engine roaring. This is our life every Wednesday and Saturday.

On top of this, we have the various wildlife that squawk, chirp, and crow anytime of the day or night with no provocation. Last night Rudy, our resident Alpha rooster, decided it would be quite fun to crow at 2:00 in the morning. Did one of the other roosters snore in his sleep? Did Leon, Rudy's cousin, make a move on one of Rudy's hens? This isn't the first time Rudy's done his crowin' business in the middle of the night. I think he's crowed just about every hour, day and night. So, folks, it is a myth, a complete myth, that roosters only crow when the sun is coming up. It took a 2,000+ move to an island for us to debunk that myth.

Let me backup a little here. For one thing, we were quite surprised when on our first day in our house we heard crowing. This was during the day as we were dripping in sweat as we unpacked our boxes. At first we laughed. Oh, how charming, we thought. Our very own "farm animal". Then we spotted not just one rooster, but at least two roaming in our backyard. And with them of course, was a group of hens. We have a gang of chickens that roam the hills that we live in. Come to find out, there are wild chickens all over the island, but they tend to mostly live in the mountains. Drive down the Kamahameha highway going into Kaneohe and you'll see them running amuck in the golf course. Who would have thought? Chickens take over Oahu!!

The entire backside of our house has a lanai (pronounced la-ny -- a balcony to mainlanders) and when you look out into our so-called backyard, all you see are trees and shrubs. It is definitely a jungle. We have quite a bit of privacy, so much so, that we don't have any curtains on the windows facing the back of the house. This leads me to another source of our morning awakenings...the sun. Forget sleeping soundly past 6a.m. It just isn't going to happen unless you are knocked out cold.

So, all of this led to Tom and I asking Noah as we were stuck in traffic on H1, "what woke you up this morning? Rudy, the garbage truck or the light?" We got a different answer each time we asked the question. The first time we asked it was the sunlight. Then he changed tactics and blamed Rudy. That's understood. That varmint is an easy target.

Can you tell I didn't get enough sleep last night?

Noah woke up inspired to be a writer. He had his journal out with his pencil in hand. He is learning to write his letters and to read so that is on his brain most of the time. The first word he wanted to write this morning was "pumpkin". We progressed along to a sentence, "I go to the beach". Tom came into the bedroom as Noah and I were working on this on the bed. He said, "We need to put on that video Bernie & Ert's Wordplay". This led to a roar of laughter, only from Tom, over how he twisted Ernie & Bert, you know, the "ambiguous roommates" from Sesame Street. I think it's Tom that needs to watch the video, not Noah!!

We went into town (that means Honolulu to anyone living outside of the city... no matter what town you really do live in on the island) so Noah and I could see Tom's new office furniture. They ordered the furniture in either June or July and they just got it. That's four months of working on a folding table. That's what life is like setting up a new office. Anyway, the office is green, very green, but with a modern touch. I told Tom it was like the modern version of the green's from the 70s. Ugh. It's not as bad as I'm probably making it seem. The office does look nice and the desks are great. I still don't know how Tom works with the view he has. When we were there a Norwegian Cruise Line ship was in port and the Superferry was puttering along to dock (more on the Superferry later).

It's raining again for the third time in the last 20 minutes. It does rain frequently here, but it only rains for up to five minutes at a time. I don't think it rains for a whole day like it does other places. It can rain so hard here that it wakes me up, and this is without my hearing aides in! Yep, that's loud.

It's now going on 4pm on Saturday and I'm already missing watching the Broncos play. Last time I looked the game against LA Tech was tied at 17-17 at halftime. Hope they win. We are leaving shortly to see Ratatouille (spelling?) at the $1 theatre here in Kailua. Tom is skeptical of a theatre where the tickets are only $1 - in Hawaii. How would you survive on that here? Who knows? We may walk in, look at the place, and end up making an about face. The movie is about a rat. For $1, we could be watching the movie with a rat.