We haven't posted any pages since Christmas because we haven't been doing a lot of sightseeing; rather, we've been spending more time visiting vendors and venues for our wedding--hotels for the reception, florists, photographers, etc. (We also had a relaxing beach day Friday with Judy and a friend of hers, Sherise, and on Saturday night Cheryl, Gail, their parents, and Mark went to the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra's performance of Beethoven's 8th and 9th Symphonies.) We've been doing this as (thoroughly committed!) boyfriend and girlfriend, though, because Mark felt it would be disrespectful, at best, to ask Cheryl to marry him before at least meeting her family.
Of course, introducing him to them was the main reason for bringing him to Hawaii with her; and besides, years ago when "the Millennium" began to be hyped, someone asked him how he planned to celebrate it and he said he hoped to be snuggling with his wife (not that he had any prospects at the time). Well, he's a little late on the "wife" part, but now that the real millennium is at hand (not January 1, 2000!), he figured it would be nice to spend it snuggling with his fiancee, so this morning he asked her to marry him, and she said yes!
We had gone together to Robbins Brothers awhile ago to look at engagement rings; it was early enough that Cheryl knew that nothing was imminent (thus preserving the surprise for later!), but it let Mark get an idea of what kind of ring she'd like. (She later told him about a nightmare she had had, wherein he proposed with a totally tacky, plastic-and-seashell kind of costume-jewelry ring; he told her that he had been concerned that if he neglected to get her input first, he might come pretty close to making that nightmare come true!)
Here's the first photo of us as fiancees, taken with Mark's camera by Cheryl's dad after we went over to her family's home from his apartment, where he had proposed. We look forward to printing this up for a "history" presentation at our golden wedding anniversary in 2051!
In the photo of Cheryl and Mark above, you'll note he's wearing a T-shirt from Atlantis submarines. Mark has been down in their electric-powered submarines off Maui twice (he posted a description on his alternative-fuels website about a year ago), and he wanted to take Cheryl and her family on a ride off Oahu. Unfortunately, the vertical ladder climb down into the submarine meant that Cheryl's mom couldn't go since she's recovering from a broken leg, so here are Cheryl, Judy, Gail, and their dad on the boat Atlantis Discovery heading out to the dive site, with the Waikiki skyline in the background.
Here's that ladder, as Cheryl descends into the 48-passenger Atlantis IX; this and the 64-passenger Atlantis XIV, the largest passenger submarine in the world, were in service off Waikiki that day.
Since we were the last two into the forward hatch (there's also an aft hatch), we were sitting right behind the pilot, and had a great view out his four-foot window as well as out our own two-foot side windows. The small fish hiding under the upper body of the sub, visible at the top of the window, were there for the same reason that they congregate at the artificial and natural reefs we were to visit a hundred feet down: it's someplace to hide from large predator fish!
Here's one of those predators patrolling nearby: a reef shark! This guy is known to spearfishermen as the "tax collector," since if you don't hand over your fish with a smile when he comes by, you are in big trouble... (You'll need a good monitor to see him; the photos with Mark's digital camera came out a lot better than the ones he had taken off Maui with a film camera, but the contrast was still very low.)
The artificial reefs we visited included two kinds of dedicated structures, plus the midsections of a couple of airliners (they were originally put in place whole, but Hurricane Iniki was strong enough to rearrange them rather drastically), and two hundred-foot ships. Here's a rare Hawaiian green sea turtle sitting atop one of those, the St. Pedro; this Korean longline fishing boat was sunk next to the YO-257 (a former U.S. Navy yard oiler) a few years ago, and they now provide homes and breeding grounds for a wide variety of sea life.
After our submarine adventure and dinner, we stayed up (of course!) to welcome the new year, playing roulette with an 8" wheel (Mark had to be taught the rules of this game, and as dealer he made some errors that probably would've gotten his kneecaps busted in Vegas...). A Hawaiian New Year's Eve celebration is, well, hard to describe; it puts to shame every Independence Day celebration we'd ever seen on the mainland! Folks here love their fireworks; Cheryl and her family found the evening's conflagration mild by comparison with previous years (people were impeded by a new requirement to purchase fireworks permits), but there were plenty of (illegal) aerial displays in the neighborhood around us, and heaven only knows how many Chinese firecracker strings!
The neighbors next door set up a rig consisting of four ten-foot stepladders and a twenty-foot tower in the center, and draped the entire thing with yard after yard of firecrackers. One thing Mark hadn't realized was that these strings, after perhaps an entire minute or two of several explosions per second, always terminate in a ball of dozens of firecrackers that go up all at once for a final exclamation point! Mark stayed at Cheryl's family's home overnight so we wouldn't have to drive him back to his apartment through all the smoke; until 1 a.m. and even later after the main crescendo at midnight, there was a continuous echo of such strings going off all over town, like distant rain. He hadn't known it was possible to be lulled to sleep by firecrackers!
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to Photo Albumnew 1 January 2001, revised 3 January 2001