So the Wife and I have been talking about spending our 10 year wedding anniversary in Hawaii for over a year now. This week we finally starting booking it. We have been fortunate enough to have been able to take a vacation every year that we have been married so far. Most of them have been pretty affordable. We always try to get the most out of our money on vacations.
Hawaii will be a different story. There will be nothing cheap about this vacation, but I guess you only have one 10 year anniversary. We did have enough miles built up on our credit card to get one of our hotel stays for free. That’s not too bad since it’s $120 a night for four nights. We want to see as much as possible for the week we are spending there, so we are spending four days on Oahu, and four days on the Big Island.
On Oahu we will be staying in Honolulu right on Waikiki beach. Our only plan so far is to visit Pearl Harbor, and get our beach time in. Neither of us are big fans of beaches, so we won’t be spending much time on the beaches.
On the Big Island we are staying in Hilo, which I hear doesn’t have great beaches, but that’s fine with us. It’s closer to the volcanoes, which we plan on spending a day at. I talked the wife out of spending extra money on ocean side rooms, and use that money on something funner like a helicopter ride, so we are planning that. I also would like to spend an evening star gazing on Mauna Kea.
There is so much to do, and so much we want to do. It’s going to be tough to narrow it down. It will be a usual non-relaxing vacation for us. Neither of us like to sit around and do nothing. We always want to see and do as much as possible. We can relax when we get home.
I have heard that some people don’t like reading on the iPad because of it’s backlit screen making their eyes sore. I have not experienced that at all. I have read on my iPad for several hours at a time and have had no eye problems. I have finished one book, and have started my second.
The thing that bugs me the most is the DRM on the different eBooks. You can buy books with the iBooks app, but you are stuck with watching them in that app. The same with the Kindle app. Both apps are very suitable for reading books on the iPad, but I much prefer the iBooks app. The iBooks app has page numbers, and tell you how many are left in the current chapter as you go. It’s much easier to track your process through a book. The problem is the iBooks store is currently very limited. Fortunately breaking the Kindle DRM was only a Google search away, making Kindle books readable in the iBooks app.
I despise DRM. I believe I should have the right to consume the media I buy in whatever way I prefer. I never bought DRMed music, and if it wasn’t so easy to break, I wouldn’t buy DRMed eBooks. Maybe someday eBooks will be DRM free and readable on any reader, but until then, I will just have to remove it.
So our Dog Kingslie has been having a hard time sleeping though the night, and every time she gets up she has to pee. Most of the time I hear her and get up with her, but many time I haven’t and she goes on the floor. It has be getting worse and worse, so we took a urine sample to the vet on her yearly visit the other day.
They did a urinalysis and discovered crystals in her urine, so we needed to have an x-ray taken to make sure she doesn’t have any bladder stones. If stones were found she would need to have surgery. Luckily she didn’t have any stones.
After a $350 vet bill we learned that she has a problem controlling the pH of her urine causing crystals to settle out. It sounds like it’s not that big of deal since it’s controllable by diet, but requires a specific kind of food that is only available from the vet. It’s a little spendy, a 5 lb back was $18, and will be a pain having to drive to the vet to get it. We will know a little more in two weeks after her next visit, but it sounds like she will have to be on this food permanently. At least she is a little dog, and doesn’t eat all that much I guess.
