Hawaiian Guests

A year and a half ago my friend Jim married Valerie from Hawaii, they had met in college, 33 years previously. This past week, for three days, I had Jim and Valerie and five of their friends from Hawaii stay with me. They were on a ten day vacation, one of the goals was to tour universities for seventeen year old fraternal twins, Kameron and Micah.

We went to an afternoon Mariners game, with the stadium full of people playing hooky from their jobs, toured the University of Washington, (I am an alumnus) went to Jim's family gathering, had lots of great food and played games until late.

I was surprised by some of the differences between their lives in Hawaii and mine in Seattle. They had trouble drinking water for it was so cold coming out of the tap. Also Kameron had to buy long pants for the trip. One of the men, Chad, asked what the big machine was in a hall closet, I told him it was my furnace. He asked where my air conditioner was and was surprised when I said I didn't have one.

In my house I have white towels on all the towel racks in my bathrooms, these are for decoration and for guests. Most of my guests wanted to use my everyday mix-matched towels over the pretty white ones.

Having them here gave me a perfect deadline for getting household projects done. The night before they arrived I finally caulked the shower in my master bedroom. It had been a year since I had removed the old caulk. It took me two hours, procrastinating a year on a project that finally takes two hours, wow.

The morning before they arrived I cleaned out the ashes from my wood stove fireplace insert. I put the ashes in a thick black plastic bag and put the bag in the garbage can in the garage. I had left too much air in the bag so the lid of the can wouldn't close. To deflate the air I put a small hole in the top of the bag to let the air out.

With this scent of ash on my clothes and the ash aroma in the garage, their was no convincing Chad that I didn't smoke cigarettes. He had no reference to fireplace ash smell so there was no way I was going to win that argument.

A month before they arrived, I ran water in my laundry room utility sink and then left the room. When I heard sounds that sounded like a waterfall I ran down and saw water everywhere. I used every towel and rag in the house to clean up the water. Some of the water went into the adjacent guest room. I soaked up the low spots and ran fans for a couple of days.

A few days latter the room smelled of mold and mildew. I also realized it had had a mild smell of this for a while. Seattle usually doesn't have much problem with mold and mildew because of our moderate temperatures.

The next week entailed removing carpet and pad, then two coats of chemicals and then four coats of sealer. Then I had to touch up the walls and then new carpet and pad were put in a week ago Friday. The room now looked fabulous.

The carpet then had a strong carpet rubber smell, it smelled like a tire store. The carpet people assured me that the smell would go away in a few days. It was almost gone by the time my guest arrived.

I had a great time during their visit. I promised Jim and Valerie I would visit them in Hawaii within the year.