Stunt Kite Flying

My husband has a new obsession. Its flying his new Prism Nexus stunt kite. This is no standard kite (like my $3 Finding Nemo kite). The kite is made of ripstop nylon with graphite spars and it has two handles!  Here is a video of some of Prism’s crazy stunt kites:

I went out with the hubby to Fort Mason this past Sunday to fly the kite. I tried to fly it myself, but, it was the hardest thing. Everytime I tried to fly it, it came crashing down within seconds. Kevin seems to have some control over it already. He learned pretty quickly. It probably has something to do with the fact that he has been watching tons of videos online on how to fly it. If you are interested in trying the kite out, Kevin would love company flying the kite seeing as his wife is so dreadful at it. Below is a photo of Kevin’s kite.

Looking for a great read?

Over our vacation in Maui, I read a fantastic book that I hope to spread the word on. Its a New York Times Bestseller and was recommended to me by two separate friends. The book is “Three Cups of Tea – One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School At A Time”. I suggested this book to my book club, but, I think that people didn’t necessarily want to read another book about the middle east. We just finished “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini a few months ago. Like “The Kite Runner”, Hosseini’s second book was really sad and depressing despite his great story telling skills. “Three Cups of Tea” is not depressing at all, but, quite the opposite. It is a very hopeful and inspiring book describing the amazing story of how one man, Greg Mortenson, befriends a community of various people in Pakistan and Afghanistan who allow him to help bring a well rounded education to their remote and needy communities. At present, Greg Mortenson and his CIA nonprofit has helped to build about 61 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan especially for girls.

The book reads like an exciting novel beginning with his extreme trek attempting to climb K2 to a kidnapping, gun battles, tea with the Taliban amongst many other scenes you wouldn’t imagine.

If you do buy the book, you should do it through the Three Cups of Tea website at: http://threecupsoftea.com/. 7% of that purchase will go to the charity run by Greg Mortenson.

Back from Maui

We got back last night from 6 relaxing days in Maui. We weren’t sure that we wanted to go to Hawaii because we like to vacation outside of the U.S. on most occasions. But, we wanted a quick getaway, and everyone seems to go to Hawaii…there must be something to they hype, right?

After doing some reading about activities in Maui, we had a long list of stuff we wanted to do. Our slow relaxing vacation had the potential of being a jam packed adventure that we might need another vacation from. But, in the end, I think we balanced the activities with some serious R&R.

On our first day, we checked into our hotel and headed out to rent boogie boards and snorkel gear for the week. We went to Boss Frog’s in Lahaina which advertised a steal… $9 for two sets of snorkel gear. Unfortunately, this was just a deal to get you in the store. Once you get there, they upsell the gear and then try to get you to attend a timeshare presentation. We were really annoyed, but, got the better gear and denied the timeshare preso. I wouldn’t recommend Boss Frog’s to anyone because the dude at the store was so pushy, we wanted to stab him in the eye with our snorkel gear. I have to admit, I used the “F” word with him…and anyone who knows me, should know that I just don’t get that upset very often. The rest of the day was pleasant. We ate dinner at a highly recommended sushi establishment “Sansei Sushi”. It really was fantastic food. We ended up eating there later in the week.

On our first full day in Maui, we took surf lessons in Lahaina. This was great! I was pretty surprised that it was pretty simple to stand up on the board. Don’t get me wrong, I wiped out a few times, as did, Kevin. But, we had loads of fun. Thumbs up to the Royal Hawaiian Surf Academy and our instructor, Ben!

On the following day, we took the 4 hour drive to Hana on the Hana Highway. Now, this drive is really hyped as a must. However, if you don’t like driving (which we don’t), you should just skip it. The waterfalls that we saw weren’t that impressive. I think that they had somewhat dried up during this time. At the “Three Bears Waterfall”, which took a small hike over many rocks to get to, I ended up slipping on a rock, and getting my digital camera wet. I was a bit devastated at the time, but, all of the electronics have now dried, and there didn’t seem to be any permanent damage. At Hamoa Beach near Hana where we spent an hour or two at was pretty fun for body surfing. We even gave our boogie boards a try.

The following day, we decided to just hit the beach…or beaches, that is. We ended up visiting Ka’anapali Beach (nice stretch of beach, but, no shade, and no interesting sports). Kapalua beach was beautiful, but, empty. The shore on this beach had a lot of coral and high surf, so, I’m guessing it was not good for swimming. There was some great volcanic rock on this beach that looked great in pictures though. Here is a picture taken at this beach:

We ended up on Napili beach where I did some snorkeling and we watched a lot of kids “Skim Boarding“. This was sort of like skateboarding at the edge of the waves. It was fun to watch.

On Thursday, we took an hour drive to “Big Beach”. We were hoping to watch surfers and get in some boogie boarding and snorkeling. This was a beautiful long stretch of beach. Once we set up our umbrella and beach chairs, I was happy as a clam just reading my book and watching serious boogie boarders. Unfortunately, there was no snorkeling going on. Kevin and I both joined the boogie boarders for a while. But, then…it started to rain. We waited out the rain a while, but, after about an hour, it didn’t seem to be halting anytime soon. The beach had mostly cleared out by the time we left.

On our last day in Maui, Kevin considered taking another surf lesson, but, he decided that we should snorkel instead because we hadn’t really done any good snorkeling yet. He chose a spot only 1-2 miles from our condo on. I believe that this area was a part of Ka‘anapali Beach (which we hadn’t liked at first). But, this area was perfect for snorkeling. There were fish as close as 10 ft. from the shore. We saw a ton of different fish including the humuhumunukunukuapua’a (Hawaii state fish), Moorish Idol, Unicorn fish, parrot fish, goatfish, convict fish (surgeonfish) and pufferfish. But, most important… I don’t think we ran into any eel.

Overall, we loved our vacation. I would highly recommend our condo (Noelani Condos), our surf lesson, snorkeling in Ka‘anapali Beach, and boogie boarding on Big beach. For food, I loved Sansei Sushi and also enjoyed Aloha Mixed Plate (where we also ate twice).

These Mai Tai’s for $3 at happy hour at “Aloha Mixed Plate” were delicious!

This is the sunset view from our balcony at the Noelani Condos in Napili.

Photo Journal of our 4th of July

Our fourth of July started with a “Freedom Run” in Golden Gate Park. I didn’t run, but, Kevin did the 1 mile race. It was so foggy in the park, you could barely see 200 ft. ahead. He finished the race in the top 15 (of about 70 people) and had a time of 6:02! That’s blazing fast!

Then, we visited a less foggy part of the city for a BBQ. The sun was blazing that we had to seek shade for some of the time. San Francisco has some crazy micro climates! Here are a few pictures of our 4th.

Here is my coworker Matt’s very American grill, except for my veggie burger over to the right.

This is the layered dip that I brought. It had refried beans, guacamole, salsa, fresh tomatoes, black olives, sour cream, cheddar cheese and green onions. It was a hit. This shot was taken near the end of the tray’s life.

KingFisher beer. This was our choice of beer to celebrate with. (not exactly American)

We decided to watch fireworks from our apartment since we had a great view last year. However, this year, we had the SF fog ruining the view. The photo above was taken of our “downtown” view Friday night. You can’t even see downtown through the fog.

Page One on Google Searches

I have been working on Kevin’s mom’s professional website for a few months. I finished it about a month ago and it went live on http://www.suelaffertyphd.com. This was the second major renovation of her site. With the first site that I created for her, I didn’t pay that much attention to getting the site to have a high ranking on google searches. In fact, I was happy that if you searched for Sue Lafferty, the site was eventually #1.

This time, I happened to be browsing at Borders when I found a book on how to get your site ranked higher on Google. I browsed it for a while and took notes (in my head) of how to improve Sue’s site’s rankings. Over a week, I did a bunch of this work. It was all behind the scenes, so, she didn’t even notice any changes. First, I validated the site on http://www.w3.org. This was a fairly laborious task, but, I learned a lot about HTML and Javascript that was compliant on all browsers. I’ve been writing Actionscript at work for so long that I was shocked to find that most event triggers in JavaScript should be all lower case rather than camel case (I should have warned that this entry would be a bit geeky). Anyways, I did some work to make the site accessible, as well, which is a part of w3 validation. I renamed some of the pages to be more descriptive and finally (thanks to some advice from my sister), I added a bunch of meta data to the pages including keywords and descriptions.

After all this work, I checked the google ranking when I searched for “Evanston Psychologist”. The site was way back on page 4 or 5. <sigh> Last week, my sister took a look at the site and told me that it was on page one of a “Evanston Psychologist” search. Woo hoo! My work paid off. It is also on page 2 of a search of “Evanston Life Coach”. I still have a few tweeks to make to the meta data so that I can get the site on the first page of a few more keywords   Kevin’s mom even had a new client who complimented her on her new site.