James Sapara’s Personal Blog

Most people probably know that I don’t sleep well. Some nights it’s waking up 5 times, other nights it’s not ever falling asleep. It baffles me that when I take this sort of symptom to a doctor, they don’t really look too deep into it. They ask if I feel depressed, I say no. They ask if there’s noise, I say yes; and, point out that I have $25 ear plugs that don’t help. They ask if I have any lights on, I say, “I’ve made my room as dark as the void”. Drugs, no. Do you do more than sleep and have sex in your bed? No. The list goes on. These are all WELL known issues for people who often find they occasionally have restless sleep. Given that this has been a problem for 5 years now, I’m suspecting that perhaps there’s something more at work here.
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Well I’ve gotten bored waiting for progress on the condo, so I’ve decided to start buying some stuff in anticipation. The two more important items as far as designing my kitchen will likely be the cooktop and the wall oven. They’re dimensions will directly effect the design of the cupboard and countertop, so it makes sense to go ahead with those now so I can start making some finalized designs for the cabinet maker. I settled on these:

• Kenmore Elite 30″ Induction Cooktop
• Kenmore Elite 30″ Electric Self-Clean Single Wall Oven (quite possibly convection, but the Canadian and American sites don’t agree on this)
• Kenmore 24.8 cu. f Bottom Freezer Refrigerator

In case your wondering why I linked to the American site, it’s because Sears.ca makes linking difficult AND they don’t provide any useful pictures or details. GO SEARS!

Next on my list will probably be finalizing what refrigerator I’m going to get, as it’s size is somewhat important on a whole (sizes seem fairly standardized these days, so it’s just a matter of picking an appropriate width). I likely won’t order that until I have a date to move in, as I have no places to store it. At some point I’ll have to choose what I want for counter tops as well. I like the idea of an integrated sink, but it limits my options in many ways. Custom concrete can do it, but it the people in town charge $180liner/foot for that stuff… more expensive that stone for some reason.

I’ve been looking for a good place online to get “discount” designer light fixtures as well. It’s very likely when I first move in; that, I’ll install those $2.33 white cap fixtures until I find stuff that I like. Oh, how classy that will look… lol. If you’ve worked with a place online for that sort of stuff, I’ve love to know about it.

Edit: Added a refrigerator, as it was on sale and basically the exact model I was thinking about anyways.

Well what can I say about my tenth day of vacation. Got into the Vancouver airport a little early, but the 6 hour delay leaving ensured we would never make our connecting flight. We got ourselves on standby with a booked flight for 8:55pm that night. From there we played the chase the terminal game. About every hour a flight is scheduled to leave from Vancouver, so 100 or so people and ourselves move from gate to gate until our name is called (my mother felt it was something like winning the lotto). Sadly, people had been their since the day before waiting for flights, so it was kinda crazy around there. Later in the afternoon a group of Asia travelers must of gotten lost, because they failed to show and several people, including ourselves, got the leave the confines of the airport.

Since we left so late in the day, we spent the night in Calgary. I attempted to book a room at the hotel our vehicle was at, but apparently it was full, so we booked at some hotel on the other side of Calgary (in retrospect, I should of not booked anything and waited…) On the way to the hotel via their shuttle, a couple informed us they too just booked a room and where told there was plenty of space. So, trying our luck, we went in to attempt to book there. Turns out they did have lots of rooms and could fit us in, but we had to somehow cancel our other reservation. Because of the short notice on making the previous reservation, they have some silly policy that you can’t cancel. After much time on hold, they finially give in and let us switch our reservation to the hotel they said had no room, which miraculously now has 32 rooms free.

After that was all settled, we revived the car and ordered some pizza. Set the alarm for 6:30am Calgary time (3:30am Maui time… blech) and went to bed. Next day was hitch free, got to Saskatchewan in record time (6 hours and 23 minutes). Whatever snow storm was being talked about the previous day never materialized for us at any point. The worst conditions we saw was very light snow blowing across the highway.

It was an early morning, with no real goal for the day. Spent part of the morning tidying up and packing out bags. Once that was all done, we checked out and went on our marry way to find adventure. First stop was a jewelry story in the same town we were in, which was unfortunately closed on Sundays. Next stop was Paia to get some curry food. As an added bonus the sister store of the earlier jewelry store was located next door.

From there we cruised the main city, looking for trouble and generally getting lost and then un-lost in the car many times over. Eventually we found a mall that looked interesting and wandered (speed walked) around it a few times. We even had a nap in the parking lot. We caught an afternoon movie, “Awake“. During the movie I got a text from Air Canada that our flight was delayed. As the afternoon went on, I got a few more of those… delaying it in increments of about 30 minutes each time.

By the time it was all said and done, we left a 1:00am Maui time; or, 6 hours delayed…

Yesterday we booked the morning cruise on the Lani Kai with Friendly Charters. It’s a snorkel cruise, so you basically boat out someplace somewhat difficult to get to, and snorkel. We went to Molokini Crater and “Turtle Town”. The crater was cool as far as craters go, but the variety of fish wasn’t all that exciting. We saw more fish and variety when we snorkeled at the beach earlier in the week. The “turtle town” was actually a deep reef where turtles hang out. Interesting, but really only good for seeing turtles. Fortunately we did see some turtles and I got some long video’s of me chasing turtle. I’ll post them when I get back on Monday.

Spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and packing stuff up. Grama and Holly were off today, and the flight’s were all somewhat messed up. It amazes me how one flight can have an Air Canada number, United number and Hawaii number; but, you check in at just one of those… not any of them. That burned 2 hours figuring it out before we left, and then later on when we got there. We also had dinner at Marco’s (POLLO!), who’s portions are monstrous and tasty.