Woops- Accidentally Hit Publish Last Night; Here's the First Half Anyhow...

Kalalau Valley
Another dreadful Kauai picture. I'll milk the trip for all it's worth i guess. 

Well, so far i still really like my job. I pretty much just haul shlonk around all day. I sometimes wonder if i wasn't a Sherpa in another lifetime. I'll try to sneak some pictures of the warehouse. I'm afraid i'll never be able to capture the enormity of it. I often find myself thinking, Oh, this is what a gajillion dollars worth of inventory looks like. It's neat knowing the company started in a garage in this little town here with an initial capital investment of $2,000. Now, the world leader in river supply sales, it nets millions of dollars annually.

So, i'm a cog in the corporate GDP monster, but a well-cared-for one, anyhow. It's definitely the consensus and my initial impression that they take very good care of their employees. The work isn't nearly as soul-less and mind-numbing as i feared. They've recently implemented a new inventory system, so there's a bit of detective work that comes into play every day, and there are few things i care to engage my mental faculties in more than a good mystery. My cohorts are an amiable, fun-loving bunch. Any less-than-friendly interaction i've encountered so far that has been compensated for in entertainment value. There are some characters for sure.

I kinda feel like a diabetic kid in a candy store though, which has been sort of a carry-over from the winter break. I'm already freaking out in a small recess of my brain. I was desperate for the job, so gah, foof, i verbally committed to work at the warehouse this summer. I had to pay for a new tooth unexpectedly a while ago so financially i was pretty hosed. Then again, a stupid tooth isn't going to do me much good when i die of river withdrawal. BUT, i do know a few buyers and sales reps that spend a good bit of time on the water on the company dime. One of them even started in the warehouse. It's a far fetch, but i can't go any longer on a dog-walker salary, so summer went on the table and got gobbled up. Fuck.

So i'm an insipid, 8-5, android for a while. But i get to fondle everybody else's smexy river stuff. The employee discount is bitching, so by the time i hit retirement and get a chance to use it, in theory, i'll have a bunch of good ish.

Which brings me back to my Hawaii trip and all the good goods i waxed not-so-poetically about in my last post. As you could see in all those pictures it was nothing short of magnificent. But emotionally it was a double-edged sword. I was whisked back to the same crusty tribulations of high school.

Even though the swells in the winter are typically on the North shore, there were a few Pacific storms that brought some good surf to the South side where my dad lives. If my slew of postcard-perfect paradise pictures weren't enough to convince you to hate me, let me just tell you what kind of person i am; i am selfish. Not to mention vicious; i'm a slave to more addictions than i can count. The foremost of which, were all of them presented to me simultaneously, is surfing. I used to skip so much school when the waves were good, my school counselor confided that i had the worst attendance of anybody who'd ever graduated from Kauai High with honors. By far, she said.

Anyhow, probably you've already anticipated my conundrum here being that surfing and seizures is an imprudent, potentially lethal combination. It was the bone of contention between my dad and me throughout high school. And understandably so. Every time i slipped into the water  surfboard, i unwittingly risked