We adventured to Costco to pick up items for dinner. On the menu: three pounds of sausage and a few chicken breasts, potato salad, steamed broccoli, salad, and brownies and fresh strawberries and cream for dessert. After shopping, we spent an hour or so at a somewhat out of the way beach in Wailea - hot sand, hard surf, and bright sun. Good for my tan. There was really only one big highlight of the day though...
Dinner With Dustin
Dustin brought a friend with him - a native girl named Tamara whom he's currently courting. She's very nice, very lovely; born on Kuaui (Koo-AH-oo-EE) but currently living on Maui. She and Dustin bring two nice bottles of red and white wine. Dustin also takes out a jar of pickled habeneros.
Heh.
I open the jar, take one out, and cut it in thirds. I eat the first chunk, and CHRIST it's powerful shit. Tamara remarks "oh, he's turning red!". My mouth flames up, I start sweating like crazy, and I swallow the damn thing and it catches in back of my throat a little. It's so bloody nasty that I start to hiccup - never did that before. I don't chase it down with anything, no water, no bread. I feel manly. Dustin follows suit with a smaller piece, eats it down, and chases it with a chunk of brownie.
My dad comes in with the grillables, I set the table, we bring out all the rest of the food, and settle in for a very pleasant dinner.
Everything is scrumptious. Tamara loves the sausage, and tries a piece each of teriyaki / mushroom / pineapple, kaluha with cherries, and mandarin orange. She absolutely loved them all, saying they were very unique and tasty. This is a good sign for my parents... they want to start a gourmet sausage business in Hawaii. If they can get the locals to love their stuff, they're well on their way to a happy retirement.
Dustin is a really neat guy, he's a hell of a lot of fun. He's got lots of great stories to tell - and oddly, most of them have something to do with him getting injured to within an inch of his life. Recently he got skewered by the skeg on the bottom of his windsurfer after a nasty wipeout. It punctured his chest, but missed his lung and his heart by fractions. Undaunted, he swam back to shore bleeding the whole way. In other tales, he constantly sees sharks swimming around him ("they're my friends eh"), and he also talks about car fires and other misadventures he's participated in.
Tamara's really sweet, and really quite pretty. She's a slight little thing, dark skinned with deep black hair - which Dustin tells her to take out of the bun to show us how long it is. After some more nudging, she does, and it's at least four feet long - down to her knees. She's quite a bit younger than Dustin; 20 years old, and finishing up college. Later in the evening, my mom said to my dad "Mike, why is he going out with such a young girl again? Because he can??" she laughs. I reply for my dad and say "Yes. DUH."
It also turns out that Dustin is a big scooch. After dinner, he and I are sitting together on the couch in the living room area, and on the spur of the moment, he proceeds to tickle me. Immediately he finds my weakest spot - my knees - and he starts grabbing my knee hard and teasing the hell out of me. We end up grappling on the couch, and man, he is a strong mother, all muscle; but I got about a hundred pounds on him, and I'm no slouch in the strength department myself. I go easy on him because we're just screwing around, just enough to keep him off my knee. We cool off, and clap each other on the back. Very macho stuff. "Boys will be boys," my mom remarks.
Last Words
Dustin and Tamara stayed until about 11:30pm. He invited us to his place next week for a traditional imu (EE-moo) dinner - imu is the big underground barbecue pit - and he says that his kalua (kah-LOO-ah) pork and turkey is unreal. It's a lot of work to make the imu though, so he also said he might just do a deep fat fried turkey instead. He hasn't done the imu in a about a year though, so we'll see what happens.
Tomorrow night's big event is the Ulalena show in Lahaina - it's a retelling of the Hawaiian mythos in dance and song, performed by entertainers who were trained in Montreal by members of Cirque Du Soleil. It gets rave reviews and should be a really good time.
See you later!