Aloha, everyone, and hope you all are having a GREAT Monday morning! It’s pouring up here in the valley as Tropical Storm Flossie slowly advances towards the isles with typical hurricane-like weather with lots of heavy, humid air. The worst part is that traffic’s gonna be a bitch today …
Last week was a great week although there were a couple of downers along the way … started off with another packed night at THE SWIM. Lots of fans including two women from Tahiti who I thought were locals until they said “Merci beacoup!” after taking pictures with us … definitely a first for me! After SWIM, we decided to go to one of our favorite Mexican eateries, Torito’s, which is located in Market City. Alex, Mark, and I ordered the Torito’s Burrito which is like an entire meal wrapped up in a giant tortilla. The real key to good Mexican food are the sauces, and Torito’s has some good ones. But the place Mark and I still talk about is this place in LA called Diana’s .. their mole sauces were out of this world! This place was so popular that on Sunday the locals would arrive in droves after church, carrying big metal pots for take-out orders of menudo for their Sunday dinners. I tell you, that place was AWESOME! Anyway, back to Torito’s … so I’m up at the counter trying to choose a bottle of hot sauce, when the cook looks at me and asks whether I’d like to try some homemade stuff. Like an idiot, I said I liked spicy … which was a mistake as soon as I saw him go to a small bowl of evil looking red salsa and scoop a generous portion into a dish for me. I took it back to our table, grabbed a tortilla chip and dipped just the very tip of it into the sauce – *!@#%! – THAT SUCKER WAS HOT!!! Alex and Mark thought it was funny until they tried it and had the same joyful response – ie, pounding of the table, sweating, swearing, etc.  We found out later that it was pureed habanero peppers (oh, and a little water – frick!). Man, I’m still sweating …
Moving on … I got emails from many of our Japanese fans asking why we weren’t going to be performing at the Aloha Yokohama Festival this year. I have to admit that I miss being there, mostly because of the fans, but I certainly don’t miss the awful heat & humidity. Summer in Japan is the pits – it’s so hot & humid that it’s hard to walk two or three blocks without ducking into a Lawson’s or Family Mart for some air conditioning. Whenever we performed outside, we always ended up looking like we had just come out of a swimming pool – except we were soaked with sweat, not water! Still, it was always a lot of fun and I look forward to going back some day …
Last Friday, we got a sneak preview of Sarah’s hula DVD (Alex did the background music and Nick assisted with production) … and it was great! It’ll be going on sale very soon so stay tuned!
Last week’s downers … my golf game continues to get worse and the only good thing is that my handicap continues to climb (up to 13 now!). I won’t be playing this week so I’m hoping the rest will help … sort of like re-booting my laptop! And to add insult to injury, I injured my elbow while teeing off on No. 18 last Thursday … damn! It still stiff and sore so I’ll probably have the doc take a look at it this week …
Have a good one, my friends!
Aloha, “D”