I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Maya Angelou
I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. Michael Jordan
The mind is everything. What you think you become. Buddha
Your time is limited; so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Steve Jobs
You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. Christopher Columbus
Whatever you think you can or you think you can’t do, you’re right. Henry Ford
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. Zig Ziglar
There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. Aristotle
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King Jr.
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. Booker T. Washington
This delicious Brooklyn dish is easy to prepare and very satisfying. It is not necessarily a side dish but a meal in and of itself. Makes a great brown bag lunch!
What you need
4-6 Italian sausages. Hot or sweet, you decide. If you live near a Costco, they have some of the best Italian sausage anywhere. Johnsonville is also very good. If you live in an Italian neighborhood then you’ll want to go to a local pork store.
A large frying pan
Grill
Olive oil
2 Green or red bell peppers
1 Medium sweet onion
2 Garlic cloves chopped medium fine
1/2 Tsp salt
1 Tsp black pepper
1/2 Tsp oregano
1/2 Tsp basil
1 Long loaf of Italian bread or crusty French baguette
First
Core and clean the peppers so that there are no seeds and no white rind. Cut them lengthwise into 1/4″ strips.
Second
Cut the ends off the onion and then cut it in half lengthwise and slice so that you have half rings.
Third
Heat the frying pan over medium heat until you can pop a drop of water then add about 1/8″ of olive oil. When you can pop a drop of water in the oil you are ready to fry up the peppers and onions.
Fourth
Saute the garlic on medium heat for about 30 seconds and then add the peppers and onions. Add the salt, black pepper, oregano and basil. Stir everything around often until the peppers and onions are tender. This will take a bit of time.
Fifth
While the peppers and onions are cooking , throw the sausage on the grill and cook them until they are done and have uniform black grill marks all around. Some people like to fry the sausage, I don’t. Frying them is O.K. but it does change the character of the recipe.
Sixth
Take the sausages off the grill and let them cool for a few minutes. Cut them lengthwise and add them to the peppers and onions for about 1 minute. Place the contents of the frying pan into a bowl lined with paper towels to absorb the excess olive oil. You are now ready to serve it up.
This makes a great sandwich and can be served with a side salad and a nice bottle of Chianti.
So, you’ve accumulated thousands of photos over the years and some of them are starting to deteriorate. What are you gonna do? Well one thing you can do is digitize your precious memories with this Epson FastFoto scanner. It can scan up to 60 photos per minute front and back. If you have writing on the back it will copy that text and automatically name the photo accordingly. You can also scan panoramics.
It comes with a software suite that allows for automatic color correction for photos that have been diminished over time. This device is so much better than a flatbed scanner. It ain’t cheap, $550-650 is the going price. But, it is so fast that I think it is well worth the money.
First of all, I’m not gonna use home made shells for this recipe. They are a royal pain in the ass to make and take the fun out of the whole deal. So, you food purests can start sending me hate mail and death threats if you’re so inclined. One more thing, after making the filling, licking the spoon is mandatory!
What you need
12 pre-baked, large cannoli shells. You can get these at an Italian bakery or a good gourmet supermarket. Yeah, I know. You can buy the cannoli at the bakery, but what fun is that. And besides, you wouldn’t have any bragging rights if you did.
Colander
Large bowl
An aluminum pan with a cover to store your little works of art in the fridge after completion
2-1 gal freezer bags
A nice big piece of cheesecloth
4 cups of whole milk ricotta, not skim (a little extra couldn’t hurt). I like Polly-O brand but any good quality brand will do just fine.
1 and1/2 cups of powdered sugar
1 tablespoon of vanilla
1/2 cup of finely chopped Maraschino cherries
First
Empty the ricotta onto the cheesecloth and let it drain in a colander for a few minutes so that it is not watery.
Second
In a large bowl, combine the ricotta, powdered sugar and vanilla until well mixed.
Third
Finely chop the Maraschino cherries and squeeze them into a ball in a paper towel until they are almost dry. If you don’t do this you will have a pink filling.
Mix the Maraschino cherries into the filling.
Fourth
Equally fill each 1 gal freezer bag with filling. After filling the bags, cut about 1/4 inch off each corner.
From this opening, squeeze the filling into each shell. It is very important to make sure that the filling penetrates the shell completely so that there is no air in the center. Fill the shell from both sides and then flatten the end of the filled shell with a butter knife.
Fifth
Place the filled shells in the aluminum pan and sprinkle liberally with powdered sugar. If you’re not gonna serve them immediately, place them in the fridge, but not for too long or they will get soggy.
Wow! It’s already September and the year is almost gone. Is time flying or what? Here in Arizona the heat is finally starting to break. We hope all of our readers had a fantastic summer.
We are now in the final phase of selling our condo and expect to be back home in Hawaii by May 2017 no matter what. This process has been a long haul but we never took our eye off the prize. When all is said and done and we are re-settled, I plan on writing a special post on what it took to achieve our goal of returning to Hawaii. If you already live in Hawaii, don’t leave! Going home is harder than you think.
We are subscribed to the group“Hawaiian History and Culture” and some inspiration for this month’s posts is from the group.
I have been playing guitar for quite a few years now and have owned many different guitars. I stopped playing electric guitars years ago and now have two acoustic guitars and a ukulele. One of those guitars is a wahine slack key tuned Guild, which was the first really good guitar I ever owned. That was back in 1970 (she’s 46 years old). The other is a RainSong WS1000, my basic rockabilly instrument.
I first encountered this beautiful and unusual RainSong guitar while on The Big Island. I stopped into a music store and saw this guitar hanging on the wall. The store owner asked if I would like to play and handed the guitar to me.
The sound was amazing! But I couldn’t wrap my head around a carbon fiber guitar. After all, a fine guitar had to be made of fine wood. Right? I thought anything else was sacreligious. Over the years I sampled this guitar whenever I was in a shop that carried RainSong. I didn’t know that I was falling in love. And then the day came for me to take the bride home.
Excerpted from a review written by Guy Little August 17, 2015
Unedited
RainSong Guitars began on the Hawaiian island of Maui when a fledgling classical guitarist John Decker witnessed a torrential downpour while attending a wedding. The guitar player performing for the guests had a bit of a dilemma: carry on playing and risk being drenched by the tropical shower, which would cause irreversible damage to his treasured guitar, or run for cover and risk the wrath of the bride. That day, John Decker was inspired to create a new kind of instrument, one that would play beautifully while enduring life’s summers and winters, bumps and bruises – and, well, most things life could throw at it (save for, say, a brick).
The instrument that John Decker created became the world’s first all-graphite guitar, known as theRainSong guitar (get it?), and it now comes in all shapes and sizes, from a parlour travel guitar to a boom box of a dreadnought. But that’s about where the similarities to a conventional guitar ends – these instruments are packed with forward-thinking technology that means you could submerge it into the Arctic ocean and it’d still sing beautifully for you. Or, if you fancy, you could drag it through the Sahara strumming it on the back of a camel without worrying about the neck warping or soundboard splitting.
Since the mid-’90s, RainSong guitars has been building high-end graphite guitars that deliver a clear, balanced tone while remaining unaffected by humidity and temperature changes – for this reason alone these guitars were/are a big hit with travelling guitarists. Along the way, the company, now based in Washington State, USA, has refined its designs and construction techniques, notably developing apatented Projection Tuned Layering process that allows the body to be built with no bracing whatsoever – and let me tell you, this takes a little getting used to. Just don’t look inside the soundhole; it’s a trippy and uncomfortable experience. Not because it’s some wormhole to a Manchester nightclub in the ‘90s, but because it just doesn’t seem right without any kerfing or soundboard braces. Continue reading RainSong Guitars→
Contemporary Hawaiian Music, Hawaiian Pop and Jawaiian have their roots, arguably, in the 1970’s, and have become a big part of the ever growing music scene in Hawaii and on the mainland . Listen to some of the artists below from then and now and then click on the links to their sites for more information about them and many more great Hawaiian artists.
Ahh! Summer, that magical time between Memorial Day and Labor Day. No matter how old or young you are, summer is the time to kick back, close your eyes and imagine that school is out.
The month of July marks our 240th birthday. In the scheme of nations that makes us pretty young. This is a good time to think about who we are, where we all came from and where we’re going.
I have been making this family vinaigrette recipe for decades and sometimes bring a bottle of it to friends’ houses when visiting. I like it so much that I thought I would share the recipe with our readers.
