Hawaii 5 oh,oh,oh,oh$

by Jody Worsham
All rights reserved to pay interest on the credit card for the next 20 years.

Everyone said the cost of living in Hawaii was very high so evidently most of the people there are tourists or people employed to take care of tourists, or homeless. We saw a lot of the homeless people in the park. I think one may have been a former Enron executive because he had his rolling office chair parked right next to his shopping cart. We passed him several times during the week and he was always there sitting in his chair. He was probably at the Hawaiian Hilton in the executive suite when Enron crashed so he just rolled his chair across the street and took up residence.


Our trolly driver was a pyro-techie for the movies but when business got slow (probably due to natural pyro-technics from the volcano erupting on the big island) he started driving the trolly. He showed us the school he attended. It was still standing so either he wasn't very good at hisjob, he didn't want to burn things down until he hit high school, or his elementary school had a very good fire prevention program.

Our waitress at dinner came to the island as a graduation present with her mother.
Mom liked it so much she moved here permanently a year and a half later. When our waitress graduated from a university in Virginia with her elementary certification she came back to the island to hang out for awhile. I asked why she wasn't teaching (our trolly driver said seven elementary schools had been added in the past three or four years). She said it's so expensive to live here, she would have had to teach school and waitress to make a decent living. "This way I can work and enjoy the island". I guess she made more waitressing full time than teaching full time.

The nine-year-old discovered the hands-on Apple Store our first day. On my third trip to the store and while leaning against a wall hoping the store would close early, a young man came up to me and said "I've seen that look a thousand times." I asked him if he was born on the island. No, but he had lived there since he was four. He asked where I was from. I told him Texas. He said he dated a violinst from Texas. I'm thinking, does he know how big Texas is? "Actually she played for the Symphony in the Pines. "In Nacogdoches, I said". "Yes." He had attended the University of Oklahoma and had visited Nacogdoches one weekend. What are the odds? I guess he was selling a lot of I-phones, I-Pads, or I-patches because he lived in Hawaii full time and he looked well fed.

McDonald's is always my barometer of expenses. You know you are in trouble when there is no dollar menue. There's a two dollar menue and there is no Happy Meals. The only happy people were the owners of the McDonald's franchise.