I'm Baaaaack

          So, I know that it has been a while since my last post, but I'm back in the saddle and ready for action.  I do want to apologize for my lack of explanations.  I just went to Kona and never told you guys what happened.  My last post, the one titled 'So my computer got a virus' was actually a full post until I accidentally deleted it and posted it with just the title.  There was a whole world of explanations in there. A lot has happened in the interim between my last post and now, but that is not for today's post.  Today's post is going to be quite cursory and just one paragraph.  I have a lot of schoolwork I need to finish, and my family and I are still building our house.  I do promise to come up with those videos eventually, but not for  a while.  From now on I'm going to post three times a week, no more no less.  I do believe that is all for now. Tomorrow I will finish this.  I also wanted to let you know that my friend James is a douche and I totally think he hacked my Facebook account. K, bye. 

So I Got A Virus On My Computer

I'm Freezing My Toes Off on This Mountain 

  

          So the bus was scheduled to arrive in Captain Cook at 5:15pm, but the traffic was ridiculous, and at one point we took a detour that was an enormous waste of time, and seemed to serve purpose at all.  But that's for later.  Firstly, I got on the bus after arriving at the bus stop forty-five minutes early so as to be perfectly sure that I would not miss it.  And then, halfway through my wait, I began to angst over the possibility that the bus would not accept my student I.D. as payment because it was going all the way to Kona, even though it was the same Hele-on company as all the other buses I ride and should by all rights follow the same policies.  This worry plagued me for a whole twenty minutes, and I began to panic because I had maybe seven pennies in my change purse, which is nowhere near enough to board the bus, and so I would not be able to go to Kona to see my best friend because I was too stupid to plan ahead and do the research to see if they accepted student I.D.s for the trip to Kona, and by the time the bus arrived, I had driven myself almost to the point of tears because, lets face it... I'm a bit irrational and emotionally unstable. 

          I climbed the three stairs to where the bus driver sat, residing over bus patrons and island travel.  The short walk felt to me as though it was taking a century, and my legs were on the verge of turning to jelly.  A light sheen of sweat covered my forehead, and as I walked I was tenuously holding my I.D out in front of me as if it were a shield from denial of entry, but I wasn't sure how good of a shield it was and I was entering the bus as warily as if I was walking onto a medieval battlefield.  When I finally reached the bus driver, he slowly looked up from his clipboard and his gaze went from my card to my face and back to my card.  He asked "What's this?" and my heart almost stopped.  My mouth was very dry and my voice came out pained and a bit whiny. "My student I.D.?" My voice kind of cracked at the end, and rather than it being a declarative sentence, it came out a question.  I felt like Kristen Stewart.  My happiness depended on his reply, and when he finally said "Ok." I almost cried in relief. 

          I shouldered my way to almost the back of the bus, and chose a seat as far away from all other passengers as possible, and after seating myself by the window, I piled my bags on the seat next to me, pulled out my computer,put a movie and my headphones in, and proceeded to settle in for what I hoped would be a relatively bearable and quiet ride.  This worked pretty well in my favor until we got to downtown, and at the bus station was a truly huge crowd of people waiting to board the bus, and I'm an idiot because I didn't even pretend to be asleep like a smart me would do.  I suppose I was still a bit traumatized from my earlier self-induced panic frenzy, which is essentially what it was.  I think.  Anyway, I assumed that there were plenty of seats for everybody, and nobody could possibly need to sit next to me.  I was wrong.

          I had to endure an entire hour of awkwardly sitting by somebody whilst watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding...I wasn't made for socialization.  I really wanted my bus mate to leave, and when he finally did, I wasted no time re-erecting my barrier against my fellows.  By this time I had finished my movie and had resorted to staring out the window for entertainment because reading gives me motion sickness.  Hawaii really is quite beautiful.  When I'm not in Pahoa, it's easy to like Hawaii, but Puna makes it terribly difficult.  But that's quite beside the point.  After learning the hard way and having to sit next to somebody, every time we stopped the bus to let someone board it, I pretended to be asleep, and nobody asked me to move my things so that they could sit down.  It was a success....until we reached Waimea and picked up a horde of school children.  I had to give up my empty seat to a little girl, and children were sitting and standing in the isle from literally the very back of the bus to the front.  About twenty minutes later, we reached a preparatory school campus and turned into the driveway.  There was a palpable sense of relief on the bus, as everybody assumed that we would soon be free of all the kids.  This was not the case.  We drove slowly and aimlessly through the campus all the way to the end, and then we turned around and drove back out the driveway without stopping to let anybody off.  Yes, you read that correctly.  We drove through a school campus with a bus full of people that needed to get to their destinations on time for no apparent reason at all.  I was really pissed off.

          Eventually we dropped all the kids off and reached a shopping center where we dropped even more people off.  It was roughly 4:30pm at that time and I said to myself "I will reach Captain Cook on time and all will be well."  Yeah... that didn't quite happen as planned.  We drove through some lovely resort towns, and past some quite scenic beaches for two more hours, and stopped to pick up more freaking people before we reached another highway which we traveled on for some ways.  At this point I began to panic again, because Keegan was supposed to meet me at the Choice Mart at 5:15ish and every moment we were on the highway was another moment later I would be.  Several times I got up to ask the bus driver questions, and I eventually convinced him to drop me off at the Choice Mart.  He didn't do quite that; he dropped me off in sight of and across the street from it.  It was 6:00 before I actually reached it, and  I was hoping and praying that Keegan would still be there when I arrived, and miracle of miracles, she was! Then I went to her new house and we hung out and stuff. Here's some pictures. 

This is me and Keegan with a giant container of Nutella.  I'm pointing to it with an idiotic expression on my face.  I have no clue what Keegan is doing. None at all.

We pressed our faces really close together to symbolize how close we are as friends.  Because we were bored and stupid.  Yep, that's us.

Keegan likes to make faces in the camera, and she also enjoys not warning me that she is about to take a picture.  Because she's thoughtful like that.  This is me, staring off into space with a platonic expression because it's my "off mode".  The off mode is initiated by boredom.  I was only bored for a few minutes because we were taking pictures.

           It gets super cold on this mountain at night and I had to put on flannel pajama pants tucked into fuzzy pink tube socks, a thick sweatshirt that I got at Myrtle Beach last year and we slept under like six blankets.  I didn't start to get warm again until around noon.  Yeah... its cold up here, but tomorrow we're going to the beach.  I hope you enjoyed my post today, and all of these silly pictures.  Here's one random one for the road. 

 

Gee Whiz, We've Made it to Blog 2!

          Hello, faithful readers! I hope you've had a good day so far.  (Actually I hope you've had a really boring day so far, so that when you read this blog, it will be the best part of your day. Sorry, I know, I'm so self serving.)  I just want to thank you for being awesome and any of you who thinks this blog is good should subscribe to it.  Anyway, I've got a big day ahead of me.  But before I tell you about my plans for the day, I need to tell you about my great friend Keegan.  First of all, it is imperative that you all know how awesome she is, because she's super awesome.  Take a look at the sky. She's as awesome as the sky.  Keegan helped me through a hard time in my life and I will forever be extremely grateful to her.  Oh god, the seriousness of that sentence took a part of my soul.  Holy mackerel! Does that mean this blog is now a horcrux!? Oh wow, I'm a super cool and super magical dark wizard who will live forever!

          Wait... I didn't kill anybody. Damn, I was so hoping I was a wizard.  Oh well, it's only one more crushing disappointment I have to endure in this life.  Back to Keegan.  She is a fiery redhead, who is gorgeous (gentlemen, she likes bow ties, just FYI) and has a really fun personality.  She also happens to share almost my exact sense of humor, and has no lack of witty comebacks.  Her favorite band is Mew, and they're actually quite good although not necessarily my genre of music.  You should go check them out and see if you like them.  She's incredibly fun to hang out with, and up until about two weeks ago, we were neighbors.  Her dad got a care-taking job on the other side of the island, and they moved into the house there. I'm providing you with a visual aid.  This is a map of the island. Now, if you look closely, you will see the town of Pahoa on the middle right side of the map.  It's ever so slightly inland and it may be found on that little piece of land jutting out into the ocean.  Do you see it? Good.  Now, on the opposite side of the island is Kona.  About midway down on the left side, practically right on the coast.  Do you see that?  Splendid.  Nearby, in bold, it will say Captain Cook.  That is where I am going. By bus.  Utterly alone.  I've never been there before.  It's going to be a bit of an adventure.  I really wish that I had a camera so that I could take pictures and make a video, but my mom was wary of letting me take her expensive digital camera all the way across the island, so I didn't press her because I'm a good daughter.  Also, I love my mommy because she was thoughtful enough to make me a snack for today. <3

         

          In a regular car, I'm told that the journey from Pahoa to Kona is only two to three hours.  But not on the bus, oh no.  You see, the city bus here is called the Hele-on.  And God forbid you call it the city bus, because the .... (here you can see that I am struggling for an adjective that is relatively polite for the idiots who don't know that just because it has a name, it's still a freaking city. bus.)  people around here cling to the name like it's a beacon of hope against all the evils of the world which makes no damn sense.  I generally get myself pretty worked up over what I consider the idiocy of certain practices around here.  But that is not for today's blog, no, we'll save that for the weekend shall we? Moving on.  This bus ride I shall be undertaking today will last a whopping 5 and 1/2 hours.  Yes folks, the city bus manages to stretch what is already a painful trip of three hours into an agonizing trip of almost six hours.  What joy I have ahead of me .______________. that's my sarcasm face. 

          Anyway, the bus only makes one trip to Kona a day, and it starts in Hilo, not Pahoa.  If you care to look, Hilo is somewhere near Pahoa on the map.  It's not even a full hour drive from Pahoa, but the city bus drags the commute on for almost four hours and it's really a pain.  I generally hitch hike into town from the boonies where I live, rather than wait at the bus stop near my home which leaves me on the bus for far too long, and I catch the bus at the 7/11.  Today however,  I was lucky enough to be picked up by a kind woman who was driving to Hilo, and I just tagged along for the ride.  This stroke of luck, however, put me in Hilo at about 9:00am and the bus to Kona doesn't arrive until 1:17pm  so I've got a bit of a wait ahead of me.  Luckily, internet access can be had almost anywhere here, so I'm sitting in Safeway writing this blog and listening to Chameleon Circuit, which, for those of you that don't know, is a band that sings songs about Doctor Who.  That's correct, Doctor Who is such an amazing show that an entire genre of music was created based on it.  My new-found love of Doctor Who can be accredited to Keegan, because that is yet another thing she's done for me and I can't thank her enough because my life would be really boring without Doctor Who now.  

          Basically people,  I'm going to Kona for the weekend.  Kona is great.  It's sunny and has beaches, but the best part is that I'm going to be in a real live house for two days.  I'm excited.  One thing I can tell you is that living here has given me a greater appreciation for things that I used to take for granted, and that I'm sure you are currently taking for granted.  Things like washing machines, and toilets, and running water, and electricity and refrigerators... stuff like that.  Oh. My. God.  They're playing "Oops I did it again" by Britney Spears.... What is this travesty?!!!  Ok, I'm over it now.  But yeah, try to imagine living all your life with all of those luxuries, and then being thrown into a partially third world life.  It's difficult, and I admit that I was really depressed for almost five months, the intensity of the depression fluctuating depending on the day, but finally it's going away and that makes me really happy.  This random serious honesty crap needs to stop.  I mean really... well I suppose one can't always be cavalier about everything. Sigh.... well, I really am quite curious as to how many people read my blog and this stupid blog site doesn't tell you how many blog views you get, just how many profile views you get.  I mean, who cares how many people stumbled upon my blog and then thought "Hey, I want to read about the author, so I'm going to go view her profile!"  I want to know how many people read my blog because I put all of my (figurative) sweat and tears into my blog, not my profile.  Pfft... Google man.  Google.

          If anybody has any requests of things they would like me to talk about, please feel free to comment below.  And if you comment, but don't subscribe, I will be sad, because you have to have a gmail to comment just as you have to have one to subscribe, which means that you could subscribe just as easily as comment.  Tomorrow I'm going to try to post some pictures, because I believe that Keegan has a camera.  And then at some point next week I'll start adding little tidbits of information about Hawaiian culture, and pictures of where I live and stuff, and eventually, I promise you that I will make some videos, but chances are that I will be posting the videos on my You-tube channel.  I fear that this blog post will come to an end quite soon because it's quite long enough.  But before I leave you until tomorrow, who thinks Rory is the best boyfriend/fiance/husband in the world? Don't get me wrong,  I would marry the Doctor in an instant, but nobody waits two thousand years for somebody unless they really really really really really really really really really really love them.  I think that I would have to choose Rory over the Doctor, were I lucky enough to have the choice. That's quite enough wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff.  I bid you adieu.                                                                             

My Very First Super Special Blog 

  Welcome, one and all! Actually maybe I should begin by saying “Thanks for reading my

blog and therefore making all my hours of slaving over a hot keyboard worthwhile.” (FYI, my keyboard isn’t really hot. Nor is it cold - it’s more room temperature…. I’m sure all of you are aware of the temperature of a keyboard because you probably have one sitting in front of you with a computer somewhere nearby; otherwise, how on earth could you be reading this?).  But I digress.  I decided to start writing a blog because one day I woke up and thought “Hey,  I’m pretty damn awesome, and so are 97.34% of my thoughts! I wish I could write all of them down and then somehow share my awesomeness with the world. How terribly sad it is that I cannot.”  And then I began to go about my day, but somebody came up to me and smacked me in the forehead with a V8 bottle and said “You should’ve had a V8!” then ran off cackling madly leaving me in his dust with an empty V8 bottle and a head full of confusion. 

          After staring forlornly at my empty V8 bottle, a real and true and totally not imaginary light bulb appeared over my head and I realized that I could share all of my magnificent ideas and thoughts and views and such with you - the world.  It’s a little thing called blogging.  And it’s not like Facebook where it is socially unacceptable to post long statuses that have super cool awesome content many times a day.  In the blogging world, you’re allowed to do that!  And it isn’t even frowned upon! It is in fact smiled upon.  Oh sweet blog world how I do love you.  I’m going to pull a fast one here and mention the blog Hyperbole and a Half because if anybody ever Googles her, this blog will show up in the results somewhere, and people might read it.  This is how I’m sneaking my way into the minds of America.  Soon, maybe I will even reach international level, but I highly doubt that.  Sorry Allie Brosh, I totally think you’re awesome but I need people to read my blog.  Wait, I just might get international viewers if I talk about Doctor Who!  I was going to do that anyway, but then I remembered that it’s a British show and that means that people in Britain watch it. Gee, I’m so smart.  Do you see now why it was so imperative that I share my genius with the world? I’m sure you do.  I’m going to take your silence on the matter as agreement, and you can’t stop me.  

          Oh, and by the way,  I just realized that earlier when I said that you had to be near a computer to read this because there is no possible other way to, that I’m wrong.  Somebody could easily have printed it out and given it to you, or even sent it to you on your phone.  But that is a long way into the future because I actually have to be popular in order to have people send this to other people.  One day though. One day. So if you somehow magically stumble upon me and are not one of my friends that I have plagued day and night with pleas to view my blog, tell your friends, and have them tell their friends, and so on and so forth until I take over the world!  Mwahahahaaha!!!!!!!!!!!! *cue thunderclap* 

          I’m going to keep this post relatively short, because it is after all my first post and I have no wish to weary you with a bunch of nonessential nonsense right now.  Because I am terribly backwards, I’m going to end this post by introducing myself.  Here goes.  (nervously clears throat and shuffles feet awkwardly)  Hi, my name is Chelsea Lippens.  I live in America - sort of.  My most recent residence was in North Carolina, but six months ago, my family and I left it to move to Hawaii.  A lot of you would be super jelly of me and my home, but don’t waste the energy.  I live in a tent.  If and when I ever get around to making videos, I’ll give you a tour.  Don’t hold your breath though, it’s nothing to get excited over.  I have decided also that this blog will be pretty PG for the most part, with a minimum of profanity,  but my resolutions don’t last long so we’ll see. 

          I’m a junior in high school, but I don’t go to a real school anymore.  It was easier when we first moved here to just enroll me in virtual school.  The virtual school I attend is a branch of a charter school here on the Big Island of Hawaii in the lovely (not really) town of Pahoa.  The Charter school (which is called HAAS - Hawaii Academy of Arts and Science)  was really the best choice, because if I went to Pahoa High School, I would get my ass kicked on a daily basis, or so I’ve been told.  People here are quick to take offense, and I, with my reflexive sarcasm, would not fare well with kids who take everything to heart.  But hey, if you continue to read my blog you’ll learn a ton of things about Hawaiian culture, and fruit here and stuff like that.  As I mentioned before, I mean to make videos at some point, and when I do, I’ll walk down my road and show you the neighborhood, which isn’t so much a neighborhood as a red dirt road cut into the middle of the jungle with some houses scattered here and there.  Well, I do believe that I have now introduced myself, and said many other things besides my name and residence, so I take my leave of you now, and wish you a good day.  I said good day!