Some lessons learned from a trip to the Fun Factory: You know you’re getting old when…

…you walk into an arcade and it takes a good 5 minutes to figure out that the video games don’t take quarters anymore.

…you remark, “man, it is LOUD in here.”

…it takes less than 5 minutes to blow 5 bucks. (I can make $5 last longer in Vegas!)

…you give yourself a migraine headache after 2 rounds of playing the taiko drumming game.

Sad, but true.

I have many fond memories of my childhood in Wahiawa. One of the most cherished is of the little candy store down the street called B-Sweet. Growing up, sweets were in short supply in our house, so Dad and I would walk down the street to B-Sweet for ice cream when I was behaving myself and deserving of a special treat. Later when I started school, I would visit the shop every afternoon to buy snacks: Coke in the glass bottles, M&M’s, ring pops, funyuns, haw flakes, crack seed, or pop rocks to keep me wired enough to make it through my 3rd bell class at Japanese School.

Bill Sugimoto, the candy man with the kind face and generous spirit, would always tease and joke with me as I made my daily purchase. For reasons that will now forever be unknown to me, he would call me “Jonesy,” even though he knew my real name. In the early days, before he passed on, I recall Bill’s elderly father sitting outside on a rickety folding chair, watching as kids would come and go from the store that he founded in the late 1950’s.

I wish I had visited Bill before he passed away on June 14. According to the article, he collapsed into a customer’s arms while he was working at the store. Despite his age, 85, he was still dedicated to running the store for the children in the area and did so until the very end of his life.

The closing of B-Sweet marks the end of an era and I will always look back upon those daily after-school visits to Mr. Bill with fond remembrance.

Rest in peace, Bill.

Love, Jonesy.

Do you want a free $20 promo gift card for Kincaids?

Somehow, we got on their promo list and they’ll occasionally send us these $20 gift cards to lure us back to their restaurant. Not that I’m complaining, of course. Kincaids has great food! However, I don’t think we’ll have time to utilize this one before it expires and I hate to see free money go to waste. The card expires on August 9, 2007 and is only valid at the Honolulu, Hawaii location.

The first one to click my Contact Form and send me your mailing address will be the happy recipient of this gift card. Ah, the perks of being a champuru.net reader…

In hopes of speeding up the load time on my page, I removed a few sidebar distractions that were pulling from external sites. Do you notice the difference?

And, you patient folks, thanks for coming back time and again, despite the sloth-like load on my page.

Attention Bon Dance enthusiasts!

I have been notified of a change to the Moiliili Hongwanji practice sessions that were incorrectly printed in the initial bon dance schedule. The corrections have been made to the calendar, so if you plan to attend the practice sessions for the Moiliili Hongwanji, please be sure to download a new copy of the schedule or take note of the changes:

Moiliili Hongwanji practice sessions
Monday & Tuesday, July 2 & 3, 7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Moiliili Community Center, 2535 S. King Street, Honolulu

Yesterday, we attended the Wahiawa Hongwanji bon dance. It also gave me the opportunity to meet a couple of online acquaintances: Ryan S. and Mark from Hawaii! (Thanks for the pistachio nuts, Mark! They are wonderfully spicy! Mmm!)

Bon dances are held at the various temples around the island and each event seems to have its own flavor, so I’ve decided to create a vlog entry for every one that we attend this year. Here’s the second champuru “bon dance edition” installment for your viewing pleasure. (Press the PLAY button on the video window to watch.)

Until I get the streaming set up on my site, I am choosing faster load time over convenience. As a result, I have removed my embeded vlog window. So, instead of being able to click on the nifty video window to view the movie, you will now need to click this link instead.

I’m too tired to post photos right now, so please check out my Flickr Photostream for the latest.

Technical Note: I manually set my export settings in iMovie this time and got much better quality (although slightly larger file size) in this vlog. I am working on setting up streaming on my site and hope to achieve a faster-loading experience for you. For now, thanks for being patient!

After a delicious, yet very heavy, dinner at Assaggio Ristorante, we came home and Hubby made a beeline for the bed and knocked the heck out, sprawled out on the bedspread in his “going out” clothes. That gave me some alone time, just me and my iMac, to get some business done. In the past few hours, I managed to back up my entire photo archive (2000-2007) to my new 500 GB external hard drive and purge my e-mail account of unnecessary messages saved in my InBox. I went from 1764 messages in my Inbox to 7. I didn’t do a mass purge, but actually ended up skimming through the subject lines of all 1764 messages and filed the ones that may come in handy someday. Let’s see how long my InBox can stay in the single-digits. My guess is less than 24-hours.

I wonder if you Mac geeks out there can give me some advice. I’m trying to make my external HD compatible with both Mac and PC. Using Disk Utility, I formatted it as “MS-DOS” (i.e., FAT32), but quickly discovered that it prevents me from transferring large files (over 4 GB). Any suggestions on a work-around?

My body has been pretty adamant about getting to bed before midnight these days, so I better get a move on. It has been a very long week. Thank God for weekends.