Craters at the top of Haleakala:

3 days in Seattle almost killed me.  I flew from New Zealand to Seattle last Friday on a relatively painless flight.  Sure was nice to cover in 14 hours what took me many months to cover on Bodhran.  My youngest brother, Trevor, put me up in a spare room in his house on Capitol Hill.  Nice to be back in the states and I watched 3 football games on Sunday, but the cold was killing me.  Fortunatley I only stuck around a couple of days before flying out with my parents, brothers, nephew and niece to Maui.

First Rose family dinner in a long time:

My pops rented us all a beautiful 3 bedroom condo in Kahana just off the beach, so for the last few days we’ve been driving around eploring the island, grilling on the BBQ and generally soaking up the nice weather.  Cold beer and running water that I don’t have to skiff back to the boat is a bit different from my normal tropical experience, but I could certainly get used to it.  I’m just very concerned about heading back to Washington for 3 more weeks.  Fortunately I’ve got some cold weather gear in storage up in Bellingham.  Here’s some pics from the last few days:

My brother Colin, sister-in-law Marilyn and their kids Katie and Tyler:

Grilling brats at our condo:

My brothers, Marilyn, Tyler and Katie:

Trying to upgrade my blog at the Vava’u yacht club in Nieafu

I’ve been having a great time out in the islands and even better when I got back I got an email from my brother Alex cluing me into a much more clever way of upgrading my WordPress software. So now my blog is back up and running. I’ll try and get a Tonga post up in a little while.

So Brandon, Jason, Beth and Erica down in Barra were all pretty avid MySpace users. I’ve resisted this movement for a long time, but Brandon convinced me of the benifits of MySpace. So now I’ve joined with the millions of 14 y/o girls out there with their own MySpace pages. You can find my page here. I’m up to 5 friends now including Tom. So if any of you folks out there have MySpace accounts send me a friend request so that I don’t look like such a MySpace loser.

I guess that I’ve been neglecting putting posts on my blog lately. I’ll try to get another update up before too long. In the meantime, here’s some pics from the Stringband Jamboree last weekend: