chris and valerie: Summer Retrospective

It's been quite the summer....

I guess it's easiest to divide the summer in half. The first half was kind of dominated by Valerie's knee injury - which was a huge drag and really negatively impacted her entire summer. But overall, it was still pretty great. The second half was dominated by my own set of injuries (fractured clavicle, multiple fractured vertebrae) and due to both of us being injured was, if I'm honest, a lot less great (albeit with some great moments none the less).

But now we're into Autumn. Valerie's knee is almost fully healed. My fractures are all healed and I've started Physical Therapy. And now I can look back at that second half of the summer and try and wrap it all up with a bow.

So we'll start off with "I had a good day of body surfing that ended very poorly." And the remainder of the summer was heavily impacted by the resulting injuries and more than that by the truly horrific state of US Health Care and Health Insurance. But I've healed up.

I guess the next big thing is the Waikalaua Espresso Garage. Our amazing La Marzocco GS espresso machine finally made it back to us and has been installed in our new espresso garage. It's been amazing to be able to make espresso again and share it with friends. And having an espresso every morning again? Priceless.

Other than that... Valerie flew to America to get her knee fixed and do some work meetings. I flew to Honolulu a few times for medical stuff. We celebrated our Anniversary (in small kine way), and Valerie's birthday (in a much less smile kine way). We took a week off from work and went to Honolulu for downtime, great food, spa treatments, and just lying by the pool or on the beach reading books and napping. And we cooked and ate great food. Friends came and visited, we visited friends (and their entire extended families), and life was mostly pretty good all things considered.

And now the hope is that we are going to get a fall and winter season where each of our health situations improve materially, where Valerie gets to surf again, and where we continue to build our group of friends and neighbors and ohana here on Kauai.