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The 2013 Aloha Summer Luau

13 May

After graduating college in the 1980’s, I moved to Hawaii to work in the hospitality industry where I spent four years surfing, scuba diving and living the island life. When I moved back to the mainland, I realized Texas and Hawaii are a little different. This led me and my wife, Richele, to discover a way to bring the culture of the islands to the Lone Star State.

The Aloha Summer Luau exists to provide the same openness, warmth, friendliness and sense of belonging that was shown to me in Hawaii years ago – and to shine a light on organizations that work hard all year to bring that same spirit of aloha to the community of Boerne.

I look forward to seeing you there – Aloha!

The 2013 Aloha Summer Luau
Saturday, June 1st
Kendall County Fair Grounds
6 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Admission is FREE! (RSVP here)
 

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Fiscal Cliff Family Update

1 Jan

2012 Family Photo

We pride ourselves in burning the candles at both ends and in cramming a lot of living into every year. Sometimes it feels a little out of control, but there are occasional moments of quiet contemplation squeezed in there somewhere. So while Congress postures, procrastinates and prevaricates, we are going to get this job done and tell you the whole truth about our year (some facts might be embellished in the name of telling a good story.) For those that have been following for a while, we are still working to create our own Utopia here in the hills of Texas. Are we getting closer? Come join the craziness and judge for yourself. We can all put our hands in the air and jump off a cliff together. Here we go!

Sixteen-year-old Cheyenne decided not to follow her sister to the Amanda Bynes School of Driving and passed her first year behind the wheel almost incident-free. Swimming, sleeping, school, scuba, skiing, and eating comprise her life. Her legendary, swim-fueled appetite is the subject of an upcoming short film. A Flynn effect proof point, she is on pace to break Charisse’s high school records in Academic Decathlon. Ask her anything. Cheyenne’s low single-digit class rank – she will not allow us to reveal the number – is a source of both pride and angst. She spent enough time at Georgia Tech over the summer to conclude that Sherman had the right idea about Atlanta. Her eyes are now on the western horizon as she contemplates college choices. She is excited about her upcoming class trip to St. Petersburg – the one in Russia.

Charisse continues to ride the Green Wave where she switched from studying third wave feminism to the equally employable fields of English and economics. Her fall back career plan is to be a zip-line guide in some tropical paradise. You can hear Charisse as “DJ Peach Passion” on WTUL New Orleans at 91.5 on your FM dial where she spins the “hits” of bands you have never heard of. Her summer in Boerne reinforced her love of NOLA and we do not expect to see her back home much more. That gives us the excuse we need to go to Jazz Fest, Mardi Gras, our favorite restaurants, and Tulane football games. In November, we paid real money to watch Rice beat them in the Smart Kid’s Super Bowl. Like the rest of Charisse’s exuberant fans, we keep up with her through her constant updates on Twitter and Facebook. She is super fabulous.

Big little brother Jacob is a competitive swimmer, casual tennis player, X-Box enthusiast, and our resident Coke addict. In the real world he does not have to deal with attacks from monsters, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, or other Minecraft risks. He is a survivor. His occasional “Asian F” (otherwise known as an A-) requires constant vigilance to ensure the family’s reputation remains intact. There are at least three women in their twenties that use 15-year-old Jacob as the benchmark standard for dates while they wait for him to turn eighteen. He got his fill of adventure this summer on a fishing trip to Kodiak Island with his father and grandfather. His summary of the trip, “Paw-Paw can’t hang.” Jacob continues to protest his required attendance at musicals. He is waiting for “Call of Duty” to come to Broadway.

Jensen graduated with his master’s degree from the University of Houston and has promised us a “grand” surprise in the spring. Big changes are coming for him on all fronts as he looks to put his degree to work in a new career. We are hoping he can put his advanced psychology education to good use analyzing our “lab” experiment, Tyson. The old dog is clearly insane. He combines chronic depression with cyclothymia, short-term memory loss, agoraphobia, & other social disorders. Caring for him is good training for ultimately dealing with aging parents. Mom?

Retired taxi driver, Richele, has no trouble filling her days with one exercise class or another. The fitness queen of Cordillera Ranch is now threatening to remove even more good stuff from our daily diets in the year ahead. We are afraid that we will soon be eating nothing but cabbage soup and celery on the “free” diet; fat-free, sugar-free, sodium-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, calorie-free, and taste-free. I am pretty sure that the kids drive through McDonalds on their way home from swim practice every night. Fortunately, our September trip to Napa Valley turned her on to good red wine, so there is a bit of a Cougar Town feel to the kitchen these days. We are not les misérables after all.

Billy’s schemes and dreams continue to amaze and amuse. After multiple trips to Belize in a failed attempt to buy a resort, he invested in the G2G Collection and is helping launch that business through the Stelos Alliance. His Housley Principled Leadership class at Texas State was oversubscribed both semesters. Kalypso keeps him busy, while his raging midlife crisis drives him to seek adventure. Whether it is heli-skiing in Canada, fighting bears for salmon in Alaska, hiking the Inca Trail, four-wheeling on Lanai, breathing the air at Jazz Fest, or navigating a romance novelist convention in Chicago, he is always on the go. His debate with Richele over the proper placement of Marlin Brando – his mounted marlin – ended in a compromise. He was allowed to put it over the coat racks by the back door. If only the Congress could do as well.

While Billy’s “work” travel takes him all over the place, the whole family got into the fun this year with trips to Telluride, Costa Rica, Punta Cana, New York twice, New Orleans twice, and a wonderful weekend in Cuero, Texas (home of the Turkey Trot and the Fighting Gobblers.) In addition, Billy and Richele snuck away to Belize, Cabo, Napa Valley, Watersound, and Charlotte. Add it all up and you can break into our house just about any time. No wonder the dog has separation anxiety disorder and that this letter is always a couple of weeks late.

So we send another amazing year off with a bang and eagerly await the adventures ahead in our perpetual pursuit of happiness. We are so blessed to have each of you in our lives and sincerely hope that we can spend some quality time together in our evolving utopian experiment. You can find us here on the sunny side of street. As Tramp once said to Lady, “It’s a big world out there. Let’s start building some memories.”

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Roots

22 Sep

“The roots of my raising run deep.” – Merle Haggard

I confess that I am a middle-class white kid from a small town with two parents that are still married and love me very much. This isn’t a great start for an “up by your own bootstraps” kind of life story. I am not my own sculptor. There were – and are – many people heavily invested in shaping the person that I am.

All of this was brought into focus yesterday as we kicked off the fall edition of the Housley Principled Leadership Program. I learn so much from teaching. The first class attempts to increase self-awareness by exploring the familial sources of the most marked characteristics of our personalities. Here are mine.

Extreme Work Ethic – My paternal grandfather was a welder that built many of the buildings that make up the Houston skyline and later in life ran his own shop until he was physically unable. My other grandfather ran the dairy farm where I grew up. Up at 4:00am seven days a week, he set a very visible example of what it means to truly toil. From drilling rigs in high school and full-time graveyard work in college to managing hotels and management consulting, 70 to 80 hour, six-day work weeks have been normal for me for thirty years. A 60-hour week feels like a vacation. If you are not comfortable with that pace, you can thank my grandfathers.

Academic Excellence – At report card time, a “B” has always been completely unacceptable. I received the gift of high academic expectations from my grandmothers. In a highly unusual coincidence for young women in the 1920s and 1930s, both of them went to college and one of them went on to teach alongside my mother for close to thirty years. I know that the fact that I did not follow her to the Rice Institute broke her heart. This probably compels me to study even more. So when my kids accuse me of going all “crazy Asian mom” on them about their grades, they can blame my grandmothers.

Responsibility & Reliability – My father has three boys. As the oldest, I watched him work to provide for us kids very early in his career. He taught me that any job worth doing is worth doing well. He is a stickler and a perfectionist when it comes to follow through. He used the word “half-assed” to describe the results of most of my chores and then invited me to do them over and over until his standards were met. I soon learned to do it right the first time. Accepting responsibility and then reliably delivering on commitments with excellence is a lesson I learned from my dad.

Fun & Adventurous Spirit – With fifteen or so siblings in my grandparent’s generation all centered in the same small town, the family tree had exploded by the time my many cousins and I were coming of age. Family get-togethers often had over 100 people. My mother was a force of love and fun in these events. As a teacher she also had the habit of throwing us all in the station wagon and traveling across the country every summer. The explorer and adventurer in me comes from my mother. The desire to have fun and create meaningful relationships while working hard is the result of the “work hard, play hard” ethos that permeated my early life. Thanks Mom!

We are all products of our raising. Mine included tremendous advantages. There is no such thing as a “self-made man.” The roots of my raising run deep. These examples give me the strength that I need.

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Aloha Summer

24 Aug

This is one of my favorite weekends of the year.

After graduating college during Texas’ last major economic crisis in the mid-1980s, I did my best Magnum P.I. impersonation and escaped to Hawaii to work in the hospitality industry. After four years of surfing, scuba diving, and living the laid back life, I moved home to Texas with an island girl that was in for a bit of a culture shock.

My soon-to-be wife quickly realized that Texas and Hawaii are a little different so we started looking for a way to bring some of the culture of the islands to the Lone Star State. In 2002, we moved to the Hill Country and started the annual “Aloha Summer” Luau in our backyard. We hoped to make new friends in our new home by sharing the special spirit of aloha.

My favorite part of the luau is cooking the kalua pig in my prized imu, which is just beyond the edge of the yard. The whole hog is wrapped in banana leaves, stuffed with hot lava rocks, and smoked and steamed underground for sixteen hours. Richele rounds out the rest of the menu with island recipes and specialty items shipped from Hawaii by family members. There has always been a costume contest, games for kids, and tropical concoctions (some more potent than others). I am always happy to eat the leftover poi.

Three years ago, we had a couple of hundred people in the backyard when it started pouring down rain. After cleaning up hundreds of footprints from drenched partygoers seeking shelter in the house, Richele subtly suggested that we find another venue.

The following year we turned the luau into a composite community fundraiser. The idea was simple. Put on a traditional Hawaiian luau and invite non-profit community organizations that are doing good work for local families to participate and tell their stories. This way, they have a large crowd and a fun environment to build support, raise awareness for their cause and make new friends.

In 2010, we were able to donate $5,000 to participating organizations and increased that amount last year to over $9,000. Every organization receives a donation and in return, they are asked to provide an activity for kids and to invite all of their supporters to show up for the event. This year’s luau is poised to be bigger and better than ever.

When I moved to Hawaii at the young age of 21, I didn’t know a soul, but the “aloha spirit” of the people made me feel welcomed and at home. The “Aloha Summer” Luau aims to recreate the same openness, warmth, friendliness and sense of belonging that was shown to me years ago while we shine a light on the great organizations that work hard all year to bring that same spirit of aloha to our wonderful little community of Boerne.

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A Fish Story

18 Aug

 

A fox walking on the beach had drawn him out of the cabin into the gray, pre-dawn light. The fire had gone out during the night, but the cabin was warm compared with the chill of the morning. He grabbed at his coat and hugged himself to suppress a shiver in what he thought was silence.

Slowly he became aware of the faint sound of water falling off the mountain a mile across the bay. As his ears were straining to hear the cascade, a whale breached with a whoosh and a spray of water. Then the resident seal splashed at the end of the spit, a gull cried, and a salmon jumped, as salmon do, for reasons known only to salmon. This was not silence; it was a natural symphony played just for him.

The boy and the old man were still asleep in the cabin. The adrenaline from yesterday’s encounter with the bear had worn off leaving the man with a slightly hung-over feeling. He was not hooked on danger as some people said. He was simply a collector of life experiences and the more exciting the better.

The bear had popped out of the brush thirty feet from where they were fishing and challenged their right to extract fish from the stream. The ensuing war of wills, strong words, and a few thrown rocks had convinced the bear to find another fishing spot. The man was triumphant and the boy was exhilarated, but the old man did not like that kind of excitement.

Today was a new day. The stunning natural beauty of the place was worth the pain and suffering and potential bear attacks. Today he would teach the boy how to fill a freezer, how to cast and how to set a hook, how to keep a tight line, how to talk among men, how to casually handle discomfort, and how to make it all look easy. It was also a day for him to show the old man that real life is not lived in the living room. No one ever complains of cold, or rain, or sea sickness, or sore muscles, or wet socks when they are reeling in a monster. The rush of emotion when a big fish strikes is indescribable.

The man snapped to when he realized that the sun was coming up over the water. He said a soft goodbye to the seal and set off to continue the boy’s unfinished education in adventurous living. He wanted to make sure that his son was conscious of his choices. You rarely encounter bears or land a fish that weighs more than you do while sitting in an easy chair. Neither of them was ever going to get old.

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