In June of this year, while vacationing in Hawaii, I was blessed to be able to take my family to Pearl Harbor.  As someone who is interested in history, WWII history in particular, this was a must-visit!  I've visited before, when I was 15, but unfortunately wasn't mature enough to understand what I was looking at.  This visit was going to be different!    

The format of Pearl Harbor is a little interesting.  There are a handful of exhibits that you can see for free.  There are some memorials and other features placed around the harbor, but most of the big things, you'll need to buy a reservation/ticket for.  The most competitive ticket is the tour of the USS Arizona, the most important feature of the whole experience.  

There are a couple options.  The first option is to pay a pretty penny and buy the all inclusive tour.  This can be done through visitpearlharbor.org or pearlharboroahu.com.  After some discussion with customer support at Pearl Harbor, we decided to buy the Passport to Pearl Harbor tickets from visitpearlharbor.org, which is the Pearl Harbor Visitor's Bureau.  We bought the standard Passport, not the deluxe, to save a little bit of money.  

Now, the Passport DOES NOT INCLUDE tickets to see the USS Arizona.  We were driving ourselves because we wanted the flexibility of getting there when we wanted to, and leaving when we wanted to.  We have three children, 8, 6 ,and 4, so we wanted the option of leaving if the 4 year old started to melt down.  We could have bought an all inclusive tour pass, tour bus and all, but we would have been on their schedule.  We decided to drive ourselves, which caused us to get creative with the tickets.  So we bought the Passport, which left us responsible for buying the USS Arizona tickets.  The tickets are free, if you want to arrive at 6am and wait in line.  There are a limited amount of tickets, and no guarantee that you'll get tickets.  But customer service recommended that we try to grab tickets online through Recreation.gov.  This website allows buying tickets for many of America's parks, forests, and monuments, including the USS Arizona.  This only costs $1.50 per ticket service fee.  The catch with this service though, is that the tickets are opened up only 24 hours prior.  We rolled the dice, jumped online 24 hours before we had planned on going, and were able to buy 9 tickets without a problem.  We wanted to go a little earlier in the day, but no tickets were available.  We ended up going right around noon, which worked well.  All in all, we paid $65 per adult, $35 per child, and the service fee for the USS Arizona tickets.  This allowed us access to everything we wanted to see, gave us the flexibility to do what we wanted, and we weren't pressed for time!    

There could be a lot of reasons you ended up here. Are you interested in learning more about the business? Is your wife thinking about selling Lipsense through SeneGence? Does your wife already sell Lipsense and you need someone to talk to? Well you are in the right place.

About a month ago, my wife decided to leave her position in an interior design business that she co-founded with her mom. They did amazing work, like out of a design magazine kind of stuff! We live near the University of Notre Dame and there is a lot of residential buildings going up, most of which is bought and inhabited with out of town buyers. It's really hard to furnish a condo or townhouse when you live out of town, so my wife's business struck gold by being in the position to provide a "turn-key" product. That means when the owners would enter the condo/townhouse for the first time, they would walk into a place right from the design magazines! Over the last several years, they went from a small mother/daughter business, to growing big enough to employ staff, and had a revenue upwards of a quarter million dollars! The money around Notre Dame is insane, and their business was able to grow inside that insanity!

This last year, though, things started to become tough for my wife. The working relationship with her mom started to take precedence over their familial relationship. They also dealt with a couple of really tough clients. One of which, via email, had them moving artwork a quarter inch at a time! THROUGH EMAIL! "I don't really like where that picture is positioned, can you move it a quarter inch lower?" They also had to deal with the natural ebbs and flows of visitors coming to Notre Dame. The building phases would allow a lot of activity and sales directly before the football season, then another burst right after classes ended. This led to some financial challenges during the decorating "off season". So after much thought, prayer and conversation, my wife decided to look elsewhere for an opportunity to provide some income for our family, and another challenge!

In April of this, I was fortunate to visit Louisville and we explored the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, check out the blog post here!  As we left town, we had a few hours to kill, and it was drizzling out.  As a lifelong baseball fan, I couldn't miss stopping by the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory!

While in the Granger, Mishawaka, South Bend, Elkhart area, you have to check out Primal Kitchen in Granger, Indiana!  If you're in town, enjoying a Notre Dame football game, Primal Kitchen!  This is the place to go for clean eating, paleo, and organic food, which is at a premium here in Northern Indiana.  

Knowing the owners personally, their talent, desire and work ethic will serve this business well.  This has been their passion for many years, and I'm so excited to see them bring this kind of food and drink option to the Granger and South Bend area.  Primal Kitchen is new to the restaurant game, and this is actually the first Primal Kitchen Restaurant.  The second one, will open in Culver City, California, with others coming to Santa Cruz, Portland, Sacramento, Anchorage, and Los Angeles soon!

One of my favorite breakfast/lunch options is chicken and waffles, and I was so excited to hear that Primal Kitchen would be offering their take on it, breakfast, lunch and dinner!

After finishing up with our first dive and changing out tanks, we were on our way to our second dive location.  We went to a shallow location, which was protected from the wind a little better.  We had a little snack on the boat before diving.  There were plenty of options and some water for everyone.  There were a few more new divers that weren't qualified to dive at the deeper depth, so they took a little while to get into the water and settled.  Once they were off the boat, the certified divers were able to get in and have at it.  

Immediately, we were surrounded by a bunch of fish!  The first thing we saw were a ton of Sergeant Majors!  Then we saw a bunch of Yellowtail Snapper as well.  There were a couple parrotfish, of some variety that you could actual hear chomping on the coral!  At the 32 second mark of the video, I snuck up on a squirrelfish, hiding in a coral alcove.  

This being my first ocean dive, I was shocked and amazed at how big the ocean was, but how small these individual environments were, and they were teeming with life!  A whole world and ecosystem could be find on each individual coral bunch, it was so cool to see!

At the :38 second mark, you can see the parrotfish, chomping away!