My name is Christina, and I’m a workaholic.

I have this overwhelming sense of responsibility to my to-do list, and just about everything else seems to suffer because of it. It took two hours of enforced rock-sitting at the beach yesterday afternoon before I could mentally unplug enough to take the evening off. At the risk of stating the obvious, my work/life balance must be off if work things are demanding this much of my mental energy. The Rich Dad author was talking about personal finance, but “Pay yourself first” applies to most other parts of life. The challenge, of course, is determining which parts of a life are the walnuts and which part is the rice.

However, if we hadn’t spent the afternoon sitting on rocks at the beach, we would have missed the whales. We saw a few spouting at Poipu late last week, but yesterday was all drama. They were far away, just before the horizon, and we don’t have any binoculars, but the display was still impressive. Multiple breachings, vigorous tale slappings, enormous splashes. We can now add whales to our list of sea creatures observed in Hawaii: sea turtles, reef fish, eel, octopus, monk seal, whales.