shannon_a

Last night we saw Les Misérables at the Diamond Head Theatre.

I'm a big musical fan, but this was a foundational musical that I'd never seen (not even the movie last decade). It was amazing.

The core premise is heart-felt, that in the worst of circumstances, people will reach out for each other with kindness. Time and time again, conflicted characters are given the opportunity to choose their own self-interest over the desires and good of others. Éponine could have chosen not to deliver messages to Cosette. Jean Valjean could have chosen not to save Marius. Marius could have chosen not to bring Cosette back to a dying Jean Valjean. Every time they would have satisfied their own selfish desires by doing so (usually, to keep someone they love near them), and every time ... they didn't.

The barricades I think are the ultimate expression of that. The rebels know it's hopeless, they know they're going to die. We hear it in "Drink to Me." Yet still they stage the June Rebellion in the hope it will eventually lead to something better for the rest of France.

This world of kindness and self-sacrifice is so alien to Javert that as he comes to understand it, he decides that he can't live in it.

Of course the theme of rebellion feels even more relevant in the modern-day, as the billionaires (monsters every one of them) pile up their loot in their draconic lairs, where they hunker down as they burn down the world. But kindness to our fellow man seemed like the heart of the show.

--

We walked up to the theatre from our hotel, which is what we'd intended to do last year when we saw Mamma Mia, but Kimberly's knee wasn't up to it. This year, we were able to, though the heat was on the borderline for her.

Our lesson learned here was that although a matinee might be great so that we didn't feel like we were staying out too late, a 6pm or 7pm show is probably better to make the walk easier. (Less hot.)

The thing that surprised us on the walk up was how many fairly busy streets we had to cross with totally unprotected crossings (sometimes not even a crosswalk.) I mean, we've seen here and there that even Honolulu isn't great for walkers, and this was another sign.

The thing that surprised us on the walk down was how many houses bordering the major streets had huge, barking, threatening dogs in their yards. After the third or fourth came slamming up against the fence next to us, I started really clocking the number of "Beware of Dog" signs and even one "Dogs will Bite". There were a lot.

--

Kimberly had marked out a lot of restaurants that she thought we might enjoy, and we ate at a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant about two-thirds of the way back to our hotel.

Totally excellent! Tasty summer rolls, great green papaya salad, and excellent garlic shrimp. The green papaya salad is my favorite Vietnamese food, because it always has an excellent sauce, but the one place we've found on Kauai just pretty much serves unflavored green papaya. Not great! We wondered briefly if the sauces we enjoyed were a California thing, but no we've now had two restaurants on Oahu serve green papaya salad somewhat like what we expect (different, of course, but still tasty), so I dunno what's up with our local eatery.

--

We went back to Lulu's for breakfast this morning. I pretty much never eat bacon & eggs, so that's always a treat.

Then we went back for another swim.

For the day, we'd thought about going to both the Honolulu Museum of Art (which we haven't been to in a few years) and seeing Spider-Man: Brand New Day (because we often see movies on Oahu because there's only one theatre showing one movie on Kauai), but when I looked at the show times I decide that it would either be too rushed or leave us out too late.

So being the cultural snobs that we are, we watched Brand New Day.

(Yeah, in retrospective, doing both would have been too much, because the things we did do were already a pretty big pile of enough.)

--

Brand New Day was a lot of fun. The first part was a bit slow, and I think that's in part because it's a getting-the-band-back-together film, and that plot is always tricky, but it sets up the last half of the film, which was increasingly great.

(Basically, the Spidey supporting cast makes it great. And man that last line (last word) leaves me wanting more.)

I also found it amusing how much the film is just "Let's smash together these several major characters from the MCU and see what happens." But there are so many characters with so many stories that it works. (And I'm really curious what's happening with what must be a new generation/universe of those ex-cellent heroes who protect a world that hates and fears them. I hope we learn more in Doomsday.)

--

From BND we went out to Ala Moana mall, which was just a few blocks away. I'd wanted to look for shoes, since options are so limited on Kauai, and I wanted new shoes for walking in Korea. Bernard, our first-day Lyft driver, suggested the Skechers shop there, and it was a hit. I love slip-ons! Prices were a little higher than I usually pay for shoes, but they had a buy one get one half off sale. So Kimberly was able to get a new pair for Korea too, and that made the overall price reasonable.

K. also stopped in a few K-pop stores, and we got a box full of bulk gummies in a variety of flavors at a candy store.

--

Funny bit at the Skechers store: one of the saleswomen said, "You've got matching shoes now." (Not exactly, but close enough.) I said, "Yeah, that's because we grew up in the '80s, which was when Vans were popular, and they really popularized slip-ons for our generation, so we were happy to get some new ones from Skechers."

She looked at me curiously and said, "Oh, I've never heard that story."

--

Kimberly got dim sum for dinner on the way home. I'd been wanting that, it's one of our common treats while we're out here (not really any dim sum on Kauai), but I'm increasingly certain that the newest digestive problems I've been having this year are due to either a wheat or gluten food allergy that's bubbled to the surface. So it seemed like a bad idea because most of those wrappers are wheat, not rice.

(I've pushed again on trying to get an appointment with an allergist, so we can properly codify the allergies that have been messing me up.)

I got some tacos from a truck we'd walked by a few times near our hotel where I'd been seduced by the smell of the cooking corn tortillas.

We unfortunately didn't get the logistics right (in part because the taco truck was just opening when we got there, though Google had claimed it opened much earlier) so K's dim sum was cold by the time we got home. But she said it was good reheated and my chicken tacos were as well. (And the corn tortilla was exactly as tasty as hoped.)

--

Our check-out time is noon tomorrow. We've tried to smash things into that afternoon before we go home on previous trips, but this time we're just flying casual, so we'll have breakfast, consider swimming (we'll see what our newest tropical storm, Moke, is doing), check out not long before noon, then head into the airport.

(Hopefully Moke doesn't cause troubles with us departing Honolulu. We almost got stranded here on one previous trip. Fortunately, Maria will be at the Lihue airport waiting, we can get groceries, and then I'll start the work week on Tuesday.

I picked my folks up at the airport this afternoon to take them home after their recent visit to the Bay Area, and I was astounded to hear that though they've been on island for almost 20 years, they've never experienced a Tropical Storm.

Well, K. and I now have, while they just missed it by being out of town. It was quite a lot.

It's a super El Niño year, so I've been somewhat concerned about hurricanes this year. One missed (or stalled out or something) a few weeks ago, but then last week we got increasing reports

Lala was originally forecast to hit the the Big Island square on as a low category 1, which if she had would have been the first time the Big Island was hit since 1871. Instead, she missed by about 50 miles on the south side and continued chugging along south of the archipelago, heading northwest.

That was Saturday. I usually go out to the bike or hike on that day after a week of work, but it was too gray and windy for that, with occasional bursts of rain.

Sunday Morning, K. and I were both woken around 6am by the huge winds gusting this way and that. Lala, still running at 60 or 65 mph was starting to make its pass south of the island.

What followed was the wettest, windiest day I've seen. Bigger than any other storm I've experienced on island, and we get Kona Lows in the winter that are quite a thing. It was really impressive: Nature, red in tooth and claw. A wonderful day to be inside.

We're on a ridge line, so water has always just sloughed off of us in storms. I did cut some shrubbery by our garage where water pools if we're not careful, and with that, we didn't even notice the water.

I did make one foray out, after lunch, when the wind and rain were letting up ever the slightest. I went over to my dad's house, about a mile away, just to make sure his antenna was still up and hadn't broken a window or anything. (That would have been a mess.) It was fortunately all fine. But you could see the impact of all that wind. Leaves and small branches down everywhere, creating an almost forest-like covering at points in the road.

I finally made a tour of the yard on Monday. We had our own small branches down all over, but more disturbingly what looked like roofing material. I've seen one or two pieces of that before, and figured it was just from the work with our solar panels. And this could be too, but there were now dozens of pieces in the yard.

(So, we've got a call out to a roofing company to come take a look. They said this week, but I suspect they're very, very busy, but that's fine because we weren't seeing any water intrusions during that huge storm.)

So that was Lala: a wet, gray, impressive, awe-inducing day.

On Monday evening, when I was done with a day's work on LOSING SANITY and FTB ORIGINS, K. and I drove over to the golf course (since we suspected the paths nearer our house were still saturated and maybe even impassable) and we were pretty shocked that you really couldn't tell a storm had gone through. Apparently the staff had gotten in there first thing and cleared out the roads. (And we did see some broken branches here and there, shoved off to the sides.)

But today, when I picked up my folks, it was even more like nothing had happened. Pretty blue skies. You couldn't tell that on Sunday you would have believed it if someone told you it was the end of the world.

--

On Saturday, since I didn't go out, I spent a few hours working on the closet under our stairs. I'd ended up spending three evenings painting it, just 30 or 60 minutes each time, but it's tight enough that I was constantly bumping into the opposite walls, and I didn't want to do that with fresh paint, so I just did one wall at a time (at least that was my excuse). [Next time: a roller, but I felt like it wasn't needed for such a small space.]

On Saturday, I finally started working on the flooring. The closet is 36" wide (see above, about it being tight) and my vinyl planks are 48". That means I had to cut every single one, which drags. The first I just placed in as one piece, and that was a real pain trying to fit it under the trim when I had so little give in the plank due to its small size. I banged up some of my fresh paint in the process, so touching that up is now on my TODO. I made sure that I constructed the rest of the rows from two pieces, using the right-hand side of the previous plank and then the left-hand side of a new one, which made a nice stepping pattern.

I cut my planks out on the back patio, because that's closer than the garage (and doesn't have a car on it), which meant that I had to occasionally dodge the rain, because the wind was high enough that it was occasionally blowing rain into the patio, even though it's under our lanai.

It took me a while to get back in the swing of things. I had to recut my first plank because it was too long, but after that I got the rest right. The closet is four and three-quarters rows deep, so I did the four rows and left the three-quarters, which have to be jiggered around the door frame, for another day. It turns out that just a few hours of physical labor in the high humidity of an approaching tropical storm are a huge amount of work, however. I got somewhere around 200 "active zone minutes" according to Fitbit's measure, which is more than the average benchmark for a week.

My plan was to lay that final three-quarters of a row with two short planks. I wanted to cut the tricky one that goes around the corner of the door frame on Sunday, and then the last one, which is just a short one that goes under the door frame right and left after my dad got back (so that he could shorten the plank even more with a nice straight cut on his table saw).

Well, Sunday didn't happen because the whole patio was getting saturated all day, but I did that tricky cut on Monday after work (though I had to toss out one of the tries at one of the corners, but no biggie, this is the last use of the darker planks I bought years ago for our downstairs rooms). Now, I feel quite ready to refloor the whole Living Room and Dining Room while Kimberly is away in Korea this fall.

(This was the plan, and it's been going along well; hopefully my dad can help me put a few finishing touches on the closet before I go to Korea for Kimberly's first week, if I'm feeling well enough, but if not, everything seems enough under control that I'll be happy to dive in when I get back.)

--

One major annoyance: as the storm was passing on late Sunday afternoon, a shrill beep began floating up from the valley right behind us. It was really insistent, so I eventually started timing it. A beep every 59-60 seconds. It stopped Sunday night, but then it was back Monday morning and has been going ever since. EVERY. SINGLE. MINUTE. FOR TWO DAYS STRAIGHT AT THIS POINT.

I coconut-wirelessed some of the neighbors, and no one along our streets knows what it is, so we assume it's down in the valley, and I can't get down there without violating all kinds of property lines, and Kauai is surprisingly a real "NO TRESPASSING, WE HAVE GUNS" type of place.

Some folks have suggested that it might be a dying fire alarm, and I think they're right. If so, it must be a snow bird, who leaves their house vacant half the year and just comes out here as a second home during the winter.

If so: DIE-DIE-DIE.

Maybe it's quieter today? I dunno. I noticed it less back in my office, but it's still quite noticeable this evening as I sit typing right next to the window overlooking the valley. Kimberly and I are going to Oahu for our anniversary this next weekend, and if it's not DEAD by the time I get back, a whole lot more investigation is going to have to happen.

I used to journal with at least some regularity, but I hardly ever do any more. This has been part of a continuing trend since we moved to Hawaii. Obviously, things change with a big move like that, and the lack of journaling I think comes in two parts, both related to the fact that I now write full-time, including writing on my own projects half-time.

First, that means that after I've done 7-8 hours of writing in a day, I don't want to do much more. Especially not in the non-fiction mode that is journaling, which isn't identical to the technical writing or history writing that I do, but certainly rhymes. Second, because I'm now spending half-time on my own projects, I often have some related or continuing thing that I want to play with a bit in the evening. Researching magazines, creating magazine indices, and creating HTML timelines have all sucked up evening time. Currently, I have Karen's edits for DESIGNERS & DRAGONS LOST HISTORIES I in one window, because going through edits is tedious work that I only do in bite-sized chunks. (I'm currently running through ~200 edits at a time, which is about an hour's work.) I also have in another window my Cthulhu timeline that I've been working for a few months, doing some final organization of all the content (and adding in at least one thing).

So, with that said, here's a few things that have been going on in recent months.

CATS. It's been about a year since we sent Elmer to his new home. I think the last picture we saw of him was him looking out the window with some bewilderment at snow, something he'd (obviously) never seen here on Kauai. (This is snow on the Big Island and I suspect on Mauai, because they have bigger, taller mountains, but I don't think we ever get any anywhere.) However, Elmer's new dad is no longer working with the friend that helped to set up the long-distance adoption, so we no longer hear the office gossip about him. Which is fine. They seem settled and connected and life goes on.

Meanwhile, Mango and Megara are doing mostly fine. Mango gets Megara more than we'd like. We in fact were woken about 11.45 a few nights ago by a very loud squawking, and when we came out Megara was hiding under the couch, and seeing that we were there, did a quick guerrilla crawl to under the bed. But that level of gettingness is rare. And it's just fun chasing getting out of control as opposed to the more territorial problems we had with Elmer. Most of the time there's a little bit of squawking and Megara hides and then she's back out from under the bed two minutes later. (We suspect the late night problems were caused by a cat that our neighbors let run wild and causes us occasional problems when they show up after dark. The night before, *that* was what woke me up, when Mango was throwing a fit at the front door, with the bad black cat staring at him from the steps up to our patio.)

POWER. We *finally* have our solar power system working again. Our Tesla Powerwall 2 went out last October. I only noticed it in December when I realized our power bill was high. Then it took another 7 months for them to get our replacement. The reason for the delay was slightly understandable: Tesla was making batteries that caught fire and blew up for a bit more than a year, no doubt because every Elon Musk touches turns to crap. So when our Powerwall, which was slightly outside the recall window for exploding-batteries, died, there was a backlog of about 200 customers waiting for new batteries that wouldn't burn their houses down. And at first we were mollified by being told we were getting a Powerwall 3 because the Powerwall 2 were no longer made. Which would have been great because they're largely the same but the Powerwall 3 can supply more current at once, which is good because we hit the 5 kW limit of our Powerwall 2 when we're taking a hot shower or running the dyer. (No natural gas in most parts of Kauai.) But somehow we got moved back to a Powerwall 2, and then had to wait 7 months for our install. That left me less mollified. Still, we got it mostly in time for hurricane season, which was becoming an increasing concern. And hopefully this isn't some refurbished garbage (who knows with Tesla). If it's a new unit, as it should be, that will give us considerable value in the longevity of the battery. The old one was five and a half years old when it died, and these things are warrantied to 70% capacity at 10 years, which means they need to be replaced in the 10-15 year range. (Hopefully, but the time this one starts showing dramatically reduced storage we can get something better and not produced by Elon Musk.)

FLOORING. I have *finally* gotten back to home improvement projects. In past years, I've noted that they fell to the wayside because of years that had various stressors. But the last big stressor was the Elmer situation last year, and as I said, that's been a year now. So, I dunno. Inertia? Anyway, we have two things that need to be done to really close out the design of the downstairs as we want it. There's a closet under out stairs that's the last place downstairs with carpeting that I want to replace with the vinyl planks I installed in mine and Kimberly's office. And our offices both need good window coverings, something that was a real problem last year when I was doing all the podcasts for DESIGNERS & DRAGONS: ORIGINS. (I would regularly and somewhat haphazardly hang a blanket over the window to prevent extreme light pollution, but sometimes I had to fully move out of my office to somewhere else in the house.)

Anyway, because my folks are out on the mainland, I set these three weeks to do the flooring. It's just a tiny little closet, my guess is no more than a day's work (8 hours). My theory was I could do it afternoons after work, during times that I usually go out and walk the golf course with my dad. But, that hasn't really worked out, so I instead went at it yesterday (Saturday) morning. First work needed is pulling up the carpet, pulling out all the carpet strips and nails (which is the hardest, most time consuming, and most fraught part), scraping the floor to get the carpet glue off, and then filling all the holes (mostly caused by pulling carpet-strip nails). I spent about 1.5 hours doing that yesterday morning and didn't do the filling mostly because I was tired, but also because I couldn't locate my putty knife. (Did I get rid of my terrible rusty putty knife? I don't think so, but maybe.) Anyway, I decided that since I was going to stop by Home Depot to pick up a putty knife, I better make sure my fill-and-level was still good, since I hadn't used it since I floored my office closet last year. I opened it up, and it smelled like Hell. It was also filled with mold or mildew. Gack! Who even knew fill-and-level did that. Into the trash. I had a second, also partially used bucket, and I opened this one someone further from my face. Same deal! What in the world!? Anyway, I threw that out too, then picked up a putty knife and a new, smaller bucket of fill-and-level at Home Depot, and the holes got filled last night (another .5 hours or so).

I've decided I'd like to paint the closet before I put in the flooring because it's somewhat banged up, so Kimberly and I also grabbed some swatches to do our best to sorta-match the paint here with something we can keep on file at Home Depot. I think we found our best choice yesterday evening, but we still need to check it in the day light. After that, it'll be a session of painting, and then maybe a couple of sessions to put in the flooring, which will take some effort, because it's all tight, and I'll be cutting every third plank or so. When my dad gets back, he'll then help me to make a transition and cut some trim, and we'll be done. (Well, except the next step is then to get some shelves put in there, to make the closet more accessible and usable.)

Meanwhile, Kimberly found a Home Depot service to get us some custom blinds for our office. A little pricy, but I hope the investment will be worthwhile. We've done measurements, gotten samples, and found a few that we like. But right now we're waiting to hear back from them as they gave us samples that were totally different from the products they'd showed us in their catalogs and totally different from their quotes. But, I think we're going to get them into the manufacturing queue next week and that we'll have someone out to install ... well, my guess is in October.

SICK, SICK. Food has been making me sick again with some frequency, which is deeply frustrating. I was having troubles last year, not as bad, which turned out to be my long-time lactose intolerance during into what seems to be a milk allergy. This year? Something new and even more mysterious. My best guess at the moment is that bread is now making me sick, which sounds like a wheat or gluten allergy. It's not consistent, but gluten-free bread seems consistently better (also, varying from mediocre to nasty.) Also: What the heck!? My doc was supposed to get me a referral to an allergist last year, but that hasn't happened and I let it fall to the wayside when I discovered the problem last year was dairy. But now it's taking on new priority, but unfortunately it's not going to happen before planned trips ...

NO MAUI, YES OAHU. Kimberly and I were supposed to go on a trip with family to Maui last month, but it didn't happen for multiple reasons. One, Kimberly had just had a trip to Las Vegas where she got very sick and she was trying out new meds for that. Two, I was the most sick at that point. (The recent weeks I've been getting sick from food once or twice a week rather than constantly.) Three, a multitude of other people got invited to the trip and we wouldn't have wanted to deal with a big crowd of a trip on a vacation when we were at our best, let alone not. So we sadly cancelled. (A similar family trip we'd done in 2018 with my sister and fam, and without the big crowd, had been awesome, so I'd been looking forward to it, because I don't get a lot of time with my sis.) As a kind of replacement, Kimberly and I decided to do a trip to Oahu for our anniversary, then pushed that back a few weeks so that we could get tickets for _Les Mis_ while we were in civilization. So that's in two weeks.

KOREA. And we are coming up on Kimberly's big Korea trip, where she's going to do some immersion work for about two and a half months on the language she's been studying for the last few years. I currently have tickets to spend the first week in Korea with her (with the plan to then spend several days in San Martin with my mom and step-dad on the way back), but we'll see. It's a pretty big trip for how frequently sick I've been lately. But I also have a suspicion that Asian foods don't tend to contain the things that have been making me sick. So, maybe OK ... ? I've told her it's going to be a game-time decision whether I can really go or not. If I'm having a bad few days or weeks I'm going to end up opting out. But it'd be nice to see a part of the world I never have, even if I'm slightly concerned about the bad air quality and the sort-of authoritarian government.

In any case, even bigger home-improvement projects are planned during the two months she'll be gone and I'll (definitely) be home. Which is why I want to get my foot back in the water by taking care of the little closet now. (Basically, our upstairs has terrible bamboo flooring put in very incorrectly by some past tenant. It has literal gaps in it where the planks don't meet and also is ripping and peeling up in various places. I want to try and at least refloor the living room / dining room while Kimberly is gone, and so having the television and dining-room table out of commission won't matter, because we won't be eating and watching a nightly show together.)

WORK, WORK, WORK. It has been a tiring year for my own work. That is primarily because I'm closing out on my major projects that I've been working on since our move. Last year it was DESIGNERS & DRAGONS ORIGINS, so there was a month and a half of exhausting interviews, plus tons of editorial work. This year, it's DESIGNERS & DRAGONS LOST HISTORIES. As I was closing that out, and buried in the editorial, I started my new projects (a Call of Cthulhu history called LOSING SANITY and a new Traveller history called FREE TRADER BEOWULF ORIGINS) a bit prematuraly, because I wanted some more enjoyable original work on my desk. So I ended up working time and a half closing out the editing of LOST HISTORIES while I spun up those projects. And now that it's finally handed off to Evil Hat ... I'm time-and-a-halfing to collect cover images for LOST HISTORIES and go through Karen's edits.

So that's a bit of this and that in Hawaii.

We finished our winter Sondheim trilogy last Friday with "Assassins" (having previously seen "Into the Woods" and "Sunday Afternoons in the Park with George" while in California for Christmas, which when you put them all together is oddly enough Sondheim's main work of the 80s).

I wasn't sure of the structure: presidential assassins sitting around talking about themselves. But it turned out to be pretty great. My second favorite of this trilogy (after the light but immensely clever "Into the Woods").

What really struck me is how much the whole thing is a righteous indictment of American society. A lot of it is focused on the false promise that anyone can be great in American society if they just work hard. Which, obviously, bullshit. There are extreme structural deficiencies in American society that work against that sort of thing in the modern day. But lots of people believe it. And politicians twist that to make their followers hate people who aren't their followers. ("They're taking away your opportunity! It's the only reason you haven't achieved the American Dream!") And if those people finally see the light, then they end up lounging about around a golf club with a gun.

(Which the play suggests is one of the sources of assassins.)

There was lots more too. Lots more indictment and lots more suggestion of how it might make people decide to kill a president. One assassin was physically ill and not cared for. Multiple assassins were mentally ill and not cared for. One was caught up in false romanticism. A few more were mired in delusional spiritualism. Again and again, Sondheim pointed out how many of the pillars of American society are deeply unhealthy.

One thing that struck me in the play was how Sondheim suggested that dreaming unlikely dreams ultimately causes unhappiness. Because that's not far from his messaging in "Into the Woods" where he instead talks about the danger of "I wish ..."

The characters were also intriguing. Sometimes you'd come to like one of them, and then they'd suddenly remind you of how they were terrible people. I also loved the imagery of Booth being a spectre haunting all of American history.

I enjoyed the songs. They were lyrical and clever. None of them have particularly stuck with me, though I suspect some would if I heard them a few more times. It was also a well-produced and well-acted play (which is usually the case at Kauai Playhouse; we don't always like their choice of plays, but when we do, we enjoy the productions).

There's one more Playhouse play for the year, which I suspect we're going to see on one of the next few weekends.

GRAPEFRUIT DIET. About two and a half weeks ago, K. and I went on a diet. It's not actually a grapefruit diet, but rather a gut balance diet. The goal is to "reset our gut microbiomes" to have more good flora and less bad flora, hopefully to improve my digestive difficulties that have been getting worse for years.

Is it just pseudoscience? I hope not! It was recommended to me by someone who said it worked for them. And the author is a professor at John Hopkins. On the other hand we certainly saw during COVID that there are medical professionals at prestigious institutes with woefully wrong beliefs. Anywho, we're trying it.

It's based on the book _The Gut Balance Revolution_ and the book is horribly written. Continually repeats itself. Continually goes back to the same metaphors. Inconsistent between different sections on (and this is really critical) what food is allowed and what isn't. A good editor could have helped much of that, but that doesn't seem to have happened. So we persevere through a really bad bit of writing.

The diet itself is largely Keto and low-FODMAP in its first month. I have a suspicion that part of that is purposefully manipulative, to cause weight loss in the first month and so encourage people to continue, but I dunno. Theoretically it's supposed to be killing bad gut flora in the first month.

Also: entirely miserable. We're eating way more meat than I like, way less grain. Also, it's super restrictive, making shopping and making meals tough. Having to hand-prepare every meal is also a huge deal. I'm using to cooking some vegetables and putting together some semi-prepared foods to make up a meal. But this instead takes notable effort every meal. (At least on my days that I'm working for clients I can dash out a nut butter and (cucumber or blackberry or avocado) sandwich on nut bread, but nuts are on our "eat few" list for month one so I can't do that constantly.

And the Keto side effects suck. I've had a bad taste in my mouth for at least two weeks now. K. has discovered that we're both irritable. My muscles aren't bouncing back like they should. And I was super achey for several days.

Anyway, the jury is out on the digestion issues. I've actually lost 15 pounds which is a great side effect, but a good chunk of that has to be the fake water-weight-loss that you see with Keto.

Another week and a half and then we open up to phase two where we're supposed to be building up good flora (and have somewhat more foods to chose from). And then in April we can start eating normally again, though maybe with some lessons learned from cooking from scratch (or mostly scratch, there has been Costco rotisserie chicken).

We've picked up some spices for that and had a variety of stuff: garlic chicken and green beans, ginger chicken, salt & pepper chicken (I'm sick of the texture of cubed roast chicken), shrimp and some vegetable, shrimp salad, smoked salmon salad, too many other salads, chicken soup, shredded chicken with sautéd peppers and onions (probably the best thing we've had), and tonight some fish or another with the sautéd peppers and onions. And for lunches: nut butter sandwiches, scrambled eggs, fried eggs, tuna on almond-flour crackers, and more salads. For snacks? blueberries, cantaloupe, cashews, raspberries.

Hoping phase 2 won't be quite as annoying, because this has been really annoying.

BROKEN STUFF. We have a frustrating amount of major stuff broken right now.

Windows: Ah, not literally broken. But we've put films on most of our south-facing windows to protect us against the UV and to a lesser extent the glare (only my office has a film to really cut back on light, so that I can see to work). The one in our living room (which has our view) and the one in my office have been opaquing over the last year. I actually wasn't sure what was going on for a while, but I finally got an extendable window cleaner so I could clean the outside of the one in our living room (which is up on the second story) and determined that with the outside and inside both clean, it was still notably opaque. So we called the people who installed them, and they came out on Wednesday and affirmed that the film was "failing". Personally, I wondered if the installation had failed and they'd let moisture get under it, but their belief seems to be it's film maker 3M's fault. So they took pictures and are apparently passing the buck to 3M, and we'll see where that goes.

Battery: Our PowerWall is still out, as it has been since October. I poked our solar installers in January to see what was happening with our warranty replacement, and miraculously the same day the person I asked got back into the office, Tesla (Elon Musk is a white nationalist Neo-Nazi, I know) sent it out. That was about five weeks ago, so I'm hoping to see something soon, and drop our electricity bill to back where it should be (the $0 to $50 range instead of the $100 range with solar only during the day). I also have picked up from vague statements that our solar installation people have made that they're going around with Tesla about what Tesla will actually cover regarding re-installation (which requires more than just putting a new battery in because our failed Powerwall 2 is being replaced with a Powerwall 3, because that's all Tesla makes). More buck passing there. Hopefully Tesla gets stuck with all the cost, but I wouldn't bet on it given that the company is run by a lying scumbag rat.

Internet: We've had storms swishing around the island for a few weeks, delivering a little rain and a lot of wind. On Tuesday night, when we tried to watch the series finale of Andor, we discovered our internet was no longer up to streaming to our TV. No biggie, disruptions happen, but on Wednesday night when we again tried to watch the finale of Andor it was the same story, so I called our internet provider and they had someone out the next morning (which was extremely impressive, given that I've waited a week in the past for them to mail a modem form another island). He discovered that a conduit out on our pole had filled with water and rotted out the wire, hence our problems. But he also decided that the coax to our modem was flaky and because he couldn't get to it because it's mostly under the bookshelves we built in to our family room, he moved the modem to K's office before I had much say in the matter. So now our internet is working again, but our whole wifi configuration is messed up because we're trying to spread it out from one corner. I've actually got a mesh configuration, but having the main hub to one side wasn't working at all for my office on the far side of the house (I think the walls of books in between don't help) until I relocated our single upstairs hub downstairs to bridge the distance, and now my office is still worse than it was before ... and the upstairs is too. Sigh. So my current plan is get one more mesh router for upstairs and K. has kindly agreed to call an electrician to try and get as many of our routers wired as possible, so that we don't have to depend on the wifi to get all the way across the house.

Bike Rack: And this one isn't broken, but it nonetheless needs some work. I'm still waiting on being able to haul my bike around with Maria Kia, since it's not safe to bike to any of the more expansive biking areas available on island. That requires a 2" trailer hitch to use my trusty sturdy, easy-to-use bike rack and Kia just had 1.25" hitches, so I found a 2" hitch made for Maria, ordered it, and it arrived on Monday. Kia won't install it because it's third party, but Destination Auto (who I used to see for the much too frequent work on Julie the Benz) will, so I have an appointment with them next Friday, which hopefully means I can haul out my bike next weekend, by which point these storms have finally broken (after a few gray weeks). Funny thing, last time I walked out of Destination Auto, I thought I'd never see them again, because they'd said Julie had a mortal wound, but then Kia said that's who worked on their cars when they couldn't themselves. So, once more into the breach, dealing with their gravel lot and hoping there's enough space and then wandering around all day waiting for them (and this time I'll need to pack a lunch instead of having anything tasty).

CATS: Both the kits have been slowly starting to explore Elmer's old haunts (I assume, as his scent fades). Mango was in Elmer's donut for the first time ever a few Sundays ago (and has since become a return visitor). Megara was also up in the boys' cat tree for the first time recently (a tree that it took months for Mango to return to after Elmer's departure), and has since been hanging out in the donut too!

I find it entirely bizarre, but there is now a new car parked in our garage. And by new car, I actually mean *new* car, and if you'd asked me yesterday I would have said that I didn't ever expect to buy a new car in my life.

But, I dunno, maybe the car market is in a weird place right now post-COVID and post-tariffs. Or maybe Hawaii is just a weird car market. But it made sense!

So we made a decision on Saturday to go ahead and replace Julie the Benz this year. I was driving out to Kealia to hang out and bike and write and I just wasn't loving the way Julie was shaking and shuddering. I think maybe she might have had a while to go before that transmission died entirely, and I'd wanted to get more value out of the battery and tires that were only 2-3 years old each, but I decided that I wasn't going to enjoy having her running so badly for that year. And I'd also that morning gotten an advance for some tech writing I've got on my schedule for this year. So it felt like the fates were conspiring to encourage us to go ahead and get a new car.

K. did some research on Saturday (while I was at the beach) and came up with what looked like the five most reliable manufacturers, and then Sunday we started spreadsheeting cars we found for sale that meet our criteria of brand, style, and cost. We ultimately decided that we wanted to look more deeply into Kias, in large part because we were seeing some reasonable prices at Hertz, but we wanted to see what the cars looked like. In particular, we wanted to understand the difference between the Seltos, a compact SUV, and the Sportage, a regular SUV.

Now we'd actually gone back and forth beforehand about whether we should get an SUV at all, but we ultimately decided that life in a semi-rural island, where we have to haul things like recycling and green waste around, due to the lack of curbside pickup, really called for the SUV (or a truck, but we were 100% uninterested in that). We hadn't realized that discussion really meant that a compact SUV was what we were looking for. Heck, I hadn't even known they existed.

So on Monday we went into the Kia dealer and we looked at the Seltos and the Sportage, and we ultimately decided that the Seltos had plenty of space for the riders (especially since we rarely have more than just K. and me in the car) and the cargo space looked smaller than Julie, but probably enough for our purposes. (Still to be seen what that really means, but I think it was a nice compromise.)

Now we looked at the new Seltos they had at the dealer, and we though it seemed nice, but we weren't really interested in a new car. (And I do mean the singular there: the dealer had exactly one Seltos left.) We did ask about used stock, but it's pretty scant on the islands. A single 2023 Seltos had been at the dealer, but sold some time in the previous few days. But there was a 2024 over on Oahu with a high level of trim (meaning lots of nice features which would put it more on par with what we'd come to expect from even a 15-year-old Benz), and that seemed interesting.

After Kimberly and I went home, we ultimately decided we'd definitely like to get a Seltos, and it was either going to be the fancy one on Oahu or the cheaper one from Hertz (but less nice, and possibly badly used by tourists, and also with less warranty because it wasn't directly from Kia), which was also on Oahu.

So I messaged our Kia salesman this morning that we'd like to get the nice Seltos on Oahu, and that we'd also like to see some price reduction, and showed him our comp from Hertz.

Much of the day went by, and he called me up and let me know that his sales manager was unable to negotiate with the sales manager on Oahu to actually get the car.

Alas. I thanked him for his help and said I was sorry we weren't going to be able to get a car from him.

But that's when he started to really push that single new (2026) Seltos they had.

He dropped it about $2000, and I said no, sorry, we were going to pass and get the Hertz one.

Then he said to name a number and implied he could drop it another $2000.

K. and I talked, and I ultimately asked him to drop it another $3000, figuring we'd land halfway at $2,500 if he was serious. I also told him that I wanted to get Julie wholesaled. We'd previously talked about her as a trade-in, but they ultimately weren't willing to because of the trouble selling a Mercedes and the fact that it had a big costly repair. But now I was basically saying: I want you to deal with it, because I can't see selling it for hardly anything with the transmission going out, and I don't want to deal with it, and if get some money, great, but I'm not counting on it.

So he came back with two offers. Either a total of $3,500 off the MSRP (and I should note new cars are often marked *UP* from the MSRP in Hawaii, but Kia had already dropped their mark-ups, I assume because they're trying to empty out inventory). Or $5,000 off the MSRP if we offered the trade-in, which I just wanted off my hands, and not ending up on a ditch on Kauai after someone tried to muck with the transmission and decided it was too expensive to do so.

K. and I crunched the numbers looking at the Hertz car, the Oahu Kia car (which we could have negotiated for directly with them, since they wouldn't work with our dealer, but which I figured we'd be doing from a very weak bargaining position since we were on another island), or this brand-new one. The new car was more expensive than the older Hertz car and slightly more expensive than the older but fancier Oahu Kia car, when we calculated things like shipping them to our island, but not hugely so. And we thought it probably wasn't actually more expensive when you amortized it against that extra 2-3 years that we hopefully get out of it because it's a newer car.

So we opted to buy the new Kia at a discount that our seller claims was approximately at their invoice price (albeit, with them getting in a trade-in of some value), and that seems pretty close to turth given additional costs to Hawaii.

I was worried that we were going to have trouble not getting taken advantage of in this whole working with a dealer thing. I'd dreamed of no-haggle pricing (and that was actually one of the reasons that Hertz was appealing). I'm not great at in-person conflict. Despite a long history of gaming, that includes negotiation (at least out-of-game negotiation). I think it helped that the real negotiation happened via phone and messaging, so I didn't have quite as much of the personal pressure. But the real gamechanger seemed to be research. I'd researched what the dealer add-ons were that they use to jack up the price a bit, and I explained why I found them non-interesting (and the salesman was clearly quite shocked that I knew what they were). And we had comps on hand that showed we were clearly willing to go elsewhere, and I actually linked out salesman straight to our main comp (the Hertz).

Some combination of that research and my saying "no" (and clearly their desire to get the car off the lot) put us in the driver's seat (ha!) and turned it into a buyer's market. So I just said "no" until they dropped the price and then I said "no" until they told me to make an offer, and then I went lower than the number that they'd suggested, and ding. ding.

I'm pretty sure there was a discrepancy in our valuation of Julie too and that was to our benefit (and their benefit, probably, which is the best type of deal). I saw her as a problem at this point. A car that we'd bought six years ago for $10,000 and that would very soon need a new transmission which we got quoted $7,000 just for the parts. I thought maybe we could get $1,000 for her, but that it'd be a pain, and that we might have to dispose of her. But I suspect Kia knows how to get at least that $1,500 for her and maybe more. I mean, that's how most trading and economic games work: they're about the delta of valuation between seller and buyer. And I'm totally cool with that. Because it's not about Julie's valuation to them, it's about the valuation to me.

So, we have a new car. My first new car ever. My first car I've ever bought from a dealer. Actually my fourth car ever, but that happens when you go 30 years without driving.

And it's weird that there's a different car in the garage.

My last day in California was spent (shocker) gaming! With my old Thursday night crew.

We got to try out _Seven Wonders Dice_, a brand-new game that I purchased during a brief break on Monday. I'm always looking for more 6-7 player games that are actually good, mainly for familial gatherings. This qualified, though I'm uncertain if it's actually simpler than my standard, _Between Two Cities_, which had been my hope. In any case, fun game that adapts _Seven Wonders_ without just being a copy of it. Dry erase markers will work better than the grease pencils that came with it, but otherwise: no notes.

We also played _Pathfinder ACG_, a long-running hobby for our Thursday night group. I really liked the work Mike Selinker & co. put into PACG 2e, so it's a shame that Paizo cancelled it. We started Curse of the Crimson Throne (the major 2e adventure) before I left, and the group has made slow progress on it since (because they only meet in person about once a month), so it's still going. We played a late chapter 4 scenario on Tuesday that was all fighting, which was not the game at its best, but it was still fun to revisit it.

--

Wednesday was our travel day. A direct flight from Oakland to Lihue. Nothing of note. I had found myself not really in the mindset to work when we flew out, so I didn't even try on the way back, other than some editing that C.A. had asked for help with.

I'm ready to start work again on the fifth after what's likely been my longest holiday since we moved (unless you count some of my European trips for Rebooting the Web of Trust, but there was work at the heart of those).

--

I always say that New Year's Eve is the worst day of the year on Hawaii.

That's because of the fireworks. Huge amounts of illegal fireworks flood the island and so from sundown until midnight you get a constant cacophony of exploding aerials, earthshaking mortars, and dogs constantly howling in distress at the above. Mango cat is horrified too, and usually spends the night under a chair. (That's why we always make sure we're home by New Year's Eve, despite hating it.)

This year was ... not bad. Maybe worse than a New Year's Eve in Berkeley, but it was 90% legal fireworks (which tend to be pop-pop-pop-pop instead of BOOOOOM!).

It turns out that this can be a really local issue. For our first few years here, we had some car racers living across the street for us, and they set off illegal fireworks for hours, but they moved out a few years ago. But then last year, at both July 4 (often not well-celebrated here because of local hatred of America for stealing the islands from the Hawaiians) and New Year's Eve, there was a huge, illegal gathering at the field also across the street from us. They were constantly firing off aerials and mortars from about 6pm until 4am. I sat up with Mango for a few hours in the middle of the night (him under the chair, me on it).

But I now have to assume that last year's New Year's party, which was really horrible, must have caused the land owners some problems. (And to be honest, I was prepared to cause them problems this year because last year was so bad.) Like, their ability to build houses there might have been threatened or something. (In 6 years they've got as far as putting in 3 or 4 septic tanks, and a big fence that cut off lots of parking for the neighborhood, but no more, but there's clearly a *hope*) I didn't get my hopes up when there was no July 4 party, because see above about hatred of America. But there was no New Year's party either.

So we heard occasional explosions down in the valley below us, and pretty frequent legal fireworks. But it was so much better than every other New Year's here.

I thought at first it might have been less illegal fireworks coming in after a crackdown due to the fireworks tragedy on Oahu last year (six dead including a child, 20 injured, many so bad they had to be sent to the mainland, altogether making it the biggest fireworks tragedy ever on Hawaii: https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/02/death-toll-from-salt-lake-fireworks-explosion-rises-to-6/). But no, other people have spoken about it being bad as ever.

So apparently one or two bad seeds (race car drivers and/or vacant lot owners) can turn an OK night into a terrible night.

--

Speaking of last year's fireworks tragedy: there were somewhere around a dozen arrests at the time. As is appropriate, since peoples' irresponsible use of illegal fireworks led to numerous deaths and injuries. A year later, there are no charges however, due to a lack of cooperation from victims [https://www.khon2.com/local-news/no-charges-a-year-after-deadly-aliamanu-illegal-firework-explosion].

This is maybe the the bit of Hawaii culture that has shocked us the most. We've similarly seen families hiding murderers and other people on the run from the law.

And I was shocked by the response to a single-car high-speed fatality yesterday morning, which seems likely to have been caused by drinking and driving given the date, time, and speed. Apologists there were talking about how maybe someone had spied out the victim's work schedule and set an ambush for her. Complete fantasy rather than apportioning responsibility.

Ohana apparently trumps community, to the point where you'll protect family even if it endangers everyone else. (At least for some.)

--

Since we've returned: sheer laziness.

K. and I are both very tired, which has led to lazing about, playing games, reading, and napping.

I'm prepared to continue on with that theme for a few more days, and not return to real life until Monday.

I think it'll be a good antidote for a hard year.

(I remember thinking how rested I felt when we got back from our few days in Oahu mid-year, and then we immediately started working on the very stressful rehoming of Elmer in Boston, and it's been non-stop since ... until we got on that plane to California last Monday.)

Hopefully.

A few years ago we expanded our days-in-Berkeley (sometimes Oakland) from three to four, mainly to make sure K. had plenty of time to visit with all of her friends. Meanwhile, I do more efficient visiting of friends because I can meet them two or three at a time for gaming. That means that I often end up with a day free in the East Bay. Last year I went and saw _Wicked_, which wasn't available in Kauai's single theatre. Today, I kept trying to offer people my free Saturday, but everything ended up clumped up on Monday instead. So Saturday remained a free day.

I woke up with no plans for the day, other than the thought that I was going to either go to a museum or go for a hike. And I wasn't totally enthused for the hike. Though the rain stopped a few hours after we hit Berkeley on Friday, I'm sure the paths are all various levels of muddy. (I do bring extra shoes with me for that possibility, but would prefer not to end up caked in mud while staying at an Air B&B.)

I'd been thinking about the Oakland Museum, which I hadn't been to for years, and which I was feeling kindly toward because they, much like the Louvre, were recently the victims of a big theft recently [https://museumca.org/press/statement-from-oakland-museum-of-california-on-recent-theft-at-off-site-storage-facility/]. But then I discovered that the Legion of Honor had an exhibit on Manet and Morisot, respectively the "father" of impressionism and the only woman to appear in the Impressionism Exhibitions under her own name. That was a must see, and even though the Legion of Honor is about as far as you can get from us in San Francisco, I was determined to go.

So I headed out and an hour and a half later (after taking the yellow line BART and the 38R MUNI) I found myself climbing the hill to the Legion of Honor.

--

The exhibit was amazing. I always read all the text on an exhibit like that, and it painted an amazing picture of Éduoard Manet and Berthe Morisot and their long-term friendship, how he influenced her early work, and how she influenced his later work. The curation was quite good, because it painted them as very human people, much more than you often see at such an exhibit, but probably a necessary requirement when it was talking about not just their artwork, but their friendship (and the fact that Morisot eventually married Éduoard's brother, Eugène, who not only supported her continuing to paint but also managed a lot of her work, altogether unimaginable in the Victorian age, when women weren't even "supposed" to be painters).

And the paintings were of course incredible. The exhibit interweaved the work of the two painters, but often brought them together in similar pieces that really allowed you to compare their two styles: one pair of a seaside summer; one pair of a woman partially dressed in her boudoir; and a four painting sequence of women representing seasons, two done by Morisot (summer and winter), two by Manet (spring and autumn), the set of which had never been exhibited together before. (Incredibly, there's never even been a Manet/Morisot exhibit, even though she was long seen as his protégé, even before newer scholarship suggested that he was influenced by her work in turn.)

And of course I love impressionism, and this was an impressionist exhibit — though Manet is actually on the cusp, as he was a studio painter and a constant reviser, and certainly his older works appear much more traditional. Which may be why, as a whole, I thought Morisot's work was better. She really embraced the movement. (Which makes it more ironic that back in the day Morisot was called a poor-man's Manet.)

Anyway, awesome exhibit. Awesome, beautiful art. Great history.

The store had a book called _Paris in Ruins_ covering much of this ground in greater length that I almost picked up, but I decided I didn't need yet another book in our luggage. So, while I would have loved to give more money to the museum, it went on my Amazon list instead.

--

I got to hike too!

I'd been thinking about walking over to Golden Gate Park, which is in the same northwest corner of San Francisco, but I realized that there's actually a path down from the Legion of Honor, through the golf course that pervades that corner of San Francisco, to the Lands End Trail, which runs along the north side of western San Francisco, offering great views of the Golden Gate, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin Headlands. So I hiked down to that.

Yeah, it was slightly muddy, but not enough to coat my shoes, just requiring careful walking. And it was somewhat crowded, something that I don't expect for my hiking trails, but Lands End is clearly a big tourist destination at this point. There's a big hill at about the halfway point, and that took more effort than it would have six years ago, because I'm not regularly walking hills like I used to when I lived in Berkeley.

Overall, a gorgeous hike.

Afterward, I walked down Sea Cliff into the Richmond District and made my yearly pilgrimage to my local bank to pick up some cash. I thought about going out to Golden Gate Park at this point and even started walking there, but decided my legs were getting too worn out, so turned around and hopped back on the 38R to take me back to BART.

--

Ah, BART. I got there and it was a weird mess. There were talking about cancelling whole lines in their typical inaudible fashion, so I hopped on the first train I could get, which was a red line, which goes to Richmond (the city, not the district). It wasn't the yellow line that I needed to get home, but the first rule of BART in San Francisco is take-whatever-train-gets-you-to-the-East-Bay if there's a trouble.

So the Red Line train took me to Embarcadero, the last stop in San Francisco, and then it indeed STOPPED.

I looked up bart.gov and got a bit more info: a train was stuck at West Oakland (the first stop on the other side of the Bay), and the red and blue lines under the Bay were both cancelled. There was no mention at all of the yellow line, nor any word on what to do, but pretty soon some partially inaudible announcements said (I think) that the train I was on was being turned around for SFO.

Now I'd looked at some travel times while I was on that 38R bus, and they'd shown me all kinds of weird ways to get home, most of them involving taking an "NL" bus from the transit center. Suddenly, that made sense. So with the train still idling at the station, I got up and went upstairs, to head out of BART and over the transit center, with the hope of getting home *SOMETIME*.

Except that when I tried to exit the station, I discovered my Clipper card was gone. I searched through every pocket at least three times. And it wasn't there.

Though it seemed pretty pointless, I headed back down into the station, hoping that maybe my card had fallen out of my pocket when I sat down on the train, and no one had taken it, and the train would still be there, and the card would still be there.

Yeah, pretty unlikely.

There was indeed still a train idling where we'd been, and I was able to easily locate my seat from the landmarks in the station, and there on the blue seat was nothing ... or so I thought at first and second glance, but eventually after popping in and out of the train a couple of times, and finally determining this was indeed my seat ... I saw there was a blue Clipper card on the blue seat! I'd clearly put it in my back pocket (which I wouldn't have done when we lived here, it would have gone into a wallet or a jacket pocket with a zipper), sat down, and it had slid out.

So, I grabbed my Clipper and got off the train before it headed back to SFO.

But I ended up not exiting the station, because they were FINALLY saying what people should do. They said that the red line train was going to go back to SFO and that a yellow line train would then come in (on the same track! good trick!) and take us across the Bay.

So that happened. Under the Bay we went and to West Oakland and past the stalled-out train at like 1 mph, and finally back to Rockridge where K. and I are staying! Whew.

--

Staying in Rockridge has been super-convenient, which is almost certainly what we discovered last year as well. We're right on the BART yellow line, which means that we have straight-through transit to Concord (where I'm going today) and San Francisco.

If we were over in downtown Berkeley instead (where we stayed probably two years ago and maybe three years ago), where we're within a mile of our old house, you have to change trains that aren't timed well to get to Concord, which makes it a big pain in the neck, and you often have to rush from one train to another to get to SF (but not always; as that red line sometimes gets you through).

So it's weird that we're going to be in our long-time city-home, but quite possibly I will never go down to Telegraph Avenue or downtown Berkeley, which were our civic centers when I lived here. (K. is actually down in downtown Berkeley this morning, but it's just not on my itinerary at the moment.)

--

Today is gaming with my "Wednesday" group of friends. Tomorrow is lunch and then dinner with different people, then another play in the evening. That's my busy day. Then Tuesday is gaming with my "Thursday" group of friends, who I hosted at my house for many years.

Then, it's back home to our much warmer island. (But the brisk weather has been fine here, as long as we layer before leaving; the pause in the rain is very convenient.)

We were up at 6am to make sure we had plenty of time to be ready & settled before we headed to the airport for our yearly trip to San Martin & Berkeley.

But, not a lot to do this morning other than get our final stuff together and tell the cats, who were unnerved about us being up so early, that all was OK.

(All was not OK.)

--

I had thought we were going to have to go in early because I couldn't get checked-in yesterday. This was the first reservation I made since the Alaska & Hawaiian Airlines websites were united, and their unification has been VERY BROKEN.

I had great troubles making the reservations. Because among other things the Alaska and Hawaiian flights aren't actually unified. So I couldn't mix the two airlines, which is what you want to do from Hawaii so that you can take an interisland Hawaiian trip to whatever Alaska flight is most convenient. Instead, I just had my single Hawaiian option (through Maui), which gets us into San Jose later than we'd like (and even later than usual this year). Or, thanks to the merger with Alaska, I could take a trip through Portland or Seattle that would get us in tomorrow!

(Thanks no!)

I also discovered that I couldn't use my mostly-Hawaiian miles for Hawaiian flights, only Alaska flights. (See above: thanks, no!)

Anyway, I finally managed to get some reservations, and then when I went to check in yesterday I couldn't check in. I had two different confirmation numbers (maybe one Hawaiian and one Alaskan? I'm not sure). Neither was recognized online. One was recognized in the app, but it wouldn't check me in.

Fortunately, the airline(s) have good chat support and the person said something about codeshares, which obviously shouldn't have been the case because I'd made a Hawaiian reservation through the Hawaiian website, but obviously the whole system is FUBAR, or at least was a few months ago. Nonetheless, they were able to fix it so I could check in.

(We'll see if I have the same problem when I try to come home: betting, maybe.)

Anyway, that meant we left for the airport at about 8.45, which was enough time to stop at Subway for a sandwich (because my dairy allergy has gotten bad enough that I suspected whatever Hawaiian served would be inedible, and sure enough it was a hot sandwich with cheese and pesto cooked inside) and arrive by 9.30.

--

I am now "Atmos Silver" thanks to my use of our Alaskan and Hawaiian credit cards.

Among other things that gives both me and my traveling companion (K.) two pieces of luggage each, which is twice what Hawaiian used to give me (but apparently dropping in half next year).

And it gives me priority boarding, right after first class, but not my traveling companion (K.), who has to wait with the rest of steerage.

Which seems kinda screwed up.

But I went ahead and boarded first on our interisland flight because you really need the overheads if you have backpacks because the spaces under the seat are quite small on those puddle jumped (or at least one of the wells is, the one closer to the edge of the plane).

And then I waited to board with Kimberly for the long flight from Maui to San Jose, but when we got up to the line the person verifying that gate lice weren't invading the small boarding area indicated that I had to go to the (empty) first class line and K. had to wait in the steerage line.

Which seemed even more screwed up.

--

I usually have all the fun tales of people behaving badly, but there were less than usual.

The interisland flight was just half full or so. I think the long flight is less full too. The seats around me are all full, but we're at the front of coach. And, people seem to behave less badly on the less full flights. (I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere.)

Oh but there were some children at the Maui airport that were _horrible_. They were running FULL SPEED in circles around the gate, screeching at the top of their lungs, pretty much for the whole 20 or 30 minutes we were at the gate. I heard the mom say, once, "Don't run!" while she was looking at her phone, after which they proceeded to run away a few seconds later.

I was afraid they were going to be shrieking the entire time on the plane, and maybe even running FULL SPEED. But it's been blissfully quiet.

Oh, the one other case of someone acting badly was a guy who thought he could keep his rollerbag in the aisle next his seat on the plane. The flight attendant just picked it up and put it in the overhead, telling him that his fire hazard wasn't allowed, so there was no room for argument.

--

Oh, not behaving badly, but a really weird lady at the service desk at our gate at Maui.

Just as our plane is starting to load (which kinda made it acting badly), the lady goes up and says, "I need to change my seat, my husband doesn't want to be so near to me."

And there's some astonished back and forth, and the lady says, "Yeah, we're two rows apart, but he wants to be as far away from me as he can."

The staff just changed her seat for her.

That was apparently a good Hawaiian vacation.

--

Ah, the end of the year seems to mean it's the time of the year for things to start breaking.

So we'll have stuff to deal with when we get home.

--

When I got November's power bill, I saw it was higher than expected, which always leads me to looking at how our solar power is doing. I discovered our battery had shut down entirely. After some conversations with our installers (Rising Sun Solar: great if you ever need solar power on Hawaii), I learned there'd been a big recall of Tesla Powerwalls because the ones that made for one or two years tended to burst into flames, which is a definite downside.

But, it turned out, ours wasn't in that recall: it'd just spontaneously gone down. Once we got that nailed down (which was me making sure we didn't have to wait for a recall that didn't actually include us), they were able to pull all of the details from the Powerwall thanks to the wonders of the modern age, and they let me know that our 6-year-old Powerwall 2 was going to be replaced by a brand-new Powerwall 3. Which is terrific. The new release of the battery isn't a big deal, although it allows us to draw more energy from it at once, which will keep us from going to the grid when showering or running the dryer. But having a new battery without 6 years of degradation is great, and I'll know it isn't refurbished, because the Powerwall 3s aren't that old. (It just came out last year.) Oh, but I think there will be some issues with compatibility, because the new one integrates an inverter, but that's a problem for not-today.

(Yeah, I hate buying from Tesla, but we locked in in 2020 before we discovered Musk was a neo-Nazi piece of shit, and they're really the only answer for solar batteries in any case.)

No one knows when the new battery will be arriving, but it'll be when it'll be.

--

And Julie the Benz is having her annual end-of-the-year breakdown. It's another check-engine light, but she's been riding somewhat rough since we had our problems mid-year with her almost dying on the way to the airport, so we may well be at the place where it's better to get a new car than to repair. (She is 16 years old at this point.)

My dad and I tried to read the error code with his reader on Sunday, but it just gave "link errors". I think maybe her errors might be in German.

So I have an appointment for her about a week after I get back, and we drove her pretty minimally this last week (and plan the same on our return), and then we'll see what we see.

It'd of course be good to stretch out her life another few years, but I also increasingly wouldn't mind a car with more modern bells and more modern whistles.

--

Expected to be working on some Designers & Dragons on the flight, and I've done a tiny bit, but mostly haven't felt like it.

Thought I might close out another book on these plane trips (in first full draft), but nah, it'll probably be a January project.

Because I guess I can vacation?

I've done five interviews in the last week and a half. Just more than a week, actually, as the first one was a week ago Friday and the last one this Friday. All of course for Designers and Dragons Origins, my new four books of history that crowdfund in just more than a week (https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/0477a26f-723e-4d2f-8f11-74cdc007daf1/landing).

There was one text interview for Rascal News (paywalled), one YouTube interview with Orkus Dorkus and one more interview for text and two more interviews for YouTube that haven't appeared yet.

Thursday night, I'd finished up the Orkus Dorkus interview, which was two and a half hours talking during and after the interview. And that was on a top of a business meeting that I'd had earlier the day. And I was realizing that my voice was starting to falter and I still had two more to do the next day!

I've never done a press tour, and this isn't quite that, though maybe it is in the age of the internet. But whether it's a virtual tour or a real tour, I can now say _EX-HAUST-ING_.

(Friday I was fortunately mostly recovered, and the interviews that day ran maybe two hours between them.)

I've got at least two or three more in the planning or scheduled stage, but I don't think I'll have another week like this. Whew!

---

Among the lessons learned: my desk setup just isn't great for doing interviews. The biggest issue is that almost everywhere in this Hawaiian house gets blinding sun until at least noon, and window coverings are scant on the huge windows and doors downstairs, where our offices are.

So I end up sitting too far from the camera and angled from my desk and it's all awkward.

I scouted the rest of the house today, and decided that the end of the dining room table is probably better than my office for comfortable sitting (and there are curtains for the window next to it, which is also partly shaded because it looks out onto the lanai).

So we'll give that a try next time.

I wish I'd picked up on that faster, but those first five interviews were just such a blur that I didn't really pick up on the discomfort in my sideways seating until I looked at the Orkus Dorkus interview today and could see myself shifting around.

---

Part of the reason it was so exhausting was that those five interviews were just part of the busyness (and business) last week. That was next to two days of tech writing. Said business meeting. Appointment with our cat behavioralist as we talk about remaining (but scant) issues in the house. Dentist appointment.

And two meetings about another writing project.

That other writing project was some volunteer work for an organization that I believe in. They wanted to write about a grant that they're starting work on.

So we got organized in the first meeting, and then started interviewing people in the second meeting.

Except by the second meeting, we'd seen some shitty headlines about the corrupt chuckleheads in Washington canceling some grants in a sort of related category. Just that weekend! Because Trump and his lapdog cronies don't like any grants that might actually better people who aren't billionaires. So the person I was writing for had the very real concern that if we stuck our head up and mentioned this grant, it could actually get it canceled.

I had to agree. I think the odds of the illiterate imbeciles in DC noticing are very low if I were to write that article, but the consequences very high.

So we cancelled the article.

Now I hate-hate-hate censorship. It's right up there with cruelty to animals and people who take really long turns in simple games.

And I'd be the first to say, "Don't comply in advance." The wanna-be clown-car fascists in Washington are weak men and women. They can't stand up to pushback, so we need to push back. I 100% agree with John Oliver: we need to tell them, "Fuck You. Make Me."

But this wasn't the same. It wasn't an article fighting against them, it was an article supporting work that predated them, and those weak men and women actually DO have the power to cancel it (because the weak men and women in Congress and the Supreme Court are letting them, power of the purse be damned).

So, that's one less thing to do, but the facts of it all left me deeply disturbed.

---

That's actually the second time I was directly affected by Trump and his sore-loser policies in the last month. And that's really what's different this time. First time around, he was doing absolutely horrible things, but more often than not it was non-Americans he was screwing, at least while he was in office (as many of the worst effects were the result of his Supreme Court nominations and that's been a trailing indicator). This time around, he's screwing just about everyone in the whole country in real-time.

So it was a month ago or so that Kimberly and I went looking for our COVID vaccines. And we knew that Hawaii was a state where we should just be able to get them as long as we claimed one of the conditions that allowed them for under 65. And one was anxiety, and I'm happy to say that I'm anxious that there's a delusional narcissist who seems to be falling into dementia with his tiny vulgarian fingers on the nuclear football, or I was happy to say that I'm not physically active enough, since I sit at a desk 8 hours a day. (I think maybe this isn't necessary any more, from the last meeting of dead-animal Kennedy and the Anti-Vaxxers.)

But we got to Costco and those *)@#$ers required a prescription. Which is absolutely not what the law is in Hawaii. So I have no idea what's going on with a big chain that I'd previously had fair respect for licking the shoes of either Trump, the insurance companies, or both.

So we got our vaccines at CVS the next day. (And CVS in Poipu had a *great* pharmacist that we had a great talk with.)

---

Yeah, I'm well aware that a lot of people have it even worse thanks to Trump. We're just the privileged tip of the iceberg.

---

There's so much more I could talk about. The cat situation here at home continues to quiet. It's been maybe two weeks since we heard about Elmer in Boston, but we're comfortable with that: we didn't expect to keep hearing updates forever. My dad and Kimberly both picked up a cold (or maybe each picked up a cold) last weekend, and since we played a game together last Sunday (Harmonies), I was nervous about picking it up too, on my week of interviews. And maybe I did, as I hit a point of absolute exhaustion Thursday afternoon, but if so it passed mostly unnoticed (other than that fatigue). My step-mom Mary is in China right now, and seems to be making an absolutely amazing-looking tour of the interior of that huge, huge country.

But it's interviews and the unusual entrance of Federal politics into the life of every single person in this country that are taking up my head space at the moment.