I. BEFORE THE STORM
When Mary, my step-mother, bought our house in Hawaii 25 years ago, it was because of the picture window in the Living Room.
You see we're on the more rural side of Kauai. I mean, it's a neighborhood, but the neighborhood is partially surrounded by a coffee plantation and there's also little farms here and there and the houses quickly fade into the mountains _mauka_ of us (toward the mountains). So our neighborhood incorporates a lot of green space. There's the golf course across the street from us and down behind us there's a narrow valley: it's a bit of greenery between us and the next street over that hopefully will never be filled in with houses because it's down below a "flood line and building set back line", because that's where the water is supposed to flow to keep everything above it from flooding (as we learned when we tried to build a retaining wall, and though we did eventually get written OK for that, we had to opt out because of the ridiculously high quote we got from someone who clearly didn't want to do the job, with ridiculously high quotes being a continuing thing on Kauai.)
Anyway, that all means that we have a beautiful view out our picture window of greenery without houses (except just to the left and right) and eventually a vista that encompasses Black Mountain on the southeast corner of the island. My step-mom said, "That's a million-dollar view" when she saw it (though they paid considerably less back in 2000 or 2001, before the enormous inflation in housing stock in the last two decades and a half).
More on that picture window down the road.
--
One of the Facebook posts that I saw a number of times after the hurricane, when FB was just reiterating posts from beforehand due to a lack of connectivity (more on that down the road too!) was by a meteorologist who said that he'd never seen a major hurricane take such a dramatic move away from its expected path in its last 48 hours.
(Which means that he's a young meteorologist because Inike, the last hurricane to directly impact Kauai, was happily heading to the west, running south of the islands, and then took a totally unexpected righthand turn and ran straight over the middle of Kauai. But that was over 30 years ago, and prediction wasn't as good then, if it really existed at all. As it happens, Inike is also the start of our story here on Hawaii because afterward people were afraid of owning property on the island and so just as my step-mom became interested in buying property here for their retirement [and apparently ours], it was cheap and she was able to buy their house and ours.)
Anywho, that means that Lowell was apparently more of an oddity than I knew.
But despite the variation being unprecedented, by a short-sighted definition of unprecedented, it was expected to be unprecedented. Unlike with Inike, the meteorologists all knew that Lowell was going to take a sharp right turn and they even modeled pretty closely where it was going to turn. But the whole time they were also saying that the model was complex and they weren't sure of the accuracy of the whole right-hand-turn thing.
Here's what happened: Lowell was expected to head north, but its track was actually supposed to be NNE, which would swing it ever so slightly closer to the islands that it had passed by. The expectation Sunday night was that it was going to run about 150 miles west of Kauai. But overnight and throughout Monday it kept running further east than expected. The last I heard, as it was growing nearer to us, was that it was actually 70 miles west of us.
That meant that the eyewall ran over Niihau, the small "Forbidden Island" just west of us that only natives are allowed to walk on. Meanwhile, the very edge of the hurricane strength winds kissed the west shore of our island, Kauai.
Which was not fun.
--
Seeing the worsened predictions Monday morning, Kimberly and I quickly headed out to bring everything inside. In the pouring rain that preceded the hurricane. I'd previously stacked up stuff on our patio in the corner that I thought would be least affected by the wind, but that no longer seemed to be enough, as the overnight shift had moved us from tropical storm warning (e.g., probably tropical storm level winds somewhere on the island) to hurricane warning (e.g., probably hurricane level winds somewhere on the island).
It was very wet, but table, chairs, and even grill all came inside, as well as bits of wood from various construction projects.
We also messaged a neighbor and suggested a long piece of wood in their yard be moved, as I didn't want it going through our window in the night.
(We were generally surprised how lackadaisical some of our neighbors were, just pulling stuff close in to their houses rather than getting it out of the wind entirely. At first I thought, "Maybe they're just calmer because they've been through this before", but then I remembered that it's been 30+ years since a hurricane had hit this island. There's even a [eternal] construction site across from us that left sawhorses and such out, which I'm shocked weren't two towns over by morning.)
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II. MONDAY NIGHT: THE HURRICANE HITS
We live on the hip line of the island. West shore? South shore? No one seems to agree. But we're much more exposed to the south, with the shore just a few miles below us and pretty much downhill al the way. (The only reason we can't see the ocean is because our former neighbor planted trees on the far side of our little valley, pretty much blocking the site a few of the houses on the next street over from view. Which is nice, other than the not being able to see the ocean bit.)
(But it'd be far and small away anyway: totally sour.)
Our southward facing means that we started to get some pretty big winds from the storm starting around 6pm or so, as it approached from the south.
We were watching the last episode of _Killed by Lightning_ (a history of President Garfield, great for a history buff like me, since it's very well done, and particularly since I've recently watched the play Assassins).
As we watched the TV, I also watched that beautiful picture window (which I totally put over the fireplace at the start of this post) vibrating more and more as buffets of wind unrelentingly smashed at it, carrying huge torrents of water with it. As it got worse and worse, we started being flecked with water spraying off the window.
A window I was sitting right under, by the by.
(This is the most exposed window in the house: one of three big picture windows upstairs, but the one that has the most altitude because it looks back over the valley.)
After a dramatic event in the show (not the _final_ dramatic event), I paused and we decided we had to deal with it all.
There was water coming in from the lower jalousies because they don't close all the way because of the cheap plastic handles used on them. They've gotten brittle over time. One of them snapped off and the other feels like it'll snap if I ever try to put the force into locking the jalousie shut. So that was the big thing to deal with.
But there was also water beading down the window. That might in part have been due to condensation, but that wasn't really going on with other windows. So I have to assume it's also the window seal failing. Which isn't really what you want when your window is being buffeted by at least tropical storm–level gusts and perhaps hurricane-level gusts. (I don't know. We'll likely never know. But it looks like our strip along the south shore was expected to be some of the more protected, with gusts predicted at "only" 50-55 mph, but some of the last reports also said that the storm wasn't weakening as expected as it made its last drive toward us, so who knows what we ended up with.)
Kimberly came up with a scheme of putting plastic bags on the backs of cardboard, and then taping that in front of the two jalousies that don't close. It was pretty challenging because we constantly had to dry the surface we were applying the tape to because of the water running down the window. But we eventually did and then jammed various pieces of furniture in place to help hold them up.
We tried to go back to Death by Lightning afterward, but our internet had gone down while we fought with the water and wind and windows.
(Wait, what's the etymology of "wind" and "window"!???)
--
I couldn't deal with watching the shaking, shuddering, bleeding window any more, and I definitely didn't want to be sitting under it, so I headed downstairs at this point.
Things were quieter down there in the family room, though shortly Kimberly and I decided we'd prefer the cats be confined far from the window that was stressing us out the most. So I hauled Mango into my office, then we lured Megara into Kimberly's office (by closing all the other doors and pretending not to care where she went). Afterward, Kimberly and I spent our evening in our separate panic rooms.
I think things calmed downed. That's about when the hurricane passed behind Niihau, giving us cover rather than it just being open sea between it and us. And by the time it got a little closer to us, swinging past us on the west shore, we had that whole west shore between us and it (and not a straight shot up at us, like from the south).
(Kimberly thinks it was still pretty nasty and it was just quieter downstairs, which is protected by hillside on one side and closer to the ground on the other.)
One way or another, it was definitely less stressful without the murder window.
--
An argument against calmer? Kimberly and I each heard three distinct thumps in the night after we settled downstairs, all toward one of the neighbors who hadn't secured much.
Nothing impacted our house, but that was nerve-wracking.
--
We'd been talking about going to bed late, because the hurricane was supposed to make its closest approach after midnight, but by 10pm my head was hurting from the pressure change and I was exhausted from a stressful evening. Plus, I felt like the storm was less threatening, whether that was because of it disappearing behind Niihau or just us being downstairs. So Kimberly and I agreed to try bed at our normal 11pm.
That meant dealing with the cats again, because I still didn't want them running free just in case the storm did start threatening us more as it cleared the Forbidden Island. (And also because I didn't want them locked in our offices where we couldn't hear if something went very wrong.)
Now Megara doesn't respond well to hauling. Except for one pleasant dreamlike morning months ago when I picked her up and strolled around petting her, she's always struggled frantically.
Last month I tried an alternative when it was vet day. I attempted to lure her into the cat carrier with treats. (Megara did not end up going to the vet that day.)
So this time I just went with the old trick of stepping up to her and plucking her up. She struggled as expected, but halfway up the stairs between Kimberly's office and the bedroom, she started struggling with claws out. Several wounds later, I dropped her.
And she streaked away.
Into the bedroom.
Afterward, I hauled Mango. No problem.
So that cats stayed with us that night as planned.
--
As we checked out the upstairs on our way to bed, the murder window was still intact. And it wasn't bleeding nearly as much water. The worse of that had definitely been while we were upstairs, from the lack of water on the floor. But that might have just been the rain, not the wind.
We went to bed. Inserted earplugs. Eventually managed to fall asleep as the windows howled the end of the world outside (but really, not as bad as at 6pm, I swear. Yes, I did have earplugs in.)
The cats did not ruckus in the night, which was a relief.
(We used to keep Mango and Megara in our room at night sometimes while we were dealing with the Elmer problems, but that ended after one ruckus left Megara yowling and then desperately hissing at Mango from under the bed.)
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III. TUESDAY: THE SCARCITY BEGINS
Tuesday morning. I awoke at 6am. Things were calmer. I decided that I needed to be up to tour the house and see the damage.
Windows were all intact. Whew. Just getting away from the murder window so it didn't stress me out was the right answer.
Then the outside tour.
One of the thumps in the night was caused by the neighbor's papaya tree. I guess it wasn't fair to expect them to secure that. One of its central trunks has broken off and was splayed across their and our yards.
(We have no idea what the other two thumps were.)
We found asphalt shingles down from the roof. At first I thought it was less than Lala, but circling further, it might have been the same, just mostly on the opposite side of the house. Again, no water intrusion, so that doesn't change our fundamental of needing to have some work done on the roof, but it not being an immediate crisis, which is a relief. (If we were suffering water damage that would have been a need-to-stay-in-town-until-it's-fixed problem, because water from the sky is a daily thing in our part of Kauai.) We also walked up the road where we could get a better view, and we could see where there'd been damage on those hip lines of our roof, but nothing large scale.
(We later learned that one of our friends, who lives further west than us, had had a large patch of roof ripped out and possibly that whole side of their house compromised, so we got lucky, though part of that luck was not being where the hurricane force winds were closest.)
Some branches were down in our yard too, again much like Lala (though nothing as big as the Papaya failure behind us.)
And we didn't see the largest mortality at the time.
That was our mailbox. I think the base was part rotted through and the whole thing went over in the storm.
--
Monday was the scarier day, but Tuesday was the more frustrating one.
Our internet was still out.
Our cell phone was fine at 6am, so I could hotspot through it, but by 7am it was starting to slow down noticeably and by 9am it was toast for everything: hot-spotting, SMSing, even phone calls.
Our power had gone out sometime during the night, but our battery was still going.
Oh, and the lack of cell phone or internet meant that we couldn't find out the status of when we might expect to get power or internet or cell phones back. (By bedtime on Tuesday we still had no idea.)
Maybe we could call? Oh, let me just pull up the internet to look up their phone number, and then I can not succeed in making a call due to T-Mobile's abject and total failure. OK, never mind.
--
I did manage to make the social rounds before our cell service went down. Mostly. Message to Facebook that we were OK. Message to my sister that we were OK. Message to bsky that we were OK. Message to my mom, stepdad and bros that we were OK.
Except the last message failed to go through. I tried it again throughout the day but as far as I know it still hadn't by Tuesday night. (I hoped folks had seen my Facebook post, which they indeed had.)
--
Here's one of the big problems: our crappy Tesla app that gives us data from our crappy Tesla battery hasn't been working since the internet went down.
So I couldn't actually been able to see if the grid is on or off. And I couldn't see what the battery level was at. And I couldn't even see if that battery was charging correctly.
This means that we were conserving power whether it was needed or not.
But I'm pretty sure it was needed. The day was pretty gray, with just spots of sun, so I suspect the battery recharged some, but not a lot.
The only upside is that there had been a brief return of the net sometime in the middle of the night after the hurricane went through and so I saw that the battery was at 89% at 2am or 4am or something. That's quite high and suggested that the power was up until probably sometime after midnight. (The battery loses, I dunno 3-5% an hour at night, until I shower in the morning and blow it out by running hot water, and there was none of that this morning as part of the conservation.)
I say I dunno, because again the Tesla app sucks. When my phone is offline, as it largely was from that point on, it won't even show the archived data that *SHOULD* be on my phone.
Oh, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to tell either of these things by looking at the physical Tesla. Because that's the Musk standard: just like he got rid of the levers on his cars, increasing the risk of accidents by turning them into harder to access buttons, he apparently doesn't like informative read-outs either, preferring easy-to-break apps.
My best indication the power was still out Monday night: the constant hum of our neighbor's generator. (I could also turn off the battery to check, and see if our whole house went out. I did that once Tuesday afternoon, but I don't need to keep shocking the system.)
--
I actually was able to work on Tuesday, one of my client days. That's because I was working on web pages, and they're in a GitHub directory, and I had it local and up-to-date, along with all the other info I needed. So thank goodness for that.
I still did try to hit the internet a few times to look things up, and eventually had to flag them as: stuff to worry about another day.
--
Kimberly and I tried to walk in the golf course around 5pm. We weren't able to talk with my dad still, but figured we might meet him if we timed it right. But we got to the entrances near our house and found them both blocked by fallen trees.
My dad called an hour or so later, suggesting that T-Mobile had at least gotten their act together enough to get voice lines working and said he and Mary had tried to drive up there, but found the front gate closed and the gap to walk through next to the gate blocked.
(Was the blockage near us purposeful? Maybe. But it looked pretty organic.)
--
By Tuesday night, things weren't better:
Power was still down (not that we could tell for sure).
Internet was still down.
Cell service was still almost completely down (every once in a while we could manage a message to someone and there was that one call.)
I kept finding new things to turn off to try and minimize our energy footprint. The big one was our hot water heater. My dad suggested it when he brought some of their refrigerated and frozen goods around Tuesday morning (because they don't have solar power), but I couldn't find any off switches on the hot water heater. When we talked again in the evening he said: you just turn off the circuit breaker. Duh. So that'll save us a big spike of energy every couple of hours, but I still didn't know if we'd make the night.
(I did get my hot shower afterward, because there was no reason not to use up the hot water in the tank, now that it wouldn't drain power reheating.)
--
Lesson Learned #1: The Tesla App Sucks
Clearly, it's totally unacceptable for us not to be able to see the status of our battery and solar power when the internet is down, because the internet is likely to be down when we need the battery the most.
Tesla is a big failure here because their app is clearly extremely fragile. And apparently stores data not in my app but on Tesla's servers. The better to data mine our personal information, of course.
But, from what I've seen, there should be a way to get direct access to "live" information by getting onto the Tesla gateway's wifi.
I'd previously paired my phone, exactly to be ready for this type of emergency, but that apparently has nothing to do with data (just with pulling us off-grid, I think).
We don't have the Tesla gateway shown in the pictures on the Tesla app, but we do have something else with a sticker that has a serial number, wifi password, and QR code, just like we need, so I would have guessed that was it. But trying to read that wifi info into our Tesla app just failed.
So that's a talk with our installers about why this isn't working, and afterward I'm happy to bounce our internet up and down until I'm confident it works.
--
Lesson Learned #2: T-Mobile Sucks
I'd moved over to T-Mobile some time ago because of their superior hot-spotting (back when almost no one offered it, except with exorbitant late-era capitalist throughput fees) and their superior ability to get data and SMS in hundreds of countries (and that was back when I was traveling to at least a few of them).
Back in 2021, I had what should have been a big warning. As we started letting non-vaccinated and belligerent tourists on to the island, I stopped getting data in Poipu, one of the most over-touristed parts of the island. It was 3 or 6 months before I could even use my phone in that area again.
I figure they must have done something with their capacity in that area during COVID, leaving just enough for residents, and then when the tourists returned and massively spiked the population of the area (which was absolutely, pleasantly, wonderfully quiet during COVID), they couldn't keep up. And they didn't have the ability to keep up for some time. And rather than some type of sensible throttling, they just watched as the usage totally overwhelmed the area and made it useless for everyone.
I have to assume the same thing happened here after the hurricane. It was OK that first morning but as more and more people tried to use it, it got totally overwhelmed and by evening the best we could do still was get 1 out of 3 SMS messages through. (If that.)
Which is close to criminal level negligence IMO. Because if there's one thing that should be reliable the day after a disaster, at least in the case when it had actually survived the storm itself, that should be your cell phone service. I mean, if someone was in deep medical trouble this morning, and they were as isolated as we were, they would have died.
I'd already been down on T-Mobile for cranking up our cost then pushing us off our old plan and cranking up our cost again.
But at this point, they are gone with prejudice at the nearest convenient time. Which at the least will be after I get back from Korea. (Probably Kimberly too. She's already got an esim waiting for her in Korea, but it's probably best not to mess with our service provider while she's around the corner of the world.)
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Lesson Learned #3: Jalousie Repair Needed
Those jalousies that don't close right were an annoyance in winter. But they were a full-up menace during the hurricane.
The problem is that the slats are fine, it's just the handles that are problematic (and we have about twenty of them with those increasingly brittle handles).
My dad has suggested we might be able to find new handles at Home Depot, but that's always seemed like a snipe hunt hoping for just the right ones (and it requires disassembling one to even check).
The jalousie people that we had in to replace our old awning windows said they would probably have to be replaced entirely, which is likely to be quite expensive for 20 of them. (The four jalousies they put in to replace the awning windows were like $7,000 if memory serves, but that was possibly a more complex situation as they were replacing a different type of window, but I wouldn't be shocked if 20 jalousie replacements cost northward of $20k or more.)
Something has to be done one way or the other. At least for the three that just don't close right any more (or more likely for the two banks that include them, which would be six jalousies total.)
--
Lesson Learned #4: Global Warming, Duh
There's a reason that two hurricanes have impacted the island within the course of just a month, and that's out of just five that we have records of, dating back to 1900. It's the super El Nino caused by us continuing to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
I've said more than once that Trump is the only president to ever have a major impact on my life (and I know that's not true for many people in less privileged positions, but it is true for me). He's cost me and my publishers major money due to his tariffs and their impact on printing+shipping costs, he's kept me from getting a COVID vaccine before going to Korea, which could easily result in my first case of COVID. And he dropped us out of the Paris Accords back in the early days of his first crappy presidency, and that contributes to every murderous heat wave and hurricane today.
F*** that self-centered idiotic narcissist.
--
Here's one of the weird things. We had no idea of the status of the rest of the island(s) almost 24 hours after the hurricane hit.
That's because we hadn't seen hardly any news, since there was almost nothing up when I sat down to work at 7.30, and then the internet was gone within an hour and a half (and we don't have an antenna or cable or anything, so the internet is our lifeline.).
(Ah, we probably need a radio in our hurricane kit, I'm sure it's recommended. Doesn't have to be battery powered since we should in most cases have energy, so that'll be easier to maintain.)
--
Ugh, not how I expected to spend time I should be prepping for Korea.
But really, my biggest prep on Tuesday would have been working to finish up the docs for the client web site I'm working on, and if anything that went better because of the lack of internet distractions.
But I was also suppose to call the allergist I was referred to, since they yet again haven't contacted me, but I now have a name and number. That clearly didn't happen. (Actually, I don't have a name and number: they're in my online medical records, and so I can't access them.)
This will get more problematic as the days go by.
--
Late Tuesday night, shortly before we went to bed, Kimberly and I stepped out onto our lanai to look into the night.
Now we've seen the area back behind us dark before. Just not recently: new neighbors in a few different houses around us have cranked up the light pollution since we've moved here (much to our regret) with lots of very bright outside lights. But we'd never seen something like this.
It was black as pitch outside. We could see some lights in the distance on the mountains east of us, but they were scattered and few. And there was no particular light in our area (once we got our house's lights down). The sky was still cloudy, as it had been all day, but we saw bright stars. And a dark, dark sky that was calmer by far than the raging, angry, wind-and-rain-filled sky of the night before.
--
IV. WEDNESDAY: THE NEW NORMAL
A continuation of this journal entry because I remained unable to upload it.
Wednesday morning dawned and our battery was still happily chugging along. That tells me that it was definitely charging on Tuesday, which was the expectation, but yay. Also, our energy cutting measures (minimizing lights to a single room, not using them in the day even when it's been dim, turning off the hot water heater, and not using the stove or air fryer or toaster oven) have all been helpful. Though I suspect we would have lost power by now if our battery weren't being kept topped off until sometime after midnight on the night of the hurricane, because yesterday was so gray.
It remained very frustrating to not be able to see the state of the battery. But our internet, power, and any ability to use cellular data were still down.
However, there had been a bit of cellular uptime in the middle of the night. A message got out to my client with an updated version of a grant proposal and a note that he needed to send it because it was due, and I couldn't. (I'd tried just before bed Tuesday night when the cell phones were acting like they might process a bit of traffic, but to no avail: I couldn't ever load the page.)
Best of all, I was able to make calls. I let my mom know all was well and was able to talk to said client. So apparently T-Mobile has the most basic level of service resolved, but I don't have any faith in them to maintain it throughout the day. (Spoiler: they didn't.)
Because I was up early and it wasn't quite time to start work, I wandered the yard picking up asphalt shingles. I had a big handful, but again I'll shift my assessment to: not quite as much damage as from Lala, which is great, because I'd been afraid we might see 10x as much damage, if the interwoven structure of shingles on our roof was sufficiently weakened.
I also met another of our neighbors: Cory lives way down at the bottom of our street but was out walking his agéd dog.
I've seen more of the Aloha spirit these last two days since we moved here. Neighbors actually talking to each other. Offering help. I heard that one of my dad's neighbors has two generators and he's lending one out so that people can get their fridges cool again. Our next-door neighbor (who we already knew) has a generator and offered her fridge if we needed anything (and Kimberly has some critical meds in our fridge needed for Korea, so if there's a failure of our system, we'll take advantage of that.) And Kimberly and I have both met and talked to people that we've only ever waved at before.
And because of all of this we're also getting bits and pieces of what's going on across the island. The big news is that stores are reopening. Home Depot. Safeway, but only the one in Kapa'a (where all the tourists are). The fact that this is exciting news says most of the island is still shut down.
And the news in part was coming through some phone networks being better than others. We've heard from multiple people that T-Mobile sucks. The word on AT&T is more mixed: some people say it's totally dead, others that it's fine. Verizon has gotten a single praise for being strong. All stuff to consider when I throw T-Mobile in the gutter and kick it to death.
--
During the cellular uptime in the middle of the night, my Facebook app, open on my phone, managed to download some new posts.
Prime among them? An update from KIUC (our local power utility) the previous evening. They had gotten a total of 466 customers up over the course of Tuesday, with 32,000 households still down. They'd mainly been surveilling on Tuesday and starting work on transmission lines, with that expected to last through Thursday, and then "local distribution" work only beginning afterward, which sounds like Friday at best.
Bottom line? No power for days. Which almost definitely meant no internet for days. Meaning that our only hope is for T-Mobile to get their act together, which seemed unlikely.
--
Since Wednesday was looking increasingly sunny, which meant that our battery should charge back up to 100% of the course of the day, I tried to use the toaster oven to heat up my G-F bread for lunch and I couldn't get it to go. Since everything else in the kitchen was working, I assumed it got fried during all the light flickering of Monday night. Should have unplugged things I guess.
Mark it down as another storm casualty, alongside our mailbox.
--
New fun on Wednesday: we were occasionally getting SMS messages from crucial organizations such as the Department of Water and the County of Kauai.
They said useful things like "update", but then pointed to a URL that many of remained unable to access.
No, no, no you don't send us to a higher level data distribution in the wake of a natural disaster, you send out emergency messages at the lowest level of data distribution available, which is either automated calls or SMS.
--
Other new fun: there were cars on the road on Tuesday, but the majority of the people listened to the County telling them to stay at home.
But Wednesday, with news of stores opening, people were heading out.
The problem was that the infrastructure wasn't up to it. In particular, almost every traffic light on the island was out.
We live a couple of blocks up the hill from the highway, and in late morning we started seeing queues of cars flat-out stopped on that road. Apparently the light down where our road intersects the highway was being managed by police now and that was causing huge backups in every direction. This was made worse by the fact that the couple of gas stations down on the highway had long lines, backed up so far that they were blocking the highway.
What a mess!
(I was finally able to see that County of Kauai update that they pushed to a URL rather than including in an SMS, and it again said "essential travel only" for Wednesday. Apparently peoples' willingness to abide by that lasts somewhere around one day.)
The huge run on gas is apparently due to generators' glutinous need for gasoline. That County of Kauai update actually said there was actually a shortage of gas at the moment due to the generators. Cue Hunger-Gasoline Games in 3-2-1.
--
Also on Wednesday I noticed multiple groups of kids out either biking or else using the bike-mopeds that it's crazy (and illegal) to let your kids ride.
I think this is going to be the week that defines these kids' childhoods as the best ever. The whipping storm. The bashing rain. And then the week out of school to run about and have fun.
Ah, if only we could go back there.
--
I'd predicted that Koloa and Kapaa would be the first places to get power back, as the tourist centers of the island, because that's how Kauai usually works (and we remarkably vote in people who continue that pattern).
Wednesday afternoon my erratic and unreliable messaging brought in word that Koloa Town was reenergized, though KIUC still had no work on when anyone else would be.
By evening, they said they'd restored 25% of the island, including parts of Kapaa.
---
I kept popping up and down my Chrome browser, which I don't usually do. But it didn't serve much purpose at the moment, except in rare moments when I managed to get a trickle of data through my phone, and it just eats my power.
Every time I pop it back up I restore tabs.
But somehow it managed to drop all the tabs that I had in categories (where Chrome will squish a bunch of tabs under one colored tab with a name for you). The rest came back, but in one of my restarts those did not. That was a real bummer because the main category I had was things flagged for use in my Losing Sanity book. @*(#@.
I know some of the interviews there I wanted, like one with the author of Cthulhu by Gaslight, but I don't know what else was there. I'm pretty sure there was at least one more important interview for the next section! I have no idea if there's a way to reconstruct them, I suspect not, but I can't even check right now.
---
One of our local business, the Right Slice, had power and (somehow) internet and on Wednesday started letting people freely use both with no purchase necessary. That's more of the Aloha.
Kimberly went down there in the afternoon to order some train tickets for one of the days of her visit in Korea and also posted her own journal entry about the Lowell Saga.
I just kept adding to this ever-growing file because it didn't seem worth walking down there just to post this (and it would have required me to sit down and do another edit through this gargantuan tome).
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Late Wednesday night I realized I was started to feel down because of a combination of the helplessness of this all and the fact that I can't work on my various projects, and I feel time is slipping by.
So Kimberly and I packed for Korea. That was something we could do at least.
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Meanwhile, my dad and Mary got power back this evening.
For like five minutes.
We've got some bottles of water freezing in our garage freezer so that they can chill their freezer again tomorrow. (We're also storing lots of food for them; it's nice having energy.)
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V. THURSDAY: FEELS LIKE FOREVER
We wake on Thursday and it feels much the same as before. We're camped out in our semi-rural stronghold, strong (thankfully surviving) solar power bringing us energy to keep our lights, computers, and fridges going, provided we conserve.
I sit down for my third day of client work that I'm storing on my laptop as a series of commits all queued up for GitHub.
Then a call comes in from my step-mom. It's actually my dad. Her phone can get through, and his cannot. (They're both using T-Mobile, at my advice to better support a trip to China last year, but not I think for long either.)
Their power is back! It came back at 11.30pm Wednesday night, a few hours after I last talked to them! They're coming over to pick up food that we shepherded through the last days.
Meanwhile, I had determined that late in the work day I was going to go down to our local restaurant (The Right Slice) that was offering wifi so that I could upload my work and not have it solely sitting on my computer that's going to a foreign country (hopefully) in a few days.
But when my dad came by to retrieve his food, he revealed their net is back! So we'll go do it at their house instead. (And not have to fight desperate crowds.)
(This will probably be uploaded at the same time.)
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Lesson Learned #4: Check the Power Meter
One more lesson learned: though the inaccessibility of our Tesla setup has made it almost impossible to see what's going on, or even whether we're getting power from the grid, I did come up with one idea for checking it physically.
No, not on the Tesla, since that's a black box. (Maybe some lights might offer indication? But they've mostly looked the same and are unlabeled.) But on the power meter outside.
I went out during the blackout and saw it had an LED display, displaying nothing.
After I heard my dad's power was up, I went out, and it's now displaying data.
So that seems an indication that our power is up too. We've started plugging things back in and turned the hot water heater back on to celebrate.
(But I should probably check again in the evening, just to make sure we're not spending power like (for) water but back on battery power.)
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Did HIUC pull a Scottie and tell everyone they wouldn't even be touching local distribution until Friday so they'd be lauded when power started coming back in larger numbers of Wednesday? I guess I'll see what their percentages look like and if we just got lucky!
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Our cell phone bars came back just before we were heading out. Sending on our own power ...
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