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A Year in Hawaii
Jan. 1st, 2021 01:16 pmWow, it's been a year.
365 days ago I was climbing into a car in the pre-dawn darkness in Berkeley.
365 days ago I was hauling two cats and luggage through the Oakland Airport.
365 days ago we were standing in front of our house in Kalaheo while Mary took a picture of our new homecoming.
365 days: a year.
We have only partially outfitted our house in that time. Oh, we have most of our living space laid out, but books, games, and RPG products are still all in boxes, in large part because we haven't gotten shelving built yet for the downstairs. That leaves our Family Room still is disorder (as I haven't wanted to get a couch and chair for there until we see the shelving).
I've actually been working on this lately. I found a company called HKI that could theoretically do the type of work I wanted, but they changed my appointment last Monday, then just didn't show up on Wednesday, then just didn't show on Thursday. I haven't bothered to call them back after the last failure. Instead, I'm hoping that a realtor friend of Mary's can get me in touch with someone, but I"m waiting on that too.
The other room in disarray is Kimberly's office. There, a Murphy Bed is the element that's keeping us from filling in the rest of the room. We'd originally planned for someone from Oahu to design the bed for us, but interisland travel has been a wreck all year.
Ah, COVID. Yeah, that's been the big issue this year.
It's at times impacted us. It almost scotched our Berkeley house sale (and ended up costing us some money). It kept us from seeking shelf-builders early in the year. It's kept us from getting a Murphy Bed (in part because of the issues with going forward with our original plan for getting a custom one built; in part because there's no priority to have a bed for guests at the moment). It made Kimberly's seizure study in Oahu difficult, and so was a big roadblock in health work for the year. It kept us almost totally confined to home for several weeks, while our idiot mayor was on the insanely cautious side of his wild swings back and forth regarding the public health of the island. It's kept us from making much in the way of new friends on the island. It's prevented me from returning to the local game store, even after they reopened (as sitting at a table passing around tokens in the middle of a pandemic seemed to me the height of irresponsibility).
But mainly we've been safe, because we've been protected by a quarantine most of the year — something that really should be going on in communities all across the world — and so for the most part we've been safe from COVID.
Beyond that, COVID has revealed to us an island that we literally will never get to see again: one mostly free of tourists. The best beaches have been reclaimed by the locals. The hiking paths are mostly empty. The roads and other infrastructure aren't overburdened, as they were before COVID struck. Paradise is a paradise. In some ways it's kind of weird and unfortunate, because at this point, this is our impression of Kauai. We'd previously spent 13 or 14 weeks vacationing on the island; and then we spent 12 weeks living here before the first lockdown started; and now we've spent 40 weeks on an island where the population has often been down as much as 20% due to the lack of tourism. It's never going to be this quiet again; the infrastructure is never going to be as unstrained. But over a year, this will have become our impression of what the island is like.
I've written recently about work. Suffice to say: it took me longer than expected to get where I wanted to be in 2020, but I'm very content now to be doing two days a week of blockchain tech writing and at least two days a week of work on Designers & Dragons and other projects. I got a great start on some really big projects in 2020, and I hope to really push those forward this year.
Life in Hawaii more generally is something we're still establishing. We hang out with my dad and Mary on Sundays and sometimes walk with my dad in the evening. That's out on the golf course: nowadays we often escort Kimberly (on her scooter) to the pavilion before circling the course (but sometimes I go out on my own too).
I swim once or twice a week. After a full year here, yep, the ocean's cooler in the winter (when we always vacationed) than in the summer.
I've still got a foot in California as I get together with my gaming buddies there on Zoom or Discord once a week. It's terrific to still be able to do that, but clearly a short-term thing.
I'd like to be more involved in the community here in Kauai. To have a gaming group. To go to plays. To eat at restaurants. To help out in some community projects. But, COVID. Maybe next Fall.
The one thing I hadn't expected was to spend the whole year on Hawaii. I had three trips planned: RWOT trips to Buenos Aires and The Hague and a trip back to California. I actually had tickets for the first two, but they ended up cancelled. The Buenos Aires trip less than a week out. Kauai isn't a big island, so that makes it feel slightly confining, but fortunately there's still exploring to be done.
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with our move here. The environment is beautiful, the stress is down, the creativity is up, the family time is up.
Though the bizarreness of 2020 means that we don't 100% know what living on Hawaii was like, so far, so good.
And 2021 is already welcoming us in just like 2020: on New Year's Eve our lights started flickering. We watched The Rise of Skywalker (finally!) and the TV went off at least three times. This morning it's obvious there's a widespread problem with out electrical system. Most of our rooms can't support more than a few things being on. We're no longer drawing power from our battery. We're getting maddening flickering and dimming. Our voltage is dropping down below 110V, perhaps lower, which could be damaging our appliances, including our brand-new refrigerator and chest freezer. Obviously, the solar power people f***ed something up or else there's a problem with one of our solar-power devices. I communicated with our engineer this morning and he responded very quickly, told me he alerted the problem team ... and it's been crickets since. Meanwhile, we couldn't even watch TV this evening because it was dropping out every few minutes. So, welcome 2021.
365 days ago I was climbing into a car in the pre-dawn darkness in Berkeley.
365 days ago I was hauling two cats and luggage through the Oakland Airport.
365 days ago we were standing in front of our house in Kalaheo while Mary took a picture of our new homecoming.
365 days: a year.
We have only partially outfitted our house in that time. Oh, we have most of our living space laid out, but books, games, and RPG products are still all in boxes, in large part because we haven't gotten shelving built yet for the downstairs. That leaves our Family Room still is disorder (as I haven't wanted to get a couch and chair for there until we see the shelving).
I've actually been working on this lately. I found a company called HKI that could theoretically do the type of work I wanted, but they changed my appointment last Monday, then just didn't show up on Wednesday, then just didn't show on Thursday. I haven't bothered to call them back after the last failure. Instead, I'm hoping that a realtor friend of Mary's can get me in touch with someone, but I"m waiting on that too.
The other room in disarray is Kimberly's office. There, a Murphy Bed is the element that's keeping us from filling in the rest of the room. We'd originally planned for someone from Oahu to design the bed for us, but interisland travel has been a wreck all year.
Ah, COVID. Yeah, that's been the big issue this year.
It's at times impacted us. It almost scotched our Berkeley house sale (and ended up costing us some money). It kept us from seeking shelf-builders early in the year. It's kept us from getting a Murphy Bed (in part because of the issues with going forward with our original plan for getting a custom one built; in part because there's no priority to have a bed for guests at the moment). It made Kimberly's seizure study in Oahu difficult, and so was a big roadblock in health work for the year. It kept us almost totally confined to home for several weeks, while our idiot mayor was on the insanely cautious side of his wild swings back and forth regarding the public health of the island. It's kept us from making much in the way of new friends on the island. It's prevented me from returning to the local game store, even after they reopened (as sitting at a table passing around tokens in the middle of a pandemic seemed to me the height of irresponsibility).
But mainly we've been safe, because we've been protected by a quarantine most of the year — something that really should be going on in communities all across the world — and so for the most part we've been safe from COVID.
Beyond that, COVID has revealed to us an island that we literally will never get to see again: one mostly free of tourists. The best beaches have been reclaimed by the locals. The hiking paths are mostly empty. The roads and other infrastructure aren't overburdened, as they were before COVID struck. Paradise is a paradise. In some ways it's kind of weird and unfortunate, because at this point, this is our impression of Kauai. We'd previously spent 13 or 14 weeks vacationing on the island; and then we spent 12 weeks living here before the first lockdown started; and now we've spent 40 weeks on an island where the population has often been down as much as 20% due to the lack of tourism. It's never going to be this quiet again; the infrastructure is never going to be as unstrained. But over a year, this will have become our impression of what the island is like.
I've written recently about work. Suffice to say: it took me longer than expected to get where I wanted to be in 2020, but I'm very content now to be doing two days a week of blockchain tech writing and at least two days a week of work on Designers & Dragons and other projects. I got a great start on some really big projects in 2020, and I hope to really push those forward this year.
Life in Hawaii more generally is something we're still establishing. We hang out with my dad and Mary on Sundays and sometimes walk with my dad in the evening. That's out on the golf course: nowadays we often escort Kimberly (on her scooter) to the pavilion before circling the course (but sometimes I go out on my own too).
I swim once or twice a week. After a full year here, yep, the ocean's cooler in the winter (when we always vacationed) than in the summer.
I've still got a foot in California as I get together with my gaming buddies there on Zoom or Discord once a week. It's terrific to still be able to do that, but clearly a short-term thing.
I'd like to be more involved in the community here in Kauai. To have a gaming group. To go to plays. To eat at restaurants. To help out in some community projects. But, COVID. Maybe next Fall.
The one thing I hadn't expected was to spend the whole year on Hawaii. I had three trips planned: RWOT trips to Buenos Aires and The Hague and a trip back to California. I actually had tickets for the first two, but they ended up cancelled. The Buenos Aires trip less than a week out. Kauai isn't a big island, so that makes it feel slightly confining, but fortunately there's still exploring to be done.
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with our move here. The environment is beautiful, the stress is down, the creativity is up, the family time is up.
Though the bizarreness of 2020 means that we don't 100% know what living on Hawaii was like, so far, so good.
And 2021 is already welcoming us in just like 2020: on New Year's Eve our lights started flickering. We watched The Rise of Skywalker (finally!) and the TV went off at least three times. This morning it's obvious there's a widespread problem with out electrical system. Most of our rooms can't support more than a few things being on. We're no longer drawing power from our battery. We're getting maddening flickering and dimming. Our voltage is dropping down below 110V, perhaps lower, which could be damaging our appliances, including our brand-new refrigerator and chest freezer. Obviously, the solar power people f***ed something up or else there's a problem with one of our solar-power devices. I communicated with our engineer this morning and he responded very quickly, told me he alerted the problem team ... and it's been crickets since. Meanwhile, we couldn't even watch TV this evening because it was dropping out every few minutes. So, welcome 2021.