Weather-pocalypse Cancelled!

[shannon_a]

So I haven't written that we've had an unexpected family member since Sunday evening. One of Mary's co-workers (actually, she manages another store owned by the same people in the same mall as the one that Mary manages) lives up on the north store in Princeville. So (for now at least) when she has to close for the evening and is also on the next day, she stays here at my dad and Mary's house. She thus stayed here Sunday night, then my dad insisted that she stay again yesterday night because of the horrible weather, and she's to stay here again tonight.

She seems like a very nice lady, but it's made the house that much more crowded. Kimberly has mainly been feeling the louder, busier atmosphere of the house, while I was more concerned over the bathroom contention in the morning, which left me unable to shower until after breakfast (and thus left me feeling like an ogre until after breakfast, as a shower is how I mark the start of my day).

So, subpar but understandable. And that's exactly how nice Mary is, in opening her home to others.

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I went to bed last night to the sound of huge winds and rain. I was expecting more of the same today ... and instead woke to blue skies and sunshine. I was especially amused by this because the weather report gave an unusually specific prediction. Not only were we supposed to have 15 mph winds gusting up to 40 mph and thunderstorms, but they listed the chance of rain at ... 100%.

Not so much. On the south shore, here, it's been the most beautiful day of our visit, with no rain in sight.

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Kimberly had been entranced by Kapa'a when we went through it on Friday, and so we decided to go and visit in this morning so that she could look around at Kauai's largest town, which we've just passed by in that past.

So we looped out to Lihue in the east and up to Kapa'a ... and the closer we got, the more gray it got. It was raining lightly by the time we reached Kapa'a. I wasn't too thrilled to step out into the street in shorts, a t-shirt, and slippas. Kimberly became less thrilled as she looked around Kapa'a and discovered it was all expensive and touristy stuff. She decided that the teeny village of Kalaheo that we visited yesterday was nicer.

So after walking a few blocks up the main strip, we slunk back to the car and beat an ignoble retreat.

The sky cleared again as we headed back to Lihue.

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My dad started feeling sick yesterday, and he presumes he picked up a virus from someone after he got soaked to the skin on our Friday-afternoon hike.

While we were walking through the rain in Kapa'a today I started feeling increasingly unwell too. Headachey, throatachey, and weak. I feared I was coming down with his same cold, and napped for a few hours after lunch.

I felt much better afterward, though I'm feeling a bit throatachey and headachey again now. Hopefully I'm fighting it off, as being ill on planes is no fun.

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When I awoke from my nap around 3pm, feeling better and seeing the beautiful blue skies outside, I decided that I wanted to head down to Lawai Beach to swim. I knew that I might be setting myself up to get taken down by the cold I was fighting, but I was willing to take the chance to get a truly great beach day in.

And, it was. Things were beautiful down at Lawai too, with lots of sun. Though the western and eastern beaches have gotten all brown and icky from the weather, the southside water was blue again, and though there was a lot of sand about the water close to the beach, it cleared up when I went further out.

So, I had great, comfortable swimming. The reason I choose Lawai is because it's the best fish beach I know of on Kauai, and I'd been fish-deprived to date. Happily, I made up for it today. I saw lots of old friends like raccoon butterly fish (a school of 6!) and parrotfish (one of them huge) and various wrasses. I also some brightly colored fish I didn't know the names of in blue and purple and other attractive colors.

Oh, and I saw an eel. The second one I've seen on Kauai, and not my favorite of critters. He was brown and several feet long. I'd guess that the storms had screwed up his normal killing ground, because he was swimming under a new rock. I was fortunately in pretty deep water, so he was 6 or 10 feet down from me. I watched in kind of horrified hypnosis as he swam under the rock, and his long, lean form just kept going and going and going. Then I started heading back to the beach to be nowhere near him.

And I watched lots of other fishes for quite a while before getting out of the water.

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Doing laundry now. I always like to get clothes clean before I go, but this time I actually ran out of clothes a day early because of the need for new clothes the day we returned from our drenching hike. And I'd gone through all my socks, with one pair very muddy from the hike, another pair full of red dirt from our trip to Kalaheo, and my third and last pair used because it was so chilly yesterday.

I'm not sure I'm going to be swimming tomorrow, as my swim clothes will all be clean and dry shortly, and I did get in some great swimming of the sort I wanted today. We'll see though. Another beautiful day like today might beckon to me.

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Forgot to write about the very exciting trip to Costco on the way back from Kapa'a. I got a nice black and gold Hawaiian shirt as a birthday present, Kimberly got a $2 turtle mug that she's been regretting not buying for 14 months since we were last here, and we got some delicious triple-chocolate cake that's been disappearing too quickly since.

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And now it's back to reading Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward Lerner, which I'd like to finish before we leave, so I can toss it in the suitcase rather than carrying it on the plane in my backpack.

It's a bit of a meh book, but after the superb Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, I won't complain about my reading material on this trip.