In Which We Arrive in Kauai
Jan. 1st, 2020 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aAnd today, we moved.
The Disappointing Sleep.. I managed to get to sleep at 11.30pm last night, which was a great victory for me ... and then I was woken by explosions outside thirty minutes later. Sigh. After that my sleep was much more fitful, until I got out of bed a minute or two before my alarm went off at 3.30am.
(That may be the only time in my adult life that I wasn't awake at midnight for the New Year.)
The Final Goodbye. Jay showed up a little earlier than planned to drive us to the airport, around 4am, but we were pretty much ready to go. Ostensibly to make sure that we hadn't forgotten anything, Kimberly and I walked the house one last time, looking at all our rooms. As Kimberly says, it's weird to think that we're never going to walk the halls of that house again.
The Oakland Marathon. It was still dark when we arrived at the Oakland airport. (In fact, it would still be dark when we took off.) And that's when the marathon began: I needed to haul all of our luggage, mainly on my own, because Kimberly is not OKed for lifting and carrying. Jay suggested renting one of the little carts outside, and that got us up to the Alaska counter: a very short line, I should note, because we were traveling with pets. Afterward we sat down to await Kimberly's wheelchair, because between her foot and her recent surgery she didn't want to walk the airport. But that plan quickly changed when the wheelchair concierge came by to say we'd need to wait for a while, then told a couple who'd been there before us that they were down to 30 minutes. So at that point we decided to walk, because we had no idea how long it would take to get through TSA with cats. (And before we left, I told the woman we'd checked in with at Alaska that we wouldn't need our wheelchair afterward, and she was aghast at the fact that the wait was more than 30 minutes.)
Fortunately, our TSA-Pre work paid off. We pretty much walked up to the metal detector (no naked body scans!) and didn't have to take anything off but our metal and electronics. Kimberly and I both went through, and meanwhile we requested a private screening to deal with the cats. So off we went to a room (that I was displeased to see had a curtain rather than a door, but at least we were out of the walkway). I took the cats out of their carriers one at a time, leashed them, passed off the carrier to a TSA agent, and they took it away to x-ray. The cats were both perfectly calm (likely thanks in part to Gabapentin), though Lucy was trying to explore everything — not for the last time over the day.
We were done and to our gate an hour before boarding.
The Early Departure. We started boarding at 6.10am, and at 6.30am the Alaska Airlines crew was saying that everyone was boarded. The plane was empty, like about a third full, with most people and couples having a row to ourselves. Kimberly and I were moved a row back at the last minute, and we not only had a row to ourselves, but also the row in front of us! I hadn't seen a plane so empty since the '80s. That was apparently our other good reason for flying on January 1st. The flight took off 10 or 15 minutes early, which is just about unheard of, and we had plenty of space on a pretty quiet flight, which decreased the stress for us and the cats.
The Stressful Flight. There was one bit of stress on the flight: the length proved to be too long for our beloved middle-aged Lucy, especially since we weren't able to communicate beforehand that she should use the facilities. So about six hours after we left the house she started madly scrabbling to get out of her cat carrier, then had an accident. Poor kitty! I took her to the bathroom and got her and the carrier as clean as I could. (She was climbing all over trying to explore once more! I think we might have left a lot of fur behind! But that seems fair for the extra $100 Alaska charges for us to carry a cat in our normal carry-on luggage space.) And then I was worried for the next two hours because I knew her cat carrier didn't smell great and I wasn't sure if she might have more problems. (No more problems! And I was able to open some of the additional flaps in her super-carrier to get her some fresher air. I even let her poke her head out from time to time, while keeping good control over her.)
And then I had some more stress when I got off the plane, because I was so focused on getting Kimberly and the cats and our too much carry-on luggage (for one person to carry) out that I left behind my laptop and iPad. I actually didn't realize until we were driving away from the airport, but I did key in then, and Alaska was able to easily recover it for me, albeit with some stressful waiting.
(Other than that, the Alaska flight was quite good. The crew and staff were all really friendly and even helped me carry cats while I was struggling on and off the plane; and was also genuinely concerned when I went back to the bathroom with Lucy.)
The Human Society Interlude. Oh, I should mention that before we left the airport, we did take care of officially importing the cats. It was just a little bit of nothing, because all the hard work was the paperwork with Hawaii that I completed months ago. Our Humane Society contact was waiting at the gate (they let someone meet you at the gate!) and took the cats and me out to a van, where she slipped inside to scan their chips. After that she collected my precious, precious paperwork, and then was the next person to help me carry our cats around. I had no shame today!
The New House. And then my dad drove us to our new house. We've been here a few times before; I even helped him do a teeny bit of work some years ago, when they were between renters. But it was different landing here to ... live. It felt really alien at first, the idea of living in Kauai now that we're here and the idea that this house is our new home. But as the sun has set and the crickets have started chirping outside, and we've put out toiletries out in our en suite bathroom (a real luxury for us!) and starting hanging some clothes (because we have no dressers!) it started to feel a bit more like home to me.
There are certainly some blemishes in the house. Renters redid the floors both upstairs and downstairs and they both need work; and there are cabinet doors and blinds that are somewhat mechanically deficient. But it's the sort of thing you kind of expect in a rental house: because renters just tend to turn a blind eye unless it really bugs them. We also need to figure out if there are ways to keep the upstairs cooler during the day, because it gets a little warm, at least until you turn on fans (but screen doors for the front door and two lanais are a top priority and they should help). And I certainly remember all the problems in our Berkeley house when we landed there 19 years ago, from crazy piping to a rickety water heater and a house full of windows that didn't keep the heat either in or out. So, we'll have some new challenges and I hope they'll allow us to make this house truly our own too. (We actually have several things we want to do to make the house our own, including not just those screen doors, but also lots of built-in shelvings and solar panels, but the rest of that will probably await until we sell our Berkeley house, because we've stretched our finances with all the work we did to help sell it.)
The Cats Roam. The cats both continue to shock me with their adventurousness. We started them off in the bedroom with our mattress (the only piece of furniture we had waiting, though my dad and Mary have since supplied us with a small hodgepodge of chairs, and we also have a few appliances: a microwave and a printer and for that matter a new computer screen for my Mini), but they were soon exploring the whole house. Lucy's smelly airplane trauma was entirely forgotten, and though they were obviously a little bit nervous, they were also fearless. Within a few hours they seemed relatively comfortable with their new territory. They're also being entirely friendly with each other, which I'd always dreamed might happen when they got new territory that hadn't originally belonged to Lucy alone ... but I sadly doubt it will last.
Meanwhile, Back in Berkeley. We heard word from one of our neighbors that a large group of men were in our house! And using power tools on New Year's Day! And throwing stuff on the sidewalk!
So apparently our schedule of stuff in Berkeley is getting done, as the haulers were #1 on the list. I assume the stuff was removed from the sidewalk afterward (and likely I'll start hearing statuses from our realtor at some point.)
Our New Life Begins. After staying at the house for a while with the cats, my dad, Mary, Kimberly, and I had lunch at Keoki's, one of the first places I remember eating in Kauai, on October 31, 2001. (They had a costume contest, which is why it was memorable.) Then we went to Walmart, one of the few places open today, to get some first sundries and food. (And our mattress now has our own sheets!) Then my dad and Mary dropped us off, and we had our first evening alone in Kauai. OK, that involved napping through the late afternoon, but then I cooked up some pasta, sauce, and broccoli for dinner. (There will be many changes in Kauai, and one is that we're going to try and start cooking for ourselves, rather than just eating frozen food and canned goods.) And I discovered that unlike in our Berkeley house, I can actually get a cell phone signal in the house (should that have been in the disclosures? I mean Kimberly and I racked our brains for everything that we could think of, and perhaps I would have mentioned poor cell phone signals and wifi challenges if I'd thought of it, but there are ultimately only so many things you can think to put down.), which allowed us to stream a TV show. It was like our life was continuing on.
But a new life, with not just new challenges, but also new adventures, and hopefully new relaxation and new opportunities alike.
It begins here, on the first day of the 2020s.
The Disappointing Sleep.. I managed to get to sleep at 11.30pm last night, which was a great victory for me ... and then I was woken by explosions outside thirty minutes later. Sigh. After that my sleep was much more fitful, until I got out of bed a minute or two before my alarm went off at 3.30am.
(That may be the only time in my adult life that I wasn't awake at midnight for the New Year.)
The Final Goodbye. Jay showed up a little earlier than planned to drive us to the airport, around 4am, but we were pretty much ready to go. Ostensibly to make sure that we hadn't forgotten anything, Kimberly and I walked the house one last time, looking at all our rooms. As Kimberly says, it's weird to think that we're never going to walk the halls of that house again.
The Oakland Marathon. It was still dark when we arrived at the Oakland airport. (In fact, it would still be dark when we took off.) And that's when the marathon began: I needed to haul all of our luggage, mainly on my own, because Kimberly is not OKed for lifting and carrying. Jay suggested renting one of the little carts outside, and that got us up to the Alaska counter: a very short line, I should note, because we were traveling with pets. Afterward we sat down to await Kimberly's wheelchair, because between her foot and her recent surgery she didn't want to walk the airport. But that plan quickly changed when the wheelchair concierge came by to say we'd need to wait for a while, then told a couple who'd been there before us that they were down to 30 minutes. So at that point we decided to walk, because we had no idea how long it would take to get through TSA with cats. (And before we left, I told the woman we'd checked in with at Alaska that we wouldn't need our wheelchair afterward, and she was aghast at the fact that the wait was more than 30 minutes.)
Fortunately, our TSA-Pre work paid off. We pretty much walked up to the metal detector (no naked body scans!) and didn't have to take anything off but our metal and electronics. Kimberly and I both went through, and meanwhile we requested a private screening to deal with the cats. So off we went to a room (that I was displeased to see had a curtain rather than a door, but at least we were out of the walkway). I took the cats out of their carriers one at a time, leashed them, passed off the carrier to a TSA agent, and they took it away to x-ray. The cats were both perfectly calm (likely thanks in part to Gabapentin), though Lucy was trying to explore everything — not for the last time over the day.
We were done and to our gate an hour before boarding.
The Early Departure. We started boarding at 6.10am, and at 6.30am the Alaska Airlines crew was saying that everyone was boarded. The plane was empty, like about a third full, with most people and couples having a row to ourselves. Kimberly and I were moved a row back at the last minute, and we not only had a row to ourselves, but also the row in front of us! I hadn't seen a plane so empty since the '80s. That was apparently our other good reason for flying on January 1st. The flight took off 10 or 15 minutes early, which is just about unheard of, and we had plenty of space on a pretty quiet flight, which decreased the stress for us and the cats.
The Stressful Flight. There was one bit of stress on the flight: the length proved to be too long for our beloved middle-aged Lucy, especially since we weren't able to communicate beforehand that she should use the facilities. So about six hours after we left the house she started madly scrabbling to get out of her cat carrier, then had an accident. Poor kitty! I took her to the bathroom and got her and the carrier as clean as I could. (She was climbing all over trying to explore once more! I think we might have left a lot of fur behind! But that seems fair for the extra $100 Alaska charges for us to carry a cat in our normal carry-on luggage space.) And then I was worried for the next two hours because I knew her cat carrier didn't smell great and I wasn't sure if she might have more problems. (No more problems! And I was able to open some of the additional flaps in her super-carrier to get her some fresher air. I even let her poke her head out from time to time, while keeping good control over her.)
And then I had some more stress when I got off the plane, because I was so focused on getting Kimberly and the cats and our too much carry-on luggage (for one person to carry) out that I left behind my laptop and iPad. I actually didn't realize until we were driving away from the airport, but I did key in then, and Alaska was able to easily recover it for me, albeit with some stressful waiting.
(Other than that, the Alaska flight was quite good. The crew and staff were all really friendly and even helped me carry cats while I was struggling on and off the plane; and was also genuinely concerned when I went back to the bathroom with Lucy.)
The Human Society Interlude. Oh, I should mention that before we left the airport, we did take care of officially importing the cats. It was just a little bit of nothing, because all the hard work was the paperwork with Hawaii that I completed months ago. Our Humane Society contact was waiting at the gate (they let someone meet you at the gate!) and took the cats and me out to a van, where she slipped inside to scan their chips. After that she collected my precious, precious paperwork, and then was the next person to help me carry our cats around. I had no shame today!
The New House. And then my dad drove us to our new house. We've been here a few times before; I even helped him do a teeny bit of work some years ago, when they were between renters. But it was different landing here to ... live. It felt really alien at first, the idea of living in Kauai now that we're here and the idea that this house is our new home. But as the sun has set and the crickets have started chirping outside, and we've put out toiletries out in our en suite bathroom (a real luxury for us!) and starting hanging some clothes (because we have no dressers!) it started to feel a bit more like home to me.
There are certainly some blemishes in the house. Renters redid the floors both upstairs and downstairs and they both need work; and there are cabinet doors and blinds that are somewhat mechanically deficient. But it's the sort of thing you kind of expect in a rental house: because renters just tend to turn a blind eye unless it really bugs them. We also need to figure out if there are ways to keep the upstairs cooler during the day, because it gets a little warm, at least until you turn on fans (but screen doors for the front door and two lanais are a top priority and they should help). And I certainly remember all the problems in our Berkeley house when we landed there 19 years ago, from crazy piping to a rickety water heater and a house full of windows that didn't keep the heat either in or out. So, we'll have some new challenges and I hope they'll allow us to make this house truly our own too. (We actually have several things we want to do to make the house our own, including not just those screen doors, but also lots of built-in shelvings and solar panels, but the rest of that will probably await until we sell our Berkeley house, because we've stretched our finances with all the work we did to help sell it.)
The Cats Roam. The cats both continue to shock me with their adventurousness. We started them off in the bedroom with our mattress (the only piece of furniture we had waiting, though my dad and Mary have since supplied us with a small hodgepodge of chairs, and we also have a few appliances: a microwave and a printer and for that matter a new computer screen for my Mini), but they were soon exploring the whole house. Lucy's smelly airplane trauma was entirely forgotten, and though they were obviously a little bit nervous, they were also fearless. Within a few hours they seemed relatively comfortable with their new territory. They're also being entirely friendly with each other, which I'd always dreamed might happen when they got new territory that hadn't originally belonged to Lucy alone ... but I sadly doubt it will last.
Meanwhile, Back in Berkeley. We heard word from one of our neighbors that a large group of men were in our house! And using power tools on New Year's Day! And throwing stuff on the sidewalk!
So apparently our schedule of stuff in Berkeley is getting done, as the haulers were #1 on the list. I assume the stuff was removed from the sidewalk afterward (and likely I'll start hearing statuses from our realtor at some point.)
Our New Life Begins. After staying at the house for a while with the cats, my dad, Mary, Kimberly, and I had lunch at Keoki's, one of the first places I remember eating in Kauai, on October 31, 2001. (They had a costume contest, which is why it was memorable.) Then we went to Walmart, one of the few places open today, to get some first sundries and food. (And our mattress now has our own sheets!) Then my dad and Mary dropped us off, and we had our first evening alone in Kauai. OK, that involved napping through the late afternoon, but then I cooked up some pasta, sauce, and broccoli for dinner. (There will be many changes in Kauai, and one is that we're going to try and start cooking for ourselves, rather than just eating frozen food and canned goods.) And I discovered that unlike in our Berkeley house, I can actually get a cell phone signal in the house (should that have been in the disclosures? I mean Kimberly and I racked our brains for everything that we could think of, and perhaps I would have mentioned poor cell phone signals and wifi challenges if I'd thought of it, but there are ultimately only so many things you can think to put down.), which allowed us to stream a TV show. It was like our life was continuing on.
But a new life, with not just new challenges, but also new adventures, and hopefully new relaxation and new opportunities alike.
It begins here, on the first day of the 2020s.