The Anniversary Week
Aug. 14th, 2020 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aThis is Kimberly and my's twentieth anniversary week. To be precise, Wednesday was our twentieth anniversary.
Much of the week has seen contractors working on our roof and in our garage. That's all part of the solar power project which is *finally* going into construction four months after we signed the contract. (The time in-between: plans, approvals, the ordering of equipment, the waiting 4-6 weeks for equipment to arrive, and then the waiting another few weeks for us to get on the schedule, none of which has seen particular delays, but all of which has gone to the maximum time scheduled.)
Monday saw a bunch of workers swarm onto our roof to install the brackets for the panels, then head off to await inspection. I assume that happened, but if so we never saw it. But they were back today to place the solar panels in the brackets.
So now we have twelve handsome solar panels atop the south and southeast sides of our roof. Well, I presume we do, I haven't headed out to see them.
(And 12 is certainly more than we need at the moment, but I really wanted to plan for the future, both in electricity needs and in panels that will slowly lose efficiency over time, and the cost of the panels themselves was relatively small for the overall system.)
Meanwhile, we had an electrician here on Tuesday, mysteriously missing on Wednesday, then here on Thursday and Friday. I think he's a surfer because he likes to show up quite late (and maybe there were really good waves on Wednesday?) So far he's installed a mass of equipment in our garage, including our Tesla Powerwall (which the crew brought with the solar panels today). And beyond that, I dunno. There was talk of pulling lines through our attics yesterday, but that still hasn't happened.
Apparently the project is supposed to be done on the 19th, but the electrician admitted it was going to be tight, then asked if he could come in on Saturday. I demurred, since we had other plans, but told him we'd be happy to have him early and/or late on the three remaining weekdays.
Looking at the schedule, it appears that we're still four to six weeks out of having actual solar power. I believe the rest of the time will be entirely spent on inspections, with something like 5-10 days scheduled for the local utility to come out and put a sticker on the local power pole that says "Warning! Owner Generated Power!' (I'm pretty sure that in 5-10 days I could walk to the far end of the island and back.)
Anyway, solar power by the end of September is my current hope.
OK, actual anniversary. That was Wednesday, but the place that Kimberly wanted to go wasn't open on Wednesday, so we'd scheduled it for Friday.
I was thinking about cooking up some fried shrimp for dinner, but Kimberly suggested we could instead go to one of my favored restaurants Taco Bell, and since we'd been talking about desert I in turn suggested we pick up a tuxedo cake at Costco.
So we drove out to Lihue, listening to the Magnolia soundtrack, made a lightning strike on Costco to pick up that cake, and then drove through Taco Bell.
Romantic!
I said it was our Taco & Tuxedo Anniversary.
Today we out to Duke's, a nice restaurant overlooking Nawiliwili Bay. I'm leery of sit-down restaurants right now, but was willing to make an exception for our anniversary. (And everything seemed pretty safe: they even had a QR code that you could scan to get their menu, so you didn't have to touch stuff.)
We had a nice dinner, with some shrimp and some fish tacos for me and some hunk of meat and potatoes for Kimberly and tasty strawberry and coconut drinks for both of us. (I realized that I couldn't have alcohol on one of the couple of times a year that I sometimes have a drink, because I was driving. Alas!)
It was a good dinner with a beautiful view.
And that was anniversary week.
Tomorrow, barring problems: a land called Hanalei
Much of the week has seen contractors working on our roof and in our garage. That's all part of the solar power project which is *finally* going into construction four months after we signed the contract. (The time in-between: plans, approvals, the ordering of equipment, the waiting 4-6 weeks for equipment to arrive, and then the waiting another few weeks for us to get on the schedule, none of which has seen particular delays, but all of which has gone to the maximum time scheduled.)
Monday saw a bunch of workers swarm onto our roof to install the brackets for the panels, then head off to await inspection. I assume that happened, but if so we never saw it. But they were back today to place the solar panels in the brackets.
So now we have twelve handsome solar panels atop the south and southeast sides of our roof. Well, I presume we do, I haven't headed out to see them.
(And 12 is certainly more than we need at the moment, but I really wanted to plan for the future, both in electricity needs and in panels that will slowly lose efficiency over time, and the cost of the panels themselves was relatively small for the overall system.)
Meanwhile, we had an electrician here on Tuesday, mysteriously missing on Wednesday, then here on Thursday and Friday. I think he's a surfer because he likes to show up quite late (and maybe there were really good waves on Wednesday?) So far he's installed a mass of equipment in our garage, including our Tesla Powerwall (which the crew brought with the solar panels today). And beyond that, I dunno. There was talk of pulling lines through our attics yesterday, but that still hasn't happened.
Apparently the project is supposed to be done on the 19th, but the electrician admitted it was going to be tight, then asked if he could come in on Saturday. I demurred, since we had other plans, but told him we'd be happy to have him early and/or late on the three remaining weekdays.
Looking at the schedule, it appears that we're still four to six weeks out of having actual solar power. I believe the rest of the time will be entirely spent on inspections, with something like 5-10 days scheduled for the local utility to come out and put a sticker on the local power pole that says "Warning! Owner Generated Power!' (I'm pretty sure that in 5-10 days I could walk to the far end of the island and back.)
Anyway, solar power by the end of September is my current hope.
OK, actual anniversary. That was Wednesday, but the place that Kimberly wanted to go wasn't open on Wednesday, so we'd scheduled it for Friday.
I was thinking about cooking up some fried shrimp for dinner, but Kimberly suggested we could instead go to one of my favored restaurants Taco Bell, and since we'd been talking about desert I in turn suggested we pick up a tuxedo cake at Costco.
So we drove out to Lihue, listening to the Magnolia soundtrack, made a lightning strike on Costco to pick up that cake, and then drove through Taco Bell.
Romantic!
I said it was our Taco & Tuxedo Anniversary.
Today we out to Duke's, a nice restaurant overlooking Nawiliwili Bay. I'm leery of sit-down restaurants right now, but was willing to make an exception for our anniversary. (And everything seemed pretty safe: they even had a QR code that you could scan to get their menu, so you didn't have to touch stuff.)
We had a nice dinner, with some shrimp and some fish tacos for me and some hunk of meat and potatoes for Kimberly and tasty strawberry and coconut drinks for both of us. (I realized that I couldn't have alcohol on one of the couple of times a year that I sometimes have a drink, because I was driving. Alas!)
It was a good dinner with a beautiful view.
And that was anniversary week.
Tomorrow, barring problems: a land called Hanalei