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Hawaiian Happenings
The Writing Conundrum. I have never in my life been writing so much. I'm pretty much writing full-time now: Tuesday & Wednesdays for Blockchain Commons, Monday, Thursday, and Friday for myself, with a few hours here and there for Bitmark. And in the evenings I sometimes continue with my projects (because I didn't quite get them done! and want to!) or sometimes trade off for different projects (so that my "work" and "free" time don't entirely meld together). This has all been great, I'm really enjoying what I'm doing, and I'm creating great content. But I've discovered one problem: I haven't really been journaling (here), because either I'm writing something else, or I need a break from writing.
The House Work. With the new year, I've started work on the house again, with lots of support from my dad. It's weird actually having a house and thinking about working on it myself. I mean, in Berkeley, we usually just let the house be, other than occasionally calling someone for emergency repairs. It was only when we moved that we really did the large-scale stuff that made it more beautiful and/or usable (mostly beautiful: we were trying to sell a house). But a few weeks ago, my dad and I cut down a handful of metal fence posts in the front yard, because the fencing material had long ago rusted out, and they were just annoying obstacles to lawn-mowing. Well, he pretty much cut them out, after a technique he'd looked up to use a jack to lift them out did nothing. Since, I've been putting dirt over the holes to cover them up: things settled over the last week, so I just picked up another bag yesterday). And now, an area of our yard which really didn't benefit from fences doesn't have them.
Today we're going to start work on flooring. I really connected with the process at my dad's house, and feel like I could almost do it on my own. But he's coming over to help, especially with things I don't know like pulling up the old carpet, figuring out what to do with the closet, and figuring out transitions there. Initially we're flooring Kimberly's office, because it hurts her foot. Later we'll be doing mine as well.
I have as a definite goal for 2021 to get our downstairs in order. For Kimberly's office that'll mean getting in the flooring and a murphy bed (ordered! arriving in two weeks!), then for mine flooring, then for the family room fixing tiles that old renters put in badly, then when everything is in place, getting shelving. (The shelving was on the verge of getting contracted with someone, but then I realized we really needed the flooring redone since I find it likely we'll have cabinets below shelves to make them look nice.)
The Smart Stupidity. As part of the process, all of Kimberly's office stuff got moved out to the family room. In order to not create a fire hazard I ended up having to grab a smart plug to accommodate both our internet equipment and her desk equipment. And then our internet went down at 11pm last night. I didn't know what was up with that, but it was still down this morning. Eventually, I found that the smart plug on our wifi router had spontaneously turned itself off yesterday evening.
I told Kimberly this, and she said, "The Christmas Tree!" Sure enough, this was the same smart plug I'd been using for some of our Christmas lights, and the plug that I'd placed our eero wifi router on was programmed in the app to go off at 10.55pm every night. Sigh.
The Koke'e Trips. I've tried at least twice to write a journal entry on Koke'e, but I've never had the energy to finish it up, so here's the TL;DR. I've been up to Koke'e three times on my own now, on Saturdays for hiking. I went down the mountainside leading to the ocean once (and got exhausted by the sun and/or altitude) and into the interior twice. I've found that the roads and paths inside Koke'e are a poorly documented mess. Roads that no longer exist are on maps, new roads go places not noted on the maps, other roads just don't appear at all. The funniest was on my second trip where I ended up walking miles down an unmarked road (which had the same name as a totally different road, or maybe one letter different, or maybe one west and the other east, the various references I've seen are inconsistent) and it was clearly a road used by hunters, because I kept coming across people in orange vests and orange t-shirts and with dogs (and guns). Most of them looked skulky and ignored me, but I talked some with some kids who were out hunting pigs, I suspect for Thanksgiving. Fortunately I was wearing red that day.
The fact that I don't have cell coverage up there, and have never figured out how to hard-download a map of the area, make this all even trickier, not that it would be accurate due to the aforementioned problems.
Some of the hiking trails are fine, though they tend to go places other than what the maps say and/or don't have some side paths. The worst was on my last trip, where I went down a new road, that for once seemed to match what was on the maps, and correctly ticked off two trails, just where they were supposed to be. But when I took the second trail it dead-ended in a hollow under some trees maybe .1 mile from its end. I wandered around, trying to figure out where the path was supposed to go, and eventually gave up, in part because I was anxious about finding my way back, because the whole trail out that far had been a bit hit and miss.
Don't get me wrong: there's a wonderful glade up at Koke'e that's a great place to eat and do some writing. And I enjoy my wanderings, but it's really weird how poorly mapped it is.
The Car Annoyance. Last year I was slowly getting into the swing of appointments in Hawaii. I had a whole sequence of "annoyance" appointments like visiting the optometrist and the dentist which seemed like they had a lot of weight on them because I was doing something new and it was during COVID. I finally got down to my last one this January, which was taking Julie (the Benz) in for her annual tune-up. (Her last tune-up was on December 31, 2019, a few days before I bought her.) I'd been stalling, hoping to maybe do it the same time as her safety check in March, but then the AC suddenly lost all of its guts, and that's DEATH here in Hawaii.
The big annoyance is that we only have one car in our household, Lihue (where the Mercedes Benz repair shop is) is 13 miles away, it's not walkable because the highway is the only path there and back, and even if there were acceptable public transit, I'm not interested in taking any public transit in the middle of COVID. So I need help from my dad to get out there and back if I leave Julie, and that seems like a big imposition.
But I dropped off Julie on Wednesday to get her tune-up and check the AC, and my dad kindly gave me a ride back. Unfortunately, the repair shop seems to heavily work on Hawaiian time, so I had to wait for like 20 minutes while dropping Julie off while the manager talked with a friend-customer-but-obviously-mostly-friend on the phone, and then my noon pickup on Thursday ended up being more like a 3.45pm (which means I had to flake on my 4.30pm Zoom gaming). My dad kindly drove me out again, and they'd done all the tune-up, but they didn't have the part for the AC, which they hadn't told me before I came back, but they're not going to have it until Wednesday anyway, so longer than I would have wanted to leave her, since it was time to pick up groceries. But that means I have to go through the whole rigamarole again in a week or two. And still don't have AC. (And they're not even sure the part will fix it. There's apparently a valve which is usually what pops on these Benz ACs, but they can't tell without taking everything apart. But they're going to replace the valve, and they say that does it the majority of the time, and if that doesn't work only then will they replace the whole compresser, so it could be *two* trips.)
Weird being so car-dependent, but that was part and parcel of the move to a small, rural island.
And that's some of the happenings in Hawaii.
The House Work. With the new year, I've started work on the house again, with lots of support from my dad. It's weird actually having a house and thinking about working on it myself. I mean, in Berkeley, we usually just let the house be, other than occasionally calling someone for emergency repairs. It was only when we moved that we really did the large-scale stuff that made it more beautiful and/or usable (mostly beautiful: we were trying to sell a house). But a few weeks ago, my dad and I cut down a handful of metal fence posts in the front yard, because the fencing material had long ago rusted out, and they were just annoying obstacles to lawn-mowing. Well, he pretty much cut them out, after a technique he'd looked up to use a jack to lift them out did nothing. Since, I've been putting dirt over the holes to cover them up: things settled over the last week, so I just picked up another bag yesterday). And now, an area of our yard which really didn't benefit from fences doesn't have them.
Today we're going to start work on flooring. I really connected with the process at my dad's house, and feel like I could almost do it on my own. But he's coming over to help, especially with things I don't know like pulling up the old carpet, figuring out what to do with the closet, and figuring out transitions there. Initially we're flooring Kimberly's office, because it hurts her foot. Later we'll be doing mine as well.
I have as a definite goal for 2021 to get our downstairs in order. For Kimberly's office that'll mean getting in the flooring and a murphy bed (ordered! arriving in two weeks!), then for mine flooring, then for the family room fixing tiles that old renters put in badly, then when everything is in place, getting shelving. (The shelving was on the verge of getting contracted with someone, but then I realized we really needed the flooring redone since I find it likely we'll have cabinets below shelves to make them look nice.)
The Smart Stupidity. As part of the process, all of Kimberly's office stuff got moved out to the family room. In order to not create a fire hazard I ended up having to grab a smart plug to accommodate both our internet equipment and her desk equipment. And then our internet went down at 11pm last night. I didn't know what was up with that, but it was still down this morning. Eventually, I found that the smart plug on our wifi router had spontaneously turned itself off yesterday evening.
I told Kimberly this, and she said, "The Christmas Tree!" Sure enough, this was the same smart plug I'd been using for some of our Christmas lights, and the plug that I'd placed our eero wifi router on was programmed in the app to go off at 10.55pm every night. Sigh.
The Koke'e Trips. I've tried at least twice to write a journal entry on Koke'e, but I've never had the energy to finish it up, so here's the TL;DR. I've been up to Koke'e three times on my own now, on Saturdays for hiking. I went down the mountainside leading to the ocean once (and got exhausted by the sun and/or altitude) and into the interior twice. I've found that the roads and paths inside Koke'e are a poorly documented mess. Roads that no longer exist are on maps, new roads go places not noted on the maps, other roads just don't appear at all. The funniest was on my second trip where I ended up walking miles down an unmarked road (which had the same name as a totally different road, or maybe one letter different, or maybe one west and the other east, the various references I've seen are inconsistent) and it was clearly a road used by hunters, because I kept coming across people in orange vests and orange t-shirts and with dogs (and guns). Most of them looked skulky and ignored me, but I talked some with some kids who were out hunting pigs, I suspect for Thanksgiving. Fortunately I was wearing red that day.
The fact that I don't have cell coverage up there, and have never figured out how to hard-download a map of the area, make this all even trickier, not that it would be accurate due to the aforementioned problems.
Some of the hiking trails are fine, though they tend to go places other than what the maps say and/or don't have some side paths. The worst was on my last trip, where I went down a new road, that for once seemed to match what was on the maps, and correctly ticked off two trails, just where they were supposed to be. But when I took the second trail it dead-ended in a hollow under some trees maybe .1 mile from its end. I wandered around, trying to figure out where the path was supposed to go, and eventually gave up, in part because I was anxious about finding my way back, because the whole trail out that far had been a bit hit and miss.
Don't get me wrong: there's a wonderful glade up at Koke'e that's a great place to eat and do some writing. And I enjoy my wanderings, but it's really weird how poorly mapped it is.
The Car Annoyance. Last year I was slowly getting into the swing of appointments in Hawaii. I had a whole sequence of "annoyance" appointments like visiting the optometrist and the dentist which seemed like they had a lot of weight on them because I was doing something new and it was during COVID. I finally got down to my last one this January, which was taking Julie (the Benz) in for her annual tune-up. (Her last tune-up was on December 31, 2019, a few days before I bought her.) I'd been stalling, hoping to maybe do it the same time as her safety check in March, but then the AC suddenly lost all of its guts, and that's DEATH here in Hawaii.
The big annoyance is that we only have one car in our household, Lihue (where the Mercedes Benz repair shop is) is 13 miles away, it's not walkable because the highway is the only path there and back, and even if there were acceptable public transit, I'm not interested in taking any public transit in the middle of COVID. So I need help from my dad to get out there and back if I leave Julie, and that seems like a big imposition.
But I dropped off Julie on Wednesday to get her tune-up and check the AC, and my dad kindly gave me a ride back. Unfortunately, the repair shop seems to heavily work on Hawaiian time, so I had to wait for like 20 minutes while dropping Julie off while the manager talked with a friend-customer-but-obviously-mostly-friend on the phone, and then my noon pickup on Thursday ended up being more like a 3.45pm (which means I had to flake on my 4.30pm Zoom gaming). My dad kindly drove me out again, and they'd done all the tune-up, but they didn't have the part for the AC, which they hadn't told me before I came back, but they're not going to have it until Wednesday anyway, so longer than I would have wanted to leave her, since it was time to pick up groceries. But that means I have to go through the whole rigamarole again in a week or two. And still don't have AC. (And they're not even sure the part will fix it. There's apparently a valve which is usually what pops on these Benz ACs, but they can't tell without taking everything apart. But they're going to replace the valve, and they say that does it the majority of the time, and if that doesn't work only then will they replace the whole compresser, so it could be *two* trips.)
Weird being so car-dependent, but that was part and parcel of the move to a small, rural island.
And that's some of the happenings in Hawaii.