Two Months Later ...
Oct. 18th, 2021 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIt has been a tiring almost-two-months since Kimberly's foot surgery in Oahu. She has needed lots of assistance, which I'm very happy to provide, and we're both hopeful that her work on her foot will leave her more able to walk than she has been in the last four years, but all of that water-fetching, cooler-filling, meal-preparing, and general support is still tiring.
And meanwhile, life on those islands goes on:
Doctors. A few weeks ago, Kimberly and I each got a letter from our doctor saying that she was ending her practice on the island ... as of that day. After three years on the island, she's moving back to the mainland to be closer to family. This is apparently a common occurrence on the island, with people saying that often have to change their PCP every few years, and I have to guess it was exacerbated by the pandemic, with there being at least a year where no responsible person was traveling back and forth to the mainland, except for emergencies. So Kimberly and I promptly made appointments to establish care with a new PCP at Wilcox. Her appointment is in late January, mine early February. (Lots of people over on Kauai FB seem very upset by that lag and don't seem to understand that first-time appointments like this are always very slow, both because they're longer and because they effectively ration new patients).
Solar. We lost our solar power a few weeks ago. The most frustrating thing is that no one told us. Our solar people are suppose to be monitoring our system, but they went 5 days without noticing that we were generating 0 power from our panels. I only noticed because there was a power outage in our area and so I popped into the app to see how our system was doing. (Turns out the blackout hadn't hit us, else we would have been down due to that lack of solar power.) When I contacted our solar company they pretty quickly declared our inverter was toast, which made me happy that I'd negotiated up to a 25-year warranty on it. But, island life and all, it'll be 10-15 business days before they have a replacement inverter for us, but at least we've gotten a tentative appointment scheduled, assuming it arrives on time: October 20th. So, we'll be paying Hawaiian electricity prices again for a while. (In fact, our September bill has come in, and was $45, including the very start of this problems; that's infinitely higher than our last three months of power, as we'd run positive all summer.)
Costco. Other things I learned recently: our mayor shops at Costco and likes the bacon-wrapped chicken. Small island.
Biking. Here's one other change since Kimberly's surgery: I've been taking my bike out a lot on my free Saturdays. Twice I've been to the Kapaa bike trail, in large part because Kimberly needed to get Nellie's brakes replaced, as they came out of the surgery toast (hopefully no foreshadowing there!!!). She thinks the docs may have dragged Nellie all around with the brakes on, but she'd also been rattling around in the back of Julie a lot in previous weeks. So there's a bike shop out by the Trail that said they could deal with Nellie, so I took her out there once to look at the scooter, and then a bit more than a month later to swap in new brakes, after their order finally showed up. (With that horrible global shipping situation, they told me 1-6 months, and said it'd only be quick if someone happened to have one of those brakes sitting around, and fortunately someone did.) Nellie's brakes still suck because the way the wheels are set up they just can't use good brakes like disc brakes or even calipers, but they now lock correctly, which they didn't after the Oahu surgery trip. One other bike tripe was to Mahaulepu. The dirt trails there are fun to ride. And a fourth was up to Kokee. I didn't like that ride as much because the road I took was rock-studded dirt that was dangerous and hard-going, though I did get further distance than I had previously riding, and got to see a new perspective of Waimea Canyon.
COVID. After our politicians decided they were just going to let COVID run wild on the islands, we had our worst outbreak ever, much of that in the last two months, and sacrificed another 100 people or so to allow tourism and the economy to continue. For a while, Kauai was actually the worst of the four main islands. It seems to have finally settled down, but boy have I learned how tourism rules these islands over the course of this pandemic, how it's raised up over the lives of the people here. But the bright side is those self-same people saw it too, so we are starting to see changes that could lead to better controls over tourism rather than just blind, constant increase.
Writing. My writing continues, though my schedule hasn't been great for the last two months. I'm on the verge of having finish about four books worth of content since the start of the pandemic. That fourth book will be my elf book for RQ, which has certainly taken a huge bite of my time since the start of the year. I was originally planning to have it done by the end of September, and then October, and at this point it looks like I might be content-complete by the end of the month, but still requiring a bit of editing. I'm thrilled that the book will hopefully be an official RQ release after running elf material down a few different paths over the last 20 years, but I'll also be thrilled to have my creative time back.
Cats. Still not sure the cats are 100%. Lucy has just had one of her strange incidents in the last month or so, but we need to get a weight check on her to see the next step. Meanwhile, Callisto hasn't been eating great in the last few weeks, so it might be time to get her back in to the vet. Sigh. (She's been eating well three nights in a row though, so making her tummy is finally settling, fingers crossed.)
And that's just some of what's going on at the moment ...
And meanwhile, life on those islands goes on:
Doctors. A few weeks ago, Kimberly and I each got a letter from our doctor saying that she was ending her practice on the island ... as of that day. After three years on the island, she's moving back to the mainland to be closer to family. This is apparently a common occurrence on the island, with people saying that often have to change their PCP every few years, and I have to guess it was exacerbated by the pandemic, with there being at least a year where no responsible person was traveling back and forth to the mainland, except for emergencies. So Kimberly and I promptly made appointments to establish care with a new PCP at Wilcox. Her appointment is in late January, mine early February. (Lots of people over on Kauai FB seem very upset by that lag and don't seem to understand that first-time appointments like this are always very slow, both because they're longer and because they effectively ration new patients).
Solar. We lost our solar power a few weeks ago. The most frustrating thing is that no one told us. Our solar people are suppose to be monitoring our system, but they went 5 days without noticing that we were generating 0 power from our panels. I only noticed because there was a power outage in our area and so I popped into the app to see how our system was doing. (Turns out the blackout hadn't hit us, else we would have been down due to that lack of solar power.) When I contacted our solar company they pretty quickly declared our inverter was toast, which made me happy that I'd negotiated up to a 25-year warranty on it. But, island life and all, it'll be 10-15 business days before they have a replacement inverter for us, but at least we've gotten a tentative appointment scheduled, assuming it arrives on time: October 20th. So, we'll be paying Hawaiian electricity prices again for a while. (In fact, our September bill has come in, and was $45, including the very start of this problems; that's infinitely higher than our last three months of power, as we'd run positive all summer.)
Costco. Other things I learned recently: our mayor shops at Costco and likes the bacon-wrapped chicken. Small island.
Biking. Here's one other change since Kimberly's surgery: I've been taking my bike out a lot on my free Saturdays. Twice I've been to the Kapaa bike trail, in large part because Kimberly needed to get Nellie's brakes replaced, as they came out of the surgery toast (hopefully no foreshadowing there!!!). She thinks the docs may have dragged Nellie all around with the brakes on, but she'd also been rattling around in the back of Julie a lot in previous weeks. So there's a bike shop out by the Trail that said they could deal with Nellie, so I took her out there once to look at the scooter, and then a bit more than a month later to swap in new brakes, after their order finally showed up. (With that horrible global shipping situation, they told me 1-6 months, and said it'd only be quick if someone happened to have one of those brakes sitting around, and fortunately someone did.) Nellie's brakes still suck because the way the wheels are set up they just can't use good brakes like disc brakes or even calipers, but they now lock correctly, which they didn't after the Oahu surgery trip. One other bike tripe was to Mahaulepu. The dirt trails there are fun to ride. And a fourth was up to Kokee. I didn't like that ride as much because the road I took was rock-studded dirt that was dangerous and hard-going, though I did get further distance than I had previously riding, and got to see a new perspective of Waimea Canyon.
COVID. After our politicians decided they were just going to let COVID run wild on the islands, we had our worst outbreak ever, much of that in the last two months, and sacrificed another 100 people or so to allow tourism and the economy to continue. For a while, Kauai was actually the worst of the four main islands. It seems to have finally settled down, but boy have I learned how tourism rules these islands over the course of this pandemic, how it's raised up over the lives of the people here. But the bright side is those self-same people saw it too, so we are starting to see changes that could lead to better controls over tourism rather than just blind, constant increase.
Writing. My writing continues, though my schedule hasn't been great for the last two months. I'm on the verge of having finish about four books worth of content since the start of the pandemic. That fourth book will be my elf book for RQ, which has certainly taken a huge bite of my time since the start of the year. I was originally planning to have it done by the end of September, and then October, and at this point it looks like I might be content-complete by the end of the month, but still requiring a bit of editing. I'm thrilled that the book will hopefully be an official RQ release after running elf material down a few different paths over the last 20 years, but I'll also be thrilled to have my creative time back.
Cats. Still not sure the cats are 100%. Lucy has just had one of her strange incidents in the last month or so, but we need to get a weight check on her to see the next step. Meanwhile, Callisto hasn't been eating great in the last few weeks, so it might be time to get her back in to the vet. Sigh. (She's been eating well three nights in a row though, so making her tummy is finally settling, fingers crossed.)
And that's just some of what's going on at the moment ...