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shannon_aBad night last night. I couldn't get to sleep. And then I woke up and realized only a few hours had gone by, so I stumbled out to take some more melatonin. Then something I had to eat yesterday didn't agree with me, leaving me awake feeling sick from 3.30-4.30. Then I was up again at 6.30. So, pretty bad's night sleep.
It was also raining and storming every time I woke up. Forecasters have been forecasting apocalyptic rain on and off throughout the winter, but this is the first one that's really hit. A classic Kona Low, which are the big ones (and which blow in from the opposite direction of our usual weather patterns.) Looks like we've had 6 inches in the last 24 hours as I write, so I expect there's been some flooding. (But we're on a ridgeline, so no problem as long as I keep gutters free and a few places for water to flow around the house, and I've gotten better at all of that over the years.) When I was showering this morning I heard big booming thunder a few times.
I went downstairs to work for a few hours, but was heading back upstairs sometime around 8.45 and that's when things got complicated.
THE DOG. As I came up the stairs, which are right next to our front door, K. and I noticed a big, soaking-wet orange dog on our front steps. His tail was wagging and he was clearly very happy to see us, so after a moment of puzzlement I stepped outside to see if his collar had a tag on it. No go. But he was so happy to see me!
K. got me a towel to dry the guy off and I spent the next 15 or 20 minutes figuring out what to do with him. Eventually I opted to lure him over to the garage so that he wouldn't run away. (We have a very busy street next to us and I didn't want him to get hit.) I was still puzzling, looking around, to see if anyone was searching for a dog, but again no go.
Which complication #2 appeared.
THE WINDOW GUYS. Since we've moved to Hawaii we've gotten tints put on most of our south-facing windows. Generally, they're to protect us and our stuff from the extreme UV of Hawaii. (Some of our stuff is still fading, but I can only imagine it'd be that much worse without the UV protection.) The window in my office also has a higher level of brightness protection, so that I can see my computer in the morning even if it's sunny and clear. (I actually still have problems at some times during some parts of the year, but it's a lot better than when we moved in, and we've now got the downstairs built out so that I have other places to retreat to if I can't see.) There's been a problem though: our big living room window had gone deeply opaque and my office window had gone somewhat opaque. Which isn't great for windows.
But the 3M film we use has a lifetime warranty, which kind of shocks me, and after we talked to the window guys about it, and they came out to have a look, they ordered us some new film and were out today to deal with our windows.
While I was trying to deal with the dog! We talked about that a bit. Said dog kept trying to leap into their truck. One of the guys pointed out that the dog had an Apple AirTag. (Ah ha! A clue!) I showed them in to my office, and they got to work on the windows, and I returned to complication #1.
THE DOG (II). It took me a bit to figure out how to read the AirTag. Turns out that air tags have NFC tags in them, which means they can be read from the top of most phones. But I had to get to the underside of the air tag, and it was affixed face-up in the collar. Fortunately the pup continued to be entirely friendly so I just took his collar off and was able to scan the AirTag. It came up with an ID number and a phone number ... whose first six digits were blocked. Turns out that unless you report an AirTag as lost, other people can't see the phone number you have attached. So, limited utility.
Meanwhile, K. was also activating the coconut wireless by posting to NextDoor and a few Facebook groups. By this time, I'd closed up the garage with the dog inside, so he wouldn't disappear while we tried to track his people, and had gotten some him some water.
But we were running into complication #3:
THE PT. K. had PT this morning! Although (after surgeries & years of work) she's now doing well enough to walk down the hill to where her PT was, I wasn't going to send her out in the pouring rain. So we then had to do an elaborate ritual for me to get Maria Kia out of the garage so I could take her to PT. She had to grab the dog so that I could open the garage. One of the window guys had to move their truck out of our driveway. I had to move Maria out of the garage. I had to close the garage door, and then K. had to escape through the house (without the dog). It was like the Rush Hour game.
We managed. I took K. to PT. It's really close, only .4 miles away so I was back quickly.
And then everything began to (thankfully) unwind.
THE DOG (III). By the time K. landed at PT, coconut wireless had turned up two phone numbers, one I think for the dog's owner and another for the dog's owner's cousin (who was also nearby). I was calling one (from the garage with the dog) when one of the window guys showed up to tell me someone was at the door. It was the dog's owner! I think maybe they'd seen K's NextDoor post, which mentioned the location of our house. Dog returned! As we'd guessed, it had escaped their yard due to the thunder this morning. Happy reunion!
THE WINDOW GUYS (II). The window guys took somewhere between an hour and a hour and a half to clear, clean, and redo both windows. They look great again, whew. We really hadn't known what to do with that problem, and now we do. They were done before ...
THE PT (II). was done. It was actually bright and sunny when I went to pick K. up. (It wouldn't stay that way.)
Wottaday. I was EXHAUSTED after all that craziness. But I did manage to edit two more histories for THE LOST HISTORIES this morning. Firefly Games and Rogue Games (the latter being another that required updates since I originally wrote it, which is one of my tasks on this next-to-last pass on the three Lost Histories books.) I also barely started work on a new project. (I'd wanted to do more, but between a bad night's sleep and a crazy morning, I ended up napping in the afternoon and playing Slay the Spire 2.)
A few other notes on recent times:
THE DIET. We decided to close out the diet before we entered its fourth week. One of our friends showed us a study saying that diets of that sort just don't do much long-term change to intestinal flora, and that's what we were going for. K. found many more studies that said the same. But, funny story. Some foods are still making me quite sick (like last night), but I haven't been frequently feeling bad in the morning, as had been the case for years. Fingers cross that sticks around, but it has for two weeks at this point.
THE BIKE RACK. I got my trailer hitch receiver install on Maria two weeks ago. My vault (which I use for my keys while swimming) works great in the new received. My bike rack doesn't fit perfectly for some reason. But I just need to lift the rack up to be able to fit the pin through, something that I expect will get more natural with time. So I've been out to the bike path on the east side of the island twice in the last two weeks. K. and I were going to go together this weekend, but that's not looking likely with this storm. (But we'll see what Sunday brings.)
THE BATTERY. The one other problem that's lagging is our dead Tesla Powerwall, which went out last October. I find that politely querying usually gets that sort of thing moving on island. (For example, we hadn't heard anything on our windows for two or three weeks, so I asked them on Wednesday, and I got mail back on Thursday saying they'd just got the film in, and could they come out this morning to install.) Not quite as quick of a turnaround with my query to the battery folks because they are besieged with work because a whole year's worth of Powerwalls got recalled because they would explode into flames. (Not ours. It slightly predated the recall and just died instead, which is much preferred.) Any way, they said they'd try and talk to us about it next week. I still suspect we're going to get stuck with an installation bill, despite it being all under warranty, because of the required update from Powerwall 2 to Powerwall 3 (and because of Tesla sucking), but it'll be what it'll be, and we'll get a battery that doesn't have six years of use on it (and the new Powerwall 3 also can supply more power simultaneously, where the old Powerwall 2 would sometimes require us to go out to the grid when we were doing something power-thirsty like running a shower or the dryer.) I've been a bit nervous being battery free during this huge storm, but so far so good.
And with these annoying problems that had piled up dispersing, we can get back to some progressive work. Like getting some solid, dark blinds in our offices (something I've wanted for years, but especially since I was dodging early morning sunlight during all the podcasts I did for Designers & Dragons Origins last year) and putting flooring in the last (under-the-stairs) closet downstairs. And returning to repainting the exterior highlights of our house with an attractive blue.
But not immediately!
It was also raining and storming every time I woke up. Forecasters have been forecasting apocalyptic rain on and off throughout the winter, but this is the first one that's really hit. A classic Kona Low, which are the big ones (and which blow in from the opposite direction of our usual weather patterns.) Looks like we've had 6 inches in the last 24 hours as I write, so I expect there's been some flooding. (But we're on a ridgeline, so no problem as long as I keep gutters free and a few places for water to flow around the house, and I've gotten better at all of that over the years.) When I was showering this morning I heard big booming thunder a few times.
I went downstairs to work for a few hours, but was heading back upstairs sometime around 8.45 and that's when things got complicated.
THE DOG. As I came up the stairs, which are right next to our front door, K. and I noticed a big, soaking-wet orange dog on our front steps. His tail was wagging and he was clearly very happy to see us, so after a moment of puzzlement I stepped outside to see if his collar had a tag on it. No go. But he was so happy to see me!
K. got me a towel to dry the guy off and I spent the next 15 or 20 minutes figuring out what to do with him. Eventually I opted to lure him over to the garage so that he wouldn't run away. (We have a very busy street next to us and I didn't want him to get hit.) I was still puzzling, looking around, to see if anyone was searching for a dog, but again no go.
Which complication #2 appeared.
THE WINDOW GUYS. Since we've moved to Hawaii we've gotten tints put on most of our south-facing windows. Generally, they're to protect us and our stuff from the extreme UV of Hawaii. (Some of our stuff is still fading, but I can only imagine it'd be that much worse without the UV protection.) The window in my office also has a higher level of brightness protection, so that I can see my computer in the morning even if it's sunny and clear. (I actually still have problems at some times during some parts of the year, but it's a lot better than when we moved in, and we've now got the downstairs built out so that I have other places to retreat to if I can't see.) There's been a problem though: our big living room window had gone deeply opaque and my office window had gone somewhat opaque. Which isn't great for windows.
But the 3M film we use has a lifetime warranty, which kind of shocks me, and after we talked to the window guys about it, and they came out to have a look, they ordered us some new film and were out today to deal with our windows.
While I was trying to deal with the dog! We talked about that a bit. Said dog kept trying to leap into their truck. One of the guys pointed out that the dog had an Apple AirTag. (Ah ha! A clue!) I showed them in to my office, and they got to work on the windows, and I returned to complication #1.
THE DOG (II). It took me a bit to figure out how to read the AirTag. Turns out that air tags have NFC tags in them, which means they can be read from the top of most phones. But I had to get to the underside of the air tag, and it was affixed face-up in the collar. Fortunately the pup continued to be entirely friendly so I just took his collar off and was able to scan the AirTag. It came up with an ID number and a phone number ... whose first six digits were blocked. Turns out that unless you report an AirTag as lost, other people can't see the phone number you have attached. So, limited utility.
Meanwhile, K. was also activating the coconut wireless by posting to NextDoor and a few Facebook groups. By this time, I'd closed up the garage with the dog inside, so he wouldn't disappear while we tried to track his people, and had gotten some him some water.
But we were running into complication #3:
THE PT. K. had PT this morning! Although (after surgeries & years of work) she's now doing well enough to walk down the hill to where her PT was, I wasn't going to send her out in the pouring rain. So we then had to do an elaborate ritual for me to get Maria Kia out of the garage so I could take her to PT. She had to grab the dog so that I could open the garage. One of the window guys had to move their truck out of our driveway. I had to move Maria out of the garage. I had to close the garage door, and then K. had to escape through the house (without the dog). It was like the Rush Hour game.
We managed. I took K. to PT. It's really close, only .4 miles away so I was back quickly.
And then everything began to (thankfully) unwind.
THE DOG (III). By the time K. landed at PT, coconut wireless had turned up two phone numbers, one I think for the dog's owner and another for the dog's owner's cousin (who was also nearby). I was calling one (from the garage with the dog) when one of the window guys showed up to tell me someone was at the door. It was the dog's owner! I think maybe they'd seen K's NextDoor post, which mentioned the location of our house. Dog returned! As we'd guessed, it had escaped their yard due to the thunder this morning. Happy reunion!
THE WINDOW GUYS (II). The window guys took somewhere between an hour and a hour and a half to clear, clean, and redo both windows. They look great again, whew. We really hadn't known what to do with that problem, and now we do. They were done before ...
THE PT (II). was done. It was actually bright and sunny when I went to pick K. up. (It wouldn't stay that way.)
Wottaday. I was EXHAUSTED after all that craziness. But I did manage to edit two more histories for THE LOST HISTORIES this morning. Firefly Games and Rogue Games (the latter being another that required updates since I originally wrote it, which is one of my tasks on this next-to-last pass on the three Lost Histories books.) I also barely started work on a new project. (I'd wanted to do more, but between a bad night's sleep and a crazy morning, I ended up napping in the afternoon and playing Slay the Spire 2.)
A few other notes on recent times:
THE DIET. We decided to close out the diet before we entered its fourth week. One of our friends showed us a study saying that diets of that sort just don't do much long-term change to intestinal flora, and that's what we were going for. K. found many more studies that said the same. But, funny story. Some foods are still making me quite sick (like last night), but I haven't been frequently feeling bad in the morning, as had been the case for years. Fingers cross that sticks around, but it has for two weeks at this point.
THE BIKE RACK. I got my trailer hitch receiver install on Maria two weeks ago. My vault (which I use for my keys while swimming) works great in the new received. My bike rack doesn't fit perfectly for some reason. But I just need to lift the rack up to be able to fit the pin through, something that I expect will get more natural with time. So I've been out to the bike path on the east side of the island twice in the last two weeks. K. and I were going to go together this weekend, but that's not looking likely with this storm. (But we'll see what Sunday brings.)
THE BATTERY. The one other problem that's lagging is our dead Tesla Powerwall, which went out last October. I find that politely querying usually gets that sort of thing moving on island. (For example, we hadn't heard anything on our windows for two or three weeks, so I asked them on Wednesday, and I got mail back on Thursday saying they'd just got the film in, and could they come out this morning to install.) Not quite as quick of a turnaround with my query to the battery folks because they are besieged with work because a whole year's worth of Powerwalls got recalled because they would explode into flames. (Not ours. It slightly predated the recall and just died instead, which is much preferred.) Any way, they said they'd try and talk to us about it next week. I still suspect we're going to get stuck with an installation bill, despite it being all under warranty, because of the required update from Powerwall 2 to Powerwall 3 (and because of Tesla sucking), but it'll be what it'll be, and we'll get a battery that doesn't have six years of use on it (and the new Powerwall 3 also can supply more power simultaneously, where the old Powerwall 2 would sometimes require us to go out to the grid when we were doing something power-thirsty like running a shower or the dryer.) I've been a bit nervous being battery free during this huge storm, but so far so good.
And with these annoying problems that had piled up dispersing, we can get back to some progressive work. Like getting some solid, dark blinds in our offices (something I've wanted for years, but especially since I was dodging early morning sunlight during all the podcasts I did for Designers & Dragons Origins last year) and putting flooring in the last (under-the-stairs) closet downstairs. And returning to repainting the exterior highlights of our house with an attractive blue.
But not immediately!