shannon_a

We have shower doors!

Rather, I should say we have shower doors installed in our master bathroom shower. The difference between the two statements is that we actually bought these doors in February, and then they sat in the garage for most of the year.

The reason? COVID and bookshelves. Early in the year I was collecting things for projects at Home Depot, like the screen door we installed on our lanai and everything needed to put doors into our master bathroom shower and wood for bookshelves for my office closet.

And then we spent about six months on those bookshelves, in part because it was a large project, done a few hours at a time a few days a week and in part because we had multiple breaks of between a week and a month, either because there was a lockdown or because either my dad or I was cautious about getting together because of potentially risky COVID behavior (e.g., them going to a 100th birthday party or us going to Oahu for Kimberly's seizure study).

So anyway, most of a year after we bought them, those doors are installed.

(Still loving having a master bathroom after decades of having to wander down the hallway to get to a bathroom and wandering downstairs to get to our acceptable shower.)

It actually took us three afternoons. Maybe 8 hours total. We went about 2.30-5.30 the first two days, and then lounged around and did a little work on the last one.

The first day, our big problem was that my caulk had gone bad. It had never been opened, but it had been bought back in February, and by the time we opened it up, it had partially hardened and was impossible to work with. After that, the afternoon was spent framing out the door. I had not really known if this was a hard or easy task, but once we got to the part where my dad was cutting the metal (alumninum?) frame on his table saw, I realized it was definitely something I wouldn't have been doing on my own.

The second day, our big problem was that the shower isn't level(!). I mean, it wasn't far off, somewhere between .25 degrees and .75 degrees, depending on how we measured it, but the bearings (or wheels or whatever) on the doors were very, very responsive. So after we mounted the doors, they kept rolling down the track to the bottom side of the tub. Which just wasn't useful. We searched my garage and my dad's garage for things to wedge below the top frame and finally decided to cut out a thin piece of oak from the floor trim my dad recently cut. It props up the downward side of the top frame, to keep things more level. It might eventually rot out, but if so I bet the door doesn't move as easily by then.

The third day was just caulking the doors and installing the handles.

So three days or ten months later, depending on how you count it, we have shower doors.

In the process we learned that our downstairs shower doesn't work right. The spout doesn't divert all the water up to the shower head any more. Sigh!

My dad and I looked at it and couldn't figure out how to unscrew it either. Apparently they don't just unthread when you twist them, like they would in California.

The home improvement list never ends: that's something to fix by the time we invite guests here, maybe next fall at this rate.

Oh, the flooring project. I never wrote about that. It was a fun project over at my dad's house.

The problem, you see, is volcanos. They're recent enough in Hawaii's past that we have very red dirt, which stains everything. Yet mysteriously everyone likes to lay down white or beige carpets. So the carpets downstairs at my dad's house had gotten a bit grungy over the years. (They've been here 12 years now!) So Mary requested that my dad replace the carpets in the downstairs hallway and family room with flooring (pseudo-wood). So I joined in and we did.

That was a project that took my dad and me 10 afternoons: 4 afternoons laying floor in the hallway, 3 afternoons laying floor in the family room, 2 afternoons putting down the trim, and 1 afternoon tearing out old trim and nails and cleaning up linoleum. I suspect my dad spent somewhere around the same amount of time himself: doing the rest of the prep (especially in the hallway; I just helped one afternoon in the family room), repairing and repainting the hallway and the family room, cutting all the quarter-round trim, and doing the last bit of trim laying, which ended up being a few hours.

But I helped.

It was actually a good project because I was able to help a lot, and felt pretty competent with most of the work by the time we were done.

The material is all plastic pseudo-wood that's "floating", which means that it's held down by gravity. It all (theoretically) links together if you lay it right.

That makes the laying of the flooring pretty easy ... except for at the edges of the room. We started out in the hallway, and that turned out to be the hardest work, because we constantly had to work around door frames and corners. In contrast, the family room had big spans where we only had to cut the first and last pieces of each row (to vary the spacing) and everything else was clean sailing.

I felt pretty out of my depth on day one, but by our second day of work, I felt increasingly competent. For edges and corners and door frames, I'd take the flooring strips out to the backyard, and do most of the cutting myself: measuring, then marking with a knife, then cutting with a jigsaw (really a multitool, apparently). It was very empowering.

The hardest work was down at the end of the hallway, between the guest room, the water heater closet and the laundry room. Ay. Tons of door frames, none quite the same.

Here's something I learned: you actually don't have to be that neat when cutting edges of flooring, because it should all be under door frames or trim. But still I did some scribing of weird jig-jogs around door frames that I was quite pleased with. I got pretty good at doing the short cuts, though long cuts often ended up not straight (and if we going along the "grain" of the "wood", I just let me dad do that).

So that was the flooring project, and it encouraged me to refloor our carpeted offices downstairs, in part because they'll look nice, in part because they'll be more resistant to cat vomit, and in part because they'll hurt Kimberly's messed up scar less.

For possible future projects here at the house in the near future, I have: a second screen door for the other door on the lanai, rewiring the fence in our front yard (with some fencing that my dad brought back on a plane years ago), and at least flooring Kimberly's office. I also told my dad I'd like to help when he builds some new shelves for the family room / game room that he's been renovating.

And I need to find a carpenter to build us some shelves.

Of course the holidays are pretty much here, so we'll see what gets done between now and the end of the year.

(But we get to put up our artificial tree this coming weekend, for the first time in two years!)

Sun. We finally got our solar power system up and running about a week and a half ago. Our energy has been 99.9% supplied from our panels and battery since then, with our system just randomly pulling .1 KWh from the grid now and then. And we've learned a lot about how home power works.

Our general power usage is pretty low. I think that LED and fluorescent bulbs have gone a long way to decreasing the power load of a house. The big spikes come from a couple of things. First, showers just eat up the power (since everything is electric here, not gas). Second, the dishwasher, or even just running hot water gets the energy spiking, due to heating the hot water tank back up, I suspect. But the biggest draw we've seen has been the dryer running, though that was probably helped along by the hot-water heater reheating following the washer run. Together those two appliances spiked us to 8 KwH or so for a bit, which the highest we've seen (and just about the maximum we can possibly generate in the middle of the day: 3 or 4 KwH from our panels, 5 from our battery).

We've had two almost entirely rainy days since the panels went in, and we were surprised to see the panels running at between 25-50% efficiency over the course of the day. I'd expected much lower.

On a normal day, our battery drains to 25-40% over night, and refills by 1-2pm, after which we send power to KIUC until 5pm or so. On a rainy day, we instead didn't manage to entirely refill our battery, ending up at 75-90% by the end of the day. But we still have enough solar power to run all day and mostly refill that battery.

Does that mean that a few rainy days in a row will leave us dependent on the grid? Maybe.

Overall, it's been great. On an average day it looks like we offset about 150% of our power usage, which is about where I wanted to be, to give room for weather variance and for degradation of our panels (though they're much lower than I'd thought beforehand) and increase in our usage (since we've still got at least a chest freezer to buy — but there are currently none on Kauai). Our system should work well for at least 10 years, after which we're going to see sufficient battery degradation that we may need to look into a replacement.

Wind. Speaking our replacement, my dad and I replaced three of the six fans in the house over the last few weeks. I feel like I could do it on my own at this point, which I never would have before. We replaced the one in the Living Room because it made loud death-fan sounds. The new one isn't threatening to decapitate us, but otherwise feels much the same. We replaced the one in the Dining Room because it's in the same large space as the Living Room, and I wanted them looking the same, especially since I'd picked a four-blade design for the new ones (because it was what provided the light and the air movement that I wanted). We also put a two-foot drop bar on the fan, which had previously been quite far up on the high ceiling. It turns out, that makes a big difference. We're getting much better breeze in the Dining Room now, and it even cools the Living Room. So, that's a win. (And a wind.) Finally, we replaced the one in my office, because it had horrible lights since we moved it, which made using my office at night subpar. The new lights are so much better that I sometimes dim them a bit so as not to blind myself, and it also turns out to move air better than the old one.

So, all around, great replacements. And I'm resisting the urge to replace the other three so that everything looks the same. (They don't need to, and two of the the other three fans are fine; I think the lights on the one in the Family Room might be subpar, but until we start using that room, it's not an issue.)

Sky. And finally, we've gotten our second Roomba, which we've been planning to do for over a year, since we decided we really liked the first one. Her name is Sky (or maybe Skye, but definitely not Daisy). She's a fancy new model with built-in mapping. Our theory is that she should thus go in the upstairs, because we'd often find Hal under a couch after failing to find his way home. So she's run a few times, and is great, actually getting everything more methodically clean, and not wandering forever. Hal, meanwhile, has been consigned to the downstairs. Where he still gets lost and stuck after cleaning ... but I think I can eventually find a better home base for him in the central Family Room, which should allow him to get home, we just need to get that furnished and shelved.

And that's exciting life in Hawaii.

Tuesday, my dad and I finished the bookshelves we've been working on much of the year and installed them in the closet in my office.

This was a long, long process because it was interrupted by the initial COVID lockdown, and then by them by them settling in some new (quarantined) renters from New York, and then by us going to Oahu .... it's been that sort of year.

When my dad had initially suggested that we build these shelves that I wanted for my closet, I'd thought that we'd just knock together a dozen or so pieces of wood, like we had for old bookshelves that we'd built for previous residences (mostly donated to Uhuru Furniture before we left), but instead he'd had in mind making real furniture, and that's what we did.

We cut, then we attached real wood onto to the front of the plywood to give the shelves a nice facade. And we glued and attached and sanded and routed and filled screw holes and stained and finished. And there we are half a year later!

And I have to agree, they look quite nice, like real furniture.

Oh, except there was one final step after we thought we were done. We'd installed one of the shelves in my office closet and I put the Bronze Age Omnibus by Jack Kirby on it, a 1400-some page hardcover book, and my dad didn't like the way the shelf wobbled, so we ended up cutting strips of wood to back each of the shelves (and stained and attached and finished those).

So after we finished things last Tuesday, we finally did another project, which was install a new fan in our living room.

The old one made scary, wobbly fans when run on high, and that particularly disturbed my dad, and we got to calling it the death fan.

So we'd picked up some new fans last week, and we installed that first one on Tuesday ...

And now at high speed it makes slightly less scary, but still kinda wobbly sounds.

We've got an identical fan for the dining room, so we'll see what it does, because if it doesn't do the same thing, there's something wrong with our first installation (or the fixture).

Meanwhile, this left me the task of filling that bookcase, in a closet that had been mostly unused since we got here. (OK, honestly, it was starting to accumulate junk, so it's good we got in there before it became unsalvageable.) I set to it with alacrity, and spent somewhere more than half a day of work on it between Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday. I went through about 30 boxes of graphic novels and omnibuses (which had to be re-merged, since they'd been placed in different boxes for sizing) and pretty much entirely filled the closet.

I've got 3 boxes that I never opened, and maybe 192 quarts of books that I unboxed and couldn't fit. So I guess they're not all going in the closet.

I looked some to see if there was more that I wanted to cull, but the answer was, "Not at this time". I culled a lot in Berkeley. So, some of the comics will have to go in the less friendly environment outside of the closet (which has a dehumidifier).

At the moment I've got Marvel on the left shelf, DC and Vertigo on the right shelf, and Valiant overhead, alongside a lot of books to read. And everything's is tightly packed, so there's no room for growth. That means that mostly "indie" books will have to go outside of the closet, plus I'll have to figure out how to manage growth within the closet itself.

I've got my eye on a stretch of wall just to the left of the closet for the rest that should keep everything nearby (unlike in Berkeley when the comics were stretched across at least five different shelves (perhaps more) in three different rooms. It'll be nice to have everything together, and what I've got is already better organized.

One unfriendly discovery: our packers were crap at packing comics. In the first box of graphic novels they packed, I literally found one bent into a "U". Generally, they tossed graphic novels in haphazardly with no attention to their pages interleaving or things bending them. In all I think there were slightly less than 20 that they damaged to noticeable levels out of 3 boxes they packed. I mean, I'm not perfect, but I found maybe half-a-dozen I'd damaged out of 30 boxes. That's a big difference.

Fortunately, the graphic novels they packed fell into two categories: things I read in the last few weeks before they showed up and things that I'd planned to someday replace with sturdier omnibuses. The majority were the latter, and so that was most of what they damaged. About a dozen books that they messed up had in fact been replaced in the last 10 months or so, so those were unfortunately just thrown out.

I am so, so happy that I packed the majority of our books myself (and was sending new purchases on to my dad by October or so).

After unboxing all those graphic novels, I had a family room full of boxes, which I broke down last night and today.

Then today there was a mighty pass around Eleele and Hanapepe getting rid of stuff.

Talk Story got another two armfuls of graphic novels that I'd replaced since they were packed (also allowing me to support the only book store on the island, which is pretty important right now).

A ton of cardboard got recycled near Salt Pond (though curiously the actual beach was blocked off by police cars and a helicopter seemed to be regularly picking up water).

Some stuff from Kimberly got dropped off at Habitat for Humanity.

And I tried to get some new Sterilite tubs at Ace Hardware, but they just had what looked like a lower quality brand, and which wouldn't have matched what I already have. (Which might have been OK, but I didn't have the precise measurements with me to fit on the shelves in the garage).

It was weird making the run out to Salt Pond and Habitat again, because I was doing that a bit in January and February and March, and then when the Shelter in Place occurred at the end of March, that stopped.

It was also my first time either into Hanapepe proper or Talk Story since we'd moved.

(And I say it was a "mighty pass", but it just took an hour. Thanks, Julie!)

So, I've still got some graphic novels that need to be re-stored, but otherwise the great graphic-novel shelf project is done and our house is that much closer to being a normal home, both for the removal of 20-25% of our remaining boxes, and for recreating my graphic novel library.

(I was really thrilled to have them back, and have already started reading some of the stuff that had been in storage.)

Oh, and I've figured out at least two graphic novels I'm missing, which suggests to me that there's still some unboxed — stuff that I read in July and August according to Goodreads, which probably means it ended up in a weird box, after I'd packaged its brethren (but thankfully I read them before the graphic-novel-murdering packers got there). That probably means I should unpack the last three graphic novel boxes into Sterilites when I get more (hopefully at Home Depot next Monday or Tuesday) and maybe get it all better sorted.

When we were walking a few nights ago, my dad mentioned that the shelves had taken quite a long time and queried if we wanted to do more or not.

I've had fun working on the project with him, but I'm also entirely happy to pay someone to work on the rest of the shelves we need, so we talked about it a while until I could assess that indeed he felt like we'd done enough.

So right now we're waiting on a quote that Kimberly has out to replace the old, sticky, sunfaded curtains throughout the house, most of them hung from very classy PVC pipe. That'll be another nice step to making our house a home. After that I'm going to try and get a quote from a carpenter to put floating bookshelves throughout my office and our family room. My dad and I had never really arrived at a good solution for my desire to keep the shelves really organic, feeling like they're part of the house, not just shelves jammed in front of the wall, so it'll be good to have a professional do so. (I'm also not sure how to make them look good around my desk and file cabinet, so again: hopefully a professional can help).

So after a six month or so hiatus (during which COVID mostly fizzled out on Kauai, but also during our finances settled thanks to the sale of our Berkeley house), we're back to slowly settling back in to our new home. Ain't going to be done this year though.

I took Lucy to the vet today. Nothing serious, but she's been having some bathroom problems lately, continuing on some problems from back in Berkeley, so I wanted to talk with a vet about the next steps in testing and/or what else to do.

However, COVID made the situation extremely bizarre. They're no longer letting people into the office, instead having chairs set aside. You sit down, fill out forms, then they come and take your pet, then they bring your pet back, then a vet comes out to talk to you, then they bring out a bill to you.

It mostly works, and Lucy seemed to really like sitting out in the open air: she was constantly sniffing. But not seeing the vet with the cat really felt like we weren't able to give Lucy the best care we could. And I also had to listen to the vet tell someone else who was waiting nearby that they'd scheduled an appointment to put his cat down the next day, ad that he should take it home, enjoy the evening, and if he decided to cancel, to let them know. (Poor guy! Poor cat!)

But we have an action plan for Lucy: a few things to try (more litter boxes, which was already on our list for today; probiotics; if that doesn't work something that might help with any back pain; and if that doesn't work an ultrasound). Meanwhile, I *think* her weight is up, at 6.4#, but I'm not sure because our old hospital didn't send over her records like they were supposed to.

(This is why we need to allow patients, or in this case pet owners, to maintain health records in their own decentralized data stores. Because it's a constant problem, for humans and cats alike.)

Back back to problems caused by COVID response: Kimberly was supposed to have an appointment with a special doctor from Oahu next Monday, but it's been cancelled due to the interisland quarantine going up again, this time with no exceptions.

I mean, frankly, we don't want scofflaws from Oahu over here, because we actually got to see what a crappy job they were doing of maintaining public health a few months ago. It's the Plague Capital of Hawaii for a reason.

But no exceptions for health: that's problematic.

In fact, it's overall problematic how our society is deemphasizing preventative health care during this pandemic. It's sending all the wrong messages.

(We went out to the hospital today, so that Kimberly could get a totally unrelated test, and they're back to "patients only" inside, which on an island with two active cases of COVID is absolutely hygiene theatre.)

Meanwhile:

Our electrical work is definitely done.

We had our electrician out here up until last Wednesday, and that was a bit tiring, always having someone working about the house, and more notably always having to have a mask on hand (or rather, on neck). More of the Age of COVID. (I really hope there's a time not too far in the future, where all this seems alien.)

But he finished on time, Wednesday, he just had to work until 7pm every night (after usually getting a start at 10am or later).

So today someone from our solar company proper came up to "program" the system, whatever that means. He was here about 45 minutes and at the end showed me the system working. It was pulling 3.6 KW of power through the panels, using .6 KW to power the house, and using the rest to fill up the battery, or something like that.

But, he sadly told us, he had to turn it back off. I wonder how much pushback they get on that, because he really got in there and said it quick and decisively. I hope not too much on these islands.

So we're waiting on a county inspection (where they may or may not need to get inside, depending on what they've looked at before) and a utility company inspection (where they definitely need to get inside, to ensure that the solar people didn't install more than they said they would, according to our solar guy) and then we need to wait one-to-two weeks for KIUC to place a sticker, and we'll have solar power.

I told solar guy that my current expectation had been before the end of next month, and he said definitely before that.

I suspect that solar power will be something that's initially really exciting, and we'll look at the apps constantly, and within a week or two it'll be regular life to us, and we won't even notice it except for the lack of bills (and probably not even then: a lack isn't that exciting).

But we'll have a more sustainable house, and we hopefully won't have brownouts, and so we won't have smartplugs and dish washers die, and we also won't be burning coal at Port Allen.

If there was going to be a year as horrible as 2020, I am soooo happy to be out of the Bay Area (and my condolences to all my friends who aren't).

Because the pandemic would have been so shitty for us, having to walk or bike everywhere in the hot sun with masks.

And the wildfires are obviously worse than 2017-2018. It's so weird that we didn't have these problems in the Bay Area until 2015 or so, and then there was some climate tipping point, and there are suddenly wildfires making the air in the Bay Area dangerous almost every year for a week or two at a time.

Meanwhile, on Kauai, we've had a hurricane miss us, and I can drive places without a mask, and we're on an island with two active cases of COVID and a population that's about 20% lower than the (infrastructure-busting) norm, because of the lack of tourists.

This 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

So we've gotten our first new appliance since we moved to Hawaii.

Our dishwasher had been flaky since we got here, often having to be reset after a power outage, sometimes having to be reset several times. And, we get brown-outs here pretty regularly. Just before we went to Oahu, I had to reset it about a dozen times before it worked, and then when we got back there'd been another power outage, and that was it.

The problem was I'm pretty sure the latching mechanism. It's this electronic crap they put in everything, rather than a physical latch, and it stopped reading that the dish washer was closed. So, that was that. Looking it up online, it's apparently a common problem for these GE dishwashers.

The dishwasher was only 2.5 years old, but I figured that repairing it would be half the cost of replacing it, so hating the waste, I did the later.

So I set to handwashing dishes for a bit more than a month, and finally decided on a new one, and it arrived on Tuesday.

Fortunately, my dad came over on Wednesday to help me get it installed. There was lots of futzing with cords and hoses that he was just more familiar with, but we also ran into a few actual problems that I wouldn't have known what to do with (like the fact that Home Depot had clearly swapped out the power cord at some point, and the new one doesn't actually fit without a little surgery).

But, given my dad's help, it was a pretty easy installation. And then we just had to haul the old one out to the appliance dump near Salt Pond. (I'm still shocked how easy it is to get rid of things with a car and with Kauai having open dumps of various sorts.)

We tested it out briefly on Wednesday, and tonight I'll run it with some actual plates from meals, and we'll see if it clears out dishes without extensive prewashing, as we hope.

Meanwhile: Designers & Dragons work continues abreast. For the last three weeks or so, I've been working on some '10s histories of Swedish companies, and oh boy, I'm tired of introducing the extra step of translating stuff and then reading mostly intelligible text. I was going to continue on through all four Swedish companies now (or recently) publishing in English, but I think at least the last is going to get saved for a future month.

Meanwhile: COVID is going crazy on Hawaii. After many weeks of 0-10 cases, and then some bad week of 20-30, we've had 100 cases a day two days a row, almost entirely on Oahu.

First up, this doesn't shock me, because when we were on Oahu no one seemed to care about wearing masks.

But, this is also apparently a result of everyone running around, having large gatherings since the 4th of July.

I wouldn't be surprised if another big lockdown is coming down, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's mostly resisted by the population. As I said back in March: the problem with the lockdown strategy is that it's unsustainable. That's proving itself right now.

But here on Kauai, we really need to reintroduce the 14-day quarantine for inter-island travel. Because we're starting to have new cases too and ... shocker ... they're travel related.

Meanwhile: my dad and I have finally gotten back to my shelving project. We've actually got two shelves for my closet ready to go. We just have to stain, finish, and fill them, and they're done. Hoping to do the staining tomorrow. Hoping to get a bunch of comics out of boxes soon, and to think about what to do for the rest of our shelving needs.

Meanwhile: our solar panel installation is supposed to start in about a week and a half. Hoping it won't be too much of a pain in the neck for us, but I'm looking forward to that solar power. Saving $150 a month will be nice, but that's a long term thing. Not having brownouts all the time will be a big plus though. Hoping it works as advertised.

And that's life in these Hawaiian states.

I think we started making the plans to move to Hawaii toward the tail end of 2015. We'd previously been talking seriously about leaving the Bay Area because of our growing distress with the decline of the area, but we weren't ready to semi-retire to Hawaii. So we were looking at other places to live prior to moving to Hawaii. Oregon, Colorado, Washington, Montreal, and London were all considered as possibilities.

(Understand what I mean by semi-retire: it means I keep doing about as much work as I have previously, but on my own projects, for less pay and no guarantees.)

And then we decided to just cut through that complexity. Yes, it would be wonderful to live somewhere cool for five or ten years. But planning to move twice sounded exhausting. We could just move straight out to Hawaii without the interim stop, and we could enjoy the beautiful climate and the closeness to family much earlier.

But, it was a five-year plan. I wanted to take some time to really mindfully enjoy our last days in the Bay Area, but I also wanted to get to the point where I felt like our finances were stable enough that even if I ran into problems with Skotos or Blockstream (who I was working for at the time), we'd probably still be OK.

That original five-year plan presumed that we would keep our Berkeley house and rent it out.

We were probably influenced by my dad and Mary's rentals out here in Hawaii (including, at the time, our house). But it just seemed the obvious thing to do.

I mean, everyone said that property was the best long-term investment. And I was pretty sure we could pay a property company to rent it, cover the costs, and have a little money left over: enough to cost the likely higher cost of living in Hawaii.

But over the next three or so years I began to question that.

I noted whenever we visited Hawaii how much effort my dad and Mary had to put into maintaining their properties. Our house was empty at least once or twice with them looking for tenants, and being a little worried about getting it filled. There was often work required at the houses.

And I fretted about the fact that our Berkeley house was in earthquake country, and that's something we'd have to continue to worry about ... and I always wondered if our little Blake street house could even be rebuilt following an earthquake given the fact it was on a postage size stamp of land.

My brother, Jason, gave me the last piece of the puzzle. He's an MBA working in finance, and he said, "Yeah, property, that only gives you like a 1% annual return."

And I crunched some numbers and realized he was right.

If we kept the house, we had continued anxiety and tension due to the state of Berkeley and the problems of renters, which were the exact sort of thing we were trying to avoid by the move, and we also had all of our money tied up in one inaccessible, potentially vulnerable bundle.

Whereas if we sold it we could take advantage of the interest our assets earned, rather than seeing that just keep building up. To be precise, we could use some of it to live on, which would give me the chance to do the writing and work (and, let's be honest, swimming and hiking) that I wanted to.

So I figured out what I thought the house would sell for based on the current market, ran some calculations, compared them to my assumptions about renting the place, and yes, it looked like it would make our lives easier to divest ourselves entirely of our Berkeley holdings.

So something like two years ago, we decided to sell.

Our realtor who helped us buy our house in 2000 was wonderful. Frankly, I never believed that we should have been able to afford our Berkeley house in a market that was running up due to the dot-com bubble.

But, we had out-of-the-area sellers who had no idea what they were doing. They put the price too high a year previous and no one would buy. Then they dropped the price by $100,000 in 2000. Kimberly found it before it was listed, our realtor got us in to see it before anyone else could, and we wrote an offer that they had to accept before any other offers came in.

I've been thinking about black swan events lately, and that was one. It was a black swan in the dot-com bubble, but a good one, because it got us a great house to live in for twenty years, right where we wanted to be at the time (and it ended up being a great investment too).

Oh, we still had to scrimp and save in the years thereafter. We never had a lot of money because Kimberly was on disability and I was offering my technical skills at a cut-rate because I believed in Skotos and in RPGnet. But as we refinanced, things gradually loosened a little bit and then after I published Designers & Dragons and started doing a bit of technical writing on the side, we suddenly had just a bit more money than the breakeven of the first decade or so of our marriage.

So after our realtor got us that black-swan house, we of course called her back 18 years later to sell it for us.

The three of us walked the house in August or September 2018 and she advised us what we'd need to do to give it the best chance to sell well.

Then we spent the next year getting that all done.

As 2019 advanced, I sometimes felt like we were the proverbial lobsters in the slowly heating pot, because we kept being asked to put out more and more money. Inheritances from Kimberly's dad and from my grandmother got us through it (and the other costs of the move). I'd carefully maintained and even slightly grown those principles for over a decade, and it finally paid off. I'd calculated that we'd spend about half of that money to get the house ready and us moved and our new house refurnished and in the end we spent most of it and had to put off some of the new furniture for our house (like a murphy bed for guests and a couch for the family room and most of our shelves) because money was getting tight ... and the sale was getting iffy.

At one point my dad and I talked about the money we were putting into the house, and he said, "Well, you can never know if that money was actually useful or not."

But by that time I was seeing a scarily large range in what different companies were predicting the house was worth, so I said, "We sorta can". I figured that if we were at the top of the range (or above!), it was more likely that it had been worth our time and effort, and if it was at the bottom (or below!), it was more likely that it was not.

(Fun story: Zillow was the one low-balling our house, and [spoiler] the day we closed they told us the house was worth almost a quarter less than what we'd sold it for almost two months earlier, so, yeah, I think we can feel like that time, money, and effort was worthwhile.)

When we moved in January 2020, there was still work to be done, but I'd carefully planned it all out. One day to clear junk, one day to clean, two and a half weeks to paint, another day to clean more deeply, a day for the windows, a day for the staging, and then the house to go on sale right around the end of January.

But to a large extent, that's when the day-to-day of managing the house work and I departed (because, of course, our ever-wonderful realtor took it over). I think everything got done on time, but the house didn't go onto the market for two weeks later.

I don't know why. I didn't push and I haven't asked. I always do my best to trust professionals to know their job better than I do. That's why I kept spending money when my realtor and my stager told me to. And I wasn't going to second-guess now.

But there were times when I feared that those two weeks had doomed us.

I should note, I'd already had some concerns if we had waited too long. The Berkeley house market went wobbly in 2019. That was the source of the declines we saw in Zillow values. And another fun story about Zillow: at that time they didn't actually admit that their valuation had dropped that much: they just quietly recalibrated their valuation engine.

When we talked to our realtor in late 2019 she agreed that the market had gone "soft" in the latter half of the year. She still showed us some good comps, but for each one we saw, I could pick out why I felt like that house was better than ours. (I mostly kept that to myself.)

But now, in mid-February 2020, our realtor was actually showing our house: nicely cleaned up, entirely repainted, beautifully staged. There were two open houses and any number of private showings and then a week to give everyone a chance to make offers.

And in that week before people made their offers, the stock market crashed due to fears over COVID-19.

For the first of a few times, our realtor talked me down, because I worried about whether the crash was going to affect our offers. I was worried whether we'd missed a great time to sell by just a week.

And, by the by, she was right. We were still going to do fine.

House sales in the Bay Area are ridiculous. You list your house for much less than it should sell for, then you get a lot of offers, your realtor indicates how many interested parties there are, and the potential buyers then overbid by an appropriate amount.

This has been going on for a long time. When we were looking for a house in 2000, houses were getting overbid by about $100,000, which was about 25% of the listing price. In fact, I'm pretty sure we got outbid by $100,000 on the first house we bid on in Berkeley that year. (And that's why it's amazing that when all was said and done we ended up paying about $25,000 less than the listing price for our Berkeley home, after a negotiation down due to the poor condition of the roof.) If anything, the comps that BL showed us indicated that things were worse now. We saw much more expensive houses getting bid up by that same 25% or 30%.

That bid up wasn't just a ton of money, but for us it was also the difference between having a fund to help get along in Hawaii and having enough money for me to really dedicate the time I wanted to my own projects without stress.

But there was stress in the whole listing & offer process, because we had to ask for a lot less than we expected to get, and then we had to hope the whole crazy system worked out like it was supposed to.

Our realtor called us the evening that our offers came in. I think there were eight. I'd been setting my benchmark as about ten for what we wanted to see in order to get the price I was still hoping for, despite the downturn in the market. One was embarrassingly low and three more generally seemed to show a lack of understanding of the Berkeley housing market, some in price, some in the way they arranged the splitting up of responsibilities for various items (like who pays various taxes and fees), and some in both.

But there were four good offers.

And one offer was at precisely, to the dollar, what I'd set as my hopeful goal two years previous when we first thought about selling the house!

Kismet!

Our second-place offer was a bit of a heartbreaker. We liked the attitudes of the buyers better (yes, because they wrote us a silly letter, even though I'd personally sworn I wouldn't care about silly letters), we liked the use of the house better (because it would be for their kids in college, as opposed to a rental), and we liked the escrow period better (because it was 25 days instead of 30).

If all things were equal, I think we would have taken it.

And it looked to me like all things should have been equal. Their loan preapproval was actually for the same amount as our winning bid. But they dropped it by $25,000 when they made the offer. (Since they did so by taking that amount out of the down payment, I actually wasn't sure their loan preapproval was valid any more as a result, because a loan usually requires a certain percentage down payment.)

As best I could figure, that second place bidder had been affected by the stock market crash, and had suddenly found themselves $25,000 short in their down payment. So, my guess is, they reduced the bid accordingly. Which means, by my reckoning, that COVID-19 cost them the house.

And I should say that our decision wasn't 100% mercenary. We did see one other advantage in the winning bid: the bidders had another rental just around the corner, and we felt that meant that they were more professional buyers, less likely to freak out if anything weird happened during the escrow period.

And though in the end having a 25-day escrow period instead of 30 *could* have made a world of difference, having calm, professional buyers *definitely* did.

So Kimberly and I went out to dinner to celebrate. Though it was February 28th, it was our first nice dinner since arriving on Kauai.

And as we ate dinner at The Dolphin, as I enjoyed my sushi and taught Kimberly how to eat lobster, we roughly calculated the escrow and figured it would end right around March 28th, and so we could celebrate again on our birthdays.

Ha.

We got home afterward and our realtor had a counter-offer ready to sign, which cleaned up some issues in the offer, and we were off to the races.

Our expected close date ended up being March 30th. This was another nice match for my pre-move plans, because I'd arranged our finances and my job plans assuming we'd sell the house by March 31st.

I was probably a little smug about my planning come out so neatly.

Ha.

It's never a good sign when your realtor says, "I've never seen this before in all my years of realty." We heard that around March 14th, when our realtor told us that the buyer's bank, the one with the pre-approved loan, had decided to place a condition: the sewer lateral work had to be done before the escrow closed.

Now sewer lateral work is a relatively new requirement for house sales in the Bay Area. It's one of those things where the local governments have decided they can use the large amounts of money being exchanged in a house sale to require compliance for something that benefits the community. In this case, they required the sewer lateral line that runs from your house to the main sewer line in the road to be inspected and if it has problems, to be repaired. I fundamentally have somewhat mixed feelings about the regressive nature of ever-increasing fees like this, because they make it harder and harder for people who aren't rich to buy houses. But fixing sewer lateral pipes to protect the Bay is a pretty good cause.

So that all means that the buyers were going to have to do this sewer lateral work anyway. The way the law is written, the buyers hand off a deposit to the city in order to close escrow, and then they get it back when the work is done, else the city does the work with a contractor of their choice.

There's no drama here, but for some reason the bank freaked out, and decided it had to be done before escrow.

What we hadn't even now realized was that there was one other advantage in the backup offer. Their preapproved loan was from Bank of America while our buyers' preapproved loan was from Roscoe & Cletus' Loans While You Wait (not its real name).

But it shouldn't have been a big deal.

Ha.

Oh, one other wrinkle: the day after we signed the addendum for that sewer lateral work, extending our escrow by four days to April 3, Berkeley and most of the greater Bay Area issued a shelter-in-place order.

Suddenly we weren't even sure if the sewer later work could be done, putting the whole sale in question.

Good job, Roscoe and Cletus.

Oh, one more wrinkle: our former neighbors did their best to engage in Tortious Interference. One of them threw a fit when our stager showed up to clear out her furniture from the house. Then, two of them threw fits and called the police when the plumbers showed up to do that sewer lateral work.

Then afterward one of them threw fits about the plumbers leaving some materials while they waited for the city to show up to do their inspection.

Besides the fact that our thankfully former neighbors clearly need to mind their own fucking business, they were bitching about a lot of stuff that was covered under the shelter in place order. Our stager was probably OK to recover her stuff because recovering inventory was allowed, and the order was eventually adjusted to account for moving services like this. And, the OK for plumbing work was entirely explicit.

Our neighbors were petrified, by the by that the movers and plumbers were working within 6 feet from each other, and so people were going to die. And then, when they tried to make them stop doing their entirely lawful work, they were surprised that they got (from what I understand) very rude feedback.

Now we'd found one neighbor in particular to be an annoying busybody the whole time we were in Berkeley, but this was a whole new level because if she'd managed to stop the work, then the bank would not have extended the loan, and our escrow was in grave danger. So, as I said: Tortious Interference.

The neighbor seemed to think we were friends or something when we lived in Berkeley, though that was never the case. I've been nice in online chats with her in the last year or two, because I felt sorry for her and didn't think responding to a few dozen messages every several months when she remembered we existed was a huge cost if it made her happy. But, screw her. She's getting blocked as soon as I'm sure she can't damage us anymore. (I think that's the case now.)

Speaking of damage: on my birthday, our realtor said, "I've only seen this happen once in my entire career as a real estate agent."

(Not good.)

Roscoe and Cletus decided to stop offering loans. None. They didn't honor their preapproval for our buyer. They didn't care we were a week from closing.

The only other time our realtor had seen it was a bank that immediately afterward went under.

My theory is that Roscoe and Cletus were a small-enough time operation that they could get away with investing money in the stock market ... and when the stock market tanked, they didn't have money to loan anymore.

Hopefully they did (or will) go out of business, because when a loan is pre-approved, we assume it's good, and when a lender doesn't keep to that promise, they're poisoning the whole system.

To a certain extent, whether our buyers could get a loan or not was innately their problem, not ours. But we obviously wanted to keep working with these buyers as long as they remained the best offer. And beyond that, as the COVID-19 situation deepened, I became increasingly concerned that we might not be able to sell our house at all in the current circumstances if the first bid fell through.

Fortunately, it was our realtor talking to the buyers (and their agent) so no one could see my concern. Because that's the type of concern that an unscrupulous buyer could have leveraged. (Not that we ever had the least indication that our buyers were anything but great, but it's the sort of thing I worried about, perhaps due to playing too many negotiation games at the tabletop where I couldn't let myself blink.)

Our buyers tried to get a loan with Wells Fargo as try #2. Wells Fargo told them that they were no longer extending loans for non-owner-occupied purchases (and as noted, our buyers were planning to rent).

At some point, I began to wonder, "Why in the world are our buyers so intent in staying in the deal?" I mean, obviously, that's what we wanted. But I couldn't see their reason to stay in when things were problematic.

I mean there was a bit of sunk-cost fallacy: they'd paid for an appraisal and they'd paid for a sewer lateral. But that was at best maybe $3,000. And it feels like the value of real estate had the potential to get wonky at a much higher level in the age of COVID-19. It sure felt like the Bay Area was ripe for a correction especially after the "softness" the previous year.

My step-mom thinks they might have seen it was a good time to take out a loan. She's expecting a high level of inflation in the near future because of all the money the government is ponying up. So that means that if they get a loan for a million dollars now, it could easily be valued at two-thirds or three-quarters of that in several years time.

I think they'll planning to rent the house out room by room. This was actually one of our problems with turning the house into a rental: the numbers don't work out for renting a whole house. You can rent a 500 or 600 square foot apartment for $3,000+ in Berkeley, but if you hop up to a house almost triple that size you're still at $4,000 or so. Which is great, until you compare it to the property tax and a mortgage. But if they rent out every room individually and the sun room and turn the dining room into a bedroom too (as was the case before we moved in, and apparently once in the '80s too, as someone told us he'd lived there when we talked to him on the street), you could probably get a lot more. We wouldn't, but the new owners could. Not that we've seen any actual indication, I just hypothesize about why things happen.

(Poor house!)

Maybe all of these are true, but the buyers certainly seemed determined.

The third attempt at a loan was through a lender directly associated with our realtor's company. So, seemed good, eh? Except they required a second appraisal, which was more money for the buyers and more time for us all. Fortunately, the appraisal came back "right", though we'd started to have concerns that an over-enthusiastic appraiser might try to forecast a drop in property values.

We were told that the appraisal was the last item that they needed to drop in the file, and we all thought then it would be closed, and a loan would be issued at that point.

So of course bank #3 came back and said that they couldn't approve the loan because they now had COVID-19 related list of what incomes could not be used to qualify for a loan. Which is damned ridiculous, because they're using an ill-considered list of occupations that might have their income affected in the next year to determine whether to issue a 20- or 30-year loan.

And that list was definitely bad. The buyer's now non-qualifying job was home tutoring. So it's non-essential and non-social distancing, right? Meaning they're not earning any money now? Nope. They'd already moved over to online tutoring through video chats.

Idiot bank.

Or perhaps I should say: cowardly bank. It was reminding me of our second refinance (I think), when the bank suddenly acted like they were discriminating against Kimberly for her disability by asking for proof of continued disability income in a way that they could never get for an actual job. And after a bit of arguing over that, they started raising more and more problems. Because (I would guess) something had spooked them and they were looking for an out.

And it looked like the same thing was going on here.

(And this level of cowardice really astounds me given how stupidly brave the banks were in 2008, which I'm pretty sure fell in between our refi problems and this sale problem.)

Our buyers wrote up a long response about how the bank was wrong not to use the tutoring income to qualify for the loan. But I had zero faith, and I think the buyers didn't have a lot of faith either. So they offered me an alternative for bank loan #4.

They wanted to go with a hard-money lender. They'd actually mentioned this as a backup possibility back when loan #1 failed, to keep us on the hook. And now, they were good for their word.

If you don't know what a hard money loan is, I didn't either back when it was first mentioned. So I asked our realtor and then afterward looked it up for myself too. It's apparently a loan made by an individual lender, who is trying to generate good interest from his own principle. He lends out as a high interest rate, and tends to get his money back pretty quickly, as borrowers replace it with a real loan when they can. Oh, and it tends to be backed up by other property. I explained it to Kimberly as our buyers going to a loan shark, but I think there's less leg-breaking involved.

The catch was that (1) this loan was more expensive, and so it was costing our buyers more, and so they asked for a reduction in the price; and (2) for whatever reason hard-money loans like the seller to pay all of the (quite expensive) transfer taxes, whereas usually they're split.

Overall, the buyer asked for a reduction somewhere in the area of $30,000 dollars.

Fundamentally, we would have taken this. I told our realtor that. Because the market was growing so fraught (and our finances were growing sufficiently tight that I might have to dip into IRAs within a few months, which of course creates penalties).

But I really wanted to ensure that there was no chance I'd feel taken advantage of. And, I had a silly little threshold I was looking at: this request took our buyer's offer beneath the value of our backup buyer's offer. So I offered a compromise. We gave them half of the rebate they asked for and paid the transfer. So we gave back more like $20,000. I also suggested to our realtor that she mentioned we were making this counter to ensure their offer remained above our backup offer. The implication being that we would have jumped to the backup offer otherwise, which I certainly wasn't going to. Since I've always found negotiation games exhausting, I was thrilled that it was our realtor, not us, who took this counter back to our buyers.

(And it feels pretty weird talking about negotiating for those amounts of money, like it should be a game.)

My realtor was back very quickly saying they agreed.

We were off to the races.

Again.

My realtor told me a few days later that she thought we'd made a good decision telling the buyers to go with the hard-money loan rather than waiting for bank #3 to kick us in the teeth again. OK, maybe she didn't put it quite like that. In any case, like us, she had doubts that the bank was going to extend a loan under any conditions.

And she told me something I hadn't known: that the buyers were afraid that the hard-money lender was going to invest his money somewhere else, and thus disappear.

From there, things were almost anti-climatic. We got almost daily updates, rather than the week or so between events when working with a bank. I think they had the loan fully secured with a week. It was funded last Thursday, then the title was recorded on Friday. The day's delay was due to the fact that Alameda County is only recording in the morning. Apparently it's harder to get COVID-19 in the morning. (As far as I know, it's not.)

We no longer own a house in Berkeley.

It took a little longer to get our money.

The house closed on Friday, so we expected maybe the payment to clear on Saturday, but at the latest on Monday.

It turned out on Monday they were still waiting for the escrow to disburse.

And when it finally did, we had problems with my bank's checking account, as the info printed on the check apparently isn't where you wire too. The escrow agent tried, and it bounced, which was a little unnerving. I talked to the bank and got different routing information.

The payment finally came through this morning.

And that's the long story of selling our house, with some details I didn't want to write while it was still in process.

And the moral?

1.) All the best laid plans don't necessarily mean a lot. We worked hard to prepare for this sale, starting over a year and a half in advance. We carefully managed repairs and upgrades. We meticulously scheduled all the work both and after our departure from the Bay Area. And it all ran smack-dab into COVID-19 — as much of a black swan event as our purchase of the house in the first place.

2.) We got really lucky. We could easily have had the sale fall through and our backup buyer fall through. We might have been unable to sell the house for months, and then we could have gotten substantially less money if the market did correct. I really feel like we missed a life-changing catastrophe by that much — the difference between me being totally comfortable doing the work I want to ... and slowly looting our IRAs as we ran out of money.

3.) A tenacious realtor can make all the difference in the world. I know we wouldn't have been able to buy that house if our realtor hadn't pushed hard on the acceptance of our offer just more than 20 years ago, and I think it's entirely possible we would have lost this sale if she wasn't constantly managing it. We owe our success in life to many of the same factors as other "self-made" people: the luck of genetics, the generosity of our parents, and the toss of the dice. We also owe it to a really great realtor: Barbara Levy.

One more moral:

4.) Don't sell your house during a pandemic.

On Wednesday, I passed the last major hurtle for the auth and control server I've been writing for Skotos, as a replacement for the black-box UserDB currently in use. There was a little extra bit of MD5 authentication that had been confusing me, but I finally managed to unravel what was being done and recoded it.

And then I was able to successful log into Lovecraft Country, my current testbed.

And I started running commands, and the ones that talked to the new auth-and-control server all worked fine. And where there were a very few remaining gaps, I filled them in.

And I was like, "Where do I go from here?"

Because this was the beginning of the end of a process planned out over the last year, a necessary step to make the games at Skotos independent, so that we can hand them off to the players.

There's still lots to be done: the actual linking of the new servers to active games, and the work to get all the rest of stuff properly separated.

But this was a crucial step that showed I was closer to the end than the start.

And meanwhile on Tuesday, Kimberly and I signed all the paperwork to complete the sale of our Berkeley house. We didn't hear much on Wednesday, when our paperwork was winging its way over the Pacific, but today we heard that the buyers' loan had funded.

The only reason we didn't close today is because Alameda County is only recording in the morning right now, because there's apparently less danger of COVID-19 spread in the morning I guess.

To a certain extent, living in Berkeley already feels like a dream. I mean it's been 113 days since I stumbled out of that house between 5 and 5.30, into the dark streets, carrying two cats and three suitcases.

But I can also feel a bit of sadness, as we're giving up our house that we'd lived in for more than 19 years, longer than either of us had ever lived anywhere before.

I mean, we're thrilled to be in Hawaii, but that's a lot of history that's ending.

One more ending? Hopefully my bad knee.

I think I've been to the physical therapist four times now. It was pretty much not getting better before I went, and since it's been better every week.

It was still aching a bit when I swam on Tuesday. And I can still feel it a bit on the stairs and very definitely when kneeling.

But I'm very hopeful that I'm on the road to recovery rather than surgery.

Tomorrow is my last scheduled appointment. We have two more on the referral, over the next slightly more than 30 days. I'll talk to my therapist tomorrow and see if we want to do two more, or just one to see how things are going. I'm guessing 14 or 28 days out, in any case, rather than the weekly to this date (though I'll still need to be taking K. out to her physical therapy, which has not been making as good of progress).

And just because I haven't found the right journal entry to complain in, and it's sort of an ending: the situation at the golf course where I walk has continued to deteriorate.

I mean, a week ago or so we thought they were going to end walking entirely.

But I'm not convinced that the alternative is better, because as I said the manager is deathly afraid of the mayor.

So, the path to our side of "town" has definitely gotten blocked out.

But more than that, they've now got staff eagle-eyed and watching everyone walking the course. And when I was out there on Tuesday, I heard someone snitching about someone else who'd disappeared (perhaps onto one of the FORBIDDEN PATHS).

And on that Tuesday walk, the situation was just unpleasant at the course. Their parkings lots were absolutely JAMMED with cars, and they'd overflowed out onto the sides of the nearby streets. These were obviously all the people from the nearby neighborhoods, who can no longer just walk in. I was one of those poor fools driving, and I'm still not loving the whole parking thing, so I really didn't love having to go up to the mid parking lot, seeing it absolutely jammed, and then having to retreat and squeeze into the lower parking lot.

I've never seen the course that parked up.

And hand-in-hand with that were more people than ever and on a smaller area because they've closed off part of the course (apparently because a local family had an ILLEGAL PICNIC there, and then got shirty with the staff when they were told to move along, with the shirtiness being the part that was absolutely unacceptable).

And I should note I don't blame the manager or staff for all of this. They're actually being really responsible and responsive to our community, keeping this area open for walking even when they can't run it as a golf course. (And they're a community resource, so what they're doing makes sense, and if anything there are more people out there walking now than I've ever seen golfing on the course.)

But I do blame our governor and especially our mayor, who have created this atmosphere of not just fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but also this atmosphere where you're snitching on your neighbor and looking for anyone to be doing anything wrong and blaming everyone else. The especially sad bit is how non-Aloha this is.

So what's ending here? My walking? Our civility? I dunno.

Endings are hard. But these endings are almost all good. The combination of the end of my Skotos work and the sale of our house gives me the beginning of the ability to truly work for myself on the projects that are most meanintful to me. The ending of my knee pain lets me begin to enjoy my physical exercise again.

We're not there for any of them yet. The house sale should end first, hopefully tomorrow, and then Skotos will be a gradual process over the next 1-5 weeks or so, and meanwhile my knee will hopefully continue to improve week by week.

I will also say I'm looking forward to the end of this FUD on the island. Irrespective of the need for a means to control this virus, the way in which at least our local government has set our citizens against each other and especially against visitors is reprehensible. They've left us in a strong space in the island for our physical health, and less so for our mental and societal health. But hopefully we'll be opening things up again soon, as we're down to one active case on Kauai and no new cases in 11 days. And hopefully the FUD, the blaming of each other, and the xenophobia will peter out, because it's not acceptable for that to be the new norm.

So part of the plan of the move to Hawaii was to reduce my stress by stepping away from the things that caused tension in my life.

But, today was a day where that was refusing to let go.

Early on, I found that Marrach was having problems. Not, like game-was-down problems, but game-was-definitely-lagging problems.

The error logs for the game definitely showed something going: a mapping (an array, apparently) overflowing multiple times every minute.

Fortunately, s. has some good experience with the code, and I was able to get some pretty quick suggestions on how to deal with the problem, though it took a bit of trial and error to get the new code in.

So, problem solved? Maybe. s. is less convinced, but we'll see.

I jumped straight from Marrach to a belated call with Chris about Blockchain Commons work for the day, and about two-thirds of the way into that, I got a call from my realtor and ... sigh.

I've been reluctant to write about too many specifics while the house sale is still in process (and hopefully is still moving forward, albeit with two steps back for every three forward), but suffice to say, our buyers had a second loan go south for stupid COVID reasons. By my understanding, some banks are now refusing to use certain occupational income to qualify for loans (basically: if they think income for the occupation is endangered due to shelter-in-place), which is really dumb, because:

1.) IT'S SHORT-TERM. Even if shelter-in-place lasts through the rest of this year, that's still short-term over the life of a house loan.

2.) In this case, our buyers have already made accommodations for COVID-19, which makes it sound to me like the work is if anything more solid than ever. (It reminds me of when an idiot bank in the '00s insisted the gov't had to give them assurance that Kimberly would keep receiving her social security checks, even though her social security check, which was guaranteed for at least a few years, was more stable than any job income, which is not guaranteed in the same way.)

I just don't understand banks. First, their core dishonesty, when they start kicking up problems when it's obvious that they just don't want to give a loan. But moreso, this level of cowardice, yet coming from the same people who were investing money into fake, non-existent things during the 2008 crisis.

It just doesn't make sense.

There is one more fallback that will allow us to sell to these folks: a loan that will cost the buyers more money. They asked for some accommodations, we met them more than halfway, and they agreed to the compromise.

So, once more into the breach? This one should be a quicker turnaround. We're hoping to close, for real this time, next week, which would be right around the limit of the extension we signed a few weeks ago. (Our original closing was March 30th, the new one is April 22nd, I think.)

And speaking of stressors, our stupid former neighbors in Berkeley apparently are continuing to kick up a fuss, because they have nothing else to do with their empty lives.

The plumbers who put in the lateral sewer line to accommodate the first bank who flaked (which makes it sound more useless than it is: the lateral sewer line replacement is a requirement of a house sale in the East Bay at this point, if it's called for) apparently left some stuff behind, because they're waiting for the city to do their inspection, and the city of Berkeley, which opted to go it alone in the whole shelter-in-place thing, unlike any other city in the greater Bay Area, is totally overwhelmed. So that hasn't happened yet, though it's been weeks, and the stuff is still sitting there.

And our neighbor has started whining about that.

That's right, she whined when our stager came to take away her furniture; she whined when the plumbers came out to do their work; and now she's whining that the plumbers *AREN'T* coming back to take away their stuff. UGGH.

I don't care, I don't really care, other than thinking that someone really needs a life.

And someone is getting totally blocked on my phone when she no longer has the ability to affect my life.

I did get some good work done for Blockchain Commons today, though less than I would had hoped with various interruptions.

And that means the last two days of my work week are focused on Skotos & RPGnet programming, which I usually find more restful and soothing — but I'm connecting my auth client up to an actual game, so it could instead be a nightmare of debugging. We'll see.

And in the late afternoon tody, I walked in the golf course just before the pouring rain came down. Always restful. There were awesome clouds in the huge Hawaiian sky.

And, I'm feeling good that I'm genuinely moving forward on the D&D product histories that are my next big Designers & Dragons project.

Over the last few Fridays I finished up two of the final three unwritten histories for what will be Book I.

And for the last few days I've been collating all of my notes for the entire project into appropriate files, clearing years worth of links and quotes.

And then I start organizing my product histories for Book I, generating Word files for each section, and ... starting actual work on something actually book shaped.

This has been a long time coming, and though it's still going to be a huge amount of work expanding, revising, cutting, and researching until I get everything both non-repetitive and with the appropriate level of detail, it'll be rewarding work.

And that's going to be big project #1 in my Hawaii writing time.

(Sometime, maybe this year, I'd like to come out with either one book for TSR: 1974-1989 or two, one for OD&D and AD&D in that time period, one for BD&D in its entirety. The word counts will tell me which ... but I've got a lot of words.)

Today after work I rushed about to do several tasks, at least one of which would not be covered under shelter-in-place rules ... and it's now been announced that we're going to shelter in place for the whole state at midnight tomorrow.

My first stop was the bank. Part of my masterplan of the move to Hawaii was to drop back on my former full-time work with Skotos and make up for that with more time working on Designers & Dragons (and other personal projects). So, I've formed "Designers & Dragons LLC" here in Hawaii, and my last step in that process was getting a bank account set up for that. They required more of the LLC paperwork than I'd expected, but fortunately I had it all with me. So, Designers & Dragons LLC is now 100% ready to go, and I expect to start using it for my writing and consulting next month.

Next up was the hospital. My new doctor got back to me about my knee that's been hurting for like a month now and so I was able to go in and get an X-Ray. Yay, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do this for months. Though I suspect it's a sprain, strain, or tear, not bone damage, so it's likely to need an MRI not an X-Ray, but it's a start. I also have a referral to a physical therapist, and maybe that will help me out.

Third stop was The UPS Store, and this was the one that I didn't think I'd be able to do after tomorrow. We have a $60 Van Gogh print that we'd ordered for our bed room that came entirely mangled. It might have been damaged in transit, but it also clearly hadn't been put together right, because it wasn't flat. So I sent it back so that we didn't have to pay for a $60 Van Gogh print that was misproduced and misshipped.

And finally I went by Costco, because it was right around the corner from the UPS Store. I picked up some refrigerated food and non-perishables. And, I was shocked that the store was relatively empty. I'm been afraid of chaos in advance of the shelter-in-place, but fortunately that announcement came in just before I got there (not earlier in the day as I'd feared). Still, it was quite the opposite of chaos. Perhaps a result of the tourists already starting to head out?

So that was the chaotic TODO on my penultimate day of freedom. I did a pretty good job of social distancing everywhere, except when someone cornered me in the frozen room at Costco. And hopefully I got the stuff done that needed to get done.

Meanwhile, I was also distracted during the afternoon because of the eternal house sale. (How could it be just three and a half weeks since we celebrated accepting an offer? It feels like forever!) Our stager had movers come and get her crap out of our house today. (Yay!) But one of our neighbors freaked out and said it shouldn't have been done during the shelter-in-place, and the movers weren't maintaining social distancing with each other, and there would be martial law. (I believe the stager's theory is that there was an exception to the shelter-in-place for recovering her inventory, and as I've written elsewhere there obviously should be an exception for movers, and I know there is in other orders, such as Colorado.) Then the plumbers were out to start the work on the lateral sewer repair, as required by the buyer's bank. (Yay!) But two of our neighbors freaked out and said it shouldn't have been done during the shelter-in-place, and claimed the plumbers were belligerent when confronted about doing their entirely legal (as clearly excepted in the shelter-in-place order) work, and apparently harsh words were exchanged between the neighbors and the plumbers, and someone may have stepped within six foot of someone else, and so the police were called at least once, maybe twice. (Boo!)

When I say the shelter-in-place orders are creating mass hysteria, that's it. And the hysteria is so hysterical that people are attacking people doing ANYTHING, even though there are clearly written exceptions to keep our society working.

Anywho, the furniture is removed, so now we just have to hope the lateral sewer repair gets done tomorrow without any more neighbor attacks or cop arrests or whatever and if so, then we're so, so, so close to closing.

Sonoma was not one of the six Bay Area counties to declare a shelter-in-place order, and they had a good reason: they thought it would cause panic.

And, I think they were right.

San Jose reported that the panic buying of food has spread to panic buying of guns, and so began shutting down gun stores as "non-essential" services.

And as I wrote yesterday, a genuine existential fear seems to be at the heart of our stager deciding to throw her professional reputation in the toilet: an existential fear that's just not (yet?) justified by the current situation.

And we were even seeing overflow of that here in Hawaii, which has tight connections to California, as that 10% or so of patrons at Costco on Monday were jamming their carts full of water, then shuffling out as fast as they could, not talking to anyone, then tossing it into illegally stopped vans that had avoided the fence of carts that CostCo has put up to prevent exactly that sort of illegal panic buying and loading.

And it's equally obvious to me that those Bay Area counties have just the faintest idea of what they've done.

I wrote about the mad scrambling of the recorders offices yesterday.

Today I spent four hours on hold with the Berkeley Public Health Office, trying to get them to confirm that moving services are essential (and how could they not be? People could literally end up homeless during a shelter-in-place order because the counties didn't think to include moving in their essential-services list.) For four wretched hours I sat programming the thin-auth server for Skotos, trying to ignore the homicide inducing Berkeley hold message, looping every thirty seconds and telling me that they'd get to me shortly.

It was a relief when my carrier cut my call off at precisely four hours, though of course that meant that I didn't get my confirmation, and that I can't yet show our stager proof that she needs to do her job.

I've tried to follow-up with a few emails instead, and meanwhile my realtor is working on getting similar input from Alameda County, though they're not technically who's in charge of the shelter-in-place in Berkeley.

(Berkeley is in fact the only city in the six-county area going it alone. AS USUAL. And that seems to be working out aces.)

Yep, I'm in an annoyed, pissy mood tonight.

It's mainly having to listen to that infernal hold message for four hours straight.

But I'm also very non-plussed over the decisions now being made by Hawaiian politicians, which seem very wrong-headed and at odds with the rest of the US.

The governor's order yesterday was generally what we'd expect at this stage in the pandemic for a country that has woefully botched its ability to test for COVID-19. Shut down bars and clubs. Make restaurants go take-out only. There were two rather shocking bits: he closed down churches (which is a big deal in Hawaii) and he asked tourists to stay away for thirty days (which is going to devastate an already reeling economy).

But the thing at odds with current wisdom was that he also closed state parks. In other parts of the country that are being locked down, people are being encouraged to get out into parks and exercise (and at a respectful distance), so that they don't go crazy. Federal parks went free today. But the governor of Hawaii doesn't seem to get it and is closing down our open spaces instead.

Meanwhile, the really wrong-headed move came from Kauai's mayor, who today laid down a curfew saying that everyone must be in their residence from 9pm-5am every day. Wow. Does he think the biggest crowds are at night? Does he think that COVID-19 spreads worse at night? It's pretty hard to figure out what's going through his head when he finds it necessary to lay down one of the most fascist rules anywhere in the country.

I certainly won't ever be voting for Mayor Derek Kawakami, who has gone full-on fascist in my mind, and Governor David Ige has gone onto my questionable list, for such a dramatic misunderstanding of the human psyche, even if the rest of his order was just following the same unfortunate direction as the rest of the US.

It's an unfortunate direction because South Korea has shown us the proper answer, and it's testing and tracing, not extreme social isolation. And they're done great.

We can't follow in that direction, unfortunately, because of the entirely pathetic Federal response. We hoped for four years that Trump wouldn't have a crisis, because we knew he'd be entirely insufficient for the task, and that's now proven true. We had our first case the same day as South Korea's, and they've done a magnificent job of controlling the crisis without destroying their economy (or their freedoms) and we've had the president jumping up and down with his fingers in his ears.

He refused tests from other sources, he said it wasn't a problem, and now he's screwed us all.

Whoever asked to live in interesting times can bite me.

This morning I awoke to the news that the San Francisco Bay Area was going on lockdown. And, of course, that sobered me (or maybe woke me up: it was the morning), because we were still living there 11 weeks ago.

The press conference announcing the details came at 1pm PT, which is currently 10am our time. I saw the summaries while I ate lunch in between bouts of programming.

But I didn't really realize the repercussions until my real estate agent messaged me a few hours later. She noted that the recorder's office in Santa Clara had already closed down and that if the Alameda County office did the same, we wouldn't be able to record the sale of our house, and thus we couldn't close escrow.

This is on March 16th, with our escrow beginning on February 29th and supposedly ending on March 30th (or maybe April 3rd: there was a little delay last week). I've been stressed out for the last month whether COVID-19 was going to impact the sale of our house, but I hadn't really thought it would while we were two weeks out of escrow closing.

But now there are two problems going on.

First, the bank asked for some sewer work to be done, as a condition for the buyer's loan. This seems to be what banks do: they pre-approve a loan, then they find a condition to make it look like they're not just approving everything. And the buyers fulfill the condition and everyone is happy.

In this case, it was some work that needed to be done when the sale occurred anyway, the bank just asked for it to be done before escrow closed. (And that perhaps makes it all sound more reasonable than it was: we've never heard of this condition being placed before, but like I said, banks like to figure out something to say.)

So my immediate response was panic, that this work couldn't get done with the Bay Area closed down, and so we couldn't close escrow, and not only that, but we were a long way off. But it turns out that plumbing is on the list of essential services that aren't being curtailed, so as long as the workers are willing to go forward, everything should be fine. In fact, the buyers have already paid in full for the work, really showing that they want to make this work, so I'm calmed down. Somewhat.

Second, there's the question that our realtor raised about whether we'll be able to record the sale. And, I'm a bit more confident there. If the buyers have the loan in hand, and we're able to do everything but record, I think we're 99.9% there, and the only question will be when we can take that final step and get the money out of escrow.

My realtor says that the worst case is we might have to wait a week. And, she's wonderfully optimistic and calm and has by my count talked me down three different times when I was worrying about the pandemic affecting the house sale.

But that's not the worst case. The worst case is that we can't get the plumbing work done and the bank decides not to extend the loan and the buyer can't buy despite their calm and professional and unwavering attitude and our backup offer doesn't have the down payment any more due to the market crash and we can't put the house back on the market because COVID-19 has made open house illegal and it sits unoccupied for six months or a year and homeless break in and get squatters rights and we have to evict them and they burn the house down on the way out and one of them dies and his family sues us.

That's the worst case.

But hopefully our experienced, super-realtor is right.

I feel a bit selfish talking about our difficulties selling a house due to COVID-19. Because I know one acquaintance, someone I've talked to more than once, whose father died from COVID-19. And, there are another 7,000 mothers or fathers or sons or daughters or husbands or wives who have died.

We could end up in some financial difficulties if everything went south, but we'd get by, and it certainly wouldn't be life or death.

But, this is how COVID-19 is impacting us. And it's a pretty big impact. Potentially.

I'm still very sad that we had to cancel RWOT10. (But today, C. is literally on the last flight out of Argentina; and my own return flights from Argentina were cancelled over the weekend, so I could have gotten stuck there for the length of the plague!) And, I'm sad that Kimberly is almost definitely going to find the BTS concert that she was so excited about get cancelled. And it's a bit of a bummer that we're not going to visit the Bay Area as planned, though really, we just got here.

And, I still have to question: how long do people think this can go on? I mean the constraints on personal freedoms are so extreme that it's entirely unprecedented. We're passing by 9/11-level changes in the lives of people in this country. And do the countries of the world think they're going to be able to carry this on for the 12-18 months to get a vaccine out? Do they think that we'll heavily balkanize the whole world for the next year and a half? I dunno.

But I'm not really bothered by this whole social distancing thing, and it looks like we're on the verge of that here in Hawaii, as those 7 cases to date could easily blow up at any moment.

Because: introvert.

I can read, I can write. (Heck, tonight I've already polished up a chapter for a self-sovereign identity book and reread a volume and a half of Locke & Key.) I can Dance Dance Revolution (Stepmania) for exercise. I can walk quietly in the golf course staying six feet away from anyone. I can find out whether swimming is suggested or prohibited.

Not that I'm worried about me, but because I want to keep my dad, Mary, and Kimberly safe as they're likely all more vulnerable to the disease than I am.

I'm already considering stepping away from my Thursday night gaming, though I'd hate to look like a flake when I'm just meeting these people. But it'll doubtless be understood.

I just hope we can close on the house. Then the stress drops tenfold, even if the world continues to fall apart.

Well, it drops tenfold unless COVID-19 impacts our lives personally even more. Hopefully not.

1. Driving. Thursday night, as I headed out from gaming at "8 Moves Ahead", I was struck by the weirdness of watching someone hop into their car, then walking past him to my own car, to drive home. That's just not how life has been for the last 30 years. Then, Friday morning, I woke up from a dream of driving, and I'm certain that I haven't dreamed of driving in 30 years either.

2. Gaming. I had a great night of gaming at 8MA on Thursday. We had 4-6 players, well board game players, because there are always Magic players and miniatures players and video game players. I'm still struggling a bit with the fact that the group is more American-game oriented than I'd like, but we played Coup, Coup, Coup, Coup, Mysterium, and Dixit. I'm hoping that I can peel off enough players to do some of the more Euro-stuff that I like (of which Mysterium was a fine example, albeit on the light side). Or a campaign that I'd like such as Pandemic Legacy Season 1 or Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. It's really amazing how differently different gaming cultures can evolve, because I had to explain PACG last night, and though several people were interested, no one had heard of it before.

3. Working. Of course my prime focus right now is on working. This is supposed to be my last month of full-time work for Skotos, and so I need to clean up some lingering updates and bugs for RPGnet and also write a thin-auth server for Skotos that will allow us to divide up the games. The RPGnet work is looking very doable, as I finished the big stuff last month and am just dipping in and fixing remaining bugs and adding a few requested features. For Skotos, I can't decide if I'm doing great or it feels unattainable. Some days the one, some the other. But I do have a server that does auth now, and I'm slowly adding in other features. I did a real sprint on Friday and am hoping to do that a few more times this coming week.

4. COVIDIng. So, COVID-19 is continuing to affect our life even though it really isn't. Santa Clara has issued an advisory against large gatherings, so Kimberly and I now suspect that her BTS concert will very likely be canceled. We'll still go out there, because we have many other reasons for visiting the Bay Area (e.g., family and friends), but it'd obviously be deeply disappointing for her. I just don't understand what the world is thinking the end-game is at this point. Because COVID-19 is out: it's spreading silently all over the globe. I mean, if the goal is to slow it down until there's a vaccine, that would make sense, but people are still saying a year out for the vaccine. So what are gov't's going to do a month from now when this is still spreading wildly? Two? Six? I think at some point people are going to have to say: it's awful, it's going to kill a lot of people, but the containment may be worse than the disease. And I'm just shocked that they're not coming to that conclusion yet. Fear is a really great control mechanism. Time will tell.

I can't find the origin of this bit of irony, but I'll leave it here: http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2020/03/weekend-open-thread-bene-gesserit-vs-covid-19/

5. Shelving. The big project that my dad and I continue to work on is shelving. I remember when he quickly knocked out some shelves for me when I was young that I used for decades. In fact, there were three of them, and I only finally got rid of them when we moved: two to Uhuru, who presumably resold them, and one left on the street, and very quickly picked up. But he's much more experienced now, and wants to do these new shelves right, so we're going to end up with some beautiful shelves, but we're taking our time. At this point we've got one of them put all together and all of the screw holes fitted with plugs. Next up will be sanding the plugs down to be flush with the shelf sides. And then we rout the shelves to give them nice edges. And then we stain.

6. Staining. Speaking of which, my dad left me with a couple of gloss finishes to put on the stain, and suggested that I paint out some stain on a scrap board and test the different finishes and see which I like best. So I put down the stain Friday afternoon and afterward I cleaned my brush like I usually would, washing it and brushing the stain out with my hands. Because I didn't really understand how much stickier stain was than paint. So I ended up with two hands entirely covered with stain. Which wouldn't wash out. Whoops! Internet to the rescue: you can use olive oil to get stain off. Who knew?? (It worked great.)

7. Writing. I am slowly making time for my personal writing again. I've written three Designers & Dragons articles since the start of the year, and one Mechanics & Meeples article. Obviously, I've also written a ton of journal entries. I've further done a bit of contract writing for Bitmark, and I'm really determined to sit down and revise a chapter I've drafted for a book on self-sovereign identity. I'm still not up to my pre-move-prep standard of doing serious work every Saturday (and Sunday) and some evenings ... but it's something, and I'm happy for that (and I'm really looking forward to having more time for my personal writing come April).

8. Graying. Here's one thing that's surprised us: every single week we've been in Hawaii since we moved has felt grayer and wetter than any single week we'd ever vacationed here, with the exception of one notably rainy (and floody) vacation where I can remember sitting in my dad and Mary's family room as thunder boomed above us and the lights went out. My dad says it's winter, but we've always been here during this time period: our earliest trip ever was at the very end of October and our latest was in May, but for the most part, we've been here in January, February, or March. We think it's overall been a bit wetter and grayer, but we also think that our house on top of a hill gets more rain and wind than my dad and Mary's place, just a mile away (and my dad seemed to confirm that, saying that they often see rain when they're going by our house, then it's perfectly sunny at theirs.) On the other hand, that means we also get to see awesome rain scything down through the sky diagonally onto this unprotected hillside, as we did last night.

9. Chickening Out. One of our local chickens has disappeared. Alberto went missing about two weeks ago, though Bessie is still around, albeit more skittish than ever. We're disappointed over the loss of one of our centipede killers, who stop the slithery monsters before they get to our house. I'd long said we should be feeding Alberto and Bessie to keep them around our house, but alas we didn't before he disappeared. I think he might have been captured by the local rooster-raisers, and thus is now likely being trained for cock fights. (Every part of this is pure supposition.)

10. Housing. My last item comes from beyond our island: our house appraiser in Berkeley was out last week and will be putting out his report this week. We assume all will go well, but this is of course one of the potential places where something could go horribly wrong, if you got an appraiser who didn't understand how things work. But in 22 days, we'll hopefully be all done and closed out and better able to move forward with our new life here.

Friday was a tough day. I woke up early to attend a meeting about the status of RWOT10. I expected to be hearing from our attendees whether they were still planning to attend, but instead the leadership team had to announce that the workshop was already cancelled, because the Argentinian government had given into FUD and is advising against meetings of ten or more people, believe it or not, if some of the attendees are foreigners.

Then I helped write a letter to our attendees letting them know the bad news.

Then I had to get to one of our Skotos games that was crashed.

Then I heard from Kimberly that some tests had suggested she needs to go on antibiotics following her recent surgery, which means that we needed to rush into Lihue as soon as we were done with the work day.

Then I heard the the antibiotics were $180.

(Fortunately, Kimberly got that squared away before the end of the workday, and got a nurse to call in a script for a $4 antibiotic rather than a $180 antibiotic; I often don't understand doctors' willful ignorance about drug pricing.)

And then I realized that because of all the crises, I hadn't yet filled out the forms and cut the checks for Skotos' local taxes, which were due at the end of February.

But I managed that, and we got out of the house, and we got to the post office just before it closed to get some stamps, and we got out to Lihue and back before traffic got terrible.

But it was a frustrating, bad day.

Until the evening. We were just thinking about dinner when our awesome realtor for our Berkeley house called with our offers. There were some we were very happy with, and we gave her the OK to write a counteroffer, and then we decided to go out to dinner to celebrate.

(I'd like to write more about the offers, but I think Kimberly is right in saying we shouldn't talk about details until we close, so I'll put a pin in that, and hopefully remember some of the interesting bits in a month, which is when we'll hopefully be all done.)

We haven't had any truly nice dinners since we got to Hawaii, so this was a pre-house-sale extravagance. We went to a place called The Dolphin in Koloa at The Shops at Kukui'ula. It was one of a few restaurants that we'd considered as a possibility when we did a walkthrough of The Shops in January: it was seafood and sushi. So I had a great crab roll called a Flyin' Hawaiian and Kimberly had a lobster tail, and much fun was had by all. Kimberly had amusingly never had a lobster tail before, so I had to show her how to eat it, and there was much waving around of utensils, and my discouraging the use of a knife, and I was several times afraid the lobster would end up on the floor, but it never did.

So, bad day, good evening.

Saturday was a fine day, albeit busy.

We were still working with our realtor on the offers. We were happy to hear that the counteroffer had been accepted, which it should have, as there was just some bureaucratic cleanup. And we also had to work with her on signing off on a backup offer, which everyone had agreed to by Sunday morning.

My dad came over at about 9am, and we planned to spend a good portion of our "bonus day" (February 29th) together.

The morning was spent working on my shelves. This was, I think, the fourth day we've spent on the project. At that point, we'd basically got all the wood for the shelves, cut it to the right dimensions, and then we'd affixed a bit of red oak (red pine? red something.) to the front of each sheet of plywood, so the front will look nice. And we routed it all to get it all level.

So on Saturday we started putting the shelves together. We got all of the holes measured and drilled and then put the top board and the next to bottom shelf in place, which gave us a frame. It was all affixed with glue and screws, and at that point my dad wanted to let it dry, so that our carefully measured, mostly 90-degree frame would stay in place.

So afterward my dad and I went for lunch (Taco Bell! In Lihue!) and then a bike ride on the Kauai Path, along the East Shore in Kapaa.

It's been years since I'd been out on the Path, and I newly discovered how beautiful it was, seeing all that beach and all those waves, right alongside the path.

Unfortunately, it was very windy. We knew this before we headed out there, and I told my dad several times that if the wind was too much for him, we should turn around. After 10 or 15 minutes or riding, we did.

He was totally winded. (Hah!) Meanwhile, I discovered that I do still have most of my biking muscles, because I was barely noticing the wind. In fact, I later discovered that my Fitbit didn't even credit me for exercise. So, yay. Except the lack of exercise.

One downside on Saturday: Kimberly revealed that her foot has been hurting for the last few weeks like she's had another stress fracture in her bad foot.

Which is as awful as it sounds. She's scooting around the house again on Jeeves (the scooter), and being much more careful about using her foot.

I suspect we're going into Lihue tomorrow, either to the doctor's office or the ER.

Today we largely spent the day with my dad and Mary: a social trip to Costco and some time eating and hanging out at their house.

And that was the busy last few days.

So, it's been two months that we've been out here on Kauai.

We've definitely settled into a routine, and it's a very busy one. Work during the day, running errands or working with my dad in the afternoon, visiting with the folks on Sunday.

My gaming on Thursday at 8 Moves Ahead is quickly becoming a part of the routine, though I'm still waiting to see how it shakes out: specifically if we have a critical mass of eurogame players.

Our work on the house has mostly stalled out, other than the work my dad and I are doing on shelves. But, those will help a lot, and after we finish these first two for my closet, we can then decide what to do with shelving for the rest of my office and for the family room, which should get much of our things out of boxes.

When the Berkeley house sells, we'll also be able to finish up the furnishing of our house. And invest in some solar panels. And buy a murphy bed. And maybe terrace the back yard. But we're going to carefully limit how much of our money we spend, as most of the proceeds of the house are intended for savings, so that the interest can help pay our bills.

I'm still not quite figuring out how to get my regular exercise into this busy routine, but I'm not worried about it because everything is going to change (again) in April. But I do now have a dance pad and a few games I can use it with on my Mac, and that's helping a little.

There's one last month of this transition period. When it ends, our Berkeley house will (hopefully) have sold and my work with Skotos full-time (hopefully) will be done, and I can (hopefully) see how life here really settles down, with some contract tech writing and more time for my own writing and more flexibility in my schedule ...

Whew, it's coming up fast!

I visited the doctor's office today, just to get brought in as a new patient with my primary-care-physician (and to get my blood-pressure med reupped).

As I checked in, the receptionist somewhat apologetically told me that she had to ask me if I was coughing or had any other symptoms that could be from Coronavirus.

Which ... I don't even know how that could be useful, because out of a thousand people who answered that question in the positive, it's very likely that a thousand wouldn't have coronavirus.

(We've had one case in Hawaii, a tourist on Maui, then Oahu two and a half weeks ago.)

The receptionists upstairs at the family practice part of the hospital were wearing masks, which they definitely weren't when I saw them a month ago for Kimberly's first doctor visit.

And in two and a half weeks, I'm supposed to be traveling, to Buenos Aires for the tenth Rebooting the Web of Trust conference.

And I know coronavirus is affecting our attendees there.

As I told C. today, I suspect that traveling through five(!) airports on my way to Buenos Aires, four of them international, does increase my chance of contracting the coronavirus: from zero to infinitesimal.

I'm not going to let that infinitesimal difference derail my support of the design workshop.

There's a lot of FUD going on.

Frankly, I suspect it's going to become a pandemic, because the rest of the world likely doesn't have the willpower to tightly contain the virus like China has tried to.

Which means that what we really need is a vaccine, and not in 18 months.

And life goes on in this time of cholera ...

One of the problems I'd foreseen in moving to Hawaii was getting my daily exercise. Too often I've had errands to run when I got done with my daily work, and then it was evening, and somehow I missed out on doing any walking or swimming.

Back in Berkeley, I'd walk to the UPS store or the library or CVS or Taco Bell, and that'd get me 20 minutes of walking at least, but not here.

Especially not when it's cool and raining.

So my solution arrived today: a USB dance pad. I used to play Dance Dance Revolution on Kimberly's PS2, but that ended when she started hanging out downstairs more ... and I didn't want to dance in our Art Room upstairs, where I'd be dancing on the floor right above her.

But here I knew I'd have an isolated office downstairs.

I just couldn't figure out how to place the PS2 and another screen in my office, without wasting a bunch of room.

But it turns out there are now USB dance pads and some dance/rhythm games for the Mac. So after a largely gray and busy week last week in which I didn't get any exercise after Monday, I ordered a pad for my desktop computer, and it arrived today.

Stepmania is a great game that evolved from DDR play, and I played it in DDR mode some today (though there are apparently other ways, I just haven't figured them out yet with the game's abyssal documentation). And I also bought and tried Crypt of the Necrodancer, a step-based roguelike. I'm not sold on it yet, but I'll try it some more. (And I only paid $3!)

Today was one of those days when my daylight got eaten up: after work Kimberly and I went to the UPS Store (for some notarized stuff for Skotos), then the doctors, then Walmart, then Taco Bell, then Costco, and it was dark within half-an-hour or so of my getting home.

So it was a great time to have that dance pad.

(Though I probably would have raced out for a twilight walk if I didn't have the dance pad to play with.)

Meanwhile, Work on homifying our house has somewhat stalled out.

We have maybe 75% of our furniture, and the remaining stuff is low priority enough that we're not going to look into it until our Berkeley house sells and we refill our coffers.

We still have plenty of boxes about, but they mostly require shelves.

But I've still got a few boxes here and there that I can unpack, and I have paintings and a few other things that I can hang.

In many ways we're still on the sharp end of the move, because even with our new house (slightly) settling, I'm still working to finish up my full-time work with Skotos, and I've got a lot to finish up for both Skotos and RPGnet in the next five weeks or so.

And as I noted, I've got a week away planned in March, for the Buenos Aires trip.

And we're still regularly talking with our realtor about the Berkeley house, and occasional problems there.

Theoretically things cool down in April, when my Skotos work is hopefully done and our Berkeley house is hopefully sold, and the Buenos Aires trip is hopefully done.

And I start doing contract technical writing.

But then Kimberly and I are heading back to the Bay Area for a bit at the end of April ...

So, busy times

In Berkeley, my home improvement was limited to ... I don't even know what. I guess I took the front door's lock apart a few times to try and get it to latch right. (I never could, but after we moved out our realtor had a handyman fix it, and he had to get a new one, so that failure wasn't on me.) And I did reinstall all of our other locks with Schlages. Oh, and I rewired bathroom lights twice, so that they could be turned on with a pullchain, because they didn't have a switch.

But, I pretty much wasn't a home improvement sort of guy.

Since we moved to Hawaii, that's changed, in large part because of the presence of my dad, who is willing to both help and teach me how to do things. (We'll see if the lessons stick or not.)

So, I've been working on a lot of projects lately:

Carpentry. Last Friday, my dad and I started work on our long-anticipated bookshelf project, which should put two four-foot wide bookshelves in my office closet (with five shelves each, that's about 40 linear feet of shelving, which I'm hoping will support all or most of my graphic novel collection). We continued the work today. And it's going to be a lot of work. The first thing we did was cut up the plywood we had. So far, we've cut eight strips that are eight foot wide and 9.5 inches deep, which will be the four sides of the bookcases and I presume eight of the shelves.

But plywood, even when it has a nice veneer on the top and bottom still looks like crap on the edges. So for the front edge, we got some red oak and have been cutting half-inch strips from that to glue and nail onto the front of the shelves. The sawing with my dad's radial saw was careful and tedious work, but it's the nailing together of the wood that was really exhausting, as we got down on our hands and knees and carefully drilled and nailed the nails every six inches. And then there was still more work with router and sandpaper today to make those bits of wood really look good together.

So after two afternoons of work, my dad and I have the left and right sides of each shelf pretty much done (other than covering the nail holes and sanding a bit where we burned the wood in a few places while cutting). And we have the shelves cut out but not put together yet. We're planning a little bit of work tomorrow afternoon on the shelves themselves, before I rush home to eat dinner with Kimberly and head out to gaming, night two.

I should say this is a project that my dad has largely been doing, with as much support from me as possible. For example, he mainly did the sawing, with me holding wood steady or catching it as necessary. But, we worked together on the drilling and nailing, and today I did some of the routing and some of the sanding.

Masonry. My dad and Mary own a few different houses and condos on Kauai that they rent (as they did with our house up until January 1). And, they sometimes have to do work on them. In fact, my dad doing this sort of landlord repair for the last 11 years is in part why he's gotten so good at all this handyman work. So, I've told my dad a few times that I'd be happy to help him with that work when it would be useful. We finally planned an outing on Saturday to go out to their duplex (which they co-own with my sister) to do some masonry work.

One of the great enemies of people in Hawaii is water, and here it appears that the duplexes have always had problems with water running down the hill above them, hitting the wall of the duplex, and going through it, down into the carport. (I asked my dad if it had been in the disclosures for the duplex, and he said no, though we're all sure it's an old problem. Ah, disclosures.) My dad came up with a solution for this: a line of cinderblocks in front of the house to run the water away fro the wall. Each of those cinderblocks had to be mortared in, to create a sturdy line.

This turned out to be work that my dad had never done before. Which was probably why we had our first fiasco with quick-setting mortar which didn't get out of the mixing tub before it was drying(!). But second time was the charm. After watching him lay down the mortar and squish in a block, then mortar between the blocks for the next one, I was able to do the same. And, I was really happy to be there, because kneeling down (always the kneeling down!) was hard on his back, so I was able to offer some real value.

Our line of cinderblocks ended up a little crooked, especially at the start, but so it goes when you're learning something. We also didn't finish. I think we got 14 down and 9 more are needed, or something like that, plus the cinderblocks should be capped to keep water from filling them and stagnating. So we'll be back next Saturday to continue.

Paintery. And finally I did a little project of my own, which was optimizing my new printer stand for my use. My dad lent me a hole saw, and I was able to use that to put a hole in the back of the printer stand so that I could feed power to USB devices (and maybe a laptop) on one shelf. I'd say the work with the hole saw was 90% successful: it put a beautiful round hole in the back, but knocked out an extra section on the front. But, it's way back in the printer stand, so should be mostly invisible. I also put two coats of Kona Brown paint on the back of the stand, which had been a bright beigish wood, which was out-of-place in my dark wood office, and problematic because it was facing the side of my desk and so quite visible.

It all looks (and works) much better now, and so I've been able to start using the printer stand's storage and recharging my USB devices out of the way.

Will this home improvement work continue beyond our first year here? I dunno, but I'm hoping my dad can teach me enough about it all that I feel comfortable doing this sort of work.

Meanwhile, in Home Furnishing. We have replaced our failed bed! Both my dad and my Uncle Don mentioned places in Lihue that might have a few beds, so on Sunday, between our late Valentines lunch and an afternoon with my folks, we checked out the first, BedMart. They just had two styles of bed, but one was an attractive reddish wood whose design wasn't unlike the failed Wayfair set (but with the pieces a little larger and the slat design not totally sucky). We got measurements, went home, decided it would mostly work, and went back on Monday to purchase. It was considerable more expensive than our original set (either about 3x as expensive, or not quite 2x, depending on if you count the shipping or not), but it looks to be much better quality.

Even better, they delivered and set up on Tuesday, so we had a bed (again) last night.

Mind you, that means we've only slept on it one night so far, and our Wayfair bed failed on night #2.

Meanwhile, in Berkeley. Our realtor held the first open house on Sunday, and it was apparently very well attended. She's also done a score or so individual tours. Apparently about a dozen parties have asked for disclosure packets, which is of course a sign that someone might be interested enough in the property.

She's having an electrician in tomorrow to fix some minor electrical problems, and is going to hold a second realtor's tour at the same time.

Thus far, she seems very pleased with the turnout and attention, and says she thinks we'll do well, so fingers crossed.

Theoretically we should have offers in a about nine days, and hopefully that'll be lots of offers, because that'll be the prime decider on whether we earn enough to make it easy for me to spend lots of time on my personal writing pursuits.

And hopefully that means we'll close around the end of March, which is where that's been in my head-calendar.

I. The Gaming.

Last Thursday I just wasn't yet up to trying out a new game store in Hawaii. It just felt too stressful, at a number of levels: I'd have to park my large car, Julie, in a small parking lot; I'd have to meet a whole bunch of new people in an unfamiliar environment; and I'd have to make a long drive home in the dark on the two-lane highway. So after my dad and I rushed around to Home Depot, getting wood to build bookcases, and after I got home to find Kimberly still have major problems with seizures, I just threw up my hands and decided that I didn't want to go out.

Apparently, it just took me a week to gather my gumption, because yesterday I felt fully ready to brave the new game store, even though my dad and I rushed a bit to get some swimming in on a rare nice day in the last few weeks, and even though Kimberly was again having some cognitive problems due to her non-motor seizures. So, after some dinner, I headed out at about 6.30 for their 7pm board game night ...

I'm pretty comfortable driving to Lihue now. But, it was getting increasingly dark as I got closer to town, so I had to really pay attention here and there. So it was a little tense, but not bad.

I pulled into the parking lot, and the first (angled) space was free. No problem.

When I headed out later in the evening, I did find out that the parking lot is indeed kinda tight. Going down one of the main rows on the way out, all of the trucks and SUVs that fill non-tourist Kauai really were sticking out into the aisle so that I felt like I had to go really carefully. But, despite the tightness, the parking lot is overall larger than I'd thought (I'd only seen about a third of it on Google Maps), so hopefully it won't be an issue.

Into the game store! (8 Moves Ahead!) I was a few minutes before 7, but I saw a group of four people already playing Zombicide. I lurked for a minute or two, and the fellow who turned out to be the owner, Terence, asked if he could help me, and I told him I was there for the board gaming night.

Fortunately, Zombicide is a game where you often have extra characters to fill out a scenario, so I got handed off the archer and was able to dive straight into the game.

Yay! Very friendly!

So that was my first game of the year.

Zombicide drags a bit. I think the game probably ran 3 hours total, from 6.30-9.30 or so, but it was good getting to play again, and it'll allow me to write a Zombicide case study for Meeples Together. (I'd played once previously, but it was eight years ago, so though Zombicide is mentioned several times in Meeples Together, it wasn't fresh enough in my mind to write up a full case study previously.)

I was a bit concerned about a turnout of just four players (Terence, Derek, Jason, and one woman whose name I never caught), because that small of a group makes it harder to get your favorite games on the table, but Terence told me it was a quiet night and 8-12 players was more common. And indeed two more folks showed up before I left. So, yay.

Apparently the board gaming is more likely to start at 6.30 than 7.00, so I'll show up a bit earlier next week, and Terence encouraged me to bring my own games, so I will. (Actually, I have no games unpacked right now, other than the few I got for Christmas; but fortunately I've got clear labels on the boxes that at least highlight the big ticket items.)

One surprising problem: most of the game distributors don't show to Hawaii!

Terence says that he's currently working with Asmodee and GTS Distribution in Honolulu. Obviously, Asmodee gives them a lot of games, while GTS seems to have really erratic products from a bunch of different companies.

I'd saved up a small list of new games I wanted (Wingspan, Castles of Burgundy 20th Anniversary, Las Vegas Royale), so that I could purchase them at my new game store, and I passed them on to Terence via FB this morning, but I have a suspicion they're not available.

So I'll have to explicitly find a few things to buy there. They've got Z-Man under Asmodee, so that's probably my most likely choice. I'd love to pick up Pandemic Legacy Season 1 if I could find a group to play it through. We'll just give it some time ...

And it gives me an excuse to get Lovecraft Letter.

And one bit of unpleasantness: while we were gaming a somewhat disheveled young man came to the door and told the owner that he wanted to see him outside.

As Terence was going outside, the man ranted: "YOU CAN'T KEEP OUT OF YOUR STORE. IF YOU DO, I'LL PUT YOU OUT OF BUSINESS. IT MAY TAKE ME TEN YEARS, BUT I'LL DO IT."

Yeah, problem people in Hawaii. Yay.

But it's not like I'm seeing them every day, like in Berkeley.

But then we're pretty much out in the suburbs. Speaking of which ...

So, the drive home: it was OK.

I left 8 Moves Ahead at about 9.40, which is later than I'd generally planned. I'm going to bed at 11 nowadays, so I'd like to be home by 10 to have time to rev down and get sleepy.

But slightly late might have been good: as I'd expected, the later it got, the quieter the streets were. So, there were still plenty of cars on the highway, but I wasn't facing a constant stream.

I'm getting better with all the headlights in my face generally, but sometimes it's just as you come around a turn or over a hill, and it's still totally blinding. Bleh.

A month ago I couldn't have made that whole drive back from Lihue (just 11 miles!) without being totally exhausted, but I was OK last night.

Even though for the last few miles I had to contend with headlights and rain!

(It's Kauai.)

II. The Bed Breaking.

So, breaking the bed.

Back when Kimberly and I got married, we did a trivia game at the dinner, where individual tables could contest for how well they knew us. One of the questions was something like: "Shannon and Kimberly have engaged in this activity in every room of the house other than the kitchen."

The answer was a lot less salacious than the question: "reading".

And so it goes with our breaking the bed.

After feeding the cats and signing some more paperwork for our realtor, I managed to settle down at about 10.30pm, and read a bit of The Incredible Hulk by Peter David Omnibus and Smiley's People. I was actually feeling like I could sleep at 11pm.

So Kimberly and I wandered off to our ablutions and bed.

We both settled into bed and starting wiggling across our huge new King bed so that we could lie together for a bit while falling asleep.

And then ...

I should note, this is the bed that we waited FIVE AND A HALF WEEKS for. It looks like we ordered it on January 5, after we decided we weren't going to find one locally. It was part an immense $3.5k order meant to Wayfair to fill out what we then saw as our two most critical rooms: the bedroom and the living room. The living room tables arrived in a couple of weeks (including a coffee table that we rejected, but more on that momentarily), while the bedroom furniture was the only thing we've purchased to go on a boat, with commiserate delays.

Wayfair kept playing silly games with the dates, pushing them back from late February to late March over the course of a few days after our purchase, and then when the furniture got on a boat, the delivery dates moved up. We finally received the nightstands on February 5th and the bed and Kimberly's drawers on February 12th. Not bad.

The wood was all "manufactured", as has been the case with about half of what we've purchased in Hawaii and that doesn't always survive travel. One corner of Kimberly's nightstand was definitely damaged and there was a notable chip in the chest of drawers. I wasn't pleased, but they weren't problematic enough to reject them and wait more than a month for replacement.

And then ...

Wiggling across the bed, Kimberly and I heard some type of CRACK and the bed dropped. And then we started hearing CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK like bowling pins going over in slow motion. We were now doing our best to wiggle our way off the bed without putting weight on it, an almost impossible proposition.

After I got off the bed, I hefted up our mattress and found total chaos under the bed.

Keep in mind, we'd never seen under the bed before, because we had Wayfair assemble it.

But first up, there were just four slim slats of plywood making up the "platform" for our mattress. No center support, which everyone says that a King platform should have. It looked totally inadequate.

Each of those slats was supported by two legs under it. "supported" in quotes. Unfortunately, the manufacture of the legs was horrible. Even if the hex bolts going through the legs and slats were totally tight, the holes for the bolts were too big and they could move about 30 degrees off of center. Oh, and there was metal inset into each leg that the bolt screwed into, and those insets weren't affixed in any way: they could just pop out. Oh, and those hex bolts weren't actually tight: every single one was still loose, and so you could move the legs more like 45 degrees off of vertical as a result.

So there were legs all over, no longer attached to the slats and one of the slats had broken the sideboard that it was attached too, falling to the ground as a result.

As best as I can guess, our slight scooting across the bed had caused one or more of those legs to slip out from under the slat, and then when the weight came back down on it, had popped off entirely. Likely just one or two did that, and it set off a chain reaction.

Despite it being after our bed time at this point, I spent a while fooling with hex bolts and slats, before I came to the conclusion that even if the bed had been assembled tightly, the instability of the legs was just a disaster weighting to happen.

We are, by the by, extremely grateful that neither cat was hurt, because that was a real possibility. Lucy, in fact, was investigating under the bed the previous evening while I was laying down. If she'd done that again last night, she could have been badly hurt or killed when the bed came down.

(This possibility left me and Kimberly more enraged than the actual breaking of the bed.)

And, I was saying that we rejected a coffee table already from Wayfair. We got one with a lift-top and it wouldn't latch right, and so Wayfair gamely shipped us a second one, and when it had almost the same problem. We determined it was crappy design and/or application of that design.

Same problem here. This wasn't just one bad leg. It was the fact that they're manufacturing all of their legs in a way that they're not stable, with parts that just don't fit together quite right.

And by they, I mean the manufacturers that Wayfair works with, but the problem is that Wayfair clearly does totally inadequate quality-control of the products that they sell. The coffee table and the bed both had foundational manufacturing problems.

So, that's a problem for Wayfair.

I did worry if we'd put too much weight on the bed, because we have a sort of heavy mattress, but looking at it in the light of day I'm pretty sure that we had less than 450# on that bed, even with our heavy mattress. If a bed can't take that, it's *)(@#)*ed.

(I looked it up, and the bed says it has a 600# capacity.)

I managed to get the mattress up against a wall so that it wasn't a hazard in the night, and then Kimberly and I staggered to our couches to do our best to sleep.

Because there was a huge, broken bed in the middle of our bedroom and nowhere to put the mattress.

Those couches are from CostCo, I should note, not Wayfair. Everything we've gotten from CostCo has been great quality, if not always precisely what we would have wanted.

Before we slept, we talked about our "ask" for Wayfair in the morning.

My first take was "they haul away the bed and give us a complete refund for it and its shipping and they give it to us in cash, not a credit on their website, like they did when they gave us a partial refund on the coffee table".

But as we were lying on those couches, not sleeping, I said, "We should demand a refund on the whole bedroom set, because we got the rest of it to match that stupid bed." (And we were also unhappy with some of its quality and the damage.) Kimberly agreed.

It took me about two hours to fall asleep.

But it was that bed crashing down that was the problem, not my late gaming.

I'll give this to Wayfair: they have good customer support that works under the general assumption that they want to help their customers.

Kimberly called them this morning, presented our ask, and they agreed.

We're being refunded the $2200 or so that we spent on the full bedroom set and shipping.

The local people are going to come and haul away the bed.

We couldn't get them to haul away the nightstands and chest of drawers, but they said we should just give it away. So, we can use it for the moment while we're getting new furniture, and then give it away.

(We'll start out by asking the person that we gave the first coffee table to. Or maybe just drag it out to the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.)

And, yeah, now we probably won't had a bed until late March or early April.

But we've got a mattress again: I disassembled the bed and got it out of the middle of the room this evening.

III. Meanwhile in Berkeley

So it turns out that the attempt to steal the plants in our front yard really happened and was part of an organized plant-theft ring. A., one of our former neighbors, looked into it on Nextdoor and found several other locals who'd had front-yard plants dug up and stolen. And then they all appeared at a local laundromat in new landscaping.

She says that the laundromat has always been pretty scuzzy, and that it's not a surprise that the owner hired people that were stealing plants to do landscaping for him.

As I said to Kimberly: it's lucky I'm not in Berkeley right now, because I wouldn't take kindly to that sort of violation by a local business.

There have been continued minor problems at the Berkeley house. The biggest was that our realtor couldn't get our heater working. Which sorta freaked me out because we had the whole system replaced on December 19th, less than two weeks before we left.

Turns out that PG&E had turned off our gas AGAIN for work on the street (something that they also did a few days before we moved), but they came out very promptly to get the gas back on (this time), and all is well again.

The house went on the MLS on Wednesday, and Barbara had the realtor tour on Thursday. She said there were LOTS Of attention. and she thought the open house on Sunday would be really good. So, fingers crossed.

The whole system for selling houses in the Bay Area makes me uncomfortable, because you list at a price well under the comps, and then depend on bid-ups to get you to where the house should be. So, we're listing at a price that would be very disappointing if that's all we got, and it's like stepping out into the void, hoping there's an invisible staircase there. But, throughout my adult life I've done my best to defer to the experts who are there doing the work, whether it's the moderators on RPGnet, the storyhosts on Skotos, or my realtor. So she tells us what she wants to do, and we say OK.

There are supposed to be two open houses on the next two Sundays, then she'll accept bids afterward. And hopefully we'll get a great price in the range of estimates we've seen, and hopefully it'll be toward the top, because if so then I'll definitely have the ability to work on my lesser-paying projects, like more Designers & Dragons, if I choose to. (And that's the plan.)

Fortunately, with all that going on in Berkeley under our agent's oversight, I can't really get too worked up about it, because we're a thousand miles away.

So, the days slip by, and word comes in our from our realtor, and I just have a moment of the stomach dropping as I hope we have good news and not a problem ...

And in two weeks or so, we'll maybe be accepting an offer.

Life is continuing on. Every day our Hawaii house is just a teeny bit more of a home. It's going to take time, lots of time, well past the next months when I'm finishing up my full-time work for Skotos, well past when I'm going out to Buenos Aires for RWOT10, and well past when we're returning to the Bay Area for an early 2020 visit, but it'll happen.

And it's a lot less stressful than the deadlined work of 2019 to move out here.

Today has been shockingly windy. Doors keep slamming. An entire roll of toilet paper got unrolled in our front bathroom. We actually closed up all the windows in the house. Well, except a couple of turncrank windows in the front of the house that can't be closed because renters let the plants grow under them.

Speaking of plants:

This weekend I bought a new weed-wacker at Home Depot, which I've now been to about half-a-dozen times. I loved my old battery-powered wacker that Bob got me several years ago, but it just wasn't sufficient to cut our steep hillside in back, which is big and too steep for a lawnmower. So I got the best battery-powered Ryobi model. At 40V, that's the same power I have for my lawnmower (and in fact the same battery, which is a plus), and I also got a wacker with a 15" cutting swath and with dual-feed lines. It did the job MUCH better. Previously, I'd been unable to do more than 20% of the back hill before I had run both of my old batteries out and utterly exhausted myself. I exhausted myself again on Saturday, truth to tell, but I finished the whole hill, and all on one battery. So, yay, that's been a problem and it's now resolved (but I need to build some upper body strength).

And speaking of plants in another state:

We had a very disturbing report from our realtor that one of our neighbors told her that a crew of people including a pregnant 30-year-old woman had been out in front of our house recently, trying to stuff our recently laid pebbles and our recently planted landscaping plants into bags!!?? She says she yelled at them to get out of there and that she was calling the police. This is honestly the most bizarre thing I've ever heard of, even in Berkeley (where our realtor said that someone also dumped a bunch of trash in front of our house, which is much more typical of the self-centered, civic-free attitude of a lot of people in the town), but a gang trying to steal our new landscaping??? WTF!!

I do wonder if the story isn't a fabrication, as I think the neighbor is the same middle-aged woman from the apartments across the street who greeted me real friendly a week or two before I left and after we talked for a bit said she was really sorry when she heard I was leaving because she liked us living there. And this was a woman that I'd swear I never talked to before. But she seemed otherwise entirely normal when we talked, and that's also balanced with concern that someone knows the house is empty and thus vulnerable ... apparently to plant theft.

But I alerted our other very nice neighbor, who I know is watching over the house, and hopefully if something is actually going on one neighbor or the other will make sure the police are alerted.

But again i say, WTF. (And did it really happen?)

(We've generally been hearing about minor nuisances at the house, such as a smoke alarm that's started chirping and a few sockets that aren't working right, and I've just been giving our realtor the OK to deal with them and/or spend money to do so. I'm thrilled she's doing so and I don't have to, especially now that we're a thousand miles away.)

And I think when I started writing tonight, my subconscious intent was to write about the insane possibly true attempt at plant theft. So I'll call it quits now.

I have successfully built all the furniture in the house. On Saturday, I built the two remaining chairs for our dining room and the shoe bench for the mud room, and then on Sunday I put together the two additional shelves for the garage that I got from Home Depot.

(I never thought I would be visiting Home Depot so much in my life, but then I'll be visiting a Mercedes repair shop for a tuneup in the near future, which was also on my I-never list.)

Disposing of all of those furniture boxes would have cleared our front room of junk if I didn't have a few boxes of games sitting there (plus a box of linens and a box of miscellanea and all the files that don't have a file cabinet yet ... but we're getting there).

Mind you, there's still lots of work to be done in this house.

The Living Room. This is our most perfect room. We've got an L-shaped sofa from CostCo, a coffee table and two end tables and an entertainment center from Wayfair, a TV from Costco, and a rocking chair which came with us from Berkeley because it was Callisto's favorite. (She's barely touched it since we arrived, of course.) This room was a top priority because we really wanted some place comfy to collapse, and though it took us weeks to piece this all together, we had the couches on day two. The only things really missing here are putting up some paintings (we've got a space selected for my Grandma's painting of St. Louis at the MIssissippi) and possibly a cat tree.

The Kitchen. I suppose this is a perfect room too because there was not a lot to be done. It's a great kitchen, much smaller than our one in Berkeley, but that was all wasted space, while this is nice and compact without being crowded. And it's got a billion cabinets. We've actually got totally empty cabinets in our kitchen. We still need a toaster or toaster oven and we have to better clear the counters and breakfast bar, which have been used for clutter since we got here.

The Dining Room. This is actually a big open space that connects with our Living Room and our entryway. But we've got a big table here which came from CostCo, also on day two, and five chairs. It's a little empty right now. I'm hoping we can put a huge armoire on the west side of the room to hold and protect games. Kimberly seems open to the idea.

Entryway. It's a little hard to know what's entryway and what's dining room, but there are a few empty spaces around the door and stairs. We've got a console table near the door (from Amazon, and a pretty crappy production, but it looks nice), and we've talked about moving Kimberly's cedar chest here and/or putting in a small bookshelf. We'll have to see how it fills out, because there are boxes here right now. My dad is also helping to rehabilitate some nice coat/hat racks that Kimberly brought to our marriage, which will go right by the front door. Not that I've worn a coat out of the house more than a few times in the last month, and only because of rain.

Bedroom. Alas, our bedroom! We have a mattress. We have a bookshelf full of Kimberly's clothes (which will eventually go to her officette: the bookshelf, not the clothes). And we have my old, but good-looking chest of drawers, which we're not really sure goes with the room. With the furniture, that is, which we ordered sometime during week one, but which has been on its way ever since, crossing the country then hopping on a boat. Wayfair has pushed the dates back twice for our bed, end tables, and Kimberly's chest of drawers. They're currently saying both that it'll arrive in our area on February 4th and 11th (for different pieces) or February 25th or March 4th (for those same pieces), depending on which numbers you believe. (Our original promise was February 28th.) I see that they just claimed "Incorrect customer phone #" on an update today, though Kimberly has been receiving texts for a month. Great. Anywho, it's going to take a while to put our bedroom in order. Surprisingly, of everything we ordered online, this is the only stuff that got sent on a boat (despite the fact that it had the most exorbitant shipping prices).

Our bedroom also has a master bath and walk-in closet, which is all kinds of luxurious for us, after living in a 100+ year old Victorian/Arts-and-Craft for the last decades. We've got a smaller dresser and a cedar chest in the walk-in, under clothes, where they fit great. We do need some dirty clothes storage that fits better here, though. Maybe we'll think about it after moving the cedar chest (assuming that happens).

Lanai. We have a nice little table and three chairs here, all from Wayfair, our Christmas gift from the Appels. We've only eaten out there once so far though! And the biggest home improvement project that my dad has helped me with so far was a screen door leading into the upstairs. It was a total pain! When he pulled out the hack saw and mitre box, I told him it was beyond me, and let him do the hacking (as opposed to working under his mentorship, as I have on most of the home improvement projects.) But we have a screen door! Now we need to get up the gumption to repeat for the door to our bedroom!

Moving downstairs ...

My Office. No love here yet. I've got a desk without any real space for stuff other than my computer (but it was what CostCo had, and much like with the Living Room furniture, I felt that I needed a desk immediately) and I've got a 50% glare reducing film on the window. I feel like the office is usable now, where it was a strain (literally) before the film. I still need to figure out the positioning of my desk, though, as I'm not convinced its current location, next to the window, is going to work. I've got a low shelf coming, which will help me with holding work stuff, and I've got a file cabinet coming, which will help too and clear up clutter all across our house, both of those items coming from Wayfair (supposed to arrive next week, but the UPS shipping numbers have never been valid, so we'll see). So that'll be the next building project I have: the current state of having everything built is a short-term one. I'll still need a printer stand, I think, and then lots of built-in shelving. I think it's going to take a while for this to come together, along with all our other downstairs rooms.

Kimberly's Office / Guest Room. Kimberly's art desk, easel, and chair all showed up from the shippers, as did a variety of plastic storage containers, so she's got a start on her office. We still want to get a murphy bed for said guests, and that's an expense that we're punting until we have more money after our Berkeley house sells. And she wants to get a comfy chair. We'll maybe see what CostCo has Monday or Tuesday. So, this one is taking shape too, other than the (ever problematic) lack of places to put stuff.

Kimberly's Officette. The center of the downstairs is another big, undefined space around the stairs, near the back door, and leading back to my office and the downstairs bathroom. Kimberly decided to use the area around the stairs for another, non-art desk. We're also going to move our big shelf down there when Kimberly actually gets a chest of drawers, and then she'll have a nice little nook.

Family Room. The area by the backdoor is actually bigger than our Berkeley dining room, so we'd considered it as a game room, but now we're leaning to just gaming upstairs at our normal table, and turning this into a family room / library: book shelves built onto the two walls, and then maybe a comfy love seat and chair. This is a super-low priority.

And I'm not sure if we're going to do anything in the space leading back to my office, other than build some bookshelves. It's too big for a hallway and too small for a room. But there is definitely space there, since we've got pretty much all the boxes I packed in that area. I dunno. Maybe we could actually put a double-sided floor-to-ceiling shelf right in the middle to define a corridor of books? Not sure if there's enough room ...

Mud Room. My dad prefers to call this the laundry room, but I love the name "mud room". It's the space between our garage and the rest of the downstairs, and has the washer and dryer and (now) the cat box and a shoe-bench. I dunno if we're going to do more with this. Other than maybe putting a cat door in the door, so that we can close it and keep the cat box smell out of the rest of the house.

Garage. I love, love, love having an attached garage. Our garage in Berkeley was semi-attached: technically adjoining the house, but with no access. I didn't like that, especially not in Berkeley where it got cold and wet and you did have dangerous people about sometimes. (So I dreamed of how we could construct crawlspaces to get into the garage from the house, but of course we never did that.) But here I can just walk into the garage and it's part of the house, albeit stuffy and hot. I'd originally thought we could fill this with storage and cat boxes, but then we got the beautiful lady, Julie the Benz. But it's a two-car garage, so there's still plenty of space for storage. I've got two Sterilite tool shelves near the door and then I've got four Home Depot Exclusive shelves on the opposite wall, whose shelves each fit two 16-gallon tubs. So that should all be great for storage. (Alas, we obviously had to leave the great wooden shelves that Bob built us back in Berkeley, but hopefully they'll find use by the next owners, as that garage wasn't big enough to fit modern cars except the new miniature ones.) And there's room for other assorted stuff like my old bike (now working again! And I did a 30-minute bike ride today!) and our new lawnmower. And I left enough spaces on the far wall to put in a work bench if I ever decide I need one, because that's the sort of thing that manly men have in their garages.

So, that's our house a month later, with some stuff settled, but lots more to do.

This morning I got up around 6am and got dressed to go walk the golf course, but saw it was pouring rain. Ironically, I then went to take a shower instead.

Much of the morning was spent on the endless task of cutting up cardboard boxes. I've been doing it out in the garage, which I am still trying to clear so that the car that might be named Felice can get in. I opened up the door while I worked, and enjoyed the cool winds and rain outside.

I also built my computer desk and got my computer set up. Yay! A work area. Except the light in the office doesn't work.

My dad came over around noon, and I finished up cutting boxes and bagging packaging material to throw out.

We then got out for drive #2 in the car that might be named Apollo. This time I headed westward, through Eleele and Hanapepe out to Salt Pond Beach. This is along the highway again, and it's still one lane each direction with lots of ups, downs, and curves. I was pretty tense going down the hill on Papalina Road, but at the stoplight to the highway I tried to loosen up, and once I got out to the highway I was still tense, but not so much. Even the continuing rain didn't bug me much, but that's because it was much more steady, so I could just turn the wipers on. Beyond that, there were only a few times when I felt I was wandering a bit.

There's a Refuse Transfer Station out on the road to Salt Pond. You take your trash and dump it in. No fee! That's apparently because we pay $6 a month for this core refuse infrastructure in our property taxes, but it's still pretty amazing after years in California.

Just beyond is a recycling station which has individual containers for a whole bunch of different stuff. My dad and I mostly dumped corrugated cardboard, with just a little mixed paper (in different bins). Yes, it's unfortunate not to have curbside recycling, which Kauai is apparently working on longterm, but again it's pretty accessible.

More generally, I felt sort of empowered after years of having troubles getting rid of stuff in Berkeley, but that was only partly the ease of getting rid of trash and a wide variety of recycling; it was also having a car that very well might be called Julie, and so having a lot of ability to get stuff around and to places.

We stopped by Ace Hardware on the way home to try and pick up some stuff to repair damage done by the renters and curiously never reported by them. One problem was the light in my office, which was due at least in part to the light switch part of the light/fan switch being broken off (!?). The other problem was a mirror which had fallen, broken, and left a mysterious gaping hole in the wall. We were able to get a switch, but not a mirror, because we were out in Eleele, which is certainly not the center of island life.

I did have to park at the refuse station, the recycling center, and the Ace hardware, which continues to be the other stressor in my driving experiences, but none of them were challenging, because I never parked between two cars. Still, it was more good practice in the car that's not named Darla, but that might give you a hint as to why we think Julie is a cool name.

When my dad and I got back to my house, sans cardboard and refuse, we first looked at the light situation in my office.

We really don't know what someone did to the fan/light. The light switch was, as noted, missing the light part of the switch, the fan's pull chain for the lights doesn't work, and the bulbs were partially pulled off their bases.

After coming to the conclusion that the fan was on the circuit breaker marked "smoke alarms" (and gosh it's nice to have my circuit breakers inside the house after nineteen years not), my dad opened up the switch, then asked me if I wanted to do the work under his direction, and I happily said yes. So we made our best guesses at the slightly differently colored wires on the old and new switch, and then I moved the wires from power, fan, light, and ground on the one switch to the other. My dad, with lots of experience on this sort of thing, got it right the first time on his guess of which wires were the same and which not. Afterward, the fan worked from the new switch, but still not the light.

We then disassembled the bottom of the fan and came to the conclusion that the pullchain switch was broken. It looked just like the one I replaced in our Berkeley bathroom a few weeks ago, the only electrical work I'd previously done (and that twice over 19 years, but only after I'd seen my dad do it once). But my dad correctly noted that we didn't really need the pullchain, since it was controlled by a light switch. So he'll bring some electrical tools another day to rewire the fan without the pullchain, but for now I don't have light in my office still.

We next moved upstairs to work on the TV mount, and again he supervised and gave instructions while I worked. Poof! We now have a 55" TV mounted on our wall! Kimberly and I later watched an episode of Star Trek: Discovery on the screen, and it looked great.

Meanwhile, I went out for a walk before dinner, looping around the small group of businesses in Kalaheo, and identifying things of note like the couple of restaurants (including a tasty cafe that Kimberly and I ate at once years ago when she was more mobile, a cheap Pizza Hut, and a Hawaiian mixed plates buffet), the vet, and a local dentist. Sadly, the local community center, which I think Kimberly and I were both interested in learning about is closed until April for gym roof repair. Which seems like a pretty long time for a facility that community members might have been depending on. (But we'll see what it really is down the road.)

After dinner I collapsed on the couch, but spent a lot of time messing with Wayfair, looking for a stand that could go under our TV and hold things like a power strip, a DVD player, a Tivo, and a Playstation. I'm not entirely sure how long all of that will be relevant, but we'll be using them at least this year.

And then we placed a $3,500 order (about a third of that shipping) for a bed, two nightstands, a dresser, a coffee table, two end tables, and that TV stand. That's almost all of our remaining critical stuff (and some of it is unfortunately going to take quite a while to arrive). I still need a chair for my office, and we'll need to decide if any rooms need more lighting. But most other things can wait. Mind you, we still have some rooms that will certainly need furniture, like the family room that we need to fully decide what to do with, and we need bookcases, probably built in. To date, we've only spent about a third of the money we budgeted to refurnish, but with costs for cleaning up the old house going so high we may wait a bit, until we sell, for things that aren't high priority.

(We'll also fill the house a bit more when our shipping container arrives, which is supposed to be somewhere between the 10th and 20th. There's not a lot of furniture there, but there's a rocking chair and some of the supplies for Kimberly's office, such as her art desk and easel and an office chair, so we'll stock the house a little bit more, and of course get lots of dishes, clothes, books, and games. Most of which will sit around until we can afford those built-in bookshelves.)

And that was pretty much it for the evening. I could be assembling chairs or cutting apart boxes or opening our mailings this evening, but I opted not. Because we've been working hard for not just four days, but weeks and weeks (and months and months) preceding that.

Unfortunately, Kimberly revealed she'd been having some medical concerns to me tonight. Hopefully nothing in her surgery has gone wrong, but we should try and get her in to see someone ASAP, which is tricky because she just signed up with a PCP yesterday, and has her first appointment weeks and weeks away.

And as for tomorrow? I've talked about swimming to my dad. I wish we could have swum at Salt Pond today, because it was bright and warm and clear while it had been raining at home all dad. Certainly, I'd like to get some more driving in with my dad at my side. We both agree that I need to drive on my own sometime, but that it's good to ease me into it while he's there with another set of eyes, plus some experience and knowledge of the island. (He's helping me learn to drive for the second time!)

Apparently the day wasn't as quiet as I thought.

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Entries tagged with house

Home Improvement

Sun, Wind, and Sky(e)

The Unboxing Continues

Life Amidst the Pandemic

The Anniversary Week

Dishwasher Destruction (and Many Meanwhiles)

In Which We Sell Our House (At Last)

In Which All Things Come to An End

In Which My Old Life Refuses to Let Go

In Which I Race Before the End

In Which Hawaii Panics & Berkeley Fails (or maybe vice-versa)

In Which COVID-19 Comes Home to Roost

In Which I Recount What's Going On in Ten Points

In Which I End My Second Month in Hawaii with Some Busy Days

In Which We Live in the Time of Cholera

In Which I Do Manly Tasks

In Which I Play a Game and We Break a Bed

In Which I Ramble About Winds and Plants

In Which I Build All the Furniture

In Which I Have a Quieter Day, OK Not Exactly Quiet