shannon_a | Entries tagged with moving to kauai

Saturday I went down to San Jose for the third time this year for gaming at Donald & Mary's house.

It's a full-day affair. I leave the house at 10.30, get to Donald's & Mary's around 1, leave between 5 and 6, and get home between 8 and 8.30. But, I've been enjoying biking around San Jose. There are no great routes from Warm Springs BART to Berryessa unless I go way out of my way, but I enjoy biking the suburbs, which remind me of the quiet communities that I grew up in, and I love the hillside roads, which remind me of the landscape of my youth. And there are any number of bike lanes going along long north-south roads, which make it all feel perfectly safe, for the most part.

(Fremont, Milpitas, and San Jose aren't great yet. There's very little in the way of dedicated bike routes unless you get up into the hills or over to the Guadalupe River or way down to the southern part of Coyote Creek, but most of the roads feel OK, with the exception of when I zipped around the Great Mall of Milpitas yesterday and twice had to merge across cars going too fast to get to the Food Court of their Dreams.)

And I enjoy seeing all the new construction. Oh, the office parks that I have to assume appeared in the '90s are pretty ugly, but it's great seeing how much the light rail is changing the face of the cities, with parks and plazas (and apartments) popping up around them.

I think it's been a nice thing to do this last year in California: regularly visiting where I grew up (and I really need to schedule a full-day biking and hiking trip down there sometime too).

Sunday was this year's open Sunday Streets in Berkeley, and so I headed out there after lunch with enthusiasm.

Only to discover that Berkeley has split its Sunday Streets into two "separate but equal" festivals, one for the rich people of North Berkeley and one of the scum living in the rest of the city. Seriously, City of Berkeley, it's not a great look to have one festival for the rich, white, old NIMBYs who live in North Berkeley, and another for the poor, minority, young students who live in South Berkeley. Especially when you hold the North Berkeley festival first so that no one would end up there after attending the other festival.

Aside from the oh-so-typical NIMBY discrimination, it kind of defeats much of the purpose of the festival. Once, Sunday Streets stitched together Berkeley south to north. You could bike or walk almost two miles, get outside your comfort zone and view the longest commercial strip in the city. Now, well, I could walk from Durant to University, a total of six blocks. Yay?

Kind of happy I'm not going to see this travesty again.

With that said, the abbreviated, separated festival was nice. There's always a community feel to it, and it felt like the community activities were trending upward again, with music and street soccer, and (my favorite) people sitting around painting Van Gogh's sunflowers.

Meanwhile, it feels like the packing is two steps forward, one step back. I've just cleared all my single-issue comics out, for example, for hopeful pickup at 10am tomorrow, but then I filled that closet with games that I'm culling. But it's a process, and one that's taking extra time and organization because we're doing our best to find homes for everything we're getting rid of.

I was feeling a little burned out toward the middle of last week, but then I got freaked out at the end of the week as I made plane reservations for Prague for September and talked about the possibility of having to go to Austin in August and realized that I'd be losing valuable packing time, especially since any of those will cause burnout extending days or weeks past the trips. I mean, I knew that the summer months would be my prime time for lots of work, and we're now 5/8th past that.

So, I've been double or triple timing. We're now somewhere around 50 boxes packed and 70 culled ...

Whenever there's a change in what goes on at Thursday gaming, it's usually due to Eric L., who is willing to challenge my stolid expectations and assumptions. So I was telling people that I wanted to have gaming on our usual Thursday night, even though it was a holiday, along with a BBQ (another Eric innovation, by the by). And he asked, "How early are you going to start?"

Now I should note that I have an entirely unhealthy relationship with holidays. Except for the major ones, like Thanksgiving and the Christmas holiday, I'm about 50/50 likely to skip them entirely. I've gotten better in recent years, but my reaction showed me that I still have a ways to go, because I said, "Early??? I'm working!" After a few minutes, I came around, and so we planned for gaming starting at 2pm, then BBQing, then gaming. And, it was good.

Mike A. was away with family, but I also invited our occasional visitors, Eric V. and Sam. Which made six, which is a bit over my preferred gaming group size, but I accommodated by setting up an extra playing area in the Living Room (which unfortunately caused some household stress). In the afternoon we ended up playing all six-player games: Tiny Towns, Seven Wonder, and Between Two Cities. But then after a delicious BBQ, we split into two groups, and I got to play Terraforming Mars.

Not only was it a great day of gaming, but stuff continuing to go out of the house. Eric L. had asked for a comfy chair and some small book shelves to fill out his reading room. I also had selected some games to give away, most of which went out of the house. And when I mentioned comics to Eric V., he noted a fondness for one of my favorites, the Legion of Superheroes. I've sadly decided to limit my single-issue comics going to Hawaii to just a short box, because I don't really touch my single issues any more. So I was happy to give Eric about two-thirds of a long-box representing the original era of the Legion. (The only ones I kept out was the "Five Years Later", which is one of the things in my short box.) I do dearly hope that most of those comics I fave Eric made it to trades or even better deluxe hardcovers in the coming years, but one way or another it was time to let the single issues go.

I was back to work on Friday, which was good, because I had things to finish off. Then, sadly my four-day week was followed by a somewhat stressful weekend.

The main reason was that when I went out to get dinner on Friday night, I got a flat tire on my bike due to a red flathead thumbtack in the road. And so I stopped by Missing Link to pick up a new tube, and they didn't have the right size. I'm sure Mike's Bikes would have had one, since that's where I bought by bike (due to Missing Link's terrible hours around the end of the year), but they've recently moved out of downtown Berkeley, which seems like a bad decision for somewhere you occasionally need to walk to, when your bike is dead. Anywho, I eventually had to order from Amazon, and the best I could get was delivery to the ASUC store on Sunday.

So I put off buying groceries for the week, and figured out what to do on Saturday without a bike, which turned out to be ~14 mile hike to the Chabot Space & Science Center. I've done that three times before, I think, and it's a great hike through a variety of terrains, and a pretty challenging one.

Oh, and while I was out Uhuru picked up four bookcases and a desk, helping to further the cleaning of our house. Kimberly dealt with it, but I stressed about them doing it while I was out.

Then on Sunday I got woken up early as a result of the changing dynamics of our house, as furniture disappears. And I spent the whole day waiting around for that inner tube. In the afternoon, I did a flurry of cleaning: having Hal make a second pass on all the places where we'd emptied furniture (Kimberly had made a first the previous day), rearranging all of our packed boxes into the new spaces and resorting them so they made sense, getting seven-and-a-half long boxes of comics ready to go out of the house, and doing a little packing.

The inner tube finally arrived after dinner (and after I spent some time tech writing). So I had to run out and get that, then Kimberly and I had a snack, then I ran out and got groceries. Whew!

And that's how I was too busy on the weekend.

The busy-ness continued into Monday night, as I had Mike B., Eric L., and Sam over for a second shot at Pathfinder ACG 2e, but then this evening Kimberly and I jointly decided not to swim. We'll continue that next week, one presumes. And so I got an evening of rest (other than running out to the Oakland Library, getting 21 final boxes ready to go to the Friends of the Public Library, packing the night's box for Hawaii, and writing this).

Yeah, I think next year will be less busy than this one. After a few months of getting settled, at least.

It feels like whenever I had a bit of free time in the evening in June, I spent it preparing for our move. So it's perhaps no surprise that I woke up this morning from a dream about wandering and wandering, through an endless series of disconnected back yards, and not being able to find our new home.

(There are six months of wandering left to go, as we're now T-184.)

My big task in June was to get going on the handyman repair of our house that we have flagged before sale. And mission ... kinda accomplished? We found a new handyman, got him out here, and OKed a quote (which was a bit high, but who cares at this point). He's got us scheduled for four days, starting in mid-July.

There's still stuff to do on this topic, including: finding an electrician (for two other issues), finding someone to re-drywall our art-room closet ceiling (because handyman keep shaking their heads at that and walking away), getting our gardener our to clear the back yard (so that I don't have to, in particular to get our handyman access to one of the crawl spaces that he's going to cover, and this is now planned for Thursday), and going downtown to buy some new parking passes (in case gardeners and/or handymen need them, but it's no longer an immediate issue since our gardener will be out on a holiday).

Ah well, onward.

I say that was my big task, but I must have spent 20-30 hours in June culling books (with Kimberly) and packing books. Basically, every night if I had the energy, I did a box, and that takes 30-45 minutes on average. And every few boxes, new culling was required.

As of this point, I've boxed 32 small (10x10x16) boxes of books. That covers everything in our bedroom and the art room, plus all of the non-fiction in Kimberly's office. We've still got the rest of the books in Kimberly's office (kids books, plays, poems), ditto for my paperback science fiction, but at least they're culled. And that culling has led us to send 24 boxes to the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library, plus 2 bags of books to Mike A and Katherine's little library* and one bag of DVDs to Half-Price Books (which paid for a McDonald's dinner, because Half-Price Books is more like one-twentieth price for selling books, and that might be estimating high). So, 32 boxes prepped for Hawaii vs 27 "boxes" of media culled. And I actually have another 12 waiting for pickup from our friendly neighborhood Friends of the Berkeley Public Library man, John, tomorrow morning.

Pulling those 70 or so boxes of media off the shelves has resulted in the first freeing up of furniture. Eric is going to be taking a few small book cases and a comfy chair for a reading nook that he's set up at home. We've also got another three large bookcases ready to leave the house. (We'd have more, but our realtor suggested that our stagers might want to use our matching Fenton MacLaren book shelves, so those stay for the moment.)

We've also freed up a couple of extra desks. We've got those and the book shelves listed on Freecycle after a failure for Nextdoor to move the bookshelves. (One rude lady said she was interested, and asked if the shelf she wanted had movable shelves. It didn't, and she didn't even bother to say she wasn't interested afterward, which is typical Berkeley entitlement.) Getting those things out of the house is going to feel like a big step forward.

PS: We received our permits to import the cats into Hawaii a few days ago. Whew! One more stressor gone. We still have to get them a final health certificate and some type of flea/tick spray before we leave, but that's gotta be within two weeks of our flight, so it's no time soon, just yet another thing to remember.

And as for July. I'm hoping to finish up with tangled handyman and gardener issues. I've suggested to Kimberly that she get in contact with the painters, as there's going to be as some extensive (and expensive) reworking of sun-damaged trim and then we need to think about whether we want to make the main paint on the house look nicer, just to sell the house (as someone else will surely redo it en toto after the price they pay for the house).

And the packing will continue. Hopefully we'll get all of that ready-to-go furniture gone, and I'll probably need to move on to comics or games. (I'm still struggling to figure a good box for comics, as the sizes of boxes I have are just barely the wrong size and thus pretty inefficient, but this afternoon I placed an order for some boxes that I hope are just graphic novel sized and some that are hopefully just RPG sized, we'll see tomorrow when they arrive one-day, after ridiculously expensive shipping, because that's what they had.)

May was our "cat month", intended to get our cats the rest of the way ready to go to Hawaii (and leaving plenty of time if there are gov't screw-ups on the other side).

The easy task was getting the cats their second rabies shots, now that we're (far more than) 30 days out from the previous shot and (far less than) a year out from our arrival. Well, it was easy if you consider carrying two cats and their carriers four or five blocks easy. Unfortunately, Kimberly is no longer cat-carrier-carrying ready.

The hard task was untangling the requirements of the Department of Agriculture and the Kauai Humane Society. Well, hard except I managed it in just about two hours and maybe four or five phone calls. You see, I had to tell the Department of Agriculture our flight number to Hawaii, and that required the agreement from the Kauai Humane Society to meet us. So I had to figure out the flights with Alaska, then get the tentative agreement from the Kauai Humane Society, then make the reservations with Alaska, then make the reservations with the Kauai Humane Society. Whew!

(Why Alaska, you might ask? It's because Hawaiian Airlines outright lies and says that the State of Hawaii will not allow them to have cats in the cabin. Neither the State of Hawaii or any other airlines seem to know about this alleged restriction. So rather than our typical Hawaiian, we flew Alaska, because we ultimately decided we wanted our cats in the cabin with us, to minimize trauma, for them at least.)

That also means we now have our flight reservations to move to Hawaii. We'd long said 2020, then we said January 2020, then we said early January 2020, then we said as soon as flight prices drop in 2020 after the holidays. So we're moving to Hawaii on January 1st. It'll be a truly momentous New Year for us.

(After I got the tickets I thought, "Oh no! We have tickets to see Arcadia at Shotgun Players the previous evening, and it'll be late!!" But that was last year. I'm getting old.)

After that, I had to pick up some money orders from my bank and then put together the packets to send to the Department of Agriculture. With the end of May being my deadline I got that last step done shortly before midnight on May 31st. Whew.

And, oh my, there were a lot of costs to this. I mean, ignoring all the vet bills we've already paid, I had to pay $330 to the Department of Agriculture to get our permits for the cats and another $800 for the Humane Society to meet us (which is pretty much a convenience fee so that our cats don't have to go through Honolulu, and well worth it for the lesser stress on them), and we'll eventually have to pay Alaska another $200 to carry the cats. So, about $750 per cat to get them to Hawaii, as opposed to about $250 for us. (Mind you, it's nothing compared to what our moving costs will be for books and games and clothes and kitchenware and small amounts of furniture.)

There are still tiny things to do for the cats. We got a collar for Lucy, and she's actually been accepting of it, and we got a new one for Callisto with a cell phone number rather than our land line number that we're abandoning (and good riddance!). We need to order soft carriers for both, to use on the plane. And in December we need to get them original health certificates and flea and tick treatments, sometime in the 14 days before we leave, which will unfortunately be pretty near the holidays.

But the big chunk of work is done, provided we have no problems getting our neighboring-island release permits now that everything has been submitted.

We have continued with the packing project that we started as our big thing in April. I've now got nine small book boxes packed, which covered all of our literature, which was three of our tall six-foot shelves. (Yes, we have lots of books.)

The culling of books has meanwhile begun to fill of foyer, but I found that Friends of the Berkeley Library would pick up donations ... but only if they were boxed. So, I started saving crappy Amazon boxes to send books off to them in. I got 11 of those boxes together by this Tuesday, at which time a volunteer helpfully picked them up for me. He was even nice enough to bring me back some boxes afterward, which will get me started on the next batch. (The foyer is still pretty full, as we're continuing to cull at about a 50% rate throughout all of our fiction.)

Oh, and my dad has given the OK to mail them our books. So, I think we're going to start that up at some time in fall, as media rate will be much cheaper than sending them all via boat (though we accept some will probably go missing).

And meanwhile our gardening project continues too: our front-yard flowers and plants continue to grow and prosper, even though we've been told they weren't good plants to go on the mostly shadowed north side of a house.

I just had to take another pass on the backyard for this Thursday's BBQ, and it had grown entirely unreasonable amounts given that I'd already cleaned it up at the end of March ... but that was on the early side of when I usually do that, and meanwhile we've had unseasonable cold and rain through April and May.

I'm going to see if we can get our gardener out to more extensively clean the back-yard jungle out there in July, because then I can get some new one-day parking permits and not have them expire within a month, which will allow him to work for more than two hours. (For whatever reason, the calendar year for parking passes is July to June.) I guess I can just get more than I need, and then hand them off to our realtor in December for use by her, the stagers, etc.

Jeez, we're now T-7 months. It's actually starting to feel close.

So our big goal in April was to get started on packing, and I suppose we succeeded on that. I've now got boxes in small, medium, and large sizes, which was step #1.

For step #2, we decided to start packing books, because we're likely to move more of those than anything else. It's obviously not cost-effective to move them across the sea, especially in large quantities, but they're really a core of our household.

We started with the lit and for each shelf, we culled first and then packed. For culling we've really tried to follow the two criteria of (1) are we likely to ever read that again, or (2) does that have emotional value. It's allowed us to cull about half the books from each shelf. Overall in April we culled two of our three lit shelves and packed one of them. (I'd hoped to get all three packed, but then we went to Hawaii, and then I was sick for weeks after our return.)

I initially packed a medium box full of books, and it was about 35 pounds, which is within the capacities of the boxes (and within the amounts suggested for moving), but I really didn't want to unload dozens of 35# boxes from a container when it got dumped on our metaphoric Hawaiian lawn. Packing in the small boxes was a lot less efficient: those medium boxes were just perfect for two rows of TPB, two levels deep, while the small boxes only have room for one row of TPBs, and everything else needs to be stacked like puzzle pieces. But, so it goes.

Anyhow, so we've got a small start on the boxes: that one shelf, half culled, then filled three small boxes. But that's three boxes we don't have to do as the year goes on.

Here's another reason I'm sick of Berkeley: I feel like we're now fighting a constant battle against encroaching homeless encampments on all sides. While we were in Hawaii in April, one set up about 100 yards from our house, literally in the street. Shortly after we got back, it began growing at a frightening rate. When someone threatened me as I walked by on the way to downtown (because I stopped too long to assess what I was going on), I'd had enough.

The police rather shockingly told me that camping on public areas was now legal, which is a really grotesque misreading of the appellate decision from Washington last year. (Basically it says you can't *criminalize* sleeping on public land, which isn't the same as protecting those commons from misuse, and it only talked about sleeping, not camping, and it also said that was only the case if you didn't give another option for the homeless, and one of the very serious problems that we have is the chronic homeless who refuse services.) Anywho, it means that the police have gotten really, really bad about doing anything about these illegal encampments. They'll force them to move along only in specific cases, and not even in the case of my being threatened, because it was *implicit* (my being told to move along when I was on a public street, with the tone and posture offering the clear implication that the homeless asshole was going to try to beat the shit out of me), rather than explicit. But it turns out that the one thing the homeless can't do is camp on the actual street, so it took several more days, but they were moved.

But it's almost pointless, because a new encampment has appeared on our main street (but at least that's a few blocks away), and there's another one a block down from that, that's been there for more than a year now, where the residents constantly sit at the bus stop bench there, blocking it from use for people like (for example) my wife, who can't stand on one foot. Only one person has died in the encampment to date, so it's not problematic enough for the police to do much about.

I have every desire to help the homeless in a societal way. We should as a country house and shelter them and help them get off drugs and get them into some psychiatric care if they need that help. Homelessness is *not* a moral failing, and it's *not* an acceptable state for our citizens. If we want to work with all the cities of the Bay Area, to work on this problem at a level where we can actually resolve it, that's great. If Gavin Newsom wants to work at it on the state level, that's even greater. Rows and rows and rows of tiny homes somewhere other than a tightly packed city (where everyone is living on top of each other), with full physical and mental health care is the least we should do.

But the "caring" people of Berkeley are making it worse, because they're attracting huge numbers of homeless people to the city with their refusal to police these violations of our community standards, and they're forcing them to live in filth because they've attracted more people than they can house, and meanwhile they're making the city more dangerous and less pleasant for the rest of us. It's a trainwreck. It's unsustainable. And Berkeley is so quickly descending into squalor that's it's shocking, especially given how bad the problems seemed *before* this, when we just had street kids threatening tourists.

Now, we've got potentially dangerous people *everywhere*, and I say that not because people who are unlucky enough to be homeless are innately dangerous, but because a lot of them are homeless because they have mental health problems, and they're not getting treated for them. And that *is* dangerous. We've had murder, arson, and any number of assaults that originated with the homeless population of Berkeley, and our fine city council, with their refusal to protect our civic commons, is putting us all right in front of that bullet.

I remember when Jesse Arreguin got elected mayor of Berkeley, the same day as Donald Trump, I said, "He's going to do some really bad things for the city." Because he's one of these liberal "purists" who doesn't let reality get in the way of his policies, and who refuses anything other than the most extreme progressive solution he can find, meaning that he's actually willing to vote down liberal proposals that aren't progressive enough. We don't have a rapid-transit bus system because of him and his co-conspirator, our former council representative. But I figured that Kimberly and I would be gone before we saw the worst of that. I had no idea that we'd be watching him destroy the civic fabric of this city in our last three years here.

On another note, here's a mild and silly nuisance as I work on my last year here: I've long had a long list of books that I wanted to read from the library. In the last year or so, I've really been working through it, because I know that libraries won't be nearly as good on Kauai. It's not just that Kauai is smaller than Berkeley, populationwise, but also because I'm used to drawing from the LINK+ system, which allows me to borrow from about 100 library systems, mostly in California (but also a few in Nevada).

So we got a notice toward the start of May that the Berkeley libraries wouldn't have access to LINK+ starting on June 1. This is supposedly part of a system upgrade that should be done by July 3 or so, but I'll believe that when I see that. (I'm not going to be shocked if we lose access to LINK+ for three months or so.)

And a lot of the books I was planning to read were ones that were only available on LINK+.

So, I've been gorging on LINK+ books this month, to try and meet my goal of finishing most of my library to-read list. I picked up five final ones today, which all need to be back to the library by May 31. I'll switch over to Hoopla digital books and the books that actually are at the local library when Berkeley's LINK+ goes down. And if they're not back in a month, I can actually get LINK+ books from Oakland instead ... it's just not nearly as convenient.

Here's the moving plan for May: get the cats fully ready to go to Hawaii (or at least have the paperwork in process) and continue packing. And, yeah, call that *(()#@ handyman. And probably find a new one. And maybe get the huge trove of books-to-go out of our foyer.

April had our last big disruption for our while, with our last vacation to Kauai, which turned out to be even more disruptive than expected because of my extended illness. May, June, July, and August should all be pretty clear, which hopefully means we can get lots and lots done. By the time we hit fall, I hope it'll look like we're in large part ready to go.

Yeah, we kind of fizzled out in our move prep in March. It was just too busy for me, with my Spain trip at the top of the month, and then a week before I recovered, and Kimberly has of course continued to have problems with her foot and the side effects thereof.

I did get one notable thing done: I finished dealing with my filing, which meant emptying a drawer of financial stuff (mostly statements) dating back to 2000 or so. Most went to recycling, some went to shredding, and a tiny, tiny bit went into our files. And I also got rid of years and years of stuff that needed to be shredded.

But we still need to deal with Kimberly's files and piles, many of which are our joint filings. And sometime down the road I have to deal with Skotos filing. And I still haven't tried to contact our handyman one last time (because I decided it needed to wait until after our next trip). And we removed very little from the house. So, minimal progress toward the big move in March.

But I think we've got good things planned that we're going to manage for April & May (spoiler: we already are). For April, we're going to get boxes and start the long process of packing, which will also be another route for getting stuff out of the house, because we'll cull as we go. And for May we're going to try and get the cats' paperwork all in order for the trip.

Meanwhile we've been playing with something else that we plan to roll out more fully when we move: smartifying our house. My mom and Bob are to blame, because they got us an Echo Dot for Christmas. And we fell in love with it. We used some of our other Christmas money to buy some other Echo Dots and it's been great being able to make lists and ask questions and play music from a few different rooms in the house.

But these last few weeks I finally got a smartplug and a firestick setup that we also purchased with Christmas money. The firestick is great because it works so much better (faster!!) than our Tivo for accessing streaming services. And it has more streaming options, including HBO, which we may just be using in the near future. (Can't imagine why!) The audio commands are more meh because they don't work great when you're watching a show. It takes a few seconds to go out to Amazon and back, and sometimes Alexa doesn't hear the commands over the TV audio. So, you tell it to pause and then you have to wait, which is less than ideal, and you might not have it work, which is even less so. But it's great to be able to issue arbitrary commands like "rewind 1 second" or "rewind 10 seconds" or ... whatever. Perhaps we'll find it more useful as we get used to it (and ditto for our smartplug, which is on the TV).

We're thinking about more cool smart stuff when we move to Hawaii, like an integrated smart-fan/smart-ac/smart-thermostat system. But right now we're just testing out the ground ...

After a great start in January, we weren't able to put as much effort into getting ready to move in February, in part because both Kimberly and I got sick, and in part because I went to Spain at the end of the month.

Our big plan for the month was to get all of our filing in order.

I got my file cabinet in order, getting rid of all unnecessary paperwork, but then I discovered a bonus drawer of filing, with a few things of note in it, but most of which just needed to be separated into recycling vs shredding. I did part of it, and was going to finish it the weekend before I left for Spain, but then I spent that weekend recuperating on the couch.
Kimberly and I didn't get to her filing, which also includes most of our household filing.
I didn't get to the Skotos filing, but there I just shrugged my shoulders, since it's something I need to do during work time, as work time allows. I just need to not save it to the last moment.

We were also continuing with our big stuff from January: we had our gardener out a few times and he's totally cleaned our front and side yards, put down plastic to mostly keep the weeds out, and planted us some new plants in the front, after consultation with his wife for what would work well. It looks good, and will hopefully look better in a year. We've had less luck with our handyman, who's been a flake. I queried for our quote early in the month, but as we got closer to my Spain trip, I decided it was going to wait until afterward. (Meanwhile, Kimberly got one of the things from our handyman list done! She ordered some handles for our pantry and installed them!)

And we continued to get some stuff out of the house, but not a lot. Kimberly got rid of a breadmaker that I don't even remember us buying. The recycler brought us brownies. I passed some books and cards on to a good home. I think I dropped off a few things at Goodwill early in the month, including some shirts that I decided I wasn't wearing any more. There were probably other small things.

I think our big thing in March is going to be finishing up the stuff we started in January and February, which means getting a handyman who's actually starting work and finishing all of our personal filing. And it'd be good to get more stuff out of the house.

So we're now 11 months out from our move to Hawaii.

At the start of the year, Kimberly and I decided that we were going to do our best to do one major thing every month, to move us toward moving, and also do some continuous work to reduce the clutter in the house.

Our major work in January was to get in contact with a gardener and a handyman. These folks are both going to help us by making the house more presentable and thus salable. They were both out last Friday.

The gardener stared actual work today, and cleared the front yard of weeds and covered it over with black plastic (and also hauled some old rotting wood away). Next up will be some mulch and then ... we start planting I guess.

I prepared a TODO list for the handyman, and he was supposed to give us a quote by today, but haven't. Well, we've got the process started anyway, and I'll bug him tomorrow.

Meanwhile, we've been quite successful this month getting rid of clutter. Kimberly said multiple bags of clothes to Goodwill and gave away a variety of unused kitchen stuff on Freecycle. I cleaned up my cache of American games that we used to play on RPG days, but haven't in over a decade (The Challenge, Riddle of the Ring, Source of the Nile, etc) and got rid of my last CCG, Mythos, or at least it's ready to go when someone picks it up in a week and a half. I've also been cleaning drawer clutter here and there. And I was happy to give Eric L. some of my old trade paperbacks that I'd flagged to get rid of.

For next month, Kimberly and I have both taken filing as our major task. She's got her office files. I have much less in the way of office filing (because I mostly give it to her), but I'll clean up the Skotos filing, because that certainly needs to be done too. And I will cut my personal files down to the bare minimum (which should be pretty bare).

So, one month gone, and we did a good job of preparing for the move so it doesn't all hit next fall.

And so begins what should be our final year in the Bay Area.

We are diving straight in, doing our best to spend the whole year getting ready for our move to Hawaii. We're going to do our best to make sure we get something major done every month (this month: get our gardener and handyman who'll help prepare our house for sale going, which we still need to do) and we're going to do our best to empty the house of stuff that we don't need over the course of the year (this month: we've started with some games and clothes and oddments stuck in various drawers).

Good News: We were happy to lead the year off with some good news: the latest attempt by the insurance companies and/or hospitals to screw us out of money got dealt with when HealthNet agreed to pay for K's anesthesiologist from her surgery last year. I really don't exaggerate when I say that over the last two decades we've gotten tens of thousands of dollars of bills that the insurance company was supposed to pay and we had to fight about.

Secret Gaming: Gaming has begun at Secret, the Wednesday-night Endgame replacement. It's very close to Endgame, but about half-a-mile toward Jack London Square. The neighborhoods start to get a little seedier as you move further away from the Oakland Convention Center, and this place is almost directly under the Nimitz Freeway (which is LOUD), but it turns out to be a very nice venue. Just a quiet room in a converted Victorian that reminds me of a fraternal hall or something. It's got a stage for small shows and three tables across the other wall for our gaming. We had 10 people or so and two tables the first Wednesday, then 13 people or so and three tables this last Wednesday. It's been a good group of the nicer and/or more serious gamers from Endgame, and after the uptrend of people in the second week, I've got my fingers crossed that it'll manage to stick around.

Sunday Gaming: I got lots of games for Christmas, including Charterstone, a Legacy resource-management and village-building game. I'd been super-intrigued by it because of the idea of building up a village over 12 games, but all my local gaming friends had expressed a lack of interest, in part because of its relatively simple mechanics. Well, Kimberly to the rescue. She agreed to try it out with me, and we've now managed two games of the twelve (though they really have the second game set up as a continuation of the first, so the first, learning game was slow and the second was fast). I do agree the mechanics are simple, but I'm enjoying it, and am particularly intrigued by how our village will develop over the course of the next ten games, as we unlock new things and build them. As I was writing for this, I got lost for a moment in what I'd like to do next game ("get my gold up to four; unlock the constructed tile I held onto; and see what it allows me to build") and that's an example of why Legacy games work.

Bad Shoes: My biggest problem of the year so far: shoes. Yeah. For my great hiking shoes from two Christmases ago, I wore through the inside of the back of the heel, exposing the plastic stiffener there. Or as I call it: the plastic pain device, because it cut up my heel last time I tried to hike. But, because I largely used them for hiking on dirt paths, the soles were still good. So I took them to a shoe repair store and they said they could fix it by covering over the inside back with leather. Great, I thought: half the price of new shoes and more ecologically sound. Do it, I said. I got shoes back with an entirely stiff collar and when I took them out for a walk of less than a mile, they literally wore holes in my ankles. MUCH worse than they were before. So I took them back, and they've theoretically softened the collar, but I couldn't really measure if they wore right now because I still have painful holes in my ankles. Maybe in a few days. Meanwhile, I discovered that I'd worn most of the soles of my normal walking shoes smooth. They're just from September or so, but they were apparently a bad purchase without solid enough soles. They're probably still OK for a month or two, but not in the rain or in the hills. And it's been raining. So last week I was feeling like I had no good shoes to wear out of the house. Well, hopefully the hiking shoe problem is solved (if not, it's back to the shoe repair one more time for more softening), and today I made it out to Target and got some new walking shoes that will hopefully fix the other problem.

Writing: I have been lagging in my writing since the new year, alas. I've just been feeling lazy/needing more downtime. But maybe I finally turned it around last week by starting in on some Mechanics & Meeples articles. I first-drafted the first, and I'm now working on a second and have notes for a third, which all told will take me to the end of February. And then I'd really like to get back to Designers & Dragons so I at least have the majority of the new books in a very raw form by the time we move.

Working: And of course it's been back to work for two weeks now. It's been the usual work I've had for the last several years, which is trying to balance way too many priorities, but I'm acutely aware this should be the last year that's the case because I'll be cutting down on my work and simplifying after we've (hopefully) sold the house next year.

The Last Days: Generally, I'm aware that these are my last days in California. We could move as early as January 1st next year. That's when our house should be available, and it's entirely possible that it'll be a day when we can get cheap tickets. (Though there are two parts to our move date: when tickets are cheap after the holidays, and when the Kauai Humane Society is willing to meet us at the airport to inspect our cats' paperwork.) But if not January 1, then surely within the week thereafter. So this day next year, we should be living in an empty-ish house in Kauai, waiting for our books and games and extra clothes and looking to fill it with new furniture. So I now know that I've been to Secret two times, and there now only 50 more this year, and that's likely it for me. And that I won't be seeing the first two weeks of winter in California again, and that when I'm annoyed by the students returning from winter break in a week or so, it'll be the last time. Because it's the beginning of our California end.

I don't think I've been out to San Francisco recreationally all year. That's in large part because BART does most of its track maintenance on the weekends, and this year this were maintaining track around West Oakland. That means that about every other weekend all summer they were doing bus bridges into the city. Spoiler: you never want to bus bridge on public transit if you can avoid it, and you especially don't want to while hauling a bike. So the couple of times that I thought about heading into SF for a Saturday, because it was warm and there wasn't a big event going on out there, I couldn't because of the bus bridge.

But, it's autumn so the construction is down, and it was unseasonably warm this first Saturday in November, and I decided to get out to SF while I still could, with my main goal being to bike up to Golden Gate Park and around it.

Standing on the BART platform, I was pleased to see one of the new BART trains arriving. There are just a few of them on the tracks, so this was a special treat. By some definitions.

Clean: CHECK. Ugly as sin with day-glo colors: CHECK. Lots of space due to lack of seats: CHECK.

I was most surprised by the lack of bike space, because bike space is one of those things that BART has been highlighting on these new trains. The old cars have two spaces for bikes, one by each set of doors. You can easily place one bike against the wall, and you can more delicately lean one or two additional bikes against that first one. Easy bike space: 2. Total bike space: 6. The new BART cars cut that in half, and though they now have racks, that doesn't make up for the lost space. You can in fact only fit two bikes easily in the three rack spaces because the third has to be squished in the middle, backward. Easy bike space: 2. Total bike space: 3. In other words, there are going to be a lot more people forced to hold their bikes on the busier routes. Thanks BART for thinking of the future.

(I took two non-new trains over the course of the day, and each time someone laid their bike against mine; if the same went on at the other half of the car, that's more bikes than the crappy new cars could support.)

The Park was great. I love Golden Gate Park because it's so big and lusciously green and has so much different stuff in it. I biked all the way through the park out to Ocean Beach, enjoyed the beach for a little bit because it was shockingly warm and not windy, and then biked back up to Spreckels lake (where I wrote for a while) and then biked up to Stow Lake so that I could hike up Strawberry Hill (where I read for a while).

It turns out that Strawberry Hill to home (via walking, biking, and BARTing) takes about the same amount of time as the top of Tilden Park to home (via walking and bussing).

In other news ...

We're now 14 months from our planned move to Hawaii, and that means I've started to see some lasts.

When I got my glasses from optometrist last Thursday, I told him I probably wouldn't be back. My next glasses would usually come no earlier than October 2020, which should be after we're well settled into our island home, and enjoying the fact that winter isn't coming.

When we started the always-hated daylight-standard time on Sunday, I realized that this would be the last time I had to face its full wrath. This year we get four horrific months of it getting dark while I work, but next year it should only be two, before we move to the land without clock resetting.

And as of today, I think I've voted for the last time in California, which may mean that was also my last experience of going down to my polling place and filling in a ballot, because Hawaii is testing out all-mail voting in Kauai, starting in 2020.

In yet other news, the work on the house next door that started while I was in Toronto (at the end of September) continues. They actually disappeared for two full weeks at the end of October, and we sat watching to see if their unprotected wood-framed back area was going to get rained on, but they got lucky, and the one storm that was supposed to come in during that time disappeared. Now they're back waking me up every morning, but gone by 3pm or 4pm. Weird.

Back to the vet today. This was stage two of getting-the-cats-ready-for-Hawaii. With their first rabies shots now 30 days past, they were ready to have blood submitted for a Rabies titer test, which is meant to prove that they have enough antibodies in their blood to fight off Rabies. Hopefully in the next few weeks we get results back with sufficiently high antibody results, and then we're through one of the more time-consuming bureaucratic hurtles.

Next, we just need to get a second rabies shot that will still be active when we move, at least 30 days before the move, then do a ridiculous amount of paperwork coordinated with Hawaii, the humane society in Kauai, and our airlines. But I'm pretty sure that's all next year some time. Probably the spring or summer. Instead, we'll be moving away from cat prep and back to house prep, as we take on a gardener and a handyman.

(But in non-Hawaii-moving TODOs, we probably need to get Callisto and Kimberly through surgery first, or at least before we have those folks showing up here.)

And the early week drama regarding the move has dissipated. Not only did my folks easily find people to rent our Kauai house until we get there, but they in fact had two people begging them to rent it on the same day.

So, the Kauai house should be rented from now until the end of 2019, and then it should be ready for our move in a few weeks later.

Two steps forward and none back, today at least.

On Saturday I put my concerns over the death of democracy to rest as I hiked the hills above Alamo and Danville. The problem's not going away; the delegitimization of our Supreme Court upon the ascension of a rapist and perjurer to its august ranks is going to be a crushing burden on our country for the rest of our lives. But I could at least put it aside. It was done.

But new stressors have just rushed in to fill the void.

And here's the truth: we're entering a stressful time of our life.

First up: the renters in our house in Kauai just gave their 30-day notice, and so my dad and Mary are showing the house. The catch is, of course, our plan to move in 15 months' from now. My folks just started showing the place, but they're seeing that people either want longer-term rentals or else a short-term rental that comes furnished.

My dad and I talked about this some Sunday night, but he didn't seem particularly worried, but then Mary wrote us and she seemed more concerned that they might have to rent the house to someone who wouldn't be ready to move out when we were ready to move in.

She suggested we could move later (not an option; more on which momentarily) or else rent a place in the interim after we arrive. The latter sounded OK to me, and I thought might even give us a chance to experience a different part of Kauai before we settled in to our actual house. But I was quickly disillusioned when I looked at long-term rentals. Some were reasonable but more were expensive, and then when I clicked the button for "allows cats" I found that 95% of the rentals disappeared. So I suddenly had a vision of us having to rent an expensive place because it was the only way we could get our cats settled on the island.

Fortunately, Kimberly ran some interference and we came up with an alternative. Mary and my Dad have another property, in Wailua, and Mary said that she could make that one available for us in January 2020 if our house isn't. I don't understand all the logistics, but problem solved: if I don't have to worry about hunting for a place that accept cats as we're trying to move, then I don't have to worry.

There was a deeper level to these worries that really makes me not want to move later than we'd planned. Oh, you know, there's the fact that we're now at a point where we are definitely making plans that depend on us moving at that point. But, there are two particular stress fractures, and they're once again cats and houses.

Lucy will be just short of 13 when we move, and I've long worried about moving her under any conditions because she's such a small cat that she seems fragile to me. She definitely used to be a real 'fraidy cat, and an airplane is going to be terrifying. I'm sure she'll be fine, but I'd be even more worried if we moved her while she was 14 or 15 or 16.

And, I'm also concerned about the housing market in Berkeley, which has gone soft in the last year. We've probably lost a little value this year, and definitely aren't seeing it heading upward any more. A real crash, like we've had a few times since we've lived here, could dramatically impact on our ability to sell, and I'm worried that's more likely the longer we stay. In fact, I increasingly think we're playing with fire waiting until 2020, but at this point, there's really nothing to be done about that.

So, those were my deeper levels of concern about pushing back a move date. And, as I said, Mary offered a great solution.

So, stress gone, right? Nope.

We took Callisto into the vet on Monday afternoon because when she got her rabies shot two weeks ago, the vet didn't like the look of her teeth. She had a cavity and might need a tooth removed, the vet said.

Well, apparently Callisto has terrible teeth, much worse than you'd expect for her age. Her underbite apparently doesn't help, but for whatever reason they're really bad beyond that. She's apparently been losing and reabsorbing teeth and has a lesion and periodontal disease and a lot more of her teeth are on the way out.

Poor kitty!

So she's going back next week and she's going to have some major surgery and will loose an undetermined number of teeth including her canines.

The dentist seemed good enough, but she also seemed more interested in playing with Callisto. She just kind of hung out with us for a while.

But she generally says no biggie. House cats don't really need their teeth, they're mainly for attacking other cats and killing prey. They can eat wet and dry food alike with no problem even if they're toothless.

And the benefit will of course be that Callisto won't have all these infected gums and hurting tooth and she'll enjoy life more.

But it's stressful sending our baby cat in for major (oral) surgery. And knowing that she'll be recovery for a few weeks and that it'll overlap with Kimberly's own recovery time for her broken foot. (Which means that Lucy and I will be taking care of everyone, and I don't expect Lucy to be much help.)

The other bit of stress: $$$$. Callisto's dental care is extensive enough that it'll be somewhere between a few thousand and several thousand dollars. Yikes! I think that's more than we've spent on all our cats combined, even with Cobweb and Munchkin's ongoing problems late in life.

We can afford it, I just hate to see that amount of money go out the window when I've been working hard to increase our savings lately, so that we won't have to cut as deeply into our funds to pay for the move. And it seems like this sort of thing has been happening all year, between my kidney stone, Kimberly's foot-related costs, and now Callisto's teeth.

But, Callisto has cat insurance, so we'll also hope that they pay for some notable chunk of this. (The admin at the hospital was less than encouraging, saying that our insurance covered "some things" in past cases.)

And the last thing that's been increasing my stress lately? My neighbors, by which I mean our new building neighbors back here in Berkeley, who are out doing construction at the house next door every weekday morning. They started while I was in Toronto, and it's been ongoing ever since.

They regularly wake me 30-60 minutes before my alarm goes off, which means that my sleep has been a mess for about a week and a half now. It's leaving me a bit cranky. They're well into the constructive part of the work, but they work slowly and knock off early, so I foresee at least a few weeks more.

I mean, the work itself is a blessing. A few years ago there was a serious black mold infestation in that house. Then the owners tried not once but twice to do illegal work to knock parts of it down and rebuild it. The end result after they got caught the second time was that pipes and other parts of the house were left lying in the yard and the stucco wall around the balcony was mostly knocked down. It was an eyesore, and I was on the verge of contacting the city to complain, violating the neighborhood compact in a way that I usually try to avoid (but it's obvious the landlord of that house is not actually a neighbor, nor does he care about the neighborhood).

I should really just push my bedtime back so that I'm awake in the morning by the time they start work. Especially since I have a 7am wakeup to take Callisto to the vet next week, then a 5am wakeup to take Kimberly to the hospital the week after. I just hate giving up the hour in the evening, because transferring it to the morning usually turns it into a useless hour rather than an hour where I might get something done.

T-.333 months for a trip to Toronto

This is the latest in the now long string of Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshops. It's actually in Mississauga, not Toronto, but as far as I can tell, the one is a suburb of the other, with the Toronto airport right in between. Sadly, this time around I'm not going to be able to see much of the city I'm visiting. The problem was that the organization reimbursing my trip had very strict rules on travel: the flights had to be the day before and the day after the event, unless there was prior authorization, so I couldn't give myself a day or two in addition to the work, like I did in Boston and Berlin last year. And, that's actually the second work-trip in a row where that's happened, though when I was down in Santa Barbara, I minimized my time there due to kidney stone: I didn't want to be hiking around their parks or something when doing so could give me a big attack a long way from home.

The particular rigamarole for this flight also required using Orbitz (or another price comparison) as our basis, and I am entirely shocked how crappy many of their flights are. There were a vast number of them that had layovers to the tune of 30-45 minutes. I mean, I like *long* layovers to reduce stress, but I don't even know how you make it from one airplane to another in that short of time, especially when they close the doors 10-20 minutes early nowadays and especially when I'm pretty sure I'd have to get through customs on one of those layovers). Fortunately, I found some non-insane layovers within the price range allowed.

Anywho, I have a very late flight coming back from Toronto, at ~6pm on the day after the workshop, so that should give me some time to scoot over to Toronto proper and see what there is to see, though I'll have a bag to haul around when I do.

So, prep.

Sunday was the flu shot. I've found it very frustrating in recent years that Kaiser doesn't start doing its flu shots until the start of October. I guess they're trying to keep their flu vaccine the most powerful during the height of flu season, which is the winter months. But two years running I've been traveling at the very end of September and/or start of October and I of course wanted to have my flu shot active before then. So it was off to CVS instead. Back when I used to go to Berkeley Family Practice, I'd often have a sore arm for a week after my flu shot, which really made me reconsider getting them. This time it was more like a day. (The last few CVS shots have also been quite good.)

Monday was the hair cut. I usually get it buzzed a few weeks before these business trips.

And that's most of my prep as I got my plane tickets a week or two ago and C. has dealt with housing. I'll need to get some trail mix next week for the plane and/or for snacking in Toronto. And some packing, but I'm planning to go super minimal (cf., hauling a bag around Toronto). My laptop, my iPad (with Hoopla comics), some cords, four changes of clothes, an autumnal coat (maybe; it's 85 degrees!!! in Mississauga today!, but the 10-day forecast shows 50-degree days around when I'm heading out there), my RWOT notepad, and the aforementioned trail mix should do it.

T-16 months for our move to Kauai.

On Tuesday we undertook step #2 of our Kauai prep. We took the cats to the vet. This is part of a procedure where we get them two documented rabies shots and one rabies antibody test.

I thought the cats might already have rabies shots on file with the vet, but it turns out not, which surprised me. So we got them both their first rabies shots at that vet and got signed original documents of them, which is piece of paper #1 for our files. We need one more, at least 30 days after this one, but we'll probably get them about a year from now. Meanwhile, the next step is going to be the rabies antibody test, after the rabies vaccine has taken full effect. Apparently Hawaii suggests at least 10-14 days later, the vet suggested a month, so we scheduled that vet-tech appointment for exactly a month later.

The vet also checked up both cats. Lucy had lost a little weight, but we think it's in her normal up-and-down. Callisto, unfortunately, had a serious problem. She has very red, inflamed gums and probably a cavity! Which means our poor kitty who loves eating is probably in some pain while eating. (And we probably have a ~$1,000 oral surgery coming up for her. Thank goodness for pet insurance, where we can just assume that the insurance will cover most of the cost, whether that actually happens or not.)

Berkeley Dog and Cat has always had what we consider a weird obsession with dental care for animals. But this is a case where it's apparently entirely warranted, probably because Callisto's underbite keeps bacteria and such constantly eating at her teeth and gums because she never closes her mouth.

Poor kitty!

We got a dental consultation scheduled as soon as we could (about a week after Toronto) and we'll probably need to bring her in every year or two to look at her teeth.

The whole evening after we brought the cats back from the vet, Lucy was obsessive about trying to get out of the house. Running around yowling and going for the door any time it opened. It's totally weird behavior, because she never cares about the outside ... except last year she did the exact same thing after we took her to the vet!

Weird!

(Both times, by morning she'd forgotten about it.)

Before Toronto I also wanted to finish up some writing projects.

First was Meeples Together, which I received redlines of on Monday. Pleasantly, the editor said that it was a well focused book that didn't take a lot of editorial work. C. pushed for several rounds of refocusing, which obviously helped, and I also feel like I got better at wordsmith editing while working on Designers & Dragons a few years ago. I was able to complete work on the redlines a bit ahead of schedule and the editor and I did our last back and forth today, which puts it back out of my hands until I see the laid-out text to OK in a few weeks.

Second is Designers & Dragons, where I have five major expansions and a few bits and bobs promised before the end of the month for the German translation. I'd like to get the major stuff done before I leave, at least to the point where it's just waiting for my final edit. (Final edits are easy to do on planes; research, less so.) So far I've handed over Chaosium and Paizo, I just got an OK to do a final edit of Wizards of the Coast, I have Fantasy Flight Games out for comment, and I'm accumulating notes for Evil Hat. (Whew!) But that all means it's going well.

The other planning for travel is getting up ever earlier, to prepare for the Toronto time zone (EDT). This week I got up at 8, next week I'll get up at 7, and I hope to push to 6 in the few days before my flight. (I'll then probably need to push back one more hour when I hit Toronto.)

I always try and take advantage of the early wakeup with some early hikes, so tomorrow I hope to get to the hills before 9am, and enjoy some chill but warming weather as I climb ..

K. is off in Seattle to see a YouTuber show tomorrow. I am home alone.

This actually hasn't happened in many, many years, so I've got an unnaturally quiet house. Callisto hasn't even started yelling at me that her wet food is overdue yet.

So what do I do with an evening all to myself?

I biked up the Ohlone Greenway to El Cerrito Plaza for some delicious shrimp tacos at Rubio's.

Then I biked back until I got to Cedar Rose Park, where I settled down and did some writing of next week's Mechanics & Meeples article and a revision I'm working on for the Paizo article in Designers & Dragons. I got to see the sunset too, which was stunning, probably due to all the particulate matter in the air from the North California fires, which set my allergies into overdrive on Sunday and Monday.

When it got dark, I headed up Rose Street to Safeway to do the week's grocery shopping, which is a challenging bit of uphill. That was my regular grocery store for a few years while ours was under construction, but I came to hate it due to their horrible staffing, which often left you waiting in line for 20-30 minutes while you gazed hopelessly up at the signs that claimed they'd open a new line whenever there were three or more people in line. (Spoiler: they didn't; there were sometimes 10 people in each open line.) Today it wasn't bad, probably because student move-in day isn't until next week.

Then I biked home.

The exciting life of a 40-hour bachelor.

Speaking of home, we have taken the first step to selling ours. We had our real-estate agent out two Fridays ago. We talked about home valuations and times to sell (she is quite certain that January is a fine time due to the limited inventory) and work that we should do to ensure we get a good price.

So, we now have a list of home repair stuff to do, to put on top of the work we need to do to get our cats ready for a quarantine-free trip to the islands.

I'm hopeful we can get going on some of it very soon, now that Kimberly's big Seattle trip will shortly be in the rearview mirror.

And it's just a hair less than 17 months until our planned move to Hawaii.

For years, K. and I have been back and forth about the possibility of retiring to Hawaii. But in late 2015, we decided that one way or another we were done with Berkeley.

Maybe (probably) we're just getting old and crotchety. But the kids these days, they got no respect. Actually, I think that an increasing percentage of the student body at Cal is more studious and quiet, but the ones who aren't seem to be getting louder, less respectful, and more over-privileged. Years ago, we moved out bedroom to the back of the house because of all the street noise, mostly loud, drunk kids. But for me the breaking point was some drunk kid trying to kill one of the trees that I raised from a pup.

Anywho, I've written about that all previously. The end result was that we started talking about moving somewhere that was not Berkeley. We were considering as close as Contra Costa, over the hills, and as faraway as the UK. It was going to be a stop before we considered retiring to Hawaii down the road.

But in 2016, K. and I went to Hawaii for our usual yearly vacation and visit with family, and when we got back, she said that she could imagine moving there.

So the four-year plan began.

We tentatively began to think about moving to Hawaii in 2020. Not retiring, but continuing to work from our little Pacific island. (The idea is that I'll stay with Skotos and/or Blockstream, as pretty much all my work is remote anyway.)

Why four years?

There were a bunch of factors.

One involved a planned vacation to the UK that we've since decided was too expensive in advance of an expensive move.

There were other financial reasons too. I wanted to be sure that we weren't in Hawaii for too long before our budget loosened up due to houses being paid off. So that if I did have problems with my income, or our costs were higher than expected out there, there was an end-point after which we could refigure.

And finally, I wasn't quite ready to give up the Bay Area. A few years advance gave us the time to go see and do the things we wanted to. Like this year's Mt. Diablo project.

But, we both genuinely feel like we're on the path to Kauai at this point.

I figure that my current Burning Wheel campaign is my last RPG campaign, at least here in the Bay Area, and so I'm working to make it a good one, with a four-year plan of its own.

We've stopped worrying about improving the house with things like new windows and bathrooms and are instead thinking about things-that-need-to-be-done-before-we-move. (Up in the air: do we rent the house or do we sell it and get some rental property in Hawaii that doesn't have a mortgage.)

I've actually got a few Hawaii-related things on my TODO list already, starting with getting blood tests for the cats in early 2018. Less than a year away now.

Humorously, I'm also trying to manage my book to-read list based on our Hawaii plans, which had contained about 100 books last year, many of which I planned to get from the good local libraries. I managed to drop it to 75 in 2016, and want to continue down to 65 in 2017. A couple of Bay Area detective series are the most troublesome, because I have dozens left in each, but only the next one of each is on my list.

More generally, we're now categorizing things into whether they'll happen before we leave or not. I should be able to bike to Marin before we leave (2018?) and I should be able to BART to Berryessa (2018?). But BARTing to San Jose or biking to San Francisco both disappeared over the not-for-us horizon. I similarly shrugged my shoulders at the purist progressives who got elected to the Berkeley council last year: they will probably make the horrible homeless situation in Berkeley even worse, but it's unlikely that a truly good mayor would have made it better in our last few years here.

So, Hawaii here we come. Eventually.