shannon_a | Entries tagged with driving

I've really been trying not to love Julie (the Benz) because I'm all too aware that I'm likely to damage her, as I dip back into the world of driving.

But on Tuesday or Wednesday (I'm not sure which: the days are blurring into each other, as I engage in an endless sequence of building furniture, unboxing stuff, breaking down boxes, and taking the boxes to county recycling), after a trip to recycling and Ace Hardware, I washed Julie for the first time.

It's another thing that I did for the first time in 30 years. I didn't do the best job of it, in part because I don't think I have a good enough scrubber, and in part because I couldn't figure out how to get to the roof (stepstool!). But much of Julie is much cleaner after her splashing through muddy potholes the first week I had her.

And I got to know Julie a lot better. I was surprised by the number of dings and scratches I found, all very low on the car, most of them near the back hatch. Some probably due to the mud and gravel on the roads, some due to loading and unloading things. I don't know if they appeared before or after I purchased her: the former owners said she'd been recently detailed, but I assume most of them must predate my ownership.

And when you wash a car, I think you come to love her more. Sigh.

On Thursday afternoon, Kimberly and I went into Lihue so that I could get a new driver's license and she could get a handicap placard. (Kimberly can't get a Hawaii State ID yet because she lost a few of the important, required proofs of identity during the move. Getting new copies is on our TODO list.)

I had to knock off work thirty minutes early to be able to get there in time. They close at 4.00, stop serving people at 3.45, and stop giving written tests at 3.30. Since I knew I had to take a written test for an out-of-state license transfer, my plan was to leave at 2.00 and be there by 2.30, giving a full hour for governmental inefficiency.

Alas, I did not know the scope of the problem. (But all of the DMVs in many states have been pretty screwed since the fascist requirements for the national ID cards came down, and the feds are putting in the screws this year, promising to deny people airline flights if they don't have their new national ID cards, though how that hasn't been challenged as a denial of our right of movement, I dunno.)

We got there a little later than planned, at 2.40, and I drew number 703 when they were serving 683. Then I sat and watched for ten minutes before they called 684. I was pretty sure I was not going to get called.

Sure enough, at 3.33, they were up to number 699. That's when a woman stood up under the sign that announced that out-of-state transfers (and permits) were only served 7.45-3.30 and said there would be no more written tests. )@(#*#)($@.

I gave Kimberly my 703 to replace her 705 and we waited until about 3.40, at which time she got called. Five or six minutes later she had a handicap placard.

While the clerk worked on Kimberly's placard, we also saw a family with kids go up to a window, to try and demand they process permits fo them. That clerk had to tell them several time that they weren't doing written tests anymore, then walked away in great exasperation.

(As for what I think of stopping written tests before closing the office, and letting people take numbers, but not get served: WELL. It's damned stupid, but typical 21st century austerity thinking.)

Meanwhile, I had nothing. I tentatively planned to come back the next morning because I knew that if it slipped I could easily go months before I got my new license, after the annoyance of wasting an hour (sorta wasted; Kimberly did get her placard).

But I really did want to do it soon, because I'd read through the whole Hawaii Driver's Guide, and had obsessively run through about 35 practice tests. (I was getting a bit sick of it all!)

So this morning, I was up at 6.50am or so, before my alarm went off. I was out of the house by 7.10, which let me do some more almost-nighttime driving, as that was five minutes or so before dawn.

I got in to the Civic Center at 7.40. I picked a new number, 722, out of the machine, and saw that they'd set the machine to 714 over night. So, the ninth number for the day, but they weren't likely to be skipping the numbers of people who left this time.

Fortunately, they had more staff at 7.45 in the morning and seemed to be more efficient. The eight numbers before me went by in twenty minutes or so, and then I got called up.

I handed over all of my carefully collated paperwork. I gave up my California Driver's License. I did an eye test, they took my picture, I paid my fees, they took my picture again (twice!?), they took my fingerprints (just one thumbprint and two index fingers!?), and then they printed up my ID. It was pretty quick from that point.

You may note what was missing there: no written test. Yep, they wouldn't process my driver's license on Thursday afternoon because they were done giving written tests, and then they didn't have me take a written test today.

#*)(@*)#@$*.

So now I'm really Kama'aina, with a Hawaiian ID and everything (albeit, a temporary one).

As for the driving itself ...

I'm getting used to the high-speed two-lane highways from here to Lihue and from here to Ele'ele. That's mostly what I've been driving lately. (In fact I've been to Lihue and back three times in the last day and a half, with another trip planned for tomorrow.) And even though I haven't been doing any full night driving, that experience with the LIhue road especially will help when I go gaming.

I continue to be surprised by all the ups, downs, twists, and turns, which I never noticed as a passenger, but I'm getting used to those too.

Parking is still challenging, but every once in a while I position Julie in a space perfectly. Yay!

(And when Kimberly is about, I'll be parking in larger handicap spaces, which obviously will be less challenging, but I can still assess how well I'm doing at hitting the spaces between the lines and getting Julie oriented well.)

And that's my driving experience a month into our Hawaiian move: I have a car, a car that's been cleaned, a Driver's License with a permanent copy pending, and definitely more comfort with driving, even if I still get uncomfortably tense in my shoulders when I drive.

OK, that's not really the big headline of the day, but I like how it sounded.

Kimberly and I had dinner at Costco, where their "food court" is clearly another loss-leader for them, just like their rotisserie chicken. Kinda greasy, but so cheap. Maybe I'll have the Caesar Salad next time. That'll definitely be less greasy.

Our trip to Costco was the end of an afternoon in Lihue. I knocked off work 30 minutes early to get Kimberly to a doctor's appointment. She learned a bit about navigating, and I learned a bit more about where everything is in a Lihue. (We did one complete loop on the way, where her navigation and my geography failed us.)

And we were done at the doctor's office at 4.30 or something, so we didn't want to drive home yet, because of traffic. So we got yet more sundries at Wal*mart, then ate dinner at Costco, and got some lunch food for the week there. And some sweets. (But not much else: it turns out we got weeks worth of food last week.)

But the time we were heading home it was a bit after 6, which means we drove into the twilight.

And that was really good. I was a bit shaken after my drive in the dark yesterday, especially given the humidity/fog debacle. Tonight we still had a bit of light, but there were an increasing number of headlights as we headed home, and almost full darkness every time we dipped into a valley.

I still wasn't loving when I had a stream of cars coming from the opposite direction, blinding me. But the highway was a lot better road to drive than my last few roads last night (Tree Tunnel and Koloa), and it wasn't full dark, and so that all helped me to get used to the night-driving on the two-lane highways a little better. Which is another small victory in a slow series.

My real headline for the day is something like: "In Which Our Cats Try to Kill Each Other in the Night".

Let's hop into the Wayback Machine for the history ...

Twenty years ago when Kimberly and I moved in together to our north Berkeley apartment, she brought with her a handsome, dignified, and beloved cat named Cobweb (as well as a playful, dumb, and beloved cat named Munchkin, who isn't a part of this story).

As far as I know, Cobweb had never seen a sliding glass door before our north Berkeley apartment, and she soon learned it was an instrument of TORTURE!!!

The problem was a cat we named Nemesis, who would wander around outside, including to the pseudo-balcony outside our sliding glass door. She would then roll around, show her stomach, and otherwise torment poor Cobweb inside. And Cobweb wanted this interloper out of her territory. She would bodily throw herself against the sliding glass door. And Nemesis would just loll about, unconcerned.

We were somewhat concerned that Cobweb might hurt herself, and we at first were somewhat concerned that she might break the door, because she really threw herself at it hard. But it was mesh-reinforced, and we soon decided that wasn't going to happen.

But still we deterred the behavior whenever we could (and chased Nemesis off).

A year later we moved to our 19-year home in south Berkeley, which had no sliding-glass door.

Occasionally a cat that we dubbed Tuxedo Max would poke his head in at the roof level with the top of the garage that overlooked our Living Room. Later a cat I dubbed Ghost did the same. And Cobweb sometimes threw herself at that window too, which we were genuinely afraid she would knock out of frame. But eventually that probably faded, and in later years none of our cats were really bothered, not Cobweb and Munchkin, and later not Lucy and not Callisto.

But we did learn that Callisto was fiercely territorial the last time we cat-sat Guest Cat, my sister's beloved Tai-Chi, because Callisto made running, thrashing, clawing attacks at him a few times that we had to ward off, and then we had to keep them separated.

Enter Hawaii. We have a sliding glass door, downstairs, exiting our Family Room. And we have a cat that's either feral or living in the house behind us that thinks our house is his territory. I've dubbed him Moon.

And at least three nights since we've been here I've been woken by Callisto yowling at the Moon. And hissing and thrashing about and generally raising a huge ruckus. I wish she just threw herself at the door!

But what really got me out of bed each night, and it happens between 0 and 2 hours after I go to bed every night, is that Lucy and Callisto then get into it, fighting each other!

After I broke it up the first night, just a few minutes after I went to bed, my assumption was that things happened like this: Callisto yowled and growled and threatened Moon. And it was really annoying. And Lucy got pissed off and ran in and attacked Callisto. Leading to the situation I found. (And I figured this because Lucy does get pissy when something annoys her.)

But I've since read about "misplaced aggression" which can happen when a territorial cat sees an interloper and then is confronted with one of her "friendly" cats. And because she's all worked up, she then attacks that friendly cat. So it's entirely possible that Lucy was like, "Hey, what's up?" And Callisto chased her down.

After two nights of this in a row (one right after I went to bed, one about two hours after I went to bed), I started drawing the curtain and leaving the patio light on, and that seemed to deter Moon.

And I know I accidentally left the lights on for a few nights after that, even if the curtain wasn't closed. I really think the lights are what Moon doesn't like, and I figured that from the start because of the way he shows up right after we go to bed.

But eventually I decided the problem was resolved, and so after my exhausting night-time drive last night, I neglected to redraw the curtains or turn on the patio lights.

DA-DA-DA-DUUUUM!

About an hour and a half after I went to bed last night, I was again woken. And this time our two cats were really angry with each other. They kept facing off and growling and I couldn't convince either to stay in bed (on our mattress, I should say), where we could keep them separate from the other.

After another two hours of being woken up by growling standoffs, I finally locked Lucy inside our bedroom and Callisto outside.

They were still unhappy with each other this morning, but they finally mellowed out after I was working for an hour or two. Apparently my office is the ultimate panacea for cat woes, because it contains me, the cat tree, cat treats, and (for the moment) sunlight so warm that the cats can't stand it.

Which is good, because I'd worried that they might have permanently damaged their relationship.

What do you do about a problem like Moon-i-a? After reading quite a few suggestions, I settled on a motion-activated ultrasonic device. As with everything ordered from Hawaii, it'll be here in a week.

Unfortunately, after a day of quiet, around 10pm Lucy started growling at Callisto again.

Apparently, when night fell, she remembered that they'd been fighting.

Sigh.

)*@#$@.

No, everything's OK, but ...

So, when I did my first practice drive in Berkeley in December, I was a little overwhelmed by all the cars, people, bicyclists, and scooterists coming from every which direction. A few different people said, "If you can drive in Berkeley, you can drive anywhere" and I felt good about driving in the quieter, calmer Hawaiian environment.

And there's not the same information overload here, but I really wasn't ready for the two-lane windy up-and-down roads that you travel at 40-50 mph. (Kimberly and I are both continuously amazed at how little we noted the curves, rises, and dips in these roads when we were simple passengers traveling these roads in years past.) I feel like I'm still trying to find my place (and the place of my large car, Julie the Benz) in those lanes, and if I get tired or fatigued I have to fight to maintain that place.

But, day by day and week by week it's getting easier.

Well, the driving is, even on the highway, even on windy, pothole-y Koloa Road.

Sort of.

The parking still feels beyond me because I just don't have a feel on where Julie's right side is: my dad says that generally I seem to think I'm closer on the right than I really am, which I suppose is the right direction to work in from. So today, for example, my dad and I went to the really small, cramped parking lot next to Sheraton Beach, because I'm doing my best not to avoid places just because they intimidate me. And he suggested that he should park the car once he saw the situation there ... and eventually decided he couldn't make it into the parking space we'd spotted, but found an alternative. So he parked there, not I. And then after swimming at the Sheraton, I took Julie out, but I had to do about a 27-point turn to do so. OK, it was maybe 7 or 9 points really, but a bit teeth-gnashing for me. It really, genuinely is a super tight parking lot.

But the driving ...

So I've been wanting to go gaming on Thursday nights, and my dad said he thought we should go out together at night first, and he was so right.

Those fast two-lane roads turn out to be so much worse when there's a stream of cars with headlights coming in the opposite direction. The highway was super stressful, but I think I'll be able to deal with it in the near future. I mean, I had problems when I had a few cars oncoming together, or a few cars at a turn, but the further I went, the better I learned to look away from the headlights. On the way back, I was getting better at watching the shoulder instead of the center line if I needed to. But that's a stressful way to drive at night (at speed) and not at all what I remember from when I was younger.

Every once in a while I'd get 15 or 30 seconds without an oncoming car, and just the dark road lighting up ahead of me, and that was more the quiet solitude and joy I remembered from night driving in the past.

And then there was the fog.

The window fog that is. (We're not in the Bay Area any more.)

Quite a ways up on the highway, my front window started fogging. The AC was running cool, because it has since we've gotten Julie, and so we set to heating things up. But the fog remained. Eventually we realized it was on the outside of the window, a result of the cool window condensing the high humidity outside. The windshield wipers worked a bit, but I was getting overloaded, just like on that first drive, and so I was having troubles figuring out how to get them going.

This was all on the long curve into Lihue, which is one of several places where there's a long stretch of road with no way to pull over, unless you ditch your car in what's probably still a muddy morass where it'll need to be towed. So I was getting a little stress about my window that was getting gradually less transparent.

Fortunately my dad was able to warn me to when the turnoff to the backroad into Lihue was. So we went down there, and then down a side road, and were able to fool with things until the windows cleared. The correct answer seemed to be: run the fan at night, not the AC. And the other correct answer seemed to be: read the *@#(@#$ manual to learn Julie's systems better.

But, ugh that was stressful. Not my best first nighttime experience, but it was very good that my dad was there to calmly talk about the problem and to guide us off on a side road and resolve it. Whew.

We'd planned to go into Lihue all the way to the game store, to plot all the whole route, but it was getting late by this point, so we turned around and head homeward.

We turned at Tree Tunnel Road to go into Koloa, and that was a nasty experience too, because it was another high speed road, and road markings were often all but invisible. Bleh. That was the one road I went down that felt really uncomfortable: a car would be oncoming, and I'd largely lose my place on the road (visually).

We eventually got out to the shore where Lappert's Ice Cream is, and Kimberly (who'd joined the trip so that we could go to Lappert's, and later regretted it because of the fog debacle and our journey down the dark back road that she called "Murder Lane", and where she said the man with the hook lived) and I had some ice cream. (They had Love Potion #9 for the first time in years!) Reward!

And then we went back via Koloa Road, which turned out to be not nearly as bad in the dark as the Tree Tunnel Road had been.

And when we got home I had definitely had enough driving for the day. Though at no point was I as painfully tense as on my first several drives.

So, I don't think I'm going to the game shop on Thursday. I don't think I can deal with driving all the way back from Lihue on that highway yet. (Though I'm hoping it'll be a little less crowded at the 8 or 9 o'clock that I expect to come home than at the 7 o'clock we were driving today.)

For that to make sense, I need to do a little nighttime driving here and there, to get used to it better, so that I can feel up to the drive from Lihue in the near future.

And I guess I should really read Julie's manual.

I've got three months of Skotos work left, and I'm trying to maximize it by sitting down and focusing on one topic a day, at least four days out of five. So, today was RPGnet. There, I need to fix some dangling problems and also finish the security upgrade related to PDO and other cleanup for the site.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty deep into the security cleanup at this point, which means that I'm getting into stuff that is increasingly difficult and time consuming. So, I dug through a handful of security TODOs this morning related to the PDO upgrade and each one took at least an hour, and there was one that I was banging my head against longer than that. (Lesson learned: don't reuse a variable that you're binding to PDO, because apparently the binding is to that variable, not its contents.)

But then a shipping container showed up in front of our house around 10.30. The driver dropped it right off, not quite in the left-hand turn lane on Maka, and not quite in our drive way, so all was well (and we didn't have to pay $400 more for a van shuttle of stuff). Then the movers showed up at about 11.00, about two hours less than expected.

(And by the by, I think our 8000 pounds didn't fill up much more than 10 feet of that 20 feet shipping container.)

After we all introduced ourselves, I plopped myself down at our dining room table with our laptop, and I did manage to solve a few more of those RPGnet PDO problems (and also fixed a membership problem that had popped up over the holidays), but I did lose much of the afternoon controlling traffic of boxes and answering questions.

The guys were very nice, but I could see there was some class thing going on of a sort I don't tend to see in the Bay Area. There was a lot more "sir"ring than I expected, and a preference to sit out on our porch to eat rather than eat at our dining room table. But, we also talked some, and one of the movers expressed his fear of Trump's war-mongering in Iran. I could tell that he thought a big, cataclysmic war was about to start, and I tried to explain that I thought everyone had managed to save face and they'd be backing down now. We had a bit of a language barrier, as the movers were all Filipino, and their English was slightly limited ... but obviously much better than my FIlipino. In any case, we still connected a bit.

We made it easy for them to get everything into the house by opening up the garage, which provides easy access to the downstairs, and the front door, which provides easy access to the upstairs: there were no more than half-a-dozen steps at any point, unless something ended up in the wrong place. And soon they were zooming up and down with hand carts full of stuff. (I tried not to listen as the carts went bang-bang-bang up and down those stairs.)

All of my "PBO" (packed by owner) stuff, which is books, comics, and games mostly, got piled in a huge pile in our cavernous downstairs family room (a room that we don't really know what to do with yet). That'll do for now, until we start getting shelves built. The movers also unpacked all of our bedroom and our kitchen, though they're both chaos. And they rightly pointed out that there wasn't much purpose in unpacking the stuff from various offices, because we don't have shelves for them, so after seeing one box get piled up, we said they could stop.

So, we have a huge chaos of stuff, as expected, and also many, many boxes. It's going to be quite a bit of work.

We started off today by putting the bedroom in order. Unfortunately, this involved me carefully hauling around a bookcase, a cedar chest, and a few dressers from where we'd told the movers to put them. It'd be much easier if Kimberly were up to help, but that's not life right now, so I moved stuff carefully and slowly on my own. In any case, we got all the clothes put away, and we have a theory for the final state of our bedroom, and our existing furniture broadly matches that theory, but its culmination is going to require waiting for our bedroom set to appear, and the bed and dresser that were supposed to be here in February suddenly slipped to March without any OK from us. Sigh. But that time will be a drop in the bucket of our life here, even if it's annoying at the moment (particularly for Kimberly who can't really sleep in the bed at the moment due to her surgery wounds). Unfortunately, we're suspecting we don't want to keep my dresser that we had shipped all the way out here, because it's just not going to fit with the new bedroom set we have. (And, as I told Kimberly, it'd be much more wasteful to have something we were unhappy with, whether we shipped it here or not; and I'm sure the Habitat for Humanity thrift store can make good use of it, if that is what we end up deciding; or maybe Kimberly will decide to use it elsewhere in the house; or maybe we'll decide it's OK.)

Tomorrow: probably the kitchen, cleaning up our stuff and packing up what my dad and Mary were kind enough to lend us.

We also did another short drive today, to practice-practice-practice. We went out to Eleele and back again, with the excuse this time being dropping off yesterday's load of recycling, from my tearing up all the boxes we had in the house before today. (I'd also wanted to dump five garbage bags I filled, but alas it was 4pm by the time we headed out, and the refuse transfer station closes promptly at 3.15.) There are still a couple of turns on the way to Eleele that I don't like at 50mph, but the most challenging bit was getting into and out of a parking space at the Big Save. But, I got in and out with no major issues, except having to do a second back and forth on the way out because I misjudged how far I needed to back up. Another lesson learned: don't take a space right at the front, where I have to back into the main lane to get out, because it's very busy, and that stressed me out on a trip that was otherwise lowering my stress. (It's going to take me a while to get used to the parking, and I remember vaguely that being true back when I first learned to drive in the '80s, first in a tank-like '70s car, then in my '80 Mustang.)

(And we had a secret McDonald's dinner; don't tell anyone as that's shamefully McDonald's two nights this week, but these have been tough, busy days. And it actually wasn't secret, because we ran into Neil there, who I'd met at my dad's church in years past, and he recognized me as "Gary's son". Busted!)