shannon_a

My sister & fam are visiting from the mainland. We had a nice dinner out at Hanapepe Art Night yesterday, and I'll see them again at lunch tomorrow. While I was eating a tasty al Pastor burrito yesterday and my sister was eating curry, she mentioned that she didn't really know what was going on with me because I'm now writing journals anymore.

True enough. I've been erratic at my journaling since we moved out here to Hawaii, I think because I'm now writing full-time during the day, but then I got even more burned out when Lucy was sick, a year and a half ago now, and so I've mainly written about our couple of trips since then.

But here's a bit of what's going on.

CONTRACT WORK

In November I took on a new client for my technical writing. I gave them a day a week and we undertook a 13-week contract, which closed out in February. It was my favorite type of work because they had four big documents to write, and they handed them off to me, and I wrote them over the course of about 100 hours as I saw fit. Some required some online research, some required interviews with their staff. But mostly I could just sit and write. At the end I handed them several foundational documents about security practices for their company and about the architecture of their platform that have already proven to be very helpful in spinning the company up.

The hope is that after they've ramped up a bit, they'll call me back in for more work. Maybe as soon as in another month, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much later in the year. But, at the moment I'm very happy to get my day a week back, because it was putting a real strain on getting my personal projects done.

PERSONAL WORK

And my personal work is really getting to some big milestones, which is good after five years of half-time work.

This is Free Trader Beowulf, my system history of Traveller, started hitting shelves in print form last fall.

Designers & Dragons Origins, my four-book product history of early D&D products is moving through the editorial process. I got the fourth and final book back from my editor on Friday and have it open in another window to check those edits.

Designers & Dragons: The Lost Histories, my three new volumes of company histories, is nearing first draft where I will have all the histories written for the new volumes. But, there's lots more to do there regarding updates for both the new and old company histories.

I suck at marketing, so I haven't been calling around to get on any podcasts or in any magazines at the moment. Both of those things happen from time to time, but it's because they ask, not me. So I should do some of that, especially as I close out my current drafts!

(If you have a podcast and would like to talk history, or if you have a magazine and would like a history-related article, call me!)

CATS

When last I wrote we had a cat stand-off, with our new scaredy-kitty Megara and our slightly-older bully-kitty Elmer not allowed in the same rooms at the same time. Which has resulted in tiring months of cats being locked up either in our bedroom (that's Megara most of the time) or my office (that's Elmer and optionally Mango when I'm working or gaming and we want to let Megara roam).

We tried animal behavior work for a while, and there's been some good reactions, but I just don't see it breaking Megara's flee and cower reaction or Elmer's chase and bat reaction.

So we've called our carpenter and he's going to be over in a few days to put a wooden gate at the top of our stairs. See, Elmer has mostly hung out downstairs for the last couple of years, mainly coming upstairs for food. So we want to try and make that more official. He won't be neglected because my office is downstairs, and I do my online gaming downstairs, so he should get 40-50 hours of whatever interaction he wants down there.

(Not that we can actually build a gate tall enough to keep him out if he tried, but we think he mostly won't try, and besides that it'll likely break any chases if Megara wanders downstairs and then gets scared by Elmer. Because she'll go over the gate like a leaf and then Elmer will have to figure out how to jump high enough.)

Fingers crossed this is a solution, because nothing else has been so far. And I'm really tired of our bedroom door being closed all the time and my constantly sealing off my office.

HOME IMPROVEMENT

We also had the same carpenter out last year to rebuild the steps up to our porch in front. As he explained, they'd been built badly originally, with wide planks that bowed, causing them to pool water, and with risers on the back, further preventing draining. So the stairs were rotting out and slimy and looking pretty bad in the process. We called him out not knowing exactly what he'd want to do, and he pretty revamped the whole stairway. Looks very nice now, and isn't constantly wet or slippery.

(Mind you, we've had a VERY dry year here in Kauai, I just saw a report that the rivers are at a 109-year low state-wide. Shades of California and the constant drought panic encouraged by the newspapers trying to sell their stories.)

That carpentry encouraged me to finally get back to work on home improvement projects, something that's been on the back burner since at least before Lucy got sick. (I've got two not quite done: repainting the rest of the deck on our lanai, as I'd previously painted just the new boards we put in on the outer third of the lanai; and putting laminate flooring down in my office closet, to match the rest of the office.)

But our carpenter's work encouraged me to restain the porch as well as paint all the railings around the porch, as he'd had to repair them some and so they were now a motley or old red paint and white epoxy or other patching material. Kimberly and a I chose a rich blue and over several hours on a couple of weekends I sanded and prepped and then put enough of the new blue paint down to cover up the dirty red that we'd never liked. (And the white epoxy; that actually took the most work to cover.)

But that of course requires redoing all of our red highlights. We're thrilled to get rid of all the muted red, which looks too much like the red dirt of Hawaii, but it's a big task. After the porch I also painted trim on the archway of our garage and on the top of a wall just inside the garage. Still to do is the railing on our lanai and one shelf at the bottom of the short stairway in our garage that leads to our house. Then we get to the big stuff: a 3 or 4 foot tall strip of stucco all around the bottom of the house and the trim at the roof line. Kimberly and I are going to figure out how to paint the stucco, and then we'll hire someone to do the roof trim, which will probably require replacing the rain gutters (which is fine, as some of them were off the house and some of them were badly damaged when we moved in, and that hasn't magically gotten any better, so I'm not sure how well they work at the moment).

And after that, I can maybe get back to some of those other tasks.

UKE

Oh, and my mom and Bob got me a Uke for Christmas, so I've been playing with that a bit. I'm not practicing every day like I'd like, but I'm gaining familiarity with chords and how to hold the strings right and strumming and all the rest. I'm working on "Here Comes the Sun" as the first song I actually know how to play, as it's got some fun finger-picking riffs in-between the main strums.

Still a ways to go.

So that's a little bit of what's going on at the moment.

THAT MUSKY SMELL. At Costco yesterday, we saw a Cybertruck. It's the only one on the island, as far as I know. I pointed and laughed. It's not just that it's a comically ugly car, but that comically ugly people buy it. The driver smiled and waved like he was Mayor McCheese.

GATED COMMUNITY. Late last week, the pet gate for Megara's room (Kimberly's office) arrived. It's intended to better integrate her into the house, through Mango being able to see and smell her more constantly, and through being able to feed them all around the gate without the only barrier being me (as was the case previously, and it was awkward). So I took Saturday off from my normal hiking and biking so that we could actually get it installed. Not a big deal once I figured out the instructions. If it's set just perfectly we can even close the gate and office door at the same time.

The question is whether the 51" height (about 52" since it's not set directly on the floor) will be enough to keep cats from going over the gate. We're pretty sure our large orangies can't get that height with basically nothing to give them footholds, but we're less sure of teeny little Megara.

There is a small cat door down at the bottom of the gate, and so we've been using that to let cats in and out of the room, with the hope that we'll teach them that the cat door is the only way they could possibly get in and out. (Pay no attention to the upper area behind the curtain.)

We'll see if we're smarter than a 1-to-3-year-old (cat).

CREAKINGS IN THE NIGHT. Mind you, we're not fully trusting of the cats yet, so every time we've left the house for an extended amount of time or gone to bed we've closed the door as well as the gate. Until last night. That was the experiment.

I was woken up at 4am by a loud thump. Ugh, I thought, was that a cat clearing the gate? (Or failing to?) Mango was at the foot of the bed, not him. I trekked downstairs and it looked to me like Megara was on the cat tree, though it was hard to figure out for sure because all of her lights were out. But after I stopped by the bathroom I returned and she was right in front of the gate (on the correct side).

I never saw Elmer, and didn't feel like hunting for him at 4am, but I was pretty sure (a) that he was the least likely to clear that gate; and (b) Megara wouldn't have been so casual if he was in the room. So, it was back to bed.

All the cats were on the correct sides of the gate when I woke up in the morning.

LIKE SOME PICASSO OR A GARFUNKEL. I was determined that if I wasn't going to go out for my normal activities on Saturday, we'd at least get some things done. So after the gate installation (and some R&R), Kimberly and I did some work to get art up in our house.

Yes, it's been almost five years since we moved here. No, that isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Griselda has been up in my office since we moved in. We have a Starry Night print that was newly purchased when we moved in in our bedroom. A couple of Hawaiian pieces are also up and some of Kimberly's work. We also had a wedding present from a friend up in the kitchen until it got replaced with a cat shelf. But we had a lot of others to still put up.

So on Saturday we decided where everything was going and put up as much as we could. It feels like there's art _all over_ the house now, everywhere I look. We have a few pieces we want to get framed and a few pieces that need some repair and so we're going to go out to a local framing place some time to close out the work, but they're only open 10-2 three days a week, and that'll take mucking with my work schedule, so we'll take care of it sometime soon, but at the moment we've got enough to take care of (primarily working to get Megara integrated into the house!).

ALL'S WELL. One of the reasons that I had the energy to do all this stuff on Saturday (with the pictures obviously being long-delayed) is that Kimberly has been doing better. Yay! Her abdominal pain from early this year has been resolved through PT. Now she's working on her knee, also with PT. Which means she's walking again and able to help with Megara and the other cats and with dishes and such. So everything is easier right now, allowing us to get back to doing more long-term household work.

BUILD UP THE WALL. In fact, for a while now I've been working on our fourth big work planned for the house. There were actually three of them planned when we moved. We've been doing them slowly not due to lack of energy, but so we could afford it. The first was solar panels. That went in in 2020, first because we knew it'd save us $150+ a month (electricity is EXPENSIVE in Hawaii) and second because the tax refunds for solar energy were dropping every year. (They've since been restored courtesy of Biden, so it turns out we could have saved more if we'd waited two years, but had to pay two years worth of electricity.)

Second was our built-in bookshelves for our family room and offices downstairs, which must have happened at the end of 2022 as we got the cabinets that formed their bases delivered while I was in Europe for an RWOT. I guess that must have been The Hague.

Then we got distracted for a year when Mango (twice!) escaped the house and we had to buy some pretty expensive custom made jalousie windows for the front of the house.

But now we're finally back to our third and final planned project, which is a retaining wall, or rather a set of retaining walls for the back yard. The problem is that we had a nasty slope in what would be a pretty nice sized back yard. 14 foot top to bottom and pretty steep. So we want to flatten it out with walls in between so that we can have more backyard and I can actually mow it all rather than tottering on a steep hill with a weed wgacker where I'll eventually break a leg if I'm not careful.

We got a contractor out here a few months ago and then a surveyor to mark where our property lines actually were, but we ran into problems when we learned there's a drainage way & building set back line in the back of our property where can't build. It was actually kind of frustrating because it's obvious that parts of it have been blocked by our neighbors (it goes down the whole block) but since we're the house on the corner, if there's ever a complaint, it'll be about our very visible back yard.

So I talked with public works who had signed off on the original drainage way and after maybe a month they decided that it was OK to build a wall because it won't obstruct the flow of water in the direction. (An ADU would *not* have been OK, but they said a wall was a house of a different color.) We got a somewhat official letter in email right away but a month later and we're still waiting for the official paperwork on letterhead that we want before we start.

And my contractor hasn't seemed willing to draw up plans and give us an estimate before we do that.

So that's on hold right now, though I'd really like to pull money out of the market while it's up, and especially before the election, but not when I don't even have an estimate. (I might have to make a decision about pulling it out anyway really soon, I just don't want to pay taxes if it doesn't happen this year!)

But, PRO-GRESS.

ANNIVERSARY

Kimberly & I celebrated our 23rd anniversary yesterday. Most anniversary lists figure it's too much trouble to list gifts or themes more than once every five years once you're past 10 or 20. One said it was our Air-themed anniversary. Another said we should buy a silver plate or an imperial topaz. Not a normal topaz or even a royal topaz, but an imperial topaz.

Kimberly and I decided to venture out to some of the parks of Kapaʻa and to have an anniversary lunch at a tasty Mexican restaurant called Monico's. Our itinerary ended up something like this:

1. LYDGATE. Head over to the swimming lagoon that Kimberly feels comfortable swimming at. Eye notice saying "Beware, Portuguese Man of Wars". Note that none of the tourists in the lagoon seem to be screaming. Nonetheless, decide that we live on this tropical island and can swim another day.

1b. LYDGATE. Have a nice walk up and down the shore along Lydgate. Watch the beautiful waves. Watch the tourists. Read a bit of _The Magicians_ at a pavilion before we head on.

2. SLEEPING GIANT. Park in the perfect spot at the East Trailhead of Sleeping Giant, which I've never been to before. (I've hiked to the top a few times, but always from the West Trailhead.) Walk up through pleasant forested paths to the .5 mile mark, passing any number of visitors heading back down. Turn around there so that Kimberly doesn't overdo it, because she's still getting her ability to walk back. Check our Fitbits at the bottom and see they read about 1.5 miles, because Hawaiian paths _always_ seem to undermeasure the miles of their paths. (This has been my experience often up in Kōkeʻe, looking at both time and mileage.)

3. MONICO'S. Visit Monico's. Eye notice saying, "Closed 8/12". Reflect that this is a common danger at Kauaian businesses. Talk with a lady who drives up right after us wanting to make donations for Maui relief, as Monico's is apparently collecting them. But not on 8/12. Karen suggests we eat at a Japanese restaurant called Sensei and says definitely not to eat at the new Greek restaurant. She says they charge $2 for ice in your water. And for refills. And a 3% charge for credit cards. And a required 20% tip on every order. And there's more. (She claims.) She says at least three times that all the locals are boycotting the restaurant but that the tourists are too dumb to know better. After suggesting she's in the class of locals four or five times, she finally says "and transplants like me". After walking back to her car, she keeps shouting about the Greek restaurant. I uh-huh, uh-huh while Kimberly talks to my Dad, who she'd texted asking for restaurant suggestions.

4. MARIACHI'S. We finally end up eating at a somewhat lower-brow (but good) Mexican restaurant called Mariachi's . We eat at the Mariachi's in Lihue occasionally, but it's a new experience eating at the one in Kapa'a. Same food though, except they put a slice of orange on everything. They don't charge us $2 for ice in water, but we're somewhat incredulous about that claim in any case.

5. DONUTS. Oh, and we get donuts on the way home from Island Craves. Well, I get a chocolate donut, Kimberly gets a malasada, which as far as I can tell is just a fancy name for a sugar-coated donut where they forgot the hole.

That's not quite the end of our anniversary. After we get home, we nap. Then we play some Azul: Queen's Garden. Then we get some dinner from Kauai Ramen and from Kauai Kookie and eat it while watching Downton Abbey: The Movie, one of the last movies we'll ever get from Netflix's DVD Rental. Ah, for the days when we had a library of almost everything ever made, available in one place, before streaming took off.

LUCY

The one other thing going on is Lucy. She has pretty much stopped eating since we started her on the chemotherapy drug a week and a half ago, which is disheartening, but not a surprise. We're not expecting to see a result (if we do) until 2-4 weeks into the process, so now she's just got the bad effects.

But we fed her before we went out yesterday and then after we got home (before we napped, I think) and then after we were done with our movie.

We are close to the end of our rope here, tube feeding her three times a day and constantly hoping to see progress which we haven't. It's been three months, and she's still not eating. And the chemotherapy is the last option we were offered that might help her out.

If it's not that, it's something neurological or ... something else they haven't considered. And we don't know if there are any other options.

MAUI

Perhaps I should have led with this, but WE ARE NOT ON MAUI. It's about 225 miles away. We did also get the super high winds that caused the disaster on Maui, but were lucky enough to not have any fire spark. We are a somewhat wetter island, I think (the top of the island has at times been the wettest place on Earth), but I've noticed places where our Buffalo Grass is tall and dry here too, so a fire could rip through those locales as well.

THE HOUSE

We've had big projects really stalling out at the house from all of our stressors this year, from Kimberly's coughing problems early in the year to Lucy's eating problems more recently.

But I'm happy to say we've had some progress too. The gaming shelves are now all together in our dining room and look very handsome and are full of games. I've got a long awaited chair in my office to have a comfy sitting area and have a new shelf arriving tomorrow, which will finalize my office and will also open up more shelving for gaming (thanks to a shelf that's moving out). We're down to a couple of boxes to unpack plus around 9 bins of games.

We still have to order a few chairs and an end table and a bench cushion for the Family Room and one more set of shelves for our Harry Potter–closet and I think we'll mostly be done and settled. Four years later.

There's still a deck to finish painting. And my office closet to finish flooring. And more flooring to put down in other parts of the office.

But that's all more revisionary. I'm thrilled that we're close to having the original visionary* part of the house done after years of plague, surgery, and other issues that kept us down.

* Well, we still need to get the backyard leveled out too, so that I don't break a leg trimming our hillside, which I do every 2-3 weeks, but we're waiting for our investments to be a bit higher than they have been in recent years before taking that on.

PAINT, PAINT

Well, with the lanai paint from Home Depot on what I expect is a long delay, I decided to put a second coat of primer on the new boards on our lanai to protect them from the elements.

I actually had to dodge rain to do so, and then got a little shower after I'd done the first few feet, but that's exactly why I want them better protected.

It pleasantly didn't take too long because I had a wider brush than I'd used previously and it was easier to do them all together. With two coats of primer I'm hopeful that the new boards will now be fine *however* long it takes Home Depot to get in the base color we need. (Because I'd originally planned for maybe just two coats: one primer and one paint, though that'll ultimately depend on how the deck looks after one coat of paint.)

BUILD, BUILD

Also on my list today was putting in some more work on the problematic BoardGameTable shelves. Every time I work on them it's hard not to tally up the poor design (screw holes too big, so there's considerable play and it takes considerable effort to get them all lined up and often requires a rubber mallet after they move at the last minute as the screw tightens; sides are fragile due to poor design of the slots for linking shelves together, and so it's possible to break them with a rubber mallet, something I've done once so far; wood is too soft and so it's possible to keep tightening the screw right into the wood; slight variance on heights, so that shelves don't precisely line up). But I'm hoping they'll mainly fade away as the shelves are complete assembled and in use.

Kimberly is unfortunately feeling ill today, something possibly picked up at the pool where she's started water aerobics as PT again, so I was at the shelves on my own. But I still put together 3/5th of the third row. Another two sessions and it'll likely all be together but then I still have to fight with the horrible doors to get them something close to straight.

And then the great board game reshelving can begin, and maybe I can find some people to invite over to play.

WRITE, WRITE

Most of my writing is done on weekdays nowadays, now that I two to three workdays for my personal projects.

But, I also did a bit this weekend. Mainly because I had some bonus work to do.

As I wrote yesterday, I deconstructed chapter 5 of my fourth TSR book and used half of that to revise chapter 3. It made me happy to do some organizational work that I think is a definite improvement for seeing how everything hangs together, and I got it done just in time, because I had the old chapter 3 (and 4) queued up for preview on my Patreon tomorrow.

Then today I got all of my AtoZChallenge ready to go for RPGnet (which meant lots of formatting but I also did a very light edit through the whole thing as I went. That should (re)appear there in May and June. Total came out to 16,000 words, a pretty big additional bit of writing for last month. As usual, it gave me some great interaction with roleplaying folks and gave me some new points-of-view on roleplaying history, so it was well worthwhile.

Though everything is off to Rose at RPGnet, I also want to put together a PDF of the entire content for anyone interested, so I'm not quite done yet.

Y & LANAI

I: Y-M-C-A.

Kimberly and I visited the YMCA in Lihue last Saturday. We started going there in November 2021 so that she could safely exercise her leg in the pool, following a good surgery to repair the previous botched surgery, which had kept her off said leg for years. So, she mainly walked in the kiddie pool and I swam in the main pool, as a nice alternative to the rough, brackish ocean waters. (Don't get me wrong, I love swimming in the ocean, but it was a great change of pace.)

That fell off sometime last year due to various illnesses and whatnot, and we eventually suspended our membership.

So, back to last Saturday, we went in to Lihue to pick up the membership as Kimberly is ready for her last push to get back on her feet again. And we found out that there is an upcoming price hike in June. A HUGE price hike.

The Lihue YMCA used to be $80 for a personal membership and $100 for a family membership. That's slightly cheap for the YMCA, but there's not actually a lot to the Lihue YMCA. I think of it as "a pool in a field". There's actually a tiny weight room too, but it's probably about the size of our downstairs at home.

The new rates? $130 for personal membership, $160 for family membership. Yeah, that's 60%+ price increase over the course of a month. I mean, I know we've had inflation, but it certainly hasn't been 60%.

So, we're mostly done with the Y. Kimberly hopes to sign up for the month of May to do some water aerobics to help with her leg. She wants to end before the price hike. I certainly think we should continue in June if she's still getting rehabilitation, but it just might be at the $10 a day when she decides to go in rate.

We assume the YMCA is in death spiral to be making that sort of increase and that it'll likely be gone within a year or two. I'm actually sad that we won't be going there anymore because it was the one bit of really LOCAL community that we've experienced on the island since the pandemic started. (I was also feeling some local community at the game store I went to a few times before the pandemic, but it's gone now. So, onwards to new things!)

II: L-A-N-AI.

My dad and I finished the first cut of work on the lanai on Tuesday! All of the boards from those five rows we cut out are now laid down in place and screwed in. There was a bit of sanding were boards met unevenly, and a bit of Gorilla Glue where they were too far apart, but it was mostly just drilling and screwing. I'm thrilled how it came together.

Still a lot to do, but not nearly as pressing. Wednesday I powerwashed the lanai, including the one board under the railing that we didn't replace. Kimberly and I will paint that board and the five new rows we laid down on Sunday. Then after my dad gets back from a trip to the Bay Area we'll pull out four feet of board we don't like in another row, do some caulking on the edges to offer more protection, and re-powerwash and then paint the bits of the lanai we didn't replace.

Hoping it'll look pretty fresh and new when we're done!

III: MORE PROJECTS.

There are still more projects to come.

I've been working on the problematic shelves from boardgametable.com as time allows. Kimberly and I got the entire second row put together last week, but we're putting the project on hold until we paint the lanai.

When that comes together I can start getting board games on shelves. Hopefully allowing us to clear out the Harry Potter-closet, and I can then use that as storage for my comics so that I can finish flooring my office closet.

And then we want to do a big flooring project upstairs.

So lots to do!

Well, we're now 48+ hours without water, except in two minute increments when I turn on the water valve.

After a very annoying Monday, we picked up a few necessities in town yesterday evening. I filled two five gallon bottles for our water dispenser, which was good because we were on the verge of _actually_ running out of potable water. We got some wet wipes and new hand sanitizer, which turned out to be not as sticky or smelly as the huge jug we got a year or so into the pandemic (after panic runs on hand sanitizer had cleared the shelf for a while). We also got plenty of bottled water, which has made us more willing to use it for rinsing off dishes, wetting tooth brushes, and that sort of thing. (And will be hurricane supplies come this summer.)

So today wasn't as annoying as yesterday.

We _did_ get a plumber out here today. He arrived in the late morning, which was about 2.30pm Hawaii time. He gamely investigated the problem in the medium-hard rain (yeah, that's irony: plenty of water outside today!).

The problem apparently is where the metal pipe from our meter meets up with the plastic pipe that runs under the ground toward our house. They'd been screwed together too tightly and one (I assume the plastic one) had eventually cracked or something. There was apparently some problem with something being low quality too. Maybe the sealant between the two?

We saw the cost cutting in the original construction of this house when we were working on the lanai too. Lots of non-stainless steel screws, which had totally corroded and so couldn't be easily removed. Nothing excessive: it's a well-built house. But apparently when they could reasonably go with something cheaper that wouldn't cause problems for 20 years, they did.

(20 years later ...)

So that's day one of what has become a week of getting things fixed.

Tomorrow, as long as it's not raining hard enough to cause problems with applying sealant to pipes, we should have water back. Mike the plumber from Kapaa seems great.

And tomorrow afternoon my dad and I will also start putting our lanai back together, though no way we get done with it tomorrow.
Thursday is the car, and Friday is the vet.

So we got back from the Bay Area two weeks ago Saturday and had to immediately dive into prep for The Great Carpentry Project.

This is is the second big project we had planned for the house, following on from our solar power install (which got done relatively promptly in 2020, despite the pandemic). The goal was to set up a complete built-in shelving system in our Family Room, with some additional shelving in our offices. It's a pretty big deal because most of our books and games have remained boxed since we moved here (not helped by BoardGameTable's game-shelves Kickstarter, which is now 10 months overdue, clearly in part due to COVID challenges ... but it's had some negligently lackadaisical communication throughout that I have to assume that's not the whole problem, but that's another whole story ...).

When things had settled enough in 2021 we tried to get someone out here, but after the people I finally found failed to show up to give a quote twice, I gave up, and then we ended up reflooring the offices and fixing the tile flooring in the family room, and so that put off the shelving work for a while, and then we ordered cabinets as the foundation of the shelves, and they showed up way at the end of their delivery window (e.g., 4 months) and then there was a missing box (and speaking of grotesquely negligent communication, Home Depot never told us it was missing and being shipped late except in limited ways when we quizzed them directly), and that actually took two more months to get to us. So we *finally* had all our parts not long before we left for the Bay Area for Thanksgiving.

I *did* by that point have a Kapaa company in my back pocket who was happy to work with us, though they were slightly expensive on T&M and also wanting to charge us for the trip out to our side of the island from Kapaa. So I dropped them a line just before I left, and while we were in the Bay Area they said they could be out here the week after we got back.

So the Sunday after we got back we had to get all our cabinets rearranged to make sure they were in the right place and we had to double-check on how we wanted all the work done ...

And then we waited.

W., our carpenter from Kapaa, showed up a week ago Wednesday. Setting up all of our cabinets was two days' work, and it was nice to see our scattered cabinets become an actual cabinet system.

The shelving atop and above the cabinets has been six more days work and isn't done yet.

I say six more days, but we're on Kauai time. The start many day's been a bit late, and there have been a few half days. Like I said, Kauai time. We saw it when we were working on the solar-power install in 2020, and there's just no reason to get bothered about it, because that's how things go. It's kind of subpar when we're paying for transport out from the other side of the island, but *shrug*, it's silly to get worked up about the facts of life.

W. seems quite skilled with his carpentry work, which is great. (Also a nice guy, and a fan of fantasy, science-fiction, and comics, which is all a plus.) He was also able to help us finalize our plans, which is exactly what we wanted an expert for.

We'd hoped for true floating shelves, to really keep the rooms as open as possible. W., however, is quite serious about making things are supported (in a way that seems rational and based on his skill set), so we compromised on shelves with vertical panels coming up from the sides of each shelf. It gives them a good coherent look. And we avoided any back wall for the shelves, which should keep them fairly open.

There was lots more design work, like use of plywood for the shelves, with real-word nosing on the edges to make them look good (which is how my dad and I designed my comic-book shelves back in 2020). And cleats on the walls to support each shelf. They should be very sturdy and support the weight.

As of carpentry day eight (which was last Friday), most of the shelves are in place, with the nosing still to be finished and installed, plus a few stray shelves still to be done, like the ones in Kimberly's office, plus a few in one corner.

It's going to be a little more expensive than I'd hoped, and is definitely taking more time, but not horribly so in either case.

The next question will be how the amount of shelving compares to the books we have, which is a pretty broad question because I don't know how the cabinets at the foundation of our shelves are going to be used (either how well they'll work or if it'll make sense to use them for books); I don't know how much shelving we need (as we got rid of so much when we moved); and I don't know how much we really have! So I'm looking forward to getting things on shelves and seeing how it all works.

Hopefully next weekend. W. won't be back until Tuesday, but he's estimated three days to finish things up: one to install the first set of nosing and preparing the rest; one to install the rest of the nosing; and one to finalize little details. Fingers crossed. I'd *really* like to be shelving things by next weekend.

And then we have a bunch of other details needed to finalize our Family Room. Probably a love seat and a chair, maybe a table, some cushions for the bench we arranged in one corner. I think it'll be a nice library/sanctuary/family-room when it's done.

Thrilled to see it move forward after almost three years of waiting.

"Wait 60 seconds, then call me", I say, then I begin to quickly move forward, not running, but walking fast. I have 60 seconds to clear the store.

---

MONTHS AND YEARS EARLIER.

We are coming to the end of the beginning of our work to make our downstairs usable. This has been a long process with a number of obstacles:

1.) The biggest problem is that the center of our downstairs, the "family room", is a big unwieldy space that I haven't seen used well by any of the renters who've previously been here. It's a kind of figure eight space, with hallways, sliding glass door, and stairs all impinging on it. One renter had a big pool table down here and another a huge sectional couch. They both looked jammed in.

2.) Combined with that is the fact that I wanted to do my best to do the opposite, to maintain a nice open space that isn't crowded like those previous setups. That called for open, built-in shelves to house our many books.

But:

3.) We had problems with the initial sale of our Berkeley house way back in the start of 2020 thanks to COVID, which killed any initial momentum we might have had to do work on the downstairs.

4.) And then COVID really settled in, and we didn't want people in our house for the duration of 2020 (other than our solar-install guy, a necessary evil.)

5.) And then when I finally settled on someone at the end of 2020, they flaked on two different appointments, at which point I decided they weren't good people to do a major project.

6.) By which time I'd come to a conclusion that all of the flooring in the downstairs was appalling.

7.) The offices were both done in beige carpets, and that was especially problematic because it meant that Kimberly's office caused her pain whenever she walked into it because of the scar on her foot from her botched 2018 surgery. So we decided to refloor the offices in the same vinyl planks that we'd used to redo the downstairs of my dad's house. That's all done, except for my closet (which is now awaiting the family-room shelving getting done because I don't have any place safe to put a closet full of graphic novels).

8.) The family room itself was done in large tiles which are relatively attractive and which keep the downstairs cool. But somehow the renters who installed those messed them up so that about a dozen tiles were wobbling, or coming up. (And more than that sound hollow underneath, which means the adhesive is not correctly under them.) My dad and I ended up removing 13 tiles, cleaning off old adhesive (which required a chisel!), and then replacing them. We've since regrouted them, and they look pretty good. Except some of our replacement tiles are noticeably redder than the originals, so now it just looks like we have TRAP TILES all over the room. We are *hoping* that the ones we didn't do don't cause problems, but I was at the verge of deciding we needed to replace the entire floor there were so many problems, so we pretty much did what we could.

---

As the tiling problem, and thus more than a year's or more worth of occasional floor work, came to an end, Kimberly and I started thinking about our family-room shelving again, as we had back at the end of 2020.

Because one of my potential designs involved having cabinets at floor level with shelving above them, my dad suggested we go to Home Depot, where their design department could produce an entire plan for our cabinets and shelving, that we could use even if we didn't go to Home Depot ... but he thought it likely that buying cabinets from Home Depot would be cheaper than having them hand constructed.

So, after deciding against stopping into Home Depot for a few weeks, because we always felt too busy when we were in town, we finally stopped in last Sunday. And not going those other times was a good decision, because we ended up spending 2 hours there (after an hour at home locking down our measurements).

The incredibly helpful and friendly J. worked through what we wanted and figured out how we could kludge it with what he had available. So we put together a plan for cabinets in the Family Room and my office, plus a bench connected to some of the cabinets in the back corner of the Family Room.

It was *not* a complete solution because we couldn't get shelving that matched the widths of the cabinets (as unlikely as that sounds, given they were all from the same manufacturer, but apparently most people are not doing what we are). But our theory is that we get the cabinets and have contractors install them. Then the contractors need to build counter surfaces atop the cabinets (because everything they had at Home Depot was way too deep) and they basically form our first shelf when they do so, and then build three slightly shallower shelves up above the cabinets. We also have plans for places without the cabinets where we'll just run two high shelves. For over desks and beds and such. Voila! A theory for a complete system for the family room (and our offices).

---

We then had to take our design plans home, where we mocked up our cabinets with the boxes and bins (mostly of books) that currently fill our family room and my office. We found several places where we were too tight, and so rejiggered things and sent them back to J.

Which brings us back to Home Depot on Thursday and the run across the store.

---

We scheduled Thursday to finalize our order, sending J. our changes in the meantime.

So, we went in, gave answers on a few final details, and then it was time to pay.

This was, I should note, a fairly large expenditure.

No problem: I'd moved money into our checking account and had the checkbook.

J. didn't have a till, so he took us up to the front to pay with our check.

Which was rejected. I don't understand what was up with that, but Home Depot does some check on large checks and they got a rejection and when they called to ask why they were told they needed a merchant number which they didn't have. Except that was just an automated recording. But when the clerk tried to talk to a human, she was told their office was closed. Because it was 3.30. (6.30 on the West Coast, and 9.30 on the East.) I mean, yeah, outside of banker's hours, but people kinda write checks at all times of day.

We tried with our ATM card next, rejected, and then J. hauled us back to his desk, where he *could* take plastic, so that we wouldn't stress everyone out, including the clerk, the people in line, and us.

---

Now this is ridiculous, because we had the money in our checking account, but I called up our two credit-card companies, figured out how much limit we had on each, and then asked J. to charge about half to the first.

Rejected.

Arrgh.

I knew this was modern-day psycho-super-cautiousness of not letting us use our own money (or credit) lest it be fraud.

And at that point I figured that if I had to start calling banks, I might as well call _our_ checking account rather than the credit card companies. So I did, using J's phone because you can't get cell signal inside Home Depot.

No problem, we were just hitting our daily spending limit, which the bank could raise.

The customer service rep just needed to message me a code so I could verify identity.

Which he did. Which I did not receive. See: no signal in Home Depot.

So I put down the phone and walked a few hundred yards to get out of the store. The message never showed up.

I walked a few hundred yards back and told our bank guy that he needed to wait 60 seconds and then message me, as sometimes messages don't go through if you're out of cell range when they first arrive.

Which is where we entered this story, with me rushing to the front of the store.

Good news: his message arrived. And his previous message. And a message from our credit card company asking about that "fraudulent" charge attempt.

---

When we write about cryptocurrency, one of our focuses is that it's self-sovereign: only you are in control of your money. This is a pretty real-world instance of why that's notable. Banks and credit card companies can entirely censor your spending. On Thursday, it was just about overzealous fraud prevention. But in the modern environment, what if it's about censoring payments to family planning centers? I could totally see the American Taliban taking that as their next step to attack Americans' reproductive rights. Imagine your own scenario.

---

In any case:

• Cabinets ordered. Arriving in 3-5 months on a truck delivered straight to our house.
  
• 13 tiles entirely removed, cleaned, and replaced, with final grouting occurring yesterday afternoon.
  
• No contractor found yet. That's the next step. We'll need them to install the cabinets and build tops and shelves.
  
• Thanks to our mock-ups, we've also got a good idea of furniture space in the Family Room, where I hope to have a loveseat and chair or two chairs. We can buy those soon if something strikes us.
  

So, onward. I'd hoped this would be done in 2020. Then I set a definite deadline in 2021. So 2022 for sure.

---

Oh, the garden part of that title. In the last few months our neighbors ripped out a big shrub along their property line for us, so that we can keep it clean in the future and keep buffalo grass out of their yard.

It's been a big improvement, though I now have more rough hillside to maintain. (Sigh.) But I'm very happy to look out at our yard and not see that shrub.

A retaining wall out there to flatten the hillside is next on our list, but whereas the family-room and office work is a necessity, this one is just resolving a major annoyance, so I want to make sure I'm comfortable with how much is in our savings and what we're spending when we do the wall, which means it comes sometime after the bookcases (and hopefully when the markets have rebounded from Putin's criminal invasion of Ukraine).

And I say that's next, but the yard is a constant battle as I try not just to maintain it but also to weed out current problems. There's another shrub on the opposite side I'd like to deal with (all buffalo grass this one) and I'd like to clear out an area in our front yard for a plumeria tree and ...

It has been a tiring almost-two-months since Kimberly's foot surgery in Oahu. She has needed lots of assistance, which I'm very happy to provide, and we're both hopeful that her work on her foot will leave her more able to walk than she has been in the last four years, but all of that water-fetching, cooler-filling, meal-preparing, and general support is still tiring.

And meanwhile, life on those islands goes on:

Doctors. A few weeks ago, Kimberly and I each got a letter from our doctor saying that she was ending her practice on the island ... as of that day. After three years on the island, she's moving back to the mainland to be closer to family. This is apparently a common occurrence on the island, with people saying that often have to change their PCP every few years, and I have to guess it was exacerbated by the pandemic, with there being at least a year where no responsible person was traveling back and forth to the mainland, except for emergencies. So Kimberly and I promptly made appointments to establish care with a new PCP at Wilcox. Her appointment is in late January, mine early February. (Lots of people over on Kauai FB seem very upset by that lag and don't seem to understand that first-time appointments like this are always very slow, both because they're longer and because they effectively ration new patients).

Solar. We lost our solar power a few weeks ago. The most frustrating thing is that no one told us. Our solar people are suppose to be monitoring our system, but they went 5 days without noticing that we were generating 0 power from our panels. I only noticed because there was a power outage in our area and so I popped into the app to see how our system was doing. (Turns out the blackout hadn't hit us, else we would have been down due to that lack of solar power.) When I contacted our solar company they pretty quickly declared our inverter was toast, which made me happy that I'd negotiated up to a 25-year warranty on it. But, island life and all, it'll be 10-15 business days before they have a replacement inverter for us, but at least we've gotten a tentative appointment scheduled, assuming it arrives on time: October 20th. So, we'll be paying Hawaiian electricity prices again for a while. (In fact, our September bill has come in, and was $45, including the very start of this problems; that's infinitely higher than our last three months of power, as we'd run positive all summer.)

Costco. Other things I learned recently: our mayor shops at Costco and likes the bacon-wrapped chicken. Small island.

Biking. Here's one other change since Kimberly's surgery: I've been taking my bike out a lot on my free Saturdays. Twice I've been to the Kapaa bike trail, in large part because Kimberly needed to get Nellie's brakes replaced, as they came out of the surgery toast (hopefully no foreshadowing there!!!). She thinks the docs may have dragged Nellie all around with the brakes on, but she'd also been rattling around in the back of Julie a lot in previous weeks. So there's a bike shop out by the Trail that said they could deal with Nellie, so I took her out there once to look at the scooter, and then a bit more than a month later to swap in new brakes, after their order finally showed up. (With that horrible global shipping situation, they told me 1-6 months, and said it'd only be quick if someone happened to have one of those brakes sitting around, and fortunately someone did.) Nellie's brakes still suck because the way the wheels are set up they just can't use good brakes like disc brakes or even calipers, but they now lock correctly, which they didn't after the Oahu surgery trip. One other bike tripe was to Mahaulepu. The dirt trails there are fun to ride. And a fourth was up to Kokee. I didn't like that ride as much because the road I took was rock-studded dirt that was dangerous and hard-going, though I did get further distance than I had previously riding, and got to see a new perspective of Waimea Canyon.

COVID. After our politicians decided they were just going to let COVID run wild on the islands, we had our worst outbreak ever, much of that in the last two months, and sacrificed another 100 people or so to allow tourism and the economy to continue. For a while, Kauai was actually the worst of the four main islands. It seems to have finally settled down, but boy have I learned how tourism rules these islands over the course of this pandemic, how it's raised up over the lives of the people here. But the bright side is those self-same people saw it too, so we are starting to see changes that could lead to better controls over tourism rather than just blind, constant increase.

Writing. My writing continues, though my schedule hasn't been great for the last two months. I'm on the verge of having finish about four books worth of content since the start of the pandemic. That fourth book will be my elf book for RQ, which has certainly taken a huge bite of my time since the start of the year. I was originally planning to have it done by the end of September, and then October, and at this point it looks like I might be content-complete by the end of the month, but still requiring a bit of editing. I'm thrilled that the book will hopefully be an official RQ release after running elf material down a few different paths over the last 20 years, but I'll also be thrilled to have my creative time back.

Cats. Still not sure the cats are 100%. Lucy has just had one of her strange incidents in the last month or so, but we need to get a weight check on her to see the next step. Meanwhile, Callisto hasn't been eating great in the last few weeks, so it might be time to get her back in to the vet. Sigh. (She's been eating well three nights in a row though, so making her tummy is finally settling, fingers crossed.)

And that's just some of what's going on at the moment ...

OK, it was only a minor disaster, but the new year started off with a bang.

(Actually it started off with obsessive and mostly illegal bangs, which began around 6pm in the old year, and continued past midnight. In fact the disaster started in the old year, our old friend 2020, too.)

I came home from a walk out to Mahaulepu on New Year's Eve and the lights at home were flickering and dimming. They got worse after I prepared dinner and we sat down to eat while (finally) watching The Rise of Skywalker. The TV turned off 3 or 4 times during the movie. The lights dropped out a similar amount of times.

I looked at our Tesla app, and it told us that there'd been six blackouts that day. I figured that's what we were seeing, and I was annoyed that our solar power system wasn't dealing with them, because we were supposed to see brownouts as little flickers, nothing more.

---

Next morning, the lights were still dim when I turned some of them on. So I dropped a line to our solar engineer. Despite being New Year's Day he responded quickly and told me he'd filed a service ticket and asked them to look at it.

I waited all day: no response.

(Why do these problems always happen at the start of holiday weekends!?)

When I walked with my dad that evening, he said that it was probably the voltage fluctuating, that I could check that by looking at my UPS, and that if it was running low that could damage appliances.

And after I got home, things were even worse. We tried to watch TV that evening, and it was turning off every minute or two. We eventually ate without entertainment, and then Kimberly and I huddled in the living room all night under a flickering light.

When I went downstairs to look at the voltage on my UPS, it was running 100-110V, which is out of spec. (Research on line also agreed that motor-driven appliances like refrigerators can indeed be damaged because low voltage means high amperage, but that newer ones are better at watching for their motors being overheated.) Afterward, I started unplugging things. But I couldn't unplug our two main motor-driven appliances (the refrigerator and chest freezer).

Oh, and we learned that our house could no longer really support power for two rooms at a time: when I was downstairs working with the UPS, the power problems had gotten worse upstairs.

---

The next day I mailed our solar people again to let them know that I hadn't heard from anyone the previous day and that the problems were getting worse. I let it sit until lunch time, and then I started get contacts from folks at the company.

Within a few hours, the problem had worked its way through the entire solar-service infrastructure and then out to Tesla, and we learned that we were getting bad voltage from our utility company!!? Our engineer said he'd never seen anything like it; my other main contact said they'd seen one other situation like this recently.

My best guess here: the power outages had preceded the voltage problems and had somehow knocked something out of kilter.

---

I'm often paranoid about calling people about a problem unnecessarily. I'll double and triple check something is really a problem before I start asking for help. And I make darned sure that I'm talking to the right people.

But this time, I had no qualms over having dumped it on Rising Sun Solar. I mean, they basically rebuilt our electricity system, and they were the one who could actually assess where the problem was. (Big plus that I stayed super friendly the whole time, though, never even hinting at my frustration.) So I felt entirely proper having contacted them, even when the problem got punted to KIUC.

---

KIUC took my report and dispatched a technician almost immediately, despite it now being the Saturday after New Year's. He was here and gone within an hour, and I wouldn't have even known he was here if I hadn't chanced to see him outside and grabbed him (well, from 20 feet away) to verify the problem was solved.

It was.

(No explanation though.)

---

Which isn't to say there weren't repercussions.

First, a few hours later, I discovered our oven making weird churning sounds ... and the door was locked! That was just before my dad came over for swimming that evening. I hadn't even been able to figure out how to turn the darned thing off, but he pointed toward the circuit breakers. Aha! I turned it off, and that stopped the churning. Turning on the cleaning cycle, and then canceling it then got the oven door unlocked. As best I can guess, it was in some type of infinite locking cycle, probably due to the uneven voltage.

Second, a brand-new LED light bulb blew out during the uneven voltage. That doesn't make me feel great about what else might have been damaged, but most important things were behind surge protectors, and I also had unplugged a lot when I'd verified the voltage issue. (Thankfully, it wasn't a smart light; I've wanted those since we started smartifying our house in Berkeley, but our first actually smart bulbs arrive in a week.)

Third, a GFCI plug in the garage got reset. I hate those things; maybe they'll stop me from being electrocuted some day, but in the meantime, they've caused me problems at least a dozen times over the years. And I don't even understand why that plug in the garage is GFCI, because the next one over isn't. Oh, and it's the plug with our new chest freezer on it. My dad and I had actually checked the freezer the other day, and it seemed cool. But it might have been defrosting even then. By the time I found it, it'd been off for at least 20 hours, but maybe as much as 72. Joy. Everything was entirely defrosted, though the stuff at the bottom was still somewhat cool. I doubtless could have saved some of it, especially the stuff frozen from the refrigerator like lunch meat and cheese, but I didn't feel like starting off the new year with a game of Frozen Roulette. So I threw out a few hundred dollars worth of food from our newly stocked newly purchased chest freezer.

So, hello 2021. But maybe we can blame this all on 2020's last gasp. Maybe? Please.

---

Today was my first day back to work. Well, I did yard work, including the much-hated hill. (I found the defrosted freezer when I realized my tool batteries weren't recharging.) My buddy, the Cattle Egret joined me again. Kimberly says his name is Egor.

And tomorrow I head back to the office. Well, my office, downstairs. I've actually done a great job of having 10 days or so of downtime, not continuing my work obsessively into the evening like I tend to. That'd be a good pattern to stick with, but we'll see how it goes. I really like the creative work I'm doing, so it's hard to hold it back into just my creative workdays. (Especially since I only have at best, three of those a week.)