shannon_a

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I crunched some numbers and realized he was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we spent the next year getting that all done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there were four good offers.

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

Kismet!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ha.

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

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

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

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Ha.

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

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

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

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

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

But it shouldn't have been a big deal.

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Ha.

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

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

Good job, Roscoe and Cletus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Not good.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Poor house!)

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

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

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

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

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

Idiot bank.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My realtor was back very quickly saying they agreed.

We were off to the races.

Again.

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

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

---

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

We no longer own a house in Berkeley.

---

It took a little longer to get our money.

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

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

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

The payment finally came through this morning.

---

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

And the moral?

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

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

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

---

One more moral:

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

And I know coronavirus is affecting our attendees there.

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

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

---

There's a lot of FUD going on.

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

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

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

---

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

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

Especially not when it's cool and raining.

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

And I start doing contract technical writing.

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

So, busy times

Wow, I can't believe we've been here a month already.

The last 31 days have been an almost endless series of opening up boxes, building furniture, cleaning up our stuff, and driving debris to the refuse transfer center and the recycling center. We're slowly clearing our house of debris (though most of the boxes I packed remain due to a lack of shelving), and we're slowly making a home. But, most of our rooms remain underfurnished, most notably our bedroom.

Today was the first day where it felt like I really relaxed. I napped for the first time since January 1st or 2nd and I read a whole graphic novel (They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, which is gutwrenching).

I've been driving Julie the Benz for four weeks now, and she's certainly a part of our lives. And, though my shoulders still get tense as I take corners at high speed on these narrow two-lane roads, I'm certainly settling into driving. In fact I drove into Lihue four times in a forty-eight hour period Thursday, Friday, and Saturday: twice to the DMV (all ultimately successful), once to Home Depot (where my dad and I again failed to get material for shelving), and once to undertake a variety of errands. I'd like to go without for a day or two now! (Though I see I'm going to need to go get cat food before our Amazon subscribe-and-save order arrives.)

And I've gotten out to enjoy the island here and there, but it's still less often than I hoped. I walk in the golf course a few times a week, I've swum five times, I haven't hiked yet. However, despite that I get to enjoy the beauty of the island every single time I walk across the street to put our trash can on the side of the road, every time I pick up the mail, every time I step out of a store into a parking lot. It's amazing.

Getting to see my dad and Mary so regularly is amazing too. My dad often calls me after work to get together. Our excuse right now is working on the house: Thursday or so we finally replaced the mirror that the renters had mysteriously ripped off the wall. And, building a first batch of bookshelves in my office closet has been a continuing plan, but we haven't managed to find acceptable wood that would fit in Julie. And sometimes instead I'm invited to walk the golf course with my dad and Mary in the evening. And every Sunday we've been here so far I've visited with them in the afternoon.

And things are quieter here, calmer. I sometimes find it's the evening and I haven't checked Facebook or the news. And, that's a good thing. I was ready for lower stress, for more energy to work on my own stuff.

(My own stuff hasn't been getting much attention, but that's because I spend hours every day on the aforementioned work on the house and unboxing and furniture building and all the rest.)

No Island Fever yet!

But I still really need to get back to hiking and gaming. I just need to make the time!

We must be starting to settle in a little bit, because I didn't feel the need to obsessively journal for the 11th day in a row on Friday (or yesterday for that matter).

That might be because we'd come upon the blesséd weekend, which though there were things to do, felt like the first break I'd had since Christmas.

And of course, there are still things to write about:

The Rain in Kauai Falls Mainly on the Lanai. It has been raining since we got here! Every morning, every day, and for the last few days, most of the day. I've walked in the rain. I've driven in the rain. My dad says it's the rainiest winter he remembers (though obviously we're not having the extreme rainfall in a day or two that caused several flooding a few years ago). It's wet, wet, wet.

And it's amazing to watch in our house, because we're at the top of a ridge, so we just see the rain thundering now out of the sky, plunging into the valley behind us and pummeling all of the houses.

(And today it finally cleared up a little, though there's expected to be more rain all next week.)

Centipede, Leave My Heart Alone. When we were here last April, we learned that the house had centipede problems, to the tune of one a week or something like that, which seriously unthrilled us. Mary told the renters that of course she'd be happy to take care of it, and so they talked about spraying when the renter's children were away ... but the tenant apparently never contacted Mary to make that happen. But for 12 days now, we've been centipede free. I'm guessing that the rain is washing them all away (seriously), but at least it's a respite while we settle in.

When I heard about the centipede problem, I imagined that we'd have to have an expert in, to carefully scour the house for ways they might be getting in. And that may still have to happen. But, while working in my office last week, I was shocked to discover the screen behind the middle louvre window in my office was easily ripped enough to let a centipede in. This was in the very room where our renter had complained about a centipede crawling across his face while sleeping. So, I walked the downstairs and found a similarly ripped window in Kimberly's office, and later when I went outside, I found one more that wasn't as bad, but was probably big enough for a centipede to get in (and a few more that aren't quite there yet). There are also a few screens in the mud room where the seal doesn't look perfect.

So, there are all kinds of obvious things to do as a first step to reducing centipede infestation.

You Make Me Feel Like (A Natural Homeowner). I've been a homeowner since 2000, but I've never felt as much like a homeowner as I have since we moved to Hawaii. That's in part because I'm assembling all of our furniture. (Including great designs from CostCo/Bay Designs and Wayfair, plus a really badly made design from Choo Choo that I bought on Amazon: never again.) But that's really about a house, not a home. I feel like a homeowner primarily because of my dad, who's been over here frequently, teaching me how to do things (supplying expertise and tools and maybe just a little bit of elbow grease here and there.) So last Friday, after work, we he showed me how to fill a huge hole in our bathroom wall and also rebuild screens. (The same screens that were open to centipede infestation.) He rebuilt about half of the first screen, and left me to finish it, and then I rebuilt two more. I mean, it's pretty easy: pull out the spline, pull out the screen, lay the new screen over the frame, lay in the spline using a handy tool, and cut the screen against the spline. But back in Berkeley I would have just bought new screens or had someone build them. Instead, here, I got the extreme satisfaction of seeing these pristine looking screens that I rebuilt. (And perhaps we should have rebuilt a few more, but I was tired after three. Anyhow, I'm hopefully that none of the remaining ones will let in centipedes yet.)

My dad said that we might built some or all of the bookshelves that we're interested getting built-into the house: we'll see if we're really up to the scope of that project.

La Vie Boheme. Moving into this house that my parents had rented out for almost two decades, I've discovered that I just don't understand renters (and I say that having been a renter from 1989-2000). On the one hand, you have mysterious damage. The hole in our bathroom wall was behind where a mirror had literally been ripped off the wall, based on the how all of its holders were broken, but which the renters said "fell down". Similarly, I dunno what was done to the light in my office (which we did finally get working, but it's the one overhead light which just isn't bright enough for the room: we think renters might have changed it out at some point). Meanwhile, we have the things that they just ignored, like those centipede-big holes in windows in a house where they were complaining about centipedes, or the dripping pipe in our master bathroom (which just needed to be tightened or ...). I mean, my parents are the nicest landlords around, so if the tenants had asked for anything to be fixed, it would have been, but it apparently wasn't even worth asking. As I said, I don't understand.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream ... On Saturday, looking for somewhere to drive to, I chose Lappert's ice cream in Koloa. It was my first drive out to Koloa, and it was largely successful (other than the fact that Koloa Road is filled with awful potholes, which my dad says is due to the really bad rainy season). As usual, I had problems parking Julie the Benz, but afterward I watched videos and discovered that my main problem in those 90-degree parking spaces was probably not getting far enough to the other side (and that if I thought about them as left-hand turns they might feel less intimidating).

Kimberly says there are several rites of passage to becoming citizens of Kauai and that getting our Lappert's frequent-customer card was one of them.

Walking on Sunshine. I have long imagined how things might be here in Kauai. Some things have fallen down, like my dream that I'd walk the loop trail every morning before work. But today I did something else I'd long dreamed of: I walked over to my Dad and Mary's house to visit in the afternoon. It's just more than a mile: 25 minutes there (downhill), 30 minutes back (uphill). Both my dad and Mary were surprised that I walked, and tried to give me a ride back, which tells me they don't understand how much I walked everywhere back in Berkeley. But I partook of a bit of their late lunch, and then we talked for a while. It was very nice. Although I haven't done much hiking or biking or swimming yet, this was another one of the advantages I saw from living in Hawaii, and I'm glad to see it taking form.

Heigh-Ho, Heigh Ho. And even with the weekend, it feels like I'm not getting enough time for everything. I haven't had time to do most of my personal writing (though I finally produced a new Mechanics & Meeples article tonight, for publication .. momentarily), and I haven't given a lot of time to Bitmark writing. But that may be because this weekend I mostly relaxed. There was computer game playing (Dresden Files Card Game on my Mac; thanks Eric!), there was reading, there was napping.

So maybe I'm a little more ready now for a new week of work, and the usual busyness (and maybe also catching up on some more of that writing and of course doing more building and unpacking, which were also minor parts of this weekend).

The advemture continues ...

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!)

Today was the first day that felt like real life, instead of a constant attempt to settle into our new house.

Oh, we did some work. I built two more chairs for our dining room set (two left, and they're taking about an hour and a half for each pair); we ordered a few more necessities for the house; Kimberly and I decided to spend our Christmas money from the Appels on some patio furniture, which we ordered; and we also opened a few of the boxes which arrived before we got here and have been clogging our entryway (which included some things we mailed to ourselves or had mailed to us from Berkeley, and some Christmas gifts! thanks folks!). But that was maybe three hours of actual work, and I didn't feel the need to make progress on everything for the rest of the day.

So, I played some games on my computer (I haven't been having a lot of success reading since we landed, I think because my routines have been so disrupted). And most importantly: I swam!

Around 3pm, my dad and Mary came over, and then I drove us over to Salt Pond Beach. This way day #3 of driving in Kauai, and it's getting increasingly doable. I was still tense, but less so, and best of all I knew the way to Salt Pond, and even am getting used to some of the turns and twists on the road.

Salt Pond isn't the most beautiful beach on Kauai, but it is a nice swimming beach. My dad and I swam all the way south to the end of the beach that's protected by rocks where there's a current as waves crash over the rocks (though not a lot of current today), then swam back. We talked a lot. It was nice, as swimming with my dad always is.

The weird thing was that he left his old beat-up slippas on the shore when we went in ... and they disappeared! Maybe stolen? I dunno. I didn't even see where he left them because I was blind. (I have prescription goggles which must have ended up in a shipping box, and I have a prescription mask, which hasn't made it over from my dad's house yet, where it's lived for the last several years, and without my prescriptions I really can't see.) My dad was somewhat happy to be rid of them, because apparently they needed to be repaired again.

And meanwhile, we christened Julie the Benz with some sand and probably some red dirt. She was just pristine when I got her, our guess is she was only used by her realtor-owner to go to open houses, and never had seen a beach before. Well, now she has.

At dinner, Kimberly and I continued our very successful cooking of real food, not frozen meals, admittedly made easier by Costco's prepared food. I butchered the rest of the roasted chicken and mixed some of that into a salad we also got from Costco. (I need to learn better how to debone a chicken, because I was like a drunken assassin.) And I also steamed some broccoli as a side dish. It's now been five days that Kimberly and I haven't et a frozen meal, which is a record for the last 10 or 15 years since Kimberly stopped cooking. So, yay us, it's a great start.

And there's been more relaxing this evening, though I also did some work for my one current contract job, Bitmark, the first I'd done since we landed in Hawaii.

Like I said, real life. There's still lots to be done for the move, but we're slowly clearing out the things that have accumulated in the house, putting things away and destroying boxes; add that on to our furniture we've purchased (and assembled!) in the last few days and it's starting to look just a little bit like a real house. (I think our next big challenge is going to be after our boat comes in, figuring out where to put away all the stuff that got boxed up in Berkeley; this house is bigger, but we have less wall space and almost no shelves or other containers yet (other than the built-in, but they're mostly kitchens and bedroom.)

And also work starts tomorrow for me. I've committed to 12 final weeks or so of Skotos work before I move fully over to contracting. That's going to eat up my daytime that I've been spending on moving in, and also it's going to be really busy because we have to get things ready to be handed off.

So, today did not go as expected.

---

I woke up a bit before 7am, and found it windy and rainy outside. I duly put on my brand-new Christmas raincoat to wander down our street for a walk, but my foot started hurting me almost instantly. My slippas had rubbed the side of my foot raw during my 2 or 3 mile walk out to golf course pavilion, which pretty much happens every time I'm in Kauai (and is a problem I obviously need to solve, because you want to wear slippas, not socks and shoes, in Kauai). So it was back home very quickly.

Instead, I puttered around home, cutting up an infinite number of boxes and putting together the cat's cat tree. It's positioned in my office for the moment, right in front of a window. The cats adored it for about 5 minutes before wandering off, but I'm sure it'll get more use once I'm working again ... which is coming up really quickly, on Monday(!).

After Kimberly and I had our lunch, my phone rang, and I figured it was my dad saying he was ready to head out to Home Depot ... but instead it was Mary saying that she'd been looking for a car for us on Craig's List for four months (Mary is incredible!), without any luck, but there'd just been a perfect one offered last night, and so we should go out and look at it before someone else got it.

So within 30 minutes we were headed out to Poipu, where we met a realtor couple who were replacing their 2010 Mercedes Benz 350ML with a 2020 model.

Now, I'm not the sort of guy who ever expected to own a Mercedes Benz.

And though I'd vaguely considered if our life on the island would be easier with an SUV, I was figuring we'd get a much smaller vehicle.

But it seemed like a really nice vehicle, and it was in just about pristine shape. A few small dents, but otherwise it was intact and shockingly clean and up-to-date on all its shots and such. I had my dad to a test drive since I was insuranceless, and it drove well. They were asking $10,500, Mary talked them down to $10,000, which was what I'd thumbnailed for a new car in my moving-to-Hawaii spreadsheet (which went totally out the window when we repainted our house inside and out, paid for a stager, paid for landscaping ...). And I had a new car. Yowza.

Mary headed back home, and my dad drove us out to his insurance broker, who got us signed up with insurance for the car.

And then it was all mine to drive.

---

I drove all around Lihue: to Taco Bell (for a lunch emergency), to the DMV (to transfer the title, before we realized that we hadn't gotten the current registration certificate), to Home Depot (to pick up a TV hanger and some rubber feet for our sofas), back to the DMV (to get the registration, then to transfer the title, and watch them not ask for the registration at all, even though they said it was required), to Costco (to purchase a desk for my office), and to Walmart (to get any number of sundries).

The driving still had me tense, with two things being the scariest: merging onto The Highway (which I only had to do once, as the other times I had to wait at lights) and parking. It was later pointed out to me that I was finding parking a little challenging because it's a big car! Yep!

And in some ways it was more difficult than driving in Berkeley. I mean, I didn't have all the pedestrians and bicyclists and the huge influx of cars, but I also wasn't familiar with the area, and the car was definitely bigger.

My dad offered directions the whole time, and he was great at it, almost always giving me good warning about where I was going. But still not quite enough to offset the foreignness of the driving, and the fact that I was having to concentrate on driving and a little navigating alike.

After we were done with all of my errands in Lihue, we headed home along the highway. And at first that was fine. Oh, it was bumper to bumper up to the Humane Society, the traditional place where traffic gets blocked up heading out of town. But the part that I actually found much more hair-raising was past that, where traffic sped up and we were suddenly rocketing down a narrow road, with just one lane in each direction, going 50. (Actually, I was often under the speed limit, but thankfully no one was on my tail.)

I'd been tense the whole time I was driving, and that stress was starting to wear on me, so that I was having increasing troubles staying in the lane on that highway. And there was intermittent rain, and I found that managing the windshield wipers and driving was a bit much to do at once.

And I had to not be distracted further by the natural beauty all around!

By the end I was just avidly waiting for my dad to tell me to take a left, to get off the highway and into our neighborhood. I was managing my lane better by the end, but still relieved when we headed in to home.

I parked the car in the driveway, but I think my plans to use the garage for cats and games is going out the window, because this car is in such good shape that it should really be stored in the garage (once I finish cutting up boxes). We can still get some storage in the garage around the sides, because it's a two-car garage.

---

My dad stayed long enough to help us remove our couches from the cardboard they were resting on, and to get rubber feet under them.

Mary was kind enough to pick him up, which was good because I'm not sure I had the strength to get him home, let alone drive back on my own(!).

One step at a time, as it were. I'm hoping that if he drives around with me for a little more I'll be increasingly confident (and decreasingly tense).

I'd considered putting my desk together tonight, but then remembered there's a problem with my office, wherein it doesn't have any lights that work. So, tomorrow.

Instead I cut up boxes for a little bit.

---

And tomorrow? I drive more. We recycle some boxes. My dad helps me hang that TV. I put together a desk.

And we still need a bed and a coffee table and probably various end tables before we have at least the bare minimum needed for a house, at which point we can see how our finances lie.

And maybe someday we open up the Christmas presents and book shipments we got here in advance of us? (But I want to finish emptying our suitcases first!)

And maybe someday we swim? Or hike?

I can't believe we've been here three days without doing any "kauai" things (other than going to CostCo); and I can't believe that less than 72 hours ago we were in Berkeley, that five days ago I was sitting around Mike B's table, playing Pathfinder Adventure Card Game.

Things continue to keep us very busy since our arrival, but it's a different busyness than that in Berkeley, less desperate, because if we don't get something done, we can still do it tomorrow ...

---

The car has not yet been named.

And today, we moved.

The Disappointing Sleep.. I managed to get to sleep at 11.30pm last night, which was a great victory for me ... and then I was woken by explosions outside thirty minutes later. Sigh. After that my sleep was much more fitful, until I got out of bed a minute or two before my alarm went off at 3.30am.

(That may be the only time in my adult life that I wasn't awake at midnight for the New Year.)

The Final Goodbye. Jay showed up a little earlier than planned to drive us to the airport, around 4am, but we were pretty much ready to go. Ostensibly to make sure that we hadn't forgotten anything, Kimberly and I walked the house one last time, looking at all our rooms. As Kimberly says, it's weird to think that we're never going to walk the halls of that house again.

The Oakland Marathon. It was still dark when we arrived at the Oakland airport. (In fact, it would still be dark when we took off.) And that's when the marathon began: I needed to haul all of our luggage, mainly on my own, because Kimberly is not OKed for lifting and carrying. Jay suggested renting one of the little carts outside, and that got us up to the Alaska counter: a very short line, I should note, because we were traveling with pets. Afterward we sat down to await Kimberly's wheelchair, because between her foot and her recent surgery she didn't want to walk the airport. But that plan quickly changed when the wheelchair concierge came by to say we'd need to wait for a while, then told a couple who'd been there before us that they were down to 30 minutes. So at that point we decided to walk, because we had no idea how long it would take to get through TSA with cats. (And before we left, I told the woman we'd checked in with at Alaska that we wouldn't need our wheelchair afterward, and she was aghast at the fact that the wait was more than 30 minutes.)

Fortunately, our TSA-Pre work paid off. We pretty much walked up to the metal detector (no naked body scans!) and didn't have to take anything off but our metal and electronics. Kimberly and I both went through, and meanwhile we requested a private screening to deal with the cats. So off we went to a room (that I was displeased to see had a curtain rather than a door, but at least we were out of the walkway). I took the cats out of their carriers one at a time, leashed them, passed off the carrier to a TSA agent, and they took it away to x-ray. The cats were both perfectly calm (likely thanks in part to Gabapentin), though Lucy was trying to explore everything — not for the last time over the day.

We were done and to our gate an hour before boarding.

The Early Departure. We started boarding at 6.10am, and at 6.30am the Alaska Airlines crew was saying that everyone was boarded. The plane was empty, like about a third full, with most people and couples having a row to ourselves. Kimberly and I were moved a row back at the last minute, and we not only had a row to ourselves, but also the row in front of us! I hadn't seen a plane so empty since the '80s. That was apparently our other good reason for flying on January 1st. The flight took off 10 or 15 minutes early, which is just about unheard of, and we had plenty of space on a pretty quiet flight, which decreased the stress for us and the cats.

The Stressful Flight. There was one bit of stress on the flight: the length proved to be too long for our beloved middle-aged Lucy, especially since we weren't able to communicate beforehand that she should use the facilities. So about six hours after we left the house she started madly scrabbling to get out of her cat carrier, then had an accident. Poor kitty! I took her to the bathroom and got her and the carrier as clean as I could. (She was climbing all over trying to explore once more! I think we might have left a lot of fur behind! But that seems fair for the extra $100 Alaska charges for us to carry a cat in our normal carry-on luggage space.) And then I was worried for the next two hours because I knew her cat carrier didn't smell great and I wasn't sure if she might have more problems. (No more problems! And I was able to open some of the additional flaps in her super-carrier to get her some fresher air. I even let her poke her head out from time to time, while keeping good control over her.)

And then I had some more stress when I got off the plane, because I was so focused on getting Kimberly and the cats and our too much carry-on luggage (for one person to carry) out that I left behind my laptop and iPad. I actually didn't realize until we were driving away from the airport, but I did key in then, and Alaska was able to easily recover it for me, albeit with some stressful waiting.

(Other than that, the Alaska flight was quite good. The crew and staff were all really friendly and even helped me carry cats while I was struggling on and off the plane; and was also genuinely concerned when I went back to the bathroom with Lucy.)

The Human Society Interlude. Oh, I should mention that before we left the airport, we did take care of officially importing the cats. It was just a little bit of nothing, because all the hard work was the paperwork with Hawaii that I completed months ago. Our Humane Society contact was waiting at the gate (they let someone meet you at the gate!) and took the cats and me out to a van, where she slipped inside to scan their chips. After that she collected my precious, precious paperwork, and then was the next person to help me carry our cats around. I had no shame today!

The New House. And then my dad drove us to our new house. We've been here a few times before; I even helped him do a teeny bit of work some years ago, when they were between renters. But it was different landing here to ... live. It felt really alien at first, the idea of living in Kauai now that we're here and the idea that this house is our new home. But as the sun has set and the crickets have started chirping outside, and we've put out toiletries out in our en suite bathroom (a real luxury for us!) and starting hanging some clothes (because we have no dressers!) it started to feel a bit more like home to me.

There are certainly some blemishes in the house. Renters redid the floors both upstairs and downstairs and they both need work; and there are cabinet doors and blinds that are somewhat mechanically deficient. But it's the sort of thing you kind of expect in a rental house: because renters just tend to turn a blind eye unless it really bugs them. We also need to figure out if there are ways to keep the upstairs cooler during the day, because it gets a little warm, at least until you turn on fans (but screen doors for the front door and two lanais are a top priority and they should help). And I certainly remember all the problems in our Berkeley house when we landed there 19 years ago, from crazy piping to a rickety water heater and a house full of windows that didn't keep the heat either in or out. So, we'll have some new challenges and I hope they'll allow us to make this house truly our own too. (We actually have several things we want to do to make the house our own, including not just those screen doors, but also lots of built-in shelvings and solar panels, but the rest of that will probably await until we sell our Berkeley house, because we've stretched our finances with all the work we did to help sell it.)

The Cats Roam. The cats both continue to shock me with their adventurousness. We started them off in the bedroom with our mattress (the only piece of furniture we had waiting, though my dad and Mary have since supplied us with a small hodgepodge of chairs, and we also have a few appliances: a microwave and a printer and for that matter a new computer screen for my Mini), but they were soon exploring the whole house. Lucy's smelly airplane trauma was entirely forgotten, and though they were obviously a little bit nervous, they were also fearless. Within a few hours they seemed relatively comfortable with their new territory. They're also being entirely friendly with each other, which I'd always dreamed might happen when they got new territory that hadn't originally belonged to Lucy alone ... but I sadly doubt it will last.

Meanwhile, Back in Berkeley. We heard word from one of our neighbors that a large group of men were in our house! And using power tools on New Year's Day! And throwing stuff on the sidewalk!

So apparently our schedule of stuff in Berkeley is getting done, as the haulers were #1 on the list. I assume the stuff was removed from the sidewalk afterward (and likely I'll start hearing statuses from our realtor at some point.)

Our New Life Begins. After staying at the house for a while with the cats, my dad, Mary, Kimberly, and I had lunch at Keoki's, one of the first places I remember eating in Kauai, on October 31, 2001. (They had a costume contest, which is why it was memorable.) Then we went to Walmart, one of the few places open today, to get some first sundries and food. (And our mattress now has our own sheets!) Then my dad and Mary dropped us off, and we had our first evening alone in Kauai. OK, that involved napping through the late afternoon, but then I cooked up some pasta, sauce, and broccoli for dinner. (There will be many changes in Kauai, and one is that we're going to try and start cooking for ourselves, rather than just eating frozen food and canned goods.) And I discovered that unlike in our Berkeley house, I can actually get a cell phone signal in the house (should that have been in the disclosures? I mean Kimberly and I racked our brains for everything that we could think of, and perhaps I would have mentioned poor cell phone signals and wifi challenges if I'd thought of it, but there are ultimately only so many things you can think to put down.), which allowed us to stream a TV show. It was like our life was continuing on.

But a new life, with not just new challenges, but also new adventures, and hopefully new relaxation and new opportunities alike.

It begins here, on the first day of the 2020s.

PG&E. Friday night, after our gas was turned back on 14 hours and 4 phone calls to PG&E after the problem was fixed, our house seemed to really be having troubles heating up. I worried that something might be wrong with our gas flow when I went to bed and I worried when I woke up ... and though I took my time coming downstairs, it turned out my worries were right, because the thermostat was sitting five degrees under the temperature it was supposed to be at.

PG&E had managed to mess up our natural gas flow, two days now after the problems started.

I didn't realize yet that they'd done so on purpose.

As I stood there in my bathrobe, I noticed there was a PG&E guy right outside. He had apparently just got the gas on for one of the condos next door who had gone a second night without heat, presumably because they didn't squeak their wheels as much as we did. So I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, but then remembering the four calls to PG&E the previous day, and the way that their customer support line seems to be trained to lie to, deter, and mislead their customers, I realized this was my last, best chance to solve the problem. So I rushed outside in my bathrobe and waved at the PG&E guy, who was now in his truck, a few minutes from driving away.

(He and I would never comment on my bathrobedness.)

Listening to the problem he came in and looked at all our gas appliances, which really wasn't helpful, and then he decided that he should measure the gas pressure outside, which was. He said it should be 7 inches water column pressure, and after he popped our gas valve off and put some tool up against it, he said it was just barely over. And then he said, "Oh, I see what happened." (Success!) (Success?)

Well, success until he started explaining. He said that our gas line was probably put in during the '60s or '70s (which fits with the age of our floor heater) and that it was likely put in at 8.5 inches water column pressure. He emphasized that we were only paying for 7 inches water column pressure, and said that since PG&E just had to pay $13.5 billion dollars for all the people they murdered and burnt out of their homes last year (he didn't phrase it exactly like that, but I translated in my head), they were trying to scrimp and save pennies whenever they could. So, they took the opportunity of our gas line emergency where we were all without heat in the dead of winter for 30 hours or so to also cut our gas pressure from 8.5 inches water column pressure to 7. Because, multitasking. (You can screw the customers while also screwing the customers!) And so the modern appliances like our stove and tankless water heater were mostly fine, because that was the gas pressure level they expected, but our heater wasn't.

Now fortunately PG&E guy had a solution: he said the heater should have a regulator which determines the amount of gas that goes into it. All I needed to do was adjust it up a bit. He said he couldn't do it, because PG&E refuses to accept the liability of adjusting gas levels in a house (perhaps remembering how they blew up San Bruno in 2010 and killed another 10 people there), but he popped open our stove, showed me the regulator there, and explained that I just needed to twist up the similar screw in the heater regulator. ("That's the scary part, though," he said. "Do you turn it a quarter turn or a half turn? Because you don't want to blow up your house.")

So after he left I crawled under the house to see if it was doable by me. It turned out that the whole flow mechanism for the heater was readily accessible (meaning that anyone could crawl under our house and blow it up), and though the regulator screw wasn't quite the same, I found a Youtube video that explained how to adjust it.

So I had to go buy a screwdriver (I knew I shouldn't pack it!) and then in the evening I crawled under the house a second time and tuned up the regulator an eighth of a turn, because I was willing to do it in little increments to get it right. And this evening the house is staying warmer. The morning will really be the test, but if I have to go crawling and adjust it up a tiny bit more tomorrow, so be it.

We have a screwdriver.

(And screw PG&E.)

---

Hiking. It was 57 degrees out and sunny, so I got one last(?) little hike in this afternoon, between my crawls under the house. Nothing big, just up the Derby Trail above Clark Kerr, then across Panoramic Hill, then down the Lower Fire Trail out to Centennial Drive. It's maybe an hour and a half hike, including the back and forth from our house (since the hills are about a mile east of us), but it's all stuff I've walked a lot in days past (and in fact I did most of that hike at least one evening a week in 2017 or so), so it was nice to do it again.

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Cleaning. And our cleaning continues on. I got the Harry Potter closet cleaned out Friday morning, when I was trying to stay warm in our very cold house, and that closet had our last bookcase in the house, which is now gone.

Then today I was hoping to get the kitchen reorganized after Kimberly managed to get rid of our microwave cart yesterday (which I did) and to get my office the rest of the way cleared out (which I did not, but it's close).

Once I get my office the rest of the way clear (hopefully tomorrow) we are getting very close to the end. We'll mainly have cleaning supplies, food, and other sundries which we haven't finished using and/or disposing of, and then the final furniture which we planned to use to the end. There are also still a few things which we hope Kimberly can get rid of in Craig's List and Freecycle posting, but that'll either happen or not.

So we thought that things would get a lot quieter once our furniture went out of the house two weeks ago now, and that hasn't really happened, but at least we're getting to the point where we'll be able to turn off the lights in the house and exit without a panic in the last few days.

Hopefully.

Because we've only got three days left.