shannon_a

Something that has surprised me since we've been in California is the idea of preemptive COVID testing. I've had three different people note they'd recently tested negative when I arrived at gatherings, one of them mentioning that he tested before every gathering.

Probably good public health, sure, but totally alien to the Hawaiian experience of the pandemic.

This morning, we had no lunch plans because we'd had to cancel with my sister due to a cold running through their family, so I ran out to Boston Market to get us some lunch. (This Air B&B is really nicely located.)

I got a chicken on ciabatta sandwich, and it was really tasty, in part because the bread was so good. That made me remember how the Safeway sandwich I got to take up to Panoramic Hill also had great (Dutch Crunch) bread. I swear there is *no* good bread on Kauai. It's all soft and tasteless, no matter claims it's a French Roll or Sourdough, or whatever. So that's a nice change of pace.

Here at the Air B&B I'm reminded of how cold tap water gets in winter. Yowtch! That's something I haven't missed living in Kauai.

After lunch I went for a walk up to Lake Temescal.

It was a common destination for me for a number of years, I'd often bike up there after work and/or on weekends. It's where I wrote most of the original batch of product histories for DnDClassics.com, many of them on cold, gray, threatening days in December 2011 and January 2012 (I think!). It's where I finished reading A Dance with Dragons, discovered that it was entirely incomplete and non-conclusive, realized I might have to wait six more years to see those plots completed (ha!), but didn't throw it across the room because I wasn't in a room.

I didn't expect to ever return to Lake Temescal, out of all the places I might see in the Bay Area, because it's kind of isolated, up above Rockridge without much nearby ... but we're right here in Rockridge, so it's just a mile and a half above our Air B&B.

The walk up was slightly grueling. I'd forgotten how steep Broadway Terrace is at places.

I enjoyed seeing the lake and the park again, though not for *too* long, because it was cold. (We're having a notable cold snap in the Bay Area, and I'm thrilled to discover that my cold resistance hasn't been eaten away by two years in the tropics.)

And then hiked back down on Broadway enjoying the views of the Golden Gate and San Francisco as I did.

I swung by Trader Joe's on the way back to pick up some tasty treats for Kimberly and myself.

Outside I was accosted by another petition-signing beggar, again not wearing a mask. I yelled at her to back off when she started advancing on me, and told her she should wear that mask she had around her neck if she wanted people to actually sign, but she was too busy begging me for signatures to listen.

In the evening we had a dinner date than a gaming date with Michael and Katherine, which was nice all around. We got to enjoy La Mediterranee, another favorite restaurant, and we got to play a third game of Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra (which Mike deftly won).

Good company, and a good penultimate day in Berkeley.

It'd be nice to have some friends like that in Hawaii.

I finished up one Christmas book, Forged, today, and started in on a new one, A History of What Comes Next. I've done a lot of reading on the trip, and that's been nice because I've kind of fallen out of the reading habit during our years in Hawaii. It feels like there's never time. Hopefully this reading habit will stick.

Tomorrow is our last full day: a bit more friend seeing and hiking planned and some simple food before we fly on Friday.

(Lucy! We're coming home!)

Man, having a sick pet, and especially a chronically sick pet, and especially a mysteriously chronically sick pet, really fucks up your life. This morning I was just dreading emerging from the bedroom to the day, because I knew I'd have to give Callisto her food, and she wouldn't eat it, and I'd have to give her her pill, and it'd be a desperate drooling battle, and thus far she doesn't seem any better for all of it.

But the real killer is that we can pump her up on anti-nausea drugs and painkillers and at this point she begs for food and doesn't eat more than a bite or two. What can we even do with that!?

Did I mention that it's been a month at least since I had a week when I wasn't at the vet at least once, and sometimes two or three times? This week's count is twice so far: Monday for a big work-up which turned up very little and Wednesday for fluids and anti-nausea drugs, because Callisto hadn't been eating and we still then thought the anti-nausea would turn things around, because it always had before.

It's exhausting. And expensive, but honestly the exhausting is the big problem right now.

I should rewind. Last week this time, Callisto very much seemed to be on the mend. Oh, she was still picky with her eating, often not finishing her meal, but there's a mile of difference between ate-slowly-and-didn't-manage-to-finish and ate-two-bites. We thought the prednisolone and doxycyline she'd been prescribed the week before had done the job, that if she'd had some slight pancreas inflamation it'd come under control.

But when I got up last Saturday, she was acting super skittish, and I discovered bloody patches under both her ears. She was also starting to hide again. So we called up the vet and got her an appointment for Monday. She then hid through the weekend and ate less day by day.

Monday's appointment: they discovered she still had a fever, and it was up to 104. They cleaned up her ear wounds and cleared out her ears, but didn't see anything causing problems there.

But after the lingering fever they decided to keep her on for some x-rays and ultrasound. That all got sent off for consultation, and they started talking about cancer as a possible cause.

But the find of the day was bloody urine, which they said was a UTI, and so it was off to a new broad spectrum antibiotic. Meanwhile, we were waiting on all the results, from those consults to a culture of the urine to figure out what exactly was getting her.

It felt like progress. Oh, we certainly were unhappy by the backslide in health, when we were just getting our happy, chirpy kitty back, but it felt like progress.

Three days later.

Callisto has hidden in her cat carrier 99.9% of the time.

Her eating declined day by day from Monday, to just a few bites on Wednesday morning when we took her in for anti-nausea and fluids. And that didn't change a damned thing.

Last night she was clearly in pain and she we gave her her opiate for the first time in more than a week.

Three days of new antibiotics and it doesn't seem to have made any difference. I'd hope we'd be seeing _some_ change, today at the worst, but nothing.

The consultation on her scans came back and they said everything looked totally normal. No cancer. Presumably nothing ingested. Nothing of note.

This morning she scratched one of her ears bloody again.

So we have a beloved cat who was totally healthy before her sudden night of gagging two and a half months ago. Who was mostly healthy other than some eating reluctance until two and a half weeks ago. Who was recovering until last weekend.

We've done thorough blood tests and x-rays and ultrasounds and other than the obvious signs of infection, nothing.

We've given a full course of doxycyline and are three days into a seven-day broad spectrum antiobiotic, nothing.

This is so frustrating and so hopeless.

Part of the frustration is the horrible state of vets in the pandemic.

We can't go in with her. We have to report status on long notes, so that the vet gets some context before seeing her.

There's fundamentally no pet emergency service on the island (which I heard is mostly the case even back in the Bay Area) and getting urgent care is always a fight, such as Saturday, when we had to wait for Monday after the sudden new decline.

My only salvation in all of that is that Dr. I., our vet recommended by a friend, or rather local family of a friend, just writes in Callisto on her schedule when she decides on an appointment and tells the staff they just need to bring her in when she needs fluids or shots.

We couldn't take her to another vet for a second opinion even if we wanted, because it's a multiple month wait to see a new pet. (Months? I'm not even sure how we get her to Monday or Tuesday when we get those urine culture results back.)

Another frustration is that three times now when they've been held over at the vet all day, our cats came back with a cold. Callisto was held over on Monday, and now she has runny eyes and Lucy is sneezing. Poor babies! And poor Callisto, sick on top of sick!

Is Callisto actually getting adequate care? I dunno. Is this just some really tough illness to fight? I dunno. Could she suddenly make a turnaround tomorrow? I dunno. Might the revelation from the urine culture next week give us a new avenue of attack? I dunno.

But this is horrible and frustrating and constant.

It's only NOW, but it's a never-ending NOW.

And our poor kitty is clearly suffering.

We want her to be her happy, chirpy, gluttonous self again.

We want her to sneak over to Lucy's food plate, rather than vice versa.

We want her to assault us with her head and her body and refuse to settle down.

We want her to beg for the food that she loves so much and actually eat it.

We have no idea if this is possible.

A week ago Wednesday was a golden day for getting things done, but as always there's some steps backward too.

Return of the Office. I am back in my office! My dad helped me cut up and place trim a few weeks ago, I painted it, he helped me move the heavier furniture back in a week ago Tuesday, and then that Tuesday night I got much of my current references (and my computer and stuff) moved back in, in advance of the workday Wednesday.

I am surprised how happy I am to be back in my office. I mean, the back corner of our family room, where I was setup, is actually quite large. (Something we really need to account for when we get shelving, so we don't waste all the open space.) I had my full desk/shelf/filing-cabinet/printer-stand setup out there. But it's one of the darker corners of the house (because it's on the front wall of our house, where the first story is mostly under ground), and there's just a different feeling being in borrowed space.

So, thrilled to be back in my office, though I did learn I'd been wrong about one thing: my office is actually hotter than my borrowed space was, especially in the morning, because it has a huge south-facing window (which is why I needed to get the window tinted, just to make the room usable as an office, without having the drapes shut 100% of the time). It just feels cooler because there's an overhead fan, and the back corner of the family room is one of the very few nooks in the office that doesn't have a fan of its own.

My office isn't done. I need to floor my closet, work with my dad on transitions for the family room and the closet, and then put a last bit of trim down around the door (which we couldn't do until the transition was done) and in the closet. We've got a full iteration of the family-room transition out to the hallway done ... but it was too tall for Hal so we need to rout it down. But after that the rest will probably wait until next year, because my goal was to get enough of the office refloored that we could put shelving down, even if some of the shelving comes down to the floor, which may or may not be the case.

After my dad and I finish that transition, the next major task will be to fix the tiling in the family room. Renters did a lot of flooring in the house on their own over the years: some nice tiling in the family room and wood laminate throughout the upstairs. Unfortunately, they did an awful job. (To be fair, I suspect it was all harder work than the lego-like planking I've been working with.) In the family room, the problem is that some of the tiling has popped up. So we need to clean those off, reseat them, and hope that solves the problem, again before the shelves go in.

But given my dad is going to be away for the next few weeks (more on that momentarily) I have other tasks planned: rescreening some windows, hanging some curtains, and using tubs to sort out and clean some of our boxes in the family room (for stuff meant to go on shelves). (I haven't gotten any of it done yet, but hope springs eternal!)

Kimberly's Office. I should note that Kimberly's office is totally done at this point, after I finally decided I was done with the spray painting of her final closet doors (the second set of which never ended up as good as I would have liked, but good enough). That's going to allow her to get that office into final shape (minus any shelving she wants), and will also helpfully drain more material out of the family room.

Here Comes the Sun. A week ago Wednesday we also got our solar power fixed with the installation of a new inverter. It took a few hours, and then a few days before the battery was topping out at 100% again.

Hawaii Taxes. But the most pleasant surprise that Wednesday was when our tax guys let us know that Hawaii has FINALLY accepted our tax return, after half-a-year of illegally trying to force us to pay taxes that we'd already paid to California for the sale of our house. Our tax guy also had to kick them to get our refund started, and a week and a half later it's still not here, but progress. (And that all means that I can hopefully get started on paying the excise tax that I owe THEM for the privilege of doing contract work in Hawaii. To date the state has been totally non-helpful in getting me a TAX ID number for that, but now that our return has finally settled, I'm hoping I can get that through an automated process.)

The Many Trips to the Airport. Last week was a busy week, because after all of that good progress on Wednesday, I then spent Thursday and Friday going back and forth to the airport. On Thursday, I took Kimberly to the airport for her second post-surgery followup on her foot ... and then picked her up several hours later. Instead of going home in between, as I did last time, this time I went up to the bike path on Kapaa and had my usual day out, with a Safeway sandwich for lunch and some writing at a pavilion before I walked about five miles up and down the path. (Hawaii sun was hot! I was exhausted! But I enjoyed seeing stuff by foot, including some walking on one of the beaches.) Overall, I'm pretty sure I got more work done than last time I drove Kimberly to and fro the airport (not a high bar), and had a nice day out too.

The trip on Friday was to take my Dad and Mary to the airport, to go to San Jose. Obviously, I did not pick them up the same day. They're gone for three weeks again, to see their new granddaughter and tour California and Oregon. So we're alone again (naturally) on the island. Which mainly means our time is less structured because there's no Sunday gettogether, no early evening walks, and no joint work on projects.

I am Kimberly's Foot. Well I'm not. And I'm not even Joe's. But anyway. Kimberly's second followup appointment told her foot was healing fine. And she got the referral for physical therapy that she'd been waiting for, and so we're now struggling to fit twice a week physical therapy into our schedule, plus the request for her to get out to a swimming pool. Fortunately, the physical therapy is just down the hill a few blocks. Of course the concern here is that Kimberly has to be really careful to not hurt her foot after years of not using it (much) ... and she says it's been hurting since her last physical therapy ... like it did when she broke it, setting off this whole string of problems. Hopefully not what's going on.

Two Steps Back. Of course, it's three steps forward, two back. Kimberly broke a tooth last weekend. It's these silver fillings that they used in the '80s. They expand and crack teeth over time, and Kimberly and I both had them. When my dentist learned I was moving, she said she wanted to replace my last ones (I think my last ones! Definitely the last ones she had flagged as problems) before I moved. So she did, and two years later, I'm all good. But Kimberly still had one they were keeping an eye on, and one of those silver-filled teeth was what broke. So she got an emergency temporary crown on Monday, and a permanent crown is being made on the mainland.

Meanwhile, I got another annoying notice regarding my health coverage. A few weeks ago, it was my doctor jumping ship. This time, it's my insurance plan doing the same. To be precise, my HMO is being replaced with a PPO. They're happily telling me that I get to choose my own specialists without a referral now. Yay. Which is pretty grossly dishonest, because if I fail to pick the doctors in network, I pay out the nose, and that now falls on me. Boo. I've been fighting to keep an HMO for 20 years now, which resulted into higher fees for a while, but now PPOs are right up there and not as good. (There will probably be higher copays too.) So, boo. I'll see if I have any options, but I actually have very few options on-island, so I'll probably just go over to a sucky PPO at the same cost as my better HMO.

American healthcare sucks the big one.

I've been wondering how much Berkeley is going to have been changed by the pandemic, how much will be different we return to visit friends and family this Christmas. Apparently one loss was the California Theatre.

I used to have an office at the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Astrophysics, a joint UCB/NASA project, that was right across the street and above the California. On any afternoon, I could look out and see how popular that week's movies were. Occasionally, the lines would snake out into the street and around the parking lot right next door. (The parking lot is long gone now too, replaced by an underground garage and actual businesses.)

Never again will anyone be able to sit in that office, with the tiny windows swung open, and listen to people across the street loudly speculating about whether Captain Kirk will survive the new Star Trek movie. (It was Generations, i suspect, based on the dates, but maybe no one even speculates even more, given the spoiler-driven internet.)

I wonder if the Shattuck is still scheduled to be rebuilt, which will result in the temporary, and quite likely permanent closure of that theatre too, leaving Berkeley with just the UA.

The day of the theatre is, I believe, passed, hastened to the grave by the pandemic and HBOMax.

Kimberly and I got our second vaccinations on Thursday.

I managed to work with my dad in the afternoon (getting very close to finishing Kimberly's office!), but Kimberly and I were both EXHAUSTED by the evening. Then I had a fitful night of sleep, broken up when I was awoken by Kimberly around 4am, calling out for me because she'd gotten up, almost fainted, and thought her heart rate was 220. (That was due to the fact that she got woken up because her Fitbit beeped to congratulate her for 20 active minutes. She was having palpitations, and when she looked at her wrist it said 220, but that was steps, not bpm. Her actual heart rate was around 90.)

Then when I got up in the morning, I was stiff, sore, congested, and generally feeling crappy. (But not as muzzy-headed as I was after the first shot.)

I felt a little better after a very hot shower, but it was mid-day before I really felt myself again. I've been mostly fine since. I even walked out on the golf course before dinner.

Fortunately, I was bright enough not just to take the day off work, but to actually abide by that, mostly sitting around reading, albeit with a little online research for my first Designers & Dragons history in May, which will be Sine Nomine Publishing, for The '10s.

Kimberly had a worse time of it all, and is still feeling off this evening, but I'll let her write about that.

So, 13 days and counting at this point. Then I'm fully immunized, can stop shrinking away from every tourist on the trails, and will be 5G compliant.

When Kimberly and I were driving over to the Kauai War Memorial Convention Center yesterday for our shots, we noticed a long line snaking up the side of the building.

Kimberly thought it was great that so many people were getting vaccinated, as the line was much longer than last time. I was uncertain, because last time around we'd gotten vaccinated at the rear of the building (which was the main entrance), not the side. Sure enough, that's what happened again this time.

So what was the long line? I saw the sign while waiting in my own line: COVID TESTING.

Because Kauai is LITERALLY undergoing its worst outbreak of COVID throughout this entire pandemic. We have over 40 active cases, which we've never had before, and we're running a 7-day average of more than 7 cases a day, WHICH WE'VE NEVER HAD BEFORE.

The problem is that our feckless and mathematically challenged mayor opened the island up to tourists in April, even though we knew perfectly well that when he did that in October it led to a huge community outbreak (but not as bad as this!), forcing him to reapply quarantine.

Sure enough, the fool did the same thing in April, and (shocker) it had the same result. The difference? Last time he correctly pulled back, and reinitiated the quarantine that had protected us. This time, he's remaining bent over for tourist interests. He seems determined to try and weather it out, to wait until the vaccination forms a wall. As I said, he's bad at math. He doesn't seem to understand that the cases are getting exponentially worse. 2 cases for a few days went to 6 for a few days, went to over a dozen for a few days ...

The thing that just makes me weep is that everyone on the island who wanted to be vaccinated would have been by the end of May. We'd already been closed for 12 months. And he couldn't wait two more. He wasted all of our sacrifice because he was impatient, now people will die (already have) and will long-term health consequences as a result.

So, sot only was there a ghastly line for testing, but they actually ran out of tests! Today they were rationing them!

Dunno what's going to happen. We've already had our second death on-island, and that doesn't seem to be enough to deter Mayor Kawakami either.

In fact, he's been almost silent on the plague, pestilence, and death he's allowing to spread.

Yes, at a certain point we're going to have to tell people they're on their own if they choose not to get a vaccine, but right now we're at a point where people who get vaccinated on the first day it was generally available won't even be getting their next shot until next week at the earliest.

So, the phrase "grossly irresponsible" comes to mind.

As I've told Kimberly a few times, this whole pandemic has really destroyed my faith in humanity. Because we have so many scumbags who think their vacation is more important than other peoples' health. So many people utterly unable to see past their personal, sociopathic belief about "freedom" to the society that they're a part of. So many people who are so delusional, listening to whatever alt-right bullshit they hear on the internet. So many people who are just bad human beings.

And they really made it obvious during the pandemic, where they couldn't stay home, couldn't help their community, couldn't resist jumping on an airplane to go on a vacation in an otherwise protected island chain halfway around the world, couldn't even wear a frickin' mask.

Hawaii's vaccination rollout has literally been horrific, in large part because the state has decided to throw vulnerable populations under the bus to fill the ever-gluttonous maw of the tourism industry. So, in callous disregard for CDC guidelines, they opted to name non-essential groups like bartenders and concierges and timeshare salesman (and for that matter architects, IT professionals, and who-knows-what-else) as essential and let them cut in the vaccine line ahead of people with serious health conditions. In fact, Hawaii only identified three super dangerous conditions for early vaccines, and left the vast majority of people with kidney disease, HIV, asthma, and other conditions more likely to cause them to die out in the cold.

Which literally means that Hawaii chose for vulnerable people to die to get tourism going faster.

But, that's kind of been the trend throughout the pandemic. Hawaii has made it very clear that there's a deep cancer in the state that leads them to put tourists above residents. That's not something I'd really realized in my own 20 years of visiting here, not even in the previous 13 years, when I was family, not a tourist per se. But you live here and it becomes as obvious as the palm trees and the turquoise ocean.

It's pretty easy to see in the state's quarantine procedures.

Our island, Kauai, has a mayor who's been very uneven in his plague proclamations, varying between too strict, too dumb, and too lax, but he's the one mayor who has generally fallen on the side of protecting the population, and that shows. Except for 6 or so scary weeks in October and November, when Mayor Kawakami bent over for the tourism industry to let plague-carriers back on the island in a limited (but it turns out not sufficiently limited) way, anyone coming to Kauai has had to do a little bit of work. For the last three or four months we've had a good compromise: a 3 day quarantine and a second test after arrival. Not torturous, but enough to halt the community spread that began when Mayor Kawakami foolishly opened the island up more last fall.

The other islands? Not so much. They have their 14-day quarantine, but you can opt out with a pre-arrival test which is totally inadequate, and so they've all had pretty high quantities of COVID at various times, and it remains in the community on at least Oahu and Maui.

The result is really horrible when you consider the numbers.

Kauai has a population of 70,000, compared to 1.4M for the islands overall. So we've got almost exactly 5% of the overall population.

We've also had 1 COVID death. (My dad says one of his doctors said 2, but if so that other one has never been officially reported). Extrapolating that, there should be 20 deaths on the islands overall (or 40). The actual number? 460.

Now those other islands don't have some of the natural advantages that Kauai does, like being a smaller and more rural community, and thus having people who actually care about the community, unlike the sociopathy that naturally grows in larger cities (such as Honolulu).

But still, that's at least a few hundred citizens that those other islands sacrificed to keep their tourism open.

Unfortunately, our inconstant Mayor has once again wavered over to the side of the tourism industry. At the start of March he announced that as of April 5th the islands would be open with just the pre-testing that we already know is inadequate, that let something like 20 false negatives onto the island last Fall and quickly led to community spread, to our island's one death, and to a threat to our extremely limited (9) ICU beds.

Now there were doubtless some political reasons for this. Some representatives in the State House who were even deeper into the pockets of the tourism industry were advancing a new law that would disallow mayors (and even the Governor) from adjusting access to the islands based on COVID concerns. It would have been a disaster that would have led to the tourism industry killing even more residents. And, that seemed to get dropped as soon as Mayor Kawakami announced his return to "Safe" Travels. And, doubtless, Mayor Kawakami has been getting pressured the whole time by people who care more about bucks than lives.

But the result, that Mayor Kawakami stopped running with the finish line in sight, is deeply frustrating. Even moreso when you consider we were on the verge of new money coming in to help people and businesses and states impacted by economic losses.

Scientists have been very clear that there isn't yet enough vaccine in arms to actually slow the spread of COVID. So, we're now likely to get a repeat of last Winter, where COVID escapes into the community again and threatens the at-risk people who Hawaii has refused to give vaccination priority.

And all we had to do was wait a few months more.

Here's the one bright spot: Kauai is the one island that is getting more progressive in its vaccinations.

Kimberly and I noticed on Monday when the County started posting kind of weird announcements that you should sign up for for a vaccine as an essential worker, and if you didn't qualify, you'd be placed on their waitlist. Because it wasn't like the whole essential-workers thing was new.

I told Kimberly that she should sign up immediately, and I did the same. I hadn't quite twigged to what was going on yet, I just figured that we could drop everything and be in Lihue in 30 minutes at the drop of a hat if they suddenly had an unexpected opening.

But the next morning I found waiting in my email box a token to sign up for vaccinations, and after Kimberly filled out their quickly changing form a few more times, she did too.

When I looked at the vaccination signups, it became obvious to me that Kauai was constrained by the state's guidelines, and thus had been wasting vaccinations slots, so they were trying to find a technically allowed solution for that. Because the day I got my OK back, on Tuesday, I looked at the signups and there were slots that had gotten wasted that day (because I noticed my email too late to do anything), and there were about 100 slots available on Wednesday and over 150 on Thursday. So, Kauai was pretending to make a waitlist, but was also moving people off of it immediately.

So Kimberly and I signed up for the same slot on Thursday morning, and we were off ...

Cut to the vaccination clinic on Thursday morning.

There were quite a few people out there getting their shots yesterday, but it was well-administered.

It all happened at the War Memorial Convention Hall in Lihue, which I'd never been to, but seems like a medium-sized community center with an auditorium for a few hundred people.

The line out front was maybe 15-20 people deep. One volunteer moved up and down the line to make sure everyone had their pre-vaccination questionnaire filled out. We moved up and got checked in. A short time later, after a second short line, we met a second administrator just outside the hall, who double-checked our ID and gave us our vaccination card. Then it was inside, to a third line, and finally to the vaccinator.

My vaccinator told me that they didn't have cookies like they did out at the Veterans Hospital, but they could offer blue bandaids instead of clear/white ones. I was deeply disappointed over the lack of cookies, but did my best not to show it, and told her the vaccine and the blue bandaid were more than enough.

The vaccine was perhaps the most painless shot I'd ever had. My vaccinator wasn't as good with distracting me with meaningless conversation while sneaking up to stab me as most people giving me shots (or taking blood) are, but I literally didn't feel the needle.

Afterward it was on to line #4, which led into the auditorium, where Kimberly and I sat far from anyone else for 15 minutes to make sure we didn't keel over dead from the vaccine. (Because when you're giving vaccines to 70k people or 1.4M or 350M or 7.5B or whatever, some *will* have side effects. It's normal and expected, because statistics are real assholes.)

Administrator #3 wrote on a piece of paper when we could leave. I think mine said 9.47 or 9.49.

So Kimberly and I got in line at 9.10 for our 9.20 appointment, and we were back in Julie the Benz before 10.00. Not bad!

Side effects?

My arm has somewhat hurt ever since. Not bad, but noticeable, especially if I do something stupid like lean on a wall with that arm.

I was a little tired yesterday afternoon, and so did work that I could do while listening to music. When my dad came over and we worked on transitions for Kimberly's closet, that perked me up.

I was a little achey this morning from where I'd been sleeping.

So, stronger side effects than any vaccines I've had in years, but not particularly notable in the scheme of things. My only concern is that shot #2 might be worse, but so it goes. (COVID would be a lot worse, and could potentially lead to very long-term side effects.)

I am *thrilled* to be vaccinated, but also aware that it's about five weeks too late for what our mayor has done to our island. Because when we get tourists back in larger numbers on Monday, this first vaccination won't even have taken effect. Another week after that I'll have some immunity, but it'll still be another few weeks before I can get my second shot and two weeks beyond that that I should have my 94.5%.

And, we've clearly been seeing increased tourists already: selfish assholes who think that it's their right to have a fun vacation in the middle of a pandemic. I was out on the trails above Waimea Canyon last weekend and met at least half-a-dozen people who were clearly tourists (including flying-his-drone-in-the-canyon man and literally-dangling-out-over-the-canyon-for-a-selfie-holding-on-only-with-her-hands lady, who I was certain I was about to see plunge to her death). It made me nervous being anywhere close to them (and also made me aware that I should have walked those particular trails more while the tourists were gone, alas!).

On the bright side, Kauai has now been able to announce that they are opening vaccines to everyone 16+. That news came in a few hours after Kimberly and I got our vaccines yesterday. They must have been able to convince the state that their excess capacity was not going away.

The irony? That starts on April 5th, which is the exact same day that the tourists start flooding back on a swell of disease. So, that'd be vaccinations that are generally being made available six weeks too late.

Like I said, our mayor saw the finish line in the distance, and thought he'd won the race without getting there.

Might be some hard months ahead for our island.

The last week, I've been enjoying Kauai with some self-awareness. (Much like I did with California in 2019.) Last Tuesday when I swam at the mostly empty Poipu, I was aware that it wasn't just quiet swimming that was quickly coming to an end, but safe swimming too.

And yesterday Kimberly and I felt much the same when we made some plans to eat out. Which didn't turn out exactly as planned.

The problem is our politicians. For six months, Kauai has been one of the safest counties in the United States of Disease-ridden America. Maui too. Not so much Oahu, where as we saw they don't care the least bit about public health. But on Kauai we've had 59 cases ever. Like I said: safest place.

It's been because of the 14-day quarantine that went up in April. And now, despite the fact that Autumn surge has begun, our idiot politicians have decided to end it.

They're hiding behind a new pre-testing program where someone has to get a negative test no more than three days before they come to the island to avoid the quarantine. But, the program is riddled with problems, as the government's own scientists have told them. They've estimated that 20-30% of COVID-19 will still get through. And, it's no surprise. You add together people testing negative because they're still incubating, people getting COVID after their test, and people getting it on the plane, and I'll be shocked if it's not higher.

So, in one of the two states with a strong natural barrier to entry, we're pissing that away and welcoming COVID in.

Our mayor had an answer: a 3-day quarantine and a required post-arrival test. That would have resolved 99% of the problem and kept Kauai pretty safe. But the governor vetoed it, and our mayor folded like a house of cards.

The problem, one of the problems, is that Kauai's Mayor Kawakami is very inexperienced. As in, he's a surfer-dude that's younger than I am. So, the Big Island mayor, Kim, was fighting for post-arrival testing too, but when he didn't get it, he said, "We're opting out of the pre-arrival program" and within a day he had at least a half-assed version of the post-arrival testing, and then he said, "Oh, there was a mistake in thinking I was opting out." But our mayor's answer was to have the county council send a plea to please let us do our post-arrival testing. And to say: we didn't promise anyone we'd open up on October 15th, only you did. Which is true, but of course that didn't work. Because our mayor was too green to understand that he needed leverage, which is what Mayor Kim on the Big Island created when he opted out.

Our mayor's answer following that particular failure?

A horrible "tiers" program, which is riddled with problems.

First, it punishes the locals by limiting their gathering as tourists bring COVID here. That's Tier 3. And only once COVID has hit a catastrophic rate, where every two weeks we have as many cases of COVID as we had in the last seven months, and only after he's starting locking down local gatherings, only then does he opt out of the failed pre-testing program. That's Tier 2.

Kauai, by the by, has 9 ICU beds. *NINE*. According to the stats, 14%-20% of COVID patients end up hospitalized, and 3-5% end up in the ICU. Assuming the absolute best case, we end up in Tier 2 after a week of 35 cases and have 3% entry to the ICU. That's 11% of our ICU beds gone immediately, and we've got COVID raging through the community. Worst case is 56 cases in the week that things get closed down, and it's likely we've been building up cases for a few weeks to hit that number. So call it 75 cases. At a 5% entry rate to the ICU that's 44% of our ICU beds gone just that week, and by the next week we've probably got people dying in the hospital corridors.

The real issue here is that our Mayor, Kawakami, doesn't think things through, and he especially doesn't math.

So he came up with a retail restriction which would have let so few people into grocery stores and Costco that there would have been starvation on the island. (Someone remathed it for him the next day.)

And he locked up the golf courses _after_ disease had already stopped spreading on the island, and without any consideration to the fact that golf courses obviously weren't a super-spreader locale.

And he ran curfews at night as if the disease could only spread then.

And he told us that he was going to lock the island down for 28 days every time there was a single case of community spread.

So it's not even like he's totally in the tourist industry's pocket; he seemed to be totally protecting the local community back in spring.

It's just that he simultaneously feels he has to do something, swings wildly back and forth, and is incompetent in about 50% of his decisions, in large part because he doesn't math.

So now, the safest county in the United States is opening up in an unsafe way, exposing a population which literally has 0% immunity (to two significant digits, unless you presume infection is 10x what has been reported, then it's only to one), just as COVID is exploding across the United States in the long-promised autumnal bloom.

(And did I mention that only people from the US are eligible for the pre-arrival testing? 'Tis true. And the stats say that they're the most likely to spread COVID of almost anyone in the world.)

So that's why Kimberly and I were doing a final eating out yesterday, because we figured there couldn't be too many tourists on the island after day one.

Though we saw a pair at Costco. Gawking about, wearing expensive, tight clothes, the guy wearing a lei.

But we went to Keoki's last night, because they had a touchless buffet, and it sounded good.

Except that it turned out that their touchless buffet involved standing in line with all the other touchless buffet people. With no social distancing going on. We had reservations, we wanted to support one of our favorite local residents, but upon seeing all of that, we got up from our table, told the hostess we were bailing, and left.

We ate at an outdoor table at Savage Shrimp in the nearby Shops at Kukui'ula. And got ice cream at Lappert's. It was actually quite nice if not as fancy, in no small part because that tourist-heavy shopping center was still almost empty.

Yes, this is all being done for the economy. Yes, I have sympathy for the people now missing their paycheck, themselves thrown under the bus by the sociopathic Republicans in Washington, who have actually admitted that they are preemptively trying to cripple the Biden administration by destroying the economy.

But choosing the absolutely worst time to open up the island, when COVID spread is ramping up EVERYWHERE, mocks our six months of community sacrifice. Personally, I haven't been to a game store since March. We've just eaten out a few times. We actually were zooming with my dad and Mary during the height of the lockdown. But there are also plenty of people who have gone onto unemployment, losing long-term jobs, and their sacrifice is being thrown away too.

And it's not just opening the islands, but doing it in a horrible, incompetent ways. Yes, a post-arrival test would have deterred people from coming, but so will the chaotic mess of per-island regulations that's developed, some of which could involve islands opting out of the program at a second's notice. (I know that Kauai is pretty unlikely to shut down based purely on Kawakami's badly mathed tier system, because the numbers are astronomically high for the environment; but the average tourist doesn't know that.)

Here's more math: 8,000 people arrived on the islands yesterday. Up from 1,000-2,000 a day during the quarantine. About 6,000 of them did the pre-arrival program. They were of course freely mingling with the 2,000 who did not, both on the plane and in the airport afterward, where they were packed like sardines into lines for at least an hour to try and verify their pre-arrival testing. If there was *any* COVID among those arrivals, it ran through everyone like wildfire. And there were 2,000 untested people, plus at least 20% failure rate among the others.

So did someone have COVID?

Assume that we're mostly getting people from California (which may or may not be true, but you gotta start somewhere with a simple calculation). Currently, a jaw-dropping 1% of their population has COVID (400k/4M). But maybe you instead measure it as new cases, which wouldn't have been known by the travelers either because they were in the incubation period or happened after the test. Call it the new cases over the last 5 days. That's a much more reasonable 14k/4M or about .033%. In the first case (where people are sociopathic enough to travel even if they suspect they have COVID, which I find likely to some degree), there were 20 COVID carriers about the 2,000 people who didn't bother to test and given a 1 in 5 failure rate, about 12 among the tested people. Or 32 new cases to spread COVID on the islands. In the best case they were a 66% chance of 1 COVID case among the untested and about half of that among the tested. Which was still one case on those planes yesterday. Those numbers could easily have jumped by 10x after the plane flight and standing around the terminal without social distancing.

So COVID is coming.

And our politicians don't care enough about the local population to actually think through how to avoid people dying here.

Thanks Governor Ige, thanks Mayor Kawakami. You suck. The deaths are going to be on your heads.

But even beyond that: you pissed away our six months of work on Kauai, just because you were too lazy or incompetent to do it right.

Today my original plan was to go on a hike of the Powerline Trail with a friend, but we've been getting storm warnings about a storm stalling and drenching the island, so we called it off until next week.

But, there hasn't actually been any rain since this morning, just lots of overcast. So I drove back to Koloa (where Kimberly and I were yesterday), parked at the Shops at Kukui'ula (where we ate yesterday) and then walked to Poipu, where I've been enjoying the surf, and not much sun, and typing on my computers. It was a good walk: we used to do it on our first visit in 2001.

It's another enjoyable "last" day, where the beach is pretty empty and I can just chill. No one near me, no COVID even if those 1 to 30 cases are on our island (as opposed to Oahu, where they'd fit right in).

I'll walk back soon, hopefully before all that rain hits.

(And then tomorrow I'll do the actual day of work that I'd have usually done today: I'm sticking to my five-day schedule as much as possible, even though three days remain mostly my own.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But no exceptions for health: that's problematic.

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

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

Meanwhile:

Our electrical work is definitely done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's life in these Hawaiian states.

We've been back from Oahu for 9 days now. We probably don't have COVID, since the average incubation period is 5-6 days. I guess Kimberly will know for sure in a few days as she has another required COVID test for another procedure.

Oahu was just exhausting. Part of that was, obviously, balancing work with supporting Kimberly and then having to go back to a small hotel room at night. (It was an OK hotel, but I've stayed in nicer, and I usually prefer AirBnBs, but they're currently illegal in Hawaii.) But it was really the attitude in Oahu that was the most exhausting: having all these detsroyers-of-the-commons pretty much ignoring the mask rules, and so I had to worry about how much exposure there really was. When I got home I was pretty much ready to collapse, and then having to put in a day of work on that Friday pretty much ensured that I was out of commission through that weekend.

I finally perked up on Monday, and since I'd edited histories throughout Saturday, I took that opportunity to do a shorter walk from Shipwreck to Mahaulepu. That sort of thing always relaxes me.

And then the whole week went by in a blur. That was partly semi-quarantine after Oahu, mainly not hanging out with my dad and Mary, but I think I was still tuckered out. I was a bit surprised that a week had gone by when I realized that was the case, on this Friday.

Chicks. Ares, one of the six remaining brood, was gone when we returned. This was not a surprise. When I saw the chicks just before we left, I actually wondered if I'd see Ares again, because he was so often wandering quite far afield from mom Danielle. So I was expecting him to go traveling. Which I trust is what he did. But there's been this black hen out in an adjacent yard, and one of the days since we got back, I noticed she had a half-pint companion, and so I wondered if Ares had found his Mrs. Robinson.

Lizards. The teeny lizards of Hawaii are SOOO dumb. More than once I've held back a cat so they can escape and they just sit there, frozen. And more than once they've disappeared under a couch (while I held down a cat) just to come back out a few minutes later. As I write, I hear Callisto chasing a lizard that I saved a few minutes ago.

Designers. The Designers & Dragons patreon has been every bit as successful in getting me to focus on my projects as I had hoped it would. Oh, this is work I love, and so there's a frequent desire to do it, but having monthly deadlines where I've promised certain types of content is keeping me pushing along quickly, and also letting me make grandiose plans about what I can produce each month. (It also is having a nice side effect of making me feel OK about buying source material for all of my projects, because I've got a bit of money coming in each month from the Patreon.)

Mynahs. Oh, there was one other animal-related change while we were in Oahu: THE MYNAHS RETURNED TO OUR LANAI. @)#$@#. I put Ozzie the plastic owl out when I saw this on our return, and a few days later I found a mynah on the railing staring at him! *)(#$@*#)(. But, I've determinedly kept moving Ozzie around and that seems to have done the trick again. They've left the valley once more. But those Mynahs are determined!

I was going to swim today after a hike all the way from Poipu to Mahaulepu, but that 10 miles or so is pretty exhausting in the 80+ degree heat. So I ended up having a shave ice instead, alas. Haven't swum since I returned from Oahu, but I think things are returning to normal after a week of stunned rest, so I'm sure I'll get out there sometime early this next week.

It's the Day to take Kimberly to Oahu for her seizure study!

Yep, we now get to fly for some medical treatment!

Waking up at 5am to go to the airport in Hawaii turns out to be not so early as it was in California. I mean, that's literally true, it's 8am in California. But also we've now got an earlier schedule (because I wanted to stay somewhat on west-coast time) so, I'm up two hours early, rather than in the middle of the night.

I drive out to Lihue Airport, and note to Kimberly that this was the first time we'd ever drive ourselves there.

After parking, I take a picture of the car and message it to my dad so he knows where it is. For Complex Reasons(tm), my dad will be picking up Julie the Benz later today. (He does, later assures me that she's made it home safely, and also sends a picture of Callisto oh-so-patiently waiting for Lucy to finish her wet food. Car and cats taken care of!)

It's fortunate that there's pretty much no one in the security line, because our local government has made it even more of a godawful mess to get into an airport by now requiring you to fill out quarantine-related forms prior to getting into the TSA line.

One form is about our business and where we're settling in on the other island, which we note doesn't even have a checkbox for "Medical". We're just told to check "Business".

Pretty much everyone in line is flying on a medical exemption, so that seemed like a bit of an oversight, but oversight has been the name of the game for the Hawaiian government since we got here, in all senses of the word.

And then we're required to initial and sign a form acknowledging the 14-day interisland quarantine, which I found very questionable because we explicitly have forms exempting us from the quarantine due to Kimberly's having medical needs to be taken care of on Oahu. The guy helping us with the forms just nods and says: sure, just keep that exemption paper with you.

(I might be required to show my papers was the very explicit subtext.)

In any case, I decide this isn't a fight to fight at the airport even though I think it entirely inappropriate for me to sign, pretty much duress, a form acknowledging a quarantine that does not apply to me.

The interisland quarantine ends tomorrow. The guy helping us with the forms notes that we'll have different forms to fill out when we come back, as a result.

Today's forms, which take about 10 minutes to fill out, only worked without totally hamstringing the airport because there are so few people coming in. But if the other forms are similarly bad, as the end of quarantine allows more people to travel, well we'd better make sure we have plenty of time when we go back to the Honolulu airport in several days.

Lihue Airport has a big open lobby just past the TSA. We hang out there until our flight is boarding.

Apparently Airport Security doesn't have to wear masks. Or socially distance. Or work.

Because three of them are just standing there yacking, practically leaning on each other, the whole time we're in the lobby.

Finally, we head to the non-socially-distanced gate.

They're now boarding from the back of the plane to the front in clumps of about four rows at a time, to try and keep people from encountering each other ... but more than half the seats are already filled when we go back to get our seats (rows 15-12). Good going, guys.

The woman in front of me keeps snuffling, even taking down her mask once to blow her nose.

At least she presumably passed a temperature check. Unless she Karened her way out of it.

I'm shocked that they're still serving drinks on the interisland hop, despite COVID-19. Because it just sounds like an encouragement for everyone to take off their masks while all in close quarters.

Fortunately Lady Snuffles doesn't get a drink.

Sn
Kimberly had a good morning, but we realize that she's having cognitive problems on the plane when I try and talk to her several times (to ask if she wants that drink) and she is having terrible troubles hearing and understanding me. And only later does she realize it's because she didn't think to take her earbuds out.

In Honolulu we take our first shared ride car in five and a half months.

It's a little weird, driving on a highway, with an urban center around us. Honolulu is a lot more like Berkeley than Kauai is.

There's queueing and screening to get into the hospital. They don't have Kimberly on their list, but Mini has prepared us for this, and I just hand over the letter about Kimberly's admission, and that's that. They take our temperatures, tell us what they are, and pass us in.

Up in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (EMU), they start quizzing and testing Kimberly. I'm glad I'm there, because she's having increasing difficulties finding words as first the morning and afternoon go on.

During a break, we order lunch. The hospital has a decent menu, and the most delightful thing is that you can order a "guest tray" for a visitor. Yay, this is a time not to be sitting in cafeterias in Honolulu. And we're told the tray is $10 no matter what's on it, so we should pile it high.

So Kimberly orders some beefmac, and I choose a ham-and-cheese sandwich, imagining a sizzling sandwich straight off the grill with the cheese melted over the ham on the toasted sourdough. And I order some potatoes and a brownie. I try and order a pear smoothie, but that's for patients only.

What I get is two slices of ham and one slice of cheese on bread so tasteless that it could only be called sourdough in Hawaii, four halves of very teeny potatoes, and about 1 oz of brownie. Ah well, I didn't have to go to a cafeteria.

We talk to the doctor and he urges us not so say that Kimberly is having "seizures", but instead "events".

Jerry the EEG-glue guy (and monitor, apparently) then comes in and spends over an hour precisely placing and gluing 33 electrodes to Kimberly's head. It's a careful, time-consuming process. When He finally finishes, he talks about the seizure button.

And by this time it's obvious that Kimberly has really tipped over into a bad state. But it's so hard to classify "is she having a seizure" (an "event") when it's such a gradual non-discrete thing. But as we're asking if this mighjt meet the criteria, Jerry goes ahead and hits the button, so I guess that amswers that, and a few different people come in and document how Kimberly is doing.

So, yay? That's the whole point of being here.

Everyone seems to think I'm going to be staying by Kimberly's bedside 24x7, which strikes me as just short of crazy. I mean, yes, besides getting her to the hospital in the first place, my point in being here and not home is to help her feel safe and cared for. But there's only so much I can do to stay here and retain my sanity.

I can't visit Kimberly twice a day here, as was my norm last time she was in the hospital, because their current requirement at Queen's is just one visitor one time a day. Still, I'll spend a few hours here, and of course chat with her if she wants elsetime.

But I feel a little disloyal in that the hospital staff all seems to have different opinions of what I'll be doing.

(Mind you: the hospital staff all seem to think that Mayor Kawakami on Kauai is god. I'm able to just bite my tongue on that one, because I'm well aware that our cases were already mostly extinct by the time the shelter-in-place came down, and I'm aware that he's done a real disservice to Kauai in his lack of response to improving conditions. But folks here seem to be very single minded: it's only about how Kawakami has [maybe] stopped the spread of COVID-19 on Kauai. Because they're health workers, so that's of course all that's on their minds.)

Kimberly falls asleep while I'm there and a bit later suddenly awakes and seems totally panicked. I tell her, "Don't pull anything out!" She's sure something is really wrong, but her response is to push the "seizure button", which is a great response.

Two nurses rush in and record things again, but they're much, much terser than they were before.

Kimberly says I should head out a bit after 3. She says she can lay in a hospital bed all her own.

I walk Honolulu back to my hotel.

Not a particularly pretty city, but I probably think that even more after five and a half months on Kauai.

The hotel fortunately seems nice enough. But there's a homeless guy checking in in front of me. And he's got a mask on, but is wearing it as a chin strap. I keep as far back as possible.

When he can't show an ID, he wanders out and some guy wanders in with him and does all the paperwork for a night's stay at $200 (almost twice what I'm paying).

It appears to me that guy #2 represents the organization that puts homeless people up after they've illegally shipped out here on planes. I'm not convinced you're actually making Honolulu a better place, guy #2.

Afterward, there's no problem for me. I show my medical exemption, and that's that, no attempt to give me a one-use key or set the police on me.

Afterward I wander Honolulu more. I was actually trying to go down to the waterfront, just to see it (again), but I got turned around and so wandered back in the direction of Queen's before turning around. I finally land at Taco Bello where I grab some food to bring home.

I understand better why everyone at the hospital is praising Kawakami, because Mayor Caldwell of Honolulu is an absolute moron in the opposite direction.

First, we got a homeless population that's about 5% of the people I see on the streets, and they're wandering freely with no respect for any health guidelines, and unlike the guy being booked into the hotel, none of them even have masks that they're not wearing. And in fact more than half the people I see while out aren't wearing masks. In particular, if they're white or they're male, the odds are very good they're unmasked.

And Caldwell ain't doing anything about either problem, according to the readers of the Star*Advertiser because he's a coward.

So we have Kawakami who is killing our economy even when COVID is pretty dealt with on our island, but in the process has really created a spirit of community sacrifice.

And we have Caldwell who is just killing the people, and who has instilled a community sociopathy, where more than half the people don't seem to care.

So that's Oahu on day one.

Fingers crossed on the study.

And I'm not sure I'll be making it to Waikiki, both because work + Kimberly are going to keep me busy, and because I see the spread of COVID-19 on this island isn't just about parties, it's about the people.

1. Storm. A few nights ago when Kimberly and I were laying down in bed, she exclaimed that something wet had fallen on her hand. A second later the same thing happened to me, and I realized that the whipping wind was driving rain through our louvre windows about six feet into the room. Much window closing followed.

2. Lizards. They keep killing lizards. A few times now we've found a lizard corpse on the floor, just swarming with ants. ICK! I dunno, do these guys just keel over? Are they scared to death by cats? Do the ants assassinate them for a tasty dinner? ICK.

3. Chickens. Lately I get up in the morning and after I shower and get dressed I wander by the front door. And there's a herd of chickens out on the porch. And then I go downstairs, and meanwhile the chickens run around the house to get to the back patio, to beg for food. I swear they are looking for me at the front porch, and know when they see me wake up and wander through there, they can then go get their morning treat. (They're going to be grossly surprised next week, but maybe we can get them back to their core task of eating centipedes. I found one in the bathroom a few days ago!)

4. Quarantine. Kimberly had her COVID test on Tuesday, to allow her to do the seizure study in Oahu. (It came back negative, of course: there's no COVID on this island.) She has to self-quarantine following that. The staff at Queens told me I didn't have to, but nonetheless I'm staying close to home, going out only to walk on the golf course with no one else around (and bike: more on that momentarily). And it feels surprisingly lonely and constraining, even though I gamed (online) on Wednesday, did a Podcast on Thursday, zoomed with my folks today, and have been keeping in touch with several people for various work projects.

5. Plague. Oh, hey, Oahu had 15 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday and 17 on Saturday. Up from about a half-dozen a day the previous week, up from about 1 a day before that. That makes going there tomorrow really attractive. And I know that I've said that the restrictions on these islands (particularly Kauai and the Big Island) are excessive, but still, have the *(@#$#ing common sense not to go to Memorial Day parties and graduation day parties, hmm?

6. Biking. I haven't been biking since I moved to Hawaii. To be precise, I'd biked three times before Thursday, something I realized when talking to my PT about physical activities. So yesterday I did the one bike ride really possible around our house: around Puu Road, which is below and around the golf course. It's a nice ride, 30 or 40 minutes, and a somewhat challenging one because of the ups and downs. Sadly, I am getting out of biking shape. The last bit back up to Papalina was very tiring (and then I walked the bike up Papalina to get home). More of that!

7. Cats. I think Callisto is now afraid of the dark, or at least the dark at our back door. More than once I've found her yowling there or just staring intently, but there's no cat out there lurking as there was in our first weeks here. I turn on the light, and all is well.

8. Dreams. I dreamed a few nights ago that we were back in the Bay Area. That's the first time since we moved here. The house sale had fallen through (in my dream), but we'd gotten $40,000 for our troubles, and that seemed really great, and we were going about life in the Bay Area like everything was terrific. But then at some point I said, "But we were going to change our lives by moving to Hawaii, and that won't happen if we're here." And I realized it had to be a dream and I woke myself up. Whew! Still in Hawaii! Still living a mile from my dad and Mary. Still putting aside the stress of RPGnet and Skotos. Still working on my own projects most days. Still swimming and hiking (and biking!).

9. Toothpaste. So you can't take toothpaste to Oahu. Well, you can't because you're likely doing a casual interisland flight and you don't want to pick-up check-in luggage at Honolulu, a big, messy airport. (You especially don't want to mill around with other luggagers during a pandemic.) So no toothpaste for us tomorrow, nor sunscreen. I'll have to pick it up when we get there (and then we can check in the luggage coming back, because it just takes a few minutes to get it in Lihue).

10. Cleaning. So what do you do on the day before ~~doomsday~~ a trip to the disease capitol of Hawaii? If you're Shannon, you clean. Yes, it's in part because my dad will do some cat-sitting while we're out of town, but also because starting tomorrow I'll have plenty of time for writing in the evenings, but won't be able to putter around the house.

Out of the house right around sunrise tomorrow, because we're catching ~~the last train to Clarksville~~ the first plane to Oahu.

So things seem pretty much back to normal here on Kauai.

Well, we're still down the tourists that make up 15-25% of our normal population, but the local population seems back to normal.

The big change was the announcement last week that the beaches were opening, and you could actually SIT on them once more, if you maintained socially distancing from anyone not in your immediate household.

The roads are crowded enough again that I have to wait to turn out onto the highway. I've seen backup headed back toward the Kalaheo stop light in the afternoon. The Poipu parking lot is much busier. Maybe still only 40% or 50% yesterday afternoon, but closer to 80% on Saturday.

And besides people being out of their houses, they're also largely acting like things are normal again. At the beach, I saw a party of 10 or 12 people, hugging and standing in each others' spaces.

The local Hawaiian government is actually facing a big problem where they're trying to maintain restrictions that the population no longer feels is rational.

Here on Kauai our last case was diagnosed about 40 days ago. On the islands as a whole, COVID-19 has been in clear decline for just a bit longer than that, and we've been flirting with just 0-4 cases a day since the start of the month.

It's really hard for the politicians at this point to say their "bending the curve" (because it's been bent) or that they've making sure hospitals don't get overloaded (because there are only 50 active cases on the islands at all right now — and though we don't know how many of those are hospitalized, because the state is really awful at reporting at information, the obvious answer is "just a few").

And because the politicians can't say those things any more, they're mostly just shutting up and continuing forward as if COVID-19 were still raging on the islands.

At this point we've even getting health experts saying, "You can't expect to entirely eliminate COVID-19". But that seems to be what the Hawaiian politicians are trying to do, because we're so far past any other rationale for not opening.

(Meanwhile, their measures to quarantine people coming to islands continue to at best be half-assed, even though that's the only possible vector for the disease as we eliminate it from our communities.)

So because of that big disconnect between the regulations and the reality, we've got the public increasingly ignoring the shelter-in-place orders (now known by the Orwellian name "safer at home") because it's obvious that it's out of touch with reality. Which means that our politicians in the name of safety are actually creating extreme danger for the islands in the future, because if there is a big outbreak come fall, people will instead remember this time when they started ignoring the politicians' orders because they no longer seemed right.

Could there be OTHER reasons to keep the islands closed? Sure, if they've been unable to meet the criteria for testing or contact tracing. And we know that our testing is great.

So, it's either contact tracing or nothing that's the problem, and are politicians are saying ZILCH.

I say things are back to normal, but they aren't at all due to our politician's fear for their political futures, and how they might be blamed when there's an inevitable second wave of sickness.

So we still can't eat out. In fact it's technically still illegal to eat anywhere except at home or on the beach. Yeah, the beach. They opened up the beaches and said you can BBQ and stuff there, and it seems part of this constant dance where the right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. So, if you pick up dinner you have to take it home or to the beach, but can't eat it at a park, in your car, or anywhere else.

We've still got lots of people out of work.

In fact, the Hawaiian economy is crashing with the government still unable to process the vast majority of unemployment claims, and meanwhile the government is also dumping federal monies into a "rainy day" fund because they can't imagine how it might be used now.

I'm vastly disappointed that we've landed somewhere where politicians are just as out of touch with the 99% as they were in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, but in a totally different way. (There, their 1% constituency seemed to be the homeless; here, it's people who don't understand how the pandemic could be affecting anyone's finances.)

As for my life?

The Skotos work continues to drag on, with the end of May being my current hopeful finale. That's only four working days, so we'll see, but the games have been operating mostly on their own for weeks, so it's just a lot of administrative break-up of which the last BIG step, preparing contracts, is maybe two-thirds done.

My personal work is going great, but that's because I'm spending every spare moment on it. I need balance! But just 30 days on from my new Patreon and my new focus on Designers & Dragons, I've published two Lost Histories and have the third in a solid draft, getting commenters from the company's principals. Meanwhile, I'm working through the third chapter of the TSR Codex. All told, I'm something like 30k words into these projects, which is great for a month in which I still haven't been able to really offer up my full-time time.

Our chickens have definitely adopted us. They regular circle the house now. If they're eating centipedes as they do, our goal is met. Meanwhile, Danielle has figured out how to fly up into trees to knock fruit down for his chicks. She apparently started this after seeing ME knock down fruits. That's a smart chicken.

I continue to swim as I can and hike every Saturday. It's just been the trip to Mahaulepu and back again and again, but it's a really pretty walk, and it's what my knee can take right now. (And I illicitly write while I'm at Mahaulepu, but maybe that's legal now because it's a beach, or at least beach adjacent ... but no one really knows what the confusing mesh of regulations from COVID-19 mean anymore.) My last PT should be this Friday. My knee is maybe 95% of the way better, though I still felt it twinge when I moved it just wrong in the ocean yesterday.

(Also, that trip to Mahaulepu is what our shelter-in-place rules can take, without me having to get in an argument with an overzealous cop about whether we can travel further for exercise if we want, though this is quickly becoming less of an issue because, see above, no one cares about the shelter in place anymore.)

We're still waiting for Kimberly's study at Queen's, and waiting to see if I'll be able to help her out there in Honolulu, or if the 14-day interisland quarantine is still up (which would make it not just pointless but problematic for me to go, because I'd have to lock myself up the whole time in Honolulu ... and then do the same here for two weeks after returning, because I wouldn't have a medical exemption like Kimberly would).

I'm definitely looking forward to the future, where my personal work and Skotos work aren't stacked on top of each other, where I have a more casual day or two of work for Blockchain Commons and Bitmark and the rest of time for my own writing. (But I *WILL* get the Skotos games to a good place first.)

And I'm looking forward to the other future where we can travel freely on our island without worrying about the chaotic, poorly thought out restrictions currently in place, or about our politicians who are terrified about being voted out of office if there's a single COVID-19 case on the island.

And I'm looking forward to the other future where hopefully Kimberly's study gives us some results for getting her back to healthiness.

But for now, a bit of normalcy has settled in, even if our mayor is being dragged kicking and screaming along the way.

Ugh, it has been a horribly busy week, in large part because the past and future intersected here, on the last week of April 2020.

Much of this was very mundane: an expected result of life changing. But that didn't make it any less hectic or busy.

So, for example, we sold our house (yay!), and that freed up a bunch of projects that I'd queued up, and which were awaiting on the sale. So suddenly I had a bunch of new paperwork and contacts with our new financial advisor, who will manage investments for us going forward; and I had a bunch of new paperwork and contacts with the construction company who will be installing solar panels for us here in Hawaii. And we had to write up some reviews of our most wonderful realtor. And I should really get our taxes out.

The biggest conflict, though, comes in the slow slide away from full-time work toward my own projects. Theoretically I'm down to four days of Skotos work and up to one day of my own, but ah, that balance did not work well last week.

First up, I'm very eager to push on the Designers & Dragons work, so it's been getting a lot of time in my evenings, beyond that one day. So on Monday I managed to push out my first Lost History, though it kept me going until late.

And meanwhile, my one other blockchain client, Bitmark, has returned with some interesting new work. So that's suddenly been going on in the evening.

And that all hasn't been meshing great with Skotos work being particularly busy this week. That's because I've been working toward the great "split", where we start dividing up our games onto machines that we can give to the players. I've been building a new auth server to support this since February, and Wednesday and Thursday we finally put it into action, splitting out Castle Marrach, TEC, and Allegory of Empires each to their own machines.

The bad news is that it was really problematic, just because I was making two huge changes at once: a new auth server and a total rewrite of the domain names. So, Castle Marrach took all of Wednesday because it was my test case, and so I mostly took it slow and wrote up documents as I went. Then TEC took much of Thursday because its our weird non-SkotOS case and we stumbled along getting the variables right. And then I was sure I could knock Allegory of Empire out in an hour or two, but it turned out to be very problematic because it was halfway between two domain names and it had some elegant sign-in pages that hardcoded domains.

Ay. I spent 13 hours on Skotos on Thursday, missing my gaming group as a result!

And then the Skotos work continued into Friday and Saturday, because we turned up several new commands that I hadn't written support for.

The good news is that we've now gone most of a day without any new issues, so, maybe we're mostly there?

(There are still going to be a few more weeks of moving things around and doing the logistics of the split, but at last the end is in sight.)

In fact, generally the end is in sight. The house is sold. The things to immediately pop up after the sale of the house are all dealt with more a moment though some will be continuing (such as the need from someone from the solar company to come out to really nail down what they're going to be doing.)

And I think the hardest Skotos work is done, with what's left being more pragmatic.

And so, I'll soon have fewer things piling on top of each other, and also get that fabled more time for my own projects.

So how did I really know things were super busy this last week? I didn't make it out of the house between Sunday evening and Friday afternoon.

I mean, obviously this is partly the shelter-in-place, still continuing despite the fact that we have 0 known active cases on Kauai, it's been 19 days since the last new case was discovered here, it's been 27 days since the alleged community spread happened here, and the islands overall have been running 1 new case a day the last few days (and not much more before that).

But the nearby golf course's policies as the result of the mayor's overly aggressive authoritarianism are the bigger problem, because that's where I could walk just for 30 or 40 minutes at sunset even if I had a very tiring day. But I can't get into the course without walking Death Road 3000 or sneaking along the forbidden paths. Fortunately, the course has been given the OK to open on Tuesday, and word is they'll be unblocking the paths at that time.

And then I hopefully won't have another week like this past one with four days with almost no exercise.

But then I hopefully won't have the busyness of the past and future colliding either.

Oh, hey. I had a nice walk today. Out to Mahaulepu again. And I finished chapter two of the TSR Codex while out there. (Illegally sitting at a table with no one anywhere near me.) And I had a nice swim when I got back to Poipu.

Even though I had more Bitmark work waiting for me at home, that was a nice antidote to the week.

(There was shave ice too.)

Walking out to the golf course today, I stepped onto the trail near our house, under the caution tape and around the "Path Closed" sign. Just a few steps beyond, I saw someone headed my way. I carefully stepped to the side to giver her and her dog six feet to pass. We didn't even exchange a word, though perhaps we put our hands under our chins and wiggled our fingers to express membership in a secretive clan: The Walkers of the Forbidden Path.

This has become typical, in this Age of COVID-19.

As I've written before, the instigator of these events is our golf course manager's decision to close all the paths surrounding the course because of a fear that people might not be able to offer the six feet that I did. These paths are not narrow, but there are certainly points where you'd be limited to 4 or 5 feet.

And, in turn, the instigator of that decision was our intrusive, controlling mayor, who is driving his policies based on fear of enforcement. So, the manager is afraid that he might be closed down entirely, and so he adds restrictions.

And I tried to be respectful of them. Oh, the first time out I ducked under the caution tape because I thought it was no big deal, and then I saw how much work they'd gone through to block up several entrances to the trails with logs and branches. They were being serious, not just offering a facade for the mayor.

So the next time I walked up Papalina Road to get to the front of the course, rather than walking up the trail that exits so enticingly near our house. The problem was that Papalina is a typical Kauaian road. So, it's narrow, it's windy, it has areas with no shoulders, and it encourages cars to go too fast. There was one particularly nasty shoulderless area of the road where a car had to come to a complete stop while I was walking, because there was a car coming from the other direction, and there was literally not enough room for all three of us. The other car passed, the car in front of me pulled over, and we were all able to get through, but it clearly wasn't safe.

So on the way home I walked the trail, choosing to enter down by the lower parking lot, which is away from where the course currently has staff watching over the whole area (with this spying being another "innovation" of recent weeks).

I actually met my first fellow Walker earlier that same day. He'd cut straight across the trails. He didn't even talk about how unsafe it was to walk up Papalina. He was just annoyed that he was being made to go ten minutes out of way when a cut-cross path went straight from his street into the heart of the course.

I met a second Walker as I trekked back along the Forbidden Path that evening. Like me, she'd tried to respect the desires of the course, and so had walked home via Papalina the previous day. And had thought she was going to die as a car roared around her on a corner.

Yes, obviously we could choose to not walk the course until this is all over.

We choose not.

Or rather, I choose not unless at some point in the future I get into a situation where a golf course employee chides me. Because this golf course is pretty much my local park, and I don't want to upset the staff. So if that happens, I'd move on.

To be precise, I'd get in my car and go to walk elsewhere. Because that park is our safe, local place to walk.

I'm probably already swimming more than I would otherwise, which totally defeats the idea of keeping people close to home — which is the other problem of blocking up local parks like this, and especially when you're explicitly blocking access from the local neighborhoods.

I also drove Papalina last night, between Poipu and home, and saw for myself a family of four walking the street. They were on the inside of the street, next to the course, which pretty much means they were walking the street on a long, blind curve.

Good times.

Today they had a second marshall sitting out by the front gate. So I walked out to the street and about 30 feet up scrambled up the slope and over a log, which looked like it'd been purposefully piled with branches, back onto the Forbidden Path.

The Forbidden Path is very porous.

Here's my philosophical issue with all of this. I mean, beyond the fact that access to a public resource is being increasingly limited.(And I should clarify, this isn't just a golf course. This is land that Walter Duncan MacBryde put into a permanent trust to benefit the people of Kalaheo and nearby communities.)

My issue is that we've got a public safety issue: making sure people stay six feet apart.

And to resolve it we're creating a much larger public safety issue: forcing people to walk on a street where it totally isn't safe to do so.

I'd say there would be almost zero chance of someone getting COVID-19 on the course due to momentarily getting to close to someone on the paths. And that's not even accounting for the fact that there's pretty much no COVID-19 on the island at this current time.

As for the chance of someone being injured or killed by a car on Papalina while walking around the trails to get onto the course? I think that's a real possibility. (And that itself could endanger the public trust that supports the park.)

So not only do we have what I consider security theatre, given the current status of the island, but it's security theatre that actively endangers people.

I actually think we're about to start seeing increased pushback from people in Hawaii against our politicians. They've been very authoritarian since the start of this, and perhaps that's to credit for Hawaii being one of the safest states in the union, but they've also been really unfocused and not understanding that the priority had to be keeping new COVID-19 from coming to the island. So they locked up residents while still allowing visitors to pop into the state, clearly not realizing (or caring) what the real danger was.

And now they're engaging in some sort of bizarre purism that wouldn't fly in any other state. They seem to think that COVID-19 needs to be entirely gone before they can open anything.

Mayor Kawakami in Kauai offered the first really jawbreaking statement like this, and it's one of the few times I've seen him personally get pushback (the other being for his road checkpoints, where soldiers were doing things like demanding to search peoples' groceries, seriously, but which disappeared within a week). This time, Kawakami said that we couldn't open the island until 28 days had gone by since the last case of community spread.

I mean, I think it's entirely foolish to think almost anywhere could entirely eliminate the virus like that. But a small island like Kauai, with carefully controlled access? Maybe. And his date for that is May 3rd, so if that works out, maybe he can have his cake and eat it too. Say he walked a hard line, and it controlled COVID-19 on the island, but start getting people back to work before his popularity plummets. (Mind you, I don't even believe we had one case of community spread: a single, isolated, unknown case seems really remarkably unlikely, so my guess would be the person was lying to protect someone violating quarantine or something.) But if he has a second case of community spread (or a first as the case might be) and he tries to lock down the island for another 28 days based on a single case of COVID-19 on the island ... I don't think that's going to go well.

And then we have Governor Ige, who was just forced to walk back his beach closure because it was wildly unpopular to say that people couldn't even walk or run on our mostly empty beaches, go figure, to the point where some of Hawaii's mayors were giving him public sass.

Well, Hawaii under Ige is looking pretty good. it's been a full week since we had any day with more than six cases. Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island are each having a case or two a day. If you look at the statewide totals, we've bee on a clear downward trend since April 3rd, over three weeks. Meanwhile, we have one of the highest testing percentages in the nation. I don't know how well our contact tracing has developed, but other than that, it's clear that we meet the federal government's criteria for phase one reopening. And then some.

So Ige on Friday extended the shelter-in-place order through the end of May.

Suffice to say, that ain't going over well either.

We've already had some protests, and unlike those in places that still have growing or plateaued cases, I think the one's here have a foundation.

But at least one of the issues is that there is a real case of the haves and have-nots here on the islands, and the have-nots are out of work and hurting, and the haves are working remotely, living on their interest, and/or making the laws.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are protests again next week, but even moreso I wouldn't be surprised if at least one lawsuit is fast-tracked.

I'll admit I'm a have. But I am also a rebel Walker of the Forbidden Path.

Because I don't want to be killed by a car.

And we need to be talking about nuances like that, which relate to our current decisions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more ending? Hopefully my bad knee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never seen the course that parked up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My physical therapist is afraid of drones.

No, not generally. At least, not as far as I know.

She's afraid the mayor is spying with drones.

So a few days ago, she was walking on the Mahaulepu Heritage Trail and she got tired and wanted to stop. But, she was afraid to stop because our shelter-in-place order says that you can get out and exercise. But it doesn't say that you can rest while you're exercising.

And the drones might be watching.

The mayor of Honolulu is genuinely using drones.

He has them out at beaches, constantly broadcasting that people must quickly walk across the beach and dive into the water. No, it doesn't matter if the water feels cold. Dive right in! No pussy-footing around!

He swears the drones aren't taping anyone.

As far as we know, the mayor of Kauai isn't. Though he seems like the kind of guy who would love to exercise-shame people with drones or something (cf: the Derbyshire police).

The funny thing ...

(Not ha-ha funny.)

The funny thing is that a few months ago one of the late-night comedians, perhaps John Oliver, was showing tapes of drones outside apartment buildings in China telling people they had to stay inside. No pussy-footing around.

He laughed at it, that it was this Bladerunner-crazy thing, that the robots were now keeping us inside.

Now swimmers are robotically walking past the drones in Honolulu and obediently diving into the water, even if it feels cold.

How quickly we have come to obey our robotic overlords.

I don't think John Oliver (or whomever) is mocking them anymore.

And the weird thing is that yesterday the mayor made a new declaration closing down all the beaches. No, you can still swim. You just have to walk across the beaches quickly and dive in. Even if the water feels cold.

No one has any idea what he means, because that was the state of the beaches the day before yesterday.

So is the governor saying you can't walk on the beaches any more? No slow-motion Baywatch runs? No moonlit strolls?

No one has any idea. Which is to say it's a typical look-like-I'm-doing-something maneuver from one of our Hawaiian politicians.

(Not even our mayor has any idea what the governor means, so he's had to ask the Attorney General for a clarification. Hopefully he won't be told to actually close the beaches, or his political career is over.)

I walked on a beach today. No drones warned me off. None taped me that I saw. More on that momentarily. (I also ate an illicit sandwich. Or perhaps: illicitly ate a sandwich. But not on the closed beach.)

Our local golf course manager is afraid of the mayor of Kauai.

The source of the anxiety is the trails that run the east side of the course, in a wooded area. The trails are relatively wide, but there are certainly places where you couldn't give someone 6 feet of clearance. So he's afraid that if the mayor finds that out, he'll close down walking at the course.

So instead the manager has closed off the trails, putting tape over some of the entrances, and piling up felled trees in another place.

The problem is that's the only access from our neighborhood, just makai of the highway. So folks are going to have to get into their cars to drive to the course if they want to walk (or else they have to evade the barriers).

This is the second time that fear of the mayor has almost shut down walking at the course. The first occurred when the golf courses were shut down last week, and the course for a day or two said they had to shut down walking.

Maybe I helped get the mayor's office in touch with the course? I dunno. I tried. But in any case our course did get the word just in time that only golfing "activities" were forbidden. So walking continues.

But step by step we may be losing that privilege.

If the politicians of Hawaii are purposefully trying to rule with fear and uncertainty and doubt, good job, that's clearly happened. People are terrified of what the mayor might do next. If he might be spying on them, electronically or physically. He's become some sort of boogie-man.

Yet online people are still kowtowing to him, and if someone complains the reply is, "Well, leave the island then." Their xenophobia has turned from the visitors (who are mostly gone) to transplants (who are us. or we. I'm not sure. who we are?). They say it's the transplants complaining and all the good local who are telling the mayor good one.

There's a word for a ruler who reigns through terror, who uses secret forces to spy on his citizens, who has yes-men who build up everything he does, and who exiles his opponents.

There are actually several words, some polite, some not. (And there's also "Trump".)

We're not there yet. But the fear of the mayor that I've been hearing just in the last day and the constant brownnosing of some small but vocal section of the citizenry is unnerving.

I was not deterred by the alleged drones today. I decided to repeat my walk to Mahaulepu, but this time starting from Poipu, another mile or so further on.

So I:

Parked at Poipu
Picked up a sandwich from Brennecke's Deli, which turns out to be still open
Walked the green belt from Poipu to Shipwreck
Walked the Heritage Trail from Shipwreck to Mahaulepu
Rested at Mahaulepu for a while near the cave
Walked back
Got some shave ice

There was one problem with my master plan: the Grand Hyatt, which is just before Shipwreck Beach, has shut down and it's blocked up all of its beachside paths.

This is a major problem: we're given these resorts the privilege of building up the paths near our beaches, and in some cases even allowed them to tear down old paths, like the rickety one over stones that used to be between the Sheraton and Poipu.

But now they show they can just close down what have become our public thoroughfares.

I actually hit this a few days ago when I tried to walk from Poipu to the Sheraton and discovered that the Ko'a Kea Resort had closed down its paths and you can no longer get between the beaches. The really frustrating thing is that Kimberly and I both walked this span many times before the Ko'a Kea Resort was built in 2009. The old path was a rickety old affair, but kind of fun.

Now the only thoroughfare is through the Resort, and we've allowed them to shut it.

I'm not a fan of public good being sacrificed to private entities.

Whether they be Lime and Bird or the Grand Hyatt and Ko'a Kea.

So at the Grand Hyatt I walked down to the beach to avoid their path on the way in, because they had people in buggies sitting all over the resort, guarding the paths.

But, I was worried how well my knee was going to do walking on the sand.

So on the way back I just shrugged and walked the paths.

The "guards" clearly didn't want to confront anyone, especially not someone just innocuously walking from point A to point B, as opposed to exploring their resort, mucking with their very cool water features, or something like that.

(They have really great water features!)

So one pretended not to see me, and I waved and exchanged pleasantries with another.

The walk to Mahaulepu was awe-inspiring.

That's because the waters on the south side of the island were filled with breakers and whitecaps. And jellyfish, but they weren't visible. The calendar says they're there though.

In any case, every time I saw the water it was just full of amazing waves.

Sometimes I stopped and looked at them for a while.

Then I moved along, nervously watching for drones.

At Mahaulepu I sat down and rested for a while at a picnic table.

With the sandwich I got from Brennecke's.

That's the illicit sandwich. It was even premeditated.

But I was alone the whole time, other than three or four groups of people walking between the Trail and the beach (or the tortoises), generally not socially distancing from each other (though perhaps they were all families).

I might have even done a little bit of work for Designers & Dragons project that I'm working on, just to create a little sense of normalcy. Because that's what my Saturdays used to be like. But I wrote, edited, and compiled for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, whereas on a normal Saturday I might have sat there for hours, working.

Then I walked back to Poipu.

Hiking in the Hawaiian sun is tough work!

I mean, I hiked all through the summer in the Bay Area, and sometimes that was in the 90s or even up to 100. But I usually could find shade.

Here I did 8 miles back and forth. About 80 degrees, about 70% humidity. With a decent tradewind coming off the water (hence the big waves). Still, I was hot and tired by the time I got back from Mahaulepu.

Hence the shave ice. I was all around thrilled to find that Brennecke's Deli is still open.

Because they have cold-cut sandwiches and shave ice, which are two of my favorite things. ("Coldcuts on Dutch crunch and shave ice with cherry; very dark chocolate and a giant library; Amazon packages tied up with string; These are a few of my favorite things.")

Mind you, neither was great. Hawaiian sandwiches tend to be made on fluffy, tasteless bread. And the shave ice wasn't as good as JoJo's, though it might have been due to an inexperienced shave-ice-maker.

Still, they were great rewards for the 4-mile and 8-mile points of my hike.

I had my bathing suit and towel and slippahs and goggles with me, but I opted not to swim.

That's because the beaches were all red-flagged and black-diamonded. (Cf: the big waves.)

I did watch the people in the water a little at Brennecke's Beach. They were playing amidst truly awesome waves. I was a little afraid that someone would die, and hoped the fishermen near me in their swim suits would dive in to save them, so I didn't have to in my jeans.

(It was never necessary.)

Back at home now.

I don't think any drones followed me.

So yesterday was our 100-day anniversary on Kauai: 100 days since we moved on January 1.

And it was also our matching day, because we had previously spent about 100 days on Kauai by my count. That was 12 vacations to this island (I think) from 2001-2019, the first of 14 days, and the others of about 8 days each — except during one of them we spent two days on Oahu. So: 14 + (8*11) - 2 = 100.

Numbers are magic.

We've actually spent about 111 days on the Hawaiian islands prior to our move. Those 100 days on Kauai + those 2 days on Oahu + our 9-day family vacation on the Big Island in 2018. So in another 10 days, on April 20th, we'll have spent as many days on Kauai since our move as we'd ever spent on the islands before.

Numbers are fun.

For about two and a half months I was slowly developing a new routine.

My early work schedule worked well.

We furnished the core areas of house, absent mainly Kimberly's art room and the family room downstairs.

I was spending a few afternoons a week working with my dad on stuff (or swimming). We were visiting with them on Sundays.

We were on the verge of finishing up the first bookshelf for my office, with the second not far behind.

Thursday was my gaming night.

Saturday was on the verge of becoming my hiking, biking, or swimming day again (like it used to be in the Bay Area).

I was becoming used to the rhythms of the island, the rhythms of new life here.

And then COVID-19 came a'calling.

It's shocking how much life has changed in less than 30 days. March 16th was when the Bay Area put their shelter-in-place order in place (and put our house escrow in jeopardy). That same day our mayor began ratcheting down the thumbscrews on the Kauaian people, closing down community centers and campgrounds, but I really didn't notice until March 18th when he proclaimed a 9pm curfew, like we were all 8th graders. That (along with the governor's request to avoid gatherings of 10, around the same time) marked the end of gaming.

Our shelter-in-place came on March 25th. That was the governor's order, and though I think there will come a reckoning down the road when scientists look at all the numbers and see what was effective and what wasn't, it was right in line with what the rest of the US was doing, and I have no real complaints.

But, our mayor continues proclaiming on an almost daily basis, laying down new restrictions and waving his enforcement power around.

It's obviously, all about politics. He's a social climber. He spent his time on the county council, then moved up to the state legislature. But afterward he moved back to the county council for just a couple of years, obviously to give him the local credentials to make a mayoral run, which he did in 2018.

Now, he seems to be doing his best to be constantly active, and doing something, so he can point toward that when he makes a run for one of the four higher offices in 2022 or 2026 (that's governor, senator, or the neighboring islands representative).

But constantly active, doesn't mean constantly thinking, as he keeps doing things and having to redo them. His emergency clarification of the governor's order has now been revised three times, many of them for things he was just too dumb to think about (like the need for dependents and disabled people to leave the house with their families; or the need to actually math out how many people can go into stores, rather than making wild guesses). And then there's the fact that he keeps restricting locals' personal liberties, despite the absence of community spread until today, while letting travelers run rampant, even though all the cases before today came from travelers. For example, he's just shutting down vacation rentals tomorrow, even though that's a step Oahu took two weeks ago.

And so many of his policies have had repercussions that were clearly unexpected to him. Limit the number of people in stores? Great, we now get long lines outside, and instead of people having casual contact inside for a few seconds at a time, they now have more intimate contact for 20-60 minutes at a time, and we know that the latter is the main way for COVID-19 to spread, not the former. And of course if stores were religiously sticking to his numbers, we literally wouldn't be able to get enough food on the island. (Today, Costco was totally ignoring his mandates, and you could just walk right in, which is the right way to avoid food riots and litter Hunger Games on the island. And it seemed safe enough: the store was still a lot emptier than it was a month ago.) Close the golf course? Great, people now have to go further to get their exercise, driving amidst the shelter in place, and then they exercise where more people are congregating. Meanwhile, golf courses where people regularly walk, like ours, are thrown into even more chaos because the golf-course restriction was another badly written order that didn't talk about these particular cases. And of course there's the fact that he's totally ableist — and I never thought I'd actually use that word, but he has blatantly ignored and omitted the needs of the disabled in proclamation after proclamation.

(I think he really likes writing proclamations.)

To date, he's pretty much had the locals eating out of the palm of his hand. I don't know how. Maybe Kauians are particularly "compliant". But some of that support is really ill-conceived. Like they cheer him for our scant 18 cases on the island. Not understanding that per-capita it's middle of the road. Maui has 1 case per 2,600 people, Oahu has 1 case per 3,000 people, we have 1 per 4,000, the Big Island has 1 case per 7,000.

But I think he's finally getting slapped down by some locals, mainly in response to his road blocks on the main highway (it's an authoritarian's dream: there's is just a single road leading from the south side to the main town, so if he can control that, he can control the island). But I think his golf course closures starting tomorrow aren't going to be that popular either. (If he ever tries to shut down surfing, his political career will be OH-VER.)

Unfortunately, we got that community spread today, which I think is going to be his wet dream. He's seemed pretty focused on instilling fear into the population, and using that to control them, and so now he's going to be able to ride that a few weeks more. (Today's gem of fear-mongering: "But you don't need to wear your masks INSIDE your houses." Right, like anyone thought that before you scared them into doing so by suggesting it.)

Screw the mayor. It'd be good if I could spend less mental energy on him. He's just having as bad of an effect on the island as nasty 'ole Mayor Arreguín did on Berkeley. But, it's probably only going to be for the length of this emergency, and then he'll likely become mostly harmless as he plots how to ascend the next rung in the political ladder.

So it's perhaps more relevant for a retrospective of our 100 days to talk about how the island has changed in the last 25 or so days under increasing restrictions from the governor and (almost daily) from the mayor.

Day by day the streets are growing quieter, even if it's nothing like the pictures I've seen of the Bay Area. Still, it's going to be hard going back to Kauai's normal traffic and normal crowds when all of this is over.

The beaches are so very peaceful. When I went to Lawai to swim the other day I was actually momentarily unnerved when I thought there wasn't anyone in the water. But it reminded me of walking out there in the mornings when we stayed here in 2001. It was that quiet, even midday.

Meanwhile, the places to walk are much more crowded. The golf course in particular has been 2x or 3x as busy when I walked there in the last few weeks. (But there will be another big change tomorrow, when "golfing activities" end, and suddenly the walkers have golf course to themselves ... but may lose easy parking.)

And of course, we're all very, very confined. Kimberly and I getting out to Lihue just once a week for our PT/grocery trip. I think I've been out to beaches three times since the shelter in place to swim, but it's been a quieter, more solitary exercise. And otherwise, it's home or the golf course and not much else.

Weird times. I fear the next 100 days will continue that weirdness.

Kauai, Day 93. Shelter-in-Place, Day 10.

Today was supposed to be my first day of "personal work". I've given Skotos somewhere between 2-5 weeks of my additional time, to finish transitioning the Skotos and RPGnet web sites, but in exchange I'm now taking Fridays for my own personal work (which was supposed to be getting most of my time starting this week: but I'm determined to leave Skotos and RPGnet in good shape.)

Well, the new plan didn't actually work out either.

I wanted to get back to my DnDClassics work, which I'm planning to turn into a multi-book history of all of D&D's official products. So I jumped right back into the "World of Greyhawk", where I was expanding and splitting up my old writing on the product into individual histories for the folio put out in 1980 and the box put out in 1983.

I got down to my office at 7.30, which is my normal start time, as I wanted to have the best work hygiene possible for my personal work, even if I don't put in a full day like I would for Skotos, RPGnet, or Blockchain Commons. But I was only able to work until about 9.30. So, two hours for my first day of work. I worked my way through everything I'd written thus far on the 1980 folio, and started in on the next sections, but there was only so much I could do.

This was not unexpected, sadly. Yesterday I got a call from my physical therapy office, and they let me know that my therapist was self-isolating, and so all of appointments were cancelled. I didn't ask too much about this self-isolation, because I really didn't want to know right now.

I managed to get Kimberly and myself a new set of paired appointments, one after the other, but they were at 10.15 and 11.00. Hence the early end to my first day of writing.

Physical therapy was fine.

My knee is actually doing better than it was last week by a noticeable amount. I dunno if that's my exercises, natural healing, or the previous therapist taping up my knee to keep it from moving in the direction that was causing pain. I still don't know if it'll be able to get entirely better on its own, but that was encouraging.

And today I got massages with rolling pins, stretches, new exercises, and more tape.

And then we had to go to Walmart for a new prescription for Kimberly and to Costco for food for us both, and that was less fun than being attacked with a rolling pin.

First up, there were lines to get into both stores. Walmart took me about 20 minutes, Costco took us 30.

As I'd feared would be the case, those lines look like petri dishes for disease, the exact thing that these restrictions are supposed to be avoiding. Walmart was pretty decent, but the way the barriers were laid out that guided the lines, it was easy to be within 6 foot of people, depending on how people were aligned in the zig-zag rows on either side of you. Costco was worse, because the back-and-forth just before the door put you maybe 4-5 feet from people on the other sides, with no way of avoiding it.

So good job, idiot Kauai mayor. You've replaced casual interactions with people within the store with long-term interactions with people while you stand in line for 20-30 minutes, and we know those long-term interactions are how COVID-19 spreads.

In the Costco line, the lady in front of us commented that we might be safe from COVID-19 now (questionable), but we'd all have melanoma in 10 years. (Because we were standing in line in the direct Hawaiian sun.)

Which I agree with. I actually had previously stood in the Walmart line slathering myself with sunscreen while I waited (which was probably too late for that line, but likely helped out later).

And I thought: "Having to put on sunscreen to get a drug prescription is perhaps the most ridiculous thing ever."

The line at Costco also had one other delightful feature: it ran all the way to the back of the store, then looped back into the parking lot ... blocking all of the handicap spaces.

I was pissed at the people at first, but as we were forced to get into the same line I realized that none of us had any power to prevent the problem at that point.

This is the continued fault of our aforementioned idiot mayor in Kauai, who has now amended the local interpretation of the shelter-in-place order twice, but has done absolutely nothing to protect the rights of the disabled, and all it would take is a reminder that these new regulations still need to respect the ADA.

But even more obviously it's the liability (legally) of these stores, in this case Costco, who was requiring a line to enter the store, then allowing it to block their handicapped spaces.

The stores were both more crowded than I expected.

The Walmart I would guess only had 50 people last time I was there, which would have reflected v1 of the mayor's emergency decree, and this time I think it had 100, which reflected the day-two, oops I messed up, v2 of the interpretation. Despite the annoying line, it was probably the right number to help people maintain distance in the store.

The Costco theoretically only was allowed 100 people, but I'd guess there were 200 or 300 in there. Which was the right amount for the size of the store. (The idiot mayor's decree just gave one allowed patron count for all stores larger than 50,000 square feet, and the typical Costco is three times that size.) There was no change to the proclamations, so either Costco is ignoring the mayor's idiocy, and just doing what's realistic to keep everyone separated in the store (and the numbers inside were 100% OK), or else they've cut a deal under the table. I don't care which: they've done what's necessary for everyone on the island to actually get food. If Costco had instead listened to the mayor's proclamation (especially the really stupid v1 which would have limited Costco to 50 people), I honestly believe there would have been food riots starting in the Costco parking lot.

Oh yeah, there was toilet paper.

In fact, generally, the shortages seem to be resolved. Which makes sense, as it's been about a month since the anti-cooperators began panic-buying hordes of materials at the expense of the rest of the citizens. And so, with some time to produce new resources and ship then in, supplies have returned.

I bought a regular pack of toilet paper at Walmart, our first stop, but then I saw at Costco they had what I really wanted, which is Costco's massive pack of 30 rolls.

Not hoarding, honest, just buying what they had, then what I really wanted.

I suppose I could have stood in a 20-minute line at Walmart to return the first pack.

(Not likely.)

Funny story, every cart at Costco looks like the owner is hoarding.

Because it's Costco.

But I saw one freakish human actually really genuinely stockpiling at the expense of the rest of the people in the store. He literally had 8-9 rotisserie chickens in his basket. (My dad thinks that Costco is actually limiting people to one rotisserie chicken right now. I certainly hope the chicken hoarder got turned back at the register.)

And crazy hoarder heard us talking about refried beans, which were only available in flats of 8 cans, which we did not want. (Because we'd either never use them, or we'd eat EIGHT CANS of refried beans.) And when we said we weren't going to get them, he said we should because YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN THEY MIGHT DISAPPEAR OFF THE SHELVES AND NEVER BE SEEN AGAIN.

Enjoy those chickens and refried beans, dude. And I'm sure the 7-8 people who didn't get rotisserie chickens because of you would say the same.

(Not.)

Generally, Lihue was much more crowded than expected. Certainly, areas like the mall had tumbleweeds rolling through their parking lot, but Costco and Walmart had their parking lots about 60-75% of their normal occupancy. Home Depot looked if anything fuller. There was a drive-through line at Taco Bell (where we grabbed some take-home lunch) that ran a ways into the parking lot. The roads were about as busy as I'd expect at the times we drove, maybe a little less, but not much.

And I increasingly understand why this pisses people off so much. Because I'm sacrificing. I'm not gaming. I'm not going to my folks house on Sundays. I'm carefully limiting my trips into Lihue (and they'd be almost non-existent if not for that physical therapy.) I'm not building shelves with my dad. I'm not swimming with him. And here are the jackasses acting like it's all a f***ing holiday, presumably because they're not working. So I'm sacrificing, and it's not just that these other people aren't, but they're doing the things that will either force me to sacrifice longer or make it pointless.

If there's actually COVID-19 in the community here on Kauai. Because that isn't clear yet. We went three days without new cases, and then had one new one today and two new ones presumably that will show up on the stats tomorrow.

All still travelers? Probably.

But one of the problems is that Hawaii is becoming either increasingly secretive or increasingly incompetent at reporting out stats as time goes on. It looks like the latter, because after a few weeks of not talking about the origin of COVID-19 cases, we suddenly got some charts that showed travelers vs. community spread vs they don't know. But the specifics are very short. For example, as of Kauai case #13, the mayor said that there was still no community spread, but for #14 + #15 today, he didn't say anything, and those charts even if up-to-date aren't precise enough to tell.

So, that's a pretty big deal, because there's a wide difference in danger between travelers having COVID-19 and it actively spreading in our community, and our mayor is refusing to tell us which state we're in as of today.

I'd kind of hoped to get back to that World of Greyhawk / DnDClassics this afternoon, to make up for losing most of the "work" today, but I fiddled around and played some PACG when I got home, then went for a walk in the golf course, then generally putzed around this evening.

(Golf course: also super busy. It's had maybe twice as many walkers as usual the last two times I've been there, and more annoyingly, people hanging out in the pavilion, talking and enjoying themselves in violation of the shelter-in-place.)

But with that toehold of new work, I think I can at least finish those two Greyhawk product histories this weekend ... and then we're off to the races again.

(And I've got other stuff too, because it's just been hard to be productive lately. I should offer some comments on a RWOT paper that I was involved with, and there are chores to be done around the house, and I need to get some paperwork into the folks who'll be my new brokers as long as our house sale goes through ...

But it's hard to do stuff with the looming uncertainty of the world.)

This is hard.

It's not the sheltering in place. That's fine.

But instead it's the bleak uncertainty.

It's the day-to-day grayness as we're denied the interactions that bring us joy in life.

It's the feeling that we're living in a police state, that any departure from our house, no matter how legitimate and allowed, might be met with a martial presence.

I awoke this morning, and I thought "Still under shelter-in-place, with no end in sight". And it felt bleak.

I've got so much work that I could be doing. I've got some Mechanics & Meeples lined up for writing (they're all partially finished in fact). And, I'm ready to dive back into Designers & Dragons for my product histories project that got put on hold about a year ago, when our move started really ramping up.

But it's really hard to get the gumption to go in the evening, after I've already put in a day of work for Skotos.

And when everything's so gray.

So I've been reading a fair amount. A little little literature (current The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe), quite a few comics. And too much news. (I need to just stop reading the news.)

Ah, Skotos. The plan was for today to be my last day of full-time work, but that alas has not happened.

I'm certainly working less efficiently during this pandemic. But I am getting good coding in every day. There's just a lot to do. I'm getting close to a first-cut of a complete "thin auth" server from Skotos, but the difference between a first-cut and a final release can be monumental.

So I told Chris I was willing to give Skotos a few more weeks of my time, because I really am intent on leaving things in good order.

So the next few weeks, I do a few days of work on the Skotos and RPGnet code (Monday to Wednesday is the plan), and I give Chris a little work on Blockchain Commons (Thursday is the plan), and I start taking Fridays off, hopefully to do my own writing.

It seemed like a good compromise, and I'm not particularly upset about it, given the worrying state of the world. The coding gives me something to occupy myself with, that I can genuinely focus on.

One of the problems with the shelter-in-place here in Kauai is that it's coincided with a few weeks of gray, wet weather. I mean, that's ironic, because I wouldn't be out much anyway, because of the weather. But somehow it layers the feeling of claustrophobia. Because it's gray physically and psychically.

That gray faded back just enough for me to cut the lawn yesterday (well, other than the evil hillside, but I don't trust my knee on the hillside currently). Though I decided I was done when it started drizzling again.

But today it was the high 70s when I was done with my Skotos work and looking pretty sunny, so I headed out to Poipu for my legally permitted swimming.

I expected the beach to be emptier than I'd ever seen it, and it was. But there were somewhat surprisingly two or three dozen sunbathers and beachsitters, who are definitely not allowed by the shelter-in-place order. The timeshares right there by Poipu seemed the most likely culprit. It was very disappointing to discover that even while we're getting really fascist police intrusions like traffic stops blocking up our highway, they're not doing anything about people just blatantly lounging on the beach.

In any case, I swam, and afterward I walked down to the Sheraton and back, a beloved walk from when Kimberly and I stayed here way back in 2001 (though it's changed a lot, as some of that beachfront was still filled with ruined buildings from Iniki when we first visited).

The Sheraton had quite a few beachside people too (even though the Sheraton is closed). It also had quite a few surfers (another legally allowed activity). I enjoyed watching them for a bit (though not too long, as surf-gawking is not a legally allowed exercise).

So, maybe getting out to the beach will help a bit, and I did get some steps and some swimming yards (though I haven't actually hit my step goal in over a week).

But this problem still seems like it's going to stretch on ... forever.

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Entries tagged with pandemic

From Temescal to Sintra

Poor Callisto

Three Steps Forward, and a Few Back

RIP: The California

Vaccination & Disease in Hawaii

Disease & Vaccination in the Hawaiian Islands

Kauai Gets Thrown Under the Bus

Life Amidst the Pandemic

Dishwasher Destruction (and Many Meanwhiles)

Back from Oahu

Oahu, Day One: Seizures & Disease

Life in these Hawaiian States

In Which Life Returns to Normal (Sort of)

The Tumult of Past & Future

Walkers of the Forbidden Path

In Which All Things Come to An End

In Which Fear & Paranoia Descend (Also: I Eat an Illicit Sandwich)

In Which We Spend 100 Days on Kauai

In Which We Buy Toilet Paper

In Which The Days Are Gray