Covid Golf, Nene Chicks, a New Techno-Toy

 [Note: This is another blog based on my weekly emails to my family on the mainland.]

1/15/22

Aloha Ohana!

An interesting & enjoyable week.  First the weather has returned to our usual state of relentlessly nice, even in the afternoons.  This has meant (a) lots of electrons for our PV system, and (b) lots of therms for our pool (as you know, "therms" are what is measured by a "therm-o-meter".  The pv production has recovered our losses from a few weeks of lousy (for us) weather, and the pool is now in the tolerable (for us) range (78-80d).  

My new techno-toy arrived late Monday afternoon -- aka desktop computer.  I got it going pretty quickly with just a couple of glitches and confirmed it is what I was hoping for.  However, the tuning and tweaking to get it fully commissioned has taken longer.  This is partly so I can enjoy the process (have to play with my toys when they're new, of course), and also my setup is more complex than most because of my idiosyncratic preferences for certain software and my obsession with privacy and security. In short, it isn't just a matter of turning on the machine and following the instructions.  The final step will probably be tomorrow when I attempt to transfer all the files and apps from the old machine to the new one.  Although the transfer software I'm using suggests this is easy, my experience leads me to expect a fair amount of troubleshooting to get everything working again.  We'll see.

On Tuesday Karen and I played golf at Makalei.  I was a Covid substitution for her usual partner, whose husband developed virus-like symptoms over the previous weekend.  Both of them are fully-vaxed but his mild symptoms were consistent with a breakthough case.  He tried to find a home test but there's been a real run on them here and he had to wait to get a pcr test. The results came back yesterday, and were negative. To their credit, until they found out for sure they did the responsible thing by both self-isolating.

The weather on the course was beautiful.  I did pretty well (1 par and 1 bogey), but overall not quite as good

Chicks are Between Mom & Pop

as last time.  We saw a fair number of Nenes, about 20, and roughly 5 chicks.  However, there were several chickless mating pairs, and we came across a pair in which one of the mates had a broken wing. As I've mentioned before,  Nenes migrate each year from elsewhere on the island, which would be impossible with a broken wing.  It is likely, then, that it was injured in that big windstorm about a month ago.  It will be interesting to see what happens when it is the usual time to migrate in the spring.  If the Nene with the broken wing can't fly, both of them will probably stay for the summer -- Nenes tend to be very devoted to their mates, even staying together for life. Sadly, the lower than normal number of chicks suggests that a bunch of nests were destroyed in the storm, but

Grounded?

it was still heartwarming to see that some of them survived.  The peacocks are just now entering their mating season, so the mature males have regrown their tail feathers and were strutting their stuff -- a real show.

No Planet Fitness this week -- just too much virus around, but on Friday Karen & I went back to Makalei's driving range and putting green instead.  Not as much exercise but safer and a better view (!). Unfortunately, about half way through our bucket of balls, nature decided to give us a demonstration of what it means for this area to be called a "cloud forest" when the conditions turned misty, cool and foggy.  Quite a difference from Tuesday. Afterward we had a picnic at the beach where it was sunny and warm, definitely mo' betta.

Ok, that's about it. I hope you are all holding up and hanging in there.  Sure seems like everyday life is a challenge these days.  Off to market and to the beach.