Hurricane Douglas

I’ll add updates to this post.

For reference, we are on the island of Oahu. Any video updates will be on Instagram stories (user name is tempestpilot).

Saturday

6am: A hurricane hasn't made catastrophic landfall since 1991, but it has been that kind of year. Nobody would be surprised if every hurricane of the season made landfall, one after another, like a meteorological stampede.

After work today I'll help cover the windows, round up the chickens, and put supplies in the basement in case we need to wrap up all the kids and cats in blankets and run down there. You have to go outside to get to the basement door, so that's not something that would be fun to do in roof-peeling wind.  

Usually the mynah birds, finches, and bulbuls cause a morning ruckus, but it’s silent. The roosters aren’t crowing. Feels weird.

- - - -

11am: emergency alarms just went off, phones all buzzing with hurricane warnings.

- - - - 

6pm: after repair attempts, the windows are more broken. Stupid 50 year-old metal hinges. 

- - - -

Sunday 

8:40am: embarrassing update. So, the bedroom window now has no louvres at all, it’s just a bare screen. Critical fail. Then this morning two terrible things happened; Billy the Kitten had an enormous noodle-sized worm come out of his butt, and my mother also broke her window. She has plywood (but no saw) and cat butt-worm pills, so at 7am Mike packed up his power tools and drove toward the storm to get to her house, cut boards, cover her window, and retrieve the medicine. There’s a chance he’s going to get stranded there, the rain has started. So now it is me vs. the open windows. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, I always say (I mean, doing a thing well is better, but sometimes the only way to do a thing is to just do it), so I cut up a bunch of boxes and duct taped cardboard over all the open windows. It looks like shit, but the rain is staying out so far. Then I baked a Dutch baby for the kids.

Sure, that’ll do it

Chocolate chips for breakfast, why not 

The worst part of all of this is that I wasn’t sure what the butt worm even was, it was impossibly big, I thought it was a rubber band. But then I thought maaaaybe it was moving, and the ends looked suspiciously parasitic, so I shook it into a baggie and then took a time lapse video of it to see if it was alive. This was a terrible, terrible idea. 

If anyone wants to see my gross time lapse butt-worm video, let me know. 

- - - -

11am: sirens just went off.

- - - -

1:45: Here is the very worst video:

- - - -

9pm: no wind, just distant low orange clouds going by. The cardboard worked, ha. Finished painting the heliconia and watched ET with the kids.

Here we go

Hurricane season has started. This gif will refresh to show current conditions.

Hurricanes usually bounce off the invisible shield (the buffer around the Big Island), but this year we have decided to refinance the mortgage, which means nature has been invited to drop a tree on the house. Sorry, everyone.

If the house gets flattened, I'm moving us all to Homer, Alaska, I thought, having finished the Great Alone (good book, sappy last chapter - maybe the author got mad when her editor told her she couldn't have them all get eaten by bears at the end). I found a nice cabin, had some daydreams about all the things I could knit and actually wear, and then Homer was hit by an earthquake.

Fine. Minding my own business.

Edited to add:

Oh, yep, it’s a category 4 now.

And our window louvres are rusted open and busted. Haha, shit.

This is a cool tracking tool.

Well, shit

Mjolnir has cancer. He’s only a year old,  he’s Gavin’s special guy - the tiny kitten he rescued from a roadside ditch next to the gruesome remains of a littermate. We’re going to do everything we can to save him. Gavin’s last special young cat, Astrid, died terribly of a blood clot. I can’t stand the thought of him losing another.

Finally reading a book I really connect with. Freezing cold, rural isolation, dangerous people in the darkness  - these are things I know about. I can feel this story in my bones. Pick up this one if you read Tolkien as a youth and are interested in winter survival stories.

Feeling sad and tense. I don’t really have anybody to talk to, and my notepad had to be put away. Spending my lunch breaks and early mornings in books right now, instead. It feels like a small existence. I’m grateful to have it, and worried about losing the security we’ve cultivated, but I’m lonely I guess. Should get outside and have a walk through the woods, maybe.

Roses and water

Finished the roses. Roses are okay. And it's a good thing I like painting dead ones, because they don't grow here, and the ones you can buy give up pretty quickly. I have a living stalk (stalk?) of a rose plant growing in the yard, but no idea how to coax it into making flowers. I have tried... well, almost nothing. But if I had, it would be dead, so I feel like I'm winning.

My drying corner is getting out of control. If I put them in the basement, the cockroaches lick them. And you can't get rid of the roaches because the basement opens up into the underside of the house, so you'd have to poison the entire outdoors to fix the problem. Or seal it off, which is beyond me. Last week I found rat dropping down there, and so I told off the cat for shirking his duties and left the studio door open (which, again, is kind of unnecessary, but I guess the cat is too lazy to crawl under the house to get into the studio), and now there are dead rats all over the yard, which I have to pick up every morning. The cucumbers and tomatoes were dug up by chickens, but we’ve got a bumper crop of dead rats. So that is going well.

Next on the goals checklist is a landscape. Decided to warm up to landscape painting by painting some water. Water is kind of like a landscape. I have definitely seen water in landscapes.

Kind of fun, and you don’t have to make it look like anything. No eyes to set too far apart, no perspective to get lopsided. Water is great, you just slosh it on wherever, nobody gives a shit. A+ painting subject.

Work went back to normal public hours, we lost half our staff, and now I'm on that chair for 8 hours a day. The chair has lost its novelty. I'm getting kind of attached to the day-glo vest, though.

yes, I've got that Patterson book for you

win/lose

Finally got a gold star on my license, through no skill or effort of my own! I don't know which DMV employee went through the declined applications and decided I deserved one, but I could kiss them - if it weren't considered attempted murder under present circumstances.

Still playing phone tag with kitty surgeons, all of whom seem to be on vacation unless we want to come as walk-ins and pay emergency fees. Getting aggravated.

Mjolnir hasn't noticed the hump yet and is happy snogging shoes like usual, so it doesn't seem like an emergency? I DON'T KNOW, that's why people make appointments!

Painted my kid again. I love their little faces so much. Gavin has been hiding his face under a beard, but I'll go ahead and paint him anyway. Nice try, kid.

Started on some roses that have been waiting for weeks to be painted. They are dead now. I kind of like painting dead flowers better, though.

Tried painting those bottom two petals after it got dark, and surprise, they don't match.

Lesson I will never learn.

Reading a book that is juuuuust interesting enough to keep me turning pages (who's going to find that dead body rotting in the woods?), while not having any likeable characters for me to root for (I don't care if they all end up dead bodies in the woods at this point). Listen up, authors of 'contemporary literature': your writing is not any more sophisticated if all the characters are assholes. People crack jokes all the time, especially when they are depressed or nervous. Even assholes. Figure this out. 

Baby birds and cat pie

It’s lost baby season again. One of the wild chickens freaked out when her eggs started moving and was trying to murder the babies when my mother rescued them. They finished hatching in a plastic carrier. One of them got pecked in the eye before help arrived. We will need to sew a very tiny eye patch.

Whoop

Between the rain and the neighborhood fireworks, the very dim bulbuls in our lychee tree dropped another fledgling. It spent all night in a cold pile of wet leaves before I found it this morning. It took a few hours of warming to convince the little guy he wasn’t dead. He’s not sure how to feel about that.

Before and after getting warmed up and eating some banana

Babies are tiring, but I’m glad about them.

It is pie day. Made an apple pie, and Zenny decorated it, and then she made a tiny peach pie with the leftover dough.

Walked to the store by my mother’s house to find a domestic beer and we got yelled at by a big half-naked man for not buying him a quesadilla just because he wasn’t Jesus. “Your nose is hanging out of your mask,” my mom told him. “YOU LET GOD WORRY ABOUT THAT.” “Yeah, okay. God can buy you that quesadilla, too.” 

Left with Guinness, guiltily arguing that supporting a local grocery chain was kind of like buying local beer. Did not have to swing the bag of beer at the quesadilla Jesus man as we walked back, because he was sitting at a bench eating a half gallon of ice cream and spitting the peanuts onto the ground. 

There is meat, there is corn, the trees are dropping fruit (and babies) and the weather is warm. Things are pretty ok.