Cathy Reads at MVT

This morning when I was walking with Cathy she invited me to a virtual reading she was doing this afternoon at the Mānoa Valley Theater. She sent me an email with the links; I tuned in later in the afternoon and ended up buying one of her books. I love her stories!

While I was waiting for Cathy's reading to start, I took a look at the Bamboo Ridge Press website and found Jean Toyama's pandemic poetry. 

It was very lightly drizzling when I left the house; I decided to go walking anyway. I was hoping it would get drier as I made my way up the hill and it did! As I was on my way up I saw Calvin the Recycler and Fred on their morning walk. During my walk I saw Lynnette with Mary & Noe down by the park. I walked up Lurline with Yan; her husband was going to take Lucky for a walk later in the day. We saw Lorraine up by the circle so Yan walked with her counterclockwise as I headed back to the car. But as I was crossing at the top of Sierra I saw Cathy so I walked with her; she had not seen Stef this morning. Cathy & I walked clockwise around the circle and passed Lorraine & Yan! As I was leaving I saw Cathy headed up Matsonia on her way home.

Twetny-six minutes before sunrise at home.

Twenty-two minutes before sunrise on Waiʻalae.

Nine minutes before sunrise on Maunalani.

Ten minutes after sunrise on Sierra.

I was IMing with Kai in the afternoon and he sent me this photo of what it looks like out their front door. He said, "This morning. That's not fog." This is smoke mainly from the forest fires in eastern Washington, the largest one is about 150 miles away from him, on the other side of the mountains. But there is a small one (<5000 acres) about 30 miles away; it's on the other side of a major river and a highway so he is in no danger from it.

He can usually see the foothills when he looks out the door.

The US Wildfire map.

According to Duolingo, I learned 8 new words this week. I am on lessons about directions and not just mauka and makai. I learned about up, down, next to, in the middle of, north, south, intersection, and corner; those are the 8 new words.


LG Green is working from home and still putting out his daily Facebook Live video about COVID-19 cases here. The LG's experience highlights what I have said about testing, that is, if your test comes back negative that is not a free pass to do whatever you want. It just means at the moment they stuck the swab up your nose you were not shedding virus. LG Green had a negative test on September 5th before he was allowed to start his shift at the ER; on September 8th he was in close contact with the staff member who tested positive on September 11th which triggered widespread rapid testing of the LG & the rest of his staff. He is currently asymptomatic. Based on his date of exposure, he will be in isolation until at least September 26th. If he develops symptoms during that period, he will have wait until his symptoms begin to improve and he has been free of fever for 24 hours without the aid of fever-reducing methods.  

There were 131 new COVID-19 cases reported today bringing the total known cases up to 10,588. There was 1 new death, bringing that total up to 97. There are 7073 active cases. Overall, the state trend is showing a slow but decreasing amount of new cases when averaged over a 7 day period. We appear to be holding steady on the hospital beds; the place where we need help is on staff who are pretty overworked right now, especially the ICU nurses. testing has gone up again after a lull during the holiday weekend; the original 2-weeks of surge testing was extended for another week.  
 
 
 


I had mentioned earlier in the week that there was a new dashboard that the department of health was rolling out, but I have not been using it because it said "(PROTOTYPE)" and it has continued to say that even though you can get to it from a link that is publically available. As with a lot of the things we are seeing with the DOH, there is a disconnect between this dashboard and the department of health website; I have not found a way that you can get to this dashboard from the official DOH website for COVID-19. They still show the dashboard I started using back at the beginning of the pandemic. I don't know if they will ever remove the prototype label, but I will begin adding the data pieces that are not found on other sites. Like about contact tracing, though to be fair, this one doesn't have that either, but it's "coming soon". I'll write more about this in another post.

The header that takes up over 1/3 of the page is stationary which makes getting nice screen shots difficult.

Hauʻoli lā Hānau e Kathleen & Dr. Ric!