Bon Voyage, Kai!

Kai left today. He got up early so that he would have 3 hours before we needed to head to the airport. After his coffee he did the final packing of his suitcase, including the books he wanted to take back on this trip; he was 8 pounds overweight. Those books ended up in a box to be shipped to himself. Then he took a shower, bad move. He ate up most of the extra time that we were going to use to stop at the post office. Now we had an extra 15 minutes to get to the airport. Good thing! There were several accidents on the freeway as well as 2 of the alternate routes; we got to the airport 30 minutes late, giving him 1&1/2 hours to make it through the agricultural inspection, bag drop, TSA line, & walking to his gate. Fortunately, things were not as bad here as they are at some other airports, he made it with 1 hour to spare before boarding time. 

The traffic was still bad on the Ewa bound lanes going towards the airport as I headed home.

This morning, as I was lying in bed reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, I got a text from CJ; she was concerned that I had not posted anything on the blog for a while. I had to explain the situation & that I would be postdating things as I caught up with posting them. I can usually do the post for the day as well as one older post; so if this has also been a concern for you there will now start to be multiple posts on most days but you will have to go back to 07/07 to find the old posts which will show up in chronological order. (I wrote most of each post each evening but did not have time to add the photos or captions.)

A while later, I got a text from The Potential Most Favorite Roommate: 

To which I replied:

I got another email from Dave this morning; he had emailed a couple weeks ago while I was on Hawaiʻi Island. At that time I told him I was off-island and would be available the week of the 29th if numbers were still high; he was emailing today to find out exactly when I could come in to do the first call contact tracing. New case counts have continued to stay in the triple digits since his first email. 

Originally Kai was going to mail 2 boxes of books back to himself; 1 box was books that he either purchased on this trip or took out of the boxes of his books that were accidentally moved to Kohala. The other box was books he had purchased on earlier trips & left here. I will mail the boxes for him next week.

While going through the agricultural inspection at the airport, Kai found out that he would not have been able to take sugar cane to his co-worker even if we had been able to find it. He also found out the raw coconut meat he had for his housemate Dustin was OK; hope Dustin likes it! 

(Photo by Kai)

Evan called in the afternoon, Sarah went to the psychiatrist on Thursday & got a prescription for lithium. She insisted on picking it up herself yesterday but lost her car keys, then borrowed a bike from a friend & lost the bike. She ended up checking herself in to the hospital yesterday but tried to check herself out today. Sarah is now on a 72-hour involuntary hold; she will be assessed on Monday.

Later in the evening, I picked up our CSA box. Before I bagged things & put them away I had to clean all the old produce out of the refrigerator. Apparently while I was gone hardly anything was eaten. I was able to salvage a lot of the root vegetables; I cut off the wilted greens and will be roasting the rest of them tomorrow night.

There was a soursop in CSA box; I wonder how Sarah would have felt about that? Would she want to make it in to juice? Not sure, but it looks like soursop juice does not have any components that would have helped her mental health crisis like she seemed to feel it would. Kai says I should not try to assign rational thought to the actions & words of someone in the middle of a manic episode.

The Aix weather app forecast measurable amounts of precipitation here from early morning through midafternoon; it was sort of right. We had drizzles on & off throughout the morning & early afternoon. I did not grab any screen shots of weather on Hawaiʻi Island or outside Marysville where Kai is at so I don't know what it might have been like today.

At 7:49 a.m. when I went to move the car.

At 11:19 a.m. on the way to the airport.

At 12:17 p.m., just leaving the airport.

At 12:18 p.m., freeway now heads towards the mountains.

There were 258 new cases of COVID-19 reported today; bringing the total number of known cases of 40,383 cases. This is the 10th day in a row of cases in the triple digits; the vast majority of them in unvaccinated people. There were no new deaths reported so the death toll remains 527; currently 1777 cases are considered active. 

Hauʻoli lā Hānau e Shirley!