My Summer Vacation: Remedy Staffing

I applied through Remedy Staffing for the 3 contact tracing related positions with the Hawaiʻi State Department of Health that Nicole sent out yesterday. Once I got the information plugged in for the 1st one it was very easy; just a couple clicks. But the first one was tedious & not always intuitive.

One of the open positions.

Filling out the online application.

I also applied via Nicole for the part-time contact tracing position with the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education to do contact tracing in public schools. It says 17 hours per week maximum so that would allow me to also do the First Contact Calls with OmniTrak on the weekends & holidays.

I'm getting better at breaking up the frozen lau ʻuala for my proothie. I have also increased the amount of time I blend it; it's a delicate balance between blended enough to break everything up and blending too much so it gets too warm.

I got an email this morning from Sue, our Neighborhood Safety Watch coordinator. Apparently there was an accident a couple blocks away yesterday evening. It is one of the intersections I travel through a lot. It appears a truck was crossing the intersection when it was struck broadside by a car in the through lane.

(Photo by Donald)

I had another corn tortilla quesadilla for lunch. Yesterday I had to heat them up in the microwave since they were frozen; they were a little hot but they rolled up nicely. Today they were thawed out so I tried rolling them up without pre-heating; did not work too well, the tortilla cracked. I think I have to pre-heat the plain tortilla before adding the cheese & rolling it up.

I got an email from Marjorie, looking for MRC volunteers to help with another vaccine outreach & education event in Chinatown on Sunday; they will also being doing vaccinations at the same time. I told her I could make it. Then, about an hour later, it was cancelled! Auē!

I gave The Roommate Who Likes to Wash Dishes a ride to the office where he will be working in a week. He got a new job! Since all of the application & interview process was done online, he requested a quick meeting with his new supervisor today so he would know exactly where to go to a week from next Monday; a very responsible thing to do.

On the way there, The Roommate Who Likes to Wash Dishes asked me what I thought about how the new case numbers were going. I told him that in other countries there seemed to be a peak after a several weeks of very high new case numbers, followed by a decline in new cases; the main hypothesis was that the Delta variant was burning through the susceptible people so fast it was cutting its means of transmission & that might be what is happening here. But we have just come off of a holiday weekend & while most people were doing the right thing there were still large gatherings that occurred, most without masks & without physical distancing. I told him we should see how well we did over the next week.

On Wednesday night Arlene had sent me an address that Trudy gave her; it was where she used to live in Honolulu. When we were at Ohta-san's nenki lunch we discovered we had both lived on the same street! Trudy said she lived half a block from the elementary school, we lived a block away. The address Arlene sent me was where Trudy had lived 3 years ago. I went by that address today after dropping The Roommate Who Likes to Wash Dishes off. It turns out, we both did live near the elementary school. The only thing was Trudy was near Aliʻiolani while we are near Liholiho; we were on opposite sides of the freeway! I took a photo & sent it to Arlene to share with Trudy so she could see what the house she lived in looked like now. Sadly, the large mango tree she remembered is now gone.

It also looks like they got rid of all other plants on the lot!

I had Turkey Chili from Kokua Market for dinner tonight. We had eaten all the andagi; I used a slice of Lois' mango bread instead.

I am going to contact John from RevoluSun on Monday to get us signed up for this solar program. You can earn fees by having your battery system used as a way to modulate the use of electrical energy on your island. Right now it is available to RevoluSun customers on Oʻahu and Rising Sun Solar on Maui & Hawaiʻi Island. They plan on expanding it to other companies; I hope they add ProVision Solar on Hawaiʻi Island soon, they were my installer.

The Aix weather app forecast rain during the daylight hours for Honolulu; we had a couple of drizzles & partly cloudy skies. For Kapaʻau, Aix forecast rain all day; the local paper only gave it a 50% chance of rain. The Honomū weather station recorded 0.00 inches; so the local paper was more accurate. It seemed to be most accurate for Marysville, forecasting cloudy skies with no measurable precipitation.

Kaimukī looking westerly at 8:10 a.m.

Honomū looking northerly at 8:11 a.m.

Marysville looking southeasterly at 8:11 a.m. HST.

Drizzle in Kaimukī, looking southerly at 12:29 p.m.

Nā Koʻolau at 3:37 p.m.

Surf on the south facing shores look like they are still the best bet, followed by that on the east facing shores. Although the forecast indicated some small surf on north & west facing shores, the live cams did not show much when I checked.

Drizzle at Chun's Reef but no waves at 8:12 a.m.

Hilo Bay (N) at 8:13 a.m.

Waikīkī (S) at 8:13 a.m.

Waikoloa (W) at 8:14 a.m.

There was a magnitude 4 earthquake about 45 miles northeast of Homer, AK, this evening. It did not generate a tsunami.

I tried to create a Hawaiʻi SMART Health Card, it did not work for me. I am not sure why, but I do know initially my 2nd dose was entered incorrectly by a volunteer at the Data Entry Center as a 1st dose; essentially I was shown as having 2 first doses. It was supposed to have been corrected so I don't know why it's not working. I'll try again later.

Well it looks like the monoclonal antibodies that antivaxxers are turning to when they get COVID-19 because they won't get vaccinated or wear masks is not as effective as a magic bullet that they think it is. Apparently it is not as effective as some variants.

The Vaccine Administration Management System (VAMS) has released an update that can provide a QR code to recipients to provide proof of vaccination. I'm not really sure what this means since most people don't have access to VAMS. I wonder if the state SMART Health Card system is hooked in to this & this is where the QR code is coming from?

If you haven't been vaccinated yet, you may not want to read this next part. The CDC says unvaccinated people are 11 times more likely to die when the contract COVID-19 than vaccinated people. One study tracked over 600,000 people from April through mid-July which included the period when Delta began to surge. Unvaccinated people were 4.5 times more likely to become infected and 10 times more likely to end up in the hospital than fully vaccinated people. Unlike last year, this year I have talked to 2 people who had friends or family members die from COVID-19 just a few weeks before I called to them. Both were unvaccinated (like the people I was talking to) and both were in their 30's; one had underlying health conditions, the other did not.

There were 747 new cases of COVID-19 reported today, bringing the total known cases up to 70,320. Though this new case number is lower than a couple weeks ago, it is higher than the past few days & may be the start of the surge due to exposure through gatherings over the Labor Day holiday. There were 8 new deaths reported today, raising the death toll to 641; currently there are 10,377 cases considered active. As of yesterday there were 1,914,345 doses of vaccine administered, providing 64.9% of the population with full vaccination and 73.1% with their first dose. The 7-day new case count for Oʻahu is 403 with a positivity rate of 8.0%.