Cold overnight

 I listed 25 things on Ebay last night so horray for me. It got down to 34 degrees last night so it was cold. I didn't go anywhere. 

Instead, among other things, I watched a video by "Photo Luke Hawaii" of a driver's eye view of a drive from Kaka'ako in Town to Ka'a'awa on the windward side, then turning around and going back to McCully in Town again. 

I tried looking for things I knew on the windward side like the art supply where I actually had an account in high school. I believe it was called Windward Art Supply and was run by some New Zealanders (or Australians, I'm not sure) and when I first went to get something one of them made a crack about "Sign your life away" which made me feel deeply embarrassed. I  think they did me a favor, though. 

And I tried looking for the place we'd last lived with my mom, close enough to Chinaman's Hat that I could paddle, with a double-ended paddle I'd made, to it and back on a big varnished hollow wood 1930s/40s surfboard we had. The place is/was well hidden though, and I could not identify it for sure. 

Likewise the set of A-frame houses on the beach where we first lived for a few weeks when we got to Hawaii in the late 1960s. I remember my older brother getting me up in the morning to go to a place nearby on the beach with a big crab hole. And over the other way, there was an old washing machine in the ocean a short distance out, and my dad had great fun trying to throw rocks to land in the barrel of the thing. I didn't see the A-frames either. 

It was a nice virtual visit, though. People say Oahu is crowded and it is certainly so compared to the other islands, but there are vast areas of Oahu with absolutely no one living there. Maui is about the same size of Oahu with maybe 10% of the population if that. The Big Island is, well, huge, and is so sparsely populated that it really is the Wild West there, where if you leave for the weekend without having someone to guard your place you can return to find everything including and especially your water catchment system stolen, and where it's too common to be killed by packs of feral dogs.

Anyone who pines for the Apocalypse just needs to move to the Big Island and try Apocalypse Lite on for a try. Save up $10k or $20k, buy an "unpermitted" place (they all are) and have fun! 

It was nice "visiting" the old Windward Side though. I really wonder how things are for the ecosystem because when  I was a kid in the 70s subsistence fishing and foraging were a thing for quite a few people. The waters off of Hau'u'a and Punalu'u were somewhat barren, overfished. There were not a lot of feral domestic animals around. I'm pretty sure they were eaten. Not by people originally from the mainland, probably, but the place, then as well as now, is a mixing-pot of peoples, to some of whom meat is meat, and even to a few of whom, within living memory, people ate each other. 

Now it's been a generation or two eating American type food, and since the mid-80s portions got bigger and kids got fatter and the old-fashioned hunger I grew up with seemed to have ceased to be a thing. Feral animals are everywhere. The fishing might actually be very good, at least for a few years until things get further into the heat-death we've engineered for the Earth. 

I was up all night and woke up around 4. Maybe 4:30. I ate etc., and left here at 6. I rode up to Dai Thanh for some things, then 99 Ranch for some other things, then lastly H Mart for yet other things. 

It'll get down to the low 30s here overnight and yet, as cold as it was out there, I still saw zombies out doing zombie things. So I still had to dodge 'em. 

I got back in here and put things away and ate the hot food I'd gotten at 2-for-1 at H Mart, and reflected on how I still have $12 in my wallet and I've only spent a bit less than $100 of this last paycheck.