Quarantine Days 25-infinity

 Well, that sucked.

Quarantine 2020 - Days 4-24

Before I began the quarantine section of this blog, I should have realized the basic sameness of all days when you're stuck inside...I did two entries for the first three days, and now it's April 4th, Palm Sunday, and I'm just getting around to the third.

Day 4 was Erica's 40th birthday.  She opened some presents from me (well, an envelope with pieces of paper in it telling her what he presents were...)  I got her a trip to Portland, though who knows when we'll take it, and another year's subscription to the wine of the month club of a local wine shop in town.  We were supposed to have a knock down, drag out bash at a cool retro bar in the city.  We'd rented out its back room, I bought a bunch of decoration, tons of people were coming, but like all good things these days, the day came and went and we didn't get to celebrate.  When this thing is finally all over, I know two people in this house who are owed big time.

Anyway, again, it's now early April. Most of our days have proceeded thusly: wake up around 6:30am.  Try to get James to do his school work while I send an email to my students with their daily work.  Erica goes upstairs to work and stays there till 4pm.  Juliet begs for food constantly, often going into the pantry to retrieve an apple sauce squeezer and bring it to you to open.  Snack at 10am, Lunch at 11:30.  Juliet naps from noon to about 2:15 while James zones out on tv.  After, we maybe head outside for some time on the swings, and/or hitting baseballs into the neighbor's yard and/or trying to learn to ride a bike, but whining a bunch about not being able to do it.  A nice family walk, and then dinner, then Juliet goes down for bed.  James gets read to (Harry Potter 4).  We get some time to watch tv or read in the evening, then to bed.  Wash. rinse, repeat.  We haven't gone anywhere beyond about a half-mile radius from our home. 

Quarantine 2020 - Day 3

No fever news to report, thank God, so our magic number is 11.  Also, no even semi-puncturings of our protective bubble today.  The closest we got to other people was taking a walk over to the middle school basketball courts and passing a dad with his toddler daughter wandering aimlessly in a field, leaving about a 20 foot distance between us.  They seemed nice, but I guess we'll never know.

Today was "Lucky Day" (the day between James and Erica's birthdays, as decided by James).  We celebrated it by building a sofa cushion fort and then watching Juliet destroy it to the strains of Mylee Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball."   Other fun time-wasting activities: building legos, eating yesterday's pumpkin pie, um...putzing around the house, uh... Juliet has adopted this cute little habit of bringing her coat and hat to you indicate she wants to go out and swing on the playset.  Let's see...what else?  James got to play video games for the first time yesterday, and today was very proud to have gotten all the way to Level 3 of Sonic the Chipmunk, so there's that. 

Pre-St. Patty's baby

Tomorrow is Erica's 40th birthday.  On her 30th, we had an insane night of flip cup at Bridget's old apartment.  Tomorrow is unlikely to feature the same.  She'll get a few presents, and will get to choose the evening movie.  Maybe she'll want to play a game of Carcasonne or Uno? 

If the tenor is this blog entry isn't to your liking, perhaps tune in tomorrow for a report on Erica's birthday, which should feature something in the way of news.  If you're reading this today, please stay in.  Don't go outside.  Don't go near anyone else.  Write a song.  Read a novel.  Pander to small children and their strange and infeasible ideas. 

Stay clean!

QUARANTINE 2020 - Day 2

Happy birthday, James!

We did our best to make the kid feel special today.  He came in at 6:04am and informed us of his own magnanimity in sleeping in until six ("which is how old I am!").  He was awestruck by all of the crappy decorations we strung up while he was sleeping last night, and he tore right into his presents.  Most of the day he spent in his room doing his  new Lego Hogwarts Express set.  In the afternoon, I bent my otherwise iron laws against video games and introduced him to (in his words) "Sonic the Chipmunk."  He was instantly addicted, and we had to tear him from it after about half an hour.

James picked the cuisine today.  Breakfast: chocolate chip pancakes with maple syrup and whipped cream.  Lunch: bagel dogs.  Dinner: frozen pizza.  Desert: ice cream.  Ugh.  With a diet like this, it's gonna be a struggle not to pack on the ol' Covid 19, am I right?

James loving life regardless of circumstances

We had a surprise visitor today.  Uncle Tommy came by for his godson's birthday, claiming to have misunderstood Erica's request not to visit because we're, you know, quarantined.  He didn't stay long, but did bring by two kid-sized outdoor basketballs for James.  I don't know if his visit sets us back to Day 1 on the quarantine, but we decided 'no' since we've already started, and we'll keep extra vigilant on Day 15 to see if we don't get a fever.

Juju takes a reading break on her back

James got lots of video calls from family and friends, and Erica and I broke into our second consecutive nice bottle of wine.  Tomorrow is "Lucky Day," a day decided by James as being lucky since it's the one day that falls between his and Erica's birthday.  Traditionally, the literal Ides of March is not considered "lucky" per se, but nothing means anything anymore in this new insane world we live in.

Stay clean!

Quarantine 2020

DAY 1

Well, it's quarantine season out there, what with the first truly global pandemic since the Spanish Flu of Aught-18.  Erica recently discovered that someone at her office has a suspected case of COVID-19, so we took it upon ourselves to hunker down for a whole fortnight at home.  I've spent the last several weeks larding up our larder with all manner of frozen goods, bottled water, and disinfecting agents, and here we finally are.  It looks pretty grim out there, so while I did feel a bit foolish in the beginning stage of the buying spree, I (lamentably) feel decidedly less so now.

The virus usually shows up first as a fever within 4-5 days of infection, but can lie dormant inside you for up to two weeks.  Basically, we need make the following deadlines to ensure we don't have the bug:
1.) If we don't have a fever by tomorrow, we likely didn't contract the virus on our weekend getaway to Memphis (cool city, cool trip!)
2.) If we don't have a fever by Wednesday, we likely didn't contract it from Erica, whose last day at work was yesterday.
3.) If we don't have a fever by Friday, March 27th, we are almost certainly in the free and clear as long as we aren't exposed after that.  It scares me even to even type this out, since I've spent only one day cooped up in the house/backyard, and that last date seems...man...really far away right now.

Juju enjoys a *lengthy* swing

Tomorrow is James' birthday, poor kid.  What was going to be a blockbuster morning spent marching in the downtown St. Patrick's Day parade, an afternoon at Dave & Busters, and an evening being feted by friends, is now a long-ass day spent at home with his mom and dad and annoying baby sister.  We're going to put up a bunch of decorations, feed him ice cream and pumpkin pie, and do our absolute best to make him feel special.  You only turn six once! 

Erica has made a nice schedule to give our days some structure.  And here it is:

Sorry this is sideways

We did have three possible punctures in our otherwise hermetically-sealed day: a FedEx lady came by with a package (from China, no less), and I had to sign for it with her pen.  Nora dropped off some tupperware but didn't come in, and James' teacher came by with the books and supplies he'll need to do some schoolwork during the reprieve.  His school is off until April 13th.  Mine has moved to "E-Learning" indefinitely. 

Friends, please stay clean out there.

More from Hawai'i

We arrived back in Kailua Kona Monday evening.  It’s a nice town, and clearly the real nerve center of the island.  If Hilo is the business end of things, and the Kohola Coast, where all of the best beaches and ritziest resorts are, then Kailua is sort of the center of actual life.  Along its seawall is Ali’i drive, which is bookended on one side by our hotel, the King Kam, and on the other, the Royal Kona hotel.  The thing to do as a tourist in Kona Town (see how I keep switching up what I call it? I’m just like a local now.) is to basically walk up and down Ali’i drive in the evenings, patronizing it’s same 20 shops and choosing which bar/restaurant at which to have a preprandials (a cool word referring to before-dinner drinks I learned from the Jesuits) and pupus (a cool word because it sounds like “poopoos,” which is funny by any measure), and which to have actual dinner.  There are many slight variations on a theme among these places, and the theme is: vaguely Polynesian seafood place serving mai tais, Kona brewing company beers, and grilled fresh caught ono, mahi mahi, and ahi tuna (delicious, mercury-riddled) at exorbitant rates.  It’s really hard to go that right or wrong with any of these places.  Since we were there for 7 nights, we became acquainted with most of them.  On the Monday at issue here, I think maybe we ate Huggo’s on the Rocks?  Nice beach vibe, good grilled ono, tasty mai tai…you know what?, I won’t belabor the thing you get the picture. 

On the way back we made a few of our customary fruitless stops at the boutiques. 

Now, from here on out, our days consisted of the following: wake up very early for some reason, hit the beach, come back and shower, go out for pupus and preprandials, then dinner, mull about at a few stores we’d already been in, then head back to the hotel for an early evening.  I hope I’m not coming across as being bored by this schedule, because frankly, it rules.

One of these places.  Kona Canoe Club?

On Tuesday morning, we were up and out by 7:00am because we wanted to get to Mauna Kea beach, and parking at this public beach is severely curtailed by the private resort which exploits the beach for its own gain and chokes off parking so as not to subject its clientele to the presence of the hoi polloi.  We did manage to get a spot, thanks to our very early arrival, and the beach didn’t disappoint.  A long white crescent of sand with manageable surf and a mostly sandy bottom?  Can do.  There’s also the resort’s chichi Hau Tree beach bar right on the sand.  We went there. What it lacked in true, ramshackle beach bar charm it made up for in price.  But the mai tai was on point.

The question of whether Manua Kea beach was superior to Hapuna beach got Erica and I thinking of what criteria is best to determine what makes a great beach just that.  Fastidious readers on the blog may remember when I detailed my city rating system.  Here’s the beach system:

Criterion 1: Sand

Is the sand white/light tan and finely ground?  Or is it course and dark (and thus hot)?  Is it wide enough to build sand castles without them being reclaimed by high tide?  Is it too wide (like the beach at Wildwood, NJ), so you have to take special transportation from the boardwalk to the waterline? 

Hapuna ranking: 7.5/10.  A nice, wide beach.  Pretty good sand quality here; light and fine, though not the ideal white white of the Caribbean. 

Muana Kea ranking: 7.5/10.  Ditto, though not quite as wide.

Greatest in my experience:   Bay on St. John; Seven Mile Beach on Grand Cayman.  Superfine, super white sand in abundance.  Enough to make you want to make sand angels. 

Worst in my experience: Butterfly Beach, Santa Barbara, CA.  A supposedly lovely beach that is in reality comically narrow and covered with rotting, flea-covered sea detritus.  Blech.

Criterion 2: Accessibility

Is it easy to get to?  I don’t mean, is it in a foreign country or on a faraway island? (not the beach’s fault), but rather, can you park at it?  Is it a long walk carrying all of your chairs and umbrellas and coolers?  Is some greedy resort squatting on the beach trying to block public access to it?

Hapuna ranking: 8.5/10.  Parking is up a steep hill, but it’s there a plenty.

Muana Kea ranking: 2/10.  Manua Kea resort doing its best to deny you access to the beautiful beach. 

Greatest in my experience: Stone Harbor, NJ.  Plenty of parking to be had.  Just drive on up, hop the dune with your gear, and you’re on a great, wide beach.

Criterion 3: Availability

How much of the year can you swim comfortably there?  Are there seasons when high surf strips the sand right off the beach, making even the frolicking of landlubbers impossible?

Hapuna Ranking: 9/10, presumably.  Water temp is great even around Christmastime.  Winter waves might make swimming too hazardous, though.

Manua Kea: Same, since it’s just a mile up the coast.

Greatest in my experience:  Rainbow Beach, St. Croix.  Crystal blue, amniotic waters all year around, while open enough to avoid the overwarm “bathtub” effect of more sheltered tropical bays (I am really nitpicking here).

Worst in my experience:  Hills Beach, Biddeford Pool, ME.  A picturesque New England beach whose waters are never quite warm enough to abide, even in August.  More of a tease than anything else, really.

Criterion 4: Swimability

This criterium encompasses several not-unrelated considerations: Is the surf consistently so puny or so rough that you don’t have any fun while in the water?  Does it have a sandy bottom, or do you risk getting bashed around on dangerous rocks or reefs?  Is it good for a particular water sport (surfing, bodysurfing, snorkeling) of your choosing?  I like to adjudge my beaches from a primarily bodysurfing perspective; you might have an alternative criterium.

Hapuna ranking: 8/10 (waves if anything can be too big when the surf’s up; great snorkeling)

Muana Kea ranking: 6.5/10 (great snorkeling, good sized waves, some annoying rocks underfoot)

Greatest in my experience: Cocoa Beach, FL. Just miles of sandy bottoms and enough surf to make things interesting. 

Worst in my experience: First Beach, Vancouver, BC.  Yes, the Great White North has beaches, but not destination beaches. The stagnant water here is filled with bits of trash and pulp.  Sand was coarse, to boooot. 

Criterion 5: Amenities

This isn’t so much about where the beach is, as what is at the beach, if you take my meaning.  For example, Atlantic City’s beach has miles of shops, restaurants, and casinos running alongside it, but they’re not really there as beach-related amenities.  On the other hand, Coney Island or Brighton, England are old-timey seashore destinations built up in concert with beachgoing. Waikiki’s kind of like this, too. Anyway, my primary interest here is great beach bars, not kitsch.  Also, bathrooms/showers/and changing rooms fit into this category, and are nice haves.  You’re welcome to disagree.

Hapuna ranking: 4/10: there’s really only the Three Frogs grill, which is way overpriced and doesn’t serve booze.  I recommend the “Killah Fish Tacos” for those who their small chunks of fish sticks lost in mounds of shredded cabbage.

Muana Kea ranking: 6.5/10. Better, because of the fancy Hau Tree bar, but you need plenty of sheckles to hang at that place all day.

Greatest in my experience: White Bay, Jost Van Dyke.  It’s all here: the Soggy Dollar, Setty’s One Love Bar, and Ivan’s Stress Free Bar--that’s a murderer’s row. Sadly ravaged by hurricanes this past fall, it remains to be seen whether it recovers its former glory.

Worst in my experience: Lots of beaches don't have any amenities, but how about: Punta Vaca Beach, Vieques, PR.  A tiny strip of beach with no amenities, it's showing up here because the poor water visibility ruined our expensive attempt to snorkel there one time.  Sure it's not fair, but this ain't your blog.  

Criterion 6: Ambiance

Finally, this nebulous criterion captures the overall feeling of being there.  Highly subjective, probably, at the upper echelons of competition, but clearly some beaches outshine others in living up to that a special beachy, I’m-at-rest-from-my-labors ideal.  Helpful if there’s shade palms and sea grape trees to string up a hammock or two.  Aesthetics a major plus, too.

Hapuna ranking: 8.5/10.  Feel the aloha.

Muana Kea ranking: 8/10.  Lacks something of the community feel with the resort right there, but it does have some nice shade trees when the sun becomes a little too much to bear. 

Greatest in my experience: White Bay, again.  The backdrop of the BVI and USVI’s sticking up out of the clear blue water across the strait, free hammocks to use at the Soggy Dollar, raggae playing softly in all the bars.  Man, just get me there.

Worst in my experience: This seems especially hurtful to rank any beach here, but I’m going to go with Galveston, TX.  Tankers in the gulf, and oil welling up between your toes on the beach itself.  No thanks, it’s only 6 more hours in the station wagon to South Padre Island.

So, to tab it all up, Hapuna takes the cake over Manua Kea.  We did also spend Wednesday afternoon at Waikaloa Beach, just south of Hapuna.  It was a pretty, albeit rocky beach with lots of trees growing at horizontal angles to the beach, which was cool.  Swimming was made difficult due to the lava rocks lurking in the surf, and the vegetation on the beach meant little bits of organic dross floating atop the water.  Glad we went, because we got to mix it up, and since it was a hot day, it was nice to have the shade available, but overall I’ll take my Hapuna.

Waikaloa beach.  Still better than 99.9% of other places to be.

Ok, this post is way long now, so I’ll finish the trip report up later.

More from the Big Island

Saturday was a big day because Loyola--little Loyola Chicago--was playing in the Final Four.  Now, normally, we wouldn't give a fig about the tournament at this point, but it's Loyola, and I'm an alum.  Mostly, my alumni sports energy is spent on Notre Dame, as it should be, but here I have a team to which I have a legitimate graduate connection playing in the Final Four--yes, we have to make room for it in the itinerary.

So, we hung tight at our little, teeny beach here at the hotel, and snorkeled in the morning.  And boy howdy, did this little, teeny corner of heaven not disappoint.  Right off the beach we ran into liberally-colored reef fish of a hundred different varieties, and even a few spooky-looking long ago jettisoned anchors and other boat parts to complete the scene.  Nice work, Kona!

At gametime, we walked down Ali'i Drive along the sea wall to Laverne's, an upstairs sports bar with open views of our little bay.  Most of the folks in the bar were cheering for the underdog, which was nice, including a family whose awkward son will be a freshman at Loyola in the fall.  Also, we were playing Michigan, and all right-thinking persons of the world ought to have been resolutely set against Michigan winning so much as a dollar scratch-off lotto ticket, nevermind a final four basketball game.  Alas, we lost, which was a terrible bummer, though it did free our Monday up from having to carve out more vacation time for sports.

After the game, we basically just vegged at the pool, which was great.  The Big Island Revealed guidebook lauds our pool bar for having cheap drinks, so I took them up on that for awhile, then we went to dinner at the fab Kona Inn, a 1930s, koa wood drenched, formerly-very-upscale-but-now-just-kind-of-upscale restaurant right on the water.  The Ono was excellent, though Erica cautioned me about my mercury intake levels, which must at this point be just sky high.  

Sunday was Easter!  We celebrated with the fine parishioners and attendent tourists at the lovely St. Michael the Archangel church right on the main drag in Kona.  The church has sliding glass walls, and they all were open for the service.  Because of the overflow, we sat outside and looked into the sanctuary.  It was all very tropically wonderful.  

Afterwards, we headed out of town to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, a 96 mile drive from Kona along the outer fringes of the gargantuan Manua Loa volcano (the largest mountain on Earth, by volume of rock.)  During the drive, we kept track of the Notre Dame women's basketball team, who was playing Mississippi State in the national championship game, via phone updates (there was no available radio feed).  And consarnit, we won!  And in extremely unlikely and awesome circumstances, too.  Just as we had eliminated the perennially-undefeated UCONN in the national semifinal game on a last second miracle shot two days before, the same player hit an even more egregiously-unlikely, fade-away, last tenth-of-a-second three pointer to win the championship game.  Go you Irish.  The drive took forever, since you're not allowed to drive more than 50 miles an hour on this island, and the roads are all just two lane affairs, but we managed to get to the national park in enough time to hike the short Desolation Trail, which traverses a former forest struck dead by an unexpected lava shower in the late 1950s.  Check it:

The Desolation Trail. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. 

Me just slightly off the aforementioned trail.  Now that's what I call desolation!

We then drove around to the Jaggar Volcano Museum (no relation to Mick), and checked out the crater itself.  Here it is in it's smoldering glory:

85+million years and still boiling away

We didn't have a ton of time left before sundown, so we checked into our "hotel" (a very nicely remodeled small condo outside the park, the check-in for which was located in the local True Value store).  We have late dinner reservations at The Rim restaurant in the National Park hotel lodge perched on the crater rim of Hawai'i's currently active volcano, Kilauea.  The food was good, but the view was surreal.  Over 2 miles from our table, across the open plateau of the caldera, was the Hale Ma'uma'u crater, site of a perpetual lava lake, which sites above the Hawaiian Hotspot.  Here's the view from our table, where we dined in the glow of earth's primordial furnace:

That's elemental fire, friends!

The next day, we were all set to do the Kilauea Iki trail, which runs down into and across the bed of, a nearby crater.  Here's a picture we snapped of Kilauea Iki from above the day before:

There are people on the whitish trail down there, if your monitor is big enough to see them

We began the day with a short side trail to the Thorston Lava Tube.  Lava tubes for when the outer parts of a lava flow harden, creating insulting cover for the flowing lava underneath.  When the lava flow stops, a tube is left, and you can walk around in it.  We got there very early, so no one else was around, and the lights in the tube weren't yet on.  So, our time there was lamentably short.

Tubin'

Alas, the off-gassing of sulfur dioxide from Ma'uma'u caught a rare northeast wind, and blew the stuff our direction, forcing us out of the area.  So we didn't get to do our hike (a total bummer), and we ended up leaving the park altogether.  Oh, well, next time.

We ended up taking a different way back, through Hilo.  This town, on the windward rainy side, is a major port, and was once really something.  Today, it is...ratty.  It's one of those places you've been where evidence of former glory is all around you: grand parks and promenades kind of gone to seed, rotting stands of huge trees and rotting shrubbery.  Downtown shopping areas that were clearly cool just after the war during America's tiki culture enthrallment, but are now not, abound.  We ate at a very local place (the straightforwardly named "Hawaiian Style Cafe"), and I got some great saiman (Erica's kahlua pork was smothered in high fructose corn syrup masquerading as barbecue sauce.)  Afterwards, we took a short detour to a nearby waterfall, and then went up, up, up the Saddle Road back to the other side of the island.

The Saddle Road is a recently-refurbished highway originally built during wartime to connect the two sides of the island by the shortest way possible.  It goes right between the summits of Manua Loa and Manua Kea, with stunning views of each.  Though it begins on both sides at sea level and crests at over 6500ft, it does not switchback, owning to the gradual slope of the shield volcanoes.  Frankly, it is weird to drive on a road like this.  Just a constant, endless 5% grade going up, and then down.   Once you're up into the wild backcountry of this island, you begin to appreciate how huge and desolate the Big Island really is.  There are no towns or even residences anywhere, though some of America's largest ranches can be found up here, and even some herds of wild pigs, donkeys, and goats.  At the midway point of the highway, where it is bisected by a road that leads up to the two mountain summits, we pulled over and did a short hike up an ancient cinder cone called Pu'u Huluhulu.  We got some great views of the definitely-not-Hawai'i-looking landscape.  

The snows of Manua Kea 

Weird foliage and Manua Loa

The evening was spent limin' (a great, beachy loan word from Virgin Island pidgin.  I don't know the Hawaiian pidgin equivalent, but I'll look it up) by the pool.  

More later.