Sad, Sad News

First of all, happy New Year 2009 to all, and thanks to the readers who are still checking in here.

I’ll start with the good news: one of my new year’s resolutions is to blog regularly again, I even fixed my blog software so I can approve comments now.

And now the bad news: as I alluded to in a recent post, I have been neglecting this blog because there have been some upheavals in my life. Due to the recent economic situation, at least indirectly, my family and I have had to move away from Kaua’i.

As I detailed in an early post, I had the good fortune of working for a Silicon Valley-based computer company entirely remotely from my home office on Kaua’i. However, when I got hit by a round of lay-offs at my company, I found out how vulnerable and precarious this arrangement was.

I’d rather be living, hiking, and exploring on Kaua’i, but supporting my family is obviously my first priority. So after 9 months of unemployment, I had to face the facts and start looking for work in California. Even then, I feel fortunate to have found a good job in this economy, and so we reluctantly had to go through the long process of moving back to the San Francisco Bay area.

The job market on Kaua’i, and even Hawai’i as a whole, is rather difficult for people in the computer industry. There are precious few computer jobs on Kaua’i, and they’re all with military contractors at PMRF—not my cup of tea. On Oah’u, there are definitely opportunities, but again mostly with the military, and none willing to hire someone off-island. My biggest hope was to work on computers for Aloha Airlines, thinking I could actually commute by plane to HNL for work, but then they went bankrupt. There are a few programming and web development jobs on the neighbor islands, but mostly freelance contracts that do not pay market rates, nor anything near enough to sustain a family.

I also looked into other fields, trying to find something that would let me stay on Kaua’i. But the rest of the job market is hurting as well, and I just didn’t have the qualifications for the few high-paying jobs there are. All of the service jobs are taken by locals, who work 2 or 3 of them to make ends meet. Government jobs and contracts go to the well-established and well-connected. Tourist industry jobs have all disappeared with the downturn—Kauai is being hammered by the drop-off in tourism. Hawaii’s second industry, development and real-estate, has tanked as well—but that’s probably a good thing for preserving the island.

Outside of my field, there is definitely demand for professionals, doctors, nurses, even lawyers maybe, and they always need teachers, but pay is lower than elsewhere, which is why there is a shortage in the first place. The ideal would be some sort of self-employment with clients both local and remote, whether it’s technology, a web-based business, writing, or even new-age spiritual guru. But that takes time to establish, and we were running out of time and options. In the end, we decided we had to move away using our remaining savings so we wouldn’t be forced to sell our house.

The 20-foot Matson Shipping container ready for loading. This was back in October, note the lush green vegetation on Kauai, even before the winter rains.

The same container, delivered 10 days later to the Bay Area, direct via the port of Oakland. Note deciduous tree losing its leaves already.

Moving away has been a long, tiresome and depressing ordeal, having to put so much energy into leaving the place we love and chose to live. After several job interview trips, a house-hunting trip, a month of sorting, selling, tossing, and packing, several weeks of getting our house rented, a few days of loading a 20-foot container to the top, then a few weeks of living in empty houses, another few days of unloading, and finally weeks of unpacking and rearranging our stuff and our lives, we’re finally getting settled.

We still plan to return to Kaua’i, hopefully in the not too distant future. My computer job can be done remotely, once I’ve proven myself to my new company. We kept our house there and hope to move back in someday. In the meantime, California is probably my second favorite place to live in the US. I lived here for a few years before and there is so much to do, especially around the Bay Area, both indoors and out. Here’s what we’ve sampled already:

Museums and dinosaurs, oh my! The new California Academy of Sciences.

Christmas decorations and advertising on San Francisco’s Union Square.

The sun also rises in California.

And there is also fog, lots of it, and you don’t have to drive up to Koke’e to see it.

For all its sprawl and housing creeping up the hills, the Bay Area has a significant amount of parklands and trails.

The ocean is nearby too, here a shorebreak at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Note the seagull, a species that never got established in Hawai’i.

And then there are mountains, perhaps what we missed the most in Hawai’i. The Sierra Nevada is a true wonderland of trails, backcountry treks, and grandiose vistas. And the cold season isn’t so bad, both my wife and I are avid skiers, so we are actually looking forward to the snow.

Above: lake Tahoe and Mt Tallac with a dusting of snow at Thanksgiving. Right: granite formations at Pinnacles National Monument–I’m looking forward to rock climbing again.

What this means for A Kaua’i Blog: I actually have so many pictures left to publish, I’m going to just keep on blogging, hopefully at least once a week. Some hiking buddies on Kaua’i promised to keep sending me pictures of their adventures, so there should be some fresh photos as well [and if they’re reading this: hey guys, don’t forget to send me some good pics]. In between, I might add a bit more filler in the form of news stories and links to interesting posts in other blogs about Kaua’i, as well as tidbits from California or the mainland that might have some remote connection to Kaua’i.

Without further adieu (nor ado), I will now get on with my favorite topic, namely exploring Kaua’i.

North Shore Kaua’i

Blogs on Kaua’i about Kaua’i are few and far between, so I’m going to try and not let this one die. And now I have one more to add to my blog roll.

North Shore Kaua’i (NSK in their logo) has actually been around for quite a while, but for the longest time, they just had a great design with a few token posts. But over the last two years, after I stopped checking on them, they became very active. A lot of the posts and images are reprinted from news articles, but actually it’s nice to have an editor scanning all the papers and posting the Kaua’i stories for us.

One of the main interests on the blog seems to be surfing, which is after all one of the appeals of Kauai’s North Shore. As a result, NSK has live weather and surf reports on their homepage, something I’ve been meaning to do myself. Better yet, on their daily surf report page, they have a “live” map of surf conditions. I love maps of all kinds, and I hadn’t seen this one before:

Source: oceansafety.soest.hawaii.edu (updated as conditions change, click for larger image)

The image above is created by the Hawaiian Lifeguard Association and SOEST, the school of ocean and earth sciences and technology at the University of Hawaii. I have embedded the live map, which they say it is updated as conditions changes. See their website for details and disclaimers.

In any case look for the NSK logo and their link in my blogroll to the right.

Hiatus

As you can probably see, this blog has been interrupted for a little while. There have been some changes in my life, and on top of that, I was having technical difficulties and couldn’t post or approve comments.

Thank you to those writing comments of appreciation, especially those who wondered where I was.

I hope to get back to writing one of these days.

For now, I’ll leave you with a picture of a beautiful waterfall that shall remain unnamed.

More Kalalau Trip Reports

I didn’t have much time to write today, so I did what every good blogger does: link to somebody else’s writing.

I updated my page of Kalalau trip reports with 3 new ones that are worth checking out. It’s like 3 blog posts for the price of none.

The Bookstore Is Open

I’ve been thinking of ways of earning some money doing what I love: exploring Kauai and writing about it. Hiking and taking pictures is fun, writing about it is what I do here, the tricky part is getting paid for it.

Before I put advertizing on this blog, I thought I’d try some other options first. The most straightforward is to be “affiliated” with an online bookstore and provide links for people to buy the books I recommend on my blog. So I now have a bookstore page on the blog now where you can click through to Amazon.com to buy all the books I have recommended, all 3 of them (one map and two books). If you go to that page right now, you’ll see a few more books that I’m reading and will review soon.

Many of the big online merchants have these programs, which pay the website owner anywhere from 4% to 8% commission of the sales price. I hope I’m not breaching my contract when I say this, but I really wanted to be affiliated with an “independent” bookseller such as Powell’s Books. I tend to support the underdog, and I thought that a store focused only on books would serve my needs better. However, Amazon has a big network of associate booksellers, a larger group of smaller bookstores, and they were the only store that could list the relatively obscure titles about Kaua’i. On the positive side, lots of people know and trust Amazon, and I am myself a satisfied customer.

Anyways, if you’re thinking of buying the books you see on this blog, it helps me out if you buy them through my links. Hopefully, having a potential income from books will motivate me to review more of them. Don’t worry, I promise I will still recommend only the books I honestly like.