Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

We were up at 6am to make sure we had plenty of time to be ready & settled before we headed to the airport for our yearly trip to San Martin & Berkeley.

But, not a lot to do this morning other than get our final stuff together and tell the cats, who were unnerved about us being up so early, that all was OK.

(All was not OK.)

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I had thought we were going to have to go in early because I couldn't get checked-in yesterday. This was the first reservation I made since the Alaska & Hawaiian Airlines websites were united, and their unification has been VERY BROKEN.

I had great troubles making the reservations. Because among other things the Alaska and Hawaiian flights aren't actually unified. So I couldn't mix the two airlines, which is what you want to do from Hawaii so that you can take an interisland Hawaiian trip to whatever Alaska flight is most convenient. Instead, I just had my single Hawaiian option (through Maui), which gets us into San Jose later than we'd like (and even later than usual this year). Or, thanks to the merger with Alaska, I could take a trip through Portland or Seattle that would get us in tomorrow!

(Thanks no!)

I also discovered that I couldn't use my mostly-Hawaiian miles for Hawaiian flights, only Alaska flights. (See above: thanks, no!)

Anyway, I finally managed to get some reservations, and then when I went to check in yesterday I couldn't check in. I had two different confirmation numbers (maybe one Hawaiian and one Alaskan? I'm not sure). Neither was recognized online. One was recognized in the app, but it wouldn't check me in.

Fortunately, the airline(s) have good chat support and the person said something about codeshares, which obviously shouldn't have been the case because I'd made a Hawaiian reservation through the Hawaiian website, but obviously the whole system is FUBAR, or at least was a few months ago. Nonetheless, they were able to fix it so I could check in.

(We'll see if I have the same problem when I try to come home: betting, maybe.)

Anyway, that meant we left for the airport at about 8.45, which was enough time to stop at Subway for a sandwich (because my dairy allergy has gotten bad enough that I suspected whatever Hawaiian served would be inedible, and sure enough it was a hot sandwich with cheese and pesto cooked inside) and arrive by 9.30.

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I am now "Atmos Silver" thanks to my use of our Alaskan and Hawaiian credit cards.

Among other things that gives both me and my traveling companion (K.) two pieces of luggage each, which is twice what Hawaiian used to give me (but apparently dropping in half next year).

And it gives me priority boarding, right after first class, but not my traveling companion (K.), who has to wait with the rest of steerage.

Which seems kinda screwed up.

But I went ahead and boarded first on our interisland flight because you really need the overheads if you have backpacks because the spaces under the seat are quite small on those puddle jumped (or at least one of the wells is, the one closer to the edge of the plane).

And then I waited to board with Kimberly for the long flight from Maui to San Jose, but when we got up to the line the person verifying that gate lice weren't invading the small boarding area indicated that I had to go to the (empty) first class line and K. had to wait in the steerage line.

Which seemed even more screwed up.

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I usually have all the fun tales of people behaving badly, but there were less than usual.

The interisland flight was just half full or so. I think the long flight is less full too. The seats around me are all full, but we're at the front of coach. And, people seem to behave less badly on the less full flights. (I'm sure there's a lesson there somewhere.)

Oh but there were some children at the Maui airport that were _horrible_. They were running FULL SPEED in circles around the gate, screeching at the top of their lungs, pretty much for the whole 20 or 30 minutes we were at the gate. I heard the mom say, once, "Don't run!" while she was looking at her phone, after which they proceeded to run away a few seconds later.

I was afraid they were going to be shrieking the entire time on the plane, and maybe even running FULL SPEED. But it's been blissfully quiet.

Oh, the one other case of someone acting badly was a guy who thought he could keep his rollerbag in the aisle next his seat on the plane. The flight attendant just picked it up and put it in the overhead, telling him that his fire hazard wasn't allowed, so there was no room for argument.

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Oh, not behaving badly, but a really weird lady at the service desk at our gate at Maui.

Just as our plane is starting to load (which kinda made it acting badly), the lady goes up and says, "I need to change my seat, my husband doesn't want to be so near to me."

And there's some astonished back and forth, and the lady says, "Yeah, we're two rows apart, but he wants to be as far away from me as he can."

The staff just changed her seat for her.

That was apparently a good Hawaiian vacation.

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Ah, the end of the year seems to mean it's the time of the year for things to start breaking.

So we'll have stuff to deal with when we get home.

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When I got November's power bill, I saw it was higher than expected, which always leads me to looking at how our solar power is doing. I discovered our battery had shut down entirely. After some conversations with our installers (Rising Sun Solar: great if you ever need solar power on Hawaii), I learned there'd been a big recall of Tesla Powerwalls because the ones that made for one or two years tended to burst into flames, which is a definite downside.

But, it turned out, ours wasn't in that recall: it'd just spontaneously gone down. Once we got that nailed down (which was me making sure we didn't have to wait for a recall that didn't actually include us), they were able to pull all of the details from the Powerwall thanks to the wonders of the modern age, and they let me know that our 6-year-old Powerwall 2 was going to be replaced by a brand-new Powerwall 3. Which is terrific. The new release of the battery isn't a big deal, although it allows us to draw more energy from it at once, which will keep us from going to the grid when showering or running the dryer. But having a new battery without 6 years of degradation is great, and I'll know it isn't refurbished, because the Powerwall 3s aren't that old. (It just came out last year.) Oh, but I think there will be some issues with compatibility, because the new one integrates an inverter, but that's a problem for not-today.

(Yeah, I hate buying from Tesla, but we locked in in 2020 before we discovered Musk was a neo-Nazi piece of shit, and they're really the only answer for solar batteries in any case.)

No one knows when the new battery will be arriving, but it'll be when it'll be.

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And Julie the Benz is having her annual end-of-the-year breakdown. It's another check-engine light, but she's been riding somewhat rough since we had our problems mid-year with her almost dying on the way to the airport, so we may well be at the place where it's better to get a new car than to repair. (She is 16 years old at this point.)

My dad and I tried to read the error code with his reader on Sunday, but it just gave "link errors". I think maybe her errors might be in German.

So I have an appointment for her about a week after I get back, and we drove her pretty minimally this last week (and plan the same on our return), and then we'll see what we see.

It'd of course be good to stretch out her life another few years, but I also increasingly wouldn't mind a car with more modern bells and more modern whistles.

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Expected to be working on some Designers & Dragons on the flight, and I've done a tiny bit, but mostly haven't felt like it.

Thought I might close out another book on these plane trips (in first full draft), but nah, it'll probably be a January project.

Because I guess I can vacation?