We spend most of the day at Poipu Beach Park, snorkeling, swimming, and sitting out. The beach has a sheltered, shallow lagoon that makes a perfect oceanic kiddie pool for Leif. We also have fun running into our friends Martha and Adam.
In the middle of the morning, we notice that there’s a monk seal lying on the beach. Someone’s staked a rope around it to keep curious people away.
At lunchtime, Jared, Angela, and Anya drive to Island Taco and bring back some delicious tacos for lunch. Later in the afternoon, most of us go into Lihue to watch the latest Star Wars offering, “Rogue One”. It’s pretty good. Skye and Jared stay at the ocean, and report that the monk seal spent the whole day lying on the beach.
We finish up the day with dinner at a “hippie restaurant”, Caffe Coco in Kapaʻa.
We fly back to Seattle. Our departure from Lihue is delayed, and we have to change planes in Honolulu, so we don’t get back home until midnight. Meanwhile, the airline failed to notify us in a change to Skye, Jared, and Leif’s itinerary, so they end up having to spend an extra day on Kauai.
While we were away over the holidays, our catsitter found our cats increasingly interested in trying to get outside. She hung a sign on the door: “Watch out! Kitties rush the door.” This sign makes us smile, so we’ve kept it up.
The girls have MLK Jr. Day off from school. Angela takes Anya and Liya to a march. Jan spends the day trying to get his political project’s site ready for launch later this week.
Meanwhile, Bree has her friend Hazel over for the day. Hazel brings her “Dash” robot with her — the same kind Bree received for Christmas — and the two girls spend the day playing with the robots, playing with the cats, and watching the cats play with the robots.
A milestone: Angela takes Anya to fill out an application for a learner’s permit so she can begin taking a driving school course.
Jan launches a political web site called Presterity at https://presterity.org.
He started this side-project at the beginning of last month in the wake of the presidential election, after trying to look for ways to try to manage the rising flood of alarming political developments. Some friends joined him, and they’ve spent the past 6 weeks putting together a site that’s, “Pinterest + Wikipedia for alarming news about the Trump administration”. Because of the limited time they have, they have to assemble the site from off-the-shelf products and tools, but it comes together in time.
The day starts with an article on the tech site GeekWire, which had interviewed Jan ahead of the site’s launch. The site seems a burst of traffic, and people begin signing up to help with the project. It’s a busy day, but it’s as good as product launch as Jan’s ever had, and he’s happy about that.
Angela had knit pink hats for her mom and Anya to wear in the Women’s March in Washington. Back at home, she spends the morning furiously knitting to finish her own pink hat in time to join the Women’s March in Seattle.
Jan and Bree spend the afternoon flying a toy drone inside the house, and then decide to take it down the street to the neighborhood park. There’s a slight breeze, which makes it harder to fly, but they both do okay. The best place to fly is actually in the park’s tennis courts — at least until a couple with an excitable dog show up. Jan and Bree decide the dog will probably be more interested in chasing the drone than a tennis ball, so move elsewhere in the park. Bree’s starting to get the hang of flying it for short flights.
Bree pauses while flying the drone, leaving it hovering in mid-air. (The tennis court makes the drone hard to see in this picture, but it’s hovering on the left at chest height.)
Lots of people (especially dads) lose their drones on their first outdoor flights, and it’s easy to see why. Once the drone gets 20 or 30 feet in the air, it’s subject to more wind, and the increased distance makes it harder to control. Luckily, while the drone does bump into a tree branch or two, Jan and Bree have a great time flying the drone outside, and return with it unharmed.
Anya marches in Washington, DC, with her grandparents, in the Women’s March! Anya and E-moon are both wearing pink hats knitted by Angela.
Jan recently bought a fun wooden toy: a sort of pinball machine that can do simple math calculations in binary using steel ball bearings as marbles. It’s a beautiful reproduction of a toy that was first made in the 1960s, and it’s quite clever in the way it can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and divisions.
The cats find it fascinating too. Whenever they hear the balls dropping down the machine, they come running. Jan learns that he has to actually put away the balls when he’s finished, or the cats will fish them out of the machine and scatter them around the room.
Liya participates in her third and final Debate Team tournament.
Jan, Angela, and Anya get together with family friends Jessica, Will, Cordelia, and Gideon. Our original plan is to watch the movie, “Hidden Figures”, about female African-American mathematicians in the early days of NASA. But even though the movie’s been out for weeks, it’s still sold out. We have only 4 tickets for the 7 of us, so 3 of us end up seeing Oscar nominee “La-La Land”.
Afterward, we have dessert at the Jewel Cafe. Jan is particularly interested to hear Anya’s friend Cordelia’s account of a backpacking trip last summer. Jan had been in the wilderness of the North Cascades when he ran into a hiking group of teenage girls – and was surprised to recognize Cordelia in the group.