It should have been cooler for a while now here on Oahu, but thanks to the Kona winds (Kona is a place on South-West part of Big Island, and the winds come from that direction) it was much more warm and dry than it should have been during the last weeks, or months actually. The wind often brought us ‘vog’, which is a volcanic form of smog, which brings us even more warmth (this is because there is an active volcano on Big Island). For a longer time we had temperatures up to 86F (30C), and in the evening it often did not drop much more than 72-75F (22-25C) (if it dropped that much already, and let me add: on our part of Oahu, it is much warmer and dryer here than the other side of the island).

But ok, it is a lot cooler since yesterday. The tradewinds are back, they come from exactly the opposite direction (the North-East), and they bring some cooler air with them. And that is exactly what we see today and yesterday. It hasn’t been over 75F (25C) today, and during the night it even went under 68F (20C).

I said it before, compared to how the weather currently is in the Netherlands (or on the mainland US for that matter), we still have very nice weather, but if you’ve been here for a while, got used to the warmth, and cannot close the windows inside the house, then it can feel pretty cold so in the evening.

By the way, it was also very cold on the Northern side of this island a couple of days ago. It was (ok, it was not on sea level, but over 1000 feet high) only 56F (13.5C).. I opened the window of my car for a bit, well, I can tell you that I will have fun when I am in the Netherlands again, I will be sooo cold haha.

It looks like winter finally arrived in Hawai’i. I wonder for how long hahaha.

Also some another small news update on the real estate market, we decided to wait a bit with selling, and buying, until I get back from the Netherlands again in a few months. Michelle doesn’t feel so comfortable making decisions without me, which I can imagine. So it is all on hold for now

Brrr.. it’s cold!

Today is the first time since the summer that I wear long pants because I felt it was a bit cold. The temperature of today? Well, don’t be scared, it was about 80 degrees (26 Celsius) haha! Oh well, it is not so much the temperature which made it colder, but mostly the rain which did that as it has been a pretty rainy day.

Last night I really felt cold though. Well, for the folks back in the Netherlands this probably sounds a bit ridiculous as it was about 74 degrees Fahrenheit (about 23 in Celsius). You might think, what a nice temperature, and I would have agreed with you if it was not for me living here for over six months in 90 degrees or even higher. I have, in other words, gotten used to the warmth. And the fact that I have had a shortage of sleep lately, mostly thanks to our little girl, has probably also something to do with me getting cold a bit faster. And what to think about all the windows and doors that are always open? As soon as there is a breeze, we feel it inside our home. And then there is the form of heat, as soon as it gets over 80 degrees in the Netherlands, then it feels way warmer than it does over here as they have a much warmer (humid) heat.

Oh well, it is not so bad that it gets a bit colder now the ‘winter’ is coming as we are now able to have Isabella more in the livingroom. We didn’t really wanted to do this as it was just too hot for her.

Speaking of Isabella, we went to the lactation today again, and everything was really good. Isabella has been weighed again and her weight was now 6 lbs and 14.5 oz (or 3133 grams). She is perfectly on schedule because if she was born on her normal due date, then she would now be a week old. They also told us today that we did not had to wake her every three hours anymore, but the we could just do it on demand. And Michelle does not have to pump and give extra milk from a bottle after she gave the breast, she can now do it by breastmilk alone. So today a few more milestones have been reached by our little girl

We could have been in a storm right now, possibly without any power and, in the worst case scenarie, even go without a roof above our heads. Fortunately it didn’t turn out to be that bad: we have seen for most of the day, both yesterday and today (still have), but it is going very slow, so I doubt we will get real problems from this rain. Rain like this is only a blessing right now as the country really needs the rain. If the rain would pour down very fast, then the land would have no time to actually soak the water up

The worst of Felicia did not come to us, but are we there yet? No, not really.. we still have about 3.5 months to go as the hurricane season is here until november. And, well, the Pacific ocean looks currently pretty restless:

You can find two possible depressions in the first image, the ones who have a circle around them. These have less than 30 percent chance to turn into a storm (however, Felicia also turned into a storm after being classified as less than 30 percent chance), and the red ‘L’ is a depression that might turn into a hurricane.. apparently he isn’t exactly organized so there is not a big chance (yet) that it will turn into a hurricane. By now, the other image does show a storm. They still speak about ‘ten-E’ in the image (which basically means the tenth depression in the Eastern Pacific, ten-east basically) but as said, it turned out to be a storm and it received an official name: Guillermo. As you can see in the image, there’s a big chance that it will reach Hawai’i in a week (that piece of land that you can see is Big Island). In what kind of category, or power, he will arrive, I have no idea, I think it is to early for it to actually say something more clear about that. He might even completely dissolve before it comes here.

But yeah, you can see that one storm is barely gone, and the next storms are already being made. If we will experience a real hurricane in Hawai’i, I have no idea but we will find out. We will at least make sure that we are well prepared, and that we have enough supplies.

By the way, there’s also some other news as Michelle bought a new car today. I will write a bit later (tomorrow or something) about this. For one, I don’t have any pictures to show you right now as MIchelle took the car to work right away (I would have done the same haha). The post about that will, like I just said, come a tomorrow or something

A hurricane was on its way to us, like I wrote a bit earlier this week. And like I also wrote, they expected that it would decrease in strength, before it would reach Hawai’i, and that happened indeed.

Felicia is currently classified as a tropical storm, which means that it has sustained winds of 39 to 79 mph (63 to 117.5 km/h), but the gusts might be a lot faster. The current windspeeds are around 50 mph (about 80 km/h), and this is pretty stable for the whole night and day already, so I think it might still cause some problems. They especially fear flash flooding on certain parts of the islands (no fear, we’re not in such an area).

There are even people at the moment, who expect, or better said: they don’t exclude, that the storm might increase in power again. This happened in the past a few times, and well, the water here is also warmer than where the storm currently is, and from what we can see on the weatherradars, it shows indeed that it has increased rain and such also with the storm.

Here are two more pictures, the first is of the expected trajectory of the storm, you can see that it really crosses the islands. The second one is a picture of a tropical storm, so you can get an impression of how a storm like that looks like… looks pretty fierce to me:

We will see what the storm will bring us, currently it is the expectation that it will reach our island on tuesday, and that it will still be a tropical storm by then. Whatever happens, we made sure to be pretty well prepared. If we lose power or other facilities, at least we will be able to survive for about a month on the stocks that we bought.

I am curious what happens later this year with the storms and hurricanes. When you look on StormPulse, for example, then you can see there are a few storms being formed east from Hawai’i, and it also looks pretty restless in the south of Hawai’i. We’ll see

Like I said in my previous post, it is possible that we will get another week to forget next week. This because of the hurricane ‘Felicia’.

Hurricane Felicia has, while I am writing this, reached category 3 and it is very possible that she goes to a category 4 hurricane, which is 1 category below the maximum. She currently reaches windspeeds of about 125 miles per hour, which is a bit more than 200 kilometer per hour. To be classified as a category 4 hurricane, she needs to increase another 6 miles per hour, so 131 mph (or 210 km/h) in total.

Felicia is still pretty far away, we can say, she is about 2000 miles away from our island, and about 1800 miles from the whole group of islands, but still, she is coming towards us with a speed of 39-57 miles per hour, and they expect to be less than 200 miles away from us on Monday morning..

Here;s a picture of where Felicia currently is, where she is going, and some other data:

Right, and there you are, in the middle of a big pool of water, and the nearest mainland about 2500 miles (over 4000 kilometer) away from us haha. You can go nowhere, and, well, you can feel yourself become very small all of the sudden haha.

Oh well, am I really worried? No, not really. Of course it is something you need to track, but to say that it really scares me, not really. See, hurricane Felicia will almost certainly hit us, but what will we notice from it? I think we will just get bad weather and not much more, this mostly because the hurricane Felicia is still far away, and by the time it is Monday, she will have lost a lot of her power again (that is, if you have to believe the predictions). And even then, it is still almost a week until she is close enough to hit us, who knows what will happen in the meantime. If there’s something that they cannot predict, then it is the weather.

Something I don’t really understand, though, is the government of Hawai’i. We’re currently in a hurricane season (this runs from the beginning of June to the end of November), all the signs of El Niño are here, which basically means that they can expect extra hurricane activity this year. Hawai’i is overdue for a hurricane as it gets hit now and then, and it did not happen for a long time already so it might mean that it is going to happen someday, looking at statistics that is. And what does the government want to do? They want to raid the ‘hurricane relief fund’, a fund that was started to help victims of hurricanes, so they can add it to the shortages of the state. No really, how stupid can you be? According to Murphy’s law, you will see that whenever they do this, a hurricane will hit is full.. and then you will get the question ‘who will pay for it all?’… well, I doubt it will be the insurance companies as they might have fled the island long before that happens, like I hear in all kinds of places, they will try everything so they don’t have to pay any money to the victims (which I can understand, the pricing of the houses is really high here).

Oh well.. we will see how far hurricane Felicia will come. It is still a risk, and we will take some precaution, such as having extra water and canned food, and such. You should actually have that always ready here, there’s a big, active, volcano nearby, there are small earthquakes all the time because of the seismic activity, tsunami’s also happen here, we’ve seen a tornado last year (and according to Michelle, there was another one a few weeks ago) and we also have the hurricanes haha.

Yeah, if you look at it like this, then it is a weird thing to call Hawai’i paradise

If you’re interested to follow this hurricane, here’s some sites you can do this:

- Stormpulse (click on Felicia).

- Tropical Pacific - Visible Loop

- National Hurricane Center

Update 08/05/09 05:30 PM: Felicia has just been upgraded to a category 4 storm, with windspeeds up to 140 mph (225 km/h).

A tornado on Hawaii, do you expect that on a tropical island? I don’t think so but apparently it is possible… and not just one tornado, but three at the same time…

The weather was a bit weird I think, it was nice but around lunchtime it started to become very dark and it started to rain.. not the normal small rain as you mostly have here, but pretty big drups and there was also a lot of thunder with some heavy bangs. I instantly was like ‘bleh, another rainy weekend’ but it turned out to be different.. the bad weather left as quickly as it came.

I asked Michelle if she had some rain also and she said that there most likely did fall some rain but from what I understood from her words, there was no thunder and aparently not such a heavy rainfall either. It was apparently nothing special on that side of the island where she works nowadays as it rains almost every day for a bit on that side, it is the rainside of the island and with it also the greenest side of the island.

I didn’t think about it anymore until it became night… I was reading the news and I read that there was a tornado on Hawaii earlier that day, in Kapolei (at the westside of the island). And just now I found out that it wasn’t just one tornado but three even. The tornados weren’t that heavy (or just tornado as the other ones were a lot smaller and cannot really be called tornado I think) but still it was still a tornado, even though it was only a F0. He did, however, pick up a golf car and threw that away again (it came down on a golf terrain).

I didn’t know but they aparently have more sightings of tornados on that side of the island.. some people actually say they seem to become bigger (and from what I saw on the pictures and videos, it did look like a nice one, even though it was ‘only’ a F0).

Anyways, I will stop talking now.. here are some links to some pages where you can find some videos of it all since I expect you want to see them:

- Tornado video - 1
- Tornado video - 2

We had some ‘nice’ weather the last few days.. paradise didn’t look like paradise any more.. They are even speaking about the possibility that there was a tornado on one of the islands of Hawaii (on Kauai, north west of ‘our’ island Oahu).

I haven’t really got the impression that there was a tornado pounding.. it was a bit the weather like we sometimes see in the Netherlands, long lasting rain.. difference is, I think, that the islands here are not made for rain like that… there are many mountains/hills and valleys, the land is really dry and the water cannot go anywhere.. and, well, that might cause some problems, especially if the land isn’t used to rain like this.

By the way, there is hardly any damage in the area where we live, I was viewing the images of the mudstreams, falling rocks and that kind of stormy weather things with my mouth open. Also, there are aproximately 190 homes damaged according to the Red Cross. I really did not expect that it would be this bad.

Anyways, we are safe and have these things, such as a possible tornado, only seen through the news, we didn’t felt much to visit the hitted areas and look at other’s misery and so we do not have our own pictures for you. I can, however, give you some links to some picture galleries so you can get an impression of how bad it was in some areas:

- Rains, winds batter Oahu
- Waipio Acres muddy streets
- Rains bring problems
- Haleiwa drenched
- Flood waters in Waialua
- Storm aftermath
- Rains cover Farrington Highway

All the links above will bring you to their respective picture galleries of the Honolulu Advertiser, one of the local newspapers here.

We still have some showers sometimes, it isn’t the rainseason for nothing, but it is nothing compared to what we have seen the last few days… oh by the way, we saw snow today in Honolulu.. I will tell more about it tomorrow, it is around midnight and I have to get up on time tomorrow so I do not want to make it too late