Tea in the ancient world: April 2026

I usually sort out some sub-theme as a pretense for writing when I move back to Hawaii (living between Bangkok and Honolulu), but I haven't this time. I've been "here" for a month, and will go back in 6 weeks.

Rain has been the main running theme, beyond spending time with my kids always being what means the most to me. Here they are:

The little one is going through an emotional time, fueled by hormone changes, but she was just messing around in that picture. Here they are in a hike photo, along with two others:

the same shot as in the blog margin photo

Back in 2006 or 2007, when I was in grad school here, it rained one rainy season for 40 days, and it has been like that again, the rainiest period since then. It has caused flooding, road damage, power outages, and brown water advisories that increase risk of swimming, from run-off outlet flow being unclean. I don't remember us--our family--experiencing much for power outages, ever, anywhere, so it was actually kind of cool going a few hours without power, to freak out and use candles and such.

I didn't hear that there were any fatalities related to this flooding, although I guess people die in car accidents all of the time, so something a bit indirect like that could have cost people their lives, or even the limited flooding. A potential dam failure in the north could have caused extreme damage, lots of death and destruction, but luckily it didn't. Family friends in the east lost electrical power for over a day; that would be rougher than spending an hour playing Uno.

Maybe the main impact is that lots of people came for vacation and spent a week getting rained on, although the rainiest three weeks all had a break of a day of clearer weather in the middle. It's not nothing, that they spent thousands to get here and couldn't do most of what they had hoped to do.

But it's easy for locals to go past not caring much about tourists on to being resentful of them. Why? Because they can be disruptive, some few of them, drunk and disorderly, or guilty of littering. They might stand on the coral (which kills it), or endanger themselves. That I don't see as so annoying, since someone getting sucked into a blowhole, or needing to be rescued on a hike, is just par for the course in ocean resort areas.

It might be that the poorer half of all locals might struggle to cover basics, like eating, while tourists show up and are fine with paying $25 for a burger, or $10 for a coffee or juice. It doesn't affect locals that much, since those prices were never going to be reasonable locally anyway, even outside the resort areas, but it highlights the have / have not divide, and it's easy to see outgroups negatively.

I joined the Red Cross, in part related to the disaster theme coming up, and more related to a friend mentioning doing the same. Two or three weeks in I'm not placed in a position / support role yet, and I probably won't do much with that in the next 6 weeks. It's not really set up for someone to live in an area for 2 1/2 months and then join in; it has a more corporate feel to it, if that makes sense. So next I might look into supporting the central corporate management, since it relates to the work I do (with ISO systems, process, disaster planning, etc.), but apparently it's competitive just to try to volunteer, so who knows.

Usually I'm going on about local culture in these posts, about homelessness issues, or how my kids relate to local schooling. I might not have said much about my daughter switching schools, and middle school seeming to be a much rougher place. Lots of that wouldn't be area-specific; social themes change at different ages. Her school is "urban," but it's not as if she's in a bad part of Chicago or LA. Walking around that part of the city in the evening might be pushing it, but it would still be safe enough for me, just not for a younger girl.

Keo wraps up high school in a month or so; that went quick. We've been back and forth for 4 years. The plan was to change over employment, and after two years or so of intensive job search I gave up on that.

I've covered how this is an ethical concern before; if people move to Hawaii and work remotely that puts pressure on local housing, raising costs for everyone. It's slightly less of a concern if you live somewhere that outsiders should be, more specifically in Waikiki. But if we could've bought a million dollar house that could have caused an incremental demand shift, and to some extent these present conditions still do.

It reminds me of another ethical concern I've changed stances on in the past, eating a meat based diet. Billions of animals must live in captivity now to support people's carnivorous diets, and for 17 years I didn't participate in that, beyond not being completely vegan (a little milk and eggs goes a long way towards resolving protein intake issues). It's not a problem any one person causes, in any significant way, but altogether it leads to factory farming. If you've ever visited such a place, a factory farm, it means more to you. Again there isn't an easy fix, beyond the extreme solution of being vegan. There may well be environmental trade-offs related to that too, since it's not easy to supplement your diet to be effective and complete, and production of some of substances people add to do so may cause their own impact.

Related to the other local culture themes, culture-shock, transitions in conditions locally, experiencing truly local culture, and so on, there is no news. Trump's impact on the economy, culture, and foreign impressions of Americans also hasn't come up a lot. We met with Canadian friends a month ago, and they said that they would no longer buy US made goods, and you really can't blame them. It might be hard to keep track of which outrageous theme triggered that. Trump saying that he wanted to annex Canada? Those tariffs, or two unjustified wars? The US is a mess.

Cue the conservative 40%, his followers, responding "don't live here then." It's a mess whether any one person or family chooses to stick around or not, so that's about as relevant as comparing things to historical time period standards of living. It is a little strange how entire nations have PR images, related to one part of what fell apart for the US. Russia has been looking terrible for years now, right? China seems more positive for not invading any of their neighbors, recently. The bar goes lower.

The local weed booth outlet recently moved from across the alley to down at the end of the alley, making for a prompt to consider what greater acceptance of that means. I smoked weed, when I was younger, but it's been awhile, a couple of decades. It doesn't seem any more impactful than alcohol. I suspect that within a couple more years the theme of long term side effects and problems will be more common, and plenty of people have already experienced that.

Just yesterday I saw a guy with a 2 or 3 year old child buying weed there, and it didn't seem right. Would it have seemed different if he had put a 12-pack in a cart in a grocery store? It might have. So that's strange, that I'm still biased myself, in spite of that background.

Some of that earlier have / have not theme enters in. We aren't budgeted for buying those $8-10 coffees or juices, someone spending however much to be on drugs could seem wasteful, like a form of excess. But of course that's their budget, so the critical judgment isn't well grounded. If someone wants to spend $100 to breathe more concentrated oxygen that's on them. We have to be careful of externalizing our own image or limitations concerns.

Having kids changes things. People smoke weed in our street all of the time, so about one time in 10 or so venturing out you might smell it, just walking through, or maybe even a little more. People drinking beer in our alley (soi) back in Thailand drives my wife crazy, for a similar reason. A public street isn't the place for that kind of thing, per one normal take. In the US eventually there would be repercussions if someone kept drinking beer in public, but with the weed it looks like smoking a cigarette, and it's completely normalized now. Keoni mentioned there is a normal place for kids to smoke weed at school. Strange.

Hawaii is great; I should be mentioning that. I love the feel, the people, and outdoor experience options. It's a great environment for our kids, even with people smoking weed, and homeless people living on most blocks. It's culturally diverse, and people really value contact with nature, in their own ways. Kalani just went ice skating with friends yesterday, without a lot of close parent supervision, and Oahu is safe enough that's still not a high risk. It's shifting, and in a few more years it might seem so. But it's nice being here for the time period that it doesn't seem outrageous for your medium age kids to be unguarded, yet.

Being rained on wasn't so bad; that's how life in the tropics goes sometimes. Not as often as you might expect; there has probably been no corresponding rainy period like this in 19 years. In Bangkok the monsoon season can get a little rough for a week or two, at times, but there is almost never a completely rainy month over there. There was, about 17 or 18 years ago, in October, when it's not supposed to rain like that, and they experienced terrible flooding. It was all pretty touch and go in the 2025 rainy season, close to being too much.

These climate change related variations of what is normal will be even more awful in the next few years, probably. But this last one over the last month here hasn't been so bad, unless it ruined your vacation, or destroyed your home, and then maybe it was.

More images of what has gone on this past month: