A lot is being said about the decision to shut down state and county offices in anticipation of yesterday’s storm.

State officials say they acted to avoid major problems because the storm, thought to be packing near hurricane-force gusts, was expected to hit around the time of the morning rush hour.

A prudent move, probably. It was also an implicit but unanimous vote of no confidence in Hawaiian Electric, because the memory of the recent island-wide blackout was very fresh in the minds of all those decision makers as well as the rest of us and certainly influenced the decision to just preemptively shut everything down.

I consider the vote unanimous because even Hawaiian Electric reaction was to assume that the company would be unable to deliver reliable electrical power in the face of the aproaching storm. In a press release, Hawaiian Electric gave its own set of tips for preparing for and handling the effects of power outages. This is not the kind of thing that builds public confidence, coming as it did on the heels of an island-wide loss of power.

My first trip over to HonoluluAdvertiser.com yesterday morning led to this error message. In short, some script on their site rendered it “unresponsive”.

If you can’t quite read it, then just click to go full size.

And that wasn’t all going on at the ‘Tiser. Although our paper was in the driveway at the normal time, a reader reported hers was delayed for hours.

I wish the Advertiser could be truthful about their delays. Ours normally arrives before 5 a.m. When it hadn’t come by 6:30, I called the regional manager for delivery. He had a recorded message stating there had been a power outage at the plant and the papers would be late. He added that if we didn’t get our paper by 11 a.m. to then call him. It arrived at 10:30 a.m.

The Advertiser website at first had no announcement, but later had a headline mixed in with all their other breaking headlines stating there were “problems” that caused a two-hour delay in delivery. Oh, give me a break.

And another reader chimed in about hard times in the local newspaper world.

The Advertiser may not be mandating furloughs, but they cut freelance fees by 30%, effective Jan. 1, and are two weeks behind in paying freelancers who were just notified that December invoices won’t be paid until 1-22.

And Honolulu Weekly is now paying in 7 weeks, rather than 5, due to a renegotiation with their printer that “left us no other choice” but to further squeeze freelancers.

In the case of the Weekly, that’s 7 weeks after publication, which might be some time after all the freelance work is completed and a piece is accepted for publication.

In neighborhood news, Ms. Pe’a had a litter of pups on Wednesday night and into Thursday, five males and three females.

Pe’a is an excellent mother. Very protective, nurturing, long suffering and spends an enormous amount of time grooming them.

This wasn’t a planned pregnancy. The father is believed to be Boogie, the wayward guy across the street that clawed, chewed, and scratched his way through two set of fences to reach Ms. Pe’a.

But the puppies are beautiful. I hope to get over there with a camera later today or tomorrow at the latest.

Finally, I missed another deadline for Friday Felines, so here we are again with Friday’s cats on Saturday. As you can see, Mr. Toby has picked up a bit of heft. He was the trigger for the current diet, now just over a week old. I’ve got to weigh all the cats this weekend so that we can track weight loss (isn’t that an optimistic view?).