It’s a holiday, adding up to a four day weekend for many in Hawaii following Friday’s storm-induced shutdown of state and county governments.

Let’s see. The recently expanded online version of the UH alumni magazine, Malamalama, was ready for the Obama inauguration with a cover story tracing the life of Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama’s mother. The story, by freelancer Paula Bender, is accompanied by a half-dozen photographs.

The Seattle Times reports that the University of Washington will not admit any new students for the Spring quarter due to the impact of budget cuts.

The deadline for spring-quarter applications was Dec. 15. Ballinger said the decision to nix enrollment was made within the past week.

“I hate to do this,” Ballinger said. “It’s just an unavoidable situation.”

He said almost all spring applicants are transfer students. About two-thirds typically come from community colleges; the rest come from other four-year colleges.

Ballinger said there are a few exceptions to the enrollment freeze.

A handful of students in engineering programs that typically start in the spring will be admitted, as will some students enrolling in an early-entrance program for gifted youngsters.

And athletes — including football players transferring from junior colleges — won’t face a problem.

Are folks at UH taking notice?

Twenty tons of dog poop. Every day. That’s the environmental contribution of Seattle area dogs and the issue underlying that city’s dog scoop law, again according to the Seattle Times.

I notice that Hawaii’s digital TV transition earned a comment in Gizmodo (The Gadget Blog), which called it an “odder-than-expected story.”

An airline ticket to Hawaii is front and center in a Kentucky scandal involving personal travel expenditures by the recently-resigned director of Lexington’s Blue Grass Airport. The scandal has quickly escalated into a criminal probe of the airport, according to a story on Kentucky.com, web site of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Yesterday’s rants drew lots of feedback. Perhaps not surprisingly, my rant on gambling drew more than the usual number of online comments, just as Lee Cataluna’s column topped the Advertiser’s “Most Commented-On” list.

And a friend inside Hawaiian Electric took exception to my comments on the decisions leading to the Friday shutdown.

I have to disagree with your inference from the government/school closings. The reaction (or over-reaction, if that is your assessment) had much more to do with the early December storms than the December 26 lightning outage.

Hawaiian Electric is never better than with advance notice of bad weather. Forecasts are closely monitored. Routine maintenance for generators and lines is cancelled or rearranged to keep the most reliable equipment on line. Crew schedules are re-arranged and the construction and maintenance department staffs up to have extra personnel and trucks available when bad weather is expected.

On any utility system in the nation, unusually high winds such as those forecast would be expected to bring branches into contact with lines, lines down and perhaps even poles leaning or down. These result in random spot outages, as happened on Thursday night into Friday. All were returned to service expeditiously. No system-wide problems occurred. Publicly, I detected no “vote of no confidence.”

Most people seem to appreciate information about preparedness.
Certainly the media are quick to ask for it and if we do not provide good information they will find something, anything, elsewhere. Not to issue emergency preparedness information would certainly be seen as a dereliction of responsibility by a public utility. For that dereliction, the utility would receive deserved criticism.

Issuing a news release on preparedness in no way displays a lack of confidence in the utility’s ability to deal with the inevitable aftermath of a storm such as the one predicted. I doubt many other people saw it that way.

We made a site visit yesterday afternoon to check in with Ms. Pe’a and her puppies. They live just around the corner, and I can report that mother and puppies are doing just fine, thank you. It is her first litter and she’s proving herself quite an accomplished mom.

The pups are in the wiggling blob stage, just a few days old. They are brown and black. Several have white chests, a couple of white feet, and another bunch have tiny white spots on the tips of their tails. Hopefully I’ll be able to follow along as they grow over the next few weeks.

I’m trying to catch up with months of photos. Yesterday I made it through a selection of photos from October. Just click on this one to see the whole batch.