The day started out great. I actually crashed early last night and managed to get nearly 8 hours sleep for the first time in more than a week, waking up feeling better. Then things quickly went off track when I let an automated software upgrade go forward on my MacBook Pro. What I thought might take five minutes ended up taking over half an hour to complete. There went my early wakeup advantage!

Let’s see. Now that several of the public employee unions have taken the furlough issue to court, here are the legal complaints filed yesterday: United Public Workers v. Lingle, HGEA v. Lingle, and Hawaii State Teachers Association v. Lingle.

You can at least read through the complaints, which aren’t that lengthy, and make your own assessment of their substance.

Speaking of Lingle & furloughs, it seems to me, in light of the context–the governor’s difficulty or hesitation in coming up with budget details during the legislative session, forcing the legislature to put together its own version of a balanced budget, and her failure to put an official offer on the table during collective bargaining negotiations while heading off the furlough-layoff route–I now think she’s threatening the run the state into the ditch in order to force the legislature to propose tweaks to the tax structure to come up with additional revenue. Then she can sit back and attack those pesky Democrats for failing to adhere to her “no tax increase” mantra.

Cynical, I know. But it’s hard to explain all the related bits of the story without going down this path.

Here’s one I don’t get. The Advertiser gave prominent play on Sunday to the theft of two guitars from local musician Anuhea Jenkins. And the newspaper followed with another story when the guitars were found at a Waikiki pawn shop. But, somewhat inexplicably, the Advertiser doesn’t name the pawn shop. Isn’t that something of interest to readers? Wouldn’t naming the pawn shop now suspected of receiving stolen goods be a benefit to its readers? Was this an editorial decision? Was it just being sloppy? I can’t help wondering.

The Star-Bulletin story by Gary Kubota didn’t have any trouble naming the story, which turns out to be the Bag’s End pawn shop on Kalakaua Avenue.

The morning just got a little worse. While sitting here frustrated by the slow software upgrade, I forgot to take out the garbage for this morning’s pickup. Our crew hits this part of Kaaawa at close to 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday and Saturdays, a pretty unforgiving schedule.

So it goes.

We’re off to see the sunrise.

I’ll add a bit more when we return.