Living Aloha - It's Expensive

          Stuff in Hawaii is expensive.  Not just purchases that visitors make like gifts or hotel accommodation or fancy restaurants, but general, every day, ’got to have it to live’ type stuff.   For instance food immediately comes to mind. 

          Shopping for the family, weekly, bare essentials at a grocery store in any town or city on the mainland might cost you somewhere in the vicinity of $70…the same shopping list here would easily amount to double that.  But hey, you live in Hawaii, so suck it up…and do that with a smile.

          Of course the reason for the additional cost on everything from food to petrol to clothes and furniture is because very little is made in Hawaii.  Perhaps the odd surfboard, or a macadamia nut or conch shell, although those, unless they’re plastic and made in China, are usually picked up off the beach somewhere...everything else is brought over from the mainland or the aforementioned China.

          Living here you get very used to hearing:  ‘oh, we don’t have that in stock.  We can order it for you…it’ll take six weeks to get here.’  Why we can put a man on the moon in eleven days but it takes six weeks for transport to get from California to the islands is a mystery to me, but there you are.

          So, locals get very good at saving a penny or two wherever we can so we can lash out on a few luxuries from time to time.

          This saving thing actually came to mind when I received my last electric bill.  It was nearly double the usual monthly ransom I was required to pay and left me gasping.  The electric company’s explanation was that it was my fault not theirs.  I was simply using too much electricity on non-essentials.  Hot showers and a grilled chop apparently fall into this category.

          A day or so later, while watching TV I was mesmerized by the electric company’s advertisement extolling the virtues of solar, wind and geothermal and the advice that we should all investigate these as ways of saving loot on our electricity bills.

          Well, apart from the fact that six or seven heavy solar panels on my roof would quickly convert my timber two-storey townhouse into a one-storey shed, solar panels are jolly expensive.  As to windmills in my backyard?  Well, I guess I could tizzy them up with crepe paper and pretend they were palm trees…but, not a really sensible way to save on electricity for me.

          Still, for several weeks I ran around turning off anything and everything that even looked like it might be connected to a power outlet.  I didn’t go so far as to read by candlelight nor cook on a camp fire in my yard, but I’m sure power usage, much to my discomfort, was substantially lowered.

          Imagine my surprise then when I received a nice little note from the electric company advising that, in the not too distant future, it would be increasing electricity rates across the State because…wait for it…the company was losing too much money due to so many people going solar!

          It seems that we simply can’t win.  But that, my friends is the cost of living in Paradise.  I am now seriously considering those windmills in my backyard; I already have the green crepe paper left over from Christmas.