What’s life like in Honolulu?

• The Weather: Some people like the seasons.

If you like the changing of the seasons, you probably won’t want to live in Hawaii. Not everyone likes a tropical climate. If that be the case, stop reading, go into the garage, and enjoy inspecting your snow shovel blade and handle, or snow blower’s moving parts and lube schedule. Clearing the driveway makes for good exercise, as does pushing stuck vehicles. Why bloggers and YouTubers put weather down as a negative topic in considering a move to Hawaii baffles me. They show the annual weather temperatures graph, and I start laughing: the model shows a gentle wave of a pattern of daytime highs ranging from a chilly 78 degrees fahrenheit in January to a high of 84 in July. The lower nighttime range tracks an almost perfect congruent wave pattern ten degrees lower, without any spikes or gaps in the year.

First off, if you are in tune with Mother Nature, nothing like the knowing of the tides and surf conditions makes for a good waterman, and this understanding of nature is engrained in many who live here. The water temperature cools after several weeks of heavy Christmas or New Year’s rains, and there are those who know the best times to travel and visit Hawaii. Indeed, knowing when to wear a jacket in the morning does feel like a season change for those of us who call Hawaii home. I looked at my friend’s phone next to me at the dinner picnic table: Minneapolis 22 degrees–Honolulu 72 degrees. Do the math.

My world traveling friend–and there are a lot of them here in Honolulu–assures me over breakfast coffee, that nowhere in the world can a better climate be found. If you know of a place, respond. He smiles and assures me that a place with better weather doesn’t exist on the planet. Even though San Diego ranks higher than Honolulu because it has over 300 cloudless days of sun per year, Hawaii’s one hundred and seventy days of sun are caused by rainbow producing showers. What this means is great news for fair skinned folks who know that about half of the days at the beach contain some cloud cover overcast to keep down the burn. Add to that, the great green grassy areas dotted with palms, and there are many spots to lay in the shade really close to the water.

You can see in the above weather map, most of the winter bomb cyclones or atmospheric rivers track north of the Hawaiian islands before they hit the west coast of the mainland. Here you can see that Hawaii is actually even with Acapulco in Mexico, or just south of the Gulf of Baja. You can also see the wind direction flags changing direction around the Sandwich Islands of Hawaii, which is just SSW of the big H labeled 1021. We are unaffected by the big Lows which hit the Northwest, or now that Uranus can trine Jupiter or Neptune, which are very close in degree near the North Node and the Pisces Aires cusp, we have the 103 year super cycle for lots of rain.

In any event, there aren’t too many consecutive days without any breezes. This was a relief during my first summer here when I was worried about the heat. People just leave their windows open and walk around naked. My friend Andrew questions me about all my decisions, and leaving San Francisco for Honolulu was one of his “ongoing interrogations.” He said he thought it was going to be too boring for me to live here. I reassured him it wasn’t. There is plenty of ongoing natural beauty every day (or night).