Hawaii 2022 Day 5

When nerds go on vacation they swim, eat, go to the library and look at newspapers on microfilm for 6 hours. If you're us, anyway.

During the beginning of the pandemic, a friend who grew up in Hawaii told me that his grandmother had written a column for a newspaper called the Pali Press. He didn't have copies of her work. I was dying to help. I looked up Pali Press on Worldcat and it turns out that the only library with holdings is the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Two of my favorite things are Hawaii and research, and we didn't go to Hawaii for almost three years. It was so frustrating! So when people asked what I was looking forward to doing in Hawaii they laughed when I said that my very specific plan was to go to the UH Manoa library.

The campus has some really cool sculptures and 60's and 70's architecture. And on a Sunday, the week before Thanksgiving, I would definitely go there *just* to hang out.

The library staff were suuuper helpful, and mrguy's has a keenly honed sense of where to find things that are eluding us in a library setting helped us home in on the right microfilm. Recall that although I went to library school, he's the only one of us that has actually *worked* in a library.

For the first few hours we were having a good time looking at vintage newspapers but not finding grandma's column. And we were going to starve, so we went to find some lunch. We had some yummy Mexican food at an outdoor spot near campus, where we were treated to some bawdy gossip by nearby elderly white ladies -- "You put it down and it goes 'wah, wah, wah'...You couldn't insert it if you tried, or at least I can't!" 

Oh. Vibrator talk! 

We went back to the library. I was looking at newspaper issues from the 1970s, and mrguy was in the 1960s. Just as we were ready to throw in the towel, he found grandma's first column! Now that we knew the years in which she wrote, we went to work and found a ton of them for our friend. Microfilm readers are so much fancier now, btw! You can email images to yourself. We were very happy to provide our friend with 40+ articles. That was so much fun.

In the meantime, things were blowing up at the forklift factory. The top guy toppled, and I got a text from a friend telling me the news. I texted her back: "Current view" (microfilm reader).

What a day! We scratched that itch, and went home. On the way out, the lights were on in Keller Hall, illuminating the stained glass from within. Love that font, too.