By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

No, it's not just your eyes.

The lines really are crooked.

A concerned reader (or should I say, concerned driver) wrote to express her, well, concerns about the roadwork being done on Kalaniana'ole Highway between Wailupe and Kahala.

She wrote:

"Take a drive from 'Aina Haina Shopping Center on Kalaniana'ole Highway going 'ewa to 'Aina Koa. Look at the new painted lines on the newly repaved road. The guy painting it must have had a few or something! It looks like he was staggering down the highway with his paint machine and a case of beer!"

So I took a drive from 'Aina Haina Shopping Center on Kalaniana'ole Highway going 'ewa to 'Aina Koa. And yeah, those buggaz are all over the place.

The letter went on to say that someone should look into this before the same person painted the other side the same way.

Too late. The Koko Head bound lanes got the same treatment. Not egregiously off-kilter, but just enough to make you wonder if it's time to change your contact lens prescription.

State Department of Transportation spokeswoman Marilyn Kali agrees. "Everybody says they look like a drunken sailor laid them," she said.

But before we go making disparaging remarks about stripe painters (or sailors), let it be known that those kapakahi stripes are temporary. They're not even real paint, just tape laid down to mark off the lane lines.

Kali explains, "It takes a couple of weeks before the asphalt is cured." In the meantime, to make the newly repaved lanes usable, the crews put on the temporary lines. The permanent ones will be straight. Permanently.

Well, I learned something. I didn't know the asphalt needed to be cured. I didn't even know it was sick (yuk yuk yuk).

Which reminds me of the story famous in local news media circles about the mysterious growing freeway.

In the weeks before H-3 opened, there were numerous press conferences and preview tours with highway engineers. During one particular briefing, an engineer was explaining that there were sections of rubber placed between joints of the freeway, like the discs between vertebrae in your spine. This would allow for the concrete expanding during the heat of the day.

One person in attendance heard this and somehow got the impression that the freeway was actually going to grow, little by little, every day. The question was even asked out loud, "So, if it expands every day, how long will the H-3 be in, say, five years?"

Of course, the folks over at the Department of Transportation have heard their share of strange questions, including those that cast aspersions on the line painters, so they generally laugh them off.

So while the lines really are (temporarily) crooked, if the freeway seems to be getting longer, it's just your eyes.