Monday, January 4 Deaths 1,506 (+6) New cases 728
The Oregon Health Authority reports that 190,500 doses of vaccine have been delivered to Oregon sites and that 51,275 doses of vaccine have been administered. The most recent daily report shows 5,550 doses administered–5,542 first doses and 8 second doses.
Another grocery shopping day for M and E. M went again to WINCO and Eve filled out an online order with the Co-op. M failed to find any frosted animal-shaped cookies, but otherwise it went okay. Fedex delivered a pair of new shoes for M. He’s afraid to try them on.
Tuesday, January 5 Deaths 1,550 (+44) New cases 1,059
We went hiking today just west of Corvallis in the foothills of the Coast Range. The trail climbed steeply up Cardwell Hill, giving us this view of the Mary’s River, which is running high these days.
The trees in the foreground are Oregon White Oaks, Quercas garryana, also called Garry Oaks. White oaks don’t make much of a show in the fall; their leaves just turn medium brown, as can be seen in the upper left above. In winter, however, the trees are quite striking. The light grayish green color is due to a horde of lichen species that cover all their smaller limbs and branches. On a typical dark winter’s day they have a spectral brightness.
White oaks prefer drier soils, so they generally grow on hillsides and plains, where they compete with Douglas Fir. In this competition the fir trees have decided advantages. Fir grow much faster than oak and also grow taller, depriving nearby oaks of sunlight. In the last two hundred years we’ve seen many places where oak forests are steadily shrinking before the relentless advance of the firs. But how did oaks ever compete at all? Why do reports from naturalist David Douglas, who came here 200 years ago, mention seeing vast areas of oak savannah, much more than we see now? The answer, so we are told, is fire. Oaks are more resistant to fire. For thousands of years, as the story goes, the people who lived in these low altitude forests deliberately set fires in order to beat back the fir forest and expand the oak savannah. (In terms of human food value, oak savannah is many times more productive than fir forest.) The coming of the Europeans, however, changed all this. No more fires were set and naturally occurring fires were actively suppressed. The oaks lost their main competitive advantage and began to decline.
During the thousands of years when oak savannah was prevalent, many species adapted to it. As the savannah declines, those species suffer. But they’re not all gone. We’re not birders, but we think that this here photo contains a genuine Acorn Woodpecker on the side of a genuine oak.
Once we got to the top of the hill, the path descended gently and eventually looped back down toward the river.
Wednesday, January 6 Deaths 1,558 (+8) New cases 764
Unquestionably an historic day. First, it appears that Democratic candidates have won both Georgia senate seats. Second, rioters incited by Trump stormed and for a time occupied the Capitol Building before being cleared by police using tear gas, a shameful and traumatic event for the nation. Many Republicans, including McConnell and Pence, have finally broken with the President, but others remain fully supportive.
It was a cold wet day around here and we spent most of our time indoors. E worked on her photo project. She has had many hundreds of her old photos digitized–about 16 gigabytes–and has been working on giving descriptive file names to a large group of individual photos. By day’s end she was almost finished with this phase. Next, she intends to get some thumb drives and make two copies, one for backup and one to give to Andrea.
M spent the day mostly on the computer and got excited by an article in New York magazine that addresses the question of the origin of the COVID19 virus. The article, titled “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” was written by Nicholson Baker and is available online here. It’s long, but it’s interesting. The main origin question is whether the virus occurred naturally or was created by scientists in a lab. Baker emphasizes that the question is not really answerable at this point. But after doing his research, he does have an opinion. The article opens with this:
What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out.
The article goes on to provide background about virology and virology research over the past ten years. Although there are some controversial issues around this subject, there are are also some facts that Baker says are not in dispute.
One of these is that ever since the SARS and MERS epidemics in the early years of this century, large amounts of money have been devoted to virus research, much of it from the US government. The funding went to various researchers in the U.S., but U.S. money also ended up supporting virology work abroad. At a certain point the money flow was reduced on the grounds that some of the research was itself highly dangerous to public health, but this period of concern did not last and the flow soon resumed.
One avenue of virus research, which has been generously funded, involves the process of taking a naturally occurring Corona virus, one that is not particularly dangerous to humans, and genetically modifying it in ways that make it very dangerous to humans. Hundreds of these new and very infectious viruses have been created and stored in laboratory freezers. The rationale for making them is that they would provide knowledge about how to quickly create vaccines for the next natural virus that jumped from animals to humans.
It is widely agreed that the natural virus that the COVID19 virus most resembles is called RaTG13. The key difference between the two is that the COVID19 virus has the ability to find and break into human lung cells while RaTG13 does not. Scientists have also been able to find the specific structures within the COVID19 virus that give it this ability. And almost all virologists agree that it is possible that an RaTG13 virus gained these structures by natural mutation, thus creating COVID19. But the structures in question are complicated and for them to have originated naturally would have taken more than one mutation. So that’s slightly iffy. On the other hand, the idea that a scientist could add such structures to a virus is not iffy at all. Any sufficiently proficient virologist could do it. It’s what we’ve been paying them to do for at least the last ten years.
Anyway, it’s a great article. I’ve summarized only the driest parts. If you haven’t already seen this article, the juicier parts still await you.
Thursday, January 7 Deaths 1,568 (+10) New cases 867
We had FaceTime tertulia with J and R and found that we had all been somewhat heartened by a brilliantly colored sunrise. We learned that J and R are soon to celebrate their 50th anniversary. E and M were suitably impressed, though E pointed out that she too has been married for almost exactly 50 years. It’s just that it took her two husbands to get there. (M and E are looking ahead to their 25th this year.)
E went to Office Depot and got her thumb drives, transferred her most recent 500 files, then packed and mailed one of the drives to Andrea. Only this last batch have been processed to give each photo a searchable and descriptive file name. The previous 900 are organized into folders with descriptive names, but have not been individually named. That, she says, will be the next phase of her work. After that, her plan is to continue on with one more box of albums, which she estimates will yield another 500 photos. All this is connected to her main project, which is to radically reorganize the storage space in our garage in order to make space for a bicycle!
Taking advantage of the sunny day, we took a longer than usual walk, venturing outside our immediate neighborhood. After that M stayed outside and took down the remaining Christmas lights. This allowed him to return all the Xmas boxes to their places and generally tidy up the garage. Did we mention that it has been raining quite a lot lately? M found this out when he was trying to use a small ladder to reach up to unhook some lights. At one point, when he started up the ladder, its legs sank eight inches into the muddy ground, which left him four inches short of what he needed to reach. Christmas is hard.
Friday, January 8 Deaths 1,575 (+7) New cases 1,755
What started out as a dull, listless sort of day brightened up considerably in the late afternoon when E took a moment from her garage organizing labors to check the mail. M heard her cries of delight even from deep inside the house. Our care package from the Switzerland had finally arrived.
Because we are civilized folk, we waited until after dinner to open the package. Before commencing on the chocolate itself, we read the card and letter. Our friends have three children and several grandchildren, all of whom usually come home for Christmas, but this year, like many of us, the grandparents found themselves dining alone at the holidays. Apparently schools and restaurants are both open in Switzerland, but the latter close at 7:00 and multi-family gatherings are severely restricted. We can say with confidence, however, that the quality of Swiss dark chocolate remains high–very high.
We were also pleased yesterday to receive our copy of The Book of Ruthie, a volume of Eve’s mother’s writings and watercolor paintings that have been collected and made into a book by Ruth’s younger sister and last surviving sibling. It’s very well done and includes a fine preface by Son John, who also handled distribution.
And, on a much more trivial note, M was pleased today to receive word that a digital version of his Yemen VHS videotape was ready for him to download. (This was supposed to happen a couple of months ago, but on that occasion the files that he was instructed to download were not of Yemen at all but rather from some kind of beauty pageant in Minnesota. So the whole thing had to start over.) Today M finally got what he had paid for, but he was even more delighted by the fact that besides his Yemen footage his download included a special bonus–additional video from Minnesota! In this one, he was able to identify the name of the pageant: the state finals for the title of Mrs. Minnesota America, probably from 1999 or 2000. Looks like quite an event.
The logo for the Mrs. America pageant, by the way, is a drawing of an angel posed in a modestly high-walled clawfoot bathtub painted the colors of the U.S. flag. Pretty cool. If you think we made this up, try googling it. One easy way to do that is to type this phrase into your search box: 4 days left to save $200 on Mrs. Texas Then click on Images.
Saturday, January 9 Deaths 1,603 (+28) New cases 1,643
After breakfast E went out to the country to take Pepper for a walk and on her way home stopped at the fabric store to buy some elastic. Remember when everyone was trying to make masks and there was no elastic anywhere to be found? E says that judging from this fabric store, that shortage is over. E spent several happy hours making alterations to her new pajamas that she had not been able to try on in the store. She is pleased with the results. M spent a few hours reading The River Why and then did some Turkish work. Dinner was take-out chile rellenos from El Palenque. After dinner we watched two episodes of Love is in the Air (Yer Gök Aşk), a Turkish series first shown in 2010. It’s very different from some of the more recent series that we have watched.
Sunday, January 10 Deaths 1,605 (+2) New cases 1,225
The number of vaccinations in Oregon is getting close to 100,000. That’s nice, but we still have a long way to go. A letter in the paper today had a rant about how poorly this was being managed; the writer had never seen anything so badly bungled. Didn’t mention any specifics though, and didn’t make any suggestions.
But we had homemade chocolate chip scones for breakfast! (Also for a part of M’s lunch.) Wonderful. Later we went for a walk up to our little 13th Street natural area. We both wore new shoes and got them a little muddy. Yes, life goes on. A damp, misty day, but not really raining.
Later on M finished his Turkish version of last week’s post to the Pandemic Diary and appended it to the bottom of the English one. It’s a sort of primary school version of the real thing. We don’t know why he’s doing it; he said it was either that or watch more YouTube videos. We also spent time today planning a trip to Bend to stay in a nice hotel and have another picnic in the snow.