Pandemic Diary — July 4 to 11, 2021

Monday, July 5   Deaths  2,781 (+0)   New cases 85

M shopped Winco for Winco-type stuff, including sliced almonds for the granola that E plans to make in her slow cooker. The recipe includes maple syrup, so it’s likely to be pretty good. E is also planning gazpacho.

Tuesday, July 6   Deaths  2,782 (+1)   New cases 463

M made BLTs for dinner. E’s sandwich featured Morningstar Vegetarian bacon strips, which aren’t bad tasting, but which have a very long ingredients list–not our favorite thing to see. While dinner was being prepared and eaten, granola was slow cooking. 

Wednesday, July 7   Deaths  2,788 (+6)   New cases 273

M tried the granola. It was great, especially with handful of our own raspberries. For E it was not a cereal day, so she has to wait until tomorrow.

After lunch M went shopping at the Co-op(!) and got himself some pickling vegetables. He then turned around and pickled them. 

E made the gazpacho for dinner. We had a bit of rice with it and some canned fish. Good summer supper. We have strong opinions about gazpacho, both of us believing that the only real gazpacho is the kind popular in Spain during the seventies and eighties when we lived there, which is exactly what E makes. We don’t know much about other gazpachos and we don’t seem to care. We have, over the years, tried gazpacho in several restaurants here in America. It has been uniformly terrible. We find this very sad and at the same time deeply satisfying. As for the wretched stuff that restaurants in Corvallis call sangria, don’t get us started.

Thursday, July 8   Deaths  2,790 (+2)   New cases 212

Adventure day. E went on her annual HEPAJ outing to P’s cottage at the coast. She rode in J’s new Honda CR-V hybrid. Nice. Lunch was at the Drift Inn. One of the group related how she had recently had a somewhat traumatic experience with a pedicurist who had just had cataract surgery and could only see out of one eye… 

Meanwhile M took the Porsche out for a few hours. We won’t describe that here since he’s made a separate post about it.

Friday, July 9   Deaths  2,792 (+2)   New cases 265

It was the first day of the Crazy Days shopping weekend in Corvallis and E was eager to get downtown. But first she had to do some gardening and then several errands. Such self-discipline! Finally she had a few moments to slip down to the Clothes Tree and the Golden Crane and try to remedy her desperate lack of decent clothing. 

Later on we took the Boxster over to Albany to have a dine-in supper at Ba’s, our first time doing that since the beginning of last year. M had Vietnamese sticky rice for the first time ever. He says he hopes it’s not the last.

Saturday, July 10   Deaths  2,??? (+?)   New cases ???

Having had to rush through Crazy Days yesterday, E went back downtown to see what else she could find out on the sidewalks. While she was gone, M got out his 1/16th scale T-90 Russian tank. He reattached its broken radio mast and recharged the main batteries. After relearning how to fire the cannon, he made some cardboard targets and started shooting them up in the living room. Yellow BB’s were flying all over.

Just after he was done and had put everything away, E came home with her bags of loot: a pretty cloth wine bag, a couple of greeting cards and some gift tags (70% off!). She had also taken a necklace to be fixed at the bead shop and of course had stopped to socialize here and there. Along the way she’d spotted a lamp marked down from $189 to $90. She liked it, but wasn’t sure. After she got home she shared the idea with M and they ended up going back to get it. Its unique feature is that it’s a flip lamp with two positions: one upright for room lighting and another facing down. The down facing position is ideal for E to see her embroidery work while watching TV.

Sunday, July 11   Deaths  2,??? (+?)   New cases ???

We got up and ate Bodhi sugar buns for breakfast. They’re good alone; they’re good with jam. But, being covered with sugar, they are messy to eat. They gave us the strength to do some yard tasks in the cool of the morning. At 10:00 we took off to explore more up country logging roads. The plan was to drive by normal routes up to Grande Ronde and then turn south into the maze of logging roads, though which we hoped to navigate to Falls City, thirty miles away. In this we failed. Sigh. First, we had a hard time even finding our way into the forest. The best option that our Avenza map suggested did not, in fact, exist, having been consumed by an enormous casino parking lot. The next best option was likewise missing. Was this map made by someone in a parallel universe? Or was it just based on old information. Probably the latter. Despite these setbacks we kept trying. We found a way in and climbed high above the South Yamhill River valley. The forest was lovely, the temperature was ten degrees cooler than it had been below, and the scenery was wonderful. It was a nice feeling to be in a place that seemed so large and mostly empty of obvious signs of the earth’s rapacious dominant species. (This was partly an illusion, of course, as we were driving through a human-created tree farm, but it was a fine feeling nevertheless.)

All too soon, however, a locked gate barred the way on the route we had chosen. There were other roads in the area, but the map showed them all as dead ends. We parked in the shade as best we could, took a short walk past the gate, and then returned to the truck for a Nugo bar lunch. Then it was back the way we came, down down down into the valley. 

Our consolation was that on our way back to Corvallis E found us a nice coffee place in the town of Dallas, Oregon. Karma Coffee is its name and they use beans from Allan’s coffee roasters. Later on we made a dinner of cabbage-potato subzi with rice and raita.

Also, E has just finished reading The Wind in the Willows. Her favorite takeaway from the book is a quote from Badger, “Stir your stumps, Toad! We just got your house back for you and you haven’t even offered us so much as a sandwich.”