Pandemic Diary — October 25 to November 7, 2021

Monday,  October 25, 2021

Tuesday,  October 26, 2021

We watched the final episode of S1 of The Morning Show. It was pretty good, but we’re taking a break, possibly a long break, before approaching Season 2. 

Wednesday,  October 27, 2021

Did some fall gardening today and had a nice lunch, sandwiches from the Vietnamese Baguette.

E invited our friend H to dinner and served up minestrone soup, green salad and dinner rolls. H brought some fresh ciliegine mozzarella plus a small brick of reggiano. A very nice evening, talking about times old and new. 

Thursday,  October 28, 2021

Busy day today–tertulia, BBB, leaf raking, lawn mowing, napping, Laughter Yoga, and finally COVID booster shots. There was a drive- through clinic at the Benton County Fairgrounds. When you drive into the big parking lot, the first person you see tells you about how long the wait will be. We rolled in at around 5:30 and were told it would be about two hours. With some trepidation, we decided to proceed. It was indeed two hours. Oddly enough, though, the time passed pretty quickly. It was interesting to see how the whole thing was being run. E was at the wheel because she wanted her shot to be in her left shoulder. After about an hour and a quarter, we got to the place where they were handing out paperwork for us to fill out. They were matching booster vaccines with original vaccines, so that meant slightly different paperwork for each of us, since E was a Pfizer kid and M was Moderna. Finally we got to the head of the line. M got a new shot of Moderna along with a notation on his vaccination card. Wow! We were almost done. Except that we weren’t. They had just used up one batch of Pfizer vaccines and we had to wait while they prepared another. As you might expect, that seemed by far the longest ten minutes of the day… 

Friday, October 29, 2021

Cloudy day, mostly dry. M raked leaves for compost. He claims to have enjoyed the experience. His efforts were ephemeral, to a degree, since leaves were actively falling even as he worked and the yard was by no means all clear when he was done. He says that’s what made it special.

Later on, we had a salmon dinner at K and L’s house. They got their hands on a big salmon recently. We know the fish was big because when K cooked just a fourth of it, it came out to be way more than the four of us could eat. And we did try… Great food, great conversation, plus, we got to meet their new dog, Finn, an eleven-month old poodle mix. 

Saturday, October 30, 2021

Nice sunny day. M took advantage of it by mowing the front lawn. Will this be the last mowing for a while? Hard to say. Mowing is much less pleasant than raking.

Sunday,  October 31, 2021

Lunched on salmon and risotto, some of the extra from Friday’s dinner with K and L. Quite deluxe. For dinner E cooked a pumpkin, one of the eating varieties. After dinner we readied our hedge monster to greet the trick or treaters. We had a dozen of so different groups come to our door, some accompanied by parents. A happy evening. Strangers smiling at one another. You don’t see that in the news much.

Monday, November 1, 2021

Oregon reported an average of 19 COVID deaths per day in the month of October, the second highest rate since the pandemic began. 

This chart has been updated to show an extra 550 deaths in May, June, July and August of this year. The OHA has not yet released the actual data; this chart merely distributes the 550 equally across the four months in order to show at least some adjustment for the error. It will have to do.

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

E and M love to get comments or feedback of any sort. If you’ve never replied to the blog and would like to try, the way to go is to scroll all the way down the bottom of everything and look for the Leave a Reply area. There are spaces to put in your name and email address, but you don’t actually have to do that. (At least I don’t think so.) Just add your comment and post.

If you do leave an email address, then you can also request one or both of the check box options that show up at the bottom of the Leave a Reply area. The first option asks the system to automatically inform you if anyone makes a comment on your comment. The second option asks the system to automatically inform you when there is a new posting of the Pandemic Diary, which now occurs roughly every two weeks.

Once you post a comment, it would be nice if it immediately appeared in the blog. But, alas, it does not. There is a delay while the posting is being vetted by our hjghly vigilant Comment Approval Department. Is this to prevent hate speech or incitements to insurrection? Well, we haven’t actually gotten any of those. But we do get odd things. Here’s one that came a couple of weeks ago. This is the comment, in its entirety:

#B%$XC74M&8UW086*$97*5FVGD$HJHGW#NJ

The sender’s name was  T5$3HSP94#BK5GC

The staff of the our Comment Approval Dept admired the density of this comment and made no objection to its brevity. Nor were they put off by the sender’s unusual name. They gave the comment low marks for comprehensibility and relevance though, and it was rejected.

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

We have finally given up on our $189 Home Depot freezer. Why? Because it didn’t freeze anything. It did get things cold, but it never froze them and we had to throw a bunch of stuff away. We dragged the so-called freezer back into Home Depot and listened to their offer to replace it with an identical one, which they may or may not have had in stock. But no, we had lost faith. We wanted money. We wanted to be away from this freezer…far away.

That was in the morning. In the afternoon we bought another little freezer somewhere else. We set it up and put some water in it to see if it would actually get cold. It did. Good. You don’t want to have to spend all of your life dealing with appliances. 

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Dinner out at Sybaris in Albany. It’s still good. M had house made elk sausage with grits, acorn squash and jalapeño mustard cream sauce. The sausage recipe was passed on to the current Sybaris chef by his mentor, who himself learned it from its creator, Milos Cihelka. Now long retired and long out of fashion, Cihelka was a fifties era Czech immigrant. His Michigan restaurant once had a national reputation. You know, back when Detroit was one of America’s hottest cities…

Friday, November 5, 2021

A cloudy day with just a hint of rain. Went for a walk at the Finley refuge. Saw a huge, long procession of geese. They were flying low and turning this way and that. Looked like big ghostly snake gliding along in the air. Not easily photographable.

Trees, on the other hand, are more cooperative. 

Saturday, November 6, 2021

It’s salmon spawning season here, so naturally E dragged us out to see Salmon Watch Family Day. SWFD is an opportunity to see salmon in the wild and to learn more about their life cycle and their place in the forest ecosystem. It takes place at the confluence of the Alsea River and Seeley Creek, about 20 miles west of Corvallis and roughly 50 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Several species of salmon spawn in the river. Today we saw Chinook, who spawn in the main body of the river. If we were to come back in a month, we were told, we would be able to see Coho, who spawn in the smaller side streams such as Seeley Creek. 

The fish we saw were black with a white dorsal stripe and were very thin, seeming much worn down from their trip up from the ocean. Once they reach the spawning area, a courtship begins as female salmon look for acceptable males to pair up with. Females then choose the best spot they can find to lay their eggs. For Chinook, at least, this will be a gravel bar or riffle. The females use their tails to dig a depression in the gravel, into which they deposit their eggs, which the males then fertilize.

After spawning, the salmon die and the bodies come to rest along the sides of the river. Much of the meat is eaten by animals such as black bears, raccoons, or coyotes. Other parts of the fish nourish various smaller organisms. Eventually, nutrients from the dead salmon parents make their way into the soil and then into nearby plants. Scientists know this because riparian fir trees, for example, have been found to contain certain types of micronutrients that are only created in salt water environments.

We got a couple of videos of the action.

(video 4606)

The docent said that the kerfuffle might have been a male-female conflict or a conflict between females, one of whom has claimed this spawning spot and is shooing the other away. 

The World Salmon Council is especially interested in educating children about salmon and their habitats. There’s a nice little video here.   

Lovely fall day today, if a little chilly. At the Salmon Watch event we had both rain and bright sun, plus a small rainbow. Later in the day, back in Corvallis, we had to make a run to the market for a raspberry coffee cake and it was more of the same…

Sunday, November 7, 2021

We walked in the OSU forest today and noticed how the understory really shows up these days.