Month: January 2022

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

At 9:00, E had her Zoom exercise class, the first one of the new term. It was hard work, she says. At 10:00 we talked with Claudio about our planned paver driveway. We put down a large deposit. Gulp. We had planned to do concrete. But as it turns out, concrete projects are crazy expensive these days. So pavers it is. They seem more earth-friendly anyway.

In other news, we’ve made a reservation to stay at the coast next month in a state park near the mouth of the Umqua River. We’re going to stay two nights in a yurt. But not a regular yurt–a deluxe yurt. We’re not quite sure what those are, but apparently they have microwaves and bathrooms. We’ll see.

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

M worked on R’s book project for an hour or two and then watched the final episode of Frontera Verde, a Colombian series on Netflix. (Eight episodes, in Spanish and indigenous languages, with English subtitles) It’s an atmospheric crime drama set in the Amazon River section of Colombia. Good quality production with some wonderful cinematography. The basis of the story is only semi-comprehensible, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a way of opening a window onto a fascinating part of the world, a place with a dark past and a problematic present. When they talk about rubber plantation slavery in the relatively recent past and criminal logging in the present, they’re not just making things up.

And what was E doing while M was wandering around South America? In the morning she was doing yard work: transplanting, pruning and weeding. It seems odd to be pulling weeds at this time of year, but there they are staring at us and they do come out easily when the soil is wet. Later on, she went to visit her seamstress, whose workshop happens to be just across the street from one of her favorite clothing stores…

Thursday, January 20, 2022

Damp weather for the last couple of days. Warm at times, with highs in the 50’s and lows in the 40’s. We had coffee with J and R today and it was quite pleasant out in the tent at Coffee Culture. 

We’re not sitting indoors in restaurants much these days, but we did make a quick visit to Sada to pick up an online order. We shared a bento box. The bentos at Sada are big; ours had miso soup, green salad, seaweed salad, gyoza, salmon, tempura, rice, cheesecake and fruit. One was quite sufficient. Pro tip: wash it down with gin.

Friday, January 21, 2022

We got up at seven this morning, just in time for some striking sunrise colors to the east. By eight, though, we were fogged in and could barely make out the far end of the street. After breakfast, E went out and did bird feeder chores. At 10:00 we set out for the Finley Refuge, planning to walk the Mill Hill Loop. It was still foggy when we found the turn-off to the refuge but five minutes later the sun broke through. We were just in time to see a few traces of mist drifting over the ponds. 

The first part of the trail leads through one of the biggest oak forests around. Oaks and firs are competitors at these elevations, and they say that if you leave things alone, the firs will outgrow and displace the oaks. That’s what has been happening here for the past 175 years. But now, at least in conservation areas like this, people are starting to intervene on the side of the  oaks. We passed more than one fir stump today.

After the hike, we went to E’s favorite coffee shop for take-out lunch. You can get a nice healthy sandwich there–if you don’t get distracted and have one of their pastries instead. Not that we personally would ever do that, at least not very often. 

Saturday, January 22, 2022

E went to the Co-op for groceries and tended to her correspondence. M went off to Albany to get bricks.

For dinner M made enchiladas and E baked an acorn squash. Nice. Pro tip: wash it down with gin. 

At this point we have both read The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. The story begins in the early 1990’s in a very remote tea-growing area of China. The inhabitants are members of an ethnic minority who are quite different from the dominant Han Chinese in appearance, language, and culture. The story strains credulity in many ways, but who cares, learning about the culture is still fascinating and you still want to see what happens.

Sunday, January 23, 2022

M’s latest project is an expansion of Hummock #1. Seems he can’t leave well enough alone.

Monday, January 24, 2022

B and B are coming for dinner. We’re preparing a meze with tabouleh salad, white beans, pickles, humus, pita, olives, dolmas, lentil soup, grilled haloumi, and kebabs. No gin.

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

We travelled east this morning, going deep into Linn County to the town of Lebanon. We went there because we have learned that there are 42 places named Lebanon in the U.S. and we’ve decided that we’re going to visit ev– No, wait, that wasn’t it.

We went there to walk the trails around Cheadle Lake and see what we could see. Originally a swampy area with a few seasonal ponds, the site was heavily excavated and reformed in the 1930’s to make a large and complicated log pond for a lumber mill. The mill buildings and equipment are long gone , but the pond remains. The pond/lake covers 11 acres and has a maximum depth of 40 feet. At this point the lake and the area around it form a de facto nature reserve. There are a couple of miles of easy trails and lots of birds. We saw redwing blackbirds, Canada geese, two kinds of ducks, a pair of mergansers, an egret, and a mysterious something that looked like a cormorant.

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Progress continues on Hummock #1.5. Also pruning. E met with her HEPAJ group.

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Tertulia with J and R as usual. A little cold out under the canopy, about 30 degrees. Had to zip home quick for E’s jumping around class, as she calls it. Later on, we fetched the little car from storage and squeezed it back into the garage. M took a little drive just to make sure the car still worked. 

Friday, January 28, 2022

M went to the dentist. E went to the DMV. Sounds bad, but in fact both were painless. E went to apply for her new Real ID license and was in and out in 15 minutes!  

Saturday, January 29, 2022

Cold nights these days, down into the teens. Sunny and mid forties in the afternoons. A nice time to work outside, once the ground thaws. Good thing too, because there’s work to be done prepping for the driveway project. Several nice plants need to be moved out of harm’s way. 

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Pie!

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Warmer weather coming. Intermittent rain today, fairly light but still enough to keep everything pretty soggy. You do not want to walk through our backyard without waterproof shoes.

We stayed indoors and finished the jigsaw that we started on New Year’s Eve. Almost immediately a Lego shark turned up in San Fransisco Bay. Yikes.

Luckily, a Lego response unit was on the way.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Much warmer today, high 50’s most of the day, touching 60 at one point. Something of a shock.

The COVID news in Oregon is pretty much the same as a lot of other places: a very high number of confirmed cases, but also a general sense that things are not as bad as they might be. The number of hospitalizations is high but not quite crisis level high. We continue to have daily COVID deaths, but the numbers are lower than November and have not yet risen in response to Omicron–as far as we know. Here is the latest update to the Pandemic Diary curve chart:

During the last few months, the OHA has been reviewing records for the entire period of the pandemic. So far, this review has resulted in the addition of hundreds of deaths to the official COVID death toll. More than 150 of these newly added deaths occurred in November. These have been added of the Pandemic Diary database also, thus changing the height of the November bar on the chart. However, we are not going back and redoing anything before November in any precise detail. So you might be wondering: Is this home-made chart accurate? Well, accurate or not, you can’t get these numbers anywhere else! Committed to accuracy as we are, we have even taken on a new staff member in the statistics department. See that vertical bar on the far right–the one for  December? E played a key role in generating that one.

Thursday, January 6, 2022

Quite warm again today. M had an allergy attack in the evening. And yes, these two things are related. It happens to a lot of people around here at this time of year. 

Friday, January 7, 2022

The media narrative these days is that we are seeing a tremendous spike of COVID case numbers, which can be attributed to the Omicron variant. As always, the supposed “case numbers” are actually just counts of positive test results. But the number of people who get tested in any given period is just a fraction of the total population. How many more cases would be find if we could test everybody? We have no idea, which is scary. If the people tested on one day constituted a random sample, we could use that sample to make an estimate of the total. Let’s say we tested 10,000 people on a particular day in Oregon and we got 1,000 positive results. That would be ten percent. Oregon has a total of 4,200,000 residents. Our estimate would be that the real number of COVID cases in Oregon on that day was 420,000. 

Unfortunately, the number of people tested in Oregon on a particular day is never a random sample. Some people are required to be tested, some people are tested because they are showing symptoms, some people are feeling fine but know that they have been exposed. In general, you might assume that the group of people being tested are in fact at higher risk than the general population. According to that assumption, if the group rate was 10% positive, the rate of the general population would be much lower, maybe 9%, 8%, 5% or 2%. Who knows? Or maybe you might assume that the group that gets tested are actually at a lower risk because they are generally taking better care of themselves and that’s the real reason they’re getting tested, in which case the rate in the general population would be higher than theirs, maybe 12%, 15%, 25%, or 50%. Hard to say. 

But, not only do we know that the ‘new cases’ number doesn’t tell us much, we also know that the more people we test, the more new cases we find. Below are four days of recent COVID test results in Oregon. Of the four, the report for Jan. 6 is the one that made headlines. How could the number of new cases go from 4,540 on Jan. 3 to 10,451 in just four days? Well, note that there were almost twice as many tests given on the 6th as on the 3rd. That factor alone would account for roughly 85% of the difference. 

	Tests Administered	Percent Positive	Number of New Cases
Jan. 3	26,869	16.90%	4,540
Jan. 4	34,728	17.92%	6,223
Jan. 5	38,880	19.59%	7,615
Jan. 6	52,761	19.81%	10,451

So we have this number, (10,451 in this case) which tells us the result of some non-random testing, which therefore tells us very little about the total spread of the disease in the population as a whole, and which is nine times more dependent on number of tests given than it is on the extent of the infection. But it’s a number, so we jump right on it. You bet.

P.S. And by the way, what caused the number of tests to go up so much from the 3rd to the 6th? Could it be that at about that time the media really played up the dangers of the Omicron variant, causing a lot of people to get so nervous about COVID that they just had to go out and get tested? That would suggest that these semi-meaningless numbers have developed the ability to increase themselves over time, sort of like a virus….

P.P.S.  This is not to suggest that Omicron isn’t real. The percent positive numbers–a somewhat more useful statistic–are very high for all four of the dates above. The number of reported deaths is not very high lately, but deaths are a lagging indicator; so we’ll have to wait and see. 

Sunday, January 9, 2022

Walked in the OSU forest today, through the intensive management area and looping around Calloway Creek. Along the way we came across this disaster scene. Since there have been no high winds, and the ground is very wet, we are assuming the soggy soil is to blame for the demise of this venerable tree.

Monday, January 10, 2022

We spent a lot of time prepping for skiing, shopping for groceries, preparing food to take with us, and digging out all our various winter accoutrements. 

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Left town at around 9:00 today and made our way to Willamette Pass to do some cross country skiing. Willamette Pass is in the Cascades about a hundred miles southeast of Corvallis. We parked at the Gold Lake Snow Park, put on our boots and skis, and started out on the road to the lake. Alas we never made it there. The trail was easy, somewhat beaten down and well trodden but with plenty of snow. The scene was beautiful and the weather was fine. We had some fun on the way, zipping down a few of the steeper parts and not once falling down, so we’ll call it a success. But after a mile or two we started to get nervous about the fact that the trail was leading us so far downhill, thus promising us a long uphill route on the way back. After descending for an hour and a half, we decided to play it safe and stop for lunch somewhere short of the actual lake, after which we headed back.

We spent the night in a ‘chalet’ unit at Willamette Inn in Crescent, Oregon. We made dinner out of our food brought from home and settled down to rest. M read a Robert Parker novel he found in the bedroom while E amused herself on the internet before starting to read The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. We may have been the only guests at the inn. It was pretty quiet and pretty cold. Also pretty nice.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

The ski expedition returned to Corvallis in the early afternoon. All was well. But we were tired.

We Zoom watched a lecture/presentation on Bob Santelli’s Album Club. He was doing the album Blue by Joni Mitchell. What an album. He also played ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ from Ladies of the Canyon. An endless loop of that refrain is now trapped inside M’s head.

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Tertulia with J and R this morning out in the tent at Coffee Culture. The temperature must have been in the upper 40’s. Quite pleasant. J and R are having difficulties with the Hungarian exchange student who has been living with them. It turns out that both the student and her mother are distrustful of the COVID vaccines and although the girl did get two doses before she came here–as was required by the exchange organizer–that’s as far as she wants to go. This does not go down well with J, who has suggested that now would be a good time for her to get a booster, especially since one of her hosts has ongoing cardiac issues. It appears they are at an impasse. A new host family may have to be found. 

Thursday is dinner out day, but rather than risk the exposure of restaurant dining, we chose take-out dinner from Castor. Very tasty. E was particularly enraptured by the extra sweet butternut squash tartine.

Friday, January 14, 2022

We walked today with R on the boardwalk through the Jackson-Frazier Wetland. It’s wet all right, but we have seen it wetter. We saw eight or ten ducks gathered at a new pond in the open space to the west.

Later on we had errands downtown. E took her old down jacket to the resale place and left it for them to examine to see if it was of interest. M went to the tea and coffee place to pick up a pound of Yemeni coffee. The variety they have there is called Yemen Mocca Kulani. Although the word ‘mocha’ in U.S. coffee shops refers to coffee mixed with chocolate, in other parts of the world it was for a long time just another word for coffee. Coffee almost certainly originated in Ethiopia but remained a local phenomenon for a time, perhaps several centuries. It only became known to the wider world when in the 1400’s when some enterprising traders brought coffee beans across the Red Sea to the Yemeni port town of Mocha (also spelled Mokha or Mocca). The earliest consumers and growers of coffee in Yemen were Sufi monks in their mountain monasteries. But soon, more and more coffee was being grown in Yemen, much of it being exported to other areas of the Middle East and from there north into Europe. For a time–perhaps as long as 150 years–the Mocha area growers were able to maintain a sort of world monopoly on coffee production by exporting only sterile beans.

So for a long time coffee was called mocha because that’s where it came from. Only later did Arabic speakers begin calling it ‘qahweh’ an Arabic word that originally referred to a kind of wine. Qahweh is the etymological ancestor of our word coffee. 

Saturday, January 15, 2022

E returned to town only to find that her jacket had been deemed unworthy by the shop manager. She decided to go across the street and donate it to the OSU Folk Club thrift shop. This latter institution is famous in Corvallis for a number of reasons. It has been there seemingly forever in the same location; it has beautiful and interesting old things in the windows; and, finally, it is almost never actually open. They fact that the shop was open just when E needed it is a kind of miracle. M only found out about this later, as he had stayed at home to do a bit of compost stirring and moss raking. 

Sunday, January 16, 2022

We managed to choke down a breakfast of waffles with butter, maple syrup, and maple cream. We weren’t really planning to add the maple cream, but E looked at the label and it said right there on the jar “Use on waffles.” So we did.

After a modest period of recovery, E went for a walk in the OSU forest while M walked over to visit R to consult about a book project that R is undertaking. 

Monday, January 17, 2022

Grocery shopping in the morning; then a little bit of work on E’s transcription project. This involves four years’ worth of letters written by E’s uncle Charley while he was in the army during World War Two. During that time, he went to basic training, then to OCS, and later to the Europe in the last years of the war. The letters have become something of a family project. E’s grand nephew Ted scanned the letters, making an individual image of each one. He shared them on Google Drive. Now, E, A, and Ted’s father have begun transcribing them one by one so as to create digital text versions. M is helping a little with proofing and such.

Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Christmas soon, but four whole days to prepare. And we already did the grocery shopping–mostly. Must solve the problem of M’s prescription.

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Making sure to take a walk every day.

Thursday, December 23, 2021

How can it take so long just to wrap a few packages? New prescription still not approved. Renewed the old one.  

Friday, December 24, 2021

The Andees came bearing gifts this Christmas Eve, accompanied by the valiant Frankie. For dinner, one of the A’s contributed mushrooms Logroño, the other A brought frosted sugar cookies plus several bottles from her wine-a-day advent calendar, E made besugo al horno, and M made millionaire cake.   

Saturday, December 25, 2021

It was rainy on Christmas morning, but somewhere in the midst of stockings and presents and breakfast, we noticed that the rain turned briefly to snow. It wasn’t for long and it didn’t stick, but it was nice. It also gave us a preview of what was to come. The snow started for real at about 10:00 in the evening. 

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Five inches of snow this morning, which is a very unusual occurrence in these parts.

For the first half of the day, we just sat back and enjoyed it. Then, around 1:00, we noticed a neighbor out clearing his driveway. Oh yeah, that. He was using a tool called a snow shovel. You don’t see those much around here. Do we even have a snow shovel? We think maybe we do. But where is it? (Ten minutes later) Ah yes, there it is, down there under that pile of stuff.

Monday, December 27, 2021

Three more inches this morning. Wow! No time to shovel though. because we’d arranged to meet our friend El over at the coast at 10:30 and we needed to allow extra time to get there. We didn’t know what to expect on the roads. There have been times when relatively small amounts of snow have paralyzed traffic on that road. But today wasn’t bad: a packed snow surface, mostly sanded and only rarely icy. We took it slow and did fine. We met El at South Beach State Park. It was a joyous reunion because we hadn’t seen each other in 10 years! We did a loop up the beach to the south jetty and back down on the inland trail through the trees. We met a friendly local guy with a very energetic border collie and talked to him for a while. Then it was off to lunch at Local Ocean. El wanted to try a number of things, so boy did we have fun. They weren’t too busy, so we got lots of attention. We feasted on scallops, crab, rock fish and black cod–all locally caught. Yum. 

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Spent the night in a loft room at the Embarcadero, an old condo development that overlooks part of Yaquina Bay. Considering that the place is 40 years old, everything is in pretty good shape. Our unit had new floors, fixtures and furniture. Only the carpet sample coasters were vintage:

The Port of Newport has a considerable fleet of fishing and crabbing boats. The latter are having their busy season now. Newport is also the home port of several ocean research vessels, one operated by Oregon State University and several owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The calm waters of the bay give no hint of the dangers of crossing  the Yaquina Bar, which has claimed many lives over the years. 

Before heading home, we stopped to see the seals. 

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

We have been out and about a lot lately, and we were exposed to at least one person who was exposed to a known case. It doesn’t seem very likely that either of us is infected, but we decided to get tested anyway. We went to a drive-up place called WVT, which is located in a small building that once housed a Baskin-Robbins. Talk about sad transitions. When we arrived, instead of going inside to look at all the flavors in the freezer cases, we just stayed in our car. WVT has you register with LabDash before you go, which takes care of a lot of formalities.  A staffer came out and scanned our LabDash QR codes and then gave us long swabs to stick up our noses and a couple of tubes to put the swab tips into once we were finished. After swabbing, you have to put the tip of the swab into the tube and break off the handle part, leaving only the cotton tip inside the tube. That last, of course, was the hard part. In order to see the one place where the handle breaks off easily, you kinda need to have your glasses on…  

We were told that the results would be on LabDash within 24 hours. 

Thursday, December 30, 2021

Friday, December 31, 2021

A rare sunny day. We went for a walk in the OSU forest, which was lovely. But the trail surface was icy in places and we had to take care. We saw that last weekend’s heavy, wet snow had broken off thousands–or millions–of small branches and also brought down a few large trees. Here’s a downed fir just beside the path.

As is our tradition, we spent New Year’s Eve with jigsaw puzzle and a bottle of champagne. It was fun to get several new year greetings by text from friends in other time zones. First came a message from Germany at 9:30 a.m., then one from Spain at about 3:15 p.m. on Dec 31. 2021. Then it was a message from El at 12:30 am on January 1, 2022.  Did we manage to stay up till midnight our time? Yes, we did.

Saturday, January 1, 2022

Except for a few bedraggled remnants, that old 2021 snow is mostly gone. 

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Tree down, lights and decorations packed away. As our Turkish friend Umut told us: Bir yıl daha geçti yine göz açıp kapayıncaya kadar. (Another year has passed in the blinking of an eye. )

He also wishes us a year of sevgi (love), hoşgörü (tolerance), neşe (joy), mutluluk (happiness), huzur (peace), sağlik (health), and sevdiklerimizle doyasıya  güzel zamanlar (good times with our loved ones). We wish the same to all of you.