Month: January 2023

Thursday, January 12, 2023

We have a slow leak in the left front tire of the Mazda. We took it to the tire shop, but they couldn’t find anything. That was weeks ago. So it’s still leaking and we keep on filling it back up. At least we have one of those new-fangled inflators right in our own garage. Not that we’re going to be driving much. We’re off to Cancun tomorrow, traveling by Uber, airport shuttle and Delta.

Friday, January 13, 2023

Our flight was at 7:00 PM, so we dutifully checked in at the Portland Airport around 5:00. The security check was our first opportunity to try out our newly purchased TSAPre status. Which did not work. We were rejected from the line of privilege despite what it said on our boarding passes. Plus M was selected for a random check even after he got through. Sigh. Is this what we get for traveling on Friday the 13th? But after that everything went well. We flew to LAX, then got onto the long flight to Cancun. M couldn’t sleep during the flight and ended up watching Triangle of Sadness, the Palme d’Or winning movie about a group of super rich folks on a luxury cruise. Was that a good thing to see while on one’s way to a full-service tropical resort? Maybe. Maybe not.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

We arrived in Cancun early in the morning. It took a little while, but eventually a hotel shuttle arrived and soon we found ourselves in a lovely room in the Solaris Grand Caribe. 

The hotel strip in Cancun extends along 14 miles of a sand dune peninsula shaped like the number seven.

Along with the Andees, our friends K and J had also come down. One of the nicest things about the trip was having a chance to visit with all of them. 

Sunday, January 15, 2023

Wonderful day at the beach. Some areas of the beach were closed due to ocean conditions; others were open. Where we went the surf was just rough enough to be entertaining.

Monday, January 16, 2023

The Andees hired a car and took us all to Tulum, about an hour and a half away. Tulum is a Mayan city that was built around the year 900. The Mayans abandoned it soon after the Spaniards arrived in the 1500’s.

We had a wonderful guide, a Mayan himself, who had lots to tell us about Mayan history and culture. Along with much else, he taught us the Mayan number system and also told us a dramatic story about how the Mayan written language was deciphered. This last may be have been apocryphal. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2023

We took a bus today up along the strip to a shopping area. We got some tee-shirts and some Mexican vanilla, the latter costing about the same price as it would in Corvallis, but never mind. Along the way we passed lots and lots of hotels. There were a few ugly square towers, but most of the architecture was impressive. And the sheer scale was awesome. There are more than 80 hotels along the 7-shaped strip, enough to accommodate many thousands of guests and to provide some thousands of jobs. 

This was our first experience with an all-inclusive resort and it was pretty nice. It’s true that the free drinks weren’t very strong, but that’s actually a good thing because it means you can have many drinks with little ill effect. (And real drinks are also available, at the so-called Premium Bar.) The food was mostly good, which is to say, rarely great but very rarely bad. Day-long free food sounds dangerous; but when a buffet is free, there’s really less motivation to heap up your plate. There were also sit down dinner options, which were awesome because the portions were small! What a welcome change that was. Also, we never had to deal with a bill at the end of the meal. Very nice.

On our last evening there was a members only ‘gala dinner’ with live entertainment. Just before we went down to dinner, we took at last glance at the sunset.

Wednesday, January 17, 2023

Up at 4:30 to get an airport shuttle at 5:00. A long travel day, but all went well. All planes on time or early. Even our Portland to Corvallis shuttle found light traffic all the way.

Thursday, January 19, 2023

So now we’re home. The Mazda tire was way low again. We took it back to the tire shop and this time they fixed it. Okay! But wait, now we have to get Roto-Rooter to unplug the sewer lines. Geez! Shoulda stayed in Cancun.

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Okay, so maybe we can relax today. Not too much though because we have another, bigger trip coming up in a week or so…

Thursday, January 5, 2023

The day has arrived for the belated birthday party for A and N. E’s plan was to start the proceedings with dinner at Kim Hoa’s Vietnamese, followed by a pavlova dessert at our place. She made the meringue early in the afternoon. A arrived from Vancouver at 5:00 and at around six we set off for the restaurant, picking up H on the way. N joined us there. By 7:00 or so we were back at our place and E started whipping cream and spreading berries. N opened a bottle of champagne and M found sparkling cider for H and some suitably fluted glasses. After candles and song, the pavlova was served. Vay, vay vay, as the Turks might say. It was good. There wasn’t much left at the end.

E had also gotten each honoree a confetti popper. They were spectacular, firing out masses of shiny, sliced up ribbon. Made almost entirely of hard plastic, they were about as environmentally unfriendly as you can get. Fun though.

Friday, January 6, 2023

January 6 is a special day in Spain, the day the Wise Men arrive bearing gifts. Here there was a special event of another kind. There was a small gathering by the river to celebrate the birthday of Morris Walker, a recently deceased acquaintance. There was flute playing by a native American, memorial remarks and finally the tossing of a little bottle of ashes into the river. The amazing part about the bottle is that it was made of some sort of dissolvable salt that would not hurt the river.

Monday, January 9, 2023

M has been reading The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan, which is basically just an annotated list of sixty-six American popular songs from various eras and musical genres. Each entry shows the song’s title, the songwriter, the performer, and the date of release along with a number of photos that are related to the song’s time period or genre. And of course each song gets a few pages of text wherein Dylan shares some of his thoughts about it. Some of the songs are quite old–the oldest are from the 1920’s–and a few are from the early 21st century. The great majority, though, are from the years between 1945 and 1980. 

Many of the songs are very well-known or at least somewhat familiar to people of a certain age, e.g., Blue Suede Shoes, On The Road Again, Strangers in the Night, Mack the Knife, On the Street Where You Live; but quite a few are decidedly lesser known. For M this latter group would include such titles as Nelly Was a Lady, The Little Cloud That Cried, Take Me from the Garden of Evil, and Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy. Part of the fun is to see how many of the songs you recognize. And then you’re curious to see what Bob Dylan has to say about them. What you find is that his response to each song–famous or not–will go off in all kinds of (mostly) interesting directions.  

Inevitably, you’ll want to listen to each song when you read about it. Once Dylan lets you know, for example, that the harmonica part in a certain song was played by Stevie Wonder, how can you not want to hear that song? In the old days, finding and playing it might have been difficult. Now it’s just hey Siri, play Ball of Confusion by the Temptations…

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

We made a return visit to the Herbert Farm Natural Area. Went a little farther this time.

In the evening we had dinner with J, B and C at J and B’s house. A fine meal followed by peppermint pig smashing and a shortbread crust lemon tart. Hard to beat.

Wednesday, January 11

Today it’s back to work for E, who is trying desperately to finish sewing a beach cover-up for our upcoming mini-trip to Mexico with the ANDEES and friends. Oh boy!

Of course after yesterday’s indulgences, E is thinking she may have to enlarge the waistband on the beach skirt.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

A Christmas miracle: the temperature rose and along with it came rain and a great thawing. Suddenly the roads were passable, and the ANDEES were able to come for Christmas. A good time was had by all, we hope. We had a lovely Christmas Eve dinner of salmon and trimmings enclosed in the Dock Box that we ordered from Local Ocean, a seafood restaurant at the coast. Santa came overnight and we opened our presents the next morning.

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Here’s a quick summary of the last three days. Rain. Cold rain. Steady rain. Lots of rain. And sometimes, gusty winds to go with it. 

Thursday, December 29, 2022

We met R and J for coffee this morning. We went to Tried and True down in the south part of town and breakfasted on great coffee and so-so croissants. Thus fortified, the four of us headed farther south for a mile or two to Herbert Avenue, intending to do some walking. There’s a place down there, past the edge of town, called the Herbert Farm Natural Area, which we had never heard of till Joe the builder told us about it. It wasn’t a bad day for a hike–rainy, windy and cold, but not seriously so. Bad weather in a jovial mood, you might say.

The chief feature of the natural area is Muddy Creek. The headwaters of Muddy Creek are only 18 miles away as the crow flies, but the creek wanders a lot and its total length might be twice that. Muddy Creek flows into the Mary’s river just half a mile north of where we went walking. Usually the creek is a lazy thing only a few feet wide. Trees and brush grow thick on either side of it, so you usually don’t see any actual water as it winds its way through farm fields and across a part of the Finley Refuge. But if it rains enough and you get close enough…

The satellite map below shows what the area looks like in the summer. We walked in from the east along the road that you can see in the upper right of the map. On the way we found that a short section of the road was flooded, but we were able to detour around it. But then, when we came to the place where the road curves to the left, we found it completely submerged under rapidly flowing water. We were able to continue our walk, but we had to go along the edge of an old field to do it. R pointed out that the higher ground at the edge of the field didn’t seem natural. Past farmers had probably moved earth to the area to create a berm to keep Muddy Creek out.

We walked all the way down to the lower left corner of the map. See the big oval broccoli floret down there? It’s a single oak tree. That, of course, was in the summertime. Here’s what it looks like from ground level in the winter.

At the place where the road was just about to dip down and disappear into the creek, we found something interesting. Here’s what it looked and sounded like. (Turn up your sound for the full effect.)

The bubbles, we think, come from air that is being forced out of the soil as water begins to saturate it. As the water pushes in, the air is compressed. What we were hearing was the sound of the air escaping from the ground under the water of this puddle. As we stood watching the bubbles rise in the water, we also noticed something else. At our feet we saw tiny spurts of water popping up out of openings in the soil. These were silent, appearing and disappearing in an instant. It was like the ground was spitting at us.  

These phenomena suggested the possibility that the floodwaters were spreading as the creek continued to rise. That was an unsettling thought. The whole area, including the parking lot and the road back to the highway, is just a foot or so higher than the water. In the end, though, if it was rising, it wasn’t rising very fast and we were fine.

Later, as we were driving back toward the main highway, we saw more evidence of earthmoving activities sometime in the past.

Saturday December 31, 2022

The forecast for today called for rain of the intermittent sort. We decided to take our chances and go for a hike in another place we’d never been before. It’s a place about an hour north of us called Miller Woods. Frieda Miller donated the area to the Yamhill County Soil and Water Conservation District in 2004. The drive up was pretty rainy, but our luck was good and things had improved greatly by the time we arrived. Our walk through the Woods covered about three and a half miles.

Later in the day, this being New Year’s Eve and all, we had to deal with three long-standing traditions: fondue, champagne and jigsaw.

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Serious puzzle work.

Monday, January 2, 2023

Tuesday, January 3, 2023

Nice weather in the morning today. The dark clouds have given way to some white ones, which makes a big difference. After spending a couple of days obsessing over the puzzle, we now turn to more real life concerns such as taking down the Christmas tree, tending to appointments, and planning a dessert gathering for two December birthday girls. We also need to do something about all of these horrible Christmas sweets. We’ve eaten enough to make us woozy and fat. The rest we need to freeze, give away, or maybe just toss out the window of the car next time we take a joy ride. (Except for the Frigor and the Christopher Elbow. We’re not done with those.)