Sunday, October 8
Our day started with almond croissants and a lazy few hours of checking up on the news of the world. Which was mostly bad, and was especially bad in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza.
Then we did some window washing, which is good for the body and good for the soul–especially if administered in small doses. The weather this week has been beautiful, 75 and sunny, but the forecast says that the good times are soon to end.
We accomplished another chore when we moved the Jaguar out of the garage and into a storage unit. Given the good weather, this pretty much required us to first spend an hour or so driving around the countryside with the top down. Nice. Then we put the car away, which was a little sad. It’s nice having it in the garage even if just to look at as you walk by. On the other hand, with two cars in the garage, there was barely room to do any walking. So today we also celebrated the end of cramped conditions. Now, not only can we stroll around the garage like lord and lady of the manor, we can get in and out of the Ioniq 5 without contortions.
After that, it was time to deal with some of our large oversupply of apples from our tree. M cored some, not enough to make much of a dent in the total inventory, but enough for E to conjure up both a batch of applesauce and a pan of an upstate NY recipe called Barbara’s apple crisp. By then it was getting on toward supper time. We were tempted to just eat up all the apple crisp and call that a meal, but instead we managed to have a little supper first–onion pie and steamed chard. Then we only ate half the apple crisp.
Monday, October 9
Cold and wet today, with a steady rain all morning. We did our grocery shopping and then E went off to attend a sustainability fair at the county library. She heard about how the owners of a local restaurant are trying to build sustainability into all aspects of their operation. Their to-go containers, for example, are returnable and require a deposit. Their supply chain is organized so as to have as few individual deliveries as possible and they avoid using any pre-processed ingredients.
Meanwhile, M went back to the rock store to get more stepping stones for his back yard path project. He finished the first phase of the project last week and now he is ready–in theory–to do the final phase. But will he now run right out there to work in the rain? Maybe not.
In the evening, after another serving of apple crisp, we watched the final installment of the Frida Kahlo documentary on Passport. It was good to get a more fleshed out understanding of her life and work.
Tuesday, October 10
We had an appointment today to get COVID vaccinations at a Walgreen’s. We showed up on time, only to find that in actual fact they had no vaccine. It would have been nice to have been so informed. But then, our friend T told us that the Good Samaritan Hospital pharmacy was giving walk-in COVID vaccinations. So we headed up there. There were a few people ahead of us, but the wait was not overly long and E was able to get her shot. M, however, was refused service and told to return when he could provide sufficient documentation. Apparently having just arrived from Mars, M had not thought it necessary to bring his medicare card.
The strangest thing about the experience though, was the waiting room. The Good Sam pharmacy has only a small waiting area with five chairs and very limited standing room. And since they were serving the normal stream of patients picking up prescriptions as well as the additional stream of vaccination seekers, there were a lot of people in the room for the entire time we were waiting. For those of us whose minds were on COVID, that seemed terribly wrong.
Wednesday, October 11
E has been quite pensive lately. This is natural, as she is approaching a milestone birthday early next year, which gives one pause. She has not shared all her thoughts, but she has mentioned to Andrea that after much serious consideration, she has decided about the cake: a white cake with white frosting and raspberry filling.
Saturday, October 14
M went out driving his truck in the Cascades today, up in the area around Tombstone Pass. First he drove east on U.S. Highway 20 for an hour and a quarter, climbing up over the pass and then down into the dip between passes until he reached a sno-park called Lava Lake. There he turned onto a forest road leading north. The plan was to explore the logging roads in the area, moving generally northwest. He wanted to find a place called the South Pyramid Horse Camp, where he might rest and eat his meagre lunch of Nugo bar, pineapple juice and trail mix. From there he would navigate southwest so as to loop back to highway 20. Then he could go home. It looked fairly simple on the map. (Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha.)The challenge would be the usual one: there would be many, many more roads in the real world than were shown on the map, which meant that GPS, per se, would be of little help. Of course that’s the fun of it…sort of.
After lunch at the horse camp, all M had to do was to navigate about ten miles back to Highway 20. The first eight miles were easy, and then things fell apart. Post mortem analysis showed that he made not one, but two wrong turns. You can see his route by following the penciled in arrows on the map. Start on the right side of the map near Lava Lake at the little white Highway 20 marker. Black arrows show where he went; the red arrow shows where he was supposed to go. Note how well he did finding his way north and then west to the South Pyramid Horse Camp. See how he then headed south, back toward the highway. See how he came quite close. But then, at that remote intersection marked by the circle, it all went wrong. Sigh. He ended up going north(!) and didn’t get out of the forest till he had driven around Moose Mountain and followed Moose Creek Road all the way down to the other Highway 20 marker at the far left of the map. That took more than an hour.
Sunday, October 15
We met up with some friends and went to the Greekfest today, or should we say the Greekfeast? Yes, they have music and dancing, but it’s mostly about food. Greekfest comes every year at about this time and serves as a fundraiser for a local Greek Orthodox congregation. The festival is held in the same hall where E and M’s wedding reception took place some twenty-seven years ago. This year there were eight of us who made the excursion. Our friends J, B, and L came first to our house. From there they got a ride to the church in E’s new electric car. At the church we met up and H and T and proceeded to the business at hand. Our many course meal was served in a big white tent pitched just north of the church hall. After the meal, we all bought Greekfest desserts to take away. The group then reassembled at our house to enjoy their treats along with tiny cups of Greek coffee, (which is not to be confused with Turkish coffee, or is it?) The weather, unexpectedly, turned sunny and warm and we were able to move the party out onto the patio. M made a bit of a bungle serving the coffee, but despite this it was a fine occasion.
Monday, October 16
M finally got his COVID shot, at a Rite-Aid in Lebanon.
Tuesday, October 17
We started preparing for our camping trip. M was feverish and weak from his vaccination.
Wednesday, October 18
M’s fever broke at around 4:00 AM and in the morning he was good to go. While E took her friend Asher for a forest walk, M went shopping for last minute camping supplies: a bundle of firewood and ingredients for s’mores. Also some canned margaritas from the liquor store. Cutwater is our brand; they use real tequila and enough of it. Thus equipped, we packed up the truck and headed over to the coast, stopping at La Rockita in Philomath for lunch. We had reserved a yurt at Tugman State Park south of Reedsport, Oregon. We took our little fridge with us. It ran on 12 volts in the truck on the way over; we plugged it in to the 110 when we got to the yurt. Nice.
Darkness comes early these days and we had to put the porch light on and use our headlamps to clean up after dinner. We went to bed early, but M woke up just after midnight and went outside. He ended up sitting for a time looking up at the stars and listening for what there was to hear. For one thing, he could hear the traffic on U.S. Highway 101. Vehicles passed by at roughly one minute intervals. Usually, what he heard was not engine noise, but only the whoosh of a large, fast-moving object pushing the air aside as it hurtled on its way. The sound would build gradually as each car approached and then fall away as it passed. You couldn’t call it a natural sound, but it wasn’t all that different from the rushing sound that a brisk wind makes as it pushes its way through the trees. Once in a while some kind of large truck would go by and in that case the sound of buffeted air would be accompanied by something else, either the soft whine of an engine running easily downhill or else the roar of a diesel under load as the semi climbed upward. The latter had a sort of burble to it, almost as if you could hear the rapid sequence of individual explosions in the cylinders.
And in the moments when there was no traffic? Well, the ocean was more than two miles away, but the wind was blowing from that direction. There was always a soft roar of white noise from the crashing of that faraway surf.
Thursday, October 19
After breakfast we drove about fifteen miles up the coast and went for a hike in the area around the mouth of the Siltcoos River.
Back home at the yurt, we had hamburgers for dinner–during daylight–and then made s’mores on the fire in the dark.
Friday, October 20
We got up early this morning and took a pre-breakfast walk to the shore of Eel Lake, which is just a few hundred yards from the Tugman campground.
By then it was breakfast time for sure, so we got ourselves back to the yurt. Now you might think that we would have eaten some kind of delicious bakery treats to help us start the day. But no, that’s not how we operate. We had oatmeal. Then we threw everything back in the truck and headed for home. An hour later we passed the town of Waldport, home of the Pacific Sourdough Bakery and decided to make a short stop there. Why, you might ask, had we not stopped there on Wednesday on our way down to Tugman State Park? It must have been due to the irresistible lure of our oatmeal.
I wholeheartedly agree with Eve’s choice of cake! It is my favorite!