May 2024 – Meandering on the Way

Tuesday, May 7th

A new electricity generation facility opened in Corvallis today and we got to attend the opening ceremony. There wasn’t too much of crowd. In fact, except for the installer, we were the only ones there. It was pretty exciting though. It’s a small system with just nine 410 watt panels, giving it a nominal rating of 3,800 watts.

Our panels are the newer type that do not have the silver gridlines. These were made in the U.S. by Silfab

Besides the panels themselves, there are three other parts to the system.

On the back of the house, a reprogrammed electric meter.

Nearby, a code-mandated outdoor kill switch

And inside the garage, an inverter with communication and control functions, i.e., the brains of the outfit. This is an SMA unit, made in Germany.

Wednesday, May 8th

It was a day for medical appointments. In the morning M had a pre-op meeting with the eye surgeon and in the afternoon the Ioniq 5 got a checkup and software upgrade at the Hyundai dealer in Salem. (Why, one might ask, did we take the Ioniq to Salem for its upgrade instead of going to the Hyundai dealer in Albany, which is much nearer? We don’t know. Probably, you know, senility.)

While we were in Salem, just by chance we dropped in to the Konditorei to see if they might possibly have any good cake there. They did. E got a piece of her favorite Barney’s Blackout and M got a piece of German chocolate cheesecake. Their pieces were big, big enough to last us a couple of days.

Thursday, May 9th

Another beautiful spring day, sunny with temps in the seventies. M put on sunscreen and worked in the yard all day. E was in and out, what with her exercise class, a coffee date with a friend, and then Laughter Yoga. While they’re busy doing all that, here’s a leftover photo from M’s Nevada/Oregon road trip, taken when he visited the gravesite of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the son of Sacajawea and Toussaint Charbonneau. The grave is in one of the emptiest parts of Oregon. Charbonneau contracted pneumonia there while on his way from California to Montana.

If you can’t read the text here or want to know more about Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, click here.

And on a simpler note, here’s a sparkling little watercourse in a dry looking place called Glen Dun Canyon, located in the hills southwest of Winnemucca, NV.

Friday, May 10th

E started the day by getting her toes painted, then came home and mixed up a dinner to put into the slow cooker. After that she was off to a luncheon meeting of her THEPAJ group, which she had to leave a bit early in order to get to her SMART reader work at Lincoln School later in the afternoon. Whew.

M has been watching to see how our new solar system is working. Our system’s “nominal” output is 3,800 watts. But a solar panel’s nominal rating is based on its maximum possible performance in a controlled test environment. Well that’s no help; all it means is that our panels will never produce anything close to 3,800 watts. So how can we see how much they actually do produce? There are several ways; but since the inverter is connected to our home internet, the easiest way is to use a computer or phone. Here’s part of what we see:

This screenshot is from 9:45 A.M. on a sunny day and shows that the system was producing 2,023 watts when last sampled. In the lower right, it also shows how much electricity the system has produced since it was first turned on. After three days of life, mostly sunny ones, it is at 59.30 kilowatt hours.

Here’s another sample, this one from the same sunny day but taken at 1:30 P.M., when the sun was shining more directly onto the panels. This is probably close to the maximum production rate that we will ever see. The cumulative total is up to 69 kilowatt hours.

Saturday, May 11th

E has been invited up to Vancouver to celebrate Mother’s Day with Andrea and Andy. She went up today on the afternoon train and Andrea picked her up at Portland station. E’s train–contrary to all expectation–was not late. It was thirty minutes early! No one has ever even heard of that. It’s a little eerie. E was happy though. She read a Masie Dobbs novel in the waiting room. Andrea, meanwhile, had a good excuse to leave her volunteer work early, given that her mother was by herself at a station located in what is one of the worst parts of Portland.

Soon E was safely transported to the Andees’ place across the river. She reports that the food and accommodation there were quite fine. She got a wonderful dinner complete with homemade cookies.

Sunday, May 12th

The day’s main activity was to participate in the 11th Annual Reigning Roses Walk, a benefit for Rose Haven, a day shelter and community center for women. The event began with a pre-party at 10:00, which featured food, mimosas, a raffle, and live entertainment. At 11:00 the walk began. The route went through a section of NW Portland’s Alphabet District and included stops at a number of businesses which were supporting the event.

After the walk, there was a brief respite back home and then it was time for a late lunch. And wouldn’t you know it, right on cue, that’s when M showed up, having sailed the Ioniq 5 up from Corvallis. That made four for lunch at Grassa on the Vancouver riverfront. What a nice place that is. Then, after a stroll along the waterfront, it was time to say goodbye. The sad parting was assuaged by the fact that A gave us a box of cookies for the road.

Monday, May 13th

Another busy day. While M did chores inside and out, E went for a forest walk with her friend S. E and S met back in the old(ish) days when a teenage S babysat for young mother E’s children. Today they went to Peavy and walked up to the lake where they sat down and had some coffee. Later E had Zoom yoga.

In the evening we watched the last episode of Season 9 of Seaside Hotel. It’s a lovely series with great characters and well-made plot lines. Very dramatic but never really too awful. It streams from PBS.

At 9:30 in the evening M checked on the solar panel system, which was totally dead in the water. Useless. We should probably get some lunar panels.

Tuesday, May 14th

We worked in the garden in the early morning, with E fighting the mite wars and M weeding the struggling strawberries. E then went off to exercise class and did a bunch of errands, ending her day with a trip to the Co-op to buy rhubarb and other supplies. M, meanwhile, finished building a little dike in the garage.

We’ve been getting summery weather here lately, sunny and almost hot for days and days. The first roses are out. E is thrilled to have some in the house again.

Saturday, April 27th

Up at 4:15 A.M. and out of the house by 4:45. It was still dark of course and we don’t really like to drive at night; but with hardly any traffic, it wasn’t so bad. We were at the Eugene airport by 5:30. American Airlines took us first to Phoenix and thence to Palm Springs. There we picked up a rental car and made the one hour drive to the town of Joshua Tree, which is located near the west entrance to Joshua Tree National Park.

On the way we stopped at a supermarket and got a couple of tamales for lunch. E was pleased to find a vegetarian tamale; M went for chicken. Both were quite good. Later on, we had plenty of time to get into our Vrbo house and visit another grocery store for supplies. The house was in a development just west of the town. The orange circle in the satellite photo below marks the location of our temporary home.

The main part of the town of Joshua Tree was only a mile or so to the east, but because of the lay of the land the city was invisible. All we could see out our back window was boring old desert and some weird trees.

We had dinner at home. E baked a couple of Gorton’s frozen salmon squares and M sautéed a skillet full of potatoes, peppers and squash. After dinner we took a walk around the neighborhood and admired the western skyline after the sun went down. A treat for us rain forest dwellers.

Sunday, April 28th

Today we visited two places in the western part of the park: Hidden Valley and Barker Dam. The weather was pretty nice with temperatures in the seventies. On the other hand, The sun beats down all day, the air is very dry, and there is always a breeze, so you need a lot of water. Also, we were at about 4,000 feet, not an altitude we’re used to. We ended up walking only about three miles in all. But what lovely miles they were!

Here are a couple of Joshua trees framing the top of San Gorgonio peak many miles to the west. The altitude of the Mojave Desert ranges from 3000 to 5000 feet. San Gorgonio rises to 11,500 and is the highest peak in Southern California.

Both the Joshua trees and Mojave yucca were striking plants, but so was this Nolina bigelovii with its giant flower stalk. This one was still just budding…

…but on this Nolina, some of the flowers had bloomed, enough to get the bees very interested. Wikipedia says that there are up to a hundred and fifty tiny flowers on each rosette. So on the whole stalk there must be thousands.

There are also a lot of rocks in this part of the park…and by that we mean one helluva lot of rocks.

For Sunday dinner, we went back to a supermarket deli thinking to get more of those good tamales. But then E saw that they also had chile rellenos, a vegetarian dish and one of her favorite Mexican things. Alas, when we sat down to supper, the relleno turned out to be a little different from the ones in Oregon. This one was very spicy, too hot for her to handle. Fortunately, we had some other stuff around. If memories serve, she fashioned herself a sandwich out of some peanut butter we found in the fridge.

Monday, April 29th

It was time to pack up and say goodbye to the Vrbo place. For the next two days we’d be staying at a Fairfield Inn down the road in the town of Twentynine Palms. But first we had to visit Indian Cove, a relatively small area in the northernmost part of the park. Indian Cove is separated from the rest of the park by some miles of rugged terrain, so it has its own entrance. It turned out to be quite lovely with lots of flowers and a nice self-guided nature trail.

This video starts by looking down toward the town of Twentynine Palms and ends by looking up at something closer.

When you first look at Joshua Tree, you know right away you’re in a desert. The whole thing is just really dry, with a hot sun bearing down from an utterly cloudless sky. But in fact there are variations in that dryness that have a powerful effect on plant life. In the photo below you can see that a crease in the rocky hillside collects a bit of extra moisture that is then exploited by certain plant species, species that could not survive in the open areas just a few meters away.

…but here’s the bigger picture.

More subtle variations also have a part in determining which plants grow where. There are a surprising number of different plants and lots of them were in bloom.

As for animal life, during our trip we saw one rabbit, several tiny ground squirrels, two giant gray squirrels, lots of birds, and many, many lizards.

After our walk at Indian Cove we went to the park visitor center in Twentynine Palms. Besides maps and t-shirts and puzzles, there was a great deal of information about the native groups that lived in the area prior to the Euro-American invasion. There was also the following, which E found on a subsequent visit to this same center:

At 3:00 we checked into the Twentynine Palms Marriot Fairfield Inn, which is very nice. (Those Vrbo/AirBnB things are all well and good, but for comfort it’s hard to beat a good hotel!) For dinner we went to a restaurant called Thai Cafe. It was unprepossessing, as they used to say, but it was really good.

Tuesday, April 30th

Today we started out by driving into Twentynine Palms and turning south on a road called Utah Trail, which leads to the northeast entrance of the park. Once inside, we turned left on a road that leads to the south. Our first stop was for a hike to Arch Rock.

They call this Arch Rock, but…you know…we’ve been to Utah and other places where they have real arches. This looks more like an insect or maybe an elephant.

Next we drove south into the part of the park where the Mojave Desert transitions into the Colorado Desert. There were no Joshua trees in the landscape, but we did reach an area where we found ourselves surrounded by Cholla cactus. They call it Cholla Garden.

And then we made our last expedition, a place where there was little walking involved. We drove to a high place called Keys View.

Wednesday, May 1st

Time to go back to Oregon. Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave till 1:05, so we had a fairly relaxed morning even though the Palm Springs Airport is airport is an hour and a half away from Twentynine Palms. We got to the airport early, so by the time we turned in the rental car, checked our bags and went through security it was only 11:35 or so. We had a coffee and shared a croissant, then went out to the gate area and sat down to wait. After a bit, we got a text from American Airlines: our 1:05 flight to Phoenix would be delayed until 1:20. So, a fifteen minute delay, hardly worth mentioning, Then we got another text. The flight was now delayed till 1:40. Hmm. Twenty more minutes. Still, that would not be a problem for our connecting flight from Phoenix to Eugene, which didn’t leave till 4:45. Then another text: the flight to Phoenix was now delayed until 9:27 p.m.. 9:27? That can’t be right, said E. I know what you mean, said M, but I think maybe it is.

So we headed back out down the Sonny Bono Concourse, past security and back to the American ticket counter. The line there was short; there were only three people in front of us. But there was only one agent, so it took a while. When we got to the head of the line–when it was almost our turn–we happened to look behind us. Yo! There was a huge mass of people behind us, none of them looking particularly happy.

Eventually a very nice agent was able to reroute us onto Alaska. We would fly from Palm Springs to Seattle and then from Seattle to Eugene. The Seattle plane didn’t leave Palm Springs until 5:55, so we would be arriving very late in Eugene. But we would be arriving.

And so, four hours later, off we flew toward Seattle. We saw some lovely Sierra Nevada Mountains scenery out the window. About halfway through the flight there was an announcement asking if there was a doctor on board. It appeared that one of the passengers “wasn’t feeling well.” A little while later–quite possibly at the very moment that our plane was flying over the town of Eugene on its way north to Seattle–we were informed that the plane would be making a medical emergency landing in Portland. Well. We’d never experienced that before. But now we have. Once we landed, we found two ambulances and a fire engine waiting for us–all with lights aflashing. So, did we ever make to Seattle? Were we in time to make our connection to Eugene? Yes and yes. We were a little tired though.

It had all seemed so simple that morning.

Thursday, May 2nd

We arrived in Eugene around 12:30 A.M. After half an hour spent talking to people about where our two suitcases might be, we went out into the pouring rain, got into the truck and headed home.

On Thursday morning the rain stopped for a few hours, so M went out to cut the lawn, which seemed to have grown an inch a day while we were gone.

Our bags arrived in Corvallis just before dinnertime.

Friday and Saturday, May 3-4

Rain rain rain. On Saturday E did some sorting and decluttering inside. We made some hard decisions about what we could stand to get rid of. E then took a bunch of things to the Humane Society Thrift Shop. Very satisfying.

Sunday and Monday, Mar 5-6

Weatherwise, it was still kind of damp. On Monday E defrosted the garage freezer while M stayed mostly in bed with a cold.

Month: May 2024

Meandering on the Way — May 7 to 14

Meandering on the Way — April 27 to May 4, 2024