Month: June 2024

Wednesday, June 12th

In the morning we met M, L and A at Coffee Culture. The three of them (and especially the two humans) are electric car veterans, having owned a Leaf before recently getting a Subaru Solterra. L seems to be doing well. He was telling us that before too long the world’s electricity will be provided by small, self-contained nuclear plants. These plants will be about the size of a house and each one will provide enough power for a medium sized city. We may not see them ourselves, he says, but our children and grandchildren will.

Thursday, June 13th

Went out to dinner with P at the new(ish) Corazon wine bar. We’ve been there twice now and liked it very much both times.. Corazon is Spanish themed in a way, but they have their own particular cooking style. And they are very good at it. Lots of vegetarian items on the menu.

Friday, June 14th

E had a medical appointment and then rewarded herself by picking up some shoes that had just come in for her down at Footwise. Then she proceeded to Ants on a Log for a lunch of avocado toast.

We’ve been watching TV every night these days, but we’re finding it hard to find anything to settle down to after Extraordinary Attorney Wu. We tried another Korean series–Crash Landing on You–and it’s kind of interesting but it’s a slow mover. So we searched the India section of Netflix and ended up watching a movie called Laapataa Ladies. It was good and left a pleasant aftertaste. The plot was a little hard to get into at first but got better in the second half. It’s set in a rural area and provides a wonderful sense of place in addition to its gentle but insistent messaging about women’s place in society.

Saturday, June 15th

H came over so that she and E could do more sewing. Today they took on the task of altering a pair of tapered leg pants. Along the way, they celebrated the fact that they both have tomatoes in their sewing kits.

Does everyone have a tomato in their sewing kit? Inquiring editors want to know.

Meanwhile M took the truck up into the Cascades, where he drove around for a couple of hours trying to find a particular route which at first seemed to exist only in the imagination of the people who publish maps–online or printed. In the end he found evidence that indeed at one time there had been a route just where the maps said there was. But it looked like it had been closed for quite some time. That was disappointing, but it was good to have found an answer to the mystery. It was a pretty day up there in the Cascades between Upper Soda and Sheep Creek, with rain showers alternating with sunshine, seemingly every five minutes.

Sunday, June 16t

It was another cool, damp day here. This is the time of the year when we feel like summer has arrived everywhere in the country except Oregon. The weather is not bad, but you have to bundle up to go for a walk. Today we drove up to Tampico Road and walked in Dunn Forest. Along the way we came upon a snail in the middle of the path. M tried to take a video of it, but soon realized that a good snail video would require a major investment of time–both in the making and in the viewing. So here’s E’s photo of it instead.

A few minutes later we saw something strange at the old stream crossing.

Later in the day it rained pretty hard for a while. Nice for the garden.

Monday, June 17th

It was raining again this morning and the temperature at 5:30 was 38 degrees! Things improved a little as the day went on and we got to a high of 65.

Tuesday, June 18th

We did some yard work today, spreading wood chips and digging up grass. E also had a repair project. A few days ago she got out her step stool so as to be high enough to take the cover off of our rather ridiculous patio umbrella, an annual ritual at around this time. This year, when she examined the cover, she found that it was coming apart at the top. Unable to resist a mending challenge, today she got down to repairing it. This took a long time and involved a certain amount of muttering about the quality of the mending tape that the person at Ace Hardware had assured her would be just the ticket.

We also had a Ziply installer working here for much of the day on a new internet connection. We’re saying goodbye to Comcast/Xfinity. Ziply is a new provider that uses fiber optic cables rather than copper wires. For the installer, the first challenge was to find the nearest Ziply node, which was down the block several houses away. Then he had to string new fiber optic wires from there to our backyard utility pole and thence to our house. As he was doing that, M decided to clean things up a little by removing the old land line junction box from the side of the house and removing some less than sightly old wires.

Once the new fiber line was connected to the house, the process went quickly. First M disconnected the Xfinity cable and removed its outlet hardware. Then the Ziply installer–a very competent guy named Stanley–put in a Ziply outlet where the old Xfinity outlet had been. M unhooked our old cable modem and found an ethernet cable long enough to connect the Ziply outlet directly to our router. Stanley then called in an activation request and told us to wait ten minutes. After that we just powered up and gave it a try. Perfect.

Wednesday, June 19th

Our friend J came over for dinner, so we got to catch up on what’s going on with her. She’s planning a summertime trip back to the east coast to visit relatives. While she’s there, she and three of her sisters are going to help a fourth sister travel down to Atlanta to visit her daughter. They’ll be traveling by car from Delaware to Atlanta, a twelve hour drive that they plan to make in one day. J is a brave woman.

Thursday, June 20th

In honor of the Solstice, our weather has turned hottish, with clear skies and highs in the mid eighties.

We got to go to a birthday party today as C celebrated reaching another year ending in zero. The party was held at The Vue and it was quite the occasion. A nice treat for us. C is angling for a ride in the Jaguar as a birthday gift. A plan is in the works.

Sunday, June 23rd

Another chapter in Mite Wars took place today. E went out in the cool of the morning to hang cardboard cards full of Green Lacewing eggs on the rose bushes. She took care to not to cluster them together, however, since the manufacturer issued a warning that larvae can be carnivorous and may eat each other instead of the offensive mites.

Tonight we watched a movie called Miracle Club on Netflix. It features two great actors: Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates. Five stars.

Monday, June 24th

Another busy Monday. E went shopping at the Co-op. As usual, got herself there on foot and then called her car service for a ride home. When her ride arrived, she wondered what had become of her usual driver, the one who wore glasses. Apparently the old driver developed cataracts and the company had to let him go. The new driver was squinting a little, but seemed to know the route.

Saturday, June 1st

Every year in early June OSU’s Peavy Arboretum celebrates National Get Outdoors Day by hosting a variety of family-centric activities in the research forest. The goal is to get people outside, with a focus on encouraging the participation of families who may not be familiar with the recreational opportunities available in these state-owned forest lands. As the web page puts it: Durante este evento, el bosque está lleno de actividades bilingües, familias, y grupos comunitarios, todos unidos con el objetivo de salir, disfrutar con la comunidad, y con suerte aprender algo nuevo.

E has been a bilingual volunteer in the event for a couple of years now. This year she was assigned to the cookie table. Now we know what you’re probably thinking: What an ideal choice on the part of the organizers in terms of matching a specific worker to a specific job! But actually, they weren’t that kind of cookies. E’s job was to help kids decorate wooden “cookie” medallions to wear during the events and to have as a souvenir.

E was delighted to meet parents and their offspring from a variety of Spanish speaking countries, as well as people from Turkey, Korea, Japan and Iran. They all seemed to really enjoy the activity.

Thursday, June 6th

Today we went on a tour put on by the Greenbelt Land Trust. The site was a 1600 acre parcel of wooded hillside called CBow Ridge. This was once a privately owned property which has recently been converted to a permanent conservation easement to be managed by GLT. The tract is about forty-five minutes south of Corvallis, just north of the Eugene Springfield area. As the map shows, it is located just a few miles east of I-5 near the town of Coburg. What the map does not show is that the property climbs the west face of the ridge, rising from the 400 ft elevation of the valley floor to 1500 feet at the top.

It is a very beautiful piece of land. In the past, the property owners had for a time tried to use the hillside to run cattle. But although there are a number of grassy meadows here and there, the soil is rocky and produced relatively low quality forage. There was also some logging in the area, but this was apparently limited to selective cutting of a few high value trees. Consequently there is no sign whatever of old clearcuts or plantation style replantings. Instead, the area retains much of its natural character, which includes large swathes of oak savannah and an unusually large variety of tree and shrub species. In recent years the owners made only recreational use of the property–trail rides and camp-outs.

The trees and shrubs were the focus of the tour, which was led by  Ed Jensen, Oregon State University Professor Emeritus and author of Shrubs to Know in Pacific Northwest Forests, along with David Zahler, Greenbelt Board Member and former faculty member of OSU College of Forestry. We were able to practice using a shrub identification manual, which reminded M of his long-ago Field Botany class in college. We were excited to hear about several shrubs/trees that we already have in our somewhat out of control, falling-into-wilderness yard.

Friday, June 7th

Lots of garden work today. E weeded the coreopsis colony while M spread wood chips around.

Saturday, June 8th

M has embarked on another backyard project. He’s plans to dig up about 50 square feet of grass and merge Hummock Project #2 with Hummock Project #3. “Less lawn!” is his rallying cry.

E has been doing long range planning. Today she walked over to the Patissier and bought four pain au chocolate and two almond paste croissants. Thus we have been provided with three (!) Sunday breakfasts. We’ve saved out two pain au chocolate for tomorrow and frozen the rest.

That done, she hauled out an aluminum ladder and spent an hour or so thinning apples. We cut our best tree way back last fall, so now pretty much all of it is ladder accessible. Then she did more weeding and again made war on the mites with her deadly water cannon.

Sunday, June 9th

M went out to continue working on his project. He wanted to get at least some of the basic prep work done before his upcoming enforced idleness.

E managed her usual flurry of Sunday tasks. This included a walk in the OSU forest, where she found a really beautiful day. There were lots of people about but there were also an unusually high number of bird species warbling away and also some very noisy bullfrogs at the lake.

E also claims to have seen a turtle–a very rare sight around here. She has no photographic evidence but is sticking to her story.

Monday, June 10th

M had another surgery, the right eye this time. That will be the end of it as he’s only having two eyes done. Apparently there is no surgery yet available to improve cloudiness of vision in the Third Eye.