Category: Uncategorized

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.

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

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.

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.

Monday, June 26

We went up to Salem today, about forty miles away. We had a couple of things in mind, one them being that there is a good Hyundai dealer in Salem and we’ve been wanting to take a look at the Hyundai Ioniq 5. E loves her current Mazda CX-5, but she has been thinking a lot about getting either an EV or a hybrid for environmental reasons. Mazda has just started making a very good new CX hybrid, but it is only available in Europe and Asia.

So we decided to at least take a look at an all electric car. The Ioniq 5 has gotten rave reviews: for fast charging, for its 300 mile range, and for a lot of convenience and safety features. It’s about the size of a CX-5, which is exactly the size E likes. So. There we were taking a test drive in a brand new one, and guess what? It was awesome. Tons of interior space, more than sufficient power, great handling, nice styling. Lots of reviewers say that it is clearly superior to the comparably sized Tesla, not that we have any plans to ever drive a Tesla, cuz we don’t.

Anyway, the Ioniq 5 is wonderful, and not super expensive. So are we going to buy one? Hmm. Probably not. It is impressive, but we both find that it lacks personality. Maybe an EV is just too different, too much for us to get used to. We’ll have to keep thinking.

Another thing that has been on our minds lately is cake. We thought we might have a piece of cake to celebrate Becca’s birthday. Becca is amazing, still just 22 years old even though she was born 48 years ago. That’s a while back, but people still remember her and people still reach out to E at this time of year, for which we are very grateful. So our excuse for going to Salem was to look at a car, but our actual reason for going to Salem was to have a little ceremony at the Konditorei, one of E’s favorite places in the world. She had a piece of lemon cream cake; M had German chocolate. Neither of us could eat it all, had to take some home.

Tuesday, June 27

We went walking today on the Meadow Edge Loop near the top of Mary’s Peak. We started out just after noon and made our first stop at the Vietnamese Baguette to procure some sandwiches. Man they were busy! On the way out of town we stopped for a roadside picnic at Starker Arts Park. Then we went out Highway 34 and turned off onto the road that leads up the mountain. The weather at the top was sunny and pleasant; it was considerably cooler at 3,400 feet than it was in lowland Corvallis.

We have also been talking a bit more about what we would like to have in the way of cars…

Wednesday, June 28

E had lunch with her THEPAJ group at Gathering Together Farms. She had a teensy cup of carrot soup, two small pieces of bread, and a glass of water with no ice. (Now some people might be of the opinion that her actual meal was not of sufficient quantity to justify the use of the word lunch. But we are casual about such things, so we’ll let it go. Especially since she did buy 2 GTF chocolate covered spud nuts to be eaten later.–Ed.)

M, meanwhile, went back up to Salem. Hmm. What was he up to? Whatever it was, he was gone half the day.

Thursday, June 29

E had a Better Bones and Balance class today and it was not via Zoom. M dropped her off at at the community college at 11:00. It was her first in-person exercise class since the pandemic and she liked it a lot. The teacher was excellent, but alas, she was just a sub and E won’t meet the real teacher until next week.

M picked E up after class and they headed off to Salem. As planned, M had brought small sandwiches and juice so that they could have lunch along the way. The sandwiches had to be small because we planned to visit Baskin-Robbins. While the Baskin-Robbins in Corvallis closed down during the pandemic and was replaced by a COVID test center in the same location, Salem has not just one, but four(!) active B-R’s.

But before we could get the ice cream, we had a more onerous errand to perform. We had to pick up the Jaguar. And once that was done, we had to choose which of the Salem B-R’s we were going to, get its address into our respective phones, and drive to it separately. By time we got there, we were sure we deserved a reward.

Friday, June 30

Lots of chores today related to the car: bluetooth pairing to M’s phone, driving position memory settings for both of us, radio presets for both, and the most challenging problem, the process for teaching the car about the codes for the garage door opener. When that was done, we rolled up our Afghani wool runner and threw it in the trunk. M got the rug in Yemen thirty years ago and by now it really needed fringe end repair. E decided we needed to take it to the Atiyeh Brothers rug shop in Eugene. (What a nice place that turned out to be!) So off we went in the new car, first to the rug place and then to dinner at a Thai place called Blu Mist Restaurant & Bar that E had tried once but M never had. It was wonderful.

M drove the forty miles down to Eugene; E drove us back home, her first time behind the wheel of the F-Type. E had really liked riding in M’s previous car, the blue Porsche, but she hadn’t enjoyed driving it very much because it had a manual transmission. She is a lot happier with the F-Type’s automatic.

Saturday, July 1

Eve went to see our friend Jo, who is recovering from shoulder surgery and cannot yet drive. They did some errands and took a walk in Willamette Park. While they were out, E looked for a birthday card for our neighbor who is turning 90 tomorrow. She wanted a “Happy 90th” card but had to settle for one 40th and one 50th. These she has cleverly combined into one card and has added a plus sign and an equals sign. Since the recipient is a retired math teacher, she is fairly confident that he will figure it out.

Sunday, July 2

We walked a bit this morning, before the heat. We went to a place we hadn’t been to before in an obscure corner of the OSU Arboretum. We walked a quarter mile nature trail and also visited a memorial to nine Oregon firefighters who died fighting a wild fire in Colorado almost exactly twenty-nine years ago. Lately someone has pinned poems to some of the wooden beams of the structure. The poems all deal with nature in one way or another and include works by William Stafford and Mary Oliver. They were a treat.

In the afternoon we went to the aforementioned birthday party for our 90 year old neighbor and had a piece of cake. Wonderful way to spend a Sunday.

Friday, May 5

When we hike, we always like to have a small piece of chocolate and a little nip of something to finish off our lunch. You can imagine how stressed we were to discover that one of our two drink cups was badly cracked. We couldn’t just replace it from where we got it (Taco Time) because that source has switched to environmentally sound paper cups. Much as we applaud that change, it left us high and dry when it came to wee dram sized cups. What were we to do? We checked online and found that we could get either 125 cups for $2.55 (just over two cents per cup) or 2,500 cups for 27.99 (just over one cent per cup). Clearly, the large order would be a better deal. But what would we do with the 2,499 extra cups? How often do we go hiking with that many friends? Hmm. Fortunately, one of our local supermarkets has saved the day. E noticed that the store was giving away tiny samples of super expensive cheese and that each sample came in its own 1-oz. translucent plastic Solo cup! Whoopee. Now we have three good cups, the oldest one being slightly yellowed but still in good working order.

Saturday, May 6

Lots of yard work today. E replanted a succulent that hadn’t been doing well and also worked to keep her Russian sage from being smothered by the weird, super prolific blue flowered plants, the ones that go crazy this time of year. Here are some of them trying–hopefully in vain–to strangle our red rhododendron.

Sunday, May 7

M went out and tried again to drive between Harlan, just south of Highway 20, and the Falls Creek fish hatchery, just north of Highway 34. He had tried it from north to south last time but came out in the wrong place. This time he tried going from south to north, but didn’t get anywhere at all because Falls Creek Road was closed just three and a half miles in. He found some consolation by driving up into the Alsea Falls area and discovering a new way to get from there to Dawson.

Dawson, by the way, is home to the old Hull-Oakes lumber mill. For a long time, Hull-Oakes was the last steam powered sawmill in the country. It’s not primarily steam powered anymore, but the mill continues in operation and has an old-timey feeling. The steam power system is still in place ready to start up again at a moment’s notice. (Or maybe a day or two’s notice, but you get the idea.) There’s a nice video about Hull-Oakes here. You can follow the process from log truck to log pond, to cutting bed, to lumber yard. Incoming logs are hand measured and nothing is computerized.

E took a long walk in our little forest close to home and later worked on re-reading The Lincoln Highway, which is up for discussion in her book club this month.

Monday, May 8

We went on a tour of an area managed by Greenbelt Land Trust, our local land protection organization. The tour took place on a protected area of four hundred and four acres along the Willamette River about twenty miles south of Corvallis. It’s called Harkens Lake and is the result of conservation easements purchased by GLT from the owners, one portion in 2011 and another, smaller one in 2017. Both sections are former agricultural land that is being restored with the aim of re-creating a natural riverside forest that includes backwaters and seasonal wetlands. GLT estimates that this will not be fully achieved for another 150 to 200 years, but they’ve got a start.

In this satellite photo the conservation area shows up as a large, roughly triangular shape in the middle of the picture. Near the bottom of the photo, where two rows of trees come together to make one point of the triangle, there is a gate that now blocks the road. There were about two dozen of us on the tour and we all parked our vehicles in a wide space just in front of that gate. We had a brief introduction to the project from our GLT tour host, who then introduced Jim Cassidy, an OSU instructor, farm manager and soil scientist, who had agreed to come along and give us some information about soil: soil in general, local soils in particular, and the changes in soil that result from transitioning agricultural land back to natural forest.

Then we started off, walking around the gate and heading northeast paralleling the river. The small light colored area on our left was the most recently acquired easement area and had been replanted with native species just three or four years ago. Our road veered left, away from the river. Soon we came to a restored area from the oldest easement area. The horizontal line in the center of the photo marks the border between the old and new sections. The plants and trees in the older part are darker green in the photo.

At several points on the walk, we stopped to get mini lectures on various soil related topics. The basic nature of Willamette Valley soils is that they were deposited in the valley by gigantic floods that occurred at the end of the last ice age, from 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. These floods were caused by the collapse of ice dams that were up to two miles high. When one of these collapsed due to warming temperatures, a lake the size of Lake Superior would suddenly be released and go rushing westward toward the Pacific Ocean, carving out some incredible geologic features along the way. The floods eventually came down the Columbia Gorge–creating the Gorge as they did so–and most of the water and debris went west out to sea. The floods were strong enough to carry massive boulders along with them and it is now possible to find large pieces of stone from Montana and British Columbia on the ocean floor fifty miles west of the current mouth of the Columbia River.

On their way to the Pacific Ocean, the floods passed the mouth of the Willamette at what is now the city of Portland. At this point a small portion of the flood waters spread south down into the Willamette valley. This small portion was enough to carry so much silt and gravel that when the last flood receded, the original landscape was covered with a hundred or more feet of new soil and the formerly rugged terrain was dead flat. So the first thing to know about Willamette Valley soil is that it all comes from somewhere else. “See this?” asks Jim, holding up a rock he just picked up from a ditch bank. “This is metamorphic rock and the nearest natural metamorphic formations are in British Columbia.”

The small red pin in the photo marks the spot where we stopped and watched as Jim dug down about ten inches into the soil and brought up a shovelful for us to examine. To examine it properly requires running it through your hands to feel the size of the granules and get a sense of the relative proportions of the basic soil components of sand, silt and clay. To get a really good idea, you need to put some in your mouth and feel it with your lips and tongue, as he demonstrated.

Jim is a wonderful scientist and teacher, but he also has another gig. Before he went to college, he was a bass player and founding member of the band Information Society, which had a string of hits in the nineties and which has continued–in various incarnations, all including Jim–to make music unto the present day. That’s Jim in the middle of the photo below.

Tuesday, May 9

Partly cloudy today with highs in the 60’s–very different from yesterday’s cold and damp.

Wednesday, May 10

Lots of garden chores these days, much of it involving unwanted grass or removing unwanted length of grass.

Thursday, May 11

Tertulia, exercise class, gardening, all that stuff. But also, we took E’s wedding ring to the jeweler’s to have it rebuilt: new half shank, restored mill points, and restored flower design to the extent possible. It may not be done in time for our anniversary, but that’s okay. This has needed doing for a long time. The ring belonged to M’s grandmother, Hazel, so it has sentimental value in addition to its good looks.

We got a take-out dinner from Kahlo Naser, the new Syrian restaurant. The food was delicious, plus we didn’t have to worry about their disorganized service and we could comfortably have a beer with dinner. Nice.

Friday, May 12

Ack, more gardening. The weather is getting much warmer. We work only in the mornings. It’s too hot in the afternoon. And the forecast for Sunday is 90. Yikes. Fortunately, we’re planning to be at the coast on Sunday; and the forecast there is for just the high seventies.

Saturday, May 13

With the continuing warm weather, we have to transition to summer mode. Part of that is getting the patio into shape. We took the cover off our big umbrella and raised it up to where it needs to be. The mechanism is stiff from injuries stemming from a fall last year, so it wasn’t all that easy, but we persevered, in spite of our resident hornet who makes her nest in the top of the umbrella post. E also uncovered and cleaned the patio table and chairs.

For lunch we went to visit our friend J, who recently suffered a broken shoulder from a fall of her own, which happened while she was dog walking. She’s having shoulder replacement surgery next Friday and is going to be one-armed for quite a while. We took her a deli lunch and sat with her in her back yard in the shade. She has two big old black locust trees that are just now leafing out. Beautiful to look up through. If we had some actual trees in our yard, we wouldn’t have to mess with our cranky umbrella.

Sunday, May 14, Mothers Day

In the morning we went off to meet A for a Mother’s Day brunch at Local Ocean over in Newport. As we neared the coast we realized that the weather was not getting any cooler. Au contraire, at 11:45 in the morning, it was 92! So much for forecasts. This is close to the all-time record high for Newport. It’s definitely warmer than either of us has ever experienced there.

But Local Ocean was comfortably cool. And the food was awesome as usual. E and A shared a big bowl of LO’s famous Brazilian seafood stew with the coconut milk base. M had ling cod fettuccine with andouille sausage slices and melted manchego. Ooof. We had fun talking about Ze Frank and his True Facts videos, which we had all just discovered. The videos are very funny and very informative, occasionally too informative, showing you more than you might want to know. If you are not familiar with Ze Frank’s work, you should become so immediately. But do NOT begin with his video about hippopotami. Try owls instead.

After lunch we went to Ona Beach and put our feet in the river to cool off a bit. Later in the day we met again for dinner at a brewpub in the town of Depot Bay. The bay itself covers only 6 acres and is said to be the smallest navigable bay in the world.

By the time we got back to Newport, it was dark and we had some trouble finding our hotel. Was that because we are old and easily confused? Well…yeah. But you know…at a certain point we realized that it wasn’t just dark, it was really quite dark. Was that because we had somehow been blindfolded by evil spirit pranksters? Well…no, it wasn’t that dark. But there was a problem: the power was out all along the seaside part of the city. So, once back in our room, we had the annoyance of no air conditioning for a couple of hours…

Monday, May 15

When we woke this morning and looked out our window, we found a different world: fog over the sea and no sun anywhere. The local temperature was fifty-five degrees. Now that’s exactly what we would have expected in Newport at this time of year. It made the previous day seem unreal, as if it had been a dream. Or maybe just a brief vision of the future.

Monday, April 17

It’s rainy and cool these days, with nighttime temperatures in the low thirties and highs in the forties.

Tuesday, April 18

E went to her monthly book club meeting. They talked about The Fox and I: an uncommon friendship by Catherine Raven. E liked the book because of the fox, of course, but also because of the author’s knowledge of nature. For next month they’re reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles.

Wednesday, April 19

Today we went into the Cascades for some snowshoeing. It seems late in the year for it, but it’s been cold this year. We went to a place called Lava Lakes, which is just two hours from home and sometimes has hardly any snow at all. But there was plenty today, with quite a bit more falling as we went along. It was nice: fresh snow on the trail and no one else around.

Thursday, April 20

Back down in the real world, E went walking with N from her book club. They started at the fairgrounds, walked around the base of Bald Hill (which has not been bald for at least 50 years), and then headed east. They did a little of the trail toward Fitton Green before turning back. E says that she got 12,000 steps. Yo.

Friday, April 21

Rain in the morning, easing off at around 10:30. That was about when we started a walk in the OSU forest, our goal being to check on the progress of the fawn lilies. It turns out that progress is slow.

Saturday, April 22

Much warmer weather today, with partly sunny skies and a high near seventy. In our yard, bed #1 is putting on something of a show: the flowering currants are in full bloom, and the dwarf irises have just popped out. The raggedy purple tulips have been out for a while; other tulips are still unfolding.

Sunday, April 23

The warm weather pulls us out into the yard. M is replacing a dying blueberry and rehabbing the area around it. E is dealing with grass incursions in her succulent bed in the back yard just outside our window. In the front she is expanding the range of her thyme. She has also been stocking the squirrel feeder with peanuts, mostly because she wants to keep the squirrels away from the bird feeder.

Also this week, some very sad news from Spain. E’s dear friend Margie passed away on Thursday. She took a big chunk of E’s heart with her, but we are grateful to have had a last visit with her this winter.

RIP Marcella “Margie” Chartrand de Espinosa.

Monday, February 27

On E’s birthday, we had one overriding objective: a visit to the Chocolatería San Ginés to have chocolate con churros. Here’s what that might look like:

First, though, we had to take care of a few other details, such as shopping for a birthday present. We took the Metro down to the heart of Madrid, where there are lots of stores, all quite convenient to the Chocolatería San Ginés. First we shopped for a purse. E is very particular about purses, so naturally we took a look at Hermes, Gucci, and Valentino. But E didn’t see anything she liked. For one thing, their purses didn’t have enough zipper pockets. So we went to the Corte Ingles, a well-known Spanish department store. And eventually she found the perfect thing. It didn’t cost $6,000, not even $600, more like $60. M was sort of disappointed, but he got over it. Then we went to the Apple Store and got E a new phone case. Here’s the loot:

Then it was time for lunch. We met our friends L and M as agreed, but the restaurant where we had planned on going had a huge line, so we set off for the Coffee Central de Jazz, which was more accessible.

Finally it was time for the main event. We went to San Ginés Street, stood in line for 25 minutes or so, and finally were ushered down to a tiny table in the basement.

Tuesday, February 28

(Before we continue, readers should be warned that another person whose name begins with M is about to appear. Which is ridiculous, but there you are and something must be done. We have been forced to amend our style book to allow the use of last name initials as well as first name initials. And Spanish women usually have two last names and hence three total initials, which is something to keep in mind. Ready? Okay, here we go.)

We’ve already mentioned one friend of Eve’s from her days in Chicago. She was the M who took us up to Leon for the day. In our new style, she will be referred to as MTC. Today we got to meet another old Chicago friend when MB drove over from Paris and stopped in to Madrid. MTC and MB have kept up their connection over the years, but E had not seen MB for 51 years. She was pleased to find that his sense of humor remained unchanged, and issued him an invitation to make a special appearance in the Laughter Yoga class in the future.

It was decided that the four of us would go together to the the town of Ávila for the day. We left at ten in the morning, traveling in MB’s hybrid SUV, a fine vehicle for such an expedition. The drive up took a little over an hour. Like most medieval cities, Ávila was a walled town. Unlike most similar cities, Ávila’s walls are intact and still surround the oldest part of the city. When we arrived, our first stop was the cathedral, which is of course inside the old city walls.

We had our midday meal at a restaurant called Almacén, that had been recommended to MTC by a friend who has a house in Ávila. Almacén was a ways out of town on the highway leading to Salamanca and was barely noticeable if you were just driving by. But we found it.

At Almacén we had a view of the south walls of Ávila and also a long, slow, and very excellent meal. MB chose a rosé champagne to go with our starters and a twenty-one year old Tempranillo to go with our main course. Both were delicious.

On the way home from Ávila we stopped to see El Escorial, the largest renaissance building in the world. It was built by order of King Phillip the Second in the mid 16th Century, partly because he wanted a summer place where he could escape the intense heat of Madrid summers. Besides being a royal residence, the building also contains a monastery, a library, a museum, a basilica, a university, a school, and a hospital.

Wednesday, March 1

Among the presents that E got for her birthday were a couple of tickets to a special art exhibition at the Royal Palace of Madrid, and today was the day. Off we went, down into the Metro, emerging 40 minutes later at a stop just in front of the Madrid Opera House. The Royal Palace was just a short walk away. It’s a huge place and our first problem was to figure out where the heck the entrance was. Eventually we spied a large mass of people off in the distance and that, of course, was the place.

There were hundreds of people waiting to enter. Some were there for the art exhibition like us, but there were also many, many others who merely wished to tour the palace. Besides the building and the decor, visitors can see paintings by Caravaggio, Goya and Velasquez as well as frescos and museum collections of porcelain, watches, furniture, and weapons. Also on hand is a complete Stradivarius string quartet—two violins, cello and viola. Stradivarius gave the set to King Felipe V in 1702. E once took a tour of the Royal Palace and remembers that it was amazing.

But we were there to see the art of Joaquin Sorolla, a Spanish painter who was born in Valencia in on 1863, on February 27, the same day as someone else we know. In addition to several dozen paintings, the special exhibit had three more parts: a detailed timeline of Sorolla’s life, a special projection room where his paintings were enhanced with animation and projected giant sized onto all four walls at once, and finally a virtual reality portion where we had to don a special headset with heavy binocular-like glasses. That part was unlike any experience we had had before. We were told that we could touch anything we saw except for green statues, because the green statues were actual people. E proceeded to try to grab several butterflies which eluded capture by turning into soap bubbles and floating away. Then she collided with a green statue which spoke with M’s voice. At that point we walked off a bridge and came back to reality. What would Sorolla have thought of all this?

Sorolla is especially noted for beautifully luminous colors. He liked to paint by the seaside and some of his most powerful works are of fishermen and their boats on the beach in Valencia. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Sorolla was extremely successful during his lifetime. One of Sorolla’s admirers was Archer Huntington of New York, who commissioned him to produce a series of large scale paintings to be installed at the Hispanic Society of America in New York. This series, called Visions of Spain, has become part of the permanent collection at the Society’s Library and Museum. To mark the 100th anniversary of Sorolla’s death, the Hispanic Society is just now collaborating with the National Arts Club to mount an exhibition about the creation of the Visions series. That exhibition will run until April 25th at the NAC.

Thursday, March 2

Were we ready for more high culture today? Nope. Had to do laundry and other household chores. Then at noon E went off to have a delicious lunch with MTC followed by a visit to MTC’s hairdresser. The results are quite attractive, but E needs to get used to the look before we publish a photo. M, meanwhile, took the subway four stops down to Mar de Cristal in search of allergy medicine. The stuff he likes is available in Spain under the brand name Alercina, but it seems that not every pharmacy stocks it. Mar de Cristal is a big shopping area and M was hoping to find it there. And even if he couldn’t find the medicine, he could have lunch at the kebab place.

Friday, March 3

Our first order of business today was to make train and hotel arrangements for a trip to Cordoba and Granada. That took three excruciating hours. Our first mistake was to try to buy train tickets online using the RENFE website. Aargh! So much data entry, so many choices among unfamiliar options. So many mysterious roadblocks. We could have rented a car! We could have flown! Why are we doing this at all? But we got there in the end, mostly because we abandoned the Renfe website and used Trainline instead. The train is considerably faster than driving and considerably cheaper than flying. The only flaw in our reservations is that we ended up with one leg of the journey where we won’t be sitting together—close, but not together. And what was our reward for all this work? We got to go grocery shopping.

Later in the day, around 4:30, we went down to our little shopping area on Añastra Street. E was in search of a pedicure. She had her eye on a nail shop that we had passed before and now she was ready to walk in and ask for an appointment. Such things can be really daunting in a foreign country, whether you speak the language or not. So in she went, while M loitered outside. She was able to get an appointment for 5:30 that very day. So we sat down to wait at a cafe, outside in the sun, and had tea. In the end all was well with the toenails.

Saturday, March 4

Today we went to look at more pictures, this time at the Reina Sofia Museum. The Reina Sofia specializes in 20th century art and has a large number of Surrealist and Cubist paintings and sculpture. They have a number of Picasso paintings and sculptures, quite a few Dalis, and bunch of other things including photos by Man Ray and this nice Yves Tanguy.

The most famous painting at the Reina Sofia is Picasso’s Guernica. It’s amazing. For one thing, it’s huge—12 feet high and 25 and half feet long. The subject is grim—the bombing of a Spanish town by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War—and execution is pure Picasso. People just stand there and stare at it till their feet get tired.

When our feet got tired we went into a small theater that was playing Luis Buñuel’s film The Golden Age. It’s a silent film in black and white and it’s really odd. The two of us were laughing, but everyone else in the room was meh. Guess you have to be old.

Of course there was more in the Reina Sofia than we had the strength to see, so at 2:00 we decided to head home and get some lunch at a place in our neighborhood. That sounded easy enough. We got onto the Metro, our trusty Line 1, which should have taken us almost all the way home. But instead, our journey came to a stop when the train reached a place called Cuatro Caminos. As the doors opened, we heard an announcement. Our train would not be going further and all passengers had to get off. No mention was made of what passengers might do once they got off. We decided to part ways with the Metro and headed for the surface. Once there, we were glad we did. Cuatro Caminos is an area of Madrid that Eve used to frequent and even after 40 years she recognized the area well enough. Though much had changed, it was nice to relive some memories. After a short stroll down a boulevard called Raimundo Fernandez Villaverde, we got a taxi, which took us to the restaurant that we had intended to go to in our own neighborhood.

It was 2:45 by then and El Rincón de Carlos was really hopping. The atmosphere was lively with lots of banter between the waiter/manager and the customers. One older woman told the waiter—in a voice loud enough to be heard by most of the customers—that she wanted the eggs stuffed with tuna for her first course and to make sure she got lots of tuna. The waiter replied, quick as a flash, that the stuffed eggs were already made and she would get them the way they were. This got a laugh from the crowd. After a moment, the waiter continued, saying “This is not a gas station, you can’t just fill it up as far as you want.” This got another laugh and throughout the exchange the old woman was grinning as if that was exactly the response she had hoped to get. And then of course E had to join in the banter. So it was a fun time, and the meal, though slowish, was very good. It seems to us that this would be a great neighborhood to live in for a year or two. We could get a real apartment and little car of some kind…

It was a beautiful springlike day at that point and walking home was a pleasure. One the way M finally got some pictures of our resident parrots. They are quite beautifully green, but they are also an invasive species whose numbers are growing rapidly all over Madrid.

Sunday, March 5

Went out for Sunday breakfast to a bakery restaurant that we hadn’t tried before. They had tons of tempting stuff, more than we’ll ever get around to trying. E did fulfill her wish to have a palmera de mermelada de melocotón, a palm tree shaped pastry with peach jam. It lived up to her fond memory of it.

We can see that the weather is turning. Warmer and wetter, says the forecast. We felt a few drops on our way home from the bakery. Tomorrow we head south.

Tuesday, February 7

Today’s excursions were all on foot. We needed a few things to make our lives more complete and it was time to see if we could find them. In the morning we walked to a little shopping area about a half mile west of us. The weather was coldish, 40 degrees and windy, but the area we walked through was nice. Much of our route was along the street shown below, with its park-like center and widely separated lanes of traffic.

When we arrived, we found a pharmacy, a tobacconist, a couple of boutiques, three different bakeries, a nail shop, an herbalist, and an interesting looking little book store, which we did not go into for fear of losing our focus for the day. Instead, we went into the pharmacy and got some allergy medicine and sundry other things.

In the same area, there are also three different cafe/bar/restaurants. We decided that we should try one of them for lunch. At this point, however, it was only 11:45, which is way too early for lunch around these parts. So we took our purchases back home, rested a bit, and then went out again.

Of the three, we decided to try El Rincón de Carlos (Carlos’s Corner) for our first attempt at a local restaurant. We got there at 1:45, just in time to get a table before the rush. That was good because we saw as we entered that the place was quite small, with space for just six or seven tables. The daily lunch special, called the Menu del Día, consisted of two main courses, dessert and a drink: plato primero, plato segundo, postre, y bebida. There were four choices for the first course, four choices for the second and four choices for dessert. For us, just ordering was a laborious process. One difficulty was that the day’s options were written on a chalkboard in some kind of crazy all caps script that we found almost impossible to read. There was only one waiter, Carlos himself, and he was patient with us. The food was very good and was accompanied by a couple of crusty bread rolls and a bowl of awesome green olives. We had flan for dessert and that was awesome too. Besides the fact that the food was delicious and reasonably priced, E was super impressed that there was a table cloth, something hard to find in USA these days.

Wednesday, February 8

Today we visited M and M, more of Eve’s dear friends whom she has known since the era when she lived in Spain during the seventies. The trip involved another train ride into the area northwest of the city. We’re getting better at this train business and this trip was a little more relaxed. M and M met us at the station and we immediately set off on a walk around the little town where they live. The Guardarrama River runs through the town and the site has a long history of settlement. We crossed the river on a modern foot bridge that was built immediately above the crumbling stone arches of a much older bridge.

The desire to see M and M was one of the main reasons we came to Spain at this time. It was quite wonderful to see them again.

Thursday, February 9

Today we went down to the oldest part of Madrid. There we met up with our friend M, who took us on a lunchtime tour of the area. We walked around through the narrow streets, sometimes treading on pavement first laid down centuries ago. Madrid was occupied by the Romans at one time, and later by the Arabs. We saw a section of wall dating from the twelfth century and passed through a place once known as La Puerta Cerrada, the main entrance to the city during the Muslim times that was shut tight each evening and not opened till morning. We also passed by an eatery called El Botín, which first opened in 1725 and which holds the Guinness world record as the oldest continuously operating restaurant in the world.

Our peregrinations were punctuated, of course, by stops at four different cafes featuring different sorts of treats. The first was a place called Alabardero; we don’t remember the rest exactly. This was partly due to the fact that each of the first three stops included a drink of some kind: first a small vermouth, then a small beer, and then a glass of wine.

Friday, February 10

We went downtown again to day and had lunch with E’s friend Marga, who took us to a place called LasTortillas de Gabino. This was a definitely a higher class of food that we got from El Rincón. And they were pretty serious about tablecloths. Whenever a table was reset with a clean one, a waiter had to come out with an hot iron and smooth it down. Nice big iron, too. Anyway, our long, relaxed meal was amazing.

On a much more serious note, our walk from the Metro to the restaurant took us past the Turkish Embassy, where relief supplies were being collected to be sent to the areas affected by the earthquake.

Teams from Spain are in Turkey helping with rescue efforts. Spanish TV has some heartrending video.

Saturday, February 11

Lots of activity today, maybe too much. E has been on a quest for slippers and warmer pajamas. Spain has gone into energy conservation mode due to the effects of the Ukraine war and our building is heated no higher than 67 or 68. So off we went to a shopping center in the Mar de Cristal neighborhood, which is just four Metro stops away. It turned out to be just what we needed. There was a huge Carrefour hipermercado and a bunch of smaller stores. And of course there was a cafe where we could stop for a snack. This being Saturday, the Carrefour was jammed with shoppers. But the lines moved pretty quickly—we were in one of the quick checkout lanes—and it was amazing to see such a huge operation going full throttle.

Later on we did some food shopping closer to home and tried to rest up for our big evening adventure, which was going out to a movie in the downtown area. We met our friend M (there are lots of M’s in this story) who lives downtown and who had already gotten the tickets. We went to a large movie theatre called Verdi and saw The Fablemans. It was in English with Spanish subtitles and we all liked it a lot.

When we came out of the theatre at 9:30 pm, Madrid Saturday night was in full swing. There were lots of people on the streets and the cafes were crowded—both inside and outside, where people young and old were drinking, eating and talking all bundled up against the cold. We finally found a cafe with a free table indoors and did our share of the appropriate activities. M really wanted to take a video of the place, to catch the noise level, the very Spanish faces, all of the animation and the gesturing, the clothes and the hats, the serious expressions of the hardworking waiters. But that would have been a little too weird, even for M.

Sunday, February 12

We got home at 11:30 Saturday night, at which point our health apps had recorded more than 15,000 steps for the day. Sunday needed to involve a little less walking! Our biggest accomplishment for the day was doing a load of laundry, which is an all day affair. Although our apartment has a washing machine, drying is another story. It involves hanging things in the living room on a rack in front of the radiator, and then rotating them from time to time to hasten the process.

Aside from that, we ate three meals in and did our packing for our next outing. The plan is to pick up a rental car in the morning and drive north to the Pais Vasco, the Basque part of Spain. More on that next week, assuming we actually manage to do it.

Until then, we have this report on the canine situation, which has improved vastly since E’s times here in the 1970s. According to one of our local sources, there are more dogs than children in Madrid.

A few days ago I learned of the death of a friend from my teenage years, a girl who was my first love. I left Ogden when I was seventeen and never saw her again, but I always remembered her and my feelings of affection remained. In 1980, about a dozen years after I last saw her, I had a vivid dream about her and the next day wrote a description of it as if I were telling her about it in a letter, which of course I did not send. Then, sometime around 2015–at an age when we start to think a little more about the past–I wrote again about my feelings for her. I described her then as “the luminous Mormon girl” and that’s what she was to me–luminous, sensitive and kind. When I try to tell anyone about her, I always feel like I have to explain that we were never boyfriend and girlfriend–not at all. So what was it? I still don’t know. Since I learned of her passing, she has been on my mind quite a lot. I never knew anything about her adult life. From her obituary I learn some salient details, which are all as I might have expected. Several times over the years I thought about what it would be like to talk to her as an adult. That was not to be. My love was always love from afar. It’s from a little farther now, but it’s still there.