This ain't no party

If you were one of those people I was making fun of last week for still having your snow tires on, I salute you and bow down before your superior wisdom. 

Things get weird quickly sometimes, don't they?  Most of us now find ourselves in the middle of a pandemic we never even considered when we were toasting the New Year in just a few months ago.

Here in Oregon, the Governor decided to close all the schools in the state for the rest of the month at about the exact same time the White House officially called the pandemic a national emergency. 

And just like that, people started hitting the stores (even more than they had already been) and throwing items into their cart like it was the end of the world. I should know. I went out to do my weekly shopping today and, unfortunately, ran into panicked hordes of families buying five of anything they could get their hands on.

There was one woman running down the aisle with four giant packages of toilet paper and, I kid you not, at least 10 gallons of ice cream. Priorities. When I was at the feed store I watched a guy almost get wrestled to the ground after attempting to steal the cashier's large bottle of hand sanitizer, which she had sitting next to the register. It's probably a bad idea to try and steal anything from a rural tack and feed store, where at least 50 percent of the staff and shoppers are open carrying. But I guess panic beats reason these days.

On the way home, it snowed. And the freak March snow was by far the most normal part of the day.

So I guess, as the COVID cases in our area increase every day, the time has arrived to hunker down and be at home a LOT more. Other than the supermarket, almost everything is closed now anyway, so I'm not sure where we'd go even if we wanted to. I'm thankful we have a great state parks system and miles of coastline where one can walk without running into a soul -- we'll definitely be doing a fair amount of that in the next month or two. 

Big Ag and I went out to a really nice restaurant last weekend, fully aware that it was probably the last time we'd be doing that for awhile. 

Thankfully, we're on two acres, and so at least we have the advantage of being able to step outside, walk around the property, and breath deeply. I feel bad for the urbanites all over the world who maybe, if they are lucky, have a balcony to stand on to get some fresh air, but not much else if they're being advised not to go out in the city. 

For us, it's almost time to start planting the vegetable garden, so seed germination, planting and weeding will be a welcome distraction from everything that's going on in the big, outside world.

These little tomatoes would rather not go outside right now. 

And The Met has decided to stream operas all this week online! Monday it will be "Carmen," and I think Wednesday is "La Boheme." So while you might have to look to find it, there will even be plenty of culture available, with nice people trying to make good TV and internet programming available to those cocooning in place.

I expect I'll be here at the blog a bit more often, as a lot of the outside world has closed off a bit. My plan is to do some writing, some planting, and of course, enjoy things like "Carmen" and some good library books while I wait this whole thing out (the actual physical library system in Oregon is closed indefinitely, but thankfully the Overdrive online portal remains open for now for our Kindles and other tablets/readers). 

Stay healthy out there, friends. I'll share some pictures of the garden this weekend once the snow has melted. And take it easy on the ice cream -- you can buy 10 gallons at a time, but where in heaven's name are you going to store it? (answer: in your belly.)

Prepping for COVID?

There's an old saying: Stay one step ahead of the crowd, and people will call you a genius. Two steps ahead, and they'll call you a crackpot.

I've been in crackpot range for a long time now, and I've gotten used to it. My kids like to tell their friends that I grew a lot of their food and made a lot of things from scratch "before it was, like, cool to do that." (To finally achieve coolness in my kids' eyes is perhaps the greatest achievement of my 50s.) 

And now, I've probably re-entered the crackpot crowd. I've started stocking up on a few things for COVID, just in case.

First of all, let's talk reality: The COVID virus is going to be no worse than a really bad flu season, for most. For age groups like mine, it's about 98 percent non-fatal. But non-fatal doesn't mean easy. The virus spreads very easily among people, and can knock you on your ass for awhile. 

So in my mind, it's good to be prepared, in case the hospitals are overwhelmed and businesses are closed for awhile, as they have been in cities in Asia and Europe where COVID has been found.

So how to best stock up for a period of semi-quarantining? I ran two scenarios before deciding what to buy -- in one scenario, we are healthy, and in the other, one or both of us is sick, but not sick enough to need hospitalization. 

For the healthy scenario, I spent about a week noting what things we used each and every day. For a lot of stuff, I just have been picking up an extra bag/bottle/package of whatever I'm buying, to set aside and store. Easy. I made sure we have a lot of food on hand that we like (we will have champagne, wine and craft beers with dinner because that's how we roll in disaster).

But honestly, I did also buy a few things we'll only use in a real emergency, like canned veggies and chicken, Spam, bagged beans and rice. We're lucky to have fresh eggs available, and hopefully summer garden vegetables to supplement what we're eating, plus a good assortment of spices to experiment with and make meals more varied. But if the runs on the supermarkets look anything like they did in Italy this week, you may want to make sure you have enough to eat, from stuff you love to stuff you'll tolerate. And in case of nutritional holes, I also made sure we have good multi-vitamins on hand -- enough to last a few months.

There's also our pets. I would guess the most expensive items I bought this week, other than medicine, was a healthy backstock of dog food, cat food, chicken feed, and cat litter. But if you're trying to stay out of the madding crowd, you're as likely to need pet food as you are human food so it makes sense to take care of your pets and livestock while you're stocking up. 

The next area I looked at was paper goods -- things like toilet paper, obviously, but also paper eating and drinking utensils (I figure if one of us is sick we may want the infected person to eat off single-use plates, bowls and cups for sanitary reasons). Next, I picked up hygiene items, like Lysol, liquid bleach and wipes. And trash bags, aluminum foil, wax paper and other household goods we use all the time.

And finally, medications. I thought about what I like to have around when I get sick, so we now have extra Nyquil, Mucinex, ibuprofen, and Gatorade. And I always keep a course or two of antibiotics stowed away in case of antibiotic-treatable infections or issues. (Again, this is to avoid going to a potentially COVID-overcrowded hospital unless absolutely necessary). 

So what about masks? I'm not sure of the efficacy of masks, but again, better safe than sorry, especially if one of us gets sick and must care for the other. So yes, we have N95 respirator masks on hand, and gloves. But if you want some, get them now, because they are already in short supply at the local home improvement stores. There are more crackpots out there than you realize.

Normally, I'd say the biggest enemy of being semi-quarantined would be boredom. But with cable TV and the internet, that won't be as bad as it might have been for people trying to avoid the Spanish Flu in the early 1900s. And at least since we're in a more rural area it's probably safe to step out in the yard for some fresh air and sunshine. And maybe start learning Italian or Spanish via computer when I'm not beating Big Ag at Scrabble. (Gano de neuvo, Señor.)

You know, really, it's probably not so much the end of the world for the vast majority of us, but it may be a weird and significant bump in the road of 2020. So start up your crockpots, crackpots. Things may get very interesting from here on in.  

Are we getting exercise wrong?

One of the pleasures of home ownership, to me, is the work involved in keeping up with a place. That's because I'm one of those people who really does enjoy gardening, painting, fixing things, and (sometimes) even taking a hula hoe to the weeds. There's a primitive satisfaction in a simple job, done well, somehow more so if it involves manual labor rather than something I'd use my brain for.

What I enjoy the most is the same thing I enjoy after a vigorous hike or workout: the pleasant tiredness at the day's end that comes from exertion. It's probably the endorphins. I've been painting ceilings again this week and my shoulders are, frankly, feeling it. But roller painting a ceiling is a great upper body workout, and any ladder work you do, whether with a paintbrush or hammer in hand is, in my opinion, a better workout than Pilates or even yoga for improving balance and working smaller muscle groups we don't normally use in our regular life of standing, sitting and walking.

Even housework is a good workout, if we're honest, although it can certainly become tedious if you don't ever vary your routine or schedule. But if you move furniture to vacuum, stretch to high places when you dust, or put some serious oomph behind your mop, you're building or maintaining muscle mass, flexibility and strength. I despise having to clean behind the toilet but it does get me bending and flexing in some interesting positions, which in the end is probably good for me.

Yet in modern society, the stuff I just described is the work that healthy, middle-class Americans are most likely to hire out, given the chance. Several of my friends will religiously go to the gym or to yoga class, but have a gardener come in to look after the yard, a housekeeper who comes in on Fridays and does all the housework, and a full-service, $35 car wash they like to use every time their car gets dirty. Some of them are even on fixed incomes, and are pinching pennies to pay for their water aerobics class and their car washes (and complaining about it)! 

And it's not so much distaste that makes them opt for bouncing around on an exercise ball instead of running a Swiffer over the floor -- it's that it's never occurred to them to pick up the mantle of housework or gardener themselves. At some point, they just got out of the habit of doing things themselves, and never went back. But if you need exercise, you're healthy and pain-free and there just happens to be a floor mop in the laundry room, well...just sayin'. Take the opportunity where it finds you. 

 The way I look at it, doing these things myself pays me exactly three times. First, it saves me the price of the class or fitness center I'd be attending for my exercise. Second, I get to keep for myself whatever money I'd be paying the occasional "staff" to clean my house or prune my shrubs. And last but not least, it pays the priceless dividends of good health, flexibility and strength, which are worth more than any amount of money, in my opinion.  

And lest you think I'm being preachy, when Big Ag and I were both working, we had both biweekly lawn care and housekeeping; with nice people who came in to do what we didn't have time to do ourselves. But now that I'm retired, I intend to do manual labor as long as I'm able, in the hope that the pushing, pulling, bending, lifting, and kneeling that it takes to clean a house and tend to a yard will keep me fitter than just going to a gym. I still love yoga (more honestly, I hate the stretching but love the result of being more flexible) but I can do it at home as part of my day's tasks now. I have another friend who does the same with four other friends, so it can even be a home-based social activity...and free of charge, of course. 

When I can't do the household chores anymore, I hope I will relinquish things gracefully, and if that means going out to a senior's water aerobics class while someone else cleans around the back of the toilet, so be it. But for now, I'm all about the free workout I get from doing manual labor -- the under-appreciated set of tasks I used to pay a bunch of under-appreciated people to do.  

A lot of rain

We had eight inches of rain in January (and another inch so far this month) It was not quite one for the record books, but definitely on the wetter side of what we've come to expect here. I haven't lived here long enough that I really know what "normal" is, so I pretty much just take what comes and live it like it is normal. 

All I can really compare it to is where we came from, where there were more than a few years when we received eight inches of rainfall...total. Like, for an entire YEAR. Being out in the country and on a well, I will say too much water is definitely better than not enough. We even had snow for a couple of days, which was heavenly to wake up to.

Big Ag and I were talking last night and joking about how sometimes we'd stop during those years in CA and say, "Hey, do you hear that? It's raining outside!" We'd literally stop doing everything, just for a moment, in order to hear that wonderful sound of rain on the roof and the water splashing against the windows and running down the downspouts. We'd go outside and smell the petrichor (wonderful word for a wonderful smell) as the water soaked into the parched ground. 

We stopped marveling at the rain about a month after moving here. Snow will get our attention though, as will bright sunshine during winter. But the other day it was raining so hard it sounded like someone was throwing buckets at the window, I kid you not. Precipitation is a whole new experience here. At least in between the rain we got a few sunny days and a little snowfall.

We had a few days of this

followed by this

and this

and this. Not much growing going on.

So what does one do when faced with almost a month of rainy days? 

1. You can organize all your shelves and closets. I don't have any pics of them, but believe me, every one of my closets is awesomely organized now, with a place for everything and everything in its place. In summer I'll be outside gardening and they'll revert back to the chaos-driven portals of hell they usually are, but for now....neat as a pin.

2.  You can refinish second-hand furniture you bought to fill in spaces where you had nothing, and then become angry that methylene chloride is no longer legal, since it was the only really effective furniture stripper ever invented. This two day project took me about two weeks because of having to use ineffective furniture strippers on the 99 coats of paint which adorned this sofa table. But to see that gorgeous wood top revived and re-stained was worth it. 

3.  You and your spouse can head to IKEA and load your cart up with Swedish knick-knacks with unpronounceable names! (Note: we did not actually purchase the Sagstua, just layed down on it awhile since we were tired. Plus how many Sagstuas does one really need anyway?) 

IKEA. Where else can you buy a storage bin, wood cutting board and charcuterie plate, table trestle legs plus pillowcases all in one stop? 

3. You can watch the Puppy Bowl with your quite disinterested pup. Then your husband can watch the Superbowl with his quite disinterested wife. 

In a way I guess I've traded the hot summers (when I'd try and stay inside) for cold winters when I do the same. The difference, to me, is that I can always bundle up, throw on a jacket with a hood, and head outdoors when I get cabin fever-ish. When it's hot -- like, over 100 degrees --  there's literally no way of dressing that will make stepping outside a pleasant thing. So I think I'm in the right place.

I do wonder when exactly spring is going to show up, though. I'm starting to see bud swell on the fruit trees, my roses have sprouted small leaves, and the daffodils are almost ready to open. 

Even paradise is a mystery sometimes. Albeit a wet one. 

Almost daffodil time. 

Broken eggs no more

All egg cartons should look this pretty.

Broken eggs have been a problem ever since I started keeping chickens many years ago. Whether they are accidentally stepped on or deliberately pecked doesn't matter much when the result is messy goo that looks like a bunch of junior high school kids decided to "egg" your chicken coop. Not easy to clean up in junior high, ditto for now.

I've had my share of egg-pecking hens over the years, but unless you catch them in the act it's difficult to pinpoint which hen is to blame. I know our pigeon Floyd is also fond of rolling eggs and breaking them, although it seems to be more for entertainment purposes rather than wanting to eat the yolks.  Floyd does this because he is a gangster/hoodlum in a pigeon suit, as I believe I have stated before. 

Gangster.

But broken eggs are not just messy, they're also not sanitary as far as the nesting boxes go, because obviously broken eggs attract bacteria, unless you sanitize thoroughly each time it happens. And let's not even get started on the second nesting box issue most of us face -- eggs which are laid and cared for properly, but which end up smeared with feces by either the laying hen or whomever comes into the box after her.

We now have an In n' Out AND a Tractor Supply!

With that in mind, Big Ag and I drove down to the brand new Tractor Supply store in Junction City, Oregon, to buy a nesting box system with a slanted bottom and egg catchment box.  Tractor Supply stores are a staple in California, but have only recently made their way up to Oregon. Back in Paso Robles, we had a Farm Supply store, which was locally owned -- but more expensive -- and a Tractor Supply Store, which was corporate-owned, but which had better prices. We tried to split our time and money between the two; both were needed in our little town, and we knew if one decided to leave or go out of business, the other would probably immediately raise their prices, knowing they were now the "only game in town." 

But I digress. We had a nice drive down south, seeing about 500 swans parked in a field of grass, and two bald eagles (wish I'd gotten some pics but we were going 65 mph at the time). Those sights alone made the drive worthwhile. We picked up our nesting boxes, bought some rhubarb crowns, some asparagus crowns, two grape varieties (table, not wine) and some seed potatoes and Big Ag installed the boxes in the coop yesterday afternoon, after the day's laying was done. 

Looks good...but does it work?

And while I heard a lot of bitching coming from the henhouse this morning (hens really don't like the new and unfamiliar) when I went out, voila! One perfectly-laid egg in the self-contained egg compartment!

I'm hoping this allows us more freedom to be off the property, since one of my (self-appointed) tasks has become being home during morning laying hours so I can grab eggs before they become a yolky mess on the bottom of the nesting boxes. This will also keep them free of fecal matter, which means less eggs discarded due to being impossible to clean, so just a more hygienic endeavor all the way around.

Yes! It does!

One thing I am sad about it denying the girls the pleasure of sitting on their eggs for a few moments after they are laid. It's something most hens seem to enjoy doing, but for all the above reasons, isn't really practical. So they'll have to make do with extra treats and love instead, while we enjoy our omelettes, fresh ice cream and egg salad sandwiches.

A little taste of home

In and Out recently established their northern-most restaurant in Keizer, Oregon -- a 15-minute drive for us -- and it opened a couple of weeks ago to HUGE crowds. We waited until after the holidays for the opening insanity to die down, then went for a very early lunch there this morning.

It felt like a little taste of home. The only thing missing was the trip to the beach afterwards, which I suppose we could have done, but as its only about 45 degrees there right now, with huge "sneaker" waves, that might not have been as much fun as it will be in July. 

Nonetheless, the palm trees on the sides of our shake cups made us feel a little bit of sunny California has come north to live near us, and we can visit whenever we want!

An Animal/Protein Style cheeseburger has never tasted better, I'm telling you. The shakes were as good as ever. And the fries were divine...just like I remember. Who says you can't go home again?

A slower year

I've been reading a lot recently about how much the passage of time speeds up as we age, and why. One theory is that as we get closer to the end of our lives, the time we have left seems to compress itself more -- with less time remaining, it seems to move faster towards the finish line. And we all know what the finish line is, for us all. Ya. What a happy thought.

 Another theory is that our measurement of time when we are younger seems subjectively extended (which is why it seemed like three years between Christmases when we were seven). But most of us feel that time in our 20s and 30s moves at about the "correct" pace -- a year feels pretty much like a year. But after our 50s and 60s, time seems to speed up to a point where the 20 years between ages 60 and 80 will apparently, for most, only feel like about 13 years or so, according to one study of seniors.

To me the most challenging aspect of this is how to feel like you're making enough time to relax and slow down time, once it starts moving more quickly. When time seems compressed, it can always feel like you are rushing off to the latest chore or outing, and that the weekdays seem to just scream by into the weekends, all bumping into each other like train cars on the downslope of a hill.

But the advent of our tiny screens, I think, has also contributed to our never feeling like we have enough time, no matter what our age. First, because our iPhones, laptops and tablets steal so much of it through fairly useless (but time-sucking) activities such as Facebook or internet surfing, and second, because we can be roused to our phones at any given moment, via the alerts that let us know we've just received an email, text, or phone call from work or from loved ones reaching out. All of which take us out of our unscheduled "time out of mind" moments, back into the drumbeat of work or social life.

I loved having this table filled with family and friends, but also the solitude which came after.

We had the entire family here at the holidays and it was pretty much what you'd expect; being busy, being seriously plugged in to other people, and constantly thinking ahead to what was next on the schedule. It was wonderful to be with everyone again, but in the time since then, I'm really trying to be more mindful of putting less into the days, if just so I can enjoy the hours passing more slowly, for now.

Busy, busy busy!

One nice thing about the Oregon winter is that the short days and rain allow you to do that; there's never a time you feel less guilty about spending the day inside with a good book than when it's raining all day and the sun's going to set at 4 p.m. (provided no one's expecting you to cook dinner for seven people). 

I know in Paso Robles, I never felt like I had a lot of free time, and that's because the weather was so nice year-round, there was usually some chore around the property I knew I needed to get after, or something to do in the  chef's garden at work, or some appointment, errand or social activity scheduled. When every day is nice, you pretty much do something every day. Which is fine for people who like to have something on the calendar all the time.

Big Ag's vineyard in Paso Robles -- where every day could be productive.

I'm hoping to enjoy more "slow time" in 2020, and to be more conscious about pulling on the reins of time a bit more and watching the hours pass at a walk rather than a gallop. It will mean more time by the fire, or the stove, or by the window, just looking out. It will mean expecting less of myself and saying "no" to more activities and events. But ultimately, I think saying no a little more to some of those things will be worth the reward. 

If it lengthens my days so that 20 years feels more like 20 instead of only 13 years, that will mean seven more years of my life handed back to me; a reward paid in the one dividend we cannot make more of -- the gain of time itself.  

Slow time in Oregon. 8 am sunrise.