Dichroic Reflections

Though we are healthy, because we can work from home and our employers have been proactive about it, we seem to have been doing this longer than most people in the US. I realized today that I’m already a full week into semi-isolation.

It’s not complete isolation – after all, we’re still healthy and there are still just 65 (known) cases in this state. But it’s full-out social distancing.

On Friday I went to the supermarket and also stopped at Best Buy to pick up a set of the new AirPods, on the theory that, walked to a small local grocery on Saturday largely out of curiosity, talked to a neighbor (from a safe distance) Sunday while weeding. And we decided to have food delivered (by the ding-dong-ditch method) last night instead of what we were planning to cook. But I’ve been working from home with only that minimal direct contact with the outside world, all the way since last Thursday.

At least we were able to spend the weekend at the lake so I was looking at a different set of four walls, and was able to get out on the water a couple times, over the weekend.

Ted’s got to go into the fab this afternoon or tomorrow, for the first time since we’ve been wfh, but that’s just to check on his guys – I don’t think he needs to be there for long.

I am very much enjoying the chance to knit while on telecons, do laundry, start dinner etc, and most of all to be either busy or not busy and never have to *look* busy. It’s also better for balance, when you have early morning and evening meetings, to be able to take some time in the middle of the day. Only thing that’s bugging me is the lack of daylight; it was better while we were at the lake, but here in the townhouse, my desk is in the loft area, which is in the center of the house with no windows. I suppose I could take my laptop to the couch for a bit of sun now and then.

ETA: Whoops, wrote this Wednesday and it looks like I never published. I’m not on Day 9!

I’ve posted photos on FB of each winery we visited and I’m not sure I’ll get to posting them here, but I wanted to have a searchable record so in future I know where we’ve been.

Brutal honesty background: this year I planned my own birthday wine weekend, because Ted was fed up. This has roots back in the very first birthday weekend trip he planned, back in around 2007: I was thrilled when he surprised me with a trip to Venice, less thrilled when we got there and I found he’d done absolutely no research and had no plans for what to see and do while there. He said he thought I already had places I’d want to see – note that Venice is not particularly a place I’d dreamed about, though I was certainly happy to go. It ended up being a good trip, but I still think that’s a pretty big omission if you’re planning a trip for someone! We’ve had a few other squabbles since.

Last year, things came to a head. He asked for some places I wanted to go. We discussed a few wine regions, but I said I’d really rather see the Northern Lights. It’s been on my bucket list forever. He started planning for some wine trip that wasn’t even a place I was very interested in. I told him I’d REALLY rather see the Northern lights.Argument followed. Northern lights trip planned. He did research and settled on Yellowknife as the best place to see them. Fine. Then he had some trouble finding and working with a guide company, and the one he picked didn’t speak English all that well (they cater most to Asian visitors). There were a bunch of screw-ups on their part and I ended up spending considerable time on the phone with them – I wrote about it here last year. I was annoyed, because two minutes’ googling found me other outfitters with good ratings. Anyway, there were other issues after we got there – for one, they’d put us in a hotel way out on the edge of town even though all their other people were downtown – but overall it ended up being a good trip – we had great aurora sightings.

So this year, Ted said he was fed up and would just buy me a present instead of planning a trip. I said fine, we’re going to the wineries anyway. Dundee is the center of the wine region here; we’d been there about 4 years ago, so it was definitely time for a re-visit. (I think picking a B&B, making a dinner reservation for one night, and planning a couple of driving loops probably took under an hour total. Whatever. The only ‘research’ on where to go was choosing a couple of driving paths that made sense – with the density of wineries in that area, the only hard part was choosing between them.)

We got up early Friday morning and erged, since we wouldn’t be working out over the weekend and wineries don’t open until 10 or 11 anyway. Tehn we drove out; Dundee is only about 45 minutes away, but with so many wineries to visit, it’s much nicer, not to mention safer, to stay out there. On Friday, we visited:

• Archery Summit – big bold California style pinots
• De Ponte Cellars – just next door, very different wines – lighter, Burgundy-style pinots
• Domaine Drouhin – we missed this one last time we were out ther because it was closed for a private event. This is the one that put Oregon pinots on the world’s wine map, when a famous old French winemaking family came uout here, tasted the Pinots Noirs of the pioneer winemakers here, and decided to open their own vineyard
• Domaine Serene – fancy high-end wines, huge tasting room
• Francis Coppola’s Domaine de Broglie – new since we were last in the area
• Winter’s Hill Estate – the tasting is in the cask room. I’m pretty sure this was where we bought some excellent chocolate toffee.
• White Rose – odd place. They’re up on a hill and the views are beautiful but the tasting room has no windows and feels like it’s underground.

After all that, we returned to our B&B, napped *hard* for a couple hours, and walked to a decent Mexican restaurant on the main drag for dinner.

On Saturday, I’d originally planned to visit 8-9 wineries (just look how close together they are!) but we had a reservation at The Joel Palmer House and I wanted to be able to appreciate it. So we scaled back the plans.

• Erath – we’ve had their basic Pinot Noir from the grocery store, but hadn’t had any of their higher end stuff. While there, we got into a conversation – were more or less hauled into conservation! – with an older couple who have been going there for 40 years or so. We talked about lots of other wineries too, but the gentleman was an evangelist for Erath – they apparently go there a lot! His wife gave us a card that entitled us to their wine club discount for that visit, a nice perk that got us a free tasting and a discount on the wines we bought.
• Maresh Red Barn – fun because this is another of the Old Guard, one of the original winemakers in the area, the guy serving us is the son-in-law of the founders.
• Holloran – we had to walk up stairs and down and through the working building to get to their tasting room, which also turned out to be sort of an apartment where the tasting manager sometimes stays over. Not as odd as that sounds; the tasting was in a nice room with a kitchen at one en, a counter, but more tables and couches to sit on, taste, and look out the huge windows at the view.
• Furioso – another big crowded commerical tasting place unlike the intimate settings we’d been visiting. Slow services due to the crowds – I was getting fed up but the tasting manager saw my unhappy face, and started bringing over wines two at a time – ones that made sense to taste together, like from two adjacent vineyards or two years from the same block.
• Hyland – walking distance from our B&B. I think this is the only place we visited where we didn’t buy wine – not that it was bad, but there was nothing that jumped out at us. I did buy a cookbook, though.

After another nap at the B&B, we headed out to Joel Palmer House. I’d been feeling unwell the other time we visited so it was nice to be able to appreciate my dinner. They have a focus on local wild mushrooms – I had a mushroom tart, followed by angelhari past with langoustines, crab and mushrooms, and three kinds of sorbet (and yes, I think at least one of those had mushrooms too!).

After “processing” it when we got home – deciding which wines to save to drink soon and which to keep a few years – Ted announced we’d bought about two cases overall. Yikes!

I’ve been binging my way through the series (up to book 9 now) and while I wouldn’t say it’s jumped the shark yet, it is definitely getting increasingly trippy. Also, does Jane have to be injured to the pint where a normal person would die in *every* book?

I get that this is an inherent problem with open-ended fantasy series, because to keep the readers’ interest, the author has to up the stakes in every book. It got me thinking about how other authors handle the same problem.

Discworld is an obvious example, with 41 books. There, Terry Pratchett had the advantage that his characters mostly weren’t in world-saving kinds of situations. There were just a few exceptions – Equal Rites where they may have been but the rest of us don’t really understand what those two were doing anyway; some of the Sam Vimes books where Vimes mostly was trying to preserve the status quo when the subtle balance of diplomacy was teetering more than normal. The biggest tactic he used, though, to avoid plot inflation was just the switching between viewpoints in each book. For instance, if there had been too many Moist von Lipwig books, Pratchett would have had trouble keeping Discworld out of the modern era. And in the Tiffany Aching books, she really was trying to save the world, but there were only 5 books in that subseries.

I don’t think the Ilona Andrews team expected that series to take off as it did. So the world was well detailed from the beginning, but I suspect Kate’s own backstory – and Roland’s – only really got figured out as more than an inchoate mystery from around the third book or so. There’s clearly some of it there before that, but I suspect somewhere along the way the authors started realizing they had a juggernaut on their hands, so that a few books in they started to plan an ending, bending everything toward the final arc of the big conflict between Kate and her father. I don’t know if they planned ten books or if it that’s just how long it took to tell out that story arc, as they fleshed it out. (It’s always possible I’m totally wrong and they knew a lot more about Kate’s background from the beginning!)

Then finally there’s October Daye. I think McGuire is controlling plot escalation in still a third way; there are smaller continuous story arcs within the series. Sort of like real life, as one chapter ends another begins, though there are some continued threads (like learning more about Sylvester and Amandine) that persist through the smaller arcs.

Anyway, yeah, the Yellowrock thing. Hopefully I won’t succumb to the coronavirus, but if I do, this is surly the right thing for reading when you’re having fever dreams. Or maybe exactly the wrong thing?

I’m just mentioning it here so I know when it started. It was fine Monday, and started to hurt somewhere early Tuesday morning – I didn’t fall or anything, just seem to have flexed it the wrong way. What worries me is that it feels just like when I hurt it in Taiwan. That time the pain lasted a couple of months – I was walking with a hiking stick as a cane, not because I couldn’t walk without one but because it hurt less that way, and I missed the Holiday Challenge entirely that year.

So hopefully this is just yet another minor body thing that will go away in a day or two… but I am documenting just in case.

I was thinking about the Australian bushfires and did a little looking around to get some data. Currently about 12 million acres have burned – compare that with 10 million acres in the US in 2017, a bad year. (That’s for the entire US across an entire year, but of course most of that was concentrated in summer months, in the western states.) For comparison, Australia is close to the size of the US.

Living in the PacNW, I have been through some bad years. I’ve seen the sky gray from smoke, smelled it even inside the house, seen the sun as a big evil orange orb. I’ve seen the firefighters, come from all over the US, bunked in tents in the park a short walk from our house because there was nowhere else to put so many of them. So do I know what it’s like in Sydney today? Nope.

See this map. Those fires are concentrated in a ring around the outside of the continent – because that’s where the fuel is, the green or not-so-green things that will burn. The middle is a giant desert, part of it as bare and sere as the driest parts of Nevada. That’s also where the people are, and the roads, in that habitable ring around the coast. There are nt a lot of roads inland, and not a lot of infrastructure there to house people if they tried to evacuate inland. So the blazing acres are vast, but they’re also focused in a discrete and heavily populated part of the country.

I’ve lived through some bad wildfire years out here. Do I know what it’s like in Australia now? No … but maybe I know just enough to know what I don’t know.

Just getting down a quick record before I post a thoughtpiece on the fires in OZ. We had a very quiet holiday – spent just an overnight with Ted’s parents between Xmas and NYE, but otherwise we were at home, at the lake, and didn’t even go out much. I finished the Holiday Challenge (it was a ‘hard year’, with a comparatively late Thanksgiving, and thus a shorter period to row in.) The weather wasn’t great, so I didn’t get out on the water at all, not even in a kayak. I finished two pair of socks and a cowl, and started a Waiting for Rain shawl – I’ve also got yet another pair of socks in work. Ted deepfried a pair of turkeys for Christmas dinner. I cooked a gratin Normande, a rib roast (prime rib, except it was technically USDA Choice) that came out very well, plus a roast spatchcocked chicken, made a batch of pretzels, and finished last night with red beans and rice.

We cleared out the last of the mess from the renovation, and the garage is now Ted’s pride. He framed a panel of moss to hang in my bathroom, but then managed to leave it there – it will probably die before we return, with no water. And we both had bad colds – his started just after Christmas and is still lingering. At least mine mostly cleared up quickly.

We acquired a new washing machine but are still waiting for a replacement microwave to replace the one that broke (a whole saga as the door latch refused to open – with my leftovers still in there!) We also got some barrel chairs for the new breakfast area and the great room – now we just need a lower table for the great room.

And we got lots of sleep, except for all the coughing. A very quiet break, boring but restful.

Sorry, I know, still haven’t written about my Poland trip. I should also update the other blog, since I recently re-registered the domain (and am consequently, annoyingly, getting a ton of calls from people wanting to help me with my “business” site.)

The major annoyance factors are these:

• Ted’s grandfather died. This was not unexpected, he being 98, in pain, in poor health, and more than ready to go, but it’s still sad. It also means we need to go to a memorial ceremony on Saturday
• which is 6 hours away
• on the other side of the Cascades mountains
• And Ted is heading off overseas and will be arriving back Friday. (I’m still not that comfortable with highway driving or long driving.)
• Also, I just found out my car, which we plan to take (his being a Very Large Truck) doesn’t have a spare tire. Apparently Mercedes sold it to me with run-flat tires

So my primary plan is to go to Les Schwab this afternoon after work and throw myself on their mercy, probably ending up with a cheap set of chains and a tireFit kit (or possibly I will need to go to Mercedes for that, which would be annoying).

That’s plan A. Plan B is to get snow tires; Plan C is to trade the damn thing in for a Subaru or a Jeep.

Also, the Concept II Holiday Challenge has started, which means I don’t really have time for any of this, much less a weekend trip away from my erg. In the grand scheme of life, grandfathers outweigh erg challenges – I just wish all the other challenges didn’t go along with the memorial.

I do not understand why WordPress gives me so many issues with adding images these days, but I always seem to have to go back to Classic mode to do it. Blah.

Anyway, I have just upgraded again and hopefully I can figure it out on this version because I have an awesome trip to write about!

First we went to New Orleans for Tulane homecoming. We flew in on the redeye, and spent the next couple of days with Ted’s college gang revisiting their old haunts. So picture a bunch of guys their fifties partying like they dd at twenty, only with less-unreasonable alcohol consumption and nights that ended at 12 or 1 instead of 2 … or sunrise. That actually sounds awful but it was wonderful because of course they weren’t random fiftyish dudes but old friends. They’re Ted’s old friends, not mine, but I really enjoy these guys. So we got to go to their class party in the Aquarium, to Pat-O’s (Pat O’Brians) for hurricanes, to a couple of oyster bars (one for snacks Friday night, one for breakfast Sunday), to a football game in which Tulane beat Tulsa by a big margin, a nice wine bar, a very crowded restaurant for some slightly overcooked New Orleans BBQ shrimp, and Cooter Brown’s. Cooter’s is not recommended for tourists – it’s a dive bar they used to patronize as drunken undergrads. Good beer selection though! But Ted didn’t have any, as he and his old roommate of course needed to stop at the drive-through daiquiri place in order to relive the full drunken undergrad experience!

The last night we were out until 1 – then I realized I’d left my phone in the Uber car. We were able to contact the driver and get it back but that took another hour – and Ted had to get up at 4 for an early flight out. So that left him 2 hours of sleep, which turned into 3 because the change away from Daylight Savings kicked in right then. I was flying out a couple hours later (to Poland, which will need to be another entry) but never got back to sleep so I passed the time contacting my credit card companies to notify them I’d be traveling. Not restful!

After 4 weeks with the new kitten, I have scrapes and scratches all over my body – but she’s still pretty adorable. She doesn’t do it on purpose – when she deliberately touches skin it’s with velvet paws. It’s just that gravity sometimes gets the best of her – yesterday, after I finished erging, she jumped from the back of my couch onto my leg. A short distance, and I didn’t mind since I was done working out …. until she started to slip backward and tried to hand on. I now have parallel scores across my left thigh. Ow. Oolong puts up with her reasonably well; Ted’s theory is that she’s viewing Pinot as her own personal Cat Entertainment TV channel.

We’re taking them to the lake house tonight; here’s hoping this goes as well as their first trip there. (Might or might not. This time we’re in the truck, and they’ll be in the back seat where they can see us and we can hear them – last time they were in the back of my hatchback, a little further away. Not putting them in the truck bed, even with the camper top, after what happened to Macchiato there.

But what prompted this tardy update is realizing my bootiversary is this month (probably already happened). In October of 2009 we were on a driving trip to Tasmania, after competing in Sidney in the Masters World Games. While in Hobart, I tried to buy a pair of the classic Australian boot, Blundstones – but the guy in the shoestore didn’t want to sell them to me. Blundstone had recently moved their manufacturing out of Tassie to Korea. He recommended a pair in similar style by Rossi instead. I’m wearing them today. Not the same style. Not even the black pair I later ordered because I liked my original brown ones so much, but that original pair I bought. They’ve been all over Europe and pretty uch any other chilly place I”ve traveled, and they’ve been my most-frequently-worn footwear for the cooler half of ten years now. I took them to the cobbler last year to be polished and spiffed up a bit last year because they were pretty scuffed, but I am still on the original soles.

When I posted about them on FB, someone mentioned the Sam Vimes Economic Theory of boots. Much as I believe in that theory, that’s not the only thing at work here. If you happen to be in Australian and can buy a pair, you’ll spend about AUD$130, which is around $90 US right now. (Of course they’re more if you buy them from a US importer – a good reason to travel to Oz every decade or so!) That’s not cheap for shoes, but it’s hardly pricy designer range either – more like what you’d pay for a brand like Keen or Merrell, if not on sale. And those are good quality shoes – but they don’t last me a decade!!! So I think my bootiversary is worth noting, and when these do finally fall apart I will be finding an importer to order a new pair from.

And I’m late posting, because I adopted her a week and a half ago. Meet Pinot Gris:

She’s not perfect – for instance there’s her habit of walking straight up the nearest human to get up to a surface she can’t jump up to yet, not realizing that her claws go *right through* clothing 8nto skin, and I’m definitely getting a lot less knitting done as I try to keep her from biting the yarn. Also, she keeps trying to nurse on my face and neck, a very wet process.

But she is pretty special. She likes to nuzzle into my neck and gently pat my face with her claws in. She doesn’t scratch or bite humans on purpose, though my skin is starting to look like and old map from all the lines she’s scratched into it by accident. She’s snuggly, not at all shy, and likes humans. I can’t say she and Oolong are BFFs yet but they have a pretty good truce going – I only had to keep Pinot shut in a spare bedroom for a few days. She likes music, even my singing. She likes to sleep on me – though I’m also getting less sleep because she gets rambunctious for a while til she settles in.ni don’t think there’s any such thing as a calm kitten, but she’s only reasonably destructive. She follows me everywhere and sits on my lap and lets me rub her floodgates belly without attacking. Ok, she’s pretty perfect (and I’m pretty besotted).

But she does add new challenges to my morning routine!