The View from the Hermitage, Day 182

Twenty-six weeks, six months, half of one year. My hair is six months longer and a wee bit darker without the trims and highlights. My body is 15 pounds lighter, though that's not directly coronavirus-related. My mood is probably more variable than it was before the life shut-down. The number of days on which the lows seem lower probably outnumber the days on which the highs seem higher. I expect that part of that is the general disarray that accompanied all the work we've had done on the house this year. It's going to be a while longer before I feel as if there's not something major still to be put into place.

Speaking of the house's still being re-assembled, I promised photos of the new rugs. We've only put the one in the living room down so far. It needs to sit until tomorrow before we put down the adhesive squares that will hold the rug tiles together. The faint lines you see here will disappear once we've done that and it's all relaxed a bit.

Once this rug is finished and the one in the dining area is down, I can start thinking about curtains in some light neutral shade. Given the 35-year-old sofas, our house will never resemble anything staged. I think of what our house looks like as immediate-post-graduate-school chic. I don't think we'll ever have what looks like an for-real-adult house. 

We took the usual Sunday morning walk in the park. This week's walk along the river was punctuated by older son's turning around and telling me to stop and back up. He knows my almost-phobia of snakes, and there was a snake lying at the side of the trail. It was not clear what kind it was, and I did not want to look closely enough to find out. I backed up and went around some bushes to go around the snake's snoozing spot. Older son noted that this was the first snake we had encountered, and we've been going there almost weekly in the last ... yes ... six months. I'd be okay with not running into another one for another six months. 

The Western fires continue seemingly unabated though some are at least partially controlled now. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be there. One of the news shows noted that atmospheric effects had been noted as far away as Ohio. I'm waiting for smoke-polluted air coast to coast, not that climate change's being a major contributor will register at all with HWSNBN. He is supposed to visit the fire zone tomorrow, and I almost dread seeing and hearing how his visit goes. In reshelving books, I came across the storybook that Stephen Colbert's staff put together in the wake of Hurricane Florence, Whose Boat Is This Boat?: Comments That Don't Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane. Maybe the sequel can be whatever he says about the fire. Speaking of hurricanes, Sally is aiming right at Louisiana. Do they really need another cyclonic visitor?

I'm making another one of my found-during-the-pandemic recipes for dinner tonight, Fresh Corn and Tomato Fettuccine. You can find the recipe here. I need to try it using canned or frozen corn since I'm not sure how much longer the corn on the cob will be usable. I've lost track of how many times I've made this one since I found it several months ago.

New university covid-19 numbers tomorrow. Will we start seeing the effect of Labor Day gatherings?

The View from the Hermitage, Day 171

On the pandemic cooking front, I have my first attempt at naan, an Indian flatbread, rising in the kitchen. Why, you might ask, does a flat bread need to rise? Oh, you don't ask that, though it's the thought that occurred to me as I typed the first sentence. Tomorrow, when I get a new 13 x 9 inch pan and some cardamom from Amazon, I will attempt No-Churn Saffron and Pistachio Ice Cream, a take on a traditional Persian ice cream. I got the rose water I needed for it last week, also from Amazon. Fortunately, I already have saffron and only need 20 threads.

With no rain this morning, my head stopped spinning rain songs and instead worked on a list of things I want to or should do once the world rights itself and I can safely interact with it. Besides my family, there are people with whom I want to have dinner. There are other people with whom I want to have lunch or coffee. It's been almost six months since my last haircut and highlights. Since I expect my bangs will have grown out by then, I'll need to decide whether to go short again or keep my hair longer and bangless. My nails have held up surprisingly well without any attention from a nail professional. I trim them or file them and am actually used to their natural color. Older son has done a great job on the grocery front, but once the pandemic smoke clears, there's an ice cream parlor and a pizza joint I'd like to visit. I would call my hand doctor (doesn't everyone have a hand doctor?) about the De Quervain's tendonitis that will not get better without attention, which I'm hoping can be cortisone and not the surgery it may need. I'd also make an appointment with my PCP for a physical not to mention visit the dentist for the appointment I cancelled the same day they closed shop.

I guess I'm going to be busy, though it probably won't be this dumpster-fire year of 2020. I trust Dr. Fauci's suggestion that things will get back almost to what they were. We'll probably never shake hands again, and we may reserve hugs for those with whom we are very close. The election will have happened with whatever fallout there is to be. I will not now entertain what life will be like depending on who gets inaugurated in January. Either way, it will be different than what we have had the last four years, different in one way or another.

The K-12 public schools open here a week from today. I should look at some private school websites and see how they plan to handle things. Okay, I just looked at three, none of which was upfront about how they are handling the upcoming year. I guess you have to pay admission, er, tuition to learn whether it's full-time in-person, all online, or a hybrid model. I would think that the smaller, likely more cohesive student and parent bodies would make in-person instruction a bit less threatening, but that's not totally clear. Possibly even more so than with college, I would not want to spend thousands of dollars to keep my child at home learning virtually. I just checked the website of a fourth school offering grades 5-12. It appears that they are having two grades come for in-person instruction each day. 

Once again, I'm going to defer any political comment here and instead go check the naan. Expect a report on that tomorrow.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 59

We've tried two new food things this week. On Monday, the husband made a Peruvian rice and beans dish known as tacu tacu. It was a late Mother's Day present since we'd had leftovers the night before. The tacu tacu recipe came from Joe Yonan's "Weeknight Vegetarian" column in the food section of The Washington Post. It was quite good, and we will definitely be having it again.

Last night, we cooked steak on a rock. For Mother's Day, older son gave me two stones from a company known as Artestia. He gave another set to the husband as an early Father's Day gift. He also provided the steaks. You heat a stone for around 40 minutes in a 525 degree (F) oven. When you take it out, you plop the steak on it. You can cook the whole steak and then eat it or cut bites off to cook more quickly and eat the steak as it cooks. You can also cook eggs on them, though that seems a bit too much work for scrambled or fried eggs. We first had steak on a rock at a now-closed Caribbean restaurant in a city up north Route 29. Again, something we will be repeating.

In the old-normal, pre-coronavirus world, I would be packing right now and trying not to obsess over making sure all the paperwork was in order. Tomorrow, the husband and I would be driving up to Dulles International Airport and taking an overnight Turkish Air flight to Istanbul. There, we would get on another Turkish Air flight to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the start of a 17-day trip through three countries commonly thought to be along the Silk Road of Marco Polo's day. We recovered the full cost of the trip plus insurance when the tour company cancelled things. It's hard to say if we'll have the chance to do that tour again or, if we do have the chance, we would take it.

Travel as we've known it may never be the same again. It's not at all clear when different countries might change their current border lockdowns. You can probably get out of your home country, but it's not clear what other countries would admit you right now. Even state-to-state travel can get complicated with some states requiring a 14-day quarantine period for anyone entering from another state. And should those state quarantine requirements be lifted, I'm not sure I want to get on an airplane. Will "Road trip!" be the new way to go? "Shotgun!"

The local paper ran an article yesterday reporting that a majority of local residents do not support the partial reopening of the state (minus Northern Virginia) starting Friday. I hope those people vote with their feet and stay at home. I hope that things work out and that the decline in the relevant metrics continues, but I won't hold my breath. We'll see what things look like after Memorial Day.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 36

The Washington Post has run several articles recently on the boredom or creativity people deal with while quarantined. What makes one bored? What creative endeavors do people use to fill the time or otherwise deal with probably more solitude than they are used to? Trying to learn a foreign language is frequently cited as a time-filler as is learning to play a musical instrument. And judging by the absence of flour and yeast from grocery store shelves, many people are baking.

Filling time is not really an issue here in the Hermitage. Before I tried to retire (that's a whole other story), I only worked part-time and from home. Since my attempt at retirement, I have had even more free time here at home. In other words, filling in time at home has not really been an issue. I have one quilt ready for the last step of binding and another quilt pieced and ready to pin to the batting and backing. I have a simple project on my loom, a tool I'm still getting comfortable using. Not using the loom, I wove a large square of martial arts belts in various colo(u)rs; I'm still pondering where to go with that project. And ....

I've been cooking real meals, from recipes even. Since there's no running to the grocery store for a quick pick-up of something I don't have, I've had to get creative with what I do have. I think the Food Channel at one time had a show called something like Door Knock Dinners. They'd knock on your door and ask if the chef standing beside the host could come in and make dinner using whatever he or she could find in your kitchen and pantry. My making of vegetable fried rice was not nearly the level of dish a chef would have made, but it was as authentic as I could get based on several recipes I found online. Usually I only make enough rice for one dinner for two and maybe a lunch for one. I made twice as much the other night, actually planning on making fried rice the next night.

Older son is doing our grocery shopping, so there are sometimes surprises in what he gets in response to what I had on my list. Last week, he picked up some stew beef. It was chopped in chunks smaller than I usually use, so I decided to see what else I could make. I think I googled "beef stew meat" or something similar. One of the first recipes to pop up was for Mongolian beef, something I'd heard of but never eaten. I had to swap out a couple of ingredients--light brown sugar for dark, a regular onion for the green ones, dry ginger for minced--but the result was incredible. I'll definitely be making it again. Older son bought some lamb stew meat this past weekend, and I may use that just to see what it tastes like.

Finally, older son noted that the husband had not had ham for Easter. I usually bought ham slices and just threw them into the oven or plopped them into a frying pan. Last night, I cooked a whole hockey-sock-sized ham. I just followed the directions on the label, but I still count it as cooking something new. We're having some leftover ham for dinner tonight, and the rest went into the freezer. And while I would typically settle for canned pineapple, older son got a fresh pineapple. I may never used canned again.

And so, none of the above has anything to do with the novel coronavirus per se, but it is related to the passage of time in the Hermitage. If I start in on the virus and related personalities such as He Who Shall Not Be Named, my blood pressure might go even higher. And since that, in addition to my asthma and age, puts me at higher risk, I think I'll just stop here.