The Cat Who Protested a Great Deal

One of the innocent victims of the COVID stay at home situation is Wesley the cat. Over the past twelve months he has transitioned from the Cat Who Hates Me to the Cat Who Tolerates Me and, finally, the Cat Who Grudgingly Likes Me. He's not a cat who accepts change easily, and moving to my house was clearly not his idea.

He was supposed to live with me from June 2019 to about June 2020, while my brother and his family were traveling. Since there is no safe way for me to get to California or for my brother's family to visit here, it looks like he'll be living in Maryland for a while longer. I am delighted that he has ceased his regular 5am yowls, and has even grown to like sitting outside in the Maryland humidity. I'm happy to have him as my COVID companion.

Summer

Things got better, or at least calmer, in the second half of June. While protests continue, it feels less like DC is directly under attack. Now we "just" have to translate that sense of urgency into productive changes in society to combat racism.

In the meantime, I've been scheduling some downtime. While our stay-at-home orders have started to loosen, most of my friends are not socializing except in socially-distant ways. That means picnics or sitting around a firebowl, and keeps two meters apart. So I have started to see friends, and I'm grateful for the social interaction. (Throughout all of this I have continued to have six or seven hours of video meetings every day, so I don't feel like I'm missing work interactions at all.)

I also figured out a way to take a vacation that didn't break social distancing recommendations - I went camping. I recalled a campground in the far west of Maryand, near to the West Virginia border, that didn't require me to interact with people. Since the campsites are spaced so far apart that you can't see other people, and there are no bath houses, toilet facilities, or water, it was easy to stay completely isolated. I had a relaxing four-day weekend in which I traded worries about COVID and police brutality for worries about bears and rattlesnakes. I hiked, read several books, and breathed in campfire smoke. It was so lovely that I may repeat it again this fall.

Word to the wise - hiking in a forest filled with streams is lovely but if you pitch your tent next to a burbling brook, as I did, you will need to pee approximately a million times a day.

The vegetable garden in my back yard is now taking off. In the picture below, you can see the prolific green beans on the far left, which are producing so much that they feature daily in my menus and I still have extra to freeze for next winter. On the far, back right you can see the garlic turning brown that means it's nearly ready to harvest. I traditionally dig it all upon Fourth of July weekend, so we're right on schedule. I have also harvested lots of raspberries, but am still eagerly waiting for the first figs and tomatoes.

Somber times

Things are... not very good here. I live near a city where there have been serious, violent action against protesters and large numbers of unidentified law enforcement officials have suddenly appeared. I live in a county that is majority African American, and many of my coworkers are Black. People are scared and fed up. As a white person, I have the privileged that I don't feel the same fear that they do. Instead I am sad about the state of my country, angry that my friends and coworkers live in a country where they don't feel safe, and overwhelmed that so many bad things can be happening at once.  

At the same time, much of the world continues as normal. When I talk to some friends or family members, especially those not here in DC, the events seem much more distant. It's a jarring world to live in, spending my work day thinking about and acting on these issues, and then stepping outside the door to my front garden where the bees buzz as if all is right with the world. 

How my garden grows

I would like to go back in time to 2019 me and sincerely thank you her. All that backbreaking labor of tilling and hauling compost (and planting and weeding) has produced, in just one year, a beautiful cottage garden. There is something blooming from April until October, and I even managed to sneak in some color over the winter by planting pansies.

Although I went a bit overbudget last year, I don't think I'll need to spend much, if any, in future years. Even now, only one year in, some of the plants had grown so big that I could divide them to fill in gaps in the garden. Also, I'm continuing my policy of allowing unidentified plants to grow, while carefully monitoring them before they produced seeds. Last year that resulted in the hallucinogenic jimsonweed, which I destroyed before it caused problems. This year it has resulted in the lovely, purple-flowered "doubtful knight's spur." I'm not sure why the knight was so doubtful. Here it is, with the French hollyhocks in the background.

These bright yellow and orange flowers are called calendulas, which are often confused with marigolds (but should not be because one is edible and one not so much).

Next month I'll have pictures of the vegetable garden, but since I'm only at the planting stage, the pictures would just show carefully weeded and watered dirt.

Pies, illness, and conferences

I've just recovered from a long illness. It was either a delightfully light case of COVID, or a proper case of the flu. The doctor thinks it was the latter, but either way I am left wondering how I managed to catch something after suspending all contact with humans (except rare groceries trips) for four weeks. I am feeling better now, and congratulating myself that I had stocked the freezer with so many ready-to-microwave meals. I have more meals left, in case COVID is yet to come.

I missed over a week of work, but my workplace has been amazing throughout this whole stay-at-home thing. They closed down before most other companies, gave us a stipend to buy work-from-home supplies, communicate extremely frequently about how decisions are being made, and have given us two bonus days off as mental health days. They also made the news twice. The first time, they cancelled our largest conference hours before it was supposed to start, in early March. This caused great consternation in the community and I heard a lot of criticism for exactly a week, until the rest of the world imploded and they simply looked prescient. They then ran our next big conference virtually, arranging it in less than two weeks, and it went really well. I am sad that I was too sick to attend any of it.

Part of my freezer stocking this week is making savory pies. (This is the sort of inspiration you get from reading lots of British mysteries that feature meat pies, tea, and sherry.) I was reminded of my friends in graduate school, who would get together for "filled food parties," producing delicious but labor-intensive food like Chinese dumplings, German Maustaschen, or gnocchi. Generally the output was amazing, but once we attempted Cornish pasties and the dry, sawdust-like lumps we produced haunt me to this day.

I have fonder memories of the savory pies I ate in Australia and the UK, and I set out to make mushroom, spinach, and cheddar pies. Somehow I ended up choose a more open-faced recipe with an all-butter crust so it's certainly not the same as a meat pie that you'd eat at the footy. They were fiddly to make and didn't photograph well, but are buttery and delicious and make me glad I'm well enough to cook again.

Spring

My very good friend M has been quarantined in one room of her house all week, separated from her spouse and kid. I knew she'd be missing getting outside, so I sent her a picture or video from my morning walk each day. If you are quarantined, or just stuck in a state that is still experiencing winter, here's a taste of spring for you.

Violets grow wild in my yard. If you pick enough of them, you can discern that they actually have a lovely scent; it is not just something invented for soaps that Victorian ladies used.

These are my possibly-not-quite-legal pink tulips. They were a gift from my brother's family while they were traveling in the Netherlands, and I didn't remember that I was supposed to declare them when I brought them into the country.

Pansies and tulips. Last year's extra work in establishing a perennial cottage garden has really paid off. Almost everything is already coming up, and I seemed to have planned well to have bits of color even this early in the year. Experienced gardeners will know that pansies are not actually perennials, but they can live (and bloom) through entire DC winter, so I planted them anyway.

Making stuff

Everything is all Coronavirus all the time, so you don't need to really hear any news from that here. I'll just say that everyone in my house (my roommate the fire engineering graduate student, me, and the grumpy cat) is healthy and we are probably doing better than most since we're all introverts. I just finished my second week of working from home and for the first time am enjoying having such a big house.

To distract us all with happier thoughts, here are some things I've been working on. 

Okay, so this is before we all had to stay at home.  I visited my beloved Uncle M and Aunt G in Albuquerque. We now have a routine for these visits: my uncle cooks very good food, my aunt and I do some very complicated baking, I go on a hike with my uncle, and we eat at a traditional New Mexican restaurant.

This is the complicated chocolate bombe glacee, the making of which is delightfully recounted here. It was super fun to make, but actually far too sweet to eat so I was glad we could donate it to a group of hungry Rotarians.

As a minimalist, I avoid having too much furniture, but I needed a desk now that I am working from home. I had exacting requirements about size and lack of drawers (because I usually sit cross-legged while working), so I made one. It's really pretty as long as you don't look too closely, at which point you realize that I will never get a job as a professional furniture maker.

A random aside on another blog alerted me to the existence of dandelion jelly. I had all the ingredients (sugar, pectin, canning jars) and my yard and neighborhood are brimming with dandelions right now. It was a fair bit of work to pick 10 cups of dandelions, but at the end I was surprised that the jelly really did taste like honey, as advertised.

I hope you are staying healthy and as sane as possible in these surreal times.