Christmas in the new normal

Interstate travel is pretty limited right now, but my parents and I found a way to make it work. We all quarantined for two weeks (following rules that we agreed upon and wrote down, because I am nothing if not a project manager) and then I drove straight through to Ohio one evening. I changed my trip timing to avoid some winter storms, which turned out to be a good idea although I hate driving in the dark with a passion.

My mother and I took a walk almost every day. There are real advantages to owning 42 acres during the Covid times. It's easy to social distance when the only living creatures you'll run into are squirrels and deer.

Covid also led to a new family activity - haircuts for all. I cut my mother's, and my mother did the rest of them. I was so relieved that she liked hers, and I've never cut a woman's hair before (other than my own, and I am forgiving of myself :) I had my heart set on an authentic vintage cut. I was ready for a change from pinning my hair up every day. I was lucky that my mother was up for it, since it required repeated viewing of instructional videos and two hours of cutting with careful use of a ruler. Pretty much no one gets this particular haircut any more, even though it was *the* haircut of the 1940s and 1950s. This haircut, known as the Middy, looks good when you set it into pincurls, and only in that case. If you ever get lazy and wear it straight, it's a mullet.

Other than that, we cooked, ate, fixed things, and did a video Christmas gift opening with the rest of the family. Considering the times, it was a great holiday.

Everyone, together, at least in spirit.

 

Marking time

Like many people right now, my life seems to be an autopilot, without differentiation in my day. I get up, I work, I stretch out on the couch and read a book or hang out with Star Trek friends on Zoom, go to bed, and then do it again.

Only when scrolling through my pictures from the last month can I see I've actually been doing things.

I finished another sewing project, a fully lined summer skirt. I have never sewn slippery fabric before (needed for the lining), and it gave me the excuse to buy lots of new sewing equipment.

My father welded together a custom flame sensor to solve a long-time, intermittent furnace problem for me. Alas, we didn't plan correctly, so I can't install it. I'll bring it back to him at Christmas and hopefully we can alter it.

The Star Trek Christmas tree is up. Worf says, "Qapla' and Merry Christmas."*

From the seat of my bike. They close one of the roads through the parks on weekends, and that makes a good, decently-long ride.

The woods are pretty, even in winter. It's more fun biking in the cold because there are fewer pedestrians to dodge and I never overheat.

 *I always have to look up the spelling of qapla'. For the record, I tried to learn Klingon for about fifteen minutes one time and realized it is really, really hard to learn.

New furry friends

I've been missing pets, but not wanting the commitment, so I'm suddenly a cat foster parent. Things I've learned so far: cats are in short supply and foster cats like people. With the pandemic, lots of people are looking for pets, and each of these was adopted within a week. My job is to keep them healthy, give them a bit of love, and write a great dating profile. The potential adopters see the photos and bio I provide, and then meet the pets by video, when I talk up all their cuddly traits.

In other news, both of these cats snuggled me more in one week than Wesley the cat did in a year. He really was a lovable curmudgeon, who tolerated me until his real family came back for him.

 

Bicycling

Early on in the pandemic, I broke my long-standing rule that bikes should only be used for transportation. I don't have a problem with other people running or biking around for fun, but I prefer to have a destination. However, there were many weeks, especially at the beginning, when there was nowhere you could go, so I just started taking long(ish) bike rides. I can now manage 20-30 miles (30-50km). This isn't very much for a serious cyclist, but it's farther than I've ever managed before. 

The past few weeks have been quite stressful at work. I'm doing all the right things to get through it - lots of sleep, eating well, avoiding news and media. But the best thing has been doing physically exhausting things. So I took a vacation day today and went cycling along the C&O canal, so named because it connected the Chesapeake Bay and the Ohio River. It was beautiful, fairly isolated, and a good respite from work.

My trusty bicycle, a youth bike imported from Germany. (My legs are too short for adult bikes.) If I carry more than 25 kg of groceries,  I would be over the weight limit, but if I carried more than 25 kg of groceries, I'm topple over, so it's not a big limitation. My goal is to have a bike that looks trashy, so that no one will want to steal it. Thus, the classy tupperware strapped on as skirt guards, and the patches of reflective tape. Some day I may even add duct tape to bring it down a notch.

My normal bike path, close to home, follows the tributary system of the Anacostia River. It's a mix of forest, wetland, and river path, but it's usually pretty packed with people since it stretches 20 miles from downtown DC into Maryland.

The C&O. It's about an hour's car drive to get there, and it's gravel rather than pavement. But the views of the river, canal, and Great Falls were spectacular, and I listened to crickets and rushing water instead of traffic. I'

The last garden post of 2020

As many of my friends know and have laughed at, I keep a garden spreadsheet with when all the seeds are planted. Each spring, I made a new tab, remove the things that didn't go well, and decide which new seeds to purchase. Truthfully, I also keep a Powerpoint slide for the location of plantings each year. This is particularly important for crops you have to rotate, like tomatoes, but also sometimes helps me figure out what small green thing is in a given patch if my memory fails me. Like everyone else on the planet, I spent lots more time on hobbies at home this year, so I thought I'd reflect on my successes and failures during a summer when I have presumably gardened as much as I ever will.

Here is the garden in May,  June, July, and August. The front perennial garden still looks terrific, where plants bloom from March through November. I have arranged my home office so that I can look out on the garden. Not only do I enjoy the view, but I watch many neighbors stop and admire the flowers. I will make few changes next year, although now that some of the plants are big, they will need to be divided and spread around or shared with friends. But that is a task for the spring.

In the back, the fall garden is nearly "put to bed". I have pulled out everything but the herbs and carrots and have planted winter wheat, which is my cover crop. This means that next spring I won't have to weed the garden before planting. (It does mean that I will have to pull up the winter wheat and use it as mulch, but for reasons I don't quite understand this is better for the garden than weeds.)

Looking back, I was extremely pleased with the butternut squash (untidy but productive), the tomatoes (plenty for dried and frozen), and zucchini (which have so much more flavor when homegrown). I had lots of cucumbers, but I do not love the recipe I used for making pickles, so I may look for local friends to share them with. I learned that I am very good at growing turnips, but also that they are too bitter for me and I will have to harvest them directly into the compost bin. If I have extra time next year, I am toying with the idea of building a small cold frame so that I can extend my growing season, at least for salad or other leafy things.

Even more tales from the garden

 I hope you're not all bored with garden talk, because all I do is pick and preserve produce these days. 

This is the mystery fruit that appeared in July. It didn't look like anything listed on my gardening spreadsheet. (Yes, of course I have a gardening spreadsheet, as well as planting records that go back to 2015). Friends on facebook were divided as to whether it was a melon, which needs to be picked in the summer, or a squash, which should be left until late fall. I later remembered that one of my friends is a research scientist at USDA (the US Department of Agriculture, for those of you outside the US), and he determined... it was cucurbit. Which was not immensely helpful, as that plant family includes squash, melons, and cucumbers, so I still didn't know when to pick it. Eventually I guessed it was a melon, from a second fruit that an animal had started consuming, so I picked it and crossed my fingers that I had guessed correctly.

And it turned out to be a melon! The inside looked like a cantaloupe but tasted like a muskmelon, and the thing weighed more than ten pounds, so I've been eating it for almost two weeks. It has a nice flavor, so I saved some of the seeds and can hopefully grow it again.

This creature lives in my raspberry bushes. Wikipedia tells me that praying mantises are carnivores, so so I guess I don't have to worry about him going after the berries that are ripening right now.

I've been considering getting a food dehydrator, but they are really expensive and hard to find used. I just learned that I can use my car for this purpose. It works surprisingly well, and I have dried tomatoes, figs, and chili peppers. For all my efforts to save money, I am essentially drying food with a $10,000 dehydrator, but it's not like I was using my car for driving this summer anyway.

I grew butternut squash instead of sweet potatoes this summer because I realized I like squash a bit more, and both should store well in the winter. However, since squash grow above ground, I lost a few to a hungry groundhog. I decided to pick them all, even if they were not quite ripe and hope they'll all be edible. I'm working on a solution for the groundhog situation but it will take some time to implement.

Memories

Even when I was a teenager, I was enamored with the idea of being a minimalist. I read stories about people who owned only 100 things, and I still look with fondness upon the time when everything I owned fit in the Pontiac Grand Am I owned.

But of course, even then I had stored a few boxes at my parents' house, full of photos and yearbooks and childhood dolls. After I bought my house, my parents happily passed off those boxes. While I had looked through some of them, I had also added mementos from my years since then.

Ideally, I'd like to own just a small shoebox of precious things, items that I don't display but can't bear to give away. Today I decided I was ready to tackle the two large boxes of mementos. Six hours later, I had a huge pile of recycling, many electronic photos of the items I didn't want to forget but didn't want to keep, and a small number of things to save. 

It wasn't an easy day. I still can't look at things from my marriage and wedding without crying. I can't bear to write about those things, but here are items that spurred some happier memories.

This is the rubric from my sophomore-year speech class. We had to make a persuasive speech, and the teacher wrote, "I can't write enough about how good this speech was!" In truth, I agreed. Doing research for the, "Benefits of Vegetarianism," as I titled it, was what convinced me to give up meat. I like to that the speech was so good I persuaded myself. And I'm still vegetarian, thirty years later.

My brother and I attended a public elementary school that followed a Montessori pedagogy. Part of the child-centered learning took place through "stations" all over the classrooms. Kids could wander over to the geography staion and make a map using the map puzzle pieces, or color and label the parts of the tongue at the science station. Over time, you were supposed to complete a balanced number of activities. The comment on this report card from third grade says, "Renee didn't complete enough items on Science check-off list. She still spends too much time reading library books in class." I wish I could go back in time and tell my teacher it all turned out okay - I eventually learned enough science, you just had to average over graduate school.

When I lived in Germany the first time, I made a dear friend who also loved to sing. Whenever we'd get together we'd teach each other songs and learn the harmonies. The internet didn't exist, and neither of us had money to buy songbooks, so I remember carefully photocopying folk songs and making a little book. Later that year we traveled to the UK and sang in many a station while waiting for the next train. We weren't busking, just killing time. I wonder if the other passengers enjoyed it or wish we'd go away...

Scenes from a garden

August is the season when you just give in to the tide of green things growing.* Sure, the squash has taken an extra 3 meters of yard space and the tomatoes are so tall that they are breaking their support stakes.** Everything is growing like gangbusters because even the plants know that the summer will soon be over and that their lives are brief. I can tolerate the garden disorder and the huge piles of produce because I know that in a few short weeks, September will be here and I'll have to console myself with the few fall crops of peas and turnips. But for those who garden vicariously, here's what it looks like at my house.

The back (aka vegetable) garden has burst forth from the garden borders and has annexed parts of the lawn.

Ah, the halcyon days of last week when I was still excited about the first tomatoes.

Now, the tomatoes are winning.

The front flower garden looks as worn out from the heat as I am. 

Figs! It looks like a bumper crop this year. I harvested my first couple of quarts this evening.

I have canned pickles three times, a good excuse to eat lots of burgers this winter.

*To my cousin AinA, I just read your blog post summarizing the garden failures of 2020. I swear I'm not trying to rub it in.

**Many thanks to my friend S who tended my garden while I was on vacation and saved at least one cherry tomato plant.

Summer Project

I can count the summer a success, because my big project is done. I made a dress! This is so far above my previous sewing projects (trousers and skirts) and the amount of hair pulling and teeth gnashing involved reflected that. 

The mother of my friend L collects vintage patterns, and L generously loaned me a few. This had the benefit of motivating me to make an 1950's dress and the disadvantage of starting me on a pattern with minimal instructions. Let me tell you, in the 50's they assumed that everyone knew how to sew and the didn't bother filling in all the boring details on their patterns. I spent many a night binge watching collar attachment videos on youtube, cursing the non-Euclidean geometry involved. But with encouragement from friends and the magic words from one video to just "force the pieces" together, it all worked out. If you can consider "picking out my mistakes over and over" as "all working out."

Now I'm all excited about a vintage blouse pattern. We'll see if my success with collars was a one-time event...

Summer Camp

Like everyone in 2020, I had to come up with new, socially-distanced vacation plans. This week I'm visiting my parents in Ohio. Since we don't want to leave the house and property very often, I proposed that we hold a summer camp. It's very much in the ethos of my family to plan a bunch of productive work rather than watching movies or lounging around.

I had no problem coming up with crafts, because we all had stuff we wanted to make. But I had to stretch a bit with the "nature" category - since my dad wouldn't be interested in the hikes, I had to include motorcycle and car rides, where we will... um... see nature? 

It's very peaceful here. I'm sure it would be easy to take for granted if you live here, but living on 40 acres, surrounded by cicadas and killdeer and the occasional coyote means that you are surrounded by quiet and green. I've always said that I wouldn't want to live here, where you have to depend on a car and the culture is definitely too conservative to be comfortable for me, but it's a great place to visit when the world is what it is right now.

Success

I'm attending a virtual physics education conference, and a series of talks on graduate education got me thinking. There's a lot of research and attention on improving graduate education in physics right now. That's because there's a lot wrong with it: somewhere around half of the students who enter leave without their PhD, it can destroy your mental health, and it is rarely a diverse or inclusive place.

Looking back at my graduate student experience now, I realize that I was one of the students who should have failed out. Not because I deserved it, let me add. I got good grades in my undergraduate degree and had several terrific research experiences. But when I got to graduate school, I struggled mightily, and failing several classes and repeated failing my qualifying exam. The reasons are myriad. My undergraduate school was very small, and hadn't offered lots of the classes my graduate school friends had taken. I probably hadn't learned the right way to learn, focusing more on getting the right answer than understanding the reasoning and the concepts leading to it. And I'm sure there was some imposter syndrome. 

But in the end I made it, in large part because of a supportive research group and department. A friend tutored me through one of my classes in exchange for weekly ice cream cones. My advisor met with me to discuss problem solving and how to think about physics. (Looking back, I'm amazed he took this much time for a first-year graduate student when he had grants to write and far more successful students to supervise.) Twice, when I had to take the multi-day qualifying exam, my mother drove eight hours from Ohio to cook and clean so I could focus on studying all day long. When I showed up for office hours every single week, the TAs helped and didn't roll their eyes. Most (but not all) faculty members implied that they knew I could succeed. The remainder was due to me - I decided the only way I was leaving school was if they threw me out; I would not quit. 

And it worked. I learned physics, which is the coolest science in the universe; I got to do fun research with interesting people, and now I get to work in a job that helps more people study physics. What a great way for the story to end.

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.