Yesterday was a gaming day, and we had adventures clearing out a haunted city that my dragon-kobold character wants to take for their stronghold.  Quite a bit of fishing-for-ghosts and a very dramatic battle with a very powerful giant maggot undead thing that was pretty scary.  Also I discovered where my landlord funds were coming from; the city vault turned out to contain nothing but record books—records of investments made by the city that were payable to its ruler, records of debts people owed “the bearer of this note” and records of contracts various other cities had made with the city before it was overrun by ghosts that included failure-to-deliver clauses that meant the city was owed quite a bit of money.  Jake’s character suggested my character had better hire bodyguards before trying to collect those, however.

All in all a very fun game.

Today we were going to take things easy in the morning.  To get some exercise, Jake and Kip and I walked down to Bird Springs which is about 5 blocks from my house, and then took the long way back to the house; I used to walk 19 minute miles but since Covid it is more like 22 minute miles.  On the other hand, back on the 5th of July I wouldn’t have been willing to try this walk at all so it is progress. 

This afternoon we went for a planned swim with Dad at the Cherokee Dam swimming area.  We all had swim suits and swimming shoes (you don’t go into Cherokee lake barefoot unless you are much braver than I am) though my swim suit was noticeably tighter than it used to be before Covid.  One of these days I will buy a new one I think.  We had to send Kip to the store for sunscreen, because while I know I have a new bottle somewhere, I could not find it in a a reasonable amount of time.  This meant we arrived at the park with no sunscreen but there was a handy unoccupied picnic table where we could sit in the shade and watch the parking lot for Kip’s arrival.  The picnic table was one of those horrible ones made out of mesh, but everybody had a towel for when we were coming back wet in the car, so we could sit on those and be comfortable.

When Kip showed up we sunscreened up and ambled down to the water.  I had to put the car keys somewhere, so I had brought my purse, but we ended up taking turns in the water with someone always by our towels and (drinking) water, and my purse.

The swimming area had looked quite small when we inspected it the last time we walked at the dam; it seemed much larger today—perhaps because swimming is so slow compared to walking, or perhaps they had moved the boom out, so that it really comprised more of the lake.  Jake and I swam out to the boom and hung off it for a bit—my shoulders were reminding me that we had not done anything like this for literally two or three years, but the up side to my swim suit being tight was that I had no particular tendency to sink, so I didn’t have to swim hard.  The water was kind of murky, warm on top and cool underneath, with the two mixing in trails where we had swum a while.

Dad seemed to have fun; it was a bit hard to communicate with him since he had to take his hearing aid out to swim, and he left it in the car, but it wasn’t as hard to get him to understand as I’d feared it might be.  Kip and Jake and I all swam for a bit—Jake and I did 2 sessions, with a while sitting in the shade watching stuff in between—and after about 40 minutes we decided we’d done enough and went home.  People were grilling in the park and Kip decided he had a hankering to grill stuff for dinner, so we’re doing that.

 We did fairly small birthday presents this year, since Jake and Dad had to shell out for plane tickets, but I got several Kindle books I wanted from Jake and Dad gave me a wok I’d asked for.  Kip got lots and lots of D&D minis (and gave me some minis of characters in wheelchairs which I’d wanted—one of my NPCs in the Strixhaven game is a wheelchair jockey.). Dad got books, four of which we had to ship to his house in a box, since he is really only comfortable with paper.  Jake got Kindle books from me and Kip.  Jake has a slight preference for paper, but when he is traveling by plane it is so much easier to have books that weigh nothing and take no space that he went for that option.

Tomorrow afternoon Jake and Dad head home on a commercial flight.  I’m glad we could have this visit, and that Covid did not spoil it.  It is always good to spend time with them.

Kip and I tested negative a third time yesterday morning so we decided to proceed with Dad and Jake’s visit as normal—or as normal as possible given that I am still feeling pretty flattened.  

However I am still feeling pretty flattened, and have a bit of a cough and a bit of a stuffy nose, so I tested AGAIN this morning. (Many thanks to the Biden administration for all the free Covid tests they sent our household simply for the asking—it is looking like we may go through them all before I feel confident this is over.) Still negative.  I feel better about having Dad, who is in pretty good health for someone who is in his eighties but is still vulnerable, simply because he is in his eighties, in my airspace knowing I am not contagious for Covid.

I alternate between feeling well enough to load the dishwasher, if slowly, and feeling so tired that I think twice about prying myself out of my chair to walk into the kitchen for a glass of water.  Fortunately Kip is both healthy and willing to be at my beck and call, so I’m as comfortable as can be expected.  I wish I had more energy to find and do fun things with Dad and Jake though.  Kip kept Jake entertained yesterday by showing him how to play Stellaris, so there’s that, and I probably have the energy to play at least brief games of D&D.  My voice tires easily, not having really recovered from all the coughing, and it’s hard for me to speak loudly enough so that Dad, who is quite deaf even with his hearing aid, can hear me.

Covid sucks.  Even when it’s not life threatening, it really sucks.  I am glad I have only gotten it once, and intend to keep trying to get it as few times as possible.  And I’m damned glad I took standard precautions that nearly everybody is discarding now, like wearing a KF94 mask when I was around people I didn’t live with.  At least I can feel like I did my best not to pass this shit on.

I am getting gradually better, I think.  Kip is feeling basically normal, and mowed the lawn yesterday with no problems.  It is always like this; Kip picks something up at work, brings it back to me, is better in a few days and I drag around sick forever it is not fair.

Dad reminded me that only a very tiny dose of opiates will suppress coughing, and I have some pills left over from an old prescription, so I cut one in quarters and took one quarter, and sure enough that didn’t stop the coughing entirely but it stopped it enough that I could sleep for 4 hours, take another quarter and sleep another 4 hours which was so welcome I can’t tell you.

Last night I took one quarter and slept for 8 hours.  I needed that so much.

At this point the covid is 1/3 cough and 2/3 exhaustion.  I’m physically tired all the time.  I am very carefully not pushing through it because what I’ve heard on the grapevine is that trying to push through it is a good way to take much longer to recover.  This is annoying, because my dad and my brother were coming to visit on the 4th of July, and even once we test negative and are safe to be around* the house is definitely not going to be as clean as usual, and I don’t know that I will be up for much of anything in the way of trips.

* Guidance is scanty on on “safe to have a vulnerable person in your air space”, but as a first step, Kip and I are trying to meet “safe to go out again while masked” which is 2 negative tests in a row, and Kip was negative day before yesterday, positive yesterday and negative again today, whereas I had my first negative test this morning. I think I’m going to suggest Dad and Jake stay at a hotel for at least the first couple of nights, while Kip and I continue to test.  We could in theory wear masks in the house, and only eat on the back porch, but wearing a mask while sleeping is heavy going.

I’m a bit worried about persuading Dad to take this seriously.  He is in his eighties, and fairly deaf and was always headstrong, and while he is fully vaxxed and boosted, his 2nd booster isn’t due till the end of July, and I think he is leaning too hard on the assumption that as long as he doesn’t wind up in the hospital it is fine but I’m here to say it’s not fine; having Covid sucks.

But at least the era of Covid means the local Walmart has a way to order food online and then come in and pick it up at the curb, which has been a huge help.

So I was getting sick Saturday night.  And Sunday afternoon Kip tested, and it was Covid.

So first thing Monday I called the doctor's office and first they fobbed me off with the phone nurse, like that was going to get me help in any reasonable time so I left a message and then called the appointment folks again and pointed out that the phone nurse message says it might be three days before they get back to me and Kip and I are still in the window for Paxlovid, but only if we act TODAY so should we come in to the walk-in clinic or what? and the receptionist said she'd give me a drive through appointment at 3 pm.

So at 3 pm we packed our sick selves into the hot car and drove to the office only to discover the receptionist had not put us in the system at all but this time the receptionist said she gave us an appointment for 4 and 4:15 pm, so we drove home to lie around for 20 minutes and then drive back.  We took Kip's positive test and an unused test kit for me (and thanks to the Biden administration--and to everybody who pushed them--for those tests, by the way) and all our insurance info and the lot.

It turned out they did want to test me but were okay with me using the home test kit in the car, which saved us some time.  I wasn't sure if it would show positive, since I had only been sick 2 days, but it did.  They took our vitals as best they could in the car and looked at our positives and said "yep, Covid" and prescribed Paxlovid, and since they thought our usual pharmacy didn't have curbside delivery, called it in to the local Walgreens. 

We got to Walgreens and they didn't have Kip's prescription ready and hadn't received mine at all but they'd only gotten Kips 2 minutes before we arrived, so we decided to go home and go back just before 8pm, and then pick up the groceries we'd ordered online in our time slot of 8-9pm.  That worked, except they said there was an insurance problem with mine, because they hadn't figured out the insurance card we gave them the first time applied to both of us.  We got that sorted out, picked up the groceries, came home and took our first dose.

Plaxlovid leaves this low level annoying bad taste, but on the other hand, my fever broke last night and my head stopped hurting so much, so now I just have this hacking cough and sore throat.  I also feel up to some light cleaning and re-organizing; not all that I wanted to do in the last 2 days but better than nothing.  The weather was cool enough that I opened the windows and aired out the house for a good portion of the day, on the assumption that getting the Covid air out of the house wouldn't hurt and might help.

I reported Kips and my positive tests to the Health Department only to be told they are no longer tracking Covid data so there's that.

I've talked to my dad and my brother about how we will handle this if we're not both testing negative by the time they arrive (rental car and motel, basically)

 Ugh.

I had a whole great post written out and then something came up and I quit out of the browser without saving and now it is gone.  Bleagh.

Short version: the couch pins worked and are much nicer than the dowel I was using before.  No more does the couch lie in wait for an unwary knee.  

Much cleaning is happening; today I cleaned out the laundry room shelves so that I could move everything OFF the shelf that was about to fall off the wall because the people who put it up had no faint idea what they were doing and screwed into the drywall instead of the stud.  Once I had that shelf clear I had Kip hold it while I undid the three measly screws that were holding it to the wall.  Couldn’t figure out why the last screw wasn’t screwing out until I realized that screw had been completely stripped; one whole side of the shelf was being held by nothing but friction and good intentions.  

There is much more light in the laundry room sink area now.  If I get really ambitious I might buy some spackle and fix the screw holes in the drywall, but I dunno; there is plenty to do.

The closet in the guest room is full of stuff, and dust, and I vacuumed as best I could (I have mislaid the little round brush that goes on the end of the vacuum cleaner hose; I have 2 on order but they won’t show till tomorrow.)  I also pulled out the sheep wool duster to good effect.  We had three big cardboard boxes and a milk crate of old VHS tapes, and Kip went through them and discarded everything we already have DVD copies of, and reduced the bulk by half, which was very helpful.  The disappearance of the Bike E bag from the boiler room shelves meant I had quite a bit of real estate open up there, so the camping water bottles moved out of the guest room closet and into the boiler room, as did a hammock (Kip was thrilled to learn we possess one, so it is now his.)  There was another milk crate that mostly held extension cords (the good one is now in the wood shop, the flimsy one and the ethernet patch cords are now on the laundry room shelf allotted to such things.  I’m trying to open up enough space in the guest room closet that guests could actually use it for clothes storage.  So far so good.

I cleaned off the two junk counters, and cleaned out the drawers under one junk counter.  I said “thank you for the joy you brought into my life” to a lot of old Christmas and Birthday cards, and discarded them, and also found a number of blank cards Kip had bought in anticipation of future need and then forgotten about, which went into the standard spot for stationery supplies, to make them easier to remember.  A lot of bubble wrap found an entire empty drawer to live in until it is needed for shipping things, and a lot of once-used Christmas wrapping paper got discarded, though I saved a few special pieces and put them with the Christmas gift bag supplies.  We ended up with a whole empty shelf that became the art and crafts-that-are-not-woodworking supplies stash.

It’s not actually a lot cleaner—but it’s a lot more *organized* and I am convinced this will make the actual cleaning part easier.  And I did vacuum under the junk counter, and the closet floor (and boy was there a lot of dust there.)

While cleaning the living room I was annoyed AGAIN by the way the dowels I’m using to pin the back of the futon/couch in the up position stick way out to either side of the couch.  When we got that couch it had pins (or at least one pin; I don’t remember for sure if it had both even then) that were the right length and diameter for the holes they went into, but one end of the dowel of the pin was imbedded in a disk of wood that gave me something bigger to grip when inserting or removing the dowel.  Somewhere in our multiple moves, those pins disappeared, and I bought some 3/4 inch dowel and hacked it down to about 6 inches of length, to make it long enough to grip with my whole hand, but that makes it stick inconveniently far out of the couch.

And I remembered that disk of wood on the end of the original dowel/pin and thought “I could do that.  I have hardwood scraps, and a bandsaw, and a drill press, and epoxy and sawdust; I could absolutely do that.

Now the down side is 3/4 inch dowel is just a *smidge* too large.  My hunch is that this futon frame was built somewhere that used metric sizes, and the original pins were 1.75 cm in diameter.  I carved down the edges of the 3/4 inch dowel and with great effort can jam it in that hole, but it doesn’t go in as far as the design length.  I would like 1.75 cm dowel, or 11/16th dowel, which would be a bit thinner but not a lot.  But no luck finding anything like that locally.  So what I may end up doing is putting the 3/4 inch dowel in the drill press, as if it were a drill bit, and then just gently sanding it, stopping the drill press, measuring with my micrometer, checking it in the hole, rinse and repeat until I get it to the size I want.  Not great but I think it will work.  I will give it a try in the morning.

And in the meantime I found a bit of 1/4 inch dowel and replaced the one missing 1/4 inch pin in the quilt rack that I received from my mother-in-law when she was downsizing to move to Tulsa.  I just walked past that thing just now and that one empty hole caught my eye again and I thought “I can fix that.”  

Now I am off to open the windows in the shop and stick fans in them to try to take advantage of the cool evening air to cool my shop down. 

I have been undertaking a fairly major house cleaning because I’m having family over for a summer visit in July, and there’s nothing like knowing your parent is coming to make you look around at all those chores and household repairs you’ve been meaning to get to later and realize that later is now.

Last week’s major project was cleaning out the wood shop, which really hadn’t been done for three or four years, but now it is cleaned out; several generations of bug dirt have been swept up and thrown out, lots of things have been put back in their places, some have been given new places and 2 contractor bags worth of garbage and enough wood and plywood scraps to build 2 desks and a treehouse have been thrown away.  I only have so much room for wood scrap storage and Choices Were Made.

The up side of this is that I have repaired the piece of loose trim next to the back door that had been annoying me since we moved in 10 years ago, and repaired the back of the kitchen cabinet, which was a bit of a production, because it turns out they’d been nailing the pretty veneer and the trim into nothing but the 1/8th inch plywood that covered the back of those cabinets.  No wonder that didn’t hold; they might as well have been nailing into cardboard.  So I had to get a piece of real wood back there, and ended up using hot glue to stick it back there well enough that I could drill through the thin plywood from the other side, and then put in real wood screws.  There are 7 #8 wood screws in the veneer and another 3 in the trim—they will show but they are brass and I think they look nice enough.  I’m pretty sure this repair will hold.

And this morning I spent a couple of hours repairing a kitchen chair where the rail had come loose from the leg it was bracing.  I cleaned out the old glue as well as I could, painted both parts with epoxy, mixed some silica into the epoxy to improve gap filling, glopped a bunch in the hole and pressed the rail back into place.  It will need a couple of days to cure to full strength and then we will see if it can take being sat on.

However I really need to get to the actual “clean the living room” part of this week’s program; it is Wednesday already.

A Thing happened today.

I found my mom's recipe for speculaas, which is ... "Dutch gingerbread" is the closest shorthand I can come up with. It's a cookie I associate with Christmas, thick, dark brown, mostly from all the spices in it, and with a very distinctive taste.

And here we run into the child-of-expatriates portion of my heritage. The speculaas of my childhood wasn't the real thing. Back when Mom and Dad moved first to Canada and then to the US, there weren't always easy translations of everything from Dutch to English and Mom's speculaas recipe just called for such and such grams of "speculaas spices." Mom did her best to approximate with the spices she could easily get hold of in the US, and the verdict of visiting Dutch relations was universally "This is very nice, but it isn't speculaas."

Except for me, it was. It was the only speculaas I had ever known.

Crank the timewheel and some thirty years later, Mom found out that the spice whose name she hadn't known and which she hadn't found among the spices easily available to her in 60s and 70s Oregon was allspice. Around that time imported Dutch speculaas also became more generally available.

And the only speculaas I had ever known--my ur-speculaas, my platonic speculaas--vanished. Real speculaas doesn't taste right to me. It isn't even all that nice, because it's very thin and not those thick mouthwatering dark slabs of speculaas with blanched almonds glued on with egg yolk that Mom used to make. But just as Dutch speculaas is not the speculaas of my childhood, Mom's speculaas was not the speculaas of HER childhood and once she could make the real thing she wasn't interested in the facsimile.

It didn't occur to me to ask Mom for her old recipe because I didn't do much cooking at the time. When Mom died I inherited her old recipe boxes and went carefully through them but she had naturally enough, but to my dismay, discarded all her old copies of the approximation she had made.

But today I found her "corrected" recipe, which presumably has all the right structural stuff in it: the flour and butter and egg and so on. So now I just have to recreate the spices. Which I *think* were cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves. I remember looking in the bowl and seeing the different sized piles of spices. Cinnamon was the biggest and ground cloves was the smallest; I'm just about positive of that. Maybe I can re-create the proportions.

One of these days I'm going to try.

There is a kind of biscuit that is wound through some of my earliest memories. A company called Stella d’Oro made something they called “Dietetic Egg Biscuits.” I am pretty sure Mom told me she used to give me one to gnaw on when I was teething. Certainly I remember them from early childhood; a donut shape (but with tiny regular bumps on the outside, like very blunt gear teeth) with a very smooth surface, very crunchy, with a dust-dry inside that absorbed my spit and turned soft in a couple of chews, very bland and slightly sweetish.

At some point when I was eight or nine Mom stopped buying them. It didn’t occur to me to pester her about it, and that was about the time we moved to the new house so maybe Mom just took to shopping at a different store, that didn’t have them.

I saw them again in my late 20s when I was visiting Mom and Dad in Oregon and shopping for something else there. I was glad to see them and bought several packages. That was the last time I saw them. I have not seen them for decades. On a whim last year I googled ”Dietetic Egg Biscuits” to see if I could order some, and discovered the death of the company. I mourned those biscuits.

A couple of days ago I googled again, hoping some other company had bought the recipe or something, and discovered that a food blogger named Preesi had the same craving I did, was more clever with the google or something, and had discovered that they seemed to be related to an Italian cookie called Taralli all’Uovo, or Egg Taralli. She linked to an Italian food blogger named Rosella who has a vlog called “Cooking with Nonna” and had one episode dedicated to making Egg Taralli.

The Egg Taralli are a different shape than the Dietetic Egg Biscuits and Preesi was not very clear at exactly what point she deviated from the Egg Taralli process, and I don’t possess a stand mixer, much less a pasta roller as called for in the vlog.

Here is what I tried this evening:

2 1/3 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
Whisk together dry ingredients
3 large eggs
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 Tablespoons white wine

I mixed up the recipe in my bread mixer because I am a lazy creature and the prospect of mixing bread dough by hand for ten minutes and then rolling it out flat 20 times as described in the Egg Taralli vlog intimidates the daylights out of me.

Then I floured my cutting board and my rolling pin and rolled it out flat but about as thick as the cap of a 2 liter bottle. I used a cookie cutter that a housemate made for me literally 30 years ago, (thank you Bill-Bill!) to cut the outsides, and the cap of a 2 liter bottle to cut the insides to get an approximation of the donut shape. A recipe that should have made 18 Taralli made 9 DEBs (Dietetic Egg Biscuits) which seems about right.
I let them rest for 15 minutes and then put them in boiling water. It seems to take about 4 minutes for them to float to the top. They try to stick to the bottom at first so it is important to move them around a bit. When they do float to the top they come up edge first and I’m not sure if that counts so I waited mostly until they were flat on the surface.

I cut them with a knife all along the outside ring and the inside ring (as if I were trying to slice a biscuit in half to put butter and jam on it, but not all the way through) and then put them directly on the oven rack to bake.
They kept trying to fall through the rack so I think I need some kind of bake-able second rack with a smaller mesh, but I did eventually get them to stay. Turning them over was a bit of a challenge; tongs worked fine for it but I should have worn an oven mitt also because in my adventures with the falling DEBs I accidentally bumped the oven rack with the back of my hand and that stung a bit. PPE is not to be lightly set aside!
I baked them for 7 minutes at 475 degrees and then turned them over and swapped the ones in back for the ones in front because my oven does not heat evenly. I turned the heat down to 410 degrees and baked them 10 minutes more.

The texture is not quite right, mostly because it is a bit too damp inside. The outsides are only light brown so I could probably have baked a little longer. The taste is also not quite right; it should be a bit sweeter, I think. But I might give this another try in a bit.

My life hasn’t changed all that much yet.

I mean, I volunteer at a free clinic for the poor, and there is now a disinfection procedure to follow for the desk and keyboard and mouse etc when I come in, which didn’t used to be a thing, so.

And I talked my band into shutting down the jam for a month and I have been skipping out on practices. So I guess that is different.

And my dad is 85 and had a slight fever and a cough when I Skyped with him a couple of days ago, and this is not freaking me out but that’s an effort and that’s different.

And I skipped (!) my violin/mandolin lesson last week and mailed my teacher a check instead and that’s different.

And I looked at the dripping shower and thought I should have a plumber in to repair that and realized that I’m noticeably more resistant than before to having a stranger in my personal space, and that’s different.

And I paid for my oil change over the phone with a credit card and had them leave the key in it, and came in and picked it up without face to face contact, and that’s different.

But the thing that is really on my mind right now is that I haven’t been to the store since Tuesday. Kip and I used to go nearly every day, usually to pick what we would have for dinner. It was some together time. I can go sit next to him while he works on the computer or whatever but it is not the same somehow.

Thanks to Siderea we were pretty well prepared for this. Our fridge is getting noticeably emptier but our freezer and our cupboards are still pretty full. We will probably go today or tomorrow at some time that seems like it would be an off hour (9 pm?) and get fresh veggies, but I only just cooked up my first batch of beans. Except that I’m going to suggest that only one of us go. No sense exposing two people when one can do the job.

I still get outside for regular walks. Six feet of distance is easy to keep while walking here; most people drive anyway.