Oregon City, Oregon - Week 9 - February 2 - February 8, 2020

After the last three weeks of traveling, this week seemed kinda tame.

The first thing we did on Monday was to go through all of our notes from the conference and then make a copy of the synopsis for each session that had one.  It was brutally boring - determine selection, make copies, punch holes, staple, put into notebook and then do it again. We finally finished doing it by noon on Tuesday.  I even had to "eliminate" some of my Russian notebooks in order to have enough space for the conference synopses.





One morning I wanted to check all of the apical buds of the Ponderosa Pines along the road.  I was afraid that some of the buds had died and that there needed to be some trimming.  Dad was such a good sport and  did most of the work.



Then it was time to take a  big breath and finish the trimming job on the purple fig tree.

This was the tree as we left it 3-4 weeks ago.







But this week was the first day of burn season, and luckily for us, every day was a burn day.  We attacked those limbs and twigs with vigor.







And....we are done!!  Al raked and nice and tidy.



The news is full of the latest on the Coronavirus situation.  Everyone is kinda afraid - especially when we hear that people over 70 are a higher risk.....and I have always had weak bronchial tubes.  We are going to stay away from crowds, wash our hands often, and maintain our year's supply of food.

I went to Seattle on Thursday with Vannessah.  Seattle is the hardest hit region in the United States.  The chemo clinic where Vannessah goes had started new procedures to properly comply with new standards of corona virus avoidance.  All the the patients chairs had been realigned to be in lines rather in the more "social" u-shaped configuration which allows more conversation with people across from them.  With the chairs in lines you could only talk to two people - one on the right and one on the left.  It was very inconvenient for all of the staff.  Also, we had our temperatures taken before we entered the treatment room. And we had to wear a mask which is very inconvenient if you have glasses  because the glasses continually fog up.  But we willingly complied.



Kids were over on Friday as there was no school.  Ruby had fun playing with Lisa



Jude is a huge fan of the Pokemon Tyranitar and wants to draw it or embroider it onto fabric......I found a link online which shows how to draw one step by agonizing step.  We did it together... twice...and came up with four almost okay drawings.  Need to practice which Jude does not want to do.



Dad sold our old Gravely to Tim Schmidt.  Tim had come over and helped fix Jessica's Gravely, and when he heard that we had a "broken" one, he was interested.  He is a talented mechanic, engineer, and inventor and so is able to take something that is broken, and with all of the tools he has and the interest, he can fix it.



Saturday night we were invited to attend a musical production of Aladdin Jr, performed by Gardiner Middle School students.  It was pretty good - flubs here and there - like microphones not working and missing props which caused the actors to pause for a bit....until the director yelled out "mysterious cave" and then the prop miraculously appeared. Shelby was in the ensemble and did a good job.  She was very happy.





Dad even took her some congratulatory flowers!



On Sunday Warren blessed his baby boy, Copeland.  The blessing was supposed to happen last month, but Copeland had a hacking cough which didn't seem to be something we'd want to hear in between Warren words.  Today, though, Copeland was in fine shape and was a perfect model of propriety.  He is wearing the same outfit that my sons wore when they were blessed (at least I think that is correct).