The last couple of weeks...

The last couple of weeks have been interesting, to paraphrase the infamous Chinese “blessing.” We went from spending another week in Tahoe, at the Kirkwood resort, to coming home to pretty much isolation on the ranch.

Last morning skiing at Kirkwood, March 2020.

The week at Kirkwood started great - decent snow, well groomed runs, my skiing improving significantly that I was able to tackle a couple of easy black diamonds. As the week wore on the news kept getting scarier and scarier. We were already being careful - not touching doorknobs and so forth and washing, washing, washing our hands and using sanitizer. We had brought all of our own food and ate all three meals in our small suite. At that point we weren’t practicing the 6-10’ social distancing we are all doing now; however, the resort mid-week was relatively empty and we rarely rode a lift with anyone else - in fact, I can only remember one such incidence.

By the end of the week things were starting to change: the resort closed the communal hot tub and was sending someone around several times per day to disinfect things. There was talk of the resort closing all together (which did happen, right after we left). And then there was our particular Friday the 13th experience - we started with a flat tire that put us an hour and a half behind schedule. Then, as we neared Boonville just outside of Bell Valley, we literally ran into an overturned pick up truck, barely squeaking past but damaging the side of my car significantly. That whole experience added another hour and a half to the journey as we waited on emergency personnel. We were lucky - no one hurt and the car still ran. The other guy, an apparent local, was drunk and he, even luckier, was unscathed.

The past week we have been full-on social distancing. My 86 year old mother lives with us and we aren’t taking any chances with her. My husband has underlying conditions so ditto the chances there. I’ve done one shopping run to Ukiah to get enough stuff for a while. Fresh vegetables and dairy are the main things we will need to keep up on.

I, like many others, have been on a cooking spree. So much extra time and so I fill it with healthy, mainly vegetarian dishes. I purchased the Blue Zones cookbook and have been trying recipes from all over the world. We’ve also started baking again, although flour is hard to come by. We all know about the strange run on toilet paper, but flour, dried beans and vegetable starts and seeds are among the other hard to find items.

Dishes from the Okinawa chapter of the Blue Zones cookbook.

Real estate is in a bit of a limbo; I get emails about properties but I am under orders from the governor and our local multiple listing services to not do any showings. Unless people have money somewhere besides the stock market, I don’t know how much buying there will be; on the other hand, people may decide it is safer to live out in the country and that might cause an uptick. It’s too early to say.

I’ll keep doing the safe thing as long as necessary; I hope all of you will also. I’m thinking of all of you, past clients and present ones, folks who just read this (thank you!) and the world overall. This too shall pass.