Spring 2021: Perks You Up Like A Wooden Hairbrush To Your Bottom

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

20 March 2121, will be the first day of spring, but the season of renewal has already arrived for me.

On the second day of spring, I will receive my second covid-19 vaccine injection. Two weeks from then, the CDC says I can safely visit with small groups of other vaccinated people without a mask, indoors, no social distancing required. That’s the CDC rule, but my mood began to change a week after the first injection of the Moderna vaccine.

Yet to be verified but plausible reports say a single vaccination confers substantial protection. I’m sure those reports are in the back of my mind, but we have also had long sun breaks for the last few weeks in Whatcom County, and they too have touched my mood. With the sunshine, I’ve ridden over a hundred miles on my bicycle so far in March, which has done a lot to relieve the crotchets in my arthritic joints and equally age damaged psyche.

When I was a kid, we called this February Spring. It’s a comic act the climate pulls in the Northwest towards the end of February or the beginning of March. The rain stops, the skies clear, a little warm air blows in from Hawaii, dusk quits cramping the afternoon down to not much more than a coffee break, and we get a few days’ reprieve from sullen clouds and soaking drizzle. The baseball mitts come out for playing catch, and maybe an hour or two of workup baseball, or scrub, if that’s what you call it.

One year, to my mother’s chagrin, I grabbed a pair of her sewing shears and converted my jeans to cut-offs on the second or third day of February Spring. My mother and mother nature both pulled the skids out from under that. The next day was the first day of forty days of continuous showers, rain, and drizzle: all the cold damp magic that a marine climate can cast over the land. If it hadn’t been for a few whacks to my bottom with the backside of my mother’s wooden hair brush warming me up, it would have been uncomfortably cold.

But, somehow, I think this spring is different. I know. Nature has fooled me many times before and she sure can fool me again, but I don’t recall a February Spring lasting past the Ides of March like this year. The Indian Plum is blooming, the hazelnut trees have yellow catkins, the tiny pink and blue violets my grandmother planted a hundred or so years ago are popping up in the lawn, the forsythias are flashing their bright yellows, cherry blossoms are peeking out, and I see early rhododendron blooms in front of the covid-vacant school down the road.

Indian Plum
Forsythia

If I weren’t so stinking old this week, I’d have cut the bottoms off my pant legs, dug out a mitt, ball, and bat and found a game of workup this afternoon. Will nature bust me again for over optimism? Maybe. But I have to say, today, I’d give anything today to have my mother take a hairbrush to my bottom for cutting off my jeans.

We’re breaking free of the pandemic. The Whatcom County Library System has opened its branches at twenty-five percent capacity. I think I will wait until after my second shot before I venture inside, but the day is coming. In a month, planning a haircut will no longer be a soul-shuddering existential calculation.

Covid-19 had me spooked.

I’ve studied the risk calculations with all the engineering and mathematics on my resume. I have enough going against me that the odds look about fifty-fifty that I would go to the hospital if I contracted covid, and one in ten that I would not come out alive. I’m not brave, not likely to venture a round of Russian Roulette, which is close to my odds if I ever “catch the covid,” as I heard somebody say.

A few months back, I seriously doubted that I would see next Christmas, and was awed and grateful when I saw my fourth grandson, Charlie, back in November when the death count was climbing.

But today, I’m contemplating that I might just see Charlie as a young man, looking to find himself in the world. See our eighteen year old twin grandsons as established adults, and six year old Dario perhaps starting a family.

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

Outrageous: How To Sharpen a Kitchen Knife

Outrageous. I am outraged by well-intended advice. Twice.

outrageous-lenticular-sunrise
Outrageous lenticular clouds over Mount Baker at sunrise.

Yesterday I read a well meaning but outrageous bit of advice on blogging: have a theme and stick to it. None of this some nostalgia, some book discussion, some social commentary stuff. Choose a theme and stick to it. Anyone who knows me well, knows I wander all over the map. I never stick to routines for long. If you are as old as I am, you might remember a plastic surgeon back in the 1960’s who claimed all you had to do was repeat something 20 times and it became a habit. What rot! If I do the same thing 20 times in a row, it’s time for a change.

Good advice, this sticking to theme. I’m sure many readers want blogs to be predictable, but for me, no thanks. I’m not following it. Can’t follow it. I can’t even stick to bad habits. Hence, this post.

This weekend, I read an item in the New York Times, Improve Your Life With These Tiny Chores. Very sensible. Wash your sheets, throw out expired prescription opioids, unclog your sink. Yeah. Sure. Fine. I do these things whenever I am forced to. Who doesn’t?

One outrageous task sent me into low earth spitting orbit: sharpen your knives.

I know something about sharpening. I got my first jack knife from my grandpa when I six. And my first sharpening stone. The NYT article mentioned that a sharp knife is safer than a dull one. My left hand is covered with scars from dull knives that skipped off of the piece of wood I was whittling on and into my hand. These are old scars. I’ve learned to sharpen knives.

Dull knives are dangerous

The article starts with a modern nod to the counter-intuitive danger of dull knives. Good start, I said to myself, glancing at my scarred hand.

The rest was drivel

The rest of the item was drivel. It suggests sharpening knives once a year. Once a year? Piffle. Sharpen your knives the instant they loose their bite. It depends on the knife and how you use it.

How I do it

I sharpen my knives every time I use them, once or twice a day for my chef’s knife. Treat your knives with the care they deserve. Sharp edges are delicate and fragile. Don’t throw a good knife in the dishwasher to get rattled around, dented, and nicked.

After I use a knife, I clean it, and sharpen it on a steel, a dozen or more strokes on each side of the edge. Sharpening on a steel removes little or no material from the blade. Instead, it reshapes the metal into a sharp edge. A steel can’t get rid of a nick in an edge or remove a blunt spot, but it will return an undamaged edge to keen slicing form. The duller the edge, the less effective the steel.

You can’t reshape forever. Eventually, you have to grind the edge, which might amount to once a year, although once every few months is more realistic for knives you use daily.

You must be judicious in grinding, which removes metal from the edge. Grind too often and your knife disappears or morphs into an unusable shape. But if you don’t grind often enough, you have a dull and dangerous knife.

Trial and error

I won’t get into tools, angles, and techniques here. My best advice reflects my experience. Trial and error, grasshopper. Trial and error. There are many techniques and they all work, but not necessarily for you.

The blunter the angle of a blade, the less keen the edge, but the longer it stays sharp when cutting is tough. My perfect edge is not your perfect edge, but when an edge is not perfect, sharpen it. Use the steel often, a grinding stone only when needed. Power grinders are fast, but require expensive guides or great skill. Hard stainless steel blades are bears to sharpen, but stay sharp longer. Good carbon steel requires frequent maintenance, but with proper attention, it cuts like a dream. I have a cheap Chinese cleaver that looks like a mess, but cuts cleaner than its much more expensive German stainless brethren.

As an aside, most kitchens have too many knives. Learn to use and treat a few good knives well. Give an impoverished homicidal maniac a break and send the clutter to goodwill. Your life will be better. Ask Marie Kondo.

Celebrating Christmas 2020

As everywhere, Christmas 2020 ends a year like no other for us on Waschke Road. Rebecca was scheduled for spinal surgery in March that was postponed by the pandemic lockdown. That resulted in a harrowing few weeks during which we decided that a two-story house was not for us.

Sunrise before Christmas 2020 on Waschke Road
The morning panorama on Vine Maple Farm

Though we loved our spacious Ferndale house, a smaller house on Waschke Road we built for Rebecca’s parents was a much better fit for a pair of seniors with bad backs and arthritis. All on the same floor and a ramp to the front door, just in case the surgery failed.

We gave the renters notice, which, fortunately, they were glad to receive because they had already decided to buy their own house. In Phase 1 lockdown, we started moving on the 1st of July with much needed help from the family. (Even six-year-old Dario helped.) We made it in time for Rebecca to recover from surgery on Waschke Road. The Ferndale house sold a shade below our asking price in August.

Every morning, the sun rises in a panorama over the old homestead. It’s so good to be home.

2020 on Waschke Road

The Whatcom County Library System, where I serve on the board, has been open for digital lending, curbside pickup, and a raft of online events and videos. I’ve been amazed at the skill and alacrity of the library staff’s work to move the system online. Our grandson Christopher and I are working on a pilot for an online bookstore for the Friends of the Whatcom County Library System to replace in-library used book sales, which are blocked by the pandemic. I’ve been leading weekly bookstore project standup Zoom meetings, secretly promoting agile development methodology.

Software Architects Anonymous, a miscreant gang of cynical enterprise consultants, meets on Zoom Friday evenings for a little beer and a lot of gossip.

The best news of the year came from the old homestead farmhouse. On Tuesday evening, 24 November, our son Paul, wife Lanni, and a midwife brought Charles Theodore Arnold Waschke into the world in the very room his great-uncle Arnold was born a 100 years ago. My dad— Theodore, Charles’ great-grandfather— was born in what is now a chicken coop.

2020 the dismal

2020 is the year of the most devastating health disaster in a hundred years. The death toll is climbing rapidly, 318,000 as I write this. On September 11, 2001 3,000 Americans died in a single day from a terrorist attack. In December 2020, we have already endured 4 days that exceeded 3,000 deaths from covid-19. Looking at the climbing death rates, I am afraid we’ll exceed the number of U.S. military and civilian casualties in WWII (420,000) by the New Year. If you accept the Economist’s excess death method of calculating the death toll, we may already have passed that milestone.

Christmas 2020 the wonderful

As bad as all this looks, in 20 years, I am convinced we will look back on 2020 as a year of successes. I’m not crazy. At least I don’t think I am.

2020 medical breakthroughs

  • We have 2, possibly 3, effective vaccines for covid-19 11 months after the virus flashed on the scene. The first flu vaccines did not appear until nearly 30 years after the 1918 flu pandemic. In June of 2020, the World Economic Forum reported that it takes 10 years to develop an effective vaccine. We got three in 11 months.
  • Artificial intelligence has solved the problem of protein folding, potentially the most significant discovery for medicine development in a century.

Hope for arresting human caused climate change

  • In sunny places, solar electricity became cheaper than fossil fuel generation in 2020. People will start using renewable energy because it is cheap, not from altruism, which is in far shorter supply than sunlight.
  • BP, in its yearly market forecast, predicted that world oil consumption, currently suppressed by covid-19, will never return to 2019 levels. Not all oil companies agree, but the P in BP is still petroleum. Think of that. Ferndale depends on its refineries, but with the right planning and strategy, the jobs will remain and grow while the climate is preserved. A company that views the future clearly has a hand on success.
  • Car sales plummeted in 2020 but electric automobile sales went up. People buy electric now because electric is cool and practical, not because the trees need a hug.

Technology marches on

  • SpaceX now sends humans into space for $62 million. The space shuttle cost $1.5 billion per flight. The science fiction dream of visiting space is becoming practical.
  • We are learning more efficient ways to teach and learn. With all the grumbling about Zoom fatigue, it is easier and cheaper to be trained in practically anything than ever before.
  • Quantum computing is becoming real, hinting that a new level of computational power is on the horizon— a fresh set of batteries for Moore’s law.
  • Although the economy has taken a massive hit, the digital economy is surging ahead. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that Internet data volume, use of online conferencing tools has been surging. And network providers have been keeping up.

Forces are lining up for the biggest economic burst in centuries.

There is hope that Christmas 2020 will bring future peace, joy, health, and prosperity to us all.