When the curtain came up: The "End" of the Pandemic

The sign greeting us at our favorite cafe, June 30, 2021

I must have begun writing this post 20 times. Of course the pandemic has not ended - only the restrictions on the pandemic have been listed. 

The “end” of the pandemic is a goalpost that keeps moving back, but after several starts and stops, the end of restrictions is something I can finally document. 

First attempt I want to document was in June 2021. I wrote of it in my diary here:

“On June 30th Oregon opens back up. That means no masks, no social distancing, no capacity limits. It feels incredible. I am so excited. We have sacrificed so much, and like Camus [from The Plague] we are finally emerging from the walled village. It you had told me back in March 2020 that we would not 'open up' again until June 2021, I would have despaired, but now I have survived the 'long winter”'[Game of Thrones reference] and we are on the other end of it. I will travel this year to Mexico with my friends one day. I will go out to bars and clubs again. I will return to this life I love.”

Then on June 30th my family ventured out to our favorite café where we had not been in so long:

“This morning we walked to Good Coffee, not knowing what we would find. The COVID-19 restrictions lifted on June 30th - the official end to quarantine. No masks, no social distancing, no capacity limited. I didn’t know if Good Coffee would be any different, but it was. No one wore a mask inside. The indoor tables were open. Two dudes were sitting there on their laptops. We three sat at favorite table and ate croissants and scones. The bathroom was open, the plexiglass and 6-ft floor markers were gone. It felt like before, only better, because now I will never take it for granted. I will return to all my favorite cafes and restaurants and indulge in drinking lattes from a cup. I will love seeing strangers dressed up on the city streets. I will dress up too. Life, we are back. The pandemic is not over, other countries are still wrestling with high numbers and other states in the US are struggling with the delta variant from India. We don’t know how immune we will be for how long. But I wanted to capture here, for an eternal, the timeline of the end of quarantine in Portland, OR:

March 16, 2020 to June 30, 2021"

Unfortunately it was not to be. Masks came back on July 26, 2021 (my birthday) and then a summer wave of infections came, followed by another in winter. In Portland we didn’t go on lockdown again, but I know some countries did. It would be another 9 months for us before masks came off, in March. 

At the time of this writing, I am on a flight with no masks, though I have two in my carry-on just in case things are different in Europe. But I still face a risk of infection, and presently, if I test positive for COVID-19 I would be unable to enter the US – something I seriously fear. Is this the end? If not, when will it be? When will COVID-19 be something we no longer fear? 

Winter Errands

Went out to run some errands and used it as an excuse to wear this awesomely gaudy sweater and my new Mansur Gavriel tote. 

Jacket: Vintage from Goodwill
Sweater: Vintage from a thrift store 
Pants: Uniqlo
Shoes: Vintage
Scarf: Made by my mom
Bag: Mansur Gavriel

2020 In Numbers

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One of my favorite photos from 2020, taken mid-day in autumn in downtown Portland. 

I have not done a good job of documenting the extraordinary time that has been the last two years. Between the pandemic, the U.S. election, the great social reckoning, and the Russia-Ukraine war, I have also been juggling an explosion of work and the ever-expanding duties of motherhood, but I want to capture this moment in the pages of this blog, like I’ve been doing for over 10 years. In fact the 10-year-anniversary of this blog came and went without me noticing

2020 was just such a year. Up until the pandemic hit and we were in the worst of lockdown, my journaling has been sporadic, a sort of “whenever I feel like it” activity. But then by April 5th, 2020 I made a new routine for myself: to wake up on Saturday morning, drink coffee on the porch and write the highs and lows in my diary. 

“I think during this strange period of quarantine I will keep track of my lows and highs, and try to write at least once a week. Keeping a format like this will motivate me to write and to record this experience in a systematic way.”

I revisit the pages of those entries now as I write from an airplane en route to Dublin, my first flight in over two years. It feels so distant and yet we are still not out of its clutches, even though my plane ride feels unbelievably pre-pandemic with no masks. 

Writing the highs and lows each week allowed me to capture things as they were happening, and despite not going anywhere, so many many things happened. The lows of course, were the lockdown, the quarantine, the dreams put on hold, the depression, the deaths, Donald Trump’s fuckery, and (for me) the weight gain. 

But strangely, there were so many highs too. My business tripled (and the next year in 2021 it tripped again) and I started pitching my novel to agents and got 4 requests for full manuscript. While so much was ending, so much was also beginning. I really grew into my role as a consultant. 

So here is 2020 in numbers:

1 International Business Trip: Ethiopia, pre-pandemic in February 2020, just before things got bad

2 Domestic Business Trips: Chattanooga, Leavenworth, also February 2020

3 Average number of miles I traveled in a day after lockdown 

4 full manuscript requests I got from agents for my novel

5 Trips cancelled: Dublin (went in 2022), Tokyo (still closed at the time of writing), San Francisco (I presented virtually),  Washington DC (I presented virtually), and Santa Fe (going in 2022)

6 miles walked each week

7 New clients in 2020

8 lbs gained during quarantine

Date night in the pandemic

Right before the Omicron variant created a second wave of panic, I got reservations at Voysey, an underground speakeasy. It had been so long since I went out that I dressed up for the occasion. 

Coat: Vintage from Goodwill

Shirt: Guess

Suit: St. John

Bag: Mansur Gavriel

Bar life in the pandemic

Over the summer we had a rare and beautiful month of no pandemic restrictions. My friend and I took advantage of our newfound freedom and met for drinks at Raven's Manor, a zany horror-themed bar in downtown. For a brief moment, it felt like everything was back to normal again.

Dress: Zara

Bag: Chanel

New Normal: Cafe Favorites To Go

Since the pandemic started I've been ordering takeout from restaurants far more frequently than I ever did when I dined in them. 

I felt like it was my duty to try to keep my favorite restaurant afloat in these hard times, but then I realized that all the good cafes were missing out. I'd been drinking coffee at home (I order beans from a local roaster), thus neglecting to patron the many wondering cafes in Portland. 

I wondered how they must be holding up. Sure, it's easy to order coffee and lattes to go - we were doing that before the pandemic - but it doesn't make much sense to have them delivered. 

So since the cafes were missing out on all my delivery orders, and since I had made it a routine to drink coffee at home, I decided to deliberately set about ordering lattes and avocado toasts from my favorite places. 

Cup & Bar 

Fairlane Coffee

Favela Brazillian Cafe

Guilder Cafe

Keeper Coffee & Cafe Rowan

Proud Mary

Upper Left Roasters

New Normal: Cocktails To Go

I write this is real time, on January 31st, 2022. 

I'm still here. Thanks to all my readers who are still checking this blog. It's been almost a year since I have written, mostly due to being incredibly busy with work and parenting a toddler. It's hard to make time to prioritize this blog but I don't want to let it disappear completely. 

I had no idea back in March of 2020 that we would still be in this pandemic 2 years later. This past summer we had a brief reprieve, when, for one short month, all pandemic restrictions were lifted: we didn't have to wear masks, maintain a 6 ft distance, or deal with capacity limitations. It felt hopeful - like the end was in sight. 

That lasted for about 4 weeks, then the Delta variant hit, then Omicron, and we are once again wearing masks and trying to keep our distances. 

The bars and restaurants are still open, in fact, at the time of writing this I've already visited several new bars and had drinks inside(!) but it doesn't feel the same. 

From this vantage point, I don't feel like placing any bets as to what the future will hold. In the meantime, I want to memorialize a pandemic-practice that may stick or disappear: To-go cocktails. Readers in other countries or cities may find this odd. In many parts of the world you can freely drink alcohol on the street, order drinks at a bar, and take them to go, but not so in Oregon. We have some of the strictest alcohol laws in the country, and only during the pandemic did it become legal for restaurants and bars to offer cocktails for takeaway. 

Well of course, by the time I started ordering cocktails to go, I had gone over a year without an alcoholic drink that someone experienced prepared. Tired of my at-home bar, I decided to sample what other restaurants were doing with their to go orders. 

I will capture them here with this blog as a way of preserving perseverance and innovation. Every restaurant had a unique container for their alcohol, some came with the drinks pre-mixed, others separate, others with instructions. 

EEM

Two slushie drinks with umbrellas and cinnamon sticks. Served in plastic bottles with decor on the side:

The Expatriate

A tequila and rum based cocktail served in a glass bottle with hand-written instructions attached:

Palomar

One negroni and one frozen daiquiri served in plastic bottles with plastic color-changing cups on the side. I gave the cups to my kid and opted to put the cocktails in glass. 

What's in my bag - The Spa Edition

 

When I graduated form high school a friend of my mother's got me a gift certificate to a spa. 

At 17, I didn't understand the appeal. I thought it was boring. I didn't need to relax. I didn't need to heal. 

Now, at 33, I finally "get it." 

I am obsessed with the spa, and fortunate enough to live within a 3 hour drive of one of the best ones. 

Going to Olympus Spa in Seattle used to be reserved for weekend trips to the city with me bestie, but now with a kid a home, such trips are rare. 

That's why we have taken to making a day trip to the spa. One weekday every couple of months, I'll wake up at 6:00am, drive 2.5 hours from my house in Portland to Tacoma, Washington, and spend all day soaking in the pools, getting a scrub and massage, and eating a large delicious Korean lunch.  

Through my experience, I have perfected the art fo packing for the spa. 

Here is what I take with me on these day trips.

To hold my stuff:

• Spa Bag: freebie from Victoria's Secret
• Makeup bag: freebie from Korres

For the bath:

• Korres Body wash
• Korres Hair mask
• Body sponge
• Razor
• Korean facial mud mask
• Deodorant (for when it's time to go home)
• Toothbrush and toothpaste (for after lunch)

I wash my hair at the spa, and this is the source of many problems. For one, my wet hair soaks the mandatory hairnets we must wear, which makes me uncomfortably wet in the dry parts of the sauna. Second, it takes forever to dry so I often have to leave the spa with wet hair. To that end, I have a lot of solutions for these problems:

• Hair Wrap: to wrap my hair under my hairnet so it doesn't soak the hairnet
• Hair drying spray: to help my hair to dry faster
• Waterproof Drying bag: for my wet mask and hair wrap
• Blow Dryer: they have free ones at the spa, but only two of them , and I don't want to wait in case both are occupied
• Fast-drying hair brush

Covid-19 Protocol - we have to wear a mask at all times in the spa, so I come prepared:

• Waterproof mask for inside the pools
• Mask shield to help with breathing
• Dry mask to put on in the lounge (so I don't have to wear the wet one)

New Normal: I'm so Bored...Cheese Board that is

Like many people locked up inside during this difficult period, I am doing the best I can to make life at home interesting. One way this has manifested is in my newfound obsession with creating my own cheese and charcuterie board. 

I have always loved boards, but never had the vision for how to make one. The lack of skill for me was one of taste and design. What pairs well together? How do you plate it in an interesting manner? These thought were in my head for years but the pandemic seemed to promise both the time and motivation to embark on home-making projects. 

What ended up transpiring is that I had the motivation, but not the time (I have since only made one real board). 

First order of business was to follow every Instagram board producer out there. Next was to purchase “This Cheese Board Will Change Your Life” which proved to be just as amazing as promised. Just seeing examples of her simple steps helped breakdown the art of the cheeseboard in a much more approachable way. 

Next I ordered some supplies – spreading knives, ramekins, honey dipper sticks, and cheese tools, then set out to have an indoor picnic. 

Despite this being call a cheese “board” craze, I never intended to use an actual board – I want my board to be portable, for real picnics, so I made a cheese and charcuterie bento. 

The Japanese bento boxes are the perfect size and depth for portable cheese boards, and I confirmed that one layer of bento had just the right amount of space for a one-person board. 

Featured in this cheese Board/Bento:

Cheese
Humbolt Fog Goat Cheese
Manchego

Meat
Prosciutto
Coppa

Nuts
Pistachios
Marcona almonds

2 kinds of Crackers

Jam
Fig Jam 
Blackberry lavender jam

Fruit
Tangerines
Grapes

Pickles and Olives
Break and Butter pickles
Pickled red onion (homemade)
3 kinds of olives

It was my first board and I know it is not as beautiful as the ones in her pictures, but it was my first attempt and it made a fantastic dinner – so I’m pleased!

And with the leftovers...

Reading The Plague…during a plague

 

“There have been as many plagues as worst in history; yet always plagues and wars to take people equally by surprise”(Camus, 34). 

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 certainly did take the world by surprise. At a conference in February, we discussed the rising numbers in China and what the travel industry might do if the virus was to spread outside the region. Later that month in Ethiopia, we were counting our good fortune that the virus had not hit Africa yet. By the time I arrived stateside, Seattle was a hotbed to virus activity, two weeks later in March, the city of Portland shut down. 

I kept track of the changes as I observed them: the first time I worse a mask in public, the first time I saw public signage about mask wearing, the first time I bought something with plexiglass between me and the cashier. Everything suddenly felt sterile. Every time I went in public I felt like people treated me like a harbor of disease. 

The Plague by Albert Camus sold out on Amazon. 

That’s when I remembered I already owned a copy I had never read. 

By April Camus had back from the past to save me. His book, written 60 years ago, described what our world was going through so precisely. It was almost more accurate than watching the news. It was a warning, a prediction.

Reading The Plague by Camus was also healing and cathartic. It was so relevant and timely it almost felt like a friend speaking into my ear, telling me what has happened, and what is left to come. Even he said what so many others are echoing now: “Every day that passes we are one day closer to the end of this ordeal.”

My favorite quotes that seem to describe March 2020:

“But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life. Thus, for example, a feeling normally as individual as the ache of separation from those one loves suddenly became a feeling in which all shared alike and - together with fear – the greatest affliction of the long period of exile that lay ahead…  

“One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gate was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it” (Camus, 61).

“The first thing that plague brought to our town was exile… It was undoubtably the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire… We returned to our prison-houses, we had nothing left to us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea - anyhow, as soon as could be – once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it” (Camus, 65).

From summer and Fall 2020:

“They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose” (Camus, 66). 

“They seemed at the mercy of the sky’s caprices – in other words, suffered and hoped irrationally” (Camus, 69).

“In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, Dusty night fall into a sort of hectic exaltation, and unkempt freedom fevering their blood” (Camus, 111).

From January 2021, after Biden’s election and the vaccine being released:

“All agreed that the amenities of the past couldn’t be restored at once; destruction is an easier, speedier process then reconstruction… But in reality behind these mild aspirations lurks wild, extravagant hopes, and often one of us, becoming aware of this, would hastily add that, even on the rosiest view, you could expect the plague to stop from one day to another” (Camus, 241).  

“The fluctuated between high optimism and extreme depression” (Camus, 244).  

“He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen closets; that it bodes it’s time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city” (Camus, 278).  

New Normal: Living Room Picnics

We're about halfway through winter in Portland, and dining outside remains miserable. I have passed time dreaming of elaborate picnics and order picnic supplies online. I also still want to support my favorite restaurants, so I decided to stage a fancy picnic in the living room. 

Pictured is the new picnic basket I bought online from The Beach People. Oregon Blossom rose wine, and my Spanish feast from Can Font. 

Jamon Iberico y Serrano y Pan con Tomate: cured ham with bread covered with tomato

Ensalada de Remolacha: beet salad

Paella Negra: black squid ink paella with clams, mussels, and shrimp

New Normal: A 6-Course Tasting Menu at Home

While I am grateful to be healthy, housed, employed, and generally in a very good place in life, there is a lot I miss about pre-pandemic life. One of those things is tasting menus at restaurants. I love going to a new place and letting the chef decide what I will eat. I love the surprise of getting small bites of food, beautifully plated and delivered to my table, knowing it will be the perfect amount of food by the end of the meal. 

My first tasting menu experience was at the Beast, a French restaurant that Portland lost due to the pandemic. Other recent memorable tasting menus I had were at Mision 19 in Tijuana, and Han Oak in Portland, which was one of the best meals of my life. 

I can't get this experience during the pandemic. Half of the fancy restaurants closed during the pandemic because they could just not serve take-out with their concept, and the other half adapted to offering take-out friendly different menu items like street food, baked goods, and noodle soups. 

For fun, I decided to attempt my own tasting menu at home. I order take out from Lechon, a South American restaurant with an amazing vibe and gorgeous aquariums in its restaurant. Unfortunately they are closed for indoor dining, but I want to see them succeed, so I ordered a wopping 6 items from their menu and had them delivered. 

Then I plated each item for two people, selected wine pairing, turned on Chopin, got out the candles and cloth napkins, and made it my Tasting-Menu-at Home night. 

I wish I was better at decorating a dining room table or plating food, because these pictures are not all that spectacular. Although my aesthetic talents were tested in this challenge, and admittedly I suck at plating and decorating,  I think the photos and experience serves as a relic of this time: trying to relive good memories and make the most of a devastating global pandemic. 

Course 1: Brisket Empanada

Course 2: Mexican-Style Street corn

Course 3: Shrimp Ceviche

Course 4: Bone Marrow - the best!

Course 5: Grilled Octopus

Course 6: Steak