better weather

When last I posted I had retreated to the basement, where it is cold enough to need a sweater, and only ventured up into the heat when necessary (to obtain food or water the plants).

Thursday morning J woke with a stuffy nose, and since one doesn't go to work at a hospital if sick, called in. J's boss first said "ok, go get tested today", so J looked it up, and saw that there was an opportunity to do drop in testing at the clinic in town at 14:00, so set an alarm and went back to sleep. Later in the J got a text message from their boss saying "wait, you need to be showing symptoms for longer than that before you get the nose swab test, hold off, and if you are still sick in a day or two, get that test, if you get better get the antibody test". We think it was just a normal cold, because J was feeling largely better already on Friday evening, and by Saturday was up for doing a walk in the forest with me (and, of course, I haven't gotten sick at all). So on Monday J will get the antibody test, and we will find out if, as we suspect, it isn't the popular pandemic virus, or if it was.

I have been making really good progress on my research the past few days (well, not on Saturday, which I took off in favour of that walk, reading, and just relaxing). I now have most of the bits of paper #1 written that can be done before doing the rest of the data processing, and have spreadsheet templates for the tables that will be needed, and have finally resumed the data processing (knowing that I would be losing access to the lab I decided months ago to just do as many analyses as possible, in between the analyses that needed to be done for other researchers, and then spend the weeks needed to actually process and look at the data later.

The reason we were able to go for a walk on Saturday was that the temperatures are finally back to reasonable. It is cooling off to around 15 C at night, not not getting above the low 20's during the day. I stil haven't moved the computer back up stairs, because I don't trust it not to get hot again, but in the meantime it is nice to be able to do things upstairs.

I have even been able to do some baking. I have a yummy deep dish covered pizza filled with tomato paste, nettles, spinach black bean, artichoke and a little Västerbottensost. I also made a black current and lingon pie last night that I am looking forward to eating today.

This morning I mixed up a new batch of smoothies for the freezer:

1 cucumber
2 small bags (65 g each)spinach
1 package alfalfa sprouts
2 avocados

Blend the above in a food processer (I cut the cucumber into chunks first, then ran them through the food processer, then added one bag of spinach at a time and processed before adding the next, then the sprouts, and finally the avocado. This mad 4 cups of green stuff, which I transferred to a large metal bowl.

Then I ran the frozen fruit through the food processer, one type at a time, and added each to the bowl before processing the next type. The amounts listed is the after-processing amount as read from the measuring marks on the side of the food processor.

3 cups frozen raspberries (store bought)
2.25 cups blueberries (store bought)
1 cups mango bits (store bought)
3 cups strawberries (the last of the ones from our garden from 2018)
2.5 cups black currents (also from the garden)

Then stir everything together, and, a bit at a time, run it all through the food processer again to combine and make a smooth dark purple paste.

Spoon into silicon muffin cups (this was enough to fill 30 of them) and freeze to eat later.