We begin a voluntary two-week quarantine ahead of Anya’s trip to Taiwan on January 14. Anya’s program is still waiting for official approval that the students can travel there even during the current higher level of COVID restrictions. They’re hopeful approval will come through in time.
For us, quarantine means we’ll basically stay inside except for walks around the neighborhood (but not with people outside our family), and we won’t be going inside supermarkets or other businesses.
Jan comes into the kitchen and sees that Bree is making pasta for lunch. Bree has made pasta nearly every day for weeks.
Jan: “What? Bree’s making pasta for lunch?!? What a surprise!”
Bree: “I also made pasta for breakfast.”
Jan and Angela still go out for coffee most mornings — driving to the Starbucks one block away so they can get curbside pickup. Jan calls this their morning, “walk on wheels”.
Sadly, Anya’s trip to Taiwan has been deferred by at least a month. The program said they won’t be able to get approval until Lunar New Year (February 12) at the earliest.
This is sad news. On the plus side, we can now walk down the street for coffee again.
Our nephew Leif really wishes he could go back to in-person school.
Liya shows up for Mandarin class wearing her new shark hoodie, to the surprise and delight of her teacher and classmates.
The fleece hoodie includes a zippered mouth that can be closed. Unfortunately, if Liya closes the zipper, she can longer see.
Mojo, by Bree. Bree often takes many pictures of our cats, sending them to a friend of hers that wants a cat but can’t have one.
Finally getting to the end of our annual kiwi harvest. Jan and Liya picked our backyard kiwis in early December before the first frost, but the kiwis take a long time to ripen off the vine. This year we ended up with an enormous amount of kiwi — perhaps 100 pounds?
Usually we can’t use all the kiwi in time, so end up having to throw much of the harvest away. This time, however, Liya has been good about giving kiwi away, and we’ve done his best to use them up. Jan and Liya made several batches of kiwi ice cream, which everyone likes, and Jan made one batch of dark chocolate-kiwi ice cream, which no one but Jan likes. Angela made kiwi jam. For the first time, Jan tried making kiwi syrup, which turns out to be a great way of using lots of kiwi at once. It’s pretty good mixed with sparkling water.
Jan and Bree wake up at some ungodly, dark hour so that Bree can go to school. Sabriya’s 7th grade is reopening with a limited amount of in-person classes. She’ll be going to school two days a week; the rest will be online. The school hopes to reduce COVID risk by limiting the number of students on campus at any one time. Additionally, Bree is part of a “pod” of students that will be together the entire class day; the school no longer has students seeing a different mix of classmates in each class.
Liya’s school resumes hybrid classes, but Liya elects to continue studying from home. Liya’s not as eager as Bree to return to in-person classes, and given that COVID case rates are still high, decides to wait and see how the school’s in-person program works out. Tabitha, Liya’s Mandarin teacher, takes a picture “with” Liya during a hybrid class in which some students are in-person, some are remote.
Anya’s language program finally gets visa approval for her group to visit Taiwan. There are still more bureaucratic steps to take, but the approval was the most significant roadblock. The program plans to leave in mid-February.
We go snowshoeing up at Snoqualmie Pass with Diane and her daughter Emily. Our plan is to hike around the Hyak area, but when we get there, there’s a huge line for parking. We drive to the nearby Gold Creek area instead, strap on our snowshoes, and start heading up the trail.
After only about 20 minutes, Bree and Emily are ready to turn around and go back — they’d rather go sledding. Diane and Angela take them back, while Jan and Liya continue up the trail. They eventually reach a short spur trail, which they follow almost to its end before stopping and turning back.
We meet up back at the cars, then decide to head to The Commonwealth restaurant at the pass for lunch. They have a large outdoor eating area, and the food’s quite good.