Air quality

Seattle is having bad air quality due to wildfires in Eastern Washington - bad enough that we stay inside with all the windows closed. Fortunately, it's not super hot here, so although we miss tennis, we are fine. 

My department chair is an atmospheric chemist, and anytime there is wildfire smoke, he goes into super data collection mode. He wanted to measure conditions at a variety of locations and asked if our family would help out. It was super cool! He gave us a handheld particle counter.

Each run is one minute: it sucks in air through the silver tube on top, measures the size of particles in the air with laser scattering, and delivers a count of different-size particles, ranging from over 10 microns to less than 0.3 microns. We learned that 10-micron particles are stopped in the nose, 2.5-micron particles are stopped in the throat, and 0.3-micron particles go all the way into the alveoli in the lungs, making them the most impactful to people's health. We were asked to do a series of five one-minute runs indoors, and another series of five one-minute runs outdoors, to help answer the question of how much difference it actually makes to stay inside. Here's Aaron doing the outdoor run.

This is our data sheet. Fascinating! Obviously indoors is way better.

When we delivered this data to the scientists, they were impressed at how clean our indoor air is and asked if we had been running a filter. We have! It's fun to know it makes a difference.

Pandemic camping

We have had quite a few camping trips this summer. In normal years these can be hard to fit in because the kids have so many obligations, but not this year! There are some risks involved for sure, especially the public bathrooms. We wear masks and don't linger. 

Our first trip was to Lake Quinault, just the four of us. The campground was COVID-ready, alternating full with empty campsites.

The most memorable part of that trip, though, was the rain. We were there from Friday to Sunday; it started raining late Friday night and rained continually through Sunday morning. (To be fair, it is the rainforest.) Jordan and Dale built an elaborate tarp shelter, and we spent almost all of Saturday just hanging out in that tiny little outdoor living room, playing cards and eating and reading books. Limited as it was, it was at least different from being at home! We did find a dry hour or two for a walk in the beautiful woods, returning covered with mud. And here we are at some non-raining hour, apparently burning some wet wood.

The other trips we went on have been with friends. We went back to La Wis Wis with much the same crowd and had a very pleasant time. We had to have a zoom meeting in advance to discuss the protocols: no sharing food, masked most of the time, no communal tent for the kids (the kids were all at one campsite but only siblings shared tent space). It works. We've also been back to Middle Fork, one of our favorite spots, but have not been able to camp there: apparently bears have moved in. 

We camped again with friends at a place near Middlle Fork, Tinkham campground, which has a surprising view of I-90 but was better than nothing. Here's a socially distanced group photo from Tinkham... we did a panorama, and did some fancy footwork to get everyone in. See how Aaron is on both sides? 

The only water at Tinkham was from this astonishing hand pump.

We also find time for the occasional day trip. Here we are at Deception Pass early in the summer; we drove up, hiked for an hour or so, had a picnic lunch, and left just as things started to get crowded.

Jordan and Dale have also been on two camping trips without Aaron and me, arranged especially for (and by) the 16-year-olds and their dads. That's fine... Aaron and I are content to stay home and eat sushi.

Oregon coast

Early this summer, Jessica adopted our kids for a few days and took them to the Oregon coast, where she had rented a little beach house for a getaway. They were in each other's bubble for just those few days, and they were soooooooo happy to spend time with friends. This was the view from the house:

Pretty fantastic. The boys spent many hours a day on the beach, mostly digging. As you can see there is plenty of room for social distancing.

In addition to the beautiful sunset, this picture has Aaron and Adam in the foreground, and if you zoom in you can just make out Jordan and Ian's heads peeking up out of their hole down by the water.

We are grateful that our kids had such an idyllic getaway.

Virtual Camp Kesher

We are sad to have no Jewish family camp this year! For a minute there it looked like of all things, the annual talent show was going to be online, which was somewhere between hilarious and torturous to me (the "talent" is highly debatable). Fortunately (?) no one submitted anything. But! People did submit haikus and some of them are pretty darned funny. Over the years, I have become the keeper of the Kesher haiku tradition, so I video-recorded myself presenting my favorites, and posted it all to the camp's Facebook page. It was fun! The backgrounds are scenes from camp.

Trigonometry

Through a free program called Running Start, 11th graders in Seattle public schools have the option to take classes at community college, earning both high school and college credit. It’s a terrific program. Jordan will do half-time at North Seattle College (science and math), and take the other half of his classes at his high school. (The logistics are significantly easier with everything online… if it weren’t for the pandemic, he’d need transportation.)

Back in June, we made our way through the byzantine application, including a math placement test. Jordan was both delighted and tantalized by his results: He almost qualified to go straight into calculus in the fall (effectively skipping a year). But not quite! He asked if he could do the remaining material over the summer, and of course my answer was HECK YES. Are you kidding me? With every other organized summer activity cancelled? We signed him up that minute. 

The missing material is trigonometry. It is a fully online, asynchronous course, and keeping up takes him an hour or two of work most days. It’s going great! He enjoys it, and I love that he has something worthwhile to do every day. 

After the first couple weeks he recognized that there’s no use trying to work alone in his room: he gets distracted and nothing gets done. So now he works at the dining room table, at a time when I’m also free, and asks for my backup. I love this so much. First of all, when your sixteen-year-old son invites you to do essentially anything with him, the answer is YES YES YES. And I’m the only one in the house who’s fluent in trig, so it has to be me. (Dale learned trig once but doesn’t use it.) But also, it’s fun! With me there, Jordan talks through what he’s doing, has me check his answers, enjoys my semi-socratic prompts, and generally wolfs down his new understanding like a happy dog. Some of the benefit is just my presence: the fact that I am there and I care what he's doing keeps him on task. Some of it is me helping him parse the odd grammar of math problems (“From a point on the ground 47 feet from the foot of a tree, the angle of elevation of the top of the tree is 35º. Find the height of the tree to the nearest foot”) and trace errors in copying numbers from one place to another/into the calculator (191 turns to 919, etc.); this is dyslexia/dysgraphia support. And some of it is the two of us enjoying the material together, him learning and me reflecting or re-learning. It’s been a delightful part of the summer. I'm so glad I have the flexibility to do this with him.

Here is a picture of us at work, in front of a large pile of kale that Dale brought in from the garden. I know he doesn’t look happy, but I promise, that’s just about having his picture taken.

Pandemic boychoir

Heartbreakingly, one of the most unsafe activities these days is singing together with other people. Yet somehow the choirs go on! Boychoir has been particularly successful, at least from Aaron's point of view; their twice-weekly zoom rehearsals are consistently fun, rewarding, and invigorating for him. The director meets with 5-7 of them at a time and they do a lot of one-on-one work: sight reading, ear training, and vocal work. They have regular recording homework, too; the director assembles their recordings into beautiful "virtual choir" videos. These get a lot of attention on social media and for good reason. Here are three: 

Jordan also meets weekly with Vocalpoint and has occasional recording sessions, but they record in small ensembles, and he has not appeared in one yet.

Pandemic music

All three of Dale’s bands are finding ways to continue to make music, at least a little bit, even though performance opportunities are, er, limited. The swing band plays every other week or so in the backyard, or in the carport.

The rock band has played in the yard just once: they are all older and appropriately very cautious, but our yard is pretty darn good for socially distant music making, since everyone can be 10 or more feet apart. The street band has twice now gotten together and played in a local park. Social distancing is terrible for tips, but they have fun.

And sometimes the kids just pull out the guitar and ukulele.