Eating and Drinking through the Corona Virus (pt. 2) 

Well, days 5-8 have gone by without much fanfare.  Curt is sleeping way more than I am.  I'm not sure HOW he sleeps all night and all day.  But our symptoms are still very similar. 

Day 5:  I spent an hour or so talking with my cousin in Montana.  He's on about day 20.  He is now out of the hospital and describes horrible symptoms still.  It was quite a reality check for us.  We are so lucky.  

Day 6:    We had enough energy to make moose burgers for dinner on the grill. Yeah! The kids called and said they arrived!  :-)  I cried extra tears when (spoiler alert) Barbara died on "Call the Midwife."  

Day 7:   I woke up with blurry eyes---like a film of allergy puss over the top of my eyeballs.  It makes my eyes want to close.  I'm using a lot of eye drops.   One highlight today.  The kids.  

Day 8:  the State Office of Public Health called.  It was very interesting.  She had to ask us all sorts of questions, like:  are you deceased? and how many bathrooms in your house?  She asked us the names of people we saw, but didn't ask for their phone numbers, only if they had symptoms.  We had to go through day by day and explain what we did.  I think she was trying to get something out of us, it just sounded too boring.  We got up, we slept in front of the TV, we drank, we ate, we went to bed.  Not much you can embellish on....  Then just when we thought we were done, she wanted to know what we did 10 days BEFORE we were sick.  Worked at home, put shelves up in the new shed, fed the worms, harvested tomatoes....I finally just said, "we don't do much or go anywhere."  So that was that.  She told us to call Curt's dad and Pat every day to make sure they're okay, since we stayed with them.  And that was it.  Is that what contact tracing is?  

Good news:  Curt's brother's test came back negative.   We got homemade chicken soup from the kids for dinner---yum.  Curt made biscuits from scratch with gluten.  I ate chips. 

Day 8:  Today I feel like I have no more excuses to just sit around and pretend to be sick.  We are both feeling a lot better.  

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Okay....more updates.  The lingering effects of the virus are TIREDNESS.   We get up, drink coffee and go back to sleep until 10:30 or so every morning.  Then we do a few things and then take afternoon naps.  AND we still sleep through the night!  It's like a sleeping sickness with stiff muscles.  

We started eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  It seems like we didn't have the motivation to eat well any more, even though our symptoms were better.  Maybe the peanut butter sandwiches were dehydrating because a couple days we slept off bad headaches.  We are just plain sick of being sickly! 

In other news, Curt's brother got another test and it came back positive.  Apparently he had a false negative, but luckily he stayed home because he thought, like us, he had a bad cold.  So he has to start his 10 days from when he had a positive test, not when he had the symptoms.  Poor guy.  Curt's sister, who is 65, is still coughing and coughing.  She had it worse than we did, but didn't have to go to the hospital.

We started walking.  My leg muscles just hurt when I'm walking---crazy.  Curt's lungs hurt and he's winded.  I might be winded if I walked more than a little ways without resting my legs!  Yesterday we watched the news and then THREE movies.  We need some more energy somehow.  Jeanie brought us some scallop soup last night.  That was really good.  

Curt went back to work this morning upstairs in his office, but came down a little bit ago and said he took a nap already.  Oh dear.  This is a lingering disease.  

We DID get permission to go to the dentist or the store or where ever we want to, so I guess we are officially well.  

Eating and drinking through the Corona Virus

 So I've always been an early adopter.  Before I really knew how bad the Corona Virus could be, I was saying I want to get it first so that there's a ventilator for me when I need it.  I stopped saying that about June when reports started coming in about how bad it really was.  

I was so good at staying home.  So good at distancing.  Pretty good about always wearing my mask and protecting my bubble.  But then there's family.  We have one relative who has certain beliefs:  it's all part of God's plan, she'd say.  She continued to hug everyone and not wear a mask unless she was required to.  We were pretty good at keeping that relative at a distance until finally we caved.  She had just moved into a new house and she begged us to come and visit her so we could see it.  

When we got out of the car, and she was waving wildly at us from the porch, obviously so excited that we made it. I asked Curt, "Mask or no mask?"  We paused, looked back at her and got out of the car without our masks.  In reality, they say it wouldn't have mattered since she wasn't wearing a mask either.  

A couple days later, I felt blah....I laid down on the coach and declared it was make your own dinner night because I didn't feel like eating.  Curt broke out the brats from Indian Valley Meats.  The next day it was clear that both Curt and I were taking a cold.  I blamed the day I sat out by the river with only a small sweater on.  Curt blamed the time he spent with a friend who had a bad cold.  But we both took naps and ate comfort food:  macaroni and cheese, more brats.  We commenced our usual routines when have we start catching cold:  nasal washes, lots of fluid, naps, vitamins, etc.

Thursday -Day 2 of symptoms, 5 days after contact:   We had an appointment for the car to get fixed and needed to drive into Anchorage to drop it off before 10am.  We did that.  Both of us were achy.  We made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and lay on the couch watching news.  Curt did some work, but we both snoozed a lot and drank fluids. We both coughed, but usually that's what we both do with a cold.  Close to 6 pm our relative called.  She had tested positive for Covid.  Suddenly things changed. Of course she was very apologetic and wondered how it could have happened to her, but we thanked her for telling us and jumped into action.  

It was exactly three days before our grandchildren and their parents arrived at the airport.  We decided to get in the car, and drop off a car at the airport for them to drive when they arrived.  We sprayed it all down and left the key in a secret place for them to find.  We called the car repair shop and told them we had been exposed to Covid and may or may not have it, but could we pick up our car anyway?  They said they'd bring our keys out to us, so we wouldn't have to come in the shop.  The sales guy stretched his gloved hand out as far as he could with the envelope containing the keys.  We thanked him through the crack in the window and from behind our masks, but he wasn't happy.

Next we googled where we could get a covid test at 7pm in Anchorage.  Luckily we found a place and the nurse came right out to the car with her hazmat suit on and asked us to blow our noses so she could dab in and around our nostrils.  It wasn't uncomfortable at all---and that was the part I was fearing the most.  I never even gagged!

We drove home thinking it was going to be a long week to wait to find out if we had it---which is what they told us.  We opted for caribou bone broth for dinner---now that we were possibly seriously sick, we decided a healthier diet would be a good idea. 

Friday. Day 3 of symptoms, 6 days after contact.  The next morning we weren't feeling any worse and actually we were feeling a little better.  We both believed we couldn't have the covid.  We were certain we had bad colds.  BUT, it was time to break out the fire cider.  Luckily I made it this summer in anticipation of covid coming to my house. 

Recipe:  https://www.eatingbirdfood.com/how-to-make-fire-cider/   Note:  I am absolutely certain that the best part of this is the 1 T. of Alaskan honey I add to each cup.  Honey is naturally antibiotic.  

I must have had 6 cups or so that day.  We both took Zycam every 4 hours as well.  

Although we weren't really hungry, we knew eating well would help.  So we took out a red salmon fillet for dinner.  Curt skinned it, I stir fried it and we put it on top of our homemade salad. 

It was almost 7pm when they called.  Yes, you guessed it.  We were both positive for the Corona Virus.  Sigh. We still didn't feel worse than had we had a bad cold.  In fact, I was feeling a lot better.  My cough was all but gone.  I still had a stuffy head, but kept using the netty pot.

Saturday, Day 4 of symptoms, 7 days after contact.  

It's still really unbelievable that we have THE COVID.  My brother and I had been joking about it during the summer any time anyone sneezed.  "Ha, you've got the covid.  Better watch out!"   So now it was our turn to call everyone and tell them.  The worst part was that we had stayed at Curt's dad's house.  Ray just turned 88 and just got married a couple weeks ago to his bride, Pat, 82 years old.  (So far they don't have symptoms, so we can only assume we weren't contagious until after we left their house--thank God).  

We felt pretty good.  Nobody we called on the phone could really tell we even had colds.  Curt has a cough, but he always has a cough---he has dry eye syndrome.  So....no one we called was really concerned----except our grandchildren. They will now have to wave at us through the window until we are done with this thing.

Curt made us a nice breakfast of omelettes.  

But by now we were getting a little stir crazy. This was a Saturday and we were supposed to be outside working on getting things cleaned up for winter.  We thought about it, but decided we'd better continue to rest.  What if we had a relapse, or something? 

I got up after finishing another season of Call the Midwife and made some zucchini bread.  

I decided to make some yarrow/nettle tea to go with it.  It's oh so good for you! Note:  I was tired after making zucchini bread and had to watch another episode of Call the Midwife while I waited for it to come out of the oven.

And then.......I ate too many warm slices.  Yum.  You only get the coronavirus once in your life, right?  (I hope so, anyway)

We needed some things from the store, so I got online and placed an order.  

When we got a text saying our groceries were ready for pickup, we were both anxious to go for a drive and get out of the house.  We pulled up in the parking slot, called the number and told them to just open the hatch and put in the groceries because we were positive for covid.  Alarms went off.  The kid said, "We've never done this before."  I said I was sure they had, we were just polite enough to tell them we had covid.  He called his manager.  

After much consternation, the manager explained that we couldn't order Night Time NyQuil because they had to see our driver's licenses and get signatures.  So we asked for them to substitute Night Time AlkaSelzer Plus.  That was acceptable.  Finally the manager got back on the phone and proclaimed he gave us a refund for the NyQuil, but he couldn't figure out how to charge us for the AlkaSeltzer Plus, so he paid for it himself.  And then he said, "God, bless you,"  like it might be the last time we ever see the light of day.  We tried not to laugh when we saw the young boy coming out with our groceries.  I think he borrowed clothes from the butcher.  He had  every inch of his body covered.  He set the bags down on the ground in front of our car and backed away and then turned quickly and rushed back into the store.  Curt got out and collected the bags and put them into the back of the car.  And then our adventure was over and all that was left was to go back home. 

For dinner that night I wasn't hungry.  I'm sure it was the zucchini bread, it felt like a lump just solidifying in my stomach.  I decided to have blueberries and yogurt (about a cup of each).  That was perfect.  Those probiotics went right to work and I was feeling much better.  Poor Curt...all he could find was a frozen veggie burger in the freezer.  He announced that it wasn't anything like the veggie burger at Red Robin.  Oh well. 

Sunday, Day 5 of symptoms, 8 days after contact.    It's 3:05 and I'm still in my pajamas.  We watched all the news shows and I washed the dishes and did some laundry.  Now what?  There is some controversy about how soon we can leave the house again.  One of the factors is temperature.  I spent quite some time looking for a thermometer in the house.  I don't think we have one.  We need to be without a temperature for 3 days in a row.  I think we've probably done that already, but we don't know for sure.  

Today I'm drinking Yarrow/Nettle tea with a tablespoon of honey.  Nice stuff!  I still have a stuffy head.  Nothing new to report. 

I'll keep updating as we go along.  I wonder what's for dinner today?

The merits of canning bone broth

Ever since visiting my 92 year old (retired farmer's wife) aunt this fall, I've become so curious about my life-style now compared to my Aunt's.  Or mine compared to my great grandparents.  I'm ready to learn time travel so I can go back and observe---any time now.

This week I've been working on canning bone broth (or stock as they used to call it in the old days).  I'm wondering about the merits of doing all this work for bone broth.  Is it really worth it?  I know it puts an aroma through the house that makes your mouth water.   I wonder if my relatives cut the bones, cooked the bones down enough to get the cartilage and bone marrow out.  How often did they eat it, all winter?  If the wood stove was going, I'm betting they had bones cooking.  (Nobody really used a pressure cooker until WWII)  Maybe they only used chicken bones.  Things to ponder....

My own history with bone marrow started in 1976 when I was in Anaktuvuk Pass for 2 weeks.  Our high school youth group offered to go there and teach Bible School.  This was back in the day when there was one phone for the whole village and no TVs.  The whole village showed up to meet the plane at the runway.  We stayed in James and Anna Nageak's house while they were out of town.  It was one of the few plywood houses in town.  The rest of the houses were very small hovels, some still sod houses.  The bigger the house, the harder it was to heat in the winter.

As luck would have it, our food didn't show up.  We had ordered it at the grocery store in Fairbanks and had it sent from there to Anaktuvuk Pass.  I still don't remember why our food didn't show up.  Maybe the planes were full.  Maybe the clouds came down and the plane over-headed.  But finally one day, Melinda Lord decided she would go to one of her relative's houses and ask for some food. (She was Inupiat from a well known family living in Fairbanks).  She came back triumphant with a frozen caribou leg.  She explained that they took her down into their ice cellar and she could pick out what she wanted.  I wished I would have gone with her now, since the ice cellars are all melting now.

She tossed it on the table and got out a sharp knife.  The rest of us Tunniks (whites) watched as she shaved off thin pieces of meat for us to fry up.  She ate some raw and we were horrified.  Then she got to the bone.  She thought she was going to have to fight for it.  So she asked quietly, "Who wants some marrow?"  I can't even imagine the faces we made.  I only remember her eyes getting really big, and her smile growing across her face, "Really?" she asked.  "Are you sure?"  We were sure.  Then she cracked the bone and started dipping her finger in, as if she were digging into the jelly jar.  She sat and worked that bone until she licked it clean.  How could I make sense of that???

When we got back to Fairbanks, I talked to my parents about that incident.  I was told never to eat raw meat and besides chicken gizzards, or liver, I had never heard of eating ALL of the animal before.  Of course I never really thought about how the Inupiat people survived 10,000 years in Alaska without much fruit or vegetables.  There were vitamins in the marrow.  Vitamins that were essential for survival in the far north.

It wasn't until the last 10 years (after I retired), that I started to be curious about the healing powers of bone broth.  One year we brought our moose to Indian Valley Meats near Girdwood to be processed.  To my surprise when we came back to pick up the boxes of meat, I saw people around several garbage cans.  What in the world? I thought.  In the cans were all the bones from everyone's moose. People were rooting through them to find the best bones.  So that day I brought some home too.

I put them in the sink and scrubbed them.  One moose hair can ruin the taste of the whole batch, so I cleaned them so well they looked fresh.   I put the bones in a regular pot and boiled them all day.  It turned into great soup.  But....not bone broth.  Or so I'm told.

This year I went in to get our yearly supply of Indian Valley's  jalepeno bratwurst.  I was later than usual in the year and it was a Sunday.  I explained how sorry I was that they weren't cutting moose 'cause I wanted some bones.  The gal looked to her boss and asked, "How about we give her that box that those folks never came back to get?"  He nodded and so I ended up carrying out a 50 pound box of carribou legs.

So this week was bone broth week.  I learned some more things.....



This year I used the pressure cooker to conserve fossil fuels. We cook with Natural Gas, so shortening the time it takes to cook down the bones makes it more sustainable. I cooked the bones for 4. 5 hours at 15 pounds of pressure. That gives all of the Collagen, the protein matrix in bones, tendons, ligaments, and other flexible tissues, time to brake down. When I took off the lid the next morning, this is what I saw. Lots of fat on top.

After reading up on fat on the internet, we decided to keep the fat instead of skimming it off.  You only want to keep it, apparently, if the animal has not been farmed.  That's where all the toxins are stored.  Since these bones were from wild caribou, we decided it would be good for us.  I did try some of the fat on my dry hands.  It was good until it wore off.

I noticed, after this first batch, that the marrow couldn't come out of the bones if the bones are still in tact, duh!  So that night, I held the bones and Curt cut them in half with the sawzall.

Although that opened the bone up for the marrow to come out, it didn't just float out.  I ended up sticking the shish kabob skewers in the bone cavity and coaxing the long marrow casings out.  Next time I will cut the joints off the bone instead, so that you can see through the bone when the marrow is gone.  It requires more time sawing, but less time poking and prodding.

Finally I had all the bone broth out and brought it to a boil.   I tried some and I didn't like chunks of things, sometimes meat, sometimes marrow left floating around. So I used my immersion blender to blend it all into small pieces. I added some spices to taste and it was perfect.


I cleaned out the pressure cooker, washed my quart jars in the dishwasher and then filled the jars with broth.  I cooked them for 25 minutes at 15 pounds of pressure.

The jars in the video look grimy because, for the first time ever, the alarm went off on the pressure cooker.  My husband was wondering why we couldn't use the smaller pressure cooker knob instead of the larger one.  Note:  our last pressure cooker had a circular weight that you could place on the top at either a 10, 15 or 20 pound pressure.  Our new one just came with one weight.  In the center of the lid was the pressure gauge.

Somehow it didn't like the littler weight and when we opened it up, two jars had NO lids!  The rings were off.  Yes, I did put them on tight!  And the rubberized seals were off!  The bone broth was mixed in with the water bath.  So of course I couldn't waste it.  I boiled it down and re-canned them with the proper weight on the pressure cooker.

Here's what happened after I pulled them out!  You have to see how they dance!

I called my mom to see if she remembers trying to get marrow out of the bones, but she didn't.  She was 12 years younger than her sister and suspects that she just didn't know what was going on.  But I'm imagining on cold winter nights, my relatives would get out some bone broth from the basement (root cellar), add potatoes and carrots and had a very nice meal with some fresh bread.  At -10 degrees here today....we will be doing the same thing.

New Year......New Decade....New Committment

Yes....2020.  I see you.  You have arrived.  Something my sister and I never could believe we'd ever see.  Mom was doing laundry in the cement basement with the old washer.  There was an electric ringer she had to put the clothes through before she could hang them up in the basement.  Sandee and I were riding our bikes or trikes around before all the clothes were hung up.  Mom wouldn't let us help.  She thought we'd get our fingers stuck in the ringer and be maimed for life.  So we were contemplating how long we'd live.  It's so funny that I remember that moment so clearly.

I'm guessing it was close to New Years 1967.   I would have been 7 and she, 5.  We were counting the years by 5s, but since she couldn't do that yet, I was announcing each year.  The grey concrete seemed to make my pronouncement of each year more profound in the moist dark basement.  "Could we live to 1975?"  Yeah!  She and I would scream.  Then we would take a lap around the 2 poles that held the basement up.  Could we live to 1980? '85? 90?  Each year was a resounding YEAH!  Until I reached 2000.  My sister screamed NO!!!  We could never live until the year 2000.  So I started figuring it out.  In 2000 we would be 39 and 41, I told her.  Would we live that long?  Well our mom was 29, and we knew plenty of people older than her.  So my sister agreed we could live that long.  And we took our obligatory lap around the poles.

Years later when we were having our 2000 bonfire on the beach near her house in Texas, waiting for the Y2K disaster to strike, I reminded her of this ceremony we had done when we were little.  She had no recollection.  But she was distracted with her 7 kids of various ages (5 adopted) swinging marshmellow sticks around the fire.

It's ominous now....but we continued the game and when I got to 2020, she said no, we would never live to see 2020.  I said we would.  We'd only be 60 and 58.   I can't remember what happened next.  Maybe mom called us to help hang the clothes on the basement clothes line, but I don't remember doing our obligatory race around the poles.

In November 2018 she died of a pulmonary embolism.  She predicted it back when she was little.  So here I am welcoming 2020 without her.  I'm the one left to remember and to document life in the 20s.  So my new decade's resolution is to do more writing about life, not only for my sister....but for my grandchildren and those who come after me.