We’ve got a ways to go before we hit forty days and forty nights, but the animals are starting to gather two by two. So here to distract while we await the flood of reports on the Massachusetts election results are:

1. Knitting needles a squirrel could approve of. Here, you, too, can go knit your own futon with those yarns you don’t know why on earth you ever bought.

2. The Ig Nobel Prizes:  recognition from the scientific community for experiments that should not be repeated.  Creating diamonds from Tequila? Wait.  Are Mormons allowed to wear those?

Going to Rachel’s in San Jose: “Did you get the GPS?”

“Nah, I’ll just use my phone.”

Showoff. Oh, wait, mine does that too?!

We finally gave in to the inevitable on our dying Sidekicks and bought new phones.  When you’re buying five cells, it’s like buying a car–you can’t just walk in and be done with it.  Even though we mostly knew what we wanted, Wednesday evening it took us three hours. The saleswoman laughed a bit ruefully when I gave out, gave up, plunked down and pulled out my knitting.

Richard had great fun later swiping his new phone at the barcode on a Safeway receipt and having it tell him where all the most-local sources were for that pumpkin can and what their prices were, telling me that his friend had written that Droid app.  Cool!

I got an LG env Touch, plenty for me. And I can now plug my hearing aids into my phone! I have always had to turn on the speakerphone and hold it (and hold it and HOLD it) right up at my ear.  I will actually be able to have a private conversation now?  And have much better sound quality from the phone itself, apart from the hearing aids?  This is going to be quite nice.

I told Richard I really didn’t need him to buy me any more birthday presents, we’d shot our wad.  Dirt. I need dirt. Dad sent me more amaryllis bulbs, Richard bought me a few too  (yay! Thank you!) and I just need some potting soil and a few pots.  I’m simple to please. (Wait–don’t look at that Touch when I say that…)

I’ll see Sunday if he agreed with me.

Crazy-busy trying to do everything that needs to be done before our own guests might or might not arrive, but first, for Carol, who would really appreciate this, I present: Fingernails on Friday!  Heh.

Yesterday, after part of our kids’ old bunk bed got picked up as a nice wooden bedframe for someone else, the last piece to go out the door, I was reminiscing to my daughter about the bunk beds we had in our family when I was a kid.

There were two, identical, one in the boys’ room and one in the younger girls’ room (meaning mine.)  There was the bedframe, and then there were wooden slats (not that those guitar necks reminded me of them or anything), connected by a fabric connector piece to either side, like sets of thick Venetian blinds running the length under the mattresses.

Our older brother, when he got mad, would run down the stairs to their room, lie on his lower bunk, and kick upwards at those slats.

Which is why one night Bryan rolled over in his sleep and innocently fell down on his big brother who was out cold below him.  Justice was served.

…That’s the thing about sisters, they tell tales on you all your life, you can never get away from it. Heh.

SO.  (Ahem.)

Bryan was at a show last week, selling his handmade guitars, and I just wanted to show him off a bit. Said the justifiably very proud older sister. He does *nice* work.

Nobody told the British Mormon missionary, carving his first pumpkin, that you’re supposed to cut the top off going at an angle so it won’t fall in on itself when you’re done–so his jack o’lantern ended up with a hat on its bald head, a pumpkin with a costume.  (And he did an impressive job making an expressive face, but I don’t have a picture–you’ll just have to take it on faith.)

The hubby bought candy. So did I. Oops. Total number of small children: about 10. Medium-sized children: 1.  “Take some more” can only be repeated so many times and be gotten away with when the child’s mom or dad is standing right there knowing full well what you’re up to: better your fight with yourselves than ours with our kids, was the unspoken smiling conversation.

Where are the towering greedy teenagers in goofy outfits when you need them?

I put Michelle’s jack o’lantern on the back patio afterwards to see, today, if the wild things might take interest. The wild things’ reaction was they weren’t going anywhere near that scarecrow head–we had  a squirrel-free zone and even ground-bird-free zone all the way till this afternoon, till finally one towhee braved that patio. Did I get to see gray squirrels doing the bobbing-apple dive for the seeds or the peanut butter I put inside that pumpkin?  Did I get to videotape baby black squirrels climbing through eyeballs?  No I did not.  Two finally showed up and only one so much as deigned to sniff in poor Jack’s direction. Rejection is brutal.

It didn’t hit me till later that for all but that one older kid, we could have skipped the candy thing entirely and helped Peruvian women feed their children actual and decent food: the handknitted fingerpuppets!   The little ones would have been thrilled! Their fingers could have been costumed year-round!

I AM slow sometimes! Oh well. Now you know what I’m doing next year, and the cash outlay will actually be less.

Except for a small bag of Reese’s. For that one eight-year-old. And maybe (not that I’m admitting it) me.

When someone lists a gallon of milk for sale on Amazon–wait, it gets worse, the price is $69.99–it begs for reviews like this one. Or the person who says get the Kindle version, it’s only ten bucks.  And then, looking under “new and used” there is of course the overpriced collector’s edition going for $2,500.00 plus $4.49 shipping.

Quoting the $1500 version: “Comments: Always fresh. Will never expire. We bring the cow right to your door.”  (But does one tip the cow?)  The $2499 version: “Comments: will hand deliver, then come in and make you a Tiramisu with product in your kitchen.”

Gee, cow can we resist?  After all, feeding our families well is a heifer responsibility.  I wonder if they’ll bring a DVD too so we can watch a moovie while they whip up that tiramisu. And how about a salad on the side with a little ranch dressing.  You hoof to hand it to them, that’s a pretty strong incentive: real food, real local.  It’s a grass-roots moovement!

(LynnM? LauraN?  Or…?  Your turn on the cheesy puns!)

(With thanks to Terry Border at Bent Objects for the heads-up.)

She was so thorough. She went over everything.  *Everything.*  For an hour.  She thought of things to ask that I didn’t think to mention.  When she was unsure of something, she went to go ask the woman she described as her mentor, and she was passionate about her work and about taking care of people in emergencies.  This wasn’t just a job, this was important to her.  I was really, really impressed.

It was time for renewing my MedicAlert membership and I hadn’t gotten around to it:  I never wear the necklace, the engravings on it are way out of date, I’m doing well and not worrying about it anymore, and, eh, I’d let it slide.

So they called to ask if I wanted to renew?

A few things have happened in the last year, actually, yes…  My stars, they even had a code for “allergic to Hollister brand stoma paste” to check off.

Mindful of my dislike of the too-long chain and the too-big emblem on that necklace, I asked for not only a bracelet to replace it, but a really small one. Sure, no problem.  Measure your wrist, we’ll add so much for the closure.

I want a little extra give to it.

Oh, no, that half inch closure is plenty.

I want a little extra to mine.

Oh, no, really, this is the way you want to go.

It came today. It had been measured to the larger emblem I didn’t buy and turned out just slightly shorter, with the closure, than my wrist measurement. And I laughed: not perfect after all! Oh, but she’d been SO close…

(This is my personal endorsement of MedicAlert. It’s a good idea and a good organization. If you need it, do it.  But don’t get the necklace if you won’t wear it because you like wearing your own necklaces like I do. I’d stayed away from the bracelet because I was afraid it might fall into my knitting and snag it. I looked around at Knit Night and noticed, for the first time, the wrists with MedicAlert bracelets on them–three, I think it was. I guess it must work out after all?

I’ll find out after my new wrist chain arrives.)

Okay, that phrase dates me.  But boy does it fit: Lost In Space. I’m writing this for the sake of the million other people who own one of these in case they haven’t heard yet.

Seven years ago, my husband’s co-worker stood in line on University Avenue in Palo Alto to be one of the first when the doors opened to buy the hottest new gadget: a cell phone that actually did web browsing, email, IM, calendar and calculator functions, and even had a camera.  This was unheard of.  He brought his prize into work to show off, with the upshot that my husband stood in line the second day the thing was out, after some discussion with me, and proudly brought one home too.

“You bought that for me, didn’t you.” It was not a question.

Well, no, not really…

“You’re going back to buy one for me, aren’t you.” Still not a question.  Now, normally I don’t aspire to owning electronics, I really don’t. But a phone where someone could reach me where I didn’t have to hear it?! Honey, that was mine.

And it turned out to be a really good idea for both of us to have one, of course, because that way he could reach me from wherever he might be without having to have a computer at hand.

We went back together.  What was really amusing was when the clerk handed me the box with mine in it: there were two young adults photo’d on it, Having Fun!

It was a ‘you know you live in Silicon Valley when…’ moment. I had a few years previously sat next to the mother of one of those two at his and my daughter’s high school graduation and had told the woman what a nice kid she had.

And the reason I mention all this. Those phones are Sidekicks. We still have them. (I’m on my second, Richard’s on his third; we’ve dropped them enough times, etc etc.) T-Mobile sells them; Danger manufactures them.

One of the selling points was always that all the information on your phone, your contacts, your emails, etc etc, is sustained offsite as well as in your phone, so that if you ever lose the thing, you haven’t lost all your information, it’s right there online ready to be tapped into again.  Again, this was revolutionary at the time.

Danger sold out to Microsoft recently. Microsoft, whether as an act of deliberate sabotage or complete incompetence and indifference, did not support what it had just bought, and the end result is that all that online backup has suddenly and utterly vanished. If your phone battery dies before you recharge it, if you reboot your phone as their service people were completely wrong in advising when people first started having problems, EVER (or till further notice, as they frantically try to undo what they did)–poof: everything in your phone is gone.  All your contacts information, sorry, you don’t have it anymore. It’s gone.

My stars.  No more forgetting I’ve left my phone in my purse and not recharging it overnight. I can’t remember my own parents’ new phone number without that thing.

I guess the good part is, if we wanted I-Phones now instead, well, our contract’s been broken by them and we can leave without penalty.

But by golly I’m a bit antsy about my info. Enough to go blog about it to warn others with Sidekicks.

(Oh, and this shot is just to show that the leaves here are trying their best to turn while it’s actually Fall.)

Just a quick note to my little sister (whose house is thankfully a good ways uphill) and everybody else in the Atlanta area: my prayers are with you.  To Chuck, who’s at the Shepherd Center there, you, too.

But I did all that, I’m done with all that, months and months of that, just, no! No more of this too tired to walk across the house nonsense.  Nonono.

Okay, whine over.  This is temporary, this is the easy stuff, it’ll be over in days.  My apologies to the Purlescencers I exposed–Thursday night I felt peachy-fine.

Wednesday I had had a follow-up at Stanford because my feral immune system seemed to be revving up against what was left of my dissolvable stitches and I wanted it checked out; I’m not supposed to start bleeding again now. (None today, finally.) But if I’m allergic to that suture material they needed to know.

The new Cancer Center, which is where my surgeons work, has waiting rooms that are quite small and partitioned off from each other, I imagine as a way of cutting down passing germs between immunosuppressed patients.

And so the man who came into Section A clearly feeling miserable had nowhere to sit but quite close to me.   (Dude.  Three words: face mask, reschedule.)  Friday I woke up with the flu.

I took that picture yesterday of the knitting I’d gotten done up till Thursday night partly as a way to try to entice myself to do some more–go, feel productive, work with stuff you love, go!  And then I went back to bed.

Today I might manage it.

Alison is too out of it to post tonight. As one of the children said, “Another part bit the dust” I just left her side and she is pretty beat up. Believe it or not but she is frowning while she drifting in and out of it. The anesthesia knocked out her already bad hearing, but that seems to be improving slowly. They are trying to get her pain under control. She does not remember much of the day. They were happy with how it went. Maybe in a few days she will be, but not right now. Don’t expect much for a few days as she needs to recover. I will show her comments tomorrow if she is up to it.

One blocked Monterey scarf, here you go. The patterns didn’t line up together with the yoke-to-body increase row missing, so it took some playing with. I’ll post later how I did it.

Today, I had to drop some files off for the surgeon and found myself coming back via the main road into Stanford for the first time in months.

So.  Here’s a link to an older picture to give you an idea of what the area has always looked like, give or take a few trimmed-off dead fronds; the view is an announcement that You Have Arrived  at Stanford University.

I didn’t have my camera this afternoon, and even if I had there was no place to pull over to use it.   But my stars!  The trees!

I thought, okay, I can see doing that. Maybe.  Under duress.  We used to have a date palm and one of our kids fell into it and had to go to the plastic surgeon’s–the fronds are as sharp as sewing-machine needles and the trunks are nothing you’d much want to touch either if you didn’t have to. Drunk students? Did someone sue the University?  Why did they do this?

Poodle cuts.  They gave the palm trees poodle cuts.  Shaved them smooth as can be all the way up and liposuctioned the trunks into rigid verticality, then turned the crowns into slicked poofs above, leaving the fronds at the top announcing, tadaaah! with their arms thrown out wide. Dig the new haircuts!

Poodle palms.  Huh.  There’s got to be a good reason, but I don’t know it yet.

I never knew which book to turn into *the* book so it never actually got put in one. Yet.  Once I do, that copy probably has to go up on the shelf for admiration purposes only.  The thing waits.

What a difference an s makes.

I know, I know, I butcher the quotation marks thing on my blog all the time.  That’s not entirely pure laziness; I usually only use them when I’m very sure I’m quoting someone verbatim, and given my writer’s ear, I do tend to remember emotionally powerful conversations very well.

But.  I had a job as a copy editor years ago, checking for grammar and spelling and usage back when Spell Checker was not yet written and continuing for awhile after it was; common sense tells you it’s more than just the spelling that gets hashed.  My mother used to giggle a bit at the mental images conjured by every time the Washington Post would talk about a “grizzly accident.” Not a whole lot of big brown bears in downtown DC streets or the freeways nearby.

So it was a combination of obnoxiousness and hopeful helpfulness on my part:  the first time I noted a typo in a Harry Potter book I thought, well, it’s a shame they didn’t catch that when everything else is so well done. Okay.  But when I noted a plot change from one book to a later one due to an errant s, that was just too much, and I noted a second typo as well and wrote it down along with the plot error. Scholastic got a note from me.

Never trust something where you can’t see where it keeps its brain!  In one book, one of the Weasley parents is warning Ginny* that. In a later book, the line is a flashback and a memory–and Mr. Weasley has become Mrs. Weasley.

Or the other way around. The response letter from Scholastic is dated nine years ago, so forgive me for not being sure now.

Either way, their thank you note included a signed bookplate and picture from JK Rowling. I was surprised and delighted when it came; as an author myself now, that bookplate especially means all the more to me now.

I think I’ve answered my own question. I need to go re-read the whole series, find out which book the s error snuck in, and put the plate in that one. No fair skimming ahead to find out.

*Thank you, Diana, got that corrected.  Ginny not Gina (smacking forehead–of course!)  Okay, now, that’s funny!

I’ve been trying all day to think of how to post about today while still following Thumper’s Admonition.

Hmm.  I will say that having raised four teenagers (who are all perfectly lovely adults now), I know that the angrier a person gets over something that is unreasonable, the more you know they know they’re in the wrong.

Stanford blew it.  Today I finally got through to someone with authority in accounting who was as appalled as I was–and gave us her name!  Who acknowledged that yes, I had paid my bill in full and right away, sorry for issuing a duplicate billing instead of the requested receipt, it’s all fixed now.

If ever there was a day I needed a knitting pattern that required a lot of attention to help me take a deep breath, well, I’m glad I had Monterey to work on afterwards. I got to where I’d been going to stop, decided it was still too short, and just kept on knitting.

Richard came home from work and made me laugh. I so much needed that.

I have just one more row calling me (unless I go on again…) and then the castoff.   Hopefully tomorrow I’ll show off the finished shawl.

Translation from yesterday for the hearing-impaired-impaired: “Would you like that warmed up with a little sour cream?”

Wombat was more fun.  Here’s a good link to lots of information about these down-to-earth koala relatives.  They are marsupials, but have the characteristic of rodents in that their teeth grow all their lives.