A new-to-me colorway. A doctor appointment a dozen miles up the freeway at rush hour, so best leave quite early because every five minutes later is ten more minutes spent on the road, right?

And that is how I fell in love with knitting all over again today.

So some of the Republicans have been saying loudly that Biden should quit, be 25thed if need be, because clearly his decision not to seek reelection means he’s too old and feeble to continue in office. They’re claiming the Democrats are covering up his decrepitude.

The lies get tiresome, don’t they. But hear me out on why they’re pushing that.

It’s because if Biden did leave now, Harris would be President and would need to pick a vice president. Which both the House and the Senate would then have to approve by simple majority vote, per section 2 of the 25th Amendment.

Mike Johnson would be a single heartbeat away from the Presidency, and Mike Johnson would be the one whose job it would be to call a vote in the House to vote on that VP pick.

Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t think he would McConnell that vote?

A refusal to vote on a nominee should be legally considered a de facto confirmation. Make the members of Congress do their jobs and put their names to their votes. That should be one of the first reforms come January; democracy demands it.

Got so caught up in doing the Two Sides of the Sea puzzle again that the time caught us by surprise. G’night.

Scene: pharmacy. Picking up for the both of us.

Waiting in line, the guy who had pulled in next to my car got out of his black mustang with the vivid yellow duct tape pretending to be painted racing stripes–applied in very careful lines, but the ends looked like they were flapping just ever so much in the wind now–and very cheerfully made a scene asking for the keys to the bathroom. The clerk seemed to recognize him. She smiled. Bless her.

Tall, a little high or a little drunk (hey you stagger too lady writing this what are you talking about) or maybe this was just the way he was, with a vivid yellow wildly printed shirt I took to be of the shiny nylon that was all the rage for about a month when I was fifteen that I’d worked so hard to talk my mom into letting me have. Mine was silver. (And then we Maryland kids were dying in the heat and swore off that particular fashion and blamed it on California, where we decided they didn’t know a thing about humidity and clothes needing to breathe. That shirt and that guilt over not wearing it so as to thank Mom but but but it was so hot! were exactly what got me sworn to natural fabrics. But I digress.)

Eventually he reappeared and ambled around and then got in line behind me.

Meantime, the clerk had found my meds and my husband’s and put them on her side of the counter and said something behind her mask that I told her I couldn’t hear–then, after rummaging around the shelf some more, she disappeared.

I stood there. Our meds sat there. No clerk.

Eventually I heard the guy talking again, but that seemed to be what he liked to do best and I ignored him till he got loud enough to be clear he meant me.

Excuse me, ma’am? Excuse me? Are you picking up your meds?

I told him I was, but I explained I hadn’t been rung up yet so I couldn’t walk off with them, and, *shrug*.

He said something else I didn’t quite get, but he was cheerful and friendly and happily boisterous and entertaining, so, okay, whatever.

I was wearing a vyshyvanka with embroidered flowers on the puffy sleeves and a beaded gerdan with dandelions, so clearly I was a fellow hippy traveler and he was happy to meet me. He was happy to meet anyone. Life was fabulous.

Two clerks came out and went searching together. Turns out an extra med had been declared pick-up-able today  and neither could find it, but the pharmacist said no it’s out there, and the whole thing took so long that there were now a whole bunch of people waiting.

At last they got done and as I turned to leave, Mr. 1970 screaming-yell0w-zonkers shirt told me, Peace out! Have a blessed day! and I wished him one, too.

Getting back in my car, I glanced over at the license plate on his. It seemed to be an area code and then HE double hockey sticks and since when does the DMV let that through–they used to be really strict on such things. But I guess a younger generation is running the show there now. Okay, cool.

Got home, and out of sheer curiosity looked up where that area code referred to.

Richard heard me guffaw hard from the next room and I had to explain.

It was the specific area code assigned to a college campus. Utah State.

You always meet the interesting people, he told me.

I do think he would have won. But passing the torch and letting the next generation shine to the world was absolutely the right thing to do. The Presidency ages one as it is and the telomeres were growing short.

Never since George Washington have we had a President who felt he could win the next election but chose not to run in it for the sake of the country’s well-being. My late Republican Senator Uncle Bob was right: Joseph Biden is a very good man.

I was glad when Kamala Harris ran for California Attorney General, ie finally a statewide office so I could  vote for her, and I have every chance since.

I’m really, really curious who the new VP candidate will be!

Nothing like seeing a breaking news banner with a story of a wildfire near my mom at an hour when it’s too late to call her since she’s far enough away from it anyway that I shouldn’t worry. But how close is that to my aunt. Breathe. Okay, so, this is what I was intending to write about:

We did a Trader Joe’s run. Saturday evening, lots of customers, lots of clerks, busy.

I’d never seen the one at my line before. Clearly she was new; my guess is that she’s a student on a summer job. She was trying to do it well–don’t smash the crushables, bananas go on top–but it didn’t come automatically yet, she had to pay attention to each task, and twice she rearranged an item to make sure it would get home safely.

She did a good job. I didn’t care that she took a little longer than some might. Everybody starts off young and new.

But clearly others had taken it out on her because she looked like if one more person said one more thing she was going to burst into tears. Still, she was gamely trying to greet customers pleasantly, as required, even if she couldn’t quite look at them right then.

Somehow there was nobody in line behind us yet as she handed me the receipt so a moment’s distraction wasn’t going to hurt. I told her, For customers with a crying kid? Or for whatever–happy birthday! as I handed her a hand knit brightly striped toucan finger puppet with a long black beak and crossed eyes.

Oh that’s so cute, she said, in a tone that felt to me like her pain exhaling away into the wind as she examined its tiny details while we wheeled the loaded cart and away.

That, that, I could do.

This one was the ugly duckling: it sprouted last year but a heat wave while we were out of town and that was that. My two inch tree. And yet somehow it lived.

This is also the one that had thrips eating the juices to all its attempts at new growth this spring. I squished them between my fingers every night till none came back and looked at my poor sorry little apricot wannabe and wondered: of the five, why was only that one attacked? Is it sweeter? Or just scrawnier and easier to get at? Does it mean that’s the one I should want to put to ground, does it mean I shouldn’t?

It gave itself hopeful little pep talks all spring but there wasn’t a lot to see.

Then almost suddenly, a month into summer, it has the best form and the most abundant growth of them all. All that stuff it went through, it turns out, pruned and prepped it well. This is really only its first year, and look at that!

Someone is going to love this tree over its lifetime. Might even be me.

The doorbell rang yesterday.

On the other side was a younger woman who was there to ask us a question.

The houses around here were built in the 1950s with radiant heat, and time and several mild and one big earthquake later, those inefficient old systems are falling apart. People who grew up with it have told me they love it and I’ve long wondered how it would be to wake up to a warm floor, and we even once looked into taking our house back to it. We were quickly talked out of it. It would require jackhammering the entire length of the house to replace the pipes under the slab.

Doesn’t every foundation need weak points in a quake?

So. The woman and her husband had just bought a house in the next block. They needed to replace the heat. They could see that we have an HVAC unit on our roof and wanted to know, were we happy with it?

She clearly had a lot riding on our answer: she wanted what we have, very much. Her husband was convinced it would make the house shake every time it came on.

The thought had never occurred to me. Yeah, you can hear it running quietly in the background, sure. But shaking the house? No.

Richard chimed in.

I told her how a dual unit had been nearly the same price as a simple furnace, so that for $100 we got whole-house air conditioning, and you can’t do that with radiant heat. I gave her Joe Lerma’s name at A-Z Techs Mechanical and said, Joe really knows his stuff, he’s good, his prices are good, and he’s very honest. I think you’d be very happy with him; we have been. We found him when he was recommended by the roofing company.

She was tapping into her phone and his name and number were already there. Got it.

She left looking hopeful. You could just see her telling her husband, this being right after a record-breaking heat wave: Air conditioning, too!

I’m really hoping for them.

They came. They took me to the other side of the fence. They saw. I saw. They said Why isn’t there a marked line where the fence should actually be? Measuring from stakes is not how it’s done.

And so we continue.

Meantime, in proof that yellow visually dominates any colorway it touches, this is what I ordered awhile back. Merino/silk/cashmere.

And this vivid little thing for I have no idea who is what it’s turning into. I had to go look for the original picture because it’s so, um, different.

Thumper’s Admonition says someone out there will love it. Intuition says this was the time when it was supposed to come to be so keep going, but that’s all I know so far.

This lady’s got a listing to write and a sale to make and I am in the way.

Thus the realtor for next door will meet with me and her fencing guy tomorrow about those three feet. Three weeks for a guy I found? Doubtful.

Moral of the story, part two: good realtors know their contractors and the contractors know to be available for them.

And now, just for fun and because I’ve been trying to grok the thing. Why did someone make a basketweaving ceiling? Sound absorption? Hide a roof leak? (Nahhh.) Couldn’t bear to toss the woodworking scraps from a project and finally found a big enough place to stash them?

Three FEET?!! I exclaimed at the guy.

He grinned, nodding, knowing what that meant. Knowing that now yes it was going to be worth it, yes my having called his company was worth it, and he had just justified their $3000 fee. And how.

We replaced the fence some years ago and the neighbor’s redwood and roots were in the way, so the fence company went offside of it a bit and told us and them that and we didn’t love it but at that point it’s not like you can tell them to take their lumber back and go home.

All these years we thought the difference was at most a foot at the front and we just shrugged it off. What if it were even less. Why bother. I almost didn’t call the surveyor, and in fact put it off for weeks till the coming sale of that house made a deadline I couldn’t resist: one way or another, at long last we had to know.

I’d thought that side of the yard felt a little closed in after that installation because of the missing trees that had had to be cleared out because they’d grown into the old fence and were pushing it down.

No. It was because they’d moved that line far closer to us than they’d needed to and then angled it so that even at the back of the yard it was still off by a foot taken away from us. There was no need for that.

One could cite squatter’s rights laws. Except it wasn’t ignored and permission for it to remain that way was never granted. The late owners knew about it (even if not to that degree), discussed it with us, and always intended to do right by us and split the cost on fixing it once the redwood was gone, but by then they both had cancer and there were more important things to deal with and it’s really easy to not spend lots of money over potentially not much.

I was blown off when I tried to get surveyor quotes by three companies who told me, On one side of one house? Pffft, we don’t do small jobs.

I don’t know if it was that I name-dropped the realtor who’d recommended them but these guys came right out. And they were absolutely wonderful people. And man were they worth every penny.

My sour cherry and pomegranate are about to get a lot more sunshine and the mango won’t mind, either.

The kicker is that the neighbors added an ADU for caretakers, which they ended up very much using and was a good thing–but if that fence had been where it was supposed to have been, it probably would have been too close for that ADU to have gotten approval.

So I’m actually mostly glad we didn’t get this fixed sooner.

Now to find the right fencing company. I’ve been looking up a bunch but you know? I bet that realtor’s got some real good names.

His mom moved here just this week. Everything is new. He’s new. He wasn’t walking yet, but he could crawl under chairs and, as he got more sure of himself in this room he’d never been in before with faces he’d never seen before, he could cruise upright along them too if he felt like it and if there was something to grab onto.

Took him awhile to decide to include me in on that, but a finger was all he needed and mine would do; he almost had this walking thing down.

It wasn’t just the smiles and the peekaboo games that drew him in my direction. It was the stick.

And not just any stick. Look at that. It was smooth and had a curve at one end and it didn’t weigh too much, either, it was just right for dragging around, maybe creating your own steady finger to walk by? He didn’t know, but he was determined to find out.

Only, something kept thwarting him. Why was this so hard. Why was that lady’s foot on the other end? (Because she had seen how babies can bash innocents around them with the ends of that thing, that’s why, kiddo, and because since I only just met your mom I want to stay on good terms.)

I’m not entirely sure why babies are enamored with canes, but they are absolutely compelling to them.

He had his fingers around the top of mine and looked up to see my reaction and I was smiling, even if I wasn’t abetting him. Yup you’re right, kiddo. Canes are cool.

And with that we were friends.

I got a breaking news email right as it was happening, and could not not look. It took me straight back to Reagan’s face in pain and hand in the air as the Secret Service gave their all to protect him from the crazy who had just shot him.

I wish harm on no one. Ever. It hurt to see him hurt.

My attempt at prayer, though, could only be an honest, Lord, I…I’m… so sorry that I’m having a really hard time praying for him because I know he would only twist it towards evil intentions if he could and I know what he intends to do to innocent people (again–how many years did those little kids live in metal cages thinking their mothers had abandoned them? While depriving each side of information of where the other had been taken? And that’s not even starting on the whole January 6 and dead cops thing and the vice president who won’t run with him again because he, y’know, tried to kill him), so I’m just going to leave it up to You. You know what’s best for him and for the whole country, and I’m asking for You to bless all of us in this horrific moment and especially the critically hurt and the families of the dead. Forgive me my hesitancy. I know that even that man is one of Your children. I’m trying. Thank You for being better than me.

Maybe we’ll finally now vote out the people who voted to allow the convicted, the violent, the underage, and the mentally ill to have war-level weaponry. Maybe we can fund taking care of the mentally ill again. Maybe we can value the life of a child above a gun. Maybe we can pass the bill sponsored by Senators Hinreich and King to allow no sale nor gifting of any automatic-type weapon from here on out: let the current owner register it, have it as long as they’re in good standing with the law, and have it die along with them someday.

And then I checked the updates: every single Democrat expressed their horror and their prayers for Trump’s well-being and safety, Biden, Pelosi, Harris, Obama, on down to the state level. Every single one. Their prayers. They are better than I, and it humbles me.

So it comes down to, yes I want his well-being and safety, too–and I want the country’s. And eventually I was able to offer up a real one of my own.

Nearly every Republican the reporters talked to tried to somehow blame Trump’s opponent for the thing that Biden was most horrified by, to use the shootings as a political tool towards power for their own, to blame blame blame and falsely accuse of the most vile accusations.

And that level of gaslighting is how we ended up here in the first place.

Saw my longtime rheumatologist a few days ago for the first time in two years. He ordered a CBC (complete blood count) to check on things.

I got a note back, and you could just hear the wonder in his voice as he typed out the words:

After all these years, for the first time, the ANA is negative.

That would be anti-nuclear antibodies, ie antibodies to the nuclei of my own cells, a hallmark of lupus. That doesn’t mean I’m cured. My eyes are fiercely reactive to the summer sun.

But some inner part of me took a deep breath and, surely echoing my doctor as he stared at that computer screen in delighted disbelief, at long, long last, exhaled.

—

(Edited to add, my Crohn’s was, at biopsy, always a subset of the lupus, so I think we’re two for one on this.)

Went with a friend to Andy’s Orchard today (ripe peaches! Cherries! Apricots!) and saw this posted at the checkout.

I kept reading that “any sale is dependent on future events that may not occur for quite awhile” as meaning from Andy, Over my dead body.

After I got home, another friend said he’d told her they’re thinking 3-7 years.

The clerk who gave me permission to snap that picture found herself with a new Whales Road colorway hat; it had just felt like the right time to bring her something I’d knit. I figured the heat wave wouldn’t last forever.

But man, I so much want Andy and his orchard to.