A potluck picnic in the park.

A family that had recently moved here from Boston.

I asked the wife if by chance she knew Grant…?

YES she knew Grant!!

He’s my cousin.

Then she asked me if I knew Tina?

Yes, she’s my cousin!

We bought her house!

And then, having moved here, they’d sold that house, with the closing being today in fact. I told her that Tina and her husband had moved to take care of her dad. He quietly passed away at home at 101 last year with family by his side.

Then she asked me if I knew Julia? She adored Julie, too, and Julie’s husband had gotten his PhD at Stanford, so maybe we’d met them?

Yes, she’s my oldest cousin’s daughter!

No way!

A bare spot in the yard over here, a small stray struggling plant seeded by the birds in a corner over there in the way of the peach tree I wanted to plant: would I like him to move this over there? (Motioning across the yard.)

Sure!

And now every summer I look forward to watching the hummingbirds darting in and out among the tall mound of flowers, grateful for eyes that could see what could be that I could not.

Richard’s Uncle Bill was laid to rest today at a good old age.

Many decades ago, he really wanted to be a pilot in the Navy but was told he was too tall.

Where there’s a will…

So he had a buddy sit on his shoulders all night long to compress his spine, went in in the morning, got measured at exactly the upper limit, and he was in.

There was a Carolyn Hax chat at the Post today, and I always know I can widen my perspective and come away a little better person for reading her peacemaking.

Or she’ll tell it to you straight when you need to hear it.

A woman wrote in, an avid gardener with pollenizers here, veggies there, an herb garden on the side. They’d bought the house three years ago. Her mother had found out she was terminally ill and so dug up her own sage and thyme bushes and gifted them to her daughter for her new house before she passed.

The writer’s father-in-law hated her yard and was not shy about saying so.

And so while the couple was away on vacation, he paid someone to come over to their house, rip out the front and side yards and replace them with what he thought it ought to look like. Why plant flowers when you can have neatly edged mulch?

She was furious and he was furious at her for not being grateful, after all, he’d spent a lot of money on this.

Carolyn was furious, too. She said taking the woman’s husband up on the offer to replant her things together as much as possible would be putting her marriage first and she said if she were going to offer any advice on this that’s what it would be, but no, she most certainly did not have to apologize to her FIL!

At the end of the chat she said her responses were being slow because she had never had so many people write in in response to a question before–all in defense of that poor gardener grieving her mother and those lost plants and connections.

Former copyeditor that I am, I noticed that pollenizer and pollinator were both used in their conversation.

I had to go check that out.

Pollinator is something that conveys pollen from flower to flower. Pollenizer is a plant that offers pollen, that feeds the bees and the hummingbirds. My Stella cherry is a pollenizer for itself but not for my tart English Morello. Got it.

I mentioned the letter to my husband. My easygoing, always-look-at-both-sides husband.

MOVE, he said with emotion, surprising me. There can be no communication with someone who willfully will not hear you like that.

Move to where he cannot easily reach you to trespass like that ever again?

YES.

That had been my first thought, too.

But then (in our case it was a bad boss, not a relative) 38 years ago, we did exactly that.

Now there’s a word for your next spelling bee.

The Atlantic did a fascinating piece a few years ago that is new to me. I think it’s stuck behind a paywall, but if you can get it to work, it’s here.

They’d discovered twins who were both fraternal and identical–and different genders.

Definitely only one placenta. Definitely looked like a boy and a girl.

Normally, they explained, if two sperm make it to one egg the result has three sets of chromosomes and is nonviable. What they figured happened was that that happened and survived long enough to split into three: the girl, the boy, and a third part that could not grow.

But.

The girl is 90/10 female.

The boy is 53/47 male.

The split wasn’t evenly boy/girl down the middle and both have parts of each other’s DNA.

Biology not only doesn’t always follow the rules, sometimes it plays Calvinball for the exuberance of joy that it can. To life!

He didn’t recognize the song last night, but then, I’m not the voice on the radio singing it from way back when to give him context and I had no idea of the words beyond the chorus. It’s just one of those catchy little tunes that pops up in the brain every decade or two and wants to get you to dance.

So I went and looked it up.

The No No Song, by Ringo Starr. (Me: It IS? Ringo?!)

Pulling out the second stained glass puzzle tonight, I found myself softly singing today’s silly little ear worm.

He didn’t recognize that one, either. So, repeat pattern from *.

Back Off, Boogaloo. By–you guessed it. Ringo Starr.

Which one of his will my brain come up with tomorrow.

He wondered why Ringo was using that word and what it meant.

Okay, Merriam Webster says this, that it’s Latin-inspired 60’s music, Collins says it’s a fast dance of Afro-American origin, of couples not touching while they dance in quick jerky moves (that is definitely our generation!)  and neither one of them says a thing about the group banned by Facebook that Ringo had no way to know would steal and twist that word.

I bet they had no idea who it celebrated. The self-mockery!

But then bullies were meant to be laughed at.

To the folk tune of, Did you ever see a lassie go this way and that?

The following is what you get when someone starts doing puzzles for the first time in her life at 66 after yonder friend Holly says you’ve got to try these.

This one, though, was from apparently a print-on-demand outfit. There is no artsy-fartsiness in the cut, none of the whimsy in, say, her recommended Nautilus puzzles that had me starting out with the best and I didn’t even know it.

Two shapes. With the only modification being the solid line at the edge pieces. It’s a pain to put together, it’s a pain to get them apart. “High-quality wood”? Yes, that’s what cardboard is made of, c’mon.

And it would be great for kids because if you don’t care if the picture you end up with looks like a wild game of 52-pick up, then, hey! If it fits it sits, right?

All that said. He finished it off yesterday (to my relief) while I watered the garden.

It’s pretty. It reminds me of my late cousin John, the only stained-glass artist I ever knew. I like it. I miss him.

And now, typing that out, I understand why I couldn’t make myself take it back apart till tonight.

The news from Texas has been heartrending. Historian Heather Cox Richardson says the National Weather Service did publish flash flood warnings, but the head of Kerr County said the warning systems that would have conveyed that locally were not in place because they had decided that cost too much.

Man.

My husband got his ham radio license after 24 hours of not being able to reach his aunt’s family very close to the epicenter of the big 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (they were okay but their house had stories to tell) and from there he did emergency communications volunteering with the city, the county, and the Red Cross.

I said in agony over the lost campers in Texas, Don’t they have reverse-911 there!

And then went, Wait. Do they?

Which got him reminiscing. He knew all the people who started that. It began with an idea: the city had topography maps and it had 24 fax machines. What if… So they kluged up a system where if there was a risk of flooding, the homes in the lowest elevations could get a warning phone call by having a switch that disconnected all incoming faxes, because that’s not the priority in an emergency, and took over the faxes’ phone lines to call out to those homes with a pre-recorded message.

Twenty-four numbers at a time. That’s all.

But then you have the computer call 24 more, and 24 more…

That concept got tested pretty quickly thereafter: we had our 100 year flood in 1998. There were kids boogie-boarding down our street. There was the friend who saw his koi from his back yard swim past his feet in the front yard to go live happily ever after in the Bay (good luck). The elementary school principal hauled a canoe out and got himself in the paper paddling across the playground just for fun but there really wasn’t much water there. Might have drowned a few gophers, though.

There was one notable fire department rescue operation where someone thought his big pickup could easily do that puddle and tried to drive through the steep railroad underpass. Oops.

So anyway. Instantly it became: how do we make it so we can reach everybody? In time? Can we do it all at once?

Well let’s see: the Feds had passed a law requiring the phone companies to provide the phone number to every address for 911 calls so that the first responders could know where to go no matter how much information the caller was able to give them. Early cell phones weren’t covered. The Feds made them cover them, too.

That database existed. How about if you invert it?

You could draw a circle on the map and say, everything in this boundary, or you could say everybody in the city.

And thus they created the reverse-911 system that lets you know there’s an emergency.

The surrounding cities thought this was great and copied us.

The county thought this was great and copied us.

And it took off from there.

I thought by now everybody had it. I cannot for the life of me imagine why on earth any municipality wouldn’t.

I got the nicest thank you note yesterday from a waitress.

While we were traveling, we invited some relatives out to dinner, and after asking them where they’d like to go since they knew the area and we didn’t, they said, Well, are we talking Olive Garden or–?

The –? won out. We hadn’t seen his sister in awhile and as my father used to say, How many meals do you eat in your life? Now, how many do you remember?

The meal itself was very good, the waitress, perfect.

It wasn’t till after we flew home and I was working on the bills that something seemed off. Found the receipt.

The math didn’t math at all. The intention had been good but someone had been a little too tired to think straight.

We had to make it right.

At least I had her first name on that receipt, and so I sent a check to, simply, FirstName, c/o that restaurant, asking them to please give her the tip amount she should have gotten and apologizing profusely to her.

A side note here: it helped greatly in those first moments that Richard had entered the restaurant’s name and address into his Waze app to help us find the place after his sister had named it, even though she knew perfectly well how to get there–there it was in his phone’s memory. Oh wait, it was on the bill, too. Of course.

There was a card in the mail from a name I didn’t recognize and as I opened it up and read that sweet note I almost cried. What a lovely, lovely young woman. I wish her all the best in all that life brings her from here on out.

Everything about making your own chocolate is messy. Towards the end there he looked at the front of my shirt in some amazement.

That’s why I put on an old one, hon!

And it is so worth it.

It’s a good thing it makes so much: once you’ve stirred that thick liquid nonstop while holding the bowl for 15-30 minutes in cool water and then again in warm to lower and re-raise the temp to get the right crystalline structure to try to get that perfect shiny tempered snap while not letting any water touch the inside whatsoeverdon’tyoudare, then an hour-plus of cleaning up the equipment including spraying a connected pair of granite rollers with hot water while holding them above the sink for way too long… (But you only do that after you’ve paper toweled all the chocolate off that you possibly can for the sake of the plumbing.)

You love that you got it done. But you really don’t feel like starting the next batch that very day, even if the machine claims you can get right to making your husband’s preference of 80% dark to mine of ~76%.

She who does the math rules the superfine sugar box. More or less.

(Parchment paper under the molds. Always. To create samples not spills.)

Last year a drop of water got into the melanger while it was just getting going: I had done the usual step of first running the cacao nibs through the Cuisinart, not realizing that its lid wasn’t entirely dry from the dishwasher. It was the second batch of pure cacao crumbs that touched it.

The chocolate in the machine instantly seized into a hard rock and jammed the motor. I leaped to turn it off fast.

I gouged and scraped the stuff out of there and set it aside. I didn’t know if the machine was toast. I didn’t want to know. It’s an entry level machine for hobbyists that was actually originally for dry lentils, upgraded a bit when the manufacturer found out what it was being used for and trying to match that market–not a more seriously-priced and -engineered one. But at the time we found it, it was all there was out there that we knew of. Plus we could buy it on Amazon points.

After what Congress did to the American people and the rule of law yesterday, after Monday’s little surgery that was so much fun, on the Fourth of July with no fireworks because lives were lost when the vendor’s warehouse blew up this week… I needed to do something, anything, to give myself a break from moping.

I thought I would start in the morning. It was 2:00 when I finally turned on the oven. (No professional cacao bean roaster nor winnower here.) But I got it turned on.

Half a 5 lb bag of cacao nibs got baked and Cuisinarted. (A side note: raw cacao that some swear is a health food? It’s a source of salmonella poisoning. It is typically fermented on trays in the sun, wildlife can walk on it and poop on it, just don’t. Plus the heat greatly brings out the flavor anyway.)

Superfine sugar got calculated.

The melanger turned on. It turned on. It worked.

We added the crumbled nibs slowly, slowly, slowly, taking turns, making sure not to overtax the thing with too many big particles at once. Let it work its way up.

It worked.

It’s working. It’s working! And noisy and there’s a fine spray of crumbs across the counter that no water is going near till this batch is done and poured and safe and man, it smells so good.

Tomorrow we pour it into the molds. The tempering will likely be half- (insert pejorative of your choice here.)

I had been waiting so long to find out that we could still do this, knowing how good all this could be again. And we can.

A grocery run.

A young couple with a baby girl of about 15 months, absolutely adorable. Proud grandparents. Ukrainian, was my guess, along with the dad who was clearly their son, while the mother of the baby looked to have Californian ancestors going way back.

Sometimes I see too late where my deafness trips me up: it wouldn’t occur to me to begin speaking from behind someone or where we weren’t directly facing each other and expect to be paid the least attention to because I wouldn’t hear someone speaking behind me. And so, I brushed the older woman ever so slightly on the arm to get her attention and handed her a particularly cute finger puppet. Whoever the knitter in Peru was, she put a lot of time and color into that bright bird.

“I’m a grandma too,” I smiled, offering it to her–

–while her face and body froze in abject horrified fear. Which did at least lessen to uncertainty when she saw the little toy and then followed my glance towards her beautiful granddaughter.

“Happy Birthday,” I added, still smiling, and got out of their way quickly to make it clear I wasn’t trying to demand anything whatsoever of them.

Her daughter-in-law translated.

Ohhh…!

Next time I glanced their way they were so much more relaxed than even before I’d approached them: smiling, laughing, enjoying this precious time together while the little one is so little, and oh so much better than that initial moment.

Which was such a relief.

And I got to see how much the daughter-in-law rejoiced over being able to make everything okay for her mother-in-law.

They will always have that.

There’s a book club being put together by a friend who moved here in the last year.

She announced what the first book was going to be, so of course I ran and looked it up.

Twenty-four hours later and here it is: “By the Second Spring: seven lives and one year of the war in Ukraine,” by an American who had grown up there and has a PhD in history. You know I couldn’t pass that one up.

The first thing I did was to look for a list of chapters, hoping for names, but right after the title page there it was, a list of them. I knew there wouldn’t be someone I knew–but you just never know… (Thinking in particular of the gerdan artist who trusted me with photos of the shelling damage to her home inside and out and whose town has now been evacuated.)

I didn’t want to start reading yet. Not at this time of day. I didn’t want nightmares tonight; I wanted time after the first dose of the book to sift through my emotions and make peace with what I would encounter inside.

And yet.

I opened to a random page.

There were two mug shots and a poem.

Quoted in part:

Oh human, I cannot believe your life is

just about looking into my cell?

you stand in my heavy sorrow, my aching heart is filled with your misfortune

because you are just twice as sad as I am.

I have myself, and you are just a shadow

I am the good, you are the dust, decay

we are both prisoners…

I closed the book. Tomorrow I start.

Yesterday two pigeons flew up to the peregrines’ nest ledge, canoodled a bit, and checked out the digs in the box. Heyyyy–nice spot. They came back again today for awhile.

Momma Peregrine showed up a little later, went into the nest box–and put her head down and started sniffing around where those brazen wingrats had dared to trod.

She and her mate had to reclaim their box! And stand on the ledge and show the world just exactly which apex predators own this spot thankyouverymuch.

Their four young are not yet great at this hunting thing so the parents are still making sure they get enough.

And now they know there’s a Doordash delivery just begging to happen.

The misoprostol wasn’t so bad this time–it probably helped that now I knew what to expect?

Note that one Texas newspaper wrote that it is a felony to distribute it in Texas now. That boggles my mind. There are a lot of incumbents there who ought to be charged with practicing medicine without a license.

I have a niece in OBGYN training there and was told a year ago that her colleague didn’t want to learn how to do D&Cs because of abortion. I told my in-laws about accrete, with its 7% fatality rate, where the placenta grows past the uterine wall and bleeds dangerously at and after birth and how a D&C saved the life of someone dear to us two weeks after her baby was happily in her arms.

I had a D&C with a miscarriage years ago at 12 weeks along two weeks after they’d lost the heartbeat. I had no idea at the time that the doctor was risking my getting sepsis by not doing it sooner.

At age 66 I had a D&C as part of today’s procedure to take a closer look for endometrial cancer after all the biopsies and ultrasounds.

I got pretty pictures to take home along with post-op instructions. And the hopeful news so far is that things looked good.