To paraphrase Robert Frost via capital letters: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ICE… I got a tiny taste today of how it must be like right now.

The motion sensor set off a chime to alert that someone was at the door.

I saw someone’s rear end bent over right in front of its side window and waited for the person to move far enough away that I could move faster than they could to shut and lock it again if I needed to. As women do.

He’d placed a political flier. The candidate had a Chinese name and I’m guessing the, it turned out, tiny elderly man was a relative.

I am greatly shamed by the fact that the majority of white women, it has been reported, voted for the adjudicated racist rapist and I saw the result of their choice in that man’s face as my door opened and he saw mine: he was suddenly terrified.

Then he saw the welcoming smile on my face.

I picked up the flier and he took a step closer. He told me a little about the candidate. He clearly did not begin this life as a speaker of English and I thanked him for participating in the democratic process.

Such a mixture of pride and relief in his countenance as we waved each other warmly on in our day.

My heart broke for him. And I’m so glad he was willing to risk it all to help his fellow Americans learn about the candidate he was so proud of.

I am so loving this time with my daughter home.

We outtalked the captions app.

We went from dinner to reorganizing the kitchen together. My left hearing aid that was deemed last week to be weakening has lost noticeably more oomph since then so I was using the phone to catch about half the words, using the unlimited Basic version of Live Transcribe.

The app suddenly stopped.

I did not know there were any kind of time limits on the Basic–Pro, yes, but doesn’t unlimited mean unlimited? Huh. I stopped it, erased the previous bit (as I always do) and then started it up again. No problem, onward!

Family lore is that back when it was impossible to own a phone, you could only rent one forever courtesy of the original Ma Bell monopoly, my aunt called a repairman because hers had stopped working.

The guy came and checked it out and said to my aunt in disbelief, You wore out the phone! This doesn’t happen! But you did–you broke the phone. You wore it out!

Those of us who knew her got a good chuckle out of that one.

I can just see my late Aunt Rosemary laughing over my app today, ready to tell the story. Finally, she has some competition.

A true sign of Equinox: the gray tail flapping wildly as a squirrel tries to avoid the thorns among the fading leaves while trying to get at a deep pink ripening pomegranate.

You can’t just pull one off the tree like an apple: if you want to take the whole thing it requires pruning shears, preferably sharp.

Or a good long session with one’s teeth if that’s your preference.

It didn’t take much interruption to make it decide it wasn’t worth it.

Yet.

I was sent (thank you!) a video made yesterday on Iceland’s volcanic fissures. The land in that area is rising and they know more is coming and all you can do is all you can do.

We in this area worry both too much and not enough at all about earthquakes but it made me realize I’ve never had to worry about massive liquid fire blasting out in fountains from under my feet or flowing down our street. I idly wondered how much snow would it take to cool it down just faster enough. (Uh…)

It made me stop and notice: it is the cooling last evening of summer. There was an inquisitive bunny right up at the back door who pretended to be afraid (yeah, not at that pace you aren’t) while I pretended he wasn’t welcome because he really had to go back to the dog side of the fence because my pomegranates are starting to droop to the ground the way they do as they get heavy and ripe and I want some of that juice shared with us this year.

The world is beautiful out there.

Hey, I said to her, are you still interested in that Anya apricot seedling? That one planted this spring that was promised to someone else. They just finally decided they want it but they just don’t have the room nor the sun for it, so if you still do, it’s yours.

She was ecstatic!

Alright then, we just need to get it over to you. Wonderful!

So much better of a day.

We had planned for two weeks to go to Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco this morning, but we all decided not to push my luck. I figure that just means we still get to look forward to it.

I put in a note to my family practitioner noting that I hadn’t been able to schedule the GI appointment to check on my Crohn’s till November (and that was in August) and maybe that should be moved up a bit? After that barfing and bleeding? I figured they’ll listen to her long before they will me. I want to stomp on this in the beginning stages and there are new meds out there to try.

The problem is that the doctors I’ve seen before have retired or left so I’m officially a New Patient trying to squeeze in.

He had to take more of the prep stuff at 2:30 a.m. per the instructions. And then neither of us got any sleep before his 6:30 a.m. appointment.

The great news was things looked great.

I got my hearing aids reprogrammed in the late afternoon.

We ate dinner and then it hit. I don’t think I have an appendix anymore, but if I do that might be it.

And typing this is all the sitting up I’m going to do for now.

Edited to add in the morning: I was able to get some fluids down after dinner didn’t stay there, then slept for 11 hours. I’m doing much better now.

I don’t think I’ve bought any such thing since I last had a small child with an upset stomach–I had to find a Safeway employee to help me find the stuff.

They tried to feed it to me when I was in the hospital till I told an orderly who was tasked with delivering it five times a day that “I would have to be dying to eat that stuff. And I’m not dying anymore.”

The guy laughed and I never saw him nor it again.

So. No red. No blue. No orange.

Well at least at that store that left a single option. Food-wise, lemon jello and only lemon jello all day, poor guy.

His last colonoscopy, with a doctor who has since retired, the redhead gene won out and he started chatting up the doctor with questions about the cool stuff he was seeing on the screen because the anesthesia was not doing its job.

I am told that got fixed rather fast.

So I guess tomorrow we find out if the new doctor read his chart?

I went in yesterday to get my five-year-old hearing aids cleaned and checked out.

Each one has two microphones: behind and inside the ear. Turns out the inner one on the left was slowly dying.

Well, now I knew why I’d made that appointment, good to know. They ordered a new one made and told me to come back in three weeks when it gets in.

It wasn’t till I got home and had conversations with family that I knew I should be able to hear in the rooms we were standing in that I went, Wait. That’s not a left-aid thing only, something’s way off. Everything sounded tinny and quite faint.

I sent them a note: when they were testing the programming, could it be that they didn’t get them set back to the correct ones?

Yes it could. They were apologetic and set me up to come back; the last slot on Friday was the earliest they could squeeze me in.

I find myself realizing just how good these aids normally are and what a difference they usually make. It’s been an interesting lesson in appreciation.

And man, I wish I knew where I carefully put my old set so I wouldn’t lose them as backups. (No worries, Mom: the ones I had my audiologist set up for Dad was the previous-previous pair.)

The photo reminds me of the Berryessa Glory Hole last year (scroll down for photos) when the water in the dam got high enough:

Remind me never to punch a hole through a salt mine cavern. Especially not one with a 1300-acre lake above it.

The miracle is that everybody survived.

Edited to add, Wikipedia has more: 40′ geysers, the disappeared barges that popped back up, the lake going from 10′ deep freshwater to 200′ deep saltwater. Fun times.

So at that dinner last night.

An improved caption app on my phone means I can actually follow a conversation in a less than quiet environment. It wasn’t till today that I realized that she wasn’t expecting that. I don’t think she would have said this in front of me if she had.

There was an elderly woman and she was not talking directly to me when she lamented that (and it sounded like an out-of-context talking point straight from her preferred vulpine network) “A thousand churches in the US have been shut down and taken over as mosques. It’s the fall of civilization.”

The other person shrugged a yeah, okay, whatever, hon, and the subject was dropped.

I wanted to say, So people are still going to church (let’s not quibble over the cultural words for such), still looking for community, still trying to live up to their religions by holding themselves accountable before their fellow man simply by showing up to be reminded of their duty towards their fellow man and belief in G_d together. Cool.

Except that I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me in both senses of the word if I tried.

But I did find a moment later to tell her that a friend of mine had been at university in the US when the Shah fell, and she knew if she went back she’d be perceived as an American and in great danger. So she married a man in the same boat and they raised their family here.

When their daughter got engaged the dad made a point that he did not want her to do the American thing of living together out of wedlock. The family wanted to throw a big wedding for her. He wanted her to wait.

Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is very big on the waiting for marriage thing, I knew that that would mean something to my friend and maybe open her eyes a little.

To honor her parents, the couple chose to slip off to the courthouse and quietly get married there first so that they would be doing it right before G_d, or at the very least her parents’ perception of such: the commitment to each other comes first.

Maybe I got through a little bit. She seemed glad to hear of it.

I was talking to a friend at a dinner this evening; he’s a lawyer and had this to share:

A doctor, an engineer, and a lawyer were each claiming that theirs was the oldest profession.

The doctor: Well, Eve was made from Adam’s rib–clearly, that was quite the medical intervention.

The engineer: Genesis says that the earth, the sky, the day, the night, everything was created from chaos. So clearly it was a feat of engineering.

The lawyer, triumphantly: Chaos?

We waited till I seemed to be over my germ and then found that we could make a group appointment at CVS for the flu and covid vaccines. Our Costco didn’t have the new covid in stock, CVS could offer pretty much instant gratification.

Woke up this morning feeling like, well, that was the easiest one yet. Five stars. Highly recommend.

And yeah, I missed the last six-month covid booster and paid dearly for it. Not going to miss it again.

My son’s high school class had a cross-country field trip planned: there’s nothing like learning about your country’s history right there where it’s being made and on display.

Then suddenly all planes were grounded everywhere across the US. And when they were allowed to start flying again, nobody knew: were there more hijackers waiting for us to relax our guard? Was it even appropriate to go? Should they risk it?

The trip was called off. Then back on, as differing opinions chimed in. Finally the school put it to the parents and the kids: did they think they should still go? Nobody would be penalized in any way if they didn’t want to nor if the parents felt they could not put their kids in that peril so soon after.

In the end, nearly every kid did go.

Ours came home and said, Our bus took us past the Pentagon. We saw the gaping hole. There was still smoke coming out of it. We saw it. (I remember the ‘how do you even take in the reality of this’ look on his face.) We saw it.

One of the things that sold me on this house years ago was the gloriously tropical-looking Monstera plant growing out of a a cut-out in the back patio. Huge!

What I found out today, after wondering if the sudden high heat wave of the last few days is why it’s suddenly flowering again, is that the fruit is actually edible. Who knew?

But–carefully. If you get the husk off it’s supposed to look vaguely corn on the cob-ish, with individual kernels in rectangles that ripen gradually from one end of the stalk to the other. Over maybe as much as a week.

You have to only eat the perfectly ripe ones, the kernels that fall into your hand, there has to be no pressure towards pulling them off: the rest have oxalic acid to the point of being dangerous.

Um, you know, in our world of food, we are not lacking for choices…

I watched a video of a guy trying one out trying to describe the flavors, like, a little pineapple, a little maybe strawberry–emphasis on little. Then he said, But my mouth’s starting to burn and there’s really not all that much flavor and I think I’ll stop now.

I don’t think I’ll harvest mine. I think it’s cool looking and I like it there.