I will have to wear one every time. That will not be hard.

I went back to the audiologist’s for an adjustment to stop the new mic from feeding back, and I was surprised at the reception as I walked in the door: as if the three women at the desk had been eagerly waiting for me. Maybe they had.

Or my necklace, anyway. A Yes! that I had one on, and a murmur to the effect of, See, this is what I was talking about!

One was the woman who’d been so taken with my seashore gerdan that she wanted the information in writing as to where to find such a thing, with supporting Ukraine making it feel absolutely compelling to her. She’d been the only employee in that waiting room last time.

And so today I wore one I was sure she would like. Pictures are here, but they don’t show the brilliance of the gold and caramel beads of the phoenix rising to the sun that is a sunflower. I happily took this one off too for them to see what it felt and hefted like as well as looked like.

Unlike my seashore one, this artist will repeat a design. FineBeadsJewellery, I said, because she doesn’t know how to spell in English. (Or maybe the translation app couldn’t.)

Oh, we’ll find it! was the emphatic response, and the others agreed.

Made my day, and I hope artist Iryna’s soon after.

Writing this down because maybe one of my kids will be asking about this when they hit their 60s.

One of the side effects of the surgery September 2025 when my retina had nearly torn through is that at the very center of my vision, when looking at small straight lines I tend to see double. Just right in that one small center spot, but it makes it hard to read unless I turn my head slightly to go one-eyed at it. The first ten or twelve months, every line of text being read split into a double of itself going off at different angles. Still does a little when I’m tired, but much better than it was.

So I wondered if I just needed to wait it out; I’d been told some people take as long as two years to recover from that surgery, and now I could see why.

After a recent comment from the retina surgeon about maybe I’ll need prism glasses, our very good optometrist was checking it out today.

I asked him, Dr. Google (I shrugged a, yeah, like that’s a good source) says that prism glasses can make the problem worse over time?

Actually, he told me, that’s true and I was just about to mention that. So we only correct it the least amount we can so the eye muscles don’t quit working as hard.

Then he did a test I’ve never seen before and asked me if I saw one square or two. Upright or tilted.

Two. Tilt.

Which one tilts?

The black one tilts left, the gray one’s upright.

He chuckled: there was no black one.

He put something over my glasses on the left and added one on the right. And now?

One! They came together! Gray!

He wrote me a prescription but told me not to fill it until I’d seen the cataract surgeon for the other eye, because then I’d be starting all over.

So that appointment finally got scheduled.

But that brief moment of a single square clear and completely upright totally sold me on getting those glasses if I still need them later.

So weird. Everything else, I just, y’know, see. As one does.

Meantime, yay for lines of text that go straight across.

You guys, I failed.

She was actually doing the work. It took me by surprise. She was at the door. She wanted us to vote for her. She seemed a perfectly nice person.

She was the candidate with surprisingly large amounts of outside money behind her for such a small-potatoes race but won’t say who provided it. She was the one who wants to reward developers over all other considerations. She was the one who was running on what she said was terrible treatment by the city for her own project while the members of the council and planning commission openly told reporters the paperwork was not in order and the rules weren’t followed and they were ignored when they tried to get them to do it right. Forms and rules and inspections are a thing.

I made a carefully conciliatory comment in an anonymous online forum about the logical outcome of a proposal of hers, offering details based on lived experience–because I wanted my fellow voters not to have to go through what we’d gone through re rushed inspections.

She didn’t say anything like, Oh, that’s good to know, or, I’ll have to consider that; she attacked me and justified it on the claim that I was a member of the union.

I was speechless (though she had no way to know). I have no problem with unions, but I myself have never been in one. Clearly there was no point in engaging.

But a member of the city council felt strongly enough about it to say, basically, This is what she does. This is what we’ve been dealing with when she was on one of the committees.

Ohmygosh haven’t we had enough of that…

And here she was in person, smiling sweetly and asking for our vote, and I found myself unable to be my best self back. I wasn’t about to give away who I was re her attack. I wasn’t frowning. I was just waiting for her to be done.

She seemed to know she wasn’t winning us over. I simply said, I’ve already voted.

She looked over to Richard. He gave no response.

Tell her thank you, I thought, she’s canvassing, she’s doing the footwork of democracy even if you disagree with her, at least make her day pleasant.

I gave her a nod of acknowledgment as she turned to go. It wasn’t quite a smile but having not pre-considered what I would do if…, it was the best I could manage on the spur of the unexpected moment.

And yet. We were courteous. And I was online, too.

She could learn from that.

(Not this one.)

I asked her, Do you remember when your mom brought those pomegranates to church to share?

She did indeed.

They were splitting open, there were segments falling into pieces in a way I’d never seen before, dead ripe, and it was easy for a lot of people to sample a bit outside on the grass to confine the mess.

I had never tasted a pomegranate like that! I told her, And that’s why–

–as I handed her one I’d just harvested from my own. The tree I’d planted because her mom had taught me what a pomegranate could and should be. She had decided that 80 wasn’t too old to try to plant something new and hope for fruit and she most definitely got it: she came to within five days of 98.

I’ve never seen one so big! my friend exclaimed.

I don’t know if whoever bought her late mom’s house kept her tree, but the memory lives on at mine.

My first year of college ended a few days before my close high school friend’s did, and I flew home by way of Greensboro, North Carolina and drove home from there with her.

It’s a gorgeous town and I totally got why Karen had chosen Guilford College for her physics degree.

Google says there are seven colleges in that county, two of them HBCUs, with A&T being the largest of those in the country.

North Carolina removed the polling places from them. The excuse given (by a Republican, of course) was that there wasn’t enough parking there.

Excuse me, sir, have you ever met college students? Most of them walk everywhere. There had been no worrying about parking when those polling places were still there. You’re not fooling anybody.

I remember wanting at 19 to buy someone’s old car and my mom (I found out later) saying to her friend to say to her daughter, Go talk to her.

She did. Shawna the daughter, my sister’s age with her own sister my age, was happy to save me from becoming her. She told me about getting a job to pay for her aging car’s expenses and how it got to where she wasn’t going to university to learn anymore, she was going to work to support her car with her classes shrinking in the background and the further she got pulled down into that cycle the more she regretted it. Don’t do it.

So I kept on walking, just like almost everybody else I knew on campus.

And that’s what these kids did. Forty-five minutes each way to the nearest polling place, making a rally of it, making our future hopeful again by refusing to let their rights be taken away from them or anybody else if they could help it. Here’s how it’s done: you go. You do.

You refuse to let them not hear your voice.

It always surprises me how long it takes to fill out a ballot. All the things I’ve read in order to be informed–I still have to go back to every candidate, every race, at least three sources on every ballot proposition, before I’ve got all my little ovals squiggled in because it is so important to get every one of these right.

(Whoa! That guy’s passing himself off as a Democrat and his biggest backer is the Howard Jarvis folks of Prop. 13 fame? Who never met a single tax of any amount for any purpose that they didn’t want repealed? And he’s running for the Board of Equalization? We have a new subcategory of chutzpah.)

Thank you CalMatters for your summaries.

Eight ballot pages.

It was a privilege.

So a Republican Super Pac bought ads for Susan Collins in Portland that tried to make a villain out of Troy Jackson, her opponent.

And 1.3 million people in Oregon along with some over the river in Washington State did a confused, What the what now?

(NYT link here.)

Dolphins or whale tail. Dolphins or whale tail.

At 42″, that afghan wasn’t going any further till I decided and figured out exactly how I wanted to do that part.

The first time I saw a California license plate with a whale tail on it I wondered ever so briefly why that car had a slice of portobello mushroom on it.

(Sketch sketch sketch measure math placement)

Whale tail it is.

The local paper has a voter guide whose descriptions include a link to each candidate’s website for more info, and I was going through some of the more obscure ones.

Both of those who want to head the state’s department of education called themselves nonpartisan.

And then I clicked. Wow.

One joyfully described his work for the kids in his school district and the ways and the whys of making a difference, turning things around such that his city became #1 in math and literacy among the top 80 urban districts in the country. Narrowing the gap between the success rates among his constituents was important to him and he was proud to show his work and hoped to do more for the rest of the kids in the state as well.

The other is running on reich-wing fearmongering and bullying using only-I-can-fix-it rhetoric and ohmygoodness haven’t we had enough of all that? She’s got the string of pearls and the little cross necklace both as she appears to be ready to take money from the poor districts and give it to the more deserving rich ones, and her message to gay or trans kids is, Fear me. I will teach your peers to hate you.

I have a gay cousin who, like far too many of them, committed suicide. I know where attitudes like hers lead to and I don’t want any other family ever to go through that if I can do anything about it.

We can. Every single vote matters.

Every single race in the election matters.

She sat down to my computer and went wow.

Hey Mom! Could you order my dairy-free…? In my cart it’s $29-something, in yours it’s $14.49.

Same item. Same time. Same vendor. Because Amazon knows I never buy it. I ordered two, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

As I wonder how many people out there know which party supports their big donors being able to track everything about you to gouge you like that. They can, with all three branches of government doing what they tell them to, so they do.

Voters can do something about that.

One very proud daddy brought his eight-year-old son over to me before church started.

Both of them loved it when I gasped in delight at what they had to show me: the kiddo’s knitting.

Clearly someone who knew kids and who knew good yarn got him started: it was bright, had lots of colors, was soft, and a wool with just a bit of fuzz to it. Tactility, but not enough to snag on the needle. Hefty but not too thick, needles about a size US 9 or 10–not the tense-grip broomsticks like some kids get started on. Yarn that said Knit Me. It was gorgeous.

There were about three dozen stitches and they were close to perfect. He’d knit about an 8″ square in garter stitch.

Except it was a little wider at the top third.

The daddy explained (trying to help me hear over the organ prelude music, which my captions app was struggling with, too) that his son wanted to know what he had done that had done that and how to fix it.

I looked at the kiddo and told him, Every new knitter does that. I did!

He laughed with his dad while his face went, OH good!

It’s fine like that, I said, but if you want to make it smaller again, you put your needle into two stitches, as I gestured as if my index finger were the needle.

He clearly instantly grokked it. He’d already figured out that that’s probably how you do it but he wanted to ask before maybe messing anything up on this piece he was so proud of.

I saw him after church. He had made that slight decrease and from there the width matched the bottom part. He had already knitted about three more inches, maybe four.

What makes it all the more perfect is his name: Shepherd.

Olha doesn’t often repeat designs but she did for this one, with a new one listed for the first time since I bought mine three years ago. On a similar theme, this one.

Trader Joe’s again. A man of Slavic appearance saw my gerdan and caught my eye, his whole countenance suddenly just radiant–he knew exactly where that had come from. Slava Ukraini!

I knew what it meant to me but I wondered what further symbolism it might convey, so I went home and searched on cornflowers. I didn’t know why the artist had beaded them to be intertwining with wheat, but as I read on it all came together.

It is native to that part of Europe. As a cut flower, it has been cultivated pretty much everywhere, but traditionally it grew among wheat and barley crops–as in this Van Gogh painting–where it is considered a problem that reduces yield. Thus it is seriously endangered in most of its native habitat.

And yet they are planted. And yet they grow. And yet they bloom and thrive and are celebrated in gardens even as they’ve become rare in fields of grain.

Per Wikipedia they are dependent on bees, so their nectar is particularly high in sugar. But also: their volatiles attract a major insect predator of the major pest of cabbage plants, to the point of some farmers of brassicas foregoing pesticides–just plant the pretty flowers instead. Support the goldfinches, which love the seeds.

And now I know why someone else’s gerdan (where was that) had those goldfinches….

Her signature was taken off the voter rolls along with her name when she moved. Well of course. Now that she’s moved back, she needed to submit a new signature. That’s why even though she’d re-registered to vote, when our ballots came, she didn’t get one.

Got that taken care of.

I’m glad to know they’re careful.

So here’s a dilemma, and I’d love to hear others’ take on it. There’s a No Kings rally on Saturday the 17th, aiming to make it the biggest early-voting event ever as a declaration to the world and to each other of what kind of government we want to have: of the people, for the people, to restore the rule of law and the right to due process. To invite others to take heart and vote, too, by showing where public opinion is.

As I think of that one single House Representative left twisting himself in the wind when he realized he was in the history books forever as the single vote in that chamber not to release the Epstein files, because that’s what he thought his party wanted. Won’t his future grandkids be proud.

But. One of the things about living here is there is always, always, the tiny lurking thought that we could have a major earthquake disrupting everything. We did get one already: 47 declaring two of our three biggest cities utterly disposable along with all the lives in them, like, hey, Iran, could you clear out these pesky voters in my way.

Two of our three ballots are here. Should we wait. Should we go.

Years ago, someone from Stanford was invited to give a talk on his work at Xerox Parc, the research institute that was the West Coast’s version of Bell Labs. Bernard Widrow, who would be in his 90s now, was an electrical engineer trying to improve the hearing aids of the day.

He had designed a sort of necklace with seven microphones in it that were programmed to sync with one’s aids, picking up sound directionally and from the circular width of one’s chest rather than just what hits that tiny opening in the plastic in your ear. He told of trying it out on a patient with severe hearing loss on busy El Camino Real and she found she could hear every word he was saying, even against the traffic.

She burst into tears when he told her it was just a prototype and he couldn’t sell her one yet. But he was looking.

He asked for volunteers and I figured I was the deafest person in the audience. He had me try it out. So then I too desperately wanted one of those.

But no hearing aid company took it on and that was that. For awhile I was told you could go to him and have him custom-make you one but memory says it was $6000 and that was when we had four kids to send off to college soon.

That was a keenly missed opportunity.

The New Yorker has a story about an inventor who had watched his grandparents losing their hearing, their social lives, and then their brains to dementia. Note that he says they had hearing aids, but they refused to wear them. I’m guessing nobody explained recruitment to them, how brains overreact to sounds they’re not used to being able to hear and you just have to slog through the first few months of everything sounding painfully loud before normal dB levels feel normal.

He helped develop a portable sonar medical device that was highly successful, while wishing he could do more about how limited hearing aids were. The one gave him the cred and the wherewithal to eventually tackle the other.

And so he had video made of taking someone out in the middle of a busy city street with construction going on right behind him to test out what he and his Fortell team had come up with. He demonstrated what it sounds like in the mode that most hearing aids operate in.

And then with his AI.

Most of the other sound vanished, leaving his voice far more audible.

This time, I was the hearing-impaired person looking at the roadway trying not to burst into unexpected tears.

My first reaction was, well, that’s worth a trip to New York.

My second was to check where they might have expanded to.

Dude.

I guess their venture capitalists had to have a Silicon Valley location: that’s where the old Radio Shack building used to be, right down the street from Richard’s old office. Opening up next spring.

Now, that’s convenient!

Richard, who has heard the spiels of many a product manager by now, had been listening to the video from the other room.

He said “that incorporating AI into the aids” thing–you can’t take it up into the Cloud and back in real time for your ears fast enough. He was pretty sure that although they might have some really good programming, it’s probably not more or at least not much more than what I’ve already got. Color him skeptical.

So this is a great big To Be Continued. But man, it’s great to have hope. If nothing else, some good competition will light a fire under the industry.