A restless night of not much sleep, not registering that there was a big storm going on out there, and I gave up and got up at a time when it just happened to be quiet out there.

I was washing my hands standing under the skylight when a flash of light startled me into glancing towards the light switch, not fathoming, just as the BOOM!!! hit and the power went out.

Found out later that one of the many lightning strikes had hit a few blocks over.

Thunderstorms?! In the Bay Area? In August? Rain? In AUGUST? A hundredth of an inch, as it turned out, but hey, that’s enough to sprout the fall weed seeds.

More and more house-rattling. I had been planning to go pick the one fig that should have been ripe first thing this morning. There was no going out there.

And then it seemed to settle down and all the booms stopped.

I really wanted that fig. I thought maybe I might chance it.

It wasn’t really raining (oh! Well, not enough for me to have heard from inside), just the slightest sprinkle.

For all that the fig, it turned out, had not finished ripening in the night and I left it there to be stolen later by the squirrels (which it was.)

Ten steps back to the door, I was halfway there, when out of the gray-not-blue, another BOOM! skittered me inside so fast! I could just picture the obituary: Lost Grandma because she just couldn’t bear to give up that one single piece of fruit to the rodents, but it was not the fig that got roasted.

They say we may have a repeat tonight of either yesterday’s PG&E shutdown or another weird storm and a third power outage, so dinner was the fastest thing I could cook so we wouldn’t be stuck with half-raw chicken and a fridge we couldn’t open.

Edited to add: I’m guessing that one of the biggest fire tornados ever may have helped create the atmospheric conditions that led to that storm.

Been too long.

You never know when someone else’s diet might change or something, so to be on the safe side I called before showing up.

I hadn’t seen Nina since before the pandemic started.

I put the ziplocked loaf of cranberry pumpkin sourdough down on her doorstep (that one recipe is totally worth the price of the book) rang the bell, and stepped back.

Our masks in place and with the sun low for the day’s heat blast to calm down some we continued the conversation outside that had begun on the phone. Life. Kids. Grandkids. Work.

There was such an intensity of joy in something so ordinary.

They made French toast with some of that bread after I left and I got exclamation marks!!! texted to me. Now she knew why I liked that recipe so much!

Any time, hon, any time.

That’s still around? He hasn’t used that in…huh, long enough that the seam of the can had started to rust. Wonder why he didn’t just toss it–maybe confusion over whether spray cans can be recycled or not. It’s empty, right?

Well, no, it wasn’t, and that’s why that bit of hefting felt so surprising. The little squirt in the same motion to make sure that it was exploded the stuff outwards like elementary school kids out the door at the sound of the recess bell pre-Covid.

Holy cow.

I was suddenly reliving the moment years ago when the trash men had dropped a small bottle of fabric paint out of the garbage can onto my driveway, my car hit it, and it exploded bright red paint droplets across the front of my house. My holly bush was suddenly female with berries. At least this wasn’t paint.

That shaving cream REEKED.

That’s why he hadn’t used it. And now the wall stank, and the floor, and several skirts in my closet, and that shirt? It was time for it to go to Goodwill anyway, that’s as good a reason as any. (I washed it.) My hands. Dang.

It was bad, man, it was bad, so bad that I was afraid our food would taste of it even though I washed my hands repeatedly before cooking dinner. I couldn’t get away from it.

And then I found more blue splurts of the stuff.

Some manufacturer thought that smell would bring on the girls, the fine restaurants, cool cars and the good life?

You know there were no women in that boardroom.

Into the trash. Thankfully, these days they have us put the cans out to the curb ourselves.

It doesn’t quite live up to the original, but, a Monster Mash sendup amused me.

After checking ahead, some friends stopped by after dinner. I pulled three chairs out of the kitchen and we set them up under the elm tree and visited outside, socially distanced and masked, the weather perfect with just the right breeze ruffling the many small leaves bowing down towards us.

Man did it feel good.

I hope we all treasure each other and our time together after this is all over as much as we do right now.

And I can only wonder if all my friends of normal hearing are learning more keenly how to read eyes for their expressions, to be more attuned to the emotions of those they’re in conversations with coming out of this?

Because with the masks on, everybody is visually as deaf as me. And a little muffled. One has to pay attention.

As these two ever have anyway, I’m just idly wondering.

I sent them home with two each of Andy’s perfect peaches.

In my mother’s day it was, But can she type?

My grandmother was a member and later president of the Congressional Wives’ Club back when the idea of a woman running for the Senate was considered unthinkable, when the wives were to wear proper white gloves and hats when calling upon one another and to support their important husbands.

Before their landlord priced them out during the first high tech boom, I used to drive to the biggest yarn store around, Straw Into Gold, in the western, flat part of Berkeley near the freeway, not far from the Oakland line. They had everything: spinning wheels, looms, classes, yarn in cones or skeins, and they were the American distributor for all things Ashford of wheel and loom fame.

Except parking. That could be a problem.

There was another warehouse-type building across the broken up alley from them that looked like it had been converted into housing, how legally so one could only guess. (This is not far from where the too-flammable Ghost Ship later came to be.) On its wall facing Straw, someone had written an angry warning, Do not pee against this wall because there are cameras and we will report you if you do.

This was not an incentive to spend too long around there once you walked out their door.

And that is the area around where Kamala Harris grew up, with UC Berkeley, where her mother was a researcher, up the road a bit.

And look where she is now.

I had two candidates I was undecided between and glad I didn’t have to make the final call–but when my daughter texted me to say it was Harris, something in me went YES!!! I knew. I just knew. Yes! She was the right choice and we will be well served having her as Vice President. I can’t wait.

(This was supposed to be posted Monday night, sorry for the delay.)

Now that it’s done I can feel comfortable saying it.

I asked the place our car got towed to to put one of those protective plates over our catalytic converter, and to either inscribe or if it was the only option to Sharpie our name and VIN number on it. They didn’t get back to me.

When I went to pick it up after 4:00 on Friday, that’s when they said, Oh, no, we don’t do any of that–but here’s who we recommend.

Like I could get that done before the weekend at that hour? It was going to be a long weekend: those thieves know where to go once that car’s back in the driveway.

So we set up as best a security system as we could kludge pointed at the car from inside the window and hoped.

Saturday we picked up groceries. The car ran quietly.

Sunday I turned it on and waited long enough for the motor to engage. Phew.

Today I called my own mechanic, who immediately ordered the part, called me back a few hours later and said, we’ll be ready at three.

Unlike the other guy, he had a waiting room I could knit in and they said I was welcome to same as I ever had–masks required now, of course.

What I didn’t know is, the metal plate came with a sticker to put on the car announcing what was now under the car: Cat Shield Protector, with a cat head logo.

Mike said he usually puts it in the lower corner of the window. I wanted it where people would see it when they look at the back of my car in the dark with the street light overhead without having to get out of their car–the see and scram method.

For a couple that doesn’t do bumper stickers, it’s a bit startling to have this prominent blue square to the left of the license plate but you do what you have to do.

The neighbors across the street knocked on the door. They had heard. What day had it happened?

Well, we didn’t drive the car Monday or Tuesday, and Wednesday we knew.

They checked their security footage: the first time this happened to us they could find nothing, their camera was aimed at their driveway not ours, but this time, it was Wednesday, 12:23 a.m., a white or silver car, the headlights were beamed towards their cameras and whited out the license plate, but the thieves were there and they were out of here three minutes later.

They have the video. It’s not all it could be, but it’s something.

The police were quite happy to know that.

I got the large wide flat boxes from my Dad maneuvered between the wheels and out from under the bed and was trying, including using a broom handle, to reach all the stuff that had fallen between the headboard and the mattress.

Note that a startup company a few miles away, years ago, decided to make a competitor to the then-popular Palm Pilot with more features, like a camera–and decided at the last second that it might have an even bigger market if they added a phone. Rumor is that they almost didn’t but smarter heads prevailed. There was an early version of text messaging.

And that is how the Sidekick came to be. All the cool people in Hollywood had one, all the tech nerds wrote about it. Not that that’s something I would normally know or care about in the slightest, and not that I normally aspired to own the latest electronics. But Richard’s co-worker camped out in front of the store to get one of the very first ones to be sold, showed it off at work, and then my hubby went straight there at 5:00 pm to buy one, too.

The moment he showed it to me I said, And did you get two? Because this is a deaf person’s phone and I need it more than you do.

It was extra cool that the young handsome face on the box clearly living the happy life with this perfect new gadget just waiting for you inside! happened to be our daughter’s high school classmate. Hey, I didn’t know Dan modeled! (Probably his mom worked there, and she knows a good-looking kid when she sees one.)

Richard went back.

And that is how the smartphone craze got started: a company called, don’t ask me why, Danger.

Can I…reach that… I snagged it!

Out it came from under the head of the bed.

An empty box for a Palm Travel Kit. Had a charging cord and everything, it said!

I stared at the thing, trying to grok it. That’s like a leash to go take my pet dodo bird for a walk.

She called this afternoon. Could we come pick up our car?

Blink. No almost-three-week wait this time? Sure!

The rental people had said I could leave the car there and they’d get it; Richard was talking to them while I was hurrying off to get ours.

I paid the deductible, but they were closing early because that was their last task of the day, and I asked, “How do I get the key back to Enterprise?”

“You give it to me,” said a by-now familiar voice as he walked in behind me.

I joked to her, “I’ll see you next week,” and she, knowing what we’d gone through twice now, half-joked, “I don’t ever want to see you again.”

They hadn’t gotten back to me and they’re usually really good about that, so about noon I finally called.

The agency receptionist asked whom I’d been referred to yesterday?

She hesitated. Did I want to just call Hartford’s claims directly? She’d be happy to connect me.

Something about it made me wonder if the problem was my insurance agent maybe battling covid and her not wanting to say.

I found myself talking to a very helpful person at Hartford, who then stayed on the line while she connected me to the repair shop when their side kept breaking up to make sure I got the information right.

The same repair shop, same tow truck.

The same guy at Enterprise picked me up, and when I asked if the same Rav4 was available, said it was if I didn’t mind waiting a bit but it was just then being washed from the previous customer; did I want to come inside?

Where there was a seat and no sun. Absolutely, thanks.

I opened my purse–and suddenly remembered I’d taken my carry-around project out for a Zoom Knittalk meeting and had forgotten to put it back in.

He totally got why I was unzipping that purse and asked me what I was knitting now.

That took me by surprise and it made my day. He was just waiting for it, watching what he could of my face as he asked, hoping it would.

I laughed at the ziplock-free state of the thing and said, Well, I guess I’ll just have to read my phone like everybody else.

Which made him laugh.

Which was a wonderful thing.

We all matter so much more to each other in these days of isolation and I find that so often now, we’re less afraid to show it.

Just like that, the car was already ready before I could even type in the password and I was on my way in that same dark blue car again.

My next door neighbor told me he heard that sound and groaned, “Oh no!”

A different cop came.

The insurance agent, like last time, didn’t get back to me today so there was no rental car yet and the med that I’d gotten in the car to go pick up had to be picked up, so Richard walked the mile and a quarter to the pharmacy on the grounds of needing the exercise, then grabbed an Uber home.

Clearly we’re going to be driving a rental car again for however long it takes this time to get the catalytic converter part in stock.

And so we’re putting off the new driveway, again, because you can’t risk getting that stuff on the rental. Nor can you get it on the new mattress, and that hasn’t arrived yet, so delay delay and delay some more, with apologies to the contractor.

So this is fun.

My friend Tony was talking about the skunk at his house. I invited it to come live under my car.

Thank you all, no pain last night and a much more productive day. I couldn’t get all the bags into the two recycling bins and the trash can; some will have to wait till next week’s pickup.

But the business card for the guy who worked at the long-gone Netscape? Boy did it bring back memories. Phil Karlton, one of their original engineers and an old friend, who wore a scruffy beard, a red and black plaid lumberjack shirt and a brilliant pink tutu to the Halloween party and was so fun with our kids. His wife’s paintings. Her post-polio syndrome.

The newspaper headlines in the 90’s about the first online funeral notice. The standing-room-only service for Phil and his wife Jan, who’d been on vacation in Italy driving down a road that had no stop sign nor marking that a highway was about to cross it. The loaded gravel truck doing 60 that broadsided them.

All the people across Silicon Valley who showed up in support of their suddenly-orphaned young-adult son.

The town in Italy that put up a memorial and the stop sign the townsfolk had long wanted.

The boss who paid for the son to go see where his folks had died, providing everything so he wouldn’t have to worry about the details, the gratitude of everybody for the humanity shown him; he was the son of all of us in those moments.

The business card, these decades later, of the mutual friend of my husband and Phil. I understood why it was still here.

I remembered, I considered, I hoped the son has had a good life since all those people came together for him at that beautiful Unitarian church and silently wished him all the best.

And then I let the piece of paper go.

Every now and then my lupus reminds me it’s still there and I still have to stay out of the sun. 2:17 a.m., woke up with pleuritis sharp enough that lying on my side felt like it was breaking my ribs. Same on the other side. Man, I reminisced silently into the dark, this used to be my normal life for months at a time and how did I even deal with that but it’s been years and hasn’t it been nice.

(So why is it doing it now. Yes I overdid it to exhaustion Saturday. So what. Stop it.)

Isn’t it nice that being on my back is okay? Except that there was no falling asleep that way, and any time I started to I rolled onto my side and Groundhog Day-ed the scene.

The sun came up.

The best thing about today was that it will have gotten me through to tomorrow, where I’ll get more done. And my lungs almost didn’t hurt at all.

Did anyone else watch the SpaceX landing and think those parachutes all looked like jellyfish?