She called. Then she came over. She was insistent.

Mom, you haven’t gotten out of the house in three weeks. We need to give you a change of scenery.

And with that we took a drive through the mountains and redwoods, in and out of fog and intermittent rain (at long long last, rain today!), with views of the reservoir below and hawks in the skies above. And one peregrine falcon watching the traffic pass below.

It was glorious. (With one brief backup here.)

I had some silk yarn that had been knitted into a tube, tape style, and started swatching it today. The size 8s were really too small; 9s (5.5mm) came out a lot better.

It surprised me how fast my arms got tired but I got two hours in anyway, my first knitting in almost three weeks. Man, it felt good to see something new coming to be and anticipating who would love it. It felt like it had been forever.

You can when you feel better, she’d said. So I washed the afghan and laid it out to dry and made tentative plans to myself.

I sent off a note today to be sure before I did anything, though, and got the same young nurse practitioner calling back on the phone: no worries, she soothed, you don’t have the flu.

(Yeah I knew that.) Well then does that mean… (the obvious)

You were not a person of interest so we didn’t test you for that.

(First time I’ve ever had THAT phrase applied to me!)

Everything was wonderful, everything was fine, nice to hear I was doing better, I said something about a couple more episodes and it went right past her other than her making sure I’d filled the rescue inhaler prescription, mine having expired. Yes I had.

Me: We’ve been self-quarantining. So if I feel fine is it okay to go to church on Sunday?

Boy did that change her tune fast. NO! No, don’t, not for another week or two. At least. You don’t want to expose other people who might not be as able to fight it off! People with compromised immune systems, the elderly.

And I hung up the phone thinking, you didn’t want me to panic but you finally almost said what we both now knew you were thinking.

So I took pretty pictures of the world coming back to life, marveled at all those blossoms on the one-year-old Frost in the corner, and tried not to have cabin fever.

Last year my Indian Free, the only peach that has to have a pollinator, bloomed just as the last few flowers on the last other tree were fading away. We still got a few fruits from it but one could only wonder whether this was how it was going to be.

Nope. Just Mother Nature playing fifty-two-card pickup. This year, all five peach trees are overlapping at least somewhat and there should be a good crop across the yard all summer long.

Blueberries in the last photo. Last year we were picking those in January, this year it waited till now to start.

Here, let me go pick up those scattered cards. Come time to plant my tomato seedlings I plan to be the queen of spades.

(Baby Crawford peach, Alphonso mango.)

I needed to run the ends in, wash the mill oils out, and give this afghan to its recipient. (There’s a different shade of brown left in stock, machine washable extra fine merino, here.)

So of course that’s one of the first things I asked the nurse practitioner about: how long should I leave it protected from me in its ziplock?

Wait till you’re better, she counseled.

The water was burn-your-skin hot; I pushed it down into it with the bottom of the detergent bottle and let it soak a good one.

That was a long week.

To play catch up: I messaged my doctor Thursday, heard back from her nurse, answered, and then the doctor took over and emailed me to get in there. Yes I’d had some serious breathing problems with my flu that had been scary a few times but I told her I was doing better than I had been and I didn’t quite see the point.

The phone rang, with the question: what time would you like your appointment to be? They were not messing around.

The time when I knew I could have a ride there was when I could only get a physician’s assistant.

Who had my chest x-rayed (scarring in the lungs, didn’t seem to be new) gave me several minutes of an Albuterol treatment and swabbed up my nose to test for the flu. But when I asked about The Virus I got a sharp rueful snort: Only the health department runs those, she told me with a serious case of If Only in her voice.

At that time, the entirety of California was allotted 500 tests for COVID-19, although that had doubled by the time I got home. They were clearly reserving them for those needing hospitalization–where the medical teams would need to know what they were dealing with so as not to contract it nor pass it on to more patients.

Our county has the most cases in the state and two are of kids that go to the schools ours went to, and the numbers go up every single day. It’s definitely here.

The test results were negative for influenza types A and B and that’s all I know.

Richard started coming down ill himself on Thursday, though thankfully never as bad as mine was; Friday morning the blog was out-of-the-blue dead and he was too sick to deal with it.

He took a stab at it a few times yesterday, waiting for call-backs or messages, and today he overdid it trying to get both his work work done and the blog working again, and hey! Look!

If you see anything wonky let me know. For now, it looks like we’re good. Yay. Thanks for sticking it out with me.

Testing testing 1 2 3. It looks like we’re finally live again. Go Richard!

A question: if you read the Narnia books as a kid, what did you think Turkish Delight would be like?

I thought of it as the obnoxiously tough toffee they sell to the tourists near Maryland’s shore, where sure it’s just sugar but you chew and chew and chew and chew and chew while it’s fighting back as if, should it win, it would wire your jaws shut out of sheer obnoxiousness, without enough flavor to make up for the assault on your mouth. If you still have all your teeth when it’s over you win.

My friend Michelle pointed out this Atlas Obscura article with the title, “CS Lewis’s Greatest Fiction Was Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight.” It made me laugh because it was so true.

Thus my curiosity.

I didn’t sample the real thing till well into adulthood, or at least not with that name attached, but you know what? In a way, I actually wasn’t all that far off.

Book: finished. Mango: watered. Debate: watched.

I finally got a picture that really shows what that first peach tree looks like out there. It’s glorious.

I looked at the Meyer lemon wistfully–I was going to give some of those to some of my favorite Stitches West vendors.

Next year.

Looking out the window, that one limb…

Black Jack figs grow slowly and stay pretty small, which is nice, but that one limb was going to cross over another in a year or two; better to cut it back a half a foot now to where the growth pattern angled the other way. Never mind the why didn’t I do that earlier.

Man it felt good to get something useful and real-world done.

As long as I was out there I looked at the hose, the blooming mango, our little February drought, considered it–and told myself nope, not quite there yet and headed back in.

Knitting? Not up to it. Reading? I’ve finished Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” and I’m halfway through a Jimmy Carter memoir that I was always going to get around to. Wow has the world changed over his 95 years. He’s not forging steel hoops to put around his dad’s wagon wheels anymore.

Edited to add, both noted their surprise at being handed a large bill at the end of the first month in: the President is responsible for the food bill of his family and guests at the White House. Any idle mention of a favorite or wished-for food ends in that food happening on their table no matter the cost if they don’t say anything different.

They learned fast.

Anne showed up at Stitches and they waved her in so she could get my stuff. She sent me pictures of the new pie plate from Mel and Kris, and this time it looks like a traditional pie plate; my other one from them is more a tart pan.

Today was a little better than yesterday, so all I need is patience and the germ will be over.

Yesterday I was just a bit feverish and coughing. Today when I tried to stay up for longer than ten minutes I found myself barfing nonstop. So let me type fast.

No Stitches West for me this year.

The Royal Bee booth #1339 has a pair of Holz and Stein #8s I was supposed to pick up and Mel and Kris made another pie plate for me but needles are easy to ship. The pottery, not so much. But trust me, they don’t want me there.

My sister found an old photo at Mom’s. I think those were my seventh grade glasses.

1961 or two, the builder was going to plant a single rhododendron in front of each new house on our street. Dad talked him into digging out six feet deep along the front of ours, replacing it with rhodo-friendly soil, and planting the whole length of it in Blue Peters, light purple with deep purple centers.

Years later, a housepainter climbed that brick half-wall to the left in front of the back door where it was laid in more a checkerboard pattern with staggered gaps. The guy stumbled, the bricks crumbled, and between them they sheared off nearly an entire big woody plant and a goodly part of another, too, if I remember right. (He was okay.)

Dad talked to his insurance and then called the local nursery, asking how much it would cost to replace a six foot Blue Peter.

There’s no such thing, he was told. Blue Peters don’t grow that high!

Dad: Mine do.

Well, that was a spirited debate. Wow!

So I’m just going to change the subject here and say, it’s all about the world we’re creating for our children and what we want them to live with.

Vote well.

My ’07 Prius’s fob’s buttons hadn’t worked for years, but at least it unlocked the car when you walked up to it.

Until it didn’t.

At least you could get the physical key out of the fob with great difficulty and a broken nail or two to open the driver’s side door, put it back in the fob, and then stick the fob in the slot to start the car when the fob’s battery was dead.

Until a piece of the back went missing after time in that slot and it wouldn’t go in anymore.

At least you could replace the battery.

Except now you couldn’t–we’d done it so many times the screws were stripped and they wouldn’t come out.

The cheapest new fobs cost a crazy amount of money, so we took a chance on simply replacing the plastic cover of the one I had. Didn’t know that was an option but it was.

Ordered this fob cover.

The most useful video on how to change it over was here.

A white pillow in the lap to help find any dropped tiny tiny screws should that happen. Highly recommended.

He replaced the battery. The new fob cover now has all the innards the old one had. We did not glue it like the video says, just the screws and the slides and the snapping together mixed with a bit of hope and the old physical key inside the new cover and then he sent me outside to go see.

The open button worked. The lights came on. Would you look at that!

The close button worked. The lights went off.

Cool! I was not expecting that. I was just hoping to get back to how it had been.

It was cold and I hurried back inside.

Richard: Well? Did it turn on?

Me: I didn’t try that. (Thinking, actually, I wasn’t done…)

Him: manages not to roll his eyes while I grab a jacket because hey, it’s 45F out there. Let me go make one last run past skunk territory.

So I got to go play again with the buttons and I got to try turning the car on and then hitting the lock button and testing it again and everything was peachy fine and after days of borrowing his key my new version worked! For $13 after tax.

Now, says he. Now that we know that that’s all we need, go order a new cover for mine, too, would ya? It’s starting to fall apart.