Re yesterday’s post: the woman knew she didn’t know how much she was asking so she was trying to find out if it was a reasonable ask. I suggested tie quilts because everybody could be involved in making however many and it would be more of a community outreach.

And because I was remembering the one we were surprised with and how much came from that.

Years ago there was just one girl in our ward finishing high school that year and the women decided to make her a quilt as a graduation gift; one is an easy number.

My daughter took her beautiful new pieced quilt to college and found herself with a roommate from a town in the Midwest that was going through a severe downturn.

Richard and I had lived in that state for a year during grad school: the next town over had had seven factories. Five had closed and two had cut half their workforces. I remember the Vietnam veteran dad who’d made a good wage pushing a union broom who’d never learned to read and suddenly had no way to get that income back. The ward there helped him set up a pick-your-own strawberry farm on his acreage so he could have an income while not having to pay anybody to harvest. I taught his ten-year-old, and I’ve long hoped things turned out okay for the four of them.

Sam’s roommate had a single thin blanket from Walmart and her family had zero funds for more. But she was there at college, with her whole future open to her.

My folks were visiting when Sam came home at Christmas. She and my mom went off to the local quilt shop and the two of them working together in great anticipation made a quilt for her roommate: to match hers, she told her, trying to avoid any whiff of my family has money that yours doesn’t. She told her, I’m paying it forward on what my ward did for me.

He’s not two anymore, reacting to being a new big brother. He really deserves a new afghan. That one was definitely well loved.

That thought, and how taken he was with my ocean pandemic project, is the push I need from time to time to keep going on the current afghan that slogs on. So that I can have an adult-sized one ready for each of the grandchildren so I can give him his when he graduates from high school.

Or better yet, sooner.

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.

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?

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.

Three years away, she had to reestablish herself as a local patient. Every officially first-time appointment takes longer. Today was the day three departments  wanted to see her, and a twist of fate was such that I got to drive her.

We had to be on the road by seven, then again in the early afternoon, and then, different city and rush hour, the last one, which we actually got to three minutes early. Yay.

The first one, um, tried.

The others were great.

It was a three-cookie-sheet-puzzle night with a side of spatula-ing.

I was still coughing, I didn’t want to infect anybody with this, and Tuesday’s doctor appointments start half an hour after sunrise, so I took it easy and watched church by Zoom again. Old dear friends were in town, it turned out, and I missed them, but I’m glad I didn’t pass anything on to them; they matter more than my getting to see them.

The fridge door wouldn’t close. There was nothing in the way. We finally tried leaning against it a moment and it thankfully stayed shut after that.

This had to be tracked down.

And so the lower drawers got pulled out, even though it’s hard to with that door not quite opening wide enough ever, and scrubbed and dried and re-organized.

You know those single-servings of guacamole that Costco sells?

Three had fallen behind the back of the drawer, pushing it forward. There’s your easy fix.

But look, Mom, she said: the glass shelf. It’s tilted. The supports are not even to each other anymore.

Oh well. It’s 32 years old.

It looked really great now and the door shut just fine. Call that one user error.

Still. If anyone has good things to say about any manufacturer whatsoever who actually responds to warranty complaints with integrity–but whose refrigerators seldom need such–I would dearly love to know.

Richard told me calling an ambulance was the next step if I couldn’t get fluids down after I said there was no way I could sit up, much less walk to the car for IV rehydration in Urgent Care. He took my blood pressure: 84/46.

It is a relief to be able to be up and slightly about again. Yay for sleep and for kids’ milk boxes with straws in the earthquake supplies–that’s about as no-effort fluids as you can get.

She came home last week. She saw Holly’s lemons on the table: not Meyers like our tree but the classic Eureka type. Cool! She called dibs. With a great big pretty please.

We had enough sweets around…

She really really wanted that lemon chiffon cake that had so many good memories wrapped around the thought.

Tonight we squinted through the copy of the copy of the copy that had the instructions part mostly cut off–she knew I would just know because I was such a baker all her childhood. I cheated: I compared it to my 1952 Betty Crocker to find out how long I should have it in the oven. And I substituted some of the water with the extra tablespoon of juice the lemon offered up.

I finally baked it for her. And I would brag and tell you how good it was except that we’re not cutting into it till breakfast, so all we’re doing right now is admiring its pretty face.

Call it a fruit omelet, yeah, that’s it.

Nope, it won’t let me save the photo, I’ll just have to hope the link still works.

A house by the same builder as ours has just sold. Most of theirs was in its original 1950s state, although the wood-panel walls in the master bathroom were replaced with tile: those did tend to rot.

I’m having flashbacks at how much of it is like what we saw when we walked in this place the first time, right down to the white kitchen tile. That bar across the entry to the kitchen hit Richard at forehead level and the woman across the room said into her phone, Oh, these people are not going to buy this house!

She and her husband were fixing it up for his parents to sell. They were Japanese and had changed the master shower to be nice and low. I was a little too tall for it at 5’5″. Richard was 6’8″. It was such a small stall that he couldn’t kneel down to get under the shower head because his legs were cut in half by the metal runners the door slid across on. The daughter-in-law knew whereof she spoke.

That showerhead was the first thing to go. The bar in the kitchen went when we remodeled seven years later.

Our kitchen cupboards were–this was the latest thing in the 1950s–pressboard on wooden runners: you don’t pull them open, you sliiiide across, lightweight and easy.

Except that after the Loma Prieta quake, if you tried to slide them they simply fell down on your head. That got old.

In that listing they’ve given the upper cabinet fronts hinges instead. They’ve put in a double oven. In the original, the oven was up high, singular, and so small that when I bought a Thanksgiving turkey the first year, I got it home and suddenly realized it might not fit in. Good thing it was a small one. And in ours, the kitchen had been painted sunflower yellow and avocado green.

I’m mostly typing this because our youngest was six when we started remodeling and I don’t know how much the kids remember of how it was. It’s fun to see it. We still have those hanging sphere lights; they’re great for telling if a sudden rumble is a new earthquake or not.

And that kitchen makes me really appreciate our oak cabinetry.

US News and World Report came out with its high school rankings, I just happened to casually mention to him: Mine was #3 in the state.

He looked at me, knowing that that big grin meant his no longer scored higher.

#14!

He put on a face like Stephen Colbert about to mock a politician and said, Clearly, their information sources were incomplete and out-of-date.

#3! #3!

Hah!

But then, his having been built on an old cow farm, their mascot was The Mighty Moo. When you yell, Gooo, MOOOO at your sports teams you know that those were kids who could laugh at themselves and then get back to the books.

The plane was delayed. There was not a cab to be found at that hour. We went to plan B, rolled out of bed, marveled at how little traffic there was (duh), and got her home.

Later I found myself at Safeway staring at the locked cabinets that are a silent testament to The Great Big River Company’s lack of competence at policing the sale of stolen goods on their site.  Man has that part of living changed since I last bought this stuff when she was a teen.

Push This Button For Help.

I thought of all the reasons I had never had to do that before. Alright then.

A guy showed up with a key.

I told him, My daughter flew in at 3:30 this morning and realized, Mom, I need my contact stuff! (And she was on Eastern time.)

His face softened. In that moment, he was looking out for her, too, glad to play his part, and then walked off smiling.

It is amazing how much we give each other when we can see each other. Shop local, indeed.