Well, now I know why I posted early yesterday.

Richard made dinner last night and as I sat down to it, I apologized in advance that I probably wasn’t going to eat a lot; for some reason my belly had started aching.

Within an hour it had spread and gone wild. I kept marveling inwardly that I’d gone through months of this at a time. Months, when the kids were little and the lupus new, the chostocondritis, the pleuritis, the pericarditis, the peritonitis, all of it autoimmune. It was like this, sometimes better and sometimes worse but never entirely going away day after day after month after month while I had to get kids to and from school and going in the morning and Richard to work and back (~two miles) because we only had the one car. How on earth did I do it?!

I thought, well if I could get through it then I can get through it now. (Never mind the older body with colorectomy effects.)

I managed to feel enough better after a couple of hours to get up and go type my doctor a note.

That was maybe a little too much effort. I started barfing nonstop.

I told Richard, give me a few minutes–but then if I don’t manage to keep fluids down we need to go to the ER. Knowing full well that he needed his sleep just as much as I did and it was after ten and he’d be up all night with nowhere to lie down and then he’d have a heart attack and I couldn’t do that to him if I didn’t have to.

Michelle got me a bottle of sports-something water. We poured about a half cup…and it stayed down. Yay. Breathe. I didn’t dare try for more.

First thing I did this morning was to type the doctor a follow-up note with newer details. Only I had eaten those leftovers at lunch. Only I had gotten sick. Also this painfully distended belly thing, but it was all pretty much gone now.

The nurse typed back a list of times when I absolutely should stop trying to manage it myself and get myself to the ER.

Of the five, I’d had two.

Oh.

That will surprise no doctor who knows me well. I try to comply, I really do.

And when they ask why didn’t you go in I will point to this post.

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.

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.

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.

Sandra Boynton say it’s Homemade Cookie Day. I thought it cute; a certain someone, however, thought it clearly needed celebrating.

(Photo: baked bowl scrapings, a little shy on the chocolate part.)

Her first thought was to ask me to make a batch of her favorite cookies while she had a call coming in; after years of experimenting with chocolate chip, she said the New York Times version won hands down. The odd call for cake flour and bread flour? That’s for the contrasting chewy vs soft all at once–it really does work, she assured me.

Then she realized my dislike of baking soda.

You’re not going to change the leavening, are you?

I looked at her with a smile that said, And just whom do you think you’re talking to?

Her daddy got caught up in the enthusiasm enough to head out the door for cake flour.

I weighed the flours for her while she got everything ready, quick, trying to beat that phone call. The (vegan for allergies) butter needed to come to room temperature, so, Wait an hour, Mom, and then add this then this then this to this in this order.

We put them in a line so I wouldn’t (I was kidding) put in the vanilla after the flour.

You mix that all up and at the last you refrigerate the dough for two days.

I baked the first three cookies anyway.

And you know what? Even using Miyoko vegan butter, she was right. They looked perfect and the texture was perfect and that was the best chocolate chip cookie I have had in a long time. Even baked two days early.

Except, y’know, I think I would switch out a bit of the baking soda for baking powder but that’s just me.

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.