The *ECG machine was a total flatline.

The nurse was getting flustered with it, so the patient laughed and assured the nurse that the patient at least was not.

The doctor, a little earlier: Was it a slip first? Or a faint first?

Patient: Slip, then a fall headfirst onto the cold water valve on the shower, missing my eye, then very nearly throwing up once finally getting up with his help, then starting hard to pass out but managed to just make it to the bed to collapse.

Doctor: It doesn’t need stitches, but you do need an ECG and complete bloodwork and thyroid tests. We need to find out why you were fainting.

Thus the ECG machine. A second nurse came in. I made a joke about wearing the wrong shoes–can’t reboot with clogs. Okay. They tried rebooting the machine. Then finally they sent me to cardiology down the street–but first I was to go to CT and get a brain scan. And the lab.

Which is how my husband ended up leaving work early to spend hours with me at the clinic, because no way was I driving. He is my rock.

Thirteen previous concussions?! Knocked out five times? When was the last time you saw neurology? It has been too long, they told me.

Okay, so that’s on the list, too. But enough for today.

I figured all that was one way to get a carry-around project teal-green hat back into my list of ready-to-give-aways. But seriously, life? If you want a stinking green hat, you do know there are easier ways to say so.

*Update 10/9: I typed EKG yesterday when it was an ECG, and if that’s the worst mistake my brain did after that head banging then I’m okay with that. Update 10/11: Oh wait. I was thinking EEG when I corrected away from EKG. The brain is getting there!

(Detail near the top of the river from yesterday’s photo.)

I looked up the hotel confirmation email. I had one hour left to cancel or forfeit. It had to be done. Canceled.

I’ve been dragging my feet on the plane and the car rental. But when you’re waiting to see if the thermometer hits 102 to tell you to run for a strep test–although we’re not there yet–um.

You don’t get on a plane, expose a ton of people, and then bring that to your 93-year-old mom, you just don’t.

I did knit all but the last two stitches of a raptor at the tops of the trees and felt great about getting something useful done.

This time, I remembered to pack her some needles and a yarn that was easier for a beginner than the loose single-ply Mecha had been.

This time, Maddie got right into it and the only mistakes were from when she grabbed the cast-on tail end rather than the working yarn, and that was my fault for leaving it too long and having it be confusing.

Again this time, Spencer pleaded for me to teach him to knit, too, and I told him that when he was nine I would. (I did not want him to start out in life thinking knitting was too hard for him. Let his brain catch up to his wishing. Let him happily anticipate. He’d only been six for a few hours.) Meantime, Hudson and I laughed that Maddie got to be the cat this time for playing with yarn–and Spencer again got his own little ball to at least experiment with. Which he did.

I quietly mentioned to my daughter-in-law that her oldest had really wanted that ocean afghan but the reason he didn’t get it was that I’d have to make an intarsia one like that for all six grandkids before I gave one to one. But that I planned to give it to him as a high school graduation present.

That completely made her day. Which completely made mine. I told her, I’m enjoying this landscape knitting–so if there’s any special photo or place or something for any of them… Let me know….

(Found the photo. I’d forgotten about that light band. Parker might need a do-over on his.)

Today was the 29th, not yesterday, so Spencer got to be told Happy Birthday by me two days in a row and he was cool with that. All the more celebrating.

We took a late plane home. G’night.

Suddenly realizing, as I started the next beanie carry-around project, that that’s the same yarn and color as the time grandson Spencer got hold of the ball and played with it while I laughed (and kept my hat from unraveling.) He put his sister’s beginning knitting swatch on his toes. “Spencer is a cat!” And for a few minutes there he got to pretend he was.

He is no longer that little preschooler. Tomorrow (correction: Sunday) he will be six. I wonder if he’ll recognize the yarn.

Two wonderful speakers at church today. The second was a man who started off by saying that my husband and I lived in the ward he grew up in in New Hampshire when he was a teenager, and so, he joked, “They have signed a nondisclosure agreement.” Brought down the house.

The first was my Richard.

With a very simple message, quoting from scripture about how dissension and anger are not of G_d: that we can disagree, but it must be with civility. That if we give in to rancor we are failing ourselves and those we’re talking to and G_d himself, who loves us without reservation and to whom we so much owe love by loving His children.

Nobody ever changed their minds by being argued with, he said. Only love changes people for the better.

It was the shortest talk I’ve ever heard him give.

It was all that needed to be said.

Being on Medicare and getting vaccinated was a new combination for me; I didn’t know which card to pull out so I did all three: Medicare, Supplemental, and Part D.

The guy stewed over the computer for awhile. Turns out someone had put my maiden name in the system and my last name bounced. We talked him through it, he tried again, and finally it worked.

Finally–not quite looking me in the eye–he handed me my two cards back.

There are three, I said. I gave you three.

He’d clearly been hoping I wouldn’t notice. He’d already picked one up off the floor and there had been no sign of the other.

He got another employee to look all over. Then to try. Then there was this little Monty Python sketch of all the methods they used (those tongs had a definite rubber chicken look to them) after they realized where it had to have gone.

There was the countertop, there was this one area where there were two filing cabinets just below the countertop side by side, and there was a metal plate under those cabinets. And somewhere in there, they determined, was the only place it could be.

They said they would work on it, and the original guy, who turned out to be the pharmacist, gave me my flu+covid shots and told us to wait 15 minutes to make sure there’s no reaction, like they always do. They promised us they would work on it in the meantime.

Forty minutes later, I said to Richard, quite sure of this though we couldn’t see from there, They’re not doing anything and they’re just waiting us out hoping the store closes on us.

We went back over there and I was exactly right.

They tried to tell us it was gone, it couldn’t be done, go have your insurer issue a new card, not their problem. Sorry.

Richard, looking at the cheap set up, told them all furniture is designed to come apart when you need it to.

They were in disbelief. We really wanted them to deal with this?

He offered to help, and he certainly looked the big and strong type.

They tried to say it couldn’t be done.

Things get put together and they can come apart and he was offering to do that if they needed the help.

So okay, boss pharmacist apparently thought, better you than me, and let him into the pharmacy area to help with those filing cabinets. Which he seemed to think were permanently installed.

They’re too heavy full, you have to empty them, Richard said to one of the women, boss-man having gotten himself as far away as he could. (Richard wasn’t about to touch official pharmacy stuff.)

Another store employee saw him on the wrong side of the counter and came over to ask what on earth is going on over here and all three pharmacy people said in unison and waving their hand away at her in unison, Never mind.

(One of the pharmacy women had basically said they’d all be fired if I went in there to try to help, too.)

Richard said to me afterwards, There was no organization in those cabinets–just stuff. Thrown in randomly for someone else to have to deal with later.

But drawer by drawer it all got removed and then at long last one steel file cabinet got moved out of the way. Then the other. (See? They do move.)

And there, under the metal plate on the floor that the two filing cabinets had been standing on, was my Medigap card. How it got there I’ll never know. But one hour and fifty minutes after we arrived for my shot we finally had my card back, and my husband is a hero because they would utterly have blown me off, and in fact did, but he refused to be. Nicely, but firmly.

It was probably not a good time to ask them if they could squeeze in the paperwork and a shot for him too even though online had said there was only the one opening. So we didn’t. His is tomorrow and thankfully somewhere else.

As I type this I’m realizing, we still don’t know which card we’re supposed to hand them. We don’t ever want to give them too many again.

Not that the following matters…

I knew that brand. My husband’s a licensed ham radio operator. Was this just a reporter who didn’t know what they were talking about? Or directing to an audience they assumed wouldn’t?

Walkie-talkies are children’s toys, he affirmed. Counterfeit or not, those would have been ham handhelds.

I booked it. Then I did the math. What have I done to myself, knowing how much I’d wanted to hand my brother his afghan in person and computing just how many rows per day at 268 stitches (six strands per row currently and six rows per inch) I’d have to do to get it finished by then. I’m not even quite to the halfway point.

Every time I’d gone to book that trip I’d found myself going to a certain weekend. No matter how many times I checked the fares further out–and Southwest, for all their sale emails enticing me towards them, kept giving an error message that was very frustrating.

But that set of dates worked.

Okay, then, that one, I don’t want to wait any longer to see Mom. It just felt right. Done.

And then I sat down and spent most of the last three hours knitting like crazy even though that’s too much because I have to at least try.

To make myself give my hands a break I went to go check to make sure I’d written the flights on my calendar. I had not. Okay, looking up at the itinerary and then down to the page as I flipped to the–

–there smack dab in the middle of when I’d booked it for were the words in my own hand, written small and emotional at the start of the year: “Miss you Dad.”

It will be the fifth anniversary of his passing. My mom misses him so much. We all do. And so that brother and my oldest sister and my son and I will be there with her on that day, celebrating the man with the best laugh any of us ever knew.

I can just picture Dad doing just that at the moment it finally got through my thick skull. I’m sure he’d been trying to get my attention for awhile. For Mom. For all of us.

A photo before today’s knitting began.

I ran to Andy’s to try to get some of the last peaches of the season to share but they were sold out. I did get some Reine Claude Green Gage plums, which Trees of Antiquity considers the best stone fruit of them all.

As the couple in front of me in the line turned to go, I said to them, If you’re going home by way of 101 north there was a brush fire just starting on the northbound side near Capital Expressway as I came down–you might want to go a different way.

I can only imagine the traffic snarl, much less the risk of being hemmed in that close to it. They thanked me.

I went the other way, too, with visions of how fast those flames had spread down the side of that onramp. Not high–things had been mowed recently enough and I saw no bushes nor trees–but the smoke! Whoosh!

In the emergency of the moment, I told Richard later, I realized I didn’t know how to make my 6S phone call 911 without my touching it while I was driving and I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road for fear others were looking at it rather than where they were going. There were so many other cars; surely someone else reported it, I wouldn’t want to flood their lines.

He, a former county and Red Cross emergency communications volunteer, told me, Actually–almost no one ever does.

Sounds like I need to get up to speed.

I had peaches and plans. I was going to Kings Mountain Art Fair, the one time all year I get to see my old friends. Mel had messaged me that Kris hadn’t been well enough to make the trip but their son had and they were hoping and looking forward to seeing me.

I was almost to the freeway when I saw it and pulled off the road and called Richard.

Who said the obvious: do not drive the car with the check engine light on except to come home till we can get it looked at. Yeah they just looked at it last week. Still.

(Did the mice come back to the engine compartment and do more damage. Sounds like a definite maybe.)

I thought, I’ll stop by Trader Joe’s…no don’t. Tomorrow we’ll… no you won’t. Monday we can… No you can’t. All afternoon I kept reminding myself that things were abruptly different and we weren’t going anywhere. Not unless we can rent a car on a holiday. We might try.

I moped a little while and then thought, if I can’t go then I’m at least going to get the house a little more ready for guests so I can feel good about that.

We both did. It felt good. And yeah, there’s yet another blanket from the soakstorm being washed as I type.

Remember the Southwest meltdown because their software was twenty years old?

I just spent an hour fighting with a bug in Alaska Air’s system demanding a pin for a transaction that their system said didn’t require one. Was there a help desk? No. I looked at Southwest–yow! Since when do they gouge?!

I finally closed the Alaska tab, took a deep breath, started over doing exactly the same things exactly the same way and it all sailed right on through. And good thing, because my Companion Code was about to expire for the year.

And none of that matters at all: what does is what we get to do because of all that. We’ve got some celebrating to do together.

Knit a row, get ready for houseguests, knit a row, get ready for houseguests, knit a row, give the hands another break so it’s not too much all at once. Of either. Got the moose body finished, the head done, a third of the antlers, and was going to do more tonight.

We once hosted my sister and BIL and their six boys overnight and eight extra people is a lot of pillows and blankets to have to scrounge up.

Besides, this being earthquake country, you never know whom you might have to take in. (Been there did that.)

So the guest room has a large stack of blankets along the wall and all the extra pillows go from the bed to that wall. When we have a pair of actual guests on that queen bed, that’s way too much and the herd needed to be thinned. I reached for one.

It was damp.

There is absolutely zero anything to do with water whatsoever in that room. None. Nor has there been. As I told him, yes I use that bed for blocking but I haven’t even done that in awhile and I certainly don’t pour water over it.

Fourteen damp blankets, including the quilt on the bed where it touched the others. Only one pillow definitely needs to be tossed so far.

I pulled them all out and started running the washer. Four handmade quilts were laid outside in what was left of the sunlight. SusanH, yours was in active use and not in there, thank goodness.

But one that Richard’s grandmother had made us as a wedding present. One that she’d made for Richard’s mother. A crocheted afghan my grandmother’s friend had made her who knows how long ago. Ooh, man, that one, at least it was the cheap Chinese one from a thrift store that took it the hardest.

If I ever wondered if I’d had covid at some point that interfered with my sense of smell (the first bout of it did not), that answered it: I could see the black spots but it wasn’t till I started pulling everything out of there that I got any whiff of it and he hasn’t smelled it yet. But I could enough to tell how bad it must be to someone else.

The wall. Well, it was bone dry on the outside, at least.

My childhood friend Karen helped set up a tie quilt at her house when we were 18 and put it together with me at a summer in my life when I was so down and so needed that time and that help. Her daughter and husband are the ones arriving from Maine in a few days–that quilt had dibs on the washer. (Also because I knew it could handle it.)

Meantime, our covid tests arrived at long last after dinner and we decided to do me for now. Did it, set the timer for the results, went outside to spread out another quilt to dry.

Richard has the lights in the family room set to blink from wherever he is in the house for when I don’t hear something I need to. The lights were blinking. I know that timer is obnoxiously loud for him, and I had my garden shoes on that I didn’t want to track across not just the house but anywhere near that hall lineup of stinky blankets that didn’t need one more thing happening to them. A moment late because I hadn’t thought of it fast enough, I kicked them off.

While turning and rushing.

One clog caught on my foot and twisted sideways and then so did I.

It was a few minutes before I could let him help me carefully up. Part of me thought, this is where I get to be glad I usually can’t feel much of the pain after five or ten minutes. Hopefully this time too?

And that is how I am typing this. The shoulder/upper arm hit hardest and we’ll see what tomorrow says, but I can lift it now (Demo’ing to prove it to myself after typing that and going, oh. Maybe don’t do that again soon.) The hip I landed on is just bruised. I think.

I think that’s definitely it on the knitting for the day.

Oh, and the covid test? It was negative.

Knitting charts are emphatically not my strong point, but I’d found a moose (Ravelry link) that actually looked like a moose and I went to start adding it in today.

And stopped halfway across the row, feeling silly.

It was backwards. I knew that.

This is where being married to a computer scientist comes in handy so I thought I’d pass this on.

Go to your pdf. Go to pdfux.com and scroll down to find what you want your pdf to do. There it is: flip. Click that, drag your pdf where they say, and there you go.

Didn’t go Monday. Didn’t end up going Tuesday, but c’mon, when you’ve got your daughter in town, in August no less, ya gotta have some of Andy’s divine peaches for her and we’d finished off the last previous one together, so off I finally went.

Maybe going on a long drive would get me out of my head a little better.

Some acquaintance-friends who are grieving and under pressure were not thinking straight and did something stupid because they did not think it mattered, did not think we would find out, and did not realize just how many problems they were causing. It was likely physically beyond either of us to fix it if it turned out it went as far as I was afraid it might (later: turns out it didn’t.)

Grief is not a get-out-of-rude-free card.

Forgive as you would want to be forgiven, I told myself again and again. Make it better the best you can, not worse. A year from now, this will be nothing.

Miles and miles and at last suburbia gave way to golden hills and quiet.

Andy’s Orchard. There was the woman I’d given the hat to last month. It was so good to see her.

And then–I think it’s been two years since I’ve seen him, and probably only once since the whole Covid thing–Andy himself stepped in from the back room to talk to her.

He saw me and his whole face lit up in the warmest smile, and I tell you, he had no way to know how much I needed that. Such a lovely man. The two of them turned my day around completely just by being there and by who they are.

I brought home some perfect Kit Donnells and a variety of deeply golden nectarine that Andy himself had brought home two seeds of from the then-Soviet Union. Silk Roads.

And thought wistfully of these friends who, having no idea what they were missing, were last week the only ones who have ever turned down my offer of an Andy peach.