Her first appointment was at seven across town and then she came back to get us, mine was right after we dropped Richard off at work. Her next one was at ten, my audiologist at 11:45 five cities south, and she drove drove drove to give me another day off from having to do that and to get me where I needed to go.

I waved goodbye as her ride took her off for the airport, started a load of laundry, walked in the bathroom a few minutes later at the other end of the hall–and stumbled into this reverse-direction Niagara gushing upwards out of the bottom of the toilet all the way up to the seat and flooding across the room and down that part of the hall. I had never seen anything quite like it.

Showers, faucets…everywhere else in the house was fine.

I managed to turn the washing machine and the water to the toilet off while thinking, I guess I just mopped my floor with laundry detergent. Got my money’s worth out of that load, didn’t I?

I was soaked. The towels still are. But at least all this had waited till our daughter’s weekend with us was over–and, I’d run the underwear load first and it was done. Go me.

The plumber told me to call the city, the city told me to call the plumber, the tree guy got a dial tone in edgewise to say they were coming first thing in the morning to trim away anything overhanging the house like the homeowner’s insurance demanded (I’d been hoping they could squeeze me in this week and they were making it happen), I called the agent, and then the city’s plumber showed up after all.

By this time it was about six.

His truck was blocking my car. No problem; I was pretty sure I could get around him to go pick up Richard. This time, there really was no choice but to get behind that wheel, broken rib or no broken rib.

As he watched me come up next to my–it turned out, dud of a car, I was befuddled–and then suddenly burst out laughing, laughing that was the antidote to the intensity of the day, so much so that he laughed, too. It was so unexpected, because she always, always remembers, even when I don’t.  She’s so careful about it. But she’d gotten up so early.

It’s quite my fault. After a dozen years I still have never gotten a back-up key fob for that car. They’re too expensive (something like $250 last I checked) the car’s too old to bother and I’m too cheap.

Richard Ubered home.

Hey, I can splurge all that fob money I saved on the plumber now!

I was in a discussion group Sunday where the subject was, what do you do to fight off depressive thoughts?

My rather long answer was this. (In retrospect, hey, it wasn’t even about knitting!)

When I was a teen, my aunt had twins. She complained of pain for several days afterwards and was dismissed. She said, But I’ve had children before and it was never like this.

Oh lady you’ve never had twins before.

With the end result that her appendix burst on the operating table after they were finally listening to her. It was a very near thing.

Her doctor then sat her down and told her that he’d seen too many patients with so many responsibilities–she had six kids including those newborn twins–after serious medical circumstances go spiraling downward and downward and downward and he did not want it to happen to her. He prescribed her an hour a day of exercise. Go join a gym. I don’t care how you do it, do it. You must.

Which is how my then-sixteen-year-old sister with the brand new driver’s license got flown out to California for the summer to help out. I was seventeen; I had a summer nanny job I was committed to. I tried not to be jealous, and by all accounts it sounded like Anne had the time of her life. The greatest human need is to be needed and boy was she ever.

But I never forgot that lesson. I was already in the habit of race-walking several miles a day and that cemented the idea for life: exercise isn’t just to stay in shape or control weight, it’s to help a person be in charge of how they feel about their life.

I am typing this just after getting off the treadmill that was a gift from Scrabblequeen Ruth some time ago. (Thank you, Ruth!) I’ve been experimenting: if I hold my right arm by my side will it bother my rib less?

I did put off using it for several days after the break, and rightly so, but when I finally used it again the rest of me felt so much better that it seems to me to be worth it.

We’ll see what my doctor says tomorrow. If there’s a better way to follow my aunt’s old doctor’s counsel, then I’ll do that. But I think we’re good.

We were going to make sorbet but found a small Rubbermaid in the back of the freezer with the last of the strawberry from last year. Done.

There’s a new chocolate shop in Santa Cruz and we wanted to check it out. How would it compare to our old favorite? We had to go to both on the same day to know, right?

What better way to celebrate having our daughter in town?

Given that seven million people live in the San Francisco Bay area and that there are only three routes over the mountains between San Francisco and well south of San Jose and two of those are two-lane roads and what beach traffic on a holiday is like, we hit the road before nine, and only had to do a little stop-and-go. We knew it would mean we’d have time to kill when we got there, but spending that time parked on the freeway vs walking around in our favorite beach town, hey.

Downtown parking before ten, no problem.

We bought books at Bookshop Santa Cruz in thanks for their being open for us. I tried to remember exactly what it looked like before the ’89 quake destroyed the original; there’s a plaque on the building saying they’d reused the iron balconies from the old on the new to try to keep some of the history of the place. I remembered an upstairs restaurant, I think in that building, long gone….

The doors were open on the sock store across the street, too. They had a pair that pictured cats playing on stacks of books: for $8, I’d found the one thing that most describes my friend Constance. Hey. That’s a splurge I could do.

We ate an early lunch at our old favorite, which is a restaurant as well.

They did not know the competition they were in, and turns out they were definitely not having their best day. The service was good but the food and the chocolate both were surprisingly off. Sipping chocolate as grainy pudding? Michelle’s no-dairy version was problematical, too. We felt bad for them.

The second chocolate place had had a note on the door apologizing that they would have to open late today, or we would have eaten there first. Dessert and life being uncertain and all that.

That’s okay. Mutari was definitely worth the wait.

The address listed on a news article someone had linked to that had clued us in to their existence turned out to be old and wrong but we found their new place via our phones.

Having just had that other sipping chocolate, one small spoonful of Mutari’s and I gasped, Oh WOW! Wow. What chocolate! What a difference. This is seriously the best.

We tried their fruit confection. It was hard not to buy a whole lot more on the spot.

We tried their truffles.

We agreed that there was no place but this place that we would go to for chocolate in Santa Cruz from now on. These guys truly know what they’re creating.

The proprietor asked if we wanted to sample their bars, too?

We were stuffed but we weren’t going to turn that down. Curiosity had been the point of the whole expedition. Sure!

She brought out four jars of broken bits with the names of each on top and a board with matching rows of the same laid out, one of each for each of us.

Just behind us as we tasted was a long row of 50 Kg bags of cacao beans stacked on each other, the origin of each stenciled on the burlap. As they said in the store, sometimes there’s a different flavor at the top of a hill than the bottom of the hill of the same variety of cacao and they make micro batches that let you try them individually.

Some of those definitely were coming home with us.

The woman was such a delight that had the cowl project in my purse been done I would have cast off and handed it to her on the spot.

Mutari. If you can go there, go there.

And in this section of the yarn museum we have the live installation by the visiting 5’11” granddaughter of an art dealer, illuminating the perception of the fleet-ing moment.

Of which there were not, however, a boatload.

Duration: thirty seconds.

Title: Long Drink of Water.

A full-size Bugatti made out of Legos. No glue. Holds two. It actually runs. Frankly, in the last picture, where they’re shown side-by-side, the Lego one is a lot cooler looking; they need to paint the real one to look like that if they want to have a really hot car.

Of course this means instant inspiration and aspiration on the part of the Lego enthusiasts among the grandkids that they won’t outgrow any more than the folks who built this did. Talk about a dream job.

It is a wonderful thing to walk outside first thing in the morning, find a fig drooping from the weight of the sugar and juiciness it attained to bird-free and to bring it inside to share. There was one yesterday, too, and there will be another tomorrow.

Also yesterday: my new doctor said he didn’t think anything was broken because I didn’t react strongly enough to his prodding around for the sore spot. I told him that one thing he needed to know about me was that my ability to feel pain is diminished (which…can be nice…) and that’s why having this hurt like it does when I move the wrong way was a surprise.

Thus the x-ray.

The report came today: “Slightly displaced fracture of the right anterior ninth rib…”

He gave me a prescription for a few nights’ worth of Lidocaine patches, not enough to get me through till I see him again next week but I figured I’d gone three nights with this already on my own, so no big deal. He assured me they did not cross-react with the categories of painkillers I’m allergic to.

I’d never used them before. I put the first one on right before bed.

Blink. “How fast are these supposed to kick in?” I asked Richard. “Because, wow.”

I woke up amazed at how much of a difference a good night’s sleep makes.

I’m looking forward to that next fig in the morning.

Yesterday I mentioned to Richard that I’d been thinking I ought to call my childhood friend Karen. I just really needed to. It had been awhile. Right then happened to be when I was on my way out to pick up the drycleaning and groceries but I wanted to remember to do it. I almost just stopped right there, and wondered why on earth I wasn’t, but it turned out later worked out better anyway.

Because a few hours later, as we were getting ready to go out with friends, he said to me, Were you going to call…

Oh! Right, thank you!

She happened to be celebrating our mutual friend Kathleen’s birthday with her when that phone rang. We three have been close since high school and I make a point of seeing them any time I’m back East. They live about 45 minutes apart.

Kathleen needed someone celebrating her right now.

They just didn’t quite know how to pick up the phone and cheerfully convey the news that hey, guess what, Bob cheated and we split and how was your day?

Kathleen needed me to know, and I think she needed to be with the close friend when the far-away one mourned what was by now old hat to both of them but no less intense a source of pain. The virtual hug and the real one came together in those moments.

I had no way to know. I’m so glad Richard remembered to remind me to call.

There’s some construction going on next to my husband’s commute with a lot of digging and we found ourselves going over a set of steel plates set on the road across from all that. Well, okay, there’s a utility-undergrounding project going on on that road but why the half-mile gap?

The plates were a bit wet last week.

Our water table is high enough that you can’t build basements, and I figured it was just displaced water from the construction work. Although, this was at a high enough elevation that it surprised me that it would happen there.

Then there was standing water.

Then there was an actual, splashing puddle this week, and he was Not Happy about driving over those plates and wondered why the city hadn’t gotten on this pronto.

The things you learn after being married 38 years….

Turns out that when he was a teen, growing up in a house that was about halfway down a steep hill, there was a water leak next to the road at the bottom there. A crew came out to try to patch it but they couldn’t find the source and while they looked, the amount steadily increased. Not good. They had the road blocked off to traffic, but finally had to ask the neighbors to move their cars off the street altogether so they could test further up.

So Richard U-turned the family cars and got them out of the way–this after having run various errands and having parked in front of the house a few times.

The guy jammed some kind of pole through the roadway to test what was underneath.

There was no longer anything underneath. Where my in-laws’ cars had just been, there was nothing but a huge cavernous sinkhole below the roadbed starting at the upper edge of their property, going the width of the street, about twelve feet deep, and thirty or forty feet long and he got to see just exactly how close he’d just come.

He definitely did not want to be driving over those steel plates.

Yesterday and today there were men standing in the hole he’d been sure was being created there. The men’s heads in that pit were at street level and it took up two and a half lanes of traffic (no bike lane for you!) with several flag men to keep people from driving into the abyss or each other as westbound diverted into eastbound.

A little water is like a little kindness: it can quietly move that stubborn mountain out of the way all by its little self.

My sister-in-law’s been dividing her time between various northern Californian loved ones and we got to have her again today. She’d been to the ocean with our aunt and uncle, so I took her for chocolate at Timothy Adams.

She happened to mention that her husband, having grown up in Arizona, has loved real Mexican food all his life, and so does she: but living in Texas, there was only Tex-Mex where they are and it was not the same thing at all.

Hey.

And so we took her out to dinner at Estrellita. It was what she’d been missing.

We came home to Andy’s peaches for dessert. I cut a few, served them up, and Jennifer took her first bite, I’m sure wondering if they would live up to my hype.

Her eyes flew wide open and she took it in for a moment–swallowed, then pronounced, I. have. never. in. my. life. eaten. a peach. like. this.

Then she said to me, Did you have any yet?! Take a bite take a bite!

I grinned. I knew what those were like.

She was off to see our niece next and then her childhood friend north of San Francisco, who’s had early-onset Alzheimer’s probably since her 40s and could definitely use a connection like that to how good life is despite all the things she can’t do anymore. And whose incredible angel of a husband could use some of his own good coming back to him, too.

Are you sure? as I urged her to take enough of the Angelus peaches for all.

I can get more a lot more easily than they can, I told her.

I couldn’t wait for her to get to see their eyes like I got to see hers.

Before he died, my uncle, the late Senator Bob Bennett of Utah, told all his kids to read, “Red Notice,” by Bill Browder.

Which one of them happened to mention on Facebook the other day in memory of her dad.

I picked it up today and I finally made myself put it down just now with a third to go because there simply is no more time in the day.

The man can definitely write. And Uncle Bob was right: everybody should definitely read this.

I was showing my sister-in-law around the fruit trees in back when suddenly she did a startled double take.

Oh, that’s the dead crow.

The !??!

I explained.

She burst out laughing, just like I did when the lady at the bird center told me all the crows in the area would caaaah a funeral together at their fallen comrade, and then leave and not come back–because they didn’t want to be where a crow had died.

The trick, though, is to set it out at night and then retrieve it at night so they don’t associate you with harming it and that peach tree it was under was long since done and I’d only been remembering the retrieving part during the daytime. Which wouldn’t do.

I have seen zero crows in the yard–though I did see one croaking away at full blast at the top of the tree next door yesterday, where it had direct eye contact with the deceased. No translators were available.

What mine really seemed to protect against was squirrels–they clearly did not want to go near that beak.

Nobody has confessed to ruffling its feathers.

But at this point I figure it’s been dead out there for three weeks, and if I put it over in the apple tree it will have moved and thereby be deemed alive–telling the squirrels to scram and the crows to come celebrate. Free food!

Jennifer’s guffawing did it. I remembered. I bagged it.

I was cleaning the house, as one does before one’s sister-in-law arrives from Texas, and stumbled across a spring alumni magazine I hadn’t gotten around to reading but hadn’t wanted to let go of before I did. I almost chucked it straight in the recycling. This was not a day for being patient with clutter.

But wait.

Okay, years ago when the movie Napoleon Dynamite came out, Newsweek ran a small blurb praising it, with that iconic picture of the curly-red-headed lead character.

All I knew was, I turned the page on my magazine and why on earth was my husband’s high school picture in Newsweek?! In his suit–I recognized it.

But wait (looking more closely), is that… (reading). Wow. Man is that guy a dead ringer from back in the day (although mine’s better looking.)

So here I was, alumni magazine in hand tonight and the cover looks sort of like an artsy-fartsy graphic that you might even think was that guy. It couldn’t be. What would that movie have to do with BYU?

Plenty, it turns out, given that the writer and most of the actors were students there at the time; the cover story was an interview with the cast. I’d had no idea. And they were funny!

I’ve said for years I really ought to see it just to see how else that guy looks like my husband 40 years ago. Now I want to see how those guys pulled off those scenes they described.

They borrowed a van and it broke down, so, okay, they shot that scene right there in the middle of the field. They needed a cow in front of the school bus and theirs was a no-show; well, everyone in this quite small town has the same first three numbers on their phone, so they just dialed the last four numbers randomly till they got someone.

I’m doing this movie (oh they knew who this was) and we need a people-friendly cow. Know any?

Well, we’ve got Bessie the 4-H cow. And so Bessie was there in ten minutes.

I want to watch her world debut. Finally.

Anybody around here seen it?

Ugly Christmas Sweater season is coming (but is still far enough away that prices haven’t risen yet) and my 20+ year old one was handed down several years ago to a teen who wanted to wear it in a play and then she found she loved it so I gave it to her. It was as formal a one as I’ve ever seen.

I happened to find this on swap.com, the screaming opposite of my previous one, and for $3 it was mine. It is both tacky (why are the tree and the wreath sunk down in their diamonds unlike all the centered motifs?) and bright and, well, pretty, in a way, and best of all it made me laugh. The beads are bright and big and glittery and a certain baby who will be nearing three months by then will want to try to reach for them all.

It was in near-perfect condition–just let me steam that one side that wants to curl under. There are even Christmas bells and holly on the back.

Swap.com’s mission is to keep good clothes away from the landfill. The commission paid is low enough that nobody’s going to steal from stores to sell there, as has been known to happen on Ebay; this is where you send good stuff out of your closet that you hope will find an appreciative home because it deserves it. Basically, it’s a national garage sale, hence the classic crewneck silk/cashmere sweater I got for $2.30 and the deep green cashmere tunic-length perfect sweater for $7. Which I’m actually more likely to wear holding the baby: they are definitely snuggle-worthy, and hand washing is easy.

Prices sag on things that stay too long. Sales happen. Shipping is always $5.99 or free.

Well, look at that: Ugly Christmas Sweater has its own search on Swap. Someone creatively listed a plain red crew as an “Ugly Christmas Sweater kit.” Go to town!

Another 60 grams, and by my calculations I’m 20% of the way there.

Unless I use those two skeins from a different dyelot. They were a close match to the nine in the bag. Let’s see how much the fabric stretches from the weight of the wool as I get further along–it’s a ribbing-based pattern, so it relaxes by closing in on itself for now.