The big Costco-box strawberries were good but had been in there since Thursday. Cooking them would definitely extend their shelf life.

So I blenderized them with a quarter cup sugar and about 2/3 a teaspoon of King Arthur Instant Clearjel, ie very processed (corn?) starch for, y’know, sour cherry pies and the like. Nuked it twelve minutes and poured it over sliced mangoes with leftover sauce for tomorrow.

And that was going to be the end of that.

Until he looked at the ice cream maker.

Can you put corn anything in ice cream? I asked, knowing that of course you can if you want to, it just sounded so strange.

Why don’t we try it?

So: 3/4 c. strawberry sauce, cream to fill it to two cups, two more tablespoons of sugar after a taste test and into the machine it went.

A few minutes later while doing a puzzle.

Him: I think we should check it to see if it’s done.

Me: It just started!

Him: I think we should check.

Me: If we check every three minutes we’ll run out before it’s done!

Him with a grin: Is this a problem?

Turns out the machine wasn’t turning so it’s a good thing we did check. Fixed that. We let it finish its business in peace.

And the verdict is, next time I think I’ll go half sauce/half cream because that was super rich. The sweetness level was not too much, just right.

It was very very good. Ten stars.

My sour cherry was impersonating cheerleaders as it waved its pompoms in the wind.

What I was trying to capture with the camera, though, was how the sky had suddenly turned a strong yellow. Yes it had started to rain and yes sunset was ten minutes away, but it was at the speed of a light dimmer and I’d really love to sit down with a meteorologist or physicist and ask, How do the particles do that? Why don’t they turn the sky pink, or even purple, since you get those at sunsets? Why just yellow?

And why does it sharpen all the colors and make them brighter when cataracts also do a yellow overlay and make everything duller and fuzzier?

I can just hear my mom chuckling and going, You were the kid who followed me around asking, Whyyyyy? after every explanation in answer to that question. Nonstop.

If you heard that squeal just now, I came around the corner to explain to him, I went to smash an ant on the wall, it fell, I didn’t see where it went but I felt it land on my foot and suddenly found myself kicking real hard and jumping back and, yeah, it got noisy there for a second.

His face! He was still back at the wait wait wait WHAT?! He exclaimed, You can’t. Feel. An ANT! Land on your FOOT!

I laughed because I had–and I knew exactly where he was coming from. What the nerves no longer transmit, you gradually forget they used to be able to do. I studied harmonics in a physics of acoustics class in college so I know what they are in theory and they must sound divine, the pure math of sound and all that (anyone else remember the Harmonic Convergence group in the news? Was that related to the start of Burning Man? I digress.) But asking me to report on hearing them in our experiments in the lab? It was already ten years too late for that.

That is the one specific class grade I remember from university.  A-. Never was quite sure about that one.

A quick question, prompted by a conversation where two of us mentioned using a spatula to lift assembled puzzle pieces over the established edge and into the center once you know where they go and a third person marveling that she’d never heard nor thought of doing that and she could not fathom how she had not.

So.

Do you ever spatula your pieces?

I recounted the bit to Richard, who thinks my puzzle techniques are sacrilege, and he said with a suppressed guffaw betraying his mock indignation, *I* do it right!

The NY Times ran an obit for the guy who wrote “Wild Thing,” which the Troggs turned into a #1 hit that launched Chip Taylor’s career.

Which I mentioned to Richard over dinner. He immediately ordered the Siri equivalent to play it.

The look on his face as it announced William Shatner’s Pants as that music kicked in instead.

I was torn between Idon’twannaknow and the look on his face of You.have.got.to.be.kidding.me/theWHAT now? that was so befuddled and horrified and curious in spite of himself that I laughed and laughed to tears.

A ground squirrel tunnel popped up right under the edge of my sour cherry tree. And another one at the base of my columnar apple.

One is cute. Two is a thousand, fast.

“Did you know it smells like cinnamon out there?”

Uh, that would be a yes. I poured it down the edges of those two holes to make the place inhospitable (and then did a better job of covering the cherry’s roots with an old oven rack, since cherry roots and young trunks are supposed to be a particular favorite.) Pepper and mint they can get used to; cinnamon is both sharp tasting and it gets on their paws and their fur and their noses and they’ll keep avoiding it.

Or at least in my experience so far.

So we’ll see.

I wonder how many neighbors were thinking cinnamon roll thoughts today.

I remember the big (to my childhood eyes) field between the church and the Safeway on the Maryland side of beautiful, woodsy Western Avenue in DC and the clovers that dotted the grass and spread down that field. We would pick them and make a slit near the bottom of a stem with our fingernails and slide the stem of another through it, chaining them into flower necklaces that celebrated with us for the rest of the afternoon and then quietly gave way to nature.

White clovers had some of this yarn’s color at the center, with all those curled white petals above. A few were purple.

I’m sure the older girls taught the younger ones how to do this, though I mostly simply remember making them with my best friend Kathy. Those older girls would have included my older sisters–and Richard’s.

Whose cancer finally took her when her youngest was in college.

I remember, when our kids were growing up, her backyard sewn in meadow flower packets that had beautiful wildflowers blooming all summer. Cold, cold water from the mountains ran past it all in a tight stream hemmed in by squared stones set in place just so by pioneers at the beginning of the western water rights era so that their children’s children’s children could help things grow.

Her youngest will soon have a baby girl of her own.

Clover flowers in a meadow. With hopes of making chains of necklaces with the little one someday in memory of her grandmother.

The Big Badminton Birdie! It’s back!

Let’s see if this local link works or if the paywall gets in the way. Wikipedia with more history, here.

There’s an immense hangar down the freeway–I mean, how many buildings have their own weather, naturally?–that was military, then NASA, then a decrepit environmental disaster leaking asbestos and more towards the Bay. Years and years of arguments: why do we need to preserve a massive WWII wind tunnel? Who are we hiding planes from these days? Who wants to pay for the Superfund cleanup?

There was the Golden Eagle nest at the top of the building that got left alone, until it didn’t. The shell of the building got removed and then the skeleton was left to rust in the elements. For years.

Meanwhile, Google’s founders had an idea to get around the distance and restrictions on nighttime flights at San Jose airport: they wouldn’t own the hangar, which was next to their headquarters, they would just fix it and lease it and after 60 years the Feds could take it back. Deal?

Yeah no, said lots of people.

Heck yeah, said lots of other people for whom this was an iconic landmark.

Why? wondered some of us.

My dad’s old high school buddy was one of if not the (I think the) first woman to be a boss at NASA Ames. Loved her and her husband, they had us over several times when my folks were in town and it was a hoot to listen to her and Dad catching up. Her funeral in a lovely old Catholic church is where I learned that Morning Is Broken was not, in fact, strictly a Cat Stevens song. I did quite the double take at the time.

Where my husband started a PhD, the head of the department quit when offered head of, yup, NASA Ames across the country, and I’ve wondered from time to time if the guy still lives around here or if he went back to his home state when it closed. I don’t know how he was as a boss there–but I can tell you that when he left his university and they announced the new head, half the faculty in his department quit, too, as fast as they could find other jobs, a fact that changed the entire trajectory of our lives and landed us in New Hampshire and then, eventually–here.

So yeah I guess we have a bit of history with the newly restored place, too. Who would have guessed.

(Photo from yesterday, didn’t take one today.)

Eight and a quarter repeats now after doing 21 166-stitch rows today. I haven’t worked this hard nonstop on an afghan since my grandkids’ cousin was born with a wrapped cord and not breathing on his own for his first fifteen minutes while the hospital scrambled to replace his blood and cool his body in a protocol Stanford had pioneered not long before.

I typed the above thinking a fervent oh, if only, wanting to hug my friend Jody whose granddaughter did not survive that complication.

That baby’s mom and dad needed a tangible symbol of all the hope and prayers sent by everybody.  I didn’t have the stash nor funds for more superwash merino to do it in one color, it was stripes the length of each skein and friends chipped in with more skeins of their own to be a part of the cause. Ten days start to finish.

I was told afterwards that that baby emphatically did NOT like to be cold. (Gee, I wonder why.) That made me all the more glad we had sent him our warmth.

He is turning 13 this year and doing fine.

Do you ever get yourself to keep at it by telling yourself that if you do this one row, you’ll never have to do it again? That that one row at least will forever be finished?

And then the next and the next and the next and the next.

This blog post brought to you with thanks to the makers of blue ice therapy gel packs.

I blocked the preferred escape route of the desert rabbit–I put a planting pot saucer in its path–and haven’t seen it since. Instead, a California ground squirrel showed up the next day to graze the low-lying broadleafs.

Never google them. They nest in large colonies, and if they don’t have one, two of them will make one, fast. They destroy your trees, they dig under your house in intricate tunnels, they eat everything and they will brave going up your fruit trees and its tree squirrels if that’s what it takes.

But I just see the one, and it’s chunky and cuddly-looking and pretty. But I think I’ll invite the rabbit back.

Turns out that in the Bay Area, ground squirrels have recently been documented hunting and eating voles. When the vole population explodes so do their attacks on them. Did you have ground squirrels on your apex predator list? They are if you’re a vole.

Meantime, in my brother’s very gerrymandered district (he lived an hour away from it when he moved there), two white Republican men and a Black man who’s a Democrat were running. And we’re talking Georgia.

That Democrat got the most votes in today’s special election. Honey, we are getting there.

Three weeks ago: hospital.

Two weeks ago: under strict orders not to be on his feet. Church for him by Zoom.

One week ago: still not up to going to church anyway, and that foot stayed propped up under continuing doctor’s orders. Church for him by Zoom.

Today.

Our friend Russ was holding the door open for us as we passed through at the end of the services.

I turned back to appreciate what I’d just seen: the joy in his face at Richard’s not only being there but looking so intensely normal. You wouldn’t have known at all that anything had happened to him. Russ had visited him in the hospital; he knew. Our eyes met.

His “He looks great!” was from the heart and the light in his eyes said it all.

Stop! What are you doing!

The doctor said to scrub the dead skin off.

(This is after finally finally having his foot unbandaged and free to wash up at home now without risking contaminating adjacent parts.)

You’re drawing blood! (Thinking, let’s not not not do those seven months over.)

Well yeah it’s a little red, I was scrubbing.

No! You’re bleeding. Look. You cannot do it that hard.

(Oh.) I can’t feel anything…

Right. That’s why you let me do it.

(Racks for discouraging small footsteps and gnaw marks.)

You know, I told him, planting that tree–we were just following the Biblical admonition.

He looked at me, wondering where this was taking him…

You know: Blessed are the peachmakers!

Well, that was hellacious news to wake up to. Felon47 wanted a war of his own? Those Epstein files are cutting awfully close.

Writing the rest of this in hopes that someone finds it who’s facing doing this process and hasn’t ever yet: if I can, you can.

After he spent nine days in the hospital on IV antibiotics, it’s been a week of two and a half hour at-home infusions at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and a different one at 2:30 p.m. that takes five minutes per stopwatch to slowly go in but then it’s in, all three requiring I take the med out of the fridge an hour beforehand. Timers are our friend. We both got taught how to do this so that between us we wouldn’t forget any steps on what was at first a highly unfamiliar and uncomfortable process.

Don’t touch the blue part! (He was carefully holding only the bottom of it.)

I am so you won’t pull on it. (There being a needle at the far end for him.)

So, with some hovering mid-air between us, I screwed the other piece on without touching the blue it was screwing onto. It worked. Alcohol wipe, saline infusion, alcohol wipe, med, then alcohol wipe, saline, plastic cap. Oh yeah and the open/close the valves part: if it’s not going in, that’s where it went wrong. The number of valves varied. If it’s only almost not going in, that’s the stopwatch med, it wants to make you go as slow as you’re supposed to with a full minute between partial pushes and that timer is absolutely necessary.

The one thing I don’t get, though, is going through all the steps to completely disinfect my hands and then grabbing a paper towel to dry them. In college I had a job on an assembly line for *plastic medical goods and I saw how that place was run, FDA cleanliness regulations or no. (I would have reported them, had I been able to figure out how back then when a simple phone call to the East Coast could cost you a day’s wages, or figure out how to even get that number. Today’s generations have no idea how much better their world is because my parents’ peers broke up the monopoly of Ma Bell.)

So. A paper towel as a germ-secure tool? Seriously? But then after the antiseptic and the towel they have you Purell and shake, no towel. Well alright then.

The last IV is about done and the fridge has officially reclaimed its space for food. Unscrew, alcohol wipe, cap it off and we’re done. The PCC line allegedly comes out Monday morning, but we’ll know for sure after the doctor sees that foot.

Baby steps.

* Let me hasten back to add that those were not items along the lines of these syringes, they were larger plastic items used in hospitals, like barf bowls. Still.

Still randomly laughing. He didn’t say, but I bet his wife had thoughts on the subject…

Last week I offered the surgeon his choice of a few hats. Another one was on my needles just then–he knew I’d made them.

He hesitated and his face looked as if I’d put him on the spot so I assured him, You don’t have to. It took him a moment but okay, he found a shades-of-brown Rios one and let me give it to him.

And I thought to myself, You’re thinking skiing and Tahoe and adequate warmth and I’m sure you do have some synthetic thing more windproof than these. No sweat. The irony is that the one he did take was the least warm of them–although, the easiest to tuck away.

Today was a post-op follow-up and I’m the one driving at the moment.

I almost laughed (don’t, don’t, I didn’t) when the guy near the end stopped and turned away from inspecting stitches to me and asked me about his new hat. With quite a bit of enthusiasm. He told me how much he loved it. How he keeps it in his pocket (which he patted.) It was so soft! Was it wool? ..Merino? (Said hesitatingly, apparently unsure that I would know what merino meant. Oh you sweet summer child.)

I told him yes, merino, that it was super wash treated so you could run it through the laundry but it would fuzz out so if you don’t want that then hand wash, and that it was hand dyed (let’s not get into the granularity of kettle dyeing descriptions.)

He very much appreciated it.

And I so wanted to tell his wife thank you. Still laughing. He’s a quick and willing study, for sure.