The cherry tree has woken up over the last week or so.

The older-than-us Meyer lemon keeps on offering more.

The olive tree is feeding the squirrels and jays, and judging by the wildly-flailing tails and paws and leaps to safety, the tastiest parts are at the outermost tips of the very flimsiest branches. *headdust*

The plum tree set a fair amount of fruit despite being rained on during most of its blooming, while the apples are holding off just, just a little bit for the late rains expected this week. Starting tomorrow! (Oh thank goodness.)

The pear tree is slowly stirring and coming to.

The peaches continue one after another after another in the expected sequence of future ripening.

The three blueberries are in their dogcrate of a cage. Sit! Stay!

The Fuji has four flowers open  and the other apple almost has its first….

A little rain, and we’ll take all we can get. A little sunshine.

I look forward to being able to tell the grandkids to go pick whatever they want when it’s ripe. And still there there will be room to run around and play in as they get bigger and the trees do too. And to climb on.

Stumbled across an article in the New York Times vitally, and I use that word literally, important to women dealing with potential surgery for fibroids or more.

There are quite a few comments there by Hooman Noorchashm, the doctor who started the raising of the alarm. He is facing losing his 41-year-old wife, also a doctor, the mother of their six children, because her OB/GYN did what has become a standard surgery in that specialty: laparoscopy with morcellation of the fibroid. Far faster recovery, tiny little scar, back to work much sooner, what’s not to love.

But.

Dr. Noorchashm, a surgeon himself, points out that morcellation is not done by any other surgeons in any other specialty–and for good reason: it not only breaks up the offending tissue and sucks it out, but it also spews it widely within the abdomen, and if there is any cancer lurking in those cells it’s suddenly everywhere and in the bloodstream.

Which is what happened to his wife. Her fibroids could have been removed intact and sent to pathology and instead she was suddenly an instant Stage IV leiomyosarcoma patient.

Leiomyosarcoma, he points out, is incurable and a fast death.

It is also what my mother-in-law died of a year ago. She was told that maybe when they did her hysterectomy years ago they missed a few cells which turned into ovarian cancer, but they found that that wasn’t quite what she had.

Going by the commenters on that article, it is believed in the leiomyosarcoma community that that misdiagnosis as ovarian accounts for quite a few of the cases of what MomH had, which our family was told was a highly rare disease.

Maybe not so much. Dr. Noorchashm says it’s one in 400 to 1000 of the fibroid cases that go to surgery and that every one of those cases could be treated by intact removal. Or have it go like his wife’s case. The cells might lay dormant for years and then suddenly go wild or they might get right to it, but either way it is not treatable at that point and invariably fatal. He is agitating, with good cause, for morcellation to simply cease to be done. Size of incision is not the purpose of surgery, he points out.

There’s a lot more in there about the economics of the device manufacturers and of some hospitals’ requirements that doctors do so many to keep their privileges to use those machines. There is even a morcellation procedure that encases the tissue but it is much less often done.

Patients are typically not told that the surgeon intends to do morcellation during their procedure nor what it means. A patient commented that it was not on their Informed Consent list. Patients need to know. If the doctors aren’t changing their methods to keep up with the new information, the patients need to stand up for themselves and ask and then tell them no.

And to think two or three years ago I was in an OB/GYN’s office debating whether to have fibroid surgery. We decided to see if a little more aging would take care of it, and it did. I had no desire to have my abdomen opened up yet again even a little bit and the gynecologist wasn’t pushing it.

I had no idea….

I’m trying to help get the word out to make sure that others do.

Spent the day in the car and later working on one. I think I’ll duplicate-in those couple of stitches missing on the tailgate (charts…) when I tighten up those wheels.

Even with an official ground-ship label from the seller, you can’t send lithium-iron batteries back without the covers to all the connectors. And we’d lost one when we were opening the box up before we knew one of the batteries was a dud.

Last night Richard tossed out some ideas of where I might be able to replace the little thing. Wait–the Batteries Plus people ought to be the best bet, even if they’re a hike, but hey, said he. They’ll recycle the old batteries anyway so you might as well try there.

I went down there today and the guy smiled and said, You’ve been here before.

Yes, I smiled back.  Then when I pulled out of my pocket one of the covers that I still had and explained my dilemma, he and the younger guy chuckled, no biggy, the younger guy dove into a box right next to him and he pulled out two. I asked how much I owed them and they waved me away and said it wasn’t anything. “It’s $140 to me,” I told them gratefully; now I could return both.

When I got home I found he’d given me two sizes, and the first one I tried was close but it just wasn’t quite it. The second? Perfect. Covers went on, I taped them down for good measure like one site had said you had to do for safety, took the things in the original boxes within the box back to FedEx–and stumped the clerk.

My printout of the barcode for them to print out the shipping label wouldn’t scan. She didn’t know what to do. She was about to turn me away. I had one of those moments where I had the bright idea when I needed it rather than afterwards and I asked if I could forward Martin’s email to an email address for the store, and there was one and she scanned the thing from her own machine and that worked. No charge to me was very nice.

Assuming Starkpower finds no fault with our handling of the batteries–and they absolutely shouldn’t–we are finally finally done with that expensive chore. (Now to finish the taxes…)

Meantime, Purlescence last night thankfully had one last skein of the Cascade Longwood green that I used on Parker’s sweater and I could finally get going again on Hudson’s matching birthday sweater. I could have used the leftover orange from Parker’s digger for the car, and maybe should have, but as a Prius driver somehow going green seemed the way to go.

Maybe I’ll add a sun?

Something nibbled on a one-inch peach, found it terrible, and went for a second. Time for the clamshells.

——–

I met her boss briefly a year ago. We had just flown back from my mother-in-law’s funeral and my daughter was on a two-day bereavement leave, but there was something she needed at her office and I drove down there with her–it was a time of needing to simply be together as a family as much as possible before ordinary life took over again. Such a strange thing that would feel like.

He came downstairs along with another co-worker and, as I quickly put my knitting aside and rose to my feet, they introduced themselves to me and warmly offered their condolences. I came away glad she worked for them.

Today  found me driving her back to that office: the boss was transferring to another country (home, for him) and there was to be a surprise going-away party for him and she didn’t quite feel up to that drive and back.

I said I would sit in the car and quietly knit for however long, no hurries. I cracked a back window–it’s the warmest day we’ve had in awhile–and she looked askance at that and said we can’t have you exposed to the sun like that. (Re the lupus.) Come on in the lobby. He won’t see you and he wouldn’t recognize you if he did.

Oh, ask I, intrigued, does he have face blindness? (Too? Like me?) But how many women does he know with gray hair and a cane and, this is the big one, *knitting*? There? I didn’t want to give away the surprise.

She wasn’t about to diagnose the guy but she assured me it would be fine and said he would never recognize nor even see me and so I cranked the window back up and found myself inside on a nice leather seat near the door where you could see people coming down the stairs or in the front door or out from the hallway off to the left–same chair as last time.

But I was prepared. I didn’t just have my knitting. I had my Time magazine. So I could go, y’know, incognito like that. Only, as I pulled it out of my purse, apparently I had just recycled this week’s (the truck came today, it’s gone) and kept last week’s because I have a great visual memory like that. Checking the cover? Oh. Darn. I flipped through a few pages, thought oh well, put it back and pulled out my knitting. A skein of Jacques Cousteau from Madeline Tosh, the one I bought at the MadTosh shop in Ft. Worth when we went to visit with my mother-in-law for the last time, actually; it was my souvenir skein from that trip.

Wait. I think that’s? But no, he didn’t look my way at all. Huh. The idea that I would recognize someone a year later after only seeing their face once was very highly unlikely anyway, so, okay, not.

Michelle showed up awhile later having clearly had a great time. And laughing, because….

…Hi, Michelle, I saw your mom downstairs!

He’d gone out the front doors for just a moment, forgotten his badge, had had to go to the security guy a few feet away from me and ask permission to go back in to work–the guy had chuckled and waved him on in, he was hardly a stranger–and there I was, right in my spot, I think with even the same color yarn as last time, knitting away.

Totally busted.

First, a side note: Starkpower immediately resolved the battery-shipping issue. Good people.

And:

The alarm was blaring and it was dark and, wrenched half-awake, it took me a moment to figure out what on earth was wrong with that stupid thing. It had no business going off like–oh. Right.

We piled in the car and drove through traffic and across the Bay as the sun rose, and since I wasn’t the one at the wheel I got a good view of a peregrine falcon (!) perched on a light pole at the edge of Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge. Saw a red-shouldered hawk on another one. Coming back later, there was a snowy egret near the edge of the tide in the breeding plumage that gives it its name, wings held out just enough that I got to see such a sight for the first time in my life. Glorious.

We made it to the Park and Call at the airport just as she was walking out from her plane, her old college friend happily married off now. I leaped out and grabbed her bag for her and swooped it into the trunk. Um, on the second try because I’m a klutz like that. I got back in behind where I’d been so that she could recline the front seat and give her back a break  after her flight.

Dropped Richard off at work so I could take her to her doctor appointment later in the morning because, as early as we got up, she got up a whole lot earlier, while jet-lagged, too, not to mention the whole major-pain thing still going on for her.

I was thinking ruefully a few minutes ago that with people coming over tomorrow I didn’t get much done today, much though I wanted to; I’ve been just too tired.

But you know? Actually, I did. A lot.

You know that moment of discovery that feels so obvious, so brilliant, and so stupid all at once that you didn’t think of it before? Like, to a beginner, that you can knit normal back-and-forth on circular needles, it doesn’t have to be in a circle?

And then a little later I realized that of course I’d thought of it before, I just hadn’t in awhile because I don’t do this often enough. So. Cocoa that has been opened in a humid environment becomes lumpy; my chocolate torte recipe calls for mixing flour and cocoa together before adding them in and I’ve been smushing the lumps out with a large spoon for forever.

Except when I’m not. A wire whisk (duh), the dry cocoa and flour. Smooth now as, well, newly opened cocoa.

Meantime, a little showing off of Parker’s sweater. There would be a video of Hudson walking, too, if I could get it to work here. Later.

So how was your day? he asked.

Well, I finished the purple cowl I was working on on our trip down yesterday–I’d had about an inch on it before we left, it was about 2/3 done when we got home, and today I finished the knitting waiting at the lab;  I rinsed it and now it’s blocking.

“I never saw a purple cowl, I never hope to…” he teased me with an impish grin that finishing that line might get him in trouble and skipped over to, “But I can tell you anyhowl…”

Re the lab. I guess the hyper- and hypo- thyroid autoantibodies evened themselves out: my counts that they affect are back in the normal range. No surgery and no thyroid meds needed at this time.

California’s idea of winter snow… Those are strawberry fields, the white a plastic mulch lining the rows of plants.

Richard’s cousins were blessing their baby in church this morning and so we set the alarm and drove from cities to countryside, on past Monterey to Salinas, flatness giving way to steeply winding road then to towering eucalyptus forest swallowing all but the road immediately ahead then eventually to strawberry field after strawberry field in the clouds, the occasional, blessed rain opening up on us three times and three times we left it behind as we continued on, discovering places we had not gone before.

One cauliflower field was playing ball and looking ready to harvest, then quick! Back to the strawberries, for the most part. (My table pleads guilty to agreeing with that.)

It was Sunday and the fields were still, the machinery unmanned, not a farmhand in sight. A day of rest. And of thanking for and asking for more rain.

I got about 2/3 of a cowl knitted during the long drives. I had a shawl project going at home, but I have learned to stick to larger needles in a car so that the tips are less likely to get bounced out of an ongoing stitch.

The baby was beautiful (all that hair!), his two big sisters were happily distracted by young cousins to play with in the enclosed back yard, and it was a reunion of the families of his mother and father: like a wedding, only more relaxed and with time to really get to know each other better over lunch. People brought great food.

And–earlier at the church I saw–couldn’t be. Had to be. I called David? after him as he started to disappear down a hallway without having seen us, then I thought, no, of course, wrong brother. Roger!

He turned and was suddenly startled and we did a mutual What are YOU doing here?!

He lives there. He grew up in our neighborhood (ed. to clarify, here in California, after fielding emails Monday from my siblings of I don’t remember them…) We know his mom well, attended his dad’s funeral, he’s seen us during many a visit home over the years for his kids to see Grandma. We bought his classmate’s old house over on….

Small world.

Not too far at all. We can definitely do that again.

The plum tree mid-bloom. Such a flimsy looking little thing and yet it will soon offer so much fruit. I got a note from a friend that she was saving plastic produce clamshells for me: ready to thwart the raccoons and squirrels again?

Oh yes please thank you!

And to help keep the smaller critters at bay… Yesterday Coopernicus perched on the fence, watched me for several minutes, then spread his wings wide and swooped right on over right next to the window.

Got any snacks under that picnic table?

Afraid not. They all fled awhile ago, hon.

Today I saw him on the wooden box–how did he get there without my seeing him coming!? Oh wait. That’s a hawk’s specialty.  Then he fluttered on over to the back of the chair there, looked at me and said something tongue in beak: I can only guess it was along the lines of look, lady, some of my best hunting is in that alcove and if you don’t fill the little feeder there as well as the big one I’m going to have a harder time keeping my lady fed in style.  Can you help me out here?

Sure, right on it.

And on a side note: my father the art dealer has a really cool column up that I thought I’d mention. Cecil B. DeMille, when remaking his Ten Commandments movie in color, commissioned a painter to envision fourteen scenes for him to work from, and all these years later Dad immediately recognized and confirmed for the owners who that painter was, the scenes having been left unsigned. The same who painted George Washington in the famous “Prayer at Valley Forge.”

Here, I’ll let Dad tell it.

Michelle had a long day today with three appointments in two cities, a bit much for her at this stage in her recovery from her accident and so I offered to drive.

After all the years I played taxi mom, it was in a way an odd thing to be back in that role, hair gray now, my daughter towering over me. But it meant I had a fair amount of time to sit and work on my current project that I so much want to get in the mail and on its way to the person who needs it.

So now it’s almost done–and then I’ll be able to dive into the new Stitches yarn my fingers are so antsy to get to.

While the second peach tree blooms merrily…

The doorbell rang and I didn’t even have to sign for the box as I saw the FedEx guy on his way back to his truck. I opened the door and yelled, ‘Thank you!” and he called back over his shoulder a cheerful, “You’re welcome!”

We got the first exploded battery out of the scooter’s case two days ago, but the second was well wedged in there. We put on rubber gloves to avoid any leaking anything and pulled. And pulled again, putting our whole bodies into the effort to get those things apart.  Released and reassessed. Carefully avoiding damaging the case, kind of holding our breath, he gave it another try thisaway while I said a silent prayer and I imagine he did too but whatever, about a minute later it came free from the case and the industrial-strength velcro holding it tight. Nothing broken and neither of us ricocheting into the walls.

He connected up the new batteries and I screwed the case back together and plugged the thing in.

About an hour later, Richard said to give it a try.

It’s too soon, isn’t it?

Just try turning it on. What color is the indicator?

Well, from this angle it’s green, from that it’s yellow.

Just try.

Nada. Dead. I unplugged the thing and brought the case back over to him.

“Oh wait,” I suddenly said, turning back around and disentangling cords, not having realized that someone had put a second one on the scooter at some point probably thinking it went with it, “It helps if you plug in the right one.” But I had no idea now which one had been and which hadn’t. (Edited to add later, of course we had had the right one plugged in–that indicator had been on.)

Richard unscrewed the case again–no small job–and tested the batteries, but one being dead didn’t mean anything if it wasn’t ever charged up to begin with.

It is plugged in again, only this time we’re sure it really is plugged in. Putting the key in gets you zero on the indicator still. Waiting, hoping hard…

If nothing else, the local Fry’s Electronics has a pair of lead-acids in the right size. Hopefully not expired. So there is at least a backup plan.

(Update: zero volts, one, 13.3 on the other.)

Hudson’s second day of walking and he was ready to be scooped up instead, my son says of when he snapped this today.

My backstory: the speeder who hit my car fourteen years ago severed the connections between the visual and balance centers of the brain and it makes it exceedingly difficult to walk in visually intense places; my left side collapses, my muscles go spastic and the slightest bumping-int0 sends me flying. The lupus made healing more difficult. I wasn’t epileptic–yet, warned the neurologist, but he told me I was very close to it and not to risk it walking around for long periods in loudly-colorized heavy-motion environments like Stitches. Sit.

So now, the batteries on the scooter didn’t seem to be holding a charge anymore. Increasingly over the last several years they’ve been problematic, and last year it seemed like I had to stop every few minutes and recharge for as long as I got to zip around after I did. (Hi, I’m Alison, do you mind if I borrow a plug in your booth for awhile and block your customers’ way in?) I didn’t see how it could manage this year at all.

It would be much better for lead-acid batteries if I used them all the time, but I don’t; in most of my life, I can manage with a cane.

So we finally took the scooter apart Friday night after planting that pear tree, as long as we were being productive and virtuous, to see what type of battery it was so that maybe we could simply finally ditch the old ones.

Uh, yeah. They’d ditched us first. They’d exploded.

We looked up the type and Richard found something that really appealed to him: a lithium-ion version. It would easily take ten pounds (!) off the weight of lifting that 90-lb scooter, they would last far longer, and when and how long you charged them vs how often you used them, all those issues would be over. They wouldn’t randomly explode if you left the chair plugged in all night.  (ahem)

But it was late Friday California time and the by-far most reasonably-priced place was closed for the weekend, today would be a holiday, and they were on East Coast time. But what could I lose. I sent off an email.

And got an email back Saturday! When they were all supposed to be off work.

It was not quite a sure thing in my mind till this morning when I checked my email, when, there it was, the order confirmed: two batteries, already FedExed. I would be good to go.

The guy at Starkpower.com hadn’t been sure I would want to fork over the second-day shipping charges for something that heavy, but hey, as long as we were in that deep. Their website wasn’t set up to deal with anything but the cheapest and slowest way here but he found out what it would cost and promised it could be done. I asked Richard if he was sure, and he was emphatic that he didn’t want me to be stranded by that chair anymore, he wanted me to be able to just go and enjoy Stitches and the Aquarium freely, year after foreseeable year to come with the much better and lighter and longer-lasting batteries and just not have to worry about it anymore. He’s a peach.

I cannot tell you how freeing it feels now, and just wait till this weekend!

And to Martin at Starkpower.com? You’re wonderful. Thank you so much.

I rebooted my phone today, thinking, well, that’s at least one thing I can do. Wasn’t expecting anything–but then when I typed out a name and phone number I knew and hit go, all the sudden my whole contact list came back to life. I have no idea why on earth it had disappeared but I’ll sure be asking questions. What a relief, though.

Meantime, a story I wanted to tell last night but for the late hour:

About fifteen summers ago, my sister who then lived in Texas (and North Carolina before that) told me she and her family had a work-related reason to drive to Salt Lake City for about a week, y’know, just in case we wanted to meet up with them.

My younger kids had never met her nor her family. My older kids didn’t remember them. Every time we had had specific reasons to get together over the years something had gotten in the way, and I did not want to let that happen again.

This was well before my parents retired there, and I ended up calling my Aunt Bonnie and Uncle David. Carolyn and family would be staying with her in-laws; Aunt Bonnie and Uncle David offered us to stay at their house for I think it was five days. They wanted to see us and they wanted to make sure we wouldn’t miss our chance for the cousins to get to finally meet each other. Come!

After a long hard day’s drive, we arrived to find Aunt Bonnie on crutches. Wait, what on earth happened to you?!

She had broken her hip a few weeks earlier. She had quite deliberately not told us because she knew we wouldn’t come if she did, and a hotel for six for that long was out of our range. It was that important to her and Uncle David that their nieces get their families together that they simply kept quiet.

Uncle David was the one who made up all the beds upstairs and prepared the rooms, there being no way she could. We would have done at least that much ourselves and spared them, had we had any idea, but they just waved any concern away and welcomed us warmly.

I will forever be grateful for their uncommon kindnesses. We all will.

My cousin John took his parents in a few years ago to take care of them as his dad’s Parkinson’s progressed.

Talking to him today, he had never heard that story about his folks. He told me that he’d been fielding call after call for two days of people wanting him to know what his dad had done for them and how grateful they were.

I could just picture John getting off the phone and asking his mom to tell him about that time when… She’s earned every moment of it. And so has John.

I did not know as I was planting my Comice pear tree on Friday with Richard’s help that the day’s news would make it into a memorial to my uncle, but now it will forever be so as it grows and thrives and bears the most perfect fruit in great quantity, to be offered freely to all.

(Ed. to add, Hudson started walking today!)

Watched Olympics at Michelle’s tonight till late.

And somehow in the course of the evening discovered that my Iphone 4s had

zero

as in 0

contacts.

Nada. Everybody has packed up and gone home. No idea why. Every address, every phone number, every email addy, poof. I’m hoping we can recover the info at Verizon on Monday but we won’t know till then. Has anyone else ever had this happen?

And–and this is definitely not being typed in order of importance but it’s late and I’m too tired to edit… My mom’s big brother, my Uncle David passed away yesterday, and the mathematician in him I imagine would have loved the 02142014 of the date as he slipped quietly into the beyond, well loved.

(Okay, it’s not at all as close to the fence as that photo makes it look.)

We bought a huge pot last fall on closeout at Costco, and on a wistful whim I bought a big bag of soil there too earlier this week; maybe the cherry tree needed more, right?

It was Stitches weekend a year ago that the water heater blew and my transmission did too. One of the things we talked about while deciding whether to try to replace the car right away was how, way back when we only had the one, that uninterrupted quiet time together at the beginning and ending of the work day was something we had actually missed in the years since.

Let me report that it has worked out okay most of the time. (The commute being under four miles does help.) Although, there have been days.

We were almost to the office this morning when Richard said that the one problem with this today was that he couldn’t sneak out early to go buy me roses this Valentine’s.

I said wistfully that actually, I’d really rather have a Comice pear tree than roses. (And I knew they are by far his favorite pears, too.) I had bought that pot talking about a mango tree, waiting for the season to change to where it wouldn’t possibly freeze en route from Florida, but when it came down to it, we both preferred the other, didn’t we?

We did.

We could plant it in that pot in that spot in the back where the tree guys are going to take out a dying cypress after nesting season is over; we could get a year’s head start on growth and then tip it into a hole there later. Or even just leave it in the pot to help keep it small. I already know the neighbors on both sides of that corner are hoping for bigger and over the fence.

And so it was decided. I called Wegman’s Nursery–and yes, actually, they had three, still. I headed over there mid-afternoon. Forgot my sunblock (BAD lupus patient, BAD!) but remembered my hat and I wandered around the place and finally (with help) found the fruit trees in a side yard there.

The Comices looked great, with one particularly thick and sturdy and strong-looking. *Very* nice–I was impressed.

The guy helping me asked if I wanted the (flimsy) pot it was growing in? It would be an extra five bucks. It wasn’t much and I said no and he grabbed the tree and shook the thing off–and all the soil away from the roots. Oh. It was still dormant so he pruned it for me and wrapped the roots carefully up in a plastic bag, pulling the handles tight around the trunk. Laid it across the back seat of my car once it was paid for.

But in the pruning, he lopped off the top, which included a big side branch and looked like a new bare-root tree unto itself and rather than have it be tossed, I asked if I could have it? I mean, I could plunk it in water and hope it sprouted roots, couldn’t hurt to try, right?

The guy chuckled and handled it with the reverence he did the tree itself. This was someone who clearly likes what he does for a living. But he did say that the tree really needed to be planted today, or at least not to let the roots dry out, but, plant it today. I promised him I was going to.

My friend Sally pointed out to me that the little one wouldn’t have the same rootstock, and she’s right, so I checked: the graft they used is supposed to help limit the future size of the tree, although one could prune anything to whatever.  Okay. I know that you can buy rooting hormones but I don’t think I’m that invested in it–so if you’re local and you want to play with it and see if you can turn it into a free tree, let me know and it’s yours. Must supply own partridge at Christmastime.

The pot needed holes drilled into it and the drill needed charging up. Richard took me out to Smitten to pass that time well: order the most excellent ice cream and watch them create it in front of you, frozen by nitrogen. The Tcho‘s chocolate is the first chocolate ice cream I have ever tasted that does that flavor really, really well. It was our first time there and definitely not our last.

Home again, there was drilling and sweeping away of plastic curlicues and flashlight holding and dumping in of guano-covered gravel that had been under some of the trees out back for stability as the Comice gets heavier and hauling of soil and watering and pushing out a well in the pot and planting and more soil and more watering and tamping down around the root ball and wishing there were more to put in there.

We will buy more soil tomorrow. Right now those roots are moist and protected and looking good.

My sweetie gave me my long-wanted Comice pear tree for Valentine’s and helped me plant it and I am beyond thrilled.

And: when I picked him up at work, he was standing outside holding a vase with red roses and baby’s breath and loving my disbelieving laugh of, How did you pull that off?! Google Express? (But they don’t do perishables, I thought, but maybe for Valentine’s?!)

He grinned. “They were selling them in the cafeteria. For a reasonable price, even!”

So was my tree. Make that, so was our tree.

I’ve got me a good one. Just the best.