(Frost on apricot.)

We were FaceTiming with the grandkids in San Diego who called for my birthday yesterday and the 7, 9, and 11 year olds (two of those numbers change next week) along with their 4 year old baby brother nodding solemnly were telling us that it had rained for two days and they’d had to stay inside to play. They need the rain, we all do, but…

I told them it had rained here, too, and had left a puddle.

And that the puddle froze. It was solid ice this morning!

ICE! I had their full attention. No such thing had ever happened at their house. (It helped that it had been a very shallow puddle.)

I said, Yeah, and when I went to change my clothes, you know there’s just this little flap of metal between the dryer hose and the outside. The underwear was in the dryer.

I topped off my tale with, I put on frozen underwear!

(Just in case you ever want to know how to make southern Californian kids go wide-eyed and then fall over laughing so long and so hard and so shivery as they imagined just what that would feel like. I think I just stamped a dominant Gramma memory for life on their childhoods. Ice cube undies, yessir. I am so going to hear about this at their weddings.)

Oh. Wait. I spent my usual writing time not blogging but composing a thank you letter to Sola for making my mother so happy. (Typing fast.)

Mom got her package today (don’t look at the price tag Mom); her birthday is next week but I had told her don’t wait, go enjoy.

Once she saw it…!

She made herself stop and try on her new hand-embroidered vyshyvanka before calling me so she could say it fit–she knew it would and it did–and then realized that that intricate work was not even sweeps of blanket stitch but tiny X’s of cross stitch. Done by hand in Ukraine, all of it.

She ran to her friend’s apartment to show it to someone who would understand just how much work and how much love went into that and look at this!

Then she came back upstairs and picked up the phone and called me and was so happy I was almost in tears. This. This is why I did this. This is why Sola did this and what she was so looking forward to, too.

I didn’t get to go with Mom to her Christmas party tonight a plane flight away from me where she showed it off, but my heart sure did.

My cousin Jim, who does a mean Mick Jagger impression with his guitar, was gigglesnorting over this so I had to give it a listen.

Yonder deafened musician over here can still get the notes (or the gist of them at least) but the lyrics are lost to me. So I watch. The lady in the silver dress caught herself almost in time as she was cracking up while the guy next to her sang; the lady in the turquoise is totally hamming it up and she’s having a great time. Notice how she’s leaning away from the guy next to her so her long red hair doesn’t thwap him in her enthusiasm.

Back to the start of the video–there it is, briefly: ‘George Michael, “Last Christmas”‘? Okay, not familiar with that but let’s see if that’s actually the yuletime carol they’re singing like it is but their faces are saying it isn’t. (Googles the lyrics.)

Oh my.

Doesn’t that just break your heart. (No.)

Well then.

Carry on.

Even if they’re grown only an hour away from here and we get them absolutely fresh, raspberries are like fish–you don’t wait all week to use them up, and we had a lot and I was bored with muffins so I decided to make a clafoutis. Then I decided to substitute the flour with almond flour just because I’d never tried that before. Maybe I wasn’t as bored with almond raspberry muffins as I thought I was. Whatever.

After putting it in the oven, I scraped the last tiny bit of batter onto a plate and stuck the last raspberry in the center and nuked it so I could at least get some idea of what I’d just done.

It’s what happened next that threw me so hard that I didn’t react as immediately as I should have to stop it.

I took it out of the microwave when its countdown was over…wondering what that sound was.

The thing was still going. With the door wide open. Deaf that I am, I put my hand on top of it to make sure I was feeling what I was hearing so I really was hearing it.

And still, that door was open. And I was standing right there. What?!

I reached towards it and hit the stop bottom. It kept going. NO! I stepped around it and unplugged it, kicking myself that it had taken me about seven or eight seconds to believe what was happening and to react rationally–who cares about the off button, make it be off!

I don’t seem to be cooked. (checks self again)

You need to test it, said hubby helpfully.

Yeah no babe. Uh. Uh. (like, are you crazy? why are you even saying that? i guess scientists gotta science)

But then I offered him cold leftover clam chowder and we both went no in unison to that idea, and I was in actual fact curious, so I did: I put it in the microwave. I closed the door. I plugged it in. I turned it on and stepped as far back as I could where I could still see the panel ticking off the seconds.

And it turned off at the end as one would have every perfect right to expect it to. Everything seemed peachy fine. I unplugged it, took out the chowder, handed him his, nice and warm, considered tomorrow morning’s hot cocoa and how much I hate standing still stirring at the stove while my blood pressure steadily goes down (80/40 before morning meds is where my normal starts)–and knew that if nothing else I will never leave that thing plugged in and unattended again.

I think we need a new microwave. (understatement alert)

Panasonic is OUT. Anybody got a recommendation?

Mathias made me a necklace. It was somewhat short (not a choker though) and it was a string of letters and metal squares and silvery beads and quite charming, I mean, isn’t that just the most perfect Grammy present?

I rolled the letter beads around and around, trying to figure out which ones were intended to face outwards; what did it say?

A quiet aside and I got it: he’d picked the letters that looked the prettiest. (He’s in kindergarten and apparently has some favorites, which I assume means all the ones in his name.)

His auntie did the clasp in back for me and I wore it proudly the rest of the day.

Come our bedtime, I asked her if she could undo that for me.

She did–and standing in her sister’s kitchen with us trying to be very quiet and not wake up the kids, the thing gave way and all those metal beads and plastic beads went clattering and bouncing and scattering across the tile floor and–all his happy anticipation and work! Oh no!

Oh that’s just how those are, my son-in-law told me later; Sam has a whole big kit of those for the kids to play with and when you take them off they do that.

I guess you have to carefully hold both sides once you open the clasp. It needs an end ring bigger than the beads’ openings. Which apparently is in the kit, but, oops.

My random loose beads and chain came home snapped into a hearing aid container, ready for me to find the prettiest order to put them back together in. I want him to see me wearing it next time we videochat.

I hope he doesn’t mind or notice that the order will be all mixed up. I’ll try to make it look pretty.

Re yesterday’s post: I have long had a piece of paper with my contact information inside that rollaboard, but when I was packing I noticed it had gone missing. I was going to go write up a new one in just a moment after I finished this…and then I forgot.

Now one is zipped inside the meshed-bag compartment where it won’t fall out.

Re the big magnetic-snap (if only it had a zipper!) tote bag with knitted cables embossed into the heavy leather, my adored Charlotte Ronson that was the most me purse I’ve ever had: but aging gets to everything eventually.

I took it to the shoe and luggage repair guy, who exclaimed over how nice that leather was. He did what he could to rehab it for me; I used it awhile longer but it was just no longer church-on-Sunday-able, and I’m not one who switches back and forth between purses for fear of forever grabbing the wrong one. It is in emeritus status. I would keenly love to get another, to the point of requesting a local leather worker if he might consider embossing one of his like that for me even though I am far from a designer handbag type person, but I got nowhere.

So that’s the answer to those questions.

Meantime, our kids who flew in Wednesday afternoon flew back out Friday morning. Saturday, a very tired three-year-old Lillian was told by her mom that it was time to take a nap but she refused, turning to look at us accusingly: “If I do you’ll disappear!”

No, no, honey. We will still be here when you wake up. For a few more days; we’re not leaving till Monday.

We kept both those promises, and I’m missing all of them very much right now, but at least she and her five-year-old brother got to hug and wave us goodbye.

And I’m left thinking about dumb things like purses and suitcases to distract myself.

The noisy life is more fun.

Walking in airports with all their movement and visual overstimulation is a seizure getting ready to pounce–I can do them sitting, it’s the long walk in that environment that overloads.

So, as usual, I was doing the wheelchair thing. SeaTac is a big airport and I was just as happy to have my carryon tucked under the seat and give my back a break, too. Big plus: those guys know their way around the place, which seems permanently under construction, and we sure don’t. The chair pusher who stepped forward said a few last words with three others standing waiting and I got the impression it hadn’t been the best day for him but he waved it away with yeah, it’s okay, it’s okay.

And off we went.

There was a bit of a scrum as what seemed like our entire planeload tried to all get on the same bus at once to take us to the car rental building, and my balance skittered like water flicked into a hot pan of oil–both Richard and the chair pusher urged me to get ON when some instinct told me to turn around to make sure they… But the chair guy was afraid I would fall and was focused on making sure I was okay.

We were the last ones off the bus because Richard was still looking for my rollaboard. You know, the one with the hats I’d knitted, my extra yarn and needles, and the cashmere sweater jacket I’d bought twins of so that I could match my mom when Soft Surroundings had a super-duper-duper sale (2 cashmeres/$50 for a few hours.)

It was gone.

The bus driver, bless him, parked right there and spent an hour on the phone with Southwest and airport people trying to track it down for us. Turns out Southwest has contracts with multiple wheelchair pusher companies and they didn’t know which one it was.

Whoever he was, that driver was a saint and a rescuer and I am profoundly grateful. But no luck.

I’d taken it onboard specifically so I’d have it with me and not risk losing it. Oh, and did I mention where I’d packed my ileostomy supplies? You cannot just walk into a drug store and buy that type of bag. At all. It’s a three-part system that you change every third day and the bag part is for a single day.

Richard said, But you always keep one in your purse against emergencies, right?

(Dude, I haven’t done that since I downsized to a smaller purse two years ago. Didn’t even think of it or I would have.)

I had nothing. Nothing but the acute awareness that a badly manufactured batch had, since October, left me with eight failures in eighteen days after years without problems.

We finally and profusely thanked the bus driver (did I mention it was 39F and we were freezing?) and sent him on his way. Were we going to go back to the terminal with our rental car to try to see if it was in lost and found yet? We were not, because we already knew that as far as the driver could tell it was not, and it was already past the time our kids (much less the grandkids) go to bed at that point and we had a goodly drive ahead of us.

Our younger two kids flew in the next afternoon, apprised of the situation. Michelle offered to dash last minute to our house two cities away in the wrong direction to grab more supplies, but first I called Southwest and they referred me over to Lost and Found.

I described everything in my small suitcase that had no name tag because we hadn’t thought it would need it and they sounded like they were waiting, waiting for it–and pounced when I said, And ileostomy/colostomy bags. That was IT! Yes! They had it! We could come and pick it up anytime!

I gave them our daughter’s name. Our son got there before she did even though her flight was supposed to land first but whatever, and as soon as he walked in there with the right name and the right info about the contents and the situation and the sister’s name and my phone number that all matched, they handed it right over.

And everything was right there inside it as it should be. Even the single-serving beef jerky airport snacks.

So.

Last night, a week later, we were again flying at night, y’know, the cheap, direct-flight seats. We showed up at the Southwest counter and Richard asked for a wheelchair for his wife, as it says on my ticket.

This time there was just the one wheelchair pusher nearby–and it was our guy again! The immigrant from Africa with the scars on his face that made you want to ask oh goodness what did they do to you before you managed to escape from–? But who would ever want to make him feel like that part’s all that people see.

Because what I saw was a good and honest man. I got to see him instantly taking in the fact that not only was it us, we had the rollaboard! We’d gotten it back, after all his worries, he’d succeeded! He was so, so happy, and I thought, by the grace of G_d for both of us, you got to see that we came out okay and we got to see how much that meant to you. What a treasure to have met.

He about danced and the cheerful smile on his face as we went back across SeaTac going the other way this time was something I will never forget.

Just walked in the door. Had a fantastic visit. Dodged tomorrow’s snow storm there. More later.

Grandma M! he laughed.

This being in the morning with the whole thing over with, I guffawed: “I had the same thought!”

Our oldest was born during our grad student days and when she was maybe two months old we got invited to the wedding reception of an old friend of his. Who happened to live in a small town high in the mountains in Utah a few miles from his grandmother.

We were Saving The Planet (yes kids that was a thing in our day too) and not using disposable diapers. We had cloth diapers, but not just any cloth diapers, they closed with velcro so you wouldn’t have to worry about stabbing your baby in the dark of the night. Or you.

Grandma offered to watch the baby for a couple of hours while we headed over.

We forgot to tell her, but figured velcro is pretty self-explanatory anyway.

We didn’t stay long, but when we came back Grandma was trying to be nice but clearly she. was. ticked.

Where were the diaper pins?! How could we hand her a kid with no pins on her diaper? Did we know just how long it had been since SHE’D had a kid in diapers–and she had to go FIND the stupid things?

Bless her heart–she did it.

After we got home an hour away and fed and went to change the baby, size-wise on her she was wearing kilt pins and we realized what we’d done to his poor grandmother.

The at-home sleep study that I drove three and a half hours a day for two days to drive Richard to/from work to have the car to pick that equipment up and drop it off again the next day?

It only got the oxygen reading on the finger. They wanted a do-over.

I told them, well, the velcro on the chest belt did keep giving way gradually and I kept pushing it back up all night.

No commute problems this week.

So I got the equipment back yesterday, set it up, and again the velcro just wasn’t doing its job well enough. I reviewed the video again. Nope, I was doing it exactly the way that guy was.

Dang.

It was a miserable enough night ahead with prongs in my nose, rubber on my finger, a belt around my chest, tubes in the way whenever I tried to roll over and #$!-unhelpful lights on the equipment that stayed on all night that I wasn’t going to do this a third time. I went looking and I did, I found a large safety pin and I pushed it in place to hold that belt and I definitely called the entire contraption stupid in my frustration.

The pair of green lights in the morning conveyed that the test had worked this time. (Waiting for confirmation on that.)

But I thought you had to be a *great* grandma to safety pin velcro.

If I do a full repeat every day, I’ve been telling myself, I’ll have it done before the wedding.

Fully aware that if they do come to their cousin’s wedding, too, their luggage will be weighed down with baby gear while they’ll be wrangling a one-year-old and the last thing they’ll need is to have to stuff a whole blanket in. I should ship it.

But one takes the motivation and the deadline one has. So far, they know nothing about it.

I was pretty proud of myself for how much I’ve gotten done the last four days–it just had to get past that point where the bottom curls up against your hands like a toddler grabbing your legs and whining when you know all they need is a meal and a nap.

Today I did the most of all. Momentum and all that. I finally decided, okay, give the hands a break, put it down, you want to be able to do this tomorrow. Pace it.

That was when I looked to my left and saw what had been quietly waiting all day for me to notice. I don’t know how many times I’d walked right past it.

I had moved the bag just yesterday and there were a bunch of I thought roots: y’know, I really need to plant those…

That’s no root. All that (matching lavender!) color happened today. I almost missed it. I almost missed discovering how divine saffron crocus flowers smell.

I will need to remove those bulbs very carefully from that bag.

Tomorrow. It’s way too cold out there right now.

They grow cherries. They know cherries. They’re in Michigan. (They decided to let their subscribers know they were cheering on Gov. Whitmer.) And everything I’ve ever bought from them (not that that has been a lot) has been good. Their cherry/fig/onion spread in a toasted cheese sandwich? You kind of have to smash it a bit to make it spreadable but trust me that sandwich is going to be good.

So I wondered if I could send my kids a warm cherry pie out of the oven to make Thanksgiving easier, as I looked at the picture in the catalog of their Mamma Mia’s sour cherry pie in a bottle.

I have bags of pitted sour cherries from my own tree sitting in my freezer, and I can tell you they make the best pies I’ve ever baked. But my children are not here.

There was only one way to know how the bottled ones could turn out.

The delivery. Richard opened the jar for me. I didn’t even make the crust (sorry, Scott!) though I did roll it out super thin, the way I like it.

My mom made a lot of pies while I was growing up. She called it the one last chance in a meal to get nutrition down her kids, so we’re not talking chocolate cream here, we’re talking fruit.

Someone once asked her for her pear lime recipe and won a recipe contest with it–without mentioning it to Mom, but it got back to her because such things always do and I remember Mom being both irked at her friend’s rudeness and loving that Mom, really, was the one who had won that thing. Score!

Pistachio grape pie. Cherry. Peach! After our pick-your-own expeditions in the summers we kids would just be waiting for the best part of dinner.

When I was a freshman in college eating dorm cafeteria food, the vending machines in our basement sold Hostess fruit pies if you got to them soon enough after they were restocked.

Man, they were a sorry, sorry apology for my mom’s talents and my childhood, but I bought the cherry one. Twice during the year, though I tried more times than that. They were all sugar and cornstarch and goopy and no flavor and I always assumed the red was sheer food coloring. There was none of that tart cherry essence, no hint of almond, and I remember wondering if there were more than one or two cherries in the whole thing–probably not.

They were pricey on my student budget and they never satisfied.

So.

The first bit glopped out of the jar onto the pie crust but most stayed right up inside there. I got a small spatula and started scooping.

There were a lot of cherries and also a lot of their juices cooked up into the food starch and that part was looking a lot like my dorm memories–I prepared myself to be disappointed.

And yet. The flavor! All that actual fruit! Cherries, definitely, almond, it’s there. I had the spatula all to myself afterwards. I reached back in the jar and got that very last little bit.

Baked? Cooled (some of it never got to) and once it finished setting up?

It’s not my tree’s sour cherry pie. But it’s definitely something I’d send to my kids for when they have too much that has to get readied to put on their plate.

Work was still all hands on deck for him while I had an appointment to get the car damage appraised after waiting two weeks to get in, and given how booked they’ve been, standing them up on an hour or two’s notice would have been just too rude. And I had to return the at-home sleep-study equipment within 24 hours. Rescheduling that study (again) would have pushed it to January at the earliest.

So I drove him to work again.

I showed up at the body shop at 9:59, inwardly proud of myself for getting there on time, and the lady blinked. I was who? With an appointment for when? Not on their schedule. She called the nearest shop in their chain, nope, and turned back to me: Had I gotten a confirmation email?

No, I told her, and I thought that was strange because usually you do.

Which was the tip off that I had been here and they had done that car before. The other time Richard got hit on the freeway, as a matter of fact. Note that their nearest competitor was right across the driveway and I had in fact parked facing that company’s building because that’s where there was room to. I was a repeat customer, but I had options.

She got up and talked quietly to her boss in the next room.

He decided no harm done and came out and took pictures of the car to get things started for the insurance company.

I was not expecting him to ask, Have you had your catalytic converter stolen?

Yes, twice.

That down there where it’s bent away from the door–that isn’t from the accident, which is all up here: that’s where they jacked up the car to get at it. I’ve seen so so so many of these, I know what it is. The insurance won’t cover that.

He gave me a quote on the spot for fixing it and a scratch on the other side. I guess I looked skeptical because he almost immediately knocked a hundred bucks off.

Come back in two weeks for the actual work.

After that I got the wires and monitors and belt and questionnaire all back to the clinic, glad to be done with that. Hopefully.

But for the record: I think I’d recommend not having to wake up early-ish and driving ninety rush hour minutes right after a sleep study night. It worked out okay but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I woke up too tired.

Actually, I do know: I would have called both and bailed (and paid big bucks for hogging the medical equipment an extra day and messing up their schedule.) But I have no desire to do to another driver what was done to me years ago.

Okay, all that aside: it’s pretty ironic to be getting up early three days in a row right before the Fall Back time on the clock.

I’m just going to jump the gun a little early here and sleep in tomorrow.

Little cloudbursts today, somehow never while I was actually driving.

Which I was doing for three and a half rush hour hours, just like yesterday. How on earth do people who have to do this every day do this every day?

It’s been a very unusual week where he had to be in the office and I had waited months for those appointments. So we made it work. There was a cashere/merino/silk skein‘s worth of bridge tolls. (Rainbow came today. I’m going to steal their photo to show it off because my phone’s pretty dead after running Waze to dodge the worst of the traffic.) 

And yet.

It was like the good old days, when his commute was three miles and he got to decompress by having me come get him, with the two of us together on his way home with no other responsibilities in those few moments but to be focused on each other. We’d missed that.

He got lots and lots of decompression time.

(Links so I can find them later: California major reservoir levels  and 24 hour rainfall totals)

Somehow all that time at the wheel helped make me feel a need to knit and to finish an old project, so a plain black hat that had been boring my needles to death is now done and my circs freed up for something a whole lot more fun that was waiting when we walked in the door tonight. And I didn’t even expect it to arrive yet!

Three and five year olds wanting to FaceTime their grandparents to tell us in great excitement that they’re going to be unicorns!!! for Halloween is the best thing ever.

With the three year old wearing her Wonder Woman t-shirt as she tells you this.

Why I didn’t drive to Andy’s Orchard today (in retrospect, not that I could have known it at the time.) I would have been driving right past the spot with my tires all bouncing around on a crowded part of the freeway. I somehow decided this morning that, nah, I’ll go Thursday or Friday.

And then the conversation went something like this, as my husband came around the corner:

Did you feel it?

Feel what?

Yeah, I didn’t either.

What? How did we miss it?

Turns out he’d been talking to someone in south San Jose when the 5.1 hit, nice and shallow and close at four miles deep. (Note that he was also on the phone with someone in San Jose when the Loma Prieta hit in ’89 and before the shock waves made it to here, got up and stood in the doorway of his office to prepare for it. Suddenly he heard a colleague down the hall yelling his name, he being the biggest guy on the second floor: Hey! Quit jumping up and down!

Oh wait…

Today’s means, the USGS warns, that there’s a high chance of aftershocks in the next 24 hours. And if we get something stronger then they’ll change the classification to a foreshock. This was on the Calaveras line, which connects to the Hayward fault, which is problematical because in the post-War boom of the 1950’s the fault line was the cheap land and they simply bulldozed it and developed it. Every single hospital on that side of the Bay is within yards of where the earth wants to spit and split.

This is why California decreed in 1994 that by 2020 every hospital in the state had to be seismically able to stay standing in a bigger quake than we’ve ever had. And by 2030 any acute-care facility has to not only be standing but still functional.

We have a friend who was operating on a patient at the VA when the Loma Prieta hit and his unconscious patient was suddenly trying to shoot across the room while all medical personel present grabbed at the guy and held on.

Fun times.

So. What do you do when you have an actual timestamp on that particular possibility? Where the power and even the water could get disrupted, even on this side of the Bay?

You quick run and go do all the laundry so that at least you’ll have clean clothes for as long as possible.

And you don’t wait till evening to hit post on this.