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.

To answer KC’s question: yes, there are prizes for filling out the bingo card, including a large basket of yarn and I think more, but I never paid attention to the details. You get one entry for a single line filled out, three tries if all 25 are, and the Crawl continues this week.

One well-thought-out part is that you can choose the bingo card that matches the route you want to take; it does not force you to drive 150 zigzag miles each way to fill out a single line.

We’re talking north of San Francisco to south of San Jose and from the coast to over two mountain ranges to the eastern side of the Bay. That’s serious road tripping and carpooling. It’s taken us all three years that they’ve done this for us to make it to–I think we finally made it to?–every single shop.

For that kind of driving it’s about spending time with the friends you’re carpooling with, with the bonus of running into people again and again doing the same sequence. If we can’t have Stitches anymore, with how all its faces became familiar over the years, we can make our mini version.

The prizes are lovely (but just make sure you wrote your name on that card, the first year whoever would have been the winner wasn’t because they hadn’t and nobody knew who to give it to.)

But Nina and I agreed we rather hoped we won’t be picked: we have a goodly amount and the means to buy more, but for so many people it would mean so much more to their ability to access really nice stuff that would motivate and keep those needles going. I remember those days. We want them to have it.

Those two days happened and we made the time to catch up like the old friends we are because someone out there knew that not only would knitters want to buy yarn, we would want a reason to find the time to spend the time with each other in pursuit of what we love to do anyway and hey, they could certainly make a buck in the process. Cool.

Sometimes you just need a thing scheduled.

I drove to Andy Mariani’s farm in December in part to buy small containers of his best specifically so that Nina could snack on her favorite dried apricots this weekend from a container that fit in her console.

Hey wait, did we get to that Redwood City place we missed last year? Maybe we’re not quite done….

Lunch with the delightful Peggy and Nina, Dharma Trading Company and Atelier Yarns and I now have some one-off hand-dyed skeins of thick warm soft wool to knit Zoom hats with: where the colorway does the showing off and I don’t have to look at my hands while I read the captions.

The lady at Atelier noted that I had a straight line on my Bingo card and did I want to turn it in or try to fill the whole thing (meaning, by visiting all 25 shops on that card for the Crawl.)

I kinda laughed. No, thanks, it was fun but we’re done.

We drove home with me going, After thirty years of ordering dyes from them I finally finally finally got to see what Dharma is like! And I loved the place!

Day one, Bay Area Yarn Crawl: three yarn stores, three skeins of yarn.

How did you DO that? Nina asked.

Well, I told her, Colourmart sent out an email saying they were doing inventory and finding old cones and clearing them out and once those yarns were gone they were gone. I found 970 grams of 80/20 cashmere/silk aran weight for $116 and knew I would never see that again and it is on the way. So I already had my big splurge.

This was after a discussion of having to hank and scour the mill oils out to get gauge and softness and yarn blooming and then wind it up again and how it’s extra time but it’s worth it and she said it sounded like it might well be. (Usually they’ll do some of that for you for a fee.)

So yeah, three and three. The prettiest stuff and I like supporting the locals.

And then I got home and realized that actually, I have four because we went to four.

(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.

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.

Great times, great friends, good food, good night.

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.

Years ago, I was doing Stitches West via wheelchair.

I had inherited a wheelchair pressure cushion (something like this only I think heavier duty) from a late friend and it was so comfortable that I ended up commandeering it for my knitting perch. I’ve had it about 25 years now. It has lasted.

So. Friends drove, we carpooled, and at the end of the day putting all that back into their car I heard something.

What. Is. That. Sound.

Oh, we heard that ever since this morning, they said, we just didn’t know what or where it was.

Turns out the nozzle had somehow come slightly open: the entire joyous day of running into old knitting friends and fondling new yarns, my seat had been playing whoopee cushion.

It flattened out about a month ago and Richard could use it right now so a friend came by with a bicycle pump today and we got it nice and full and it seems to be holding just fine and I guess I just knocked it loose again while rummaging around for something. Yay. But it takes me straight back to that bemused, feigned-nonchalance answer from my friend. Just before my disbelief and then our all cracking up.

But my story has been completely outdone.

Richard’s first night in the hospital, they looked at this 6’8″ guy with the operated-on foot in this normal-person bed and went, nope, and moved him down the hall to a bigger one. Still a tad short but better.

Friday, someone decided this just wouldn’t do when they did in fact have one longer than that, so while he was walking the hall with the nurse they moved that one into his room. Great.

Except.

By the next morning, after I’d started timing the (insert definitive expletive of one’s choice) thing, he’d figured it out: it was an air mattress. There had to be some small leak somewhere. That steady jackhammer-loud blast that went off for 50 seconds out of every five minutes round the clock?

So. Loud.

That was the sound of its compressor helpfully pumping it back up.

A week of driving to the hospital in stormy weather: yesterday I walked out to my car just in time to see a mom and teenage boy at theirs next to mine taking photos of the large limb a eucalyptus had dropped on their car. Not sure if the branch on the other side had been part of the first or not as he pulled it out of the way.

Today, blue sky and new snow on the nearby mountains.

I did not park under the trees.

This afternoon we watched a video and then with Richard and a nurse watching I practiced sanitizing edges and connecting examples of IV meds and saline syringes and how to do which dose how fast and how often. You set everything out in order on the sanitized tray and then you work your way across according to specific time intervals. (Write it out, I said. Yes they will.)

And then they kept him there.

The tall balding absolute beanpole of a nurse who loves his patients and looks and has a ready smile like Alex Pretti got assigned to him this evening and I didn’t say anything to the guy because I’m sure he’s heard it a lot and how can it not break your heart all over again.

Friends came to visit.

Turns out that from church this week, G had a pulmonary embolism, J had a burst appendix, L had a stroke, Richard of course…

And someone had a baby a few days ago.

I remember the wild thoughts with our first of, They’re sending ME home with this tiny thing? They think we know anything about being parents? Don’t they know we’ve never done this before? Don’t they know we have no idea what on earth we’re doing?

And then, day by single long day, you find out you can, in fact, do this, that you do learn as you go and it’s the wanting to do your best by others that makes it all somehow, inexplicably work out.

It’s all about learning to trust the life that is in us.

The slightly taller/broader RN was the guy who leaned his head in Richard’s door briefly yesterday morning after he’d seen me go by before I had any idea who he was and said something I didn’t catch, ending with, Thank you, with a big smile, and disappeared as fast as he’d come.

So I missed most of the words, but the joy! It was palpable. His whole being absolutely radiated love and my first thought was, he must have confused us with someone else, someone he loved.

Later we got the rest of the story.

The other outcome was that my husband decided there had to be a better captions app than the two I’ve tried and went searching till he found the one the others should have been like all along–one that actually works in a conversation in a room with background noise and with people at various distances away.

I cannot begin to tell you how life-changing that is going to be. It already is.

Thank Stanford for fighting insurers over billing, clearly, because of how it got us bumped to that other hospital. Not a sentence I’d thought I’d be writing.

When I said that podiatrist customer had changed lives? I had no idea.

Turns out there were two kids running the ski department of that outdoors outfitter. The customer helped the one get into podiatry school.

The two good friends who’d been working side by side there never saw each other again.

I came around the corner this morning and standing at the nurse’s station with his back to me was a middle-aged man with the same general build, the same haircut, the same touch of gray at the ear–but he seemed too tall and a smidgen too broad to be our doctor.

Richard’s hospitalization had brought them to the same floor.

Our doctor’s friend had gone to nursing school and was now the senior RN on the floor. There each other was. For the first time in all these years.

I had questions.

Who designs a new hospital such that there’s a big window in the room but the patient in the bed cannot see out it? His view was entirely blocked by the curving wall of the bathroom on the side of the room where the head of the bed goes. Maybe to entice the patient to start to be ambulatory? Okay, but when they most need to see the sky, anything at all beyond the whirrs and the beeps and the medical gear? They can’t. Only the light reflected off the wall over on that side. The mind boggles.

Maybe they were trying to protect from shattering glass in an earthquake? That’s the only thing that made sense. But Stanford is more seismic-safe in their new building and they didn’t do that. (The new seismic code went into effect a few years ago and a lot of hospital buildings got replaced.)

My view at home with the coming storm putting an exclamation point on the colors.

I had another question I wasn’t ever about to ask: how does one aspire to, I mean, cut off toes when one grows up? What would pull someone to that?

The podiatrist came in and, having a little time today, out of the blue chatted a bit about himself.

He’d thought of going to medical school but being a pilot sounded pretty cool, too, and he was leaning that way. Meantime he was working at one of those big outdoor outfitters, fitting people to their new ski boots–and he was good at it. Really good at it.

A podiatrist came in with his son and complimented his skills. That led to the doctor saying, You know–you really should be a podiatrist. Podiatry needs you.

He believed in the young guy, his enthusiasm rubbed off on him, he (the good now-doctor reminiscing chuckled) pulled some strings and got him in. And so the kid did go to medical school so that he could become a podiatrist, too, and here he was.

And I thought gratefully, one random stranger taking the personal interest and the time for someone else’s child changed so many lives.

He took off the bandaging a nurse had changed not an hour before to inspect how it had done overnight. It frankly looked a lot better than I thought it would: how does one make sense of half a big toe and the missing one next to it? How does the mind look at that and think yes, yes, that makes sense.

It doesn’t but in those skilled hands it had become okay, and I understood now how Richard had so trusted the guy to make the right decision and then to do the thing right. That foot looked the healthiest I’d seen it since August by far. It was such a relief to have all that infection we’d fought and fought against in a slowly losing agonizing battle for half an hour every night month after month simply–gone.

Two canceled trips to see grandkids last year.

There will be healing, and then we can start to plan our life the way we envision it again. It’s been awhile.

Have you ever seen this before? I marveled.

My mechanic said nothing but kind of laughed, looking at that sunken switch. He walked across the long length of his garage to pick up the right tool, but he did so slowly and looking as if he might be in pain. He’s about my age. I’d never seen that before in him. My heart went out to him.

I wondered if he would be retiring soon, or rather, how soon: the whole neighborhood was one mass of construction and tear-downs with a recent zoning change housing housing housing, trucks in the way workers parked all over the place narrowing his street nearly down to a one-way. The land his business has been sitting on for so many decades could help that retirement a lot.

Selfishly, I will greatly regret when he does. He has experience, skills, and a deep sense of integrity.

And just like that he was done.

Could I pay him anything for his time and expertise? He smiled, No.

It’s an old car, he said. Be gentle with it.

I wasn’t entirely sure he was just talking about cars.

So our car has PG’s eyes now, I told him.

A friend of PG’s had had cataract surgery and had had the lens implants deliberately not match: one was set for seeing near, one for far. He told PG it was great. PG told his doctor that’s what he wanted to do, too.

We are designed with two eyes for a reason. Sabotaging binaural vision because you don’t want to wear glasses seemed a really bad idea to the doctor, who tried hard to talk him out of it. But failed.

Out of sheer curiosity I asked my own cataract surgeon about it and his take was basically you’d have the whole rest of your life to regret that in.

So. The Prius.

There’s the window switch and there’s the set of them for setting the outside mirrors. I got the left hand mirror where I wanted it, went to change the one on the right–

–and the thing fell down inside the door. Visible, at least, but useless.

One eyeball view for me, one for Richard. Good thing we have shoulders we can look over.

Tomorrow when the mechanic sees my note I can find out if that’s a new one on him.