Olha doesn’t often repeat designs but she did for this one, with a new one listed for the first time since I bought mine three years ago. On a similar theme, this one.

Trader Joe’s again. A man of Slavic appearance saw my gerdan and caught my eye, his whole countenance suddenly just radiant–he knew exactly where that had come from. Slava Ukraini!

I knew what it meant to me but I wondered what further symbolism it might convey, so I went home and searched on cornflowers. I didn’t know why the artist had beaded them to be intertwining with wheat, but as I read on it all came together.

It is native to that part of Europe. As a cut flower, it has been cultivated pretty much everywhere, but traditionally it grew among wheat and barley crops–as in this Van Gogh painting–where it is considered a problem that reduces yield. Thus it is seriously endangered in most of its native habitat.

And yet they are planted. And yet they grow. And yet they bloom and thrive and are celebrated in gardens even as they’ve become rare in fields of grain.

Per Wikipedia they are dependent on bees, so their nectar is particularly high in sugar. But also: their volatiles attract a major insect predator of the major pest of cabbage plants, to the point of some farmers of brassicas foregoing pesticides–just plant the pretty flowers instead. Support the goldfinches, which love the seeds.

And now I know why someone else’s gerdan (where was that) had those goldfinches….

Years ago, someone from Stanford was invited to give a talk on his work at Xerox Parc, the research institute that was the West Coast’s version of Bell Labs. Bernard Widrow, who would be in his 90s now, was an electrical engineer trying to improve the hearing aids of the day.

He had designed a sort of necklace with seven microphones in it that were programmed to sync with one’s aids, picking up sound directionally and from the circular width of one’s chest rather than just what hits that tiny opening in the plastic in your ear. He told of trying it out on a patient with severe hearing loss on busy El Camino Real and she found she could hear every word he was saying, even against the traffic.

She burst into tears when he told her it was just a prototype and he couldn’t sell her one yet. But he was looking.

He asked for volunteers and I figured I was the deafest person in the audience. He had me try it out. So then I too desperately wanted one of those.

But no hearing aid company took it on and that was that. For awhile I was told you could go to him and have him custom-make you one but memory says it was $6000 and that was when we had four kids to send off to college soon.

That was a keenly missed opportunity.

The New Yorker has a story about an inventor who had watched his grandparents losing their hearing, their social lives, and then their brains to dementia. Note that he says they had hearing aids, but they refused to wear them. I’m guessing nobody explained recruitment to them, how brains overreact to sounds they’re not used to being able to hear and you just have to slog through the first few months of everything sounding painfully loud before normal dB levels feel normal.

He helped develop a portable sonar medical device that was highly successful, while wishing he could do more about how limited hearing aids were. The one gave him the cred and the wherewithal to eventually tackle the other.

And so he had video made of taking someone out in the middle of a busy city street with construction going on right behind him to test out what he and his Fortell team had come up with. He demonstrated what it sounds like in the mode that most hearing aids operate in.

And then with his AI.

Most of the other sound vanished, leaving his voice far more audible.

This time, I was the hearing-impaired person looking at the roadway trying not to burst into unexpected tears.

My first reaction was, well, that’s worth a trip to New York.

My second was to check where they might have expanded to.

Dude.

I guess their venture capitalists had to have a Silicon Valley location: that’s where the old Radio Shack building used to be, right down the street from Richard’s old office. Opening up next spring.

Now, that’s convenient!

Richard, who has heard the spiels of many a product manager by now, had been listening to the video from the other room.

He said “that incorporating AI into the aids” thing–you can’t take it up into the Cloud and back in real time for your ears fast enough. He was pretty sure that although they might have some really good programming, it’s probably not more or at least not much more than what I’ve already got. Color him skeptical.

So this is a great big To Be Continued. But man, it’s great to have hope. If nothing else, some good competition will light a fire under the industry.

This was the weekend of the semi-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

There were a lot of messages of, We are all the children of our loving Father, no matter who we are or what our circumstances or what we look like. There were warnings against the bigotry in social media. There were invocations of scripture like the woman at the well, changed by being accepted just as she was rather than judged; the good Samaritan, who saw a suffering and injured human being rather than his nationality and stepped forward to help.

I particularly loved the African woman who said that the greeting in South Africa is not, hello, but, Sawubona, meaning, I see you.

She described what that means to her people culturally and spiritually. I see you. G_d sees you. You are known. You are seen.

You are loved.

I went to get my replacement hearing aid this morning and on a whim put on a gerdan I haven’t worn for awhile: one made by a woman who lived in Kherson near the beach.

It has waves lapping the vertical shore on one side, and on the other, crabs, shells, a pearl, and as if written in sand, I love sea. (The photo doesn’t capture the depths of its shimmeriness.)

I went to check in and the receptionist was just so taken with it that I took it off so she could get a closer look.

She wanted to know how it was made; handwoven, I told her, strung with beads in the process. Glass. It’s an art form in Ukraine. I kind of laughed over the fact that Slavic languages don’t have articles, so no ‘I love the sea,’ it was just, ‘I love sea.’  I explained how Etsy had waived all fees for sellers in Ukraine at the start of the war so all that you pay goes directly to supporting them. This one had probably taken about 50 hours’ work.

She thought the price well worth that kind of time and artistry. She dearly wanted to see the seller’s shop.

But her town was on the other side of the river from Russians firing on them daily and she apparently evacuated and I’ve lost track of her.

But there are others; search for gerdan and Ukraine, I told her (and avoid the cheap string-breaking knockoffs from India), you’ll find them. And if you wear one of these and someone from Ukraine sees you they will know exactly where you got it and what it means. Support.

That meant a great deal to her.

She brought me pen and paper, wanting more. I gave her Olha’s information (that red rose!) as a good place to start.

She was so thrilled to have something she could do to visibly support Ukraine, and with something so beautiful.

My work here was done.

So is theirs: it’s such a relief to be able to hear again.

Re yesterday’s post: the woman knew she didn’t know how much she was asking so she was trying to find out if it was a reasonable ask. I suggested tie quilts because everybody could be involved in making however many and it would be more of a community outreach.

And because I was remembering the one we were surprised with and how much came from that.

Years ago there was just one girl in our ward finishing high school that year and the women decided to make her a quilt as a graduation gift; one is an easy number.

My daughter took her beautiful new pieced quilt to college and found herself with a roommate from a town in the Midwest that was going through a severe downturn.

Richard and I had lived in that state for a year during grad school: the next town over had had seven factories. Five had closed and two had cut half their workforces. I remember the Vietnam veteran dad who’d made a good wage pushing a union broom who’d never learned to read and suddenly had no way to get that income back. The ward there helped him set up a pick-your-own strawberry farm on his acreage so he could have an income while not having to pay anybody to harvest. I taught his ten-year-old, and I’ve long hoped things turned out okay for the four of them.

Sam’s roommate had a single thin blanket from Walmart and her family had zero funds for more. But she was there at college, with her whole future open to her.

My folks were visiting when Sam came home at Christmas. She and my mom went off to the local quilt shop and the two of them working together in great anticipation made a quilt for her roommate: to match hers, she told her, trying to avoid any whiff of my family has money that yours doesn’t. She told her, I’m paying it forward on what my ward did for me.

A political flyer. It was from a guy who’d wanted to set up a daycare but found himself jumping through hoops with the city such that he was paying rent for “nearly three years” waiting to get the permits to open.

So he’s running for city council. If you can’t fight city hall, get inside it and change it. It’s the American way. Good for him, was my first thought.

I looked a little more closely. His cropped photo suggests that the rent he was paying may have been on his house, but never mind.

His proposal (good luck, sir) is that it take 30 days for small projects and 90 for big ones if we elect him, and if it takes longer than that your fees are waived.

Given that the large projects can take several years to get approved after environmental reports, road studies, sewer updates–and especially given the 32-story monstrosity a Russian oligarch wants to plunk in the middle of ranch-house suburbia in the next town with no roads nor schools that can possibly accommodate that, they should–I can see why he’s frustrated. But.

There’s so much to his story he didn’t tell. Was his daycare alongside a major road where you wouldn’t want a toddler dashing into the street when someone opens the front door?

As Richard pointed out, with all the 1950s tract houses in this city turning over and new owners wanting to remodel them to match the idea of the outrageous amounts they’ve paid for them, if you’re going to knock the permit timeline down that far you’re saying you’re going to vet and hire a whole lot of new inspectors. How are you paying for that if you’re ditching lots of fees? And if you don’t, you’re essentially throwing out the idea of inspectors altogether because people can only work so many hours in a day.

And let me tell you, having remodeled years ago, you really really need good inspectors. We had to replumb the entire house for water and gas a second time when ours was done because the pipes used were substandard and oh did you know your water heater was releasing carbon monoxide the way they set this up, lady?

We didn’t know, and the inspector should have refused to sign off.

So yeah, I get where this guy’s coming from.

But I would far rather that inspections be done and be done right and pay the city those fees than fork out $40,000 in 1999 dollars again to remedy what was left behind so our house could be safe and in good working order the way we’d paid for it to be the first time.

“Lower cost home improvements,” he says.

Oh you sweet summer child.

To paraphrase Robert Frost via capital letters: Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ICE… I got a tiny taste today of how it must be like right now.

The motion sensor set off a chime to alert that someone was at the door.

I saw someone’s rear end bent over right in front of its side window and waited for the person to move far enough away that I could move faster than they could to shut and lock it again if I needed to. As women do.

He’d placed a political flier. The candidate had a Chinese name and I’m guessing the, it turned out, tiny elderly man was a relative.

I am greatly shamed by the fact that the majority of white women, it has been reported, voted for the adjudicated racist rapist and I saw the result of their choice in that man’s face as my door opened and he saw mine: he was suddenly terrified.

Then he saw the welcoming smile on my face.

I picked up the flier and he took a step closer. He told me a little about the candidate. He clearly did not begin this life as a speaker of English and I thanked him for participating in the democratic process.

Such a mixture of pride and relief in his countenance as we waved each other warmly on in our day.

My heart broke for him. And I’m so glad he was willing to risk it all to help his fellow Americans learn about the candidate he was so proud of.

I was sent (thank you!) a video made yesterday on Iceland’s volcanic fissures. The land in that area is rising and they know more is coming and all you can do is all you can do.

We in this area worry both too much and not enough at all about earthquakes but it made me realize I’ve never had to worry about massive liquid fire blasting out in fountains from under my feet or flowing down our street. I idly wondered how much snow would it take to cool it down just faster enough. (Uh…)

It made me stop and notice: it is the cooling last evening of summer. There was an inquisitive bunny right up at the back door who pretended to be afraid (yeah, not at that pace you aren’t) while I pretended he wasn’t welcome because he really had to go back to the dog side of the fence because my pomegranates are starting to droop to the ground the way they do as they get heavy and ripe and I want some of that juice shared with us this year.

The world is beautiful out there.

He had to take more of the prep stuff at 2:30 a.m. per the instructions. And then neither of us got any sleep before his 6:30 a.m. appointment.

The great news was things looked great.

I got my hearing aids reprogrammed in the late afternoon.

We ate dinner and then it hit. I don’t think I have an appendix anymore, but if I do that might be it.

And typing this is all the sitting up I’m going to do for now.

Edited to add in the morning: I was able to get some fluids down after dinner didn’t stay there, then slept for 11 hours. I’m doing much better now.

I don’t think I’ve bought any such thing since I last had a small child with an upset stomach–I had to find a Safeway employee to help me find the stuff.

They tried to feed it to me when I was in the hospital till I told an orderly who was tasked with delivering it five times a day that “I would have to be dying to eat that stuff. And I’m not dying anymore.”

The guy laughed and I never saw him nor it again.

So. No red. No blue. No orange.

Well at least at that store that left a single option. Food-wise, lemon jello and only lemon jello all day, poor guy.

His last colonoscopy, with a doctor who has since retired, the redhead gene won out and he started chatting up the doctor with questions about the cool stuff he was seeing on the screen because the anesthesia was not doing its job.

I am told that got fixed rather fast.

So I guess tomorrow we find out if the new doctor read his chart?

I went in yesterday to get my five-year-old hearing aids cleaned and checked out.

Each one has two microphones: behind and inside the ear. Turns out the inner one on the left was slowly dying.

Well, now I knew why I’d made that appointment, good to know. They ordered a new one made and told me to come back in three weeks when it gets in.

It wasn’t till I got home and had conversations with family that I knew I should be able to hear in the rooms we were standing in that I went, Wait. That’s not a left-aid thing only, something’s way off. Everything sounded tinny and quite faint.

I sent them a note: when they were testing the programming, could it be that they didn’t get them set back to the correct ones?

Yes it could. They were apologetic and set me up to come back; the last slot on Friday was the earliest they could squeeze me in.

I find myself realizing just how good these aids normally are and what a difference they usually make. It’s been an interesting lesson in appreciation.

And man, I wish I knew where I carefully put my old set so I wouldn’t lose them as backups. (No worries, Mom: the ones I had my audiologist set up for Dad was the previous-previous pair.)

So at that dinner last night.

An improved caption app on my phone means I can actually follow a conversation in a less than quiet environment. It wasn’t till today that I realized that she wasn’t expecting that. I don’t think she would have said this in front of me if she had.

There was an elderly woman and she was not talking directly to me when she lamented that (and it sounded like an out-of-context talking point straight from her preferred vulpine network) “A thousand churches in the US have been shut down and taken over as mosques. It’s the fall of civilization.”

The other person shrugged a yeah, okay, whatever, hon, and the subject was dropped.

I wanted to say, So people are still going to church (let’s not quibble over the cultural words for such), still looking for community, still trying to live up to their religions by holding themselves accountable before their fellow man simply by showing up to be reminded of their duty towards their fellow man and belief in G_d together. Cool.

Except that I knew she wouldn’t be able to hear me in both senses of the word if I tried.

But I did find a moment later to tell her that a friend of mine had been at university in the US when the Shah fell, and she knew if she went back she’d be perceived as an American and in great danger. So she married a man in the same boat and they raised their family here.

When their daughter got engaged the dad made a point that he did not want her to do the American thing of living together out of wedlock. The family wanted to throw a big wedding for her. He wanted her to wait.

Since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is very big on the waiting for marriage thing, I knew that that would mean something to my friend and maybe open her eyes a little.

To honor her parents, the couple chose to slip off to the courthouse and quietly get married there first so that they would be doing it right before G_d, or at the very least her parents’ perception of such: the commitment to each other comes first.

Maybe I got through a little bit. She seemed glad to hear of it.

We waited till I seemed to be over my germ and then found that we could make a group appointment at CVS for the flu and covid vaccines. Our Costco didn’t have the new covid in stock, CVS could offer pretty much instant gratification.

Woke up this morning feeling like, well, that was the easiest one yet. Five stars. Highly recommend.

And yeah, I missed the last six-month covid booster and paid dearly for it. Not going to miss it again.

Three years away, she had to reestablish herself as a local patient. Every officially first-time appointment takes longer. Today was the day three departments  wanted to see her, and a twist of fate was such that I got to drive her.

We had to be on the road by seven, then again in the early afternoon, and then, different city and rush hour, the last one, which we actually got to three minutes early. Yay.

The first one, um, tried.

The others were great.

A motion-sensor chime went off: someone was at the door. I went to go retrieve the package-?

He’d been nicely groomed and you could see his sweet face. His tail was wagging happily at the sniffing all the new smells: roses! Holly bush! Azalea plants!

I walked to the front of the house to see if the little guy’s owners were coming right up behind–I know he’s always on leash when they’re on walks–but they were nowhere in sight.

He ran next door and that had to have been even more fun because they have a white dog about his size. Who was not coming out to play; when I called, he came back over to me.

Not the least bit skittish. He let me pet him. (So soft!) But I had no leash to help take him home.

And then he sat. And looked up at me. He seemed to be expecting something.

Would he let me pick him up? He would, quite happily, that tail and those big eyes and lashes looking up into my face as if he’d discovered his very bestest friend and I always thought he was cute but let me tell you, that little dog melted my heart right there. He didn’t wriggle nor try to get down, he was where he wanted to be.

Nobody answered the door at his house.

I finally stepped back a bit and saw that their gate was open. Mystery solved. I walked over there thinking I would put him down in there and quietly close it behind him, but a plumber was on the other side of the yard and I got glimpses of the neighbor on the other side of him.

I called out his name: Would he like his puppy back?

The two of them walked over towards me, chuckling, and the neighbor took up his small dog fondly into his arms and I had to let it go.