Oh look, I got the date wrong in yesterday’s header. Figures.

That blood pressure reading was actually taken after I got the first 8 oz fluid down yesterday, which helped raise it enough that I could at least move; I was too wiped to go back and word that more precisely.

A normal sick day today was such a relief. Drank my hot cocoa out of a paper cup because the stoneware was too heavy and enjoyed every sip. Meanwhile, the covid tests are on the way.

Thank you, everybody. Please get your shots updated–trust me when I say they’re worth it.

Richard told me calling an ambulance was the next step if I couldn’t get fluids down after I said there was no way I could sit up, much less walk to the car for IV rehydration in Urgent Care. He took my blood pressure: 84/46.

It is a relief to be able to be up and slightly about again. Yay for sleep and for kids’ milk boxes with straws in the earthquake supplies–that’s about as no-effort fluids as you can get.

I felt fine yesterday.

Covid cases have been high here lately. I’ve been waiting for the latest update on the vaccine, figuring I’ll do that and the flu shot together. At the same time, though, I wasn’t checking every day to see if it was out yet because I’ve been fighting off the edge of a Crohn’s flare for three weeks–they ruled out 17 pathogens last week–and I hoped my immune system could settle down first before giving it a jolt.

Oh look, the FDA approved it today, with shipping holding its breath for the word. Let the mad scramble for doses begin.

My GI doctor retired, the next one quit Sutter Health, so did the one after that, and as an officially new patient to the new guy he can’t get me in till November. Although I did get told to, if I need it, go see my primary care to get her to get his attention to get me in sooner. Said by the person I saw because I couldn’t get in to see my primary care doctor. Still. Seventeen tests: we got that bit of diagnostics out of the way.

Things are better than last week and it is definitely not bad–I’ve lived through bad and this is not it–so I’ve been keeping that thought as a backup.

I just hope the unexpected sore throat that started last night didn’t reach anyone else.

As I sit down to type: we just got back from the hospital, now that he was up to visitors.

He and his wife told us he went from fine to, two hours later, her asking whether she should call an ambulance–but they got in the car and she raced for the ER. They wondered out loud between them whether he would have made it if they’d waited for a 911 response. He described what happened next as staggering in the door there knowing he was dying and he had no idea why.

They had no idea triage could work that fast.

The first surgery was in the middle of the night. The second was the second day. The twisted paralyzed part of his intestines is gone now and he was actually eating a liquid bit of dinner.

Plain chicken broth is the worst, she said.

Actually, it’s pretty good, he said, glad to be able to get anything that wasn’t through an IV.

She said she knew he was feeling better when he started wisecracking at the nurses to make them laugh.

My rule of thumb is never stay more than an hour; let the patient rest, and so it was. But he looked way better than I expected.

After all the times they showed up for us it felt good to be able to be there for them.

Nope, it won’t let me save the photo, I’ll just have to hope the link still works.

A house by the same builder as ours has just sold. Most of theirs was in its original 1950s state, although the wood-panel walls in the master bathroom were replaced with tile: those did tend to rot.

I’m having flashbacks at how much of it is like what we saw when we walked in this place the first time, right down to the white kitchen tile. That bar across the entry to the kitchen hit Richard at forehead level and the woman across the room said into her phone, Oh, these people are not going to buy this house!

She and her husband were fixing it up for his parents to sell. They were Japanese and had changed the master shower to be nice and low. I was a little too tall for it at 5’5″. Richard was 6’8″. It was such a small stall that he couldn’t kneel down to get under the shower head because his legs were cut in half by the metal runners the door slid across on. The daughter-in-law knew whereof she spoke.

That showerhead was the first thing to go. The bar in the kitchen went when we remodeled seven years later.

Our kitchen cupboards were–this was the latest thing in the 1950s–pressboard on wooden runners: you don’t pull them open, you sliiiide across, lightweight and easy.

Except that after the Loma Prieta quake, if you tried to slide them they simply fell down on your head. That got old.

In that listing they’ve given the upper cabinet fronts hinges instead. They’ve put in a double oven. In the original, the oven was up high, singular, and so small that when I bought a Thanksgiving turkey the first year, I got it home and suddenly realized it might not fit in. Good thing it was a small one. And in ours, the kitchen had been painted sunflower yellow and avocado green.

I’m mostly typing this because our youngest was six when we started remodeling and I don’t know how much the kids remember of how it was. It’s fun to see it. We still have those hanging sphere lights; they’re great for telling if a sudden rumble is a new earthquake or not.

And that kitchen makes me really appreciate our oak cabinetry.

I try to always have some small snack in my purse. You never know.

I was coming out of CVS on a beautiful 72 degree day. A little ways down the sidewalk from the door there was fabric on the ground, but there was so little depth to it that it took me a moment to realize that there was in fact a person under there.

Sometimes instinct screams Stay AWAY! but this time it felt like the opposite.

I sat down in my car a moment and went looking and hoping, but I could only find one of these.

Sir?

His face suddenly appeared as I was held the raspberry oatmeal fig bar pack out to him.

It’s not much, I told him, but it’s what I could find.

The radiance in his face! He loved me for it in that moment as if I were his own mother. I was a little staggered. And yet not a further word was said.

I glanced back as I walked towards my car: he was back fully underneath. The bright pink package was lying on the drab concrete against the outer wall of the store just past his head, where he could reach for it at any time but so could anyone else if they happened to be hungry and needed a bite to eat.

The plane was delayed. There was not a cab to be found at that hour. We went to plan B, rolled out of bed, marveled at how little traffic there was (duh), and got her home.

Later I found myself at Safeway staring at the locked cabinets that are a silent testament to The Great Big River Company’s lack of competence at policing the sale of stolen goods on their site.  Man has that part of living changed since I last bought this stuff when she was a teen.

Push This Button For Help.

I thought of all the reasons I had never had to do that before. Alright then.

A guy showed up with a key.

I told him, My daughter flew in at 3:30 this morning and realized, Mom, I need my contact stuff! (And she was on Eastern time.)

His face softened. In that moment, he was looking out for her, too, glad to play his part, and then walked off smiling.

It is amazing how much we give each other when we can see each other. Shop local, indeed.

Her plane is in the air, I can’t wait!

One of the things Whole Foods is good for is allergy-friendly food. I picked up a number of her favorites.

I found it. Yes! They had a dairy-free chocolate hazelnut spread. I debated on various cream substitutes for the rest of the ice cream batch I was plotting but realized I’d better let her tell me her preferences first.

You have to read every ingredient every time. Manufacturers make changes all the time.

The tired clerk looked like he was just counting the minutes till his shift was over and he could get out of there as he rang my stuff up.

I looked at the conveyer belt as he started to bag it up and told him, My daughter’s flying in from Boston tonight. So: all the chocolate!

He laughed and he looked at me with joy for my joy that I was going to get to see her. He was young but old enough to really know comings-home. It made his day, and that made mine: it was one of those moments that takes you by surprise and almost takes your breath away because all the sudden the love is right there, totally out in the open, we were strangers no more.

I told him Thank you! as I headed out of the store.

August so far: the dryer. The plumbing. Now the dishwasher. And Monday there will be three of us, so we can’t just ignore it.

When everything looks clear but it barely drains–I heard it trying and a little did but not enough and it threw the error code–do you call the plumber or appliance repair? I’m thinking appliance?

I tried simply clearing out the water and starting it over and that actually worked yesterday. Yay!

Today the panel gave me The Look and did not.

Tree near the shore, day two. These lower leaves look like a palm, the trunk does not because that’s not what I was going for. We’ll see how this comes out.

I know I’ve told this before, but when I was first diagnosed with lupus at 31, I read Norman Cousin’s “Anatomy of an Illness,” where he talks about the need for a creative outlet, any creative outlet, to cope with a major new diagnosis.

Okay. Choose one.

I went to the library to look for books on knitting to see if that could be it for me; I’d done a lot of knitting in high school but had given it up for lack of time and money in college.

Kaffe Fassett’s coffeetable “Glorious Knits” was easily the most prominent book on that shelf and practically fell into my hands. The center of it was two models in multi-color coats in a Dutch amaryllis field holding my favorite flowers.

I knew I could never knit any such thing but I had to check it out for the sake of those amaryllises if nothing else.

That book changed my life.

My first try was a tiptoe into it: four colors. A vest for my mom.

She wore it to the Kennedy Center in D.C. and when she sat down in her seat the woman behind her was wearing not only a sweater from that same book but that same pattern! The woman told Mom, Don’t you just love his work!

I got braver. I finished a wool coat out of 68 separate colors, where Fassett wrote, These are large, but they drape beautifully on everybody.

Then I met the guy and he almost had to duck to come through the door to do a booksigning at Uncommon Threads. My husband does have to duck through a standard doorway. I suddenly saw how it came to be that when I got done, Richard had said, It fits me better than it fits you, go make yourself another one.

And I did! Spent a little more time collecting more yarn (it is fair to say there were leftovers) and my coat had 86. So there.

I’m convinced that wanting to have that colorwork without that having to do all that intarsia work–I remember counting 64 strands across a single row for one project that I was knitting doubled, which was a little bonkers, because guys, those were cotton–is how the hand-dyed yarn industry came to be.

So here I am knitting what’s aspiring to be a Monterey Cypress overlooking the ocean in my intarsia afghan when the news came in that the area near Henry Miller’s library and Nepenthe in Big Sur are on fire. Not the buildings so far. They’re doing everything they can to save them.

Kaffe Fassett’s parents built Nepenthe. He grew up there. His family still owns it. His colorways reflect the area again and again.

A small part of this whole project all along has been an inward sort of a thank you to him for showing me what knitting could be and why I would want to do it. For me, he changed–sweeping my arm across the whole of these past 36 years, like the Kaffe Fassett vest for the foster teen who went on to graduate from college–everything.

For so many more people than just me.

Dr. Rachel Remen passed away on Saturday.

Kitchen Table Wisdom. My Grandfather’s Blessings. Two of the most important books I’ve ever read, and I recommend them to anyone and everyone.

She went to bed in her college dorm room one night and woke up six months later after a coma from blood loss, her first sign of Crohn’s disease. She made it through not just college but medical school after that.

She got offered head of pediatrics at Stanford, her dream job–but turned it down after seeing how they treated one of her young patients. She was determined to alter the culture of medicine for the better since she knew it well from the patient side as well as the professional. People went into it to be helpers but the process stomped the empathy right out of them. That had to change.

I have lived long enough and been a patient long enough to feel it is fair to say she succeeded at that.

A memory: meeting up with a man I grew up with since third grade after finding out he lives here–and realizing as he told me his story that he was in one of her stories, it all matched up, though you’d never be able to figure it out just from what she wrote. His dad and Rachel were old friends. She counseled the son when he was ready to walk away from medicine and helped him instead become a great doctor by working through his pain with him, to see that his compassion was the very strength that his pain was making visible. I have long been grateful to her for that.

She gave a reading at a local independent bookseller sometime in the early 90’s from her book, “My Grandfather’s Blessings” and then took questions from the crowd. I wrote about that here.

For those with long memories, Don Meyer was an elderly friend who used to comment on my blog all the time. Before he went into hospice, he had a visiting med student from UCSF attending to him once a week, they had some program going, I’m not sure of the details. But: Don got chatting to him about Dr. Remen and the young man said with great pride that she was one of his professors.

So through that avenue I sent a request that offered context to the evening at Kepler’s as to who I was, wondering whether Dr. Remen would like a lace shawl knit just for her?

It wasn’t going to be a wedding ring shawl–those take months on tiny needles and I didn’t know how long Don would be getting those visits–but fingering weight soft, soft baby alpaca in cream, I figured that would be pretty universal.

Dr. Remen’s response to my query was to send me her home address in great delight for me to mail it to directly. Afterwards she went me a much-treasured thank you note.

She was 88. The world was so lucky to have her as long as we did.

The treehouse DebbieR referred to. Photos here.

Four stories high, now with an elevator and building-code compliant.

I think if you ever had to cut down one of those trees that it’s no longer dependent on you’d have to do it really really carefully. But what a cool house!

A potluck picnic at the pool, old friends gathered, stories swapped.

I finally got to hear the rest of the story of the duck. The infamous huge duck. That actually once got a swim in the Baylands preserve. But mostly it was right by the side of the main commuter artery into downtown.

The artist who made it from scraps of metal and who knows what all else got harassed by the city over it and finally offered it to one of his co-workers from his day job (this guy) who appreciated such fine, fine craftsmanship.

The new owner’s kids liked to take turns camping in it.

A woman pushing a stroller stopped my friend and said she’d just moved here and her husband had bought the house without her even getting to see it first and she didn’t want to live in that town with the snooty reputation and he’d assured her, It’s okay. There’s a duck down the street. So she was looking for the duck.

Karen just so happened to know exactly where that was. (Here, let me show you the other side of my yard…) The woman went away much cheered. Quirks are fun. Good neighbors are the best. Two-for-one.

Then the particular city official whose position shall not be named here went after them because he really did not like that duck and thought it a blight on the community and dammit that thing was still around after all. Karen described it as “the size of a Volkswagon bug” and she was not wrong. Did I mention it was bright medium blue? You couldn’t miss it.

The judge was appalled: You’re bringing a case against these people? Over a LAWN ORNAMENT? Don’t you ever harass them nor waste this court’s time over such nonsense again!

The family had their seventh child and wanted to put a second story on their house. They needed those extra bedrooms.

That guy again. He told them You will NEVER get a building permit, and then he made good on that threat–until eventually he was fired. They built their second story.

So what happened to the duck? I asked. I used to drive by it all the time and it was one of those little perks of living here, everybody in the city knew that thing.

One of her kids had knocked its head off when no one was looking because he wanted his own bedroom and he was afraid someday he might have to sleep outside inside the duck like his big brother liked to do but that did not do it for him.

But that duck had adventures: permits were issued, it was hauled to the main drag on a trailer to celebrate a Stanford game, it was stolen by the rival high school who did not have a trailer nor permit and they bashed it in a bit in the process but it was gotten back.

So where is it now? I asked. I haven’t seen it in years.

Oh, I’ve still got the head, she said.

I can just hear it: Kids! Didn’t I tell you not to slam the door!

I just hope when they were building this place that the contractors didn’t put all the boxes of things for the bathrooms in one place as they worked on other rooms.

Because you know what they say: people in glass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.

I love my stoneware from Mel and Kris. But I also use small white Corningware plates all the time for all the little things. Good for carrying peach pits to the compost bin and all that.

No matter that they’re never loaded to touch anything in the dishwasher, sometimes an old one will come out with a tiny chip or round divot, which is a good time to let them retire.

I was unloading the machine this morning when suddenly there was this tiny emphatic stabbing of broken glass. Too tiny to see but wow did that thing have a bite to it, there was no question what that was.

I had one of those rare flashes of brilliance: I stepped around the corner to where the heavy-duty clear shipping tape was. I cut off a small piece, wrapped it around my finger and kind of kneaded it just for good measure, hoping I wasn’t pushing the thing further in.

Then I held the tape up to the skylight.

There it was. A round speck possibly smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. There was a tiny drop of blood on my finger, a few minutes more of ouchie while my finger whined at me, and then that was that. It was gone.

So I thought I’d mention it in case anyone else ever needs to know.