Going to Wikipedia I discover that another name for our Chinese elm is Lacebark elm. Who knew. How perfect for a knitter’s home. I’d have taken a photo of the trunk earlier if I’d known–but I can definitely say that that name fits.

But what started all this was an odd enough sight that I stopped and simply watched for awhile: five squirrels and surely more where I couldn’t see, all hanging upside down with the ends of their tails just barely wrapped around the branch above them, hanging onto the very flimsiest of limbs. In tandem. Three of them in this shot. The one in the foreground pulled his head up when I pulled the camera out.

They were reaching for the very ends of the twigs and bending them back towards them, working rapidly through the small flowers.

But they didn’t seem to be eating the flowers, rather, pushing their noses side to side through them: they were searching for the bugs that seemed to be hiding in them. Every now and then one would pull itself triumphantly upright hand over careful hand, one paw, a second, a third, a fourth, rock-climbing the air back to a steadier spot. Wait oh whoops! Almost! as a fragile twig broke off and fell below while the thing scrambled wildly.

But a big black beetle. Now, that was worth sitting up in a good spot where you could enjoy it with two paws free to hold it as you bite off the best parts first.

I’ve seen those bugs. The past few Octobers, they’ve come down through the heating vents (they seem to only fall, not fly) trying to find a good place to overwinter. They have no business being inside my house. (To everyone back East dealing with their cousins the invasive stink bugs that also like to come in in the Fall, I know I really have nothing to complain about, but I still don’t like them.)

This year, though, the furnace and the damaged, gaping ductwork across the roof have been replaced. (Thank you Joe Lerma!) The trees have been cut back from over the house. If a bug gets shaken loose it will fall to the ground outside where it belongs.

The squirrels are getting all the bugs. They’re not in my house anymore and it is Fall again and they’re not coming back in.

I cannot tell you how wonderful that is.

My doctor told me to get my flu shot as soon as I, in her words, wasn’t very sick.

And so Richard was going to leave work early and get me to the clinic before their flu-shot nurse called it a day at 5:00. I just wasn’t up to running lots of errands on my own yet.

The lights were not with us. We got there 5:02, no dice. Oh well.

It was a moment of truth: I just really, really didn’t want to have to worry about going through the last two weeks all over again if I could do anything about it–I wanted that shot done with. (He’d already gotten his.) And so we drove across town to Costco.

Pro tip: that was the fewest people I have seen in that store in ages, 5:25 must be the right time to go.

Not to mention the fewest infectious agents around us and for me to be around them.

There were questions to check off: are you currently sick? I simply left that one blank and they did not call me on it. Do you have any immune disease such as AIDS or cancer? Uh, yes no no–so, yes.

They made me wait 15 minutes while they shuffled paperwork. I had not brought my knitting, deliberately: my hands needed a break after major baby blanket time, but I’d forgotten my book, too. It is a sign of how quickly I’d run out of steam that I forgot that I could simply read the news on my phone.

I sat on their bench that faced a towering display of Men’s L/XL incontinence help (charming), noting the heavy towers of pallets to right and left, the emergency exit door thataway, and plotting my duck-and-cover should the quake strike. I’ve been under swinging chandeliers before, but at least they were anchored to the ceiling. Get away from those aisles. (The bored mind in earthquake country.)

And then they called me into a back room and the deed was done. I cannot begin to tell you what a relief it is that that is so. I have my flu shot. The world is a slightly safer place.

Little boys are wonderful. This just totally cracks me up.

A note was sent to the ward chat list this afternoon in hopes of reaching the right cellphone before everybody was gone from the church.  A five-year-old was very sad about having lost his new purple clip-on tie.

And then about five minutes later, Tie found!

Eight feet high in a tree.

I sent off a, Is it okay that I laughed? Do you need to borrow a ladder?

It’s okay and it’s all good, she wrote back, John jumped up and grabbed it.

Their little boy was still saying he had no idea how it got up there.

Last night was the first night I slept since this started, just a few coughing spells. Today was the first day I was able to eat without having to use anti-nausea meds to make it possible. That’s real progress.

And I wound up the next ball of purple yarn for my project. I almost did it last night but thought, do you want to blow all your energy standing winding for twenty minutes and then be worse tomorrow because you’re already that tired, or do you want to wait till it’s easier so it gets done *and* you still feel well? I waited and today it was no problem. Wow what a difference.

Getting tomatoes out of those boxy cages is a real pain–and the guy who comes twice a month to do some of the outside yardwork that I can’t saw me coughing just before I headed back to bed to read awhile, not talking to him because I didn’t want to share the germs. Richard was working from home: another sign I was sick. The guy saw that things hadn’t been weeded for at least a week and there were now tomato branches growing through and blooming well outside the bird netting.

He got that one ripe heirloom tomato out of there for me and put it where we couldn’t miss seeing it the next time we looked out the window. Nobody had asked him to. He just did it. I got up soon after he and his partner working next door left, too late to say thank you or even to be sure which one of them had done it.

Looking forward to tomorrow. I like this getting-better stuff.

When my daughter moved to Alaska I wished I knew more about the place and my brother-in-law suggested I read James Michener’s “Alaska.”

Being sick is a good time to catch up on reading and I am finally plowing through it, even if it’s as endless as the coastline of that state. I like that at the front he has a list of, this is historical, this is fiction.

But man oh man he drives me crazy. Describing the Great Hunt that nearly exterminated the species, I want  to tell him, river otters wouldn’t have seven foot long pelts, dude, are you crazy? They’re cute little things. It would be quite a stretch for sea otters for that matter. If you didn’t ever go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, couldn’t you at least have cracked open an old-school encyclopedia? Then, oh oops, mid-chapter he switches the description of what they’re hunting to sea otter without mentioning it and river otters are never heard from again.

Wikipedia on Sea otters: here. 

And river otters: here.

History is his thing, and he does give a lot of it.

But Michener’s character development too has had me going Nah AH a few times and actually laughing out loud this evening. C’mon, how is this supposed to be believable? Sorry, but if a woman (an Aleut) was sold into slavery and then repeatedly (he describes it most delicately) gang-raped and beaten and later one of the thugs wants to marry her to keep him from being shipped to certain never-to-return well north of the Artic Circle, having her faint in ecstacy at the preaching of the Russian Orthodox priest, making it so she willingly saves her primary tormentor’s soul (after having gotten away from him for a good long time) by marrying him and entering a life of saved Christian bliss while with that conversion severing from her life the shaman who had been her life support through all her trials because he was of the wrong religion now–James, James, honey, it just ain’t happenin’ for me.

Haven’t gotten to the end of the chapter yet but she did turn her back on her people and did marry the evil man she’d so hated. I’m hoping for a better ending on that particular subplot.

But what Michener did do was make me want to go sort out more details on what actually did happen then between the Russians and the Aleuts and all the other countries that in the 1700s were trying to move in on the lucrative otter pelt trade while claiming territory.  Yes, the Russians did enslave and kill many of the Aleuts. Not just the animals.

Not only did they nearly exterminate a keystone species in the marine ecosphere, the author says that 70% of the otters the white man shot simply vanished down into the ocean before they could get to it, destroyed and gone.

Now that I believe.

We’re still working on recovering that species. We’ve got a ways to go. A bad die-off a few years ago made headlines when they said toxoplasmosis from house cats finding its way down to the coastline was the culprit, and they were working on it.

Well, that’s one for the history books.

Oxygen at 81% at night: I am not a fan.

And yet.  Got my hair washed today, got the birdfeeder filled, got a husband working from home this week taking excellent care of me while I try to take excellent care of him as best I can.

Ran a load with your socks, hon, I knew you were getting low.

Oh. I was?

Not anymore.

Tomorrow I might even put them away.

The curious thing about yesterday is that the nurse told Richard emphatically NOT to bring me in to Urgent Care at the clinic: they would just ambulance-transport me straight to Stanford ER anyway.

They either had a lot of staff out sick or were swamped with patients or both. I would much rather have gone there–given my medical history they always take me right in and get me going on that IV. Going to the ER meant over two hours (and I knew it) of sitting up in a wheelchair.

But at least I had that IV in the second hour of it and I went from utterly limp ragdoll to sitting up and opening my eyes. The power of a little fluid.

I was planning on getting my flu shot yesterday. I got the flu instead. Trying not to sound whiny as I type this, but, this is a really nasty bug–please don’t get it. Get your flu shot now.

Woke up sick, y’know, the ordinary germy type. Hoping hard I wasn’t contagious Saturday. Or yesterday, for that matter.

Hudson went straight for the organ.

Parker went straight to the new digger toy his Grampa had bought a few days earlier and had set free from its packaging, battery in and ready to go so it would make a nice growly rrrrrrrr rrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrr. Grampa had it set on the floor not in but in front of the toy basket: couldn’t get any closer to neon signs with PARKER!!! written all over them.

Making memories.

They only had a few minutes–there was so much family get-together stuff going on this weekend on my daughter-in-law’s side of the family, and rightfully so: you only die once.

Her Grandpa John, who’d lived maybe a mile from us, had slipped quietly away in a good old age, a life well lived. I sent off a photo from the kids’ wedding of him bent way down and a small child happily high-fiving him.

The kids were here a month ago while he was in hospice care and I told them, remembering my own childhood, It may surprise you how much Parker might remember of seeing his great-grandpa.

We got some Dr. Seuss time in, Parker and me and then Hudson climbing up so as not to miss a thing. Fox in, what else in a knitter’s house, Sox.

I had been saving two last Fuji apples, expecting they would not become overripe and they didn’t, twins growing on opposite sides of a limb, the longest any had ever been able to last critter-free in our yard. I clipped the tape on the clamshells–two layers–and as they fell, lifted Parker up so he could reach. An enthusiastic snap! Snap! and they were off! Ripe, sweet, the seeds inside brown and mature now.

Parker doesn’t love having his picture taken, but just before I sliced those up I asked him if I could take a picture of the apples. He thought that was a great idea. He held them out high so I could get a good shot.

I handed out slices, and when my son, playing the piano, didn’t get to his and hadn’t eaten one from the first apple either, Parker felt it his work and fair game and he’d waited, too. But you do not let such treasures go to waste. He pulled it off the music book on top of the piano and, with a nod and no complaint from his daddy, devoured it.

A few minutes later, he surprised me with a big hug from behind and then ran away to tease me; Hudson gave me a hug from in front, and we all walked together to the curb and waved goodbye goodbye bye bye as our son snapped them into their carseats and finally away.

And this time Hudson didn’t burst into tears when they pulled out. He’d seen this movie before. This time he knew they’d be back. (Or we’ll come, little guy, when your sister arrives, believe me, we’ll come.)

I was 31. They did tell me cerebral vasculitis. Nothing at all to compare to what this woman went through, but at the same time so many parts of her story sound so familiar.

I was someone who never forgot a face. Suddenly I wasn’t remembering them instead, even having trouble, when I was tired, recognizing my own husband’s. I suddenly couldn’t spell anymore, my short-term memory was gone, and I remember the time I ordered something over the phone and had to have the sales clerk read the numbers back to me to make sure I’d read those squiggly things correctly: Tell me the name of the item back to me, too, just to be sure. Letters were far easier. Still, I could tell which numbers they were just fine if she told me first what they were, kinda hard for her to do, y’know, so we did our best. (Online ordering didn’t exist yet.)

It helped clinch my lupus diagnosis.

Read what Christine Hyung-Oak Lee can write now. She’s amazing.

Today is my sister’s birthday, and what she wanted was a photo of the house we grew up in.

Took me a long time to find the file and then I just spent an hour emailing her the roll. (Does anyone still call a photo sequence a roll?)

Hey Marian, there’s one here I missed, of looking down the street from the house, and further down in that post, one of the back yard.

And just for fun here’s a memory of the DMV in Maryland.

The photo here is of the C&O Canal, early November ’08. I used to walk there with my friends all the time, growing up; when Richard wanted to take me there for a walk and a picnic on our second date I knew he was a keeper.

A side note. Alaska went through a 9.1 earthquake in 1964, the second highest magnitude ever recorded and that lasted about a minute. So did today’s 6.2 near Anchorage, and I’m guessing that’s a good part of why my daughter’s building at work was on rollers. She gave me a quick heads-up that everybody there was fine, even if being on the seventh floor was…entertaining?

My thanks to people who build’em right.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings I was not home to do my usual watering but for just long enough to keep the pots of tomato plants going and I was off.

There was a one-plant surprise party for me Monday way across the yard over next to the cherry tree: having weeded there last Wednesday, I know it wasn’t there then.

Okay, then, squirrels do bury food for the winter, but squirrels don’t even like tomatoes–they just steal the juices out and toss the rest.

Curious little mystery. It’s a vigorous little grower, maybe we’ll even get a harvest out of it.

Meantime, thinking about yesterday’s post some more, I realized that I have no idea what time my car actually got done and my showing up to ask might have been right as they finished. In my hurry to finish the post and call it a night I neglected to mention that the mechanic had asked me for my cell number so he could tell me when it was done.

I explained the hearing impairment (I’d forgotten my bluetooth pendant to my Iphone) and that in that noisy store, I would never hear it ring; I asked if it would be possible to text instead?

He thought about that for a nanosecond and decided, with no question in his voice, a firm Yes. He added quickly that it would be from his personal phone, not the store’s (I’m sure so that I would get it despite its being an unfamiliar number.)

Now, we have a cell plan with unlimited free texting, which they don’t offer anymore; we’re grandfathered in, along with two of our kids and my parents. This guy probably pays by the text and he was willing to offer that out of his own personal pocket to a customer. He didn’t have to do that–and in the moment that he did, there was a certain joy in his face in the offering.

They’ve got a good guy there.

I got two notes back from Costco customer service this evening. The first was an automated, we don’t answer after hours but we will get back to you tomorrow.

The second, sent soon after by someone who had read it anyway and clearly had felt compelled to answer, was a note thanking me and saying they would forward my email to the manager so that Luis could get the recognition he deserved.

And now I was the one who was smiling. May that little moment he created not be buried but come to full fruition for him.

It is supposed to rain come Thursday, a whole .12 of an inch, but still, actually measurable rain as opposed to last week’s random scattered few drops that couldn’t even clean a skylight.

The first of the season in California always brings a string of accidents from all the months of accumulated oil on the roads as the surfaces all go slick in a way they will not after a good washing-away, an annual phenomenon I’d never heard of till we moved here.

It was time. The new tires went on today.

The mechanics forgot to tell me my car was done. I was in no hurry to walk outside and risk the UV exposure, so having commandeered a padded chair I found inside next to the photo lab I simply sat. And knit. And watched the reactions of passersby to the randomness of a woman knitting at Costco.

The photolab guy kind of sneered and silently but clearly wished me out of there. One woman made up for that when she stopped midstep at the sight of my needles: she looked thrilled, and almost, almost struck up a conversation. I would have myself but I let her decide at her own comfort level, wondering if there was a language barrier–but I would have told her that really, there was not. Her face lighting up like that had said what I’d needed and I wanted to tell her thank you. So I smiled greatly in return.

I knitted on. That purple scarf for my cousin I’d been meaning to really get going on? Now I have. I really like how it’s coming out, which is when a project about knits itself, y’know?

When my hands needed a break after two and a half hours I finally did get up and go back outside and in the other door to ask after that car.

Oh, right, here’s your key!

And so one sense of satisfaction at a needed job getting done became closer to two.

(Edited to add the next day: when it got past 5:00 I saw my chance at redeeming the interaction between me and the photo lab guy. I asked him what time the tire center closed up for the night, I mean, y’know, I hadn’t missed…?

He said he was pretty sure they had the same hours as the rest of the store and that everything was okay. And in that moment, he got a chance to help and he did so gladly and we both came away better off for it. Good for him.)

An impromptu get-together of cousins at Richard’s aunt’s this afternoon up in the redwoods in the mountains. I think that’s her cherry tree in front on the right, for perspective on size.

And then back downhill for a brief stop and then back up into the mountains going in the opposite direction to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday.

Where we ran into friends we hadn’t seen in years, properly celebrated the birthday boy, and a grand time was had by all.

One of those, wow, we squeezed a whole lot of living into one single day and wow is it late.

Oh and: I tucked a cowl I’d knitted into my purse, having felt that I should be ready to give–someone, no idea who–something from my needles tonight. Okay, then; I was ready for whoever it should turn out to be, since I was definitely going to see a lot of people. Madeline Tosh blue/green handdyed softness, my Ft. Worth yarn bought from the MadTosh owner herself.

It just didn’t… I wondered at first and then I simply forgot about it.  Didn’t even think of it. It stayed tucked away. Which is fine, but, huh.

We had to stop at the grocery store on the way home, one last thing to do today because we’re having company over for dinner tomorrow, and there we ran into a friend. She and her family are new in the area, here on Sabbatical from one university to another; we had hit it off with them right away and they’ve borrowed a few items they didn’t have in their temporary place. You need to know what the temperature of something is, here, use our laser thermometer, glad we could help. Your son needs to weigh things by the gram for a school project, so do I because of my knitting–here, use my scale, c’mon over.

Guess who loves that shade of bluegreen?

Well then.

She was so absolutely thrilled, the kind of reaction that makes it so many many more projects will get made in happy anticipation of the next moment like that.

And a new and strange town got a little more like home.

I sent off a card to Cliff, Don’s son, several weeks ago. He took such good care of his dad; we should all be so well loved in our old age. I knew that Don had lived in a senior community and I wondered how that works when a not-yet-55-year-0ld inherits the place.

I also know that sometimes when you’re grieving a loss, often people tend to assume a few months later that life has gone back to normal and that they shouldn’t remind you of your missing loved one and reignite any pain.

As if you could forget. As if you didn’t remember every day.

And so, me, I try to send out an ‘I’m thinking of you’ later on as well.

Today it came back to me weeks after I’d sent it, stamped unforwardable.

He had snailmailed me letters in his dad’s final illness, giving me updates, letting me know. Very much appreciated.

And now, who else would remember that day my doorbell rang and Cliff was standing there with Don grinning like crazy from the passenger side of the car out front as his son held out new pans for me to make them chocolate tortes in? Surprise! After I had complained in this space that my old pans had leaked and smoked up my oven.

Or how they saved up produce clamshells to keep my fruit trees from the squirrels. It is halfway through September and I still have a few last Fuji apples ripening, safe.

Cliff, if you read this, I baked tortes tonight because I was thinking of you both–grinning, remembering that day, thinking how much fun Don would have had with Sunday’s post.

Thank you, and may all be well with you, wherever you are now.