Thank you Supreme Court. Now my daughters can reliably get health insurance and can pay into the system for it.

Speaking of which. I’ve had an easily-flaring laryngitis that has seemed autoimmune-related for four months now.

I got to see Dr. M today for the first time in three years and secretly wished, as he came in, that my hair still had that youthful dark sandy color–just a few gray hairs on him after all these years.

Got a tube down my nose and throat briefly and I thanked him: he gave me a topical anesthetic first. The ER doctor I encountered at Stanford, who simply shoved it down, could definitely learn from him; he’s a good one. After that one experience I did not know it could be done gently, but in Dr. M’s hands it was a breeze. Just making sure nothing serious was going on.

And with that cleared and out of the way, he stopped and looked at me a moment and said, wonderingly: “You never change.”

Wait, wait–I’m the one with the gray hair! It wasn’t till about two hours later that it hit me–remember that inadvertent eyelid lift that cost me my grandma eyes when I had the skin cancer cut off my scalp? Too funny.

We swapped small grandchild news. His daughter has twins on the way? Then I’ve got some soft hats to be knitting soon, and prayers to add for their safe delivery. Twins! Very cool. To life!

Michelle was sorting in the kitchen and advocating for Goodwilling a bunch of old Tupperware: lime-gray green, Peptobismal pink, long shoved in the back of the cabinets.”This looks like from the ’80’s, Mom!”

Fancy that. “Trust me, those were the best colors they had at the time,” and the measure of an organized kitchen back then was how much and how well placed and how color-coordinated your Tupperware was on your shelves. There is nobody who will say I came close to succeeding at that.

OXO is taking over here now. Out with the random that kept changing to a new shade every time I tried to add a bit more as my budget allowed. In with the airtight, consistent-over-time, easy-on-the-eyes with a shape that fits side-to-side. Meantime, hopefully someone out there will be shopping the thrift stores for something, y’know, vintage. (I can only hope it doesn’t have BPA–I did find this, and so far, so good.)

And Michelle found–some old wedding presents.

It was the most sweltering for the date on record in Washington DC. We can tell our kids: we were totally hot.

Red roses tonight. Dinner for two at Flea Street Cafe. We kn0w how lucky we are.

The plumber came. He looked at the job, pronounced a fair price and went to work. When he was done, he asked me to come see something. I ducked down under the sink and went Wow!

When we had redone the kitchen 17 years ago, that plumber had glued all the pieces under there together, and this guy had never seen anything quite like it–and a ring was broken.  Tilted up and high, which was good, but really obviously broken.

I told him, yeah, our contractor cut a lot of corners that we found out about later. But glued? Why? Huh.

He had that ring piece in his truck. He offered to fix it for $45, which I thought reasonable in the extreme. Done! And the fluids at the front of the fridge were 37F this morning. We have a working kitchen again!

Meantime…

Michelle was cleaning a cabinet and came across a butter dish that had been a wedding present ages ago in Washington DC, the surviving one; the other we were given had been (are you ready for this) platinum-edged china, I kid you not, broken in the Loma Prieta quake and long gone. The glass one, however, had made it through.

Did you know that butter quarter pound blocks sold on the East Coast are long and narrow and butter quarters sold on the West Coast are short and squat? And do not in any way fit our East Coast butter dish? I explained to her, and she told me that, Oh, you can buy butter shaped like that at Piazza’s. You’ll pay an obscene price for it, but you can get it.

Designer butter. Who knew.

(So, can I get rid of it, Mom?

Not on your life. Call it a quacamole server.)

Ed. to add–remember how I said I was really really hoping no earthquake tonight with that sink full of Drano’d water to the top? The universe laughed. We had a 3.3 at 1:13 this morning just south of San Jose. Not enough to do damage, not even enough to splash (as far as I could tell); just enough to grin mischievously back at us.

Courtesy of Margo Lynn. Made me laugh.

My glass of milk came out of the fridge at 43 degrees, and whether it goes up or down in there from here, that’s so much better than it was.

The sink, mmm, not so much. Note to Don: we tried your plumber’s idea of adding the weight of lots of water on top of the Drano, and now I’m really really really hoping for no earthquake for the next day or so. Just sayin’. The plumber gets called in the morning.

And way more importantly: I got asked to head up the local Red Cross Interfaith Blood Drive for our ward (congregation); it’s to be held at St. Raymond’s Catholic Church 8:00-2:00 in Menlo Park on Saturday, July 14th. To sign up to donate, go to http://www.redcrossblood.org/ and for this particular event, enter the sponsor code InterfaithCommunity to sign up for a time slot.

I can’t donate, but I can guess they asked someone they knew would be passionate about it. Longtime readers know that blood donors saved my life and platelet donors saved my daughter’s. Even if you’re AB+, the universal recipient rather than O-, the universal donor, your plasma is universally donorable.

I should know. I freaked when I saw AB on the light yellowish bag being set up on my pre-op IV pole three years ago, but the nurse said no no, really, it’s okay, and explained why.

If you can, give. If you need a face to put to it to help make it personal, I’m glad to lend mine. Thank you.

The kitchen sink, which has been grumbling, backed up last night. The Drano helped some but it didn’t finish the job.

I took a break and bought a gallon of milk tonight. It was a gamble.

I came home and at last we finished that job. I hope.

Now, for 32 years I have marveled at the things my 6’8″ husband can reach; this time, he was marveling at me as I easily squeezed head and shoulders into the 13″ wide freezer side to screw the shelf runners back on after we had visually confirmed that its coils were finally totally de-iced. (Didn’t we thaw those last Saturday…?!)

A week. The freezer side has been pretty much okay, but.  And it’s 17 years old.

Over the last few days, I vacuumed the bottom, I put a tall metal bowl full of ice on the fridge side, we troubleshooted via the ‘net and talked repairmen and (oh please no) replacements. Richard has a nifty laser pointer thingy that reads out the temp of whatever it shines on, and at 58 degrees–62, yesterday–buying milk by the half gallon seemed a good idea.

One last try. Richard and Ryan pulled the behemoth out from the wall this morning and Richard squeezed somehow down on the floor in the small space behind it and unscrewed the back panel. I gave the insides the best I could with the vacuum, cleaning and resting and coming back again and again to have at it. It took us all morning.

It helped some–we got to 55.

Note that if you’re going to stick a vacuum nozzle in there, *turn the fridge off first.* See that motor? In its speed, I thought that was a solid piece there. Do you know how fast it can throw that light piece of plastic back out at you? Yeah, I asked for a flashlight after that. I have been assured it would moan and groan if I’d done any damage.

Hours later, Michelle saw the ice peeking out at the seams inside the freezer. Oh no…

To actually see the coils we had to unscrew the innards to be able to lift the metal back. And wow–all that *hairsucking haircutting hairdryering we did last week, where we thought surely we’d gotten everything thawed behind there because the metal was so warm? We had done that much hairdryering again tonight when we lifted it open and finally saw.

Iced nearly solid behind there. After half an hour of high heat blasted at it. Who knew.

THIS time we knew when those coils were done. I squeezed in and screwed the rails back together. Richard got the shelves back on them. I filled them back up from the cooler. It is done.

THIS time, if it doesn’t work…

Meantime, we put more Drano down the sink and till that works, no dishes can be done.

I really, really want to finish that single row of silk I started today before I go to bed.

*Ed to add, I didn’t blog about that? Make sure your hairdryer has a nearly-solid hairproof screen at the back. I later checked at Target: they had 16 on display. Thirteen were good; three of them had backs that were open enough to suck your hair right in if you held it pointing towards in front of you, and the only way to get that hair out–believe me, we tried–is to cut it. I’m going to have a bit of a frizzy Mohawk for a few months.

We have a laser pointer that tells the temperature of whatever you aim it at. 62F on the orange juice inside the fridge is not a good idea. (I vacuum the coils.)

Meantime…

My friend Gail needed a ride hither and yon today; she’d saved up four errands for one big afternoon on the go. Reading happened. Knitting happened, and a nebulous idea for a pattern began to actually come to be while I waited.

On our way back towards her house, there it was again, on the same telephone line, though further down the road this time. We both saw it and again exclaimed over it: by the size and shape I’d say this one was a female. Beautiful, beautiful big bird standing watch over the cars going by.

And so once again a Cooper’s hawk made our day while driving Gail around. And after I got home, I saw two Nuttall’s woodpeckers dancing together around my olive tree. I’d seen one bathing in the water in the curb last week so I knew one was around somewhere again. I’d been waiting for months. Two!

And life is good.

Now to get back to work on that project. (Yup. More of the dk silk, in not wheat but wheat cream, a pale golden shade.)

Celebrating Klutzes… (Klutz Press’s Intergalactic Headquarters, ie their retail store, is a few miles up the road.)

I mentioned the hairdryer incident yesterday because I wanted to warn off others. It didn’t burn the hair, it just wrapped it around and around the insides and Richard couldn’t even take it apart to get at it without cutting my hair off anyway.

This morning, I checked the back of that one (Michelle’s) and then my own: mine had been designed to be much better at deflecting the possibility; hers, designed to be lightweight for travel, had sideways plastic stripes with equally-wide open gaps between them at the back. Be careful out there.

She said later that when I’d yelled “Help!” she had never heard it from me like that but once, the time that…

When our kids were little, the girls were in a bunkbed with Sam on the top. Age gave privileges. One evening, tucking them in, I put one foot on the edge of Michelle’s bunk to hoist myself partway and then hopped up on top of the tall dresser to have some quiet end-of-the-day time with my eldest, much enjoyed by both of us with me at eye level up near the ceiling with her. The novelty of coming into her territory for a moment.

And then I hopped straight down.

With my pocket catching on the drawer knob and pulling the whole dresser crashing down on me.

A stunned not very loud can’t get my breath have to say something “Help?” The kids yelled for their dad.

Richard came running and then stopped, bowled over laughing in the hallway. I knew, yes of course it was funny–but tomorrow, okay, hon, can we do something about this first, I’m still under this thing okay? And I’d landed on my wad of keys in the other pocket–getmeouttahere. He got it off fast, apologizing for his initial reaction. But he was right–it WAS funny. It was so classic klutzy us.

I did not know that all these years later, Michelle remembered exactly how I’d sounded in that first moment.

And it was no big deal, I was okay.

And it’s no big deal. I do have about a dozen random stray hairs sticking up on top of my head, but they’ll just add character to the family photos in another nephew’s wedding coming up. Like when my then-four-year-old son cut his hair instead of the construction paper on the long car ride on the way to my brother’s. Family tradition.

Anybody got a klutz story to tell?

Everybody has days like this.

Baking soda. Lots of baking soda. Costco-sized baking soda.

I was supposed to drop my car off at the mechanic today, but when I described to him the broken jug of milk the night before and how I thought I’d gotten it all till I opened the door again in the morning… Baking soda, trying that… (And it did help a lot, but not enough yet.)

“Tomorrow,” he told me, hoping hard, I’m sure; today, though, mmm, not so much.

And then the fridge decided to throw a house-warming party.

I think I need to go knit.

(Ed. to add, and then I decided to be helpful and try again with the hairdryer on the freezer coils, most of which happened while I was at knit night. Did you know the back of a hairdryer could suck your hair into it? I did not. I know now. And yes, there were a fair number of hairs that after everybody’s best efforts for quite some time could only be cut off.)

It was, to be softspoken about it, an intense day.

We went to the wedding reception this evening of Marguerite’s daughter. Beautifully done, the couple and their families so very happy. So much joy. The way it should always be.

And here’s the funny part: they held it in the Rotunda at City Hall in San Jose. Okay, picture me jumping up and down in surprised glee when that invitation came. Wow!

And to top it off, with what I can only ascribe to the choreography of God, we parked the car and were on the plaza walking towards the Rotunda door when, looking up, I said to Richard and Michelle, Do you see what that is?!

No, what?

The peregrine falcon casually turned a half-circle around the circular building and away towards the direction of the nest, the one I used to be on the camera crew for. Just. So. Perfect.

As were the bride and groom.

The other thing that happened. The phone rang this afternoon. “Hi, Mom!”

“Hi, Richard!” (Wondering what the occasion might be.) I found out soon enough.

I have always thought that that freeway bridge was an example of old and, at the side near the airport, poor design. The kids were on it in heavy traffic when for reasons no one knows, someone slammed their brakes hard. And were hit. A third car hit. While our son Richard in the other lane was braking and trying to avoid and so the guy behind him slammed into him and threw him into the others and if we heard right, our kids were then hit yet again.

And they are okay. The car, not so much. One person left the scene via paramedics, braced and collared, but nobody was killed.

Cars are only so much scrap metal anyway. I told him that my big accident when I was hit, the doctor told me to keep moving gently all day, all day, while consciously relaxing and that that would keep the muscle damage to a minimum.  He was right. (He missed the brain swelling and the damage to my balance to come, but maybe it was too soon after to know.)

They’re okay. Repeat. They’re okay. Two hours later we were in San Jose, watching old friends finding old friends, everybody embracing the happy couple, four years after we were doing the same thing with our own kids and now grandson who had us holding our breath today.

Love your dear ones. Life is far too fragile for anything less.

Years ago my mom had a co-worker who was close to some kids whose parents were going through a nasty divorce. She wanted them to have a promise of hope: to see a couple who were long married, who’d raised kids together and gotten them off on their own, who were living a full life. Together. Who cherished each other. So she set up an appointment and Mom and Dad said sure, come on by.

The locals will understand when I say I grew up in an Eichler-esque house: floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room at the back of the house looking out on the woods, highly unusual architecture for Maryland, only, different from the Eichlers in that the living room rose to a cathedral ceiling.

It was the season of Christmas.

Every year Dad would get the ladder and hang globe ornaments from the top beam between the living and dining room. These were huge, deeply colored, beautiful, but something you couldn’t put in a normal ceiling without someone bonking their head. We got to have them. I’ve never seen them anywhere else. The whole area was decorated as only an art dealer and his wife could do: things collected from trips to Europe, happy-making and pretty, only the lights being your average store-bought. And even then… I was so thrilled when bubble lights finally came back on the market a few years ago.

Anyway.

For whatever reason, Mom got delayed, the co-worker and kids came early, I don’t know, but when they came only Dad was home. Mom apologized profusely later to her co-worker.

Who told her no, that was perfect.

?

My father had loved those children and had wanted the best for them before he ever laid eyes on them; I imagine the very request got him thinking how blessed his life was and how much he wished it for them too, and he welcomed them in and joyfully showed them around as they talked. I picture him showing off the painted and glittered plaster-of-paris ornaments we kids had made for years growing up, with varying levels of skill and childhood showing–Mom and Dad always insisted on putting those up long after we kids thought we’d definitely outgrown the scribblings or sloppiness or whatever lack of perfection might be in them. A little snip of twine was embedded in each to hold a hook for the tree.

Come to think of it, the best birthday party I ever had growing up was having my friends come paint a newly-cast set of those ornaments and letting them take theirs home. December birthdays rock.

Those kids went home that day with the joy of the season. It was infectious. My dad is the most joyful celebrant of Christmas you could ever hope to meet.

And the best celebrant of his children’s lives a daughter could ever ask for. Happy Birthday, Dad. I love you.

Michelle flying in just after midnight, my old friend Nancy now of Morro Bay 200 miles south of here dropping by at noon. A great way to start a day.

Then this article arrived in the mail. Ginny Russell was the kindergarten teacher for all four of my kids. Every year her classroom watched the life cycle of silk moths and the slight variations in the silk as they spun, working around and around in their sliced stacked-up toilet-paper-tube sections. There was a guinea pig and/or a bunny every year. One must be gentle, one must not frighten nor chase. Hold them like this so they feel safe and secure. They raised butterflies. They were taught to value living things and themselves.

Ginny mentions her butterfly enclosure in the article; it doesn’t say, but she used it for kids whom she saw needed a moment’s intervention before a coming meltdown–she would grant them butterfly time, where they were to hold very still in that little place and let these beautiful things they had all helped raise land on their hands and shoulders and head, surrounded too by the plants they’d grown to feed the larvae, the butterflies’ kindergarten stage.

The powers that be want the image of a great school at the expense of a real one. Ginny’s pleas to let the kids have a year of productive, learning, playing and learning to socialize went nowhere.

This acknowledged master teacher whom they had had mentor others, who was the very image of kindness with a profound empathy for the children in her care, was told she had to conform to the new high-tech standard and to pretend to be oblivious to the effects of assigning five-year-olds to tracks, to reading achievement levels in front of each other. (In kindergarten!) And her view that children need the realness of the smell of chalk and the feel of a pencil or crayon in their hand was deemed too old fashioned for Silicon Valley.

And so she is out.

Those who want only touch screens for small fingers are the ones utterly out of touch.

Years ago, I wondered how Michelle, my third, would cope with this whole idea of going off to school and all its unknowns for the very first time.

She marched right into that classroom without even looking back to wave goodbye to me: finally it was her turn to be in Mrs. Russell’s room! The silk worms, the bunny… It was hers now!

Both my girls studied biology in their undergrad and you know where they got their good start. I want to show Ginny this: part of Sam’s ongoing trajectory from all that Ginny blessed her life with. She taught my kids to love to learn and to love one another. Even the difficult classmates. “Why do you think Sean acted that way?” They talked it out. Understanding happened.

Love was the language there.

Such a loss. Such a crying loss. I can only fervently wish the decisions could somehow be reversed. And man, did my kids luck out.

Today I got to meet the man whose family built the big pipe organ at our church: some anonymous benefactor decades ago had wanted the new building to have a fine one, no electronic pretender but a real honest-t0-goodness fine instrument to be proud of for generations. And so we have been.

The man’s company also built the organ in the new conference center in Salt Lake City, designed (we were told a few years ago by one of its organists) to be just shy of the grandeur of the one in the Mormon Tabernacle, not wanting to upstage the grand old lady of them all.

“You built a beautiful organ,” I told him.

“It all depends on who’s playing it,” he answered, motioning towards the one who was; “not everybody’s Jim.” (Jim looked over at us, smiling.)

I explained, “Jim taught my son to play on that organ and he ended up minoring in organ performance; for his final, his professor took him to Salt Lake to play the tabernacle organ.”

The man was smiling broadly now: someone who understood. He had centered his whole life around making the most beautiful music in the world possible–if…

And here it was, valued and worked towards and its possibilities being earned by yet another generation.

I wanted to make a blueberry cake (best recipe ever is here) and started to set up for it. (Thank you again for the pans, Don!)

Only, that bag in the freezer wasn’t blueberries after all. Huh. Mixed berries I could experiment around, but with strawberries? Too wet. I decided to run to Costco, hoping to get that done early in the evening so I could put my feet up and knit afterwards.

And then I checked some messages.

My friend Laurel was in the hospital. She moved a few years ago, still in the general area but far enough away to be a trek; we simply hadn’t seen each other in awhile.

That was going to be a goodly hike across bad traffic.

But I remembered all the people who had come to visit me in the hospital when I’d needed it–and how my laptop would go home with Richard at night so it wouldn’t walk away while I was asleep, meaning that once he left, I felt really truly alone. Every single person who had made the effort to visit had lifted some of that burden long beyond their time in that room.

And so I drove up to Redwood City and wandered around till I found her.

It was so good to catch up. She has a baby girl now to go with her two little boys? Cool! She showed me pictures. Such beautiful children! (Well, yeah, look at their parents.) She laughed and loved as she scrolled through my Parker photos on my Iphone.

I told her my first had been in kindergarten when my fourth was born; I remembered the intensity but also the joy of those years. We traded stories, we had a grand time, and the best was when she pointed to her tray and said it was the first meal she’d kept down in days. She should be home tomorrow.

I got out of there with no time to get to the Costco near home–but there was one a few blocks away. If I hurried I would make it.

The blueberries were in stock. (Not a sure thing at our local one.) So were a few other things that very much surprised me, because ours had discontinued them. That organic sharp cheddar is a small thing, but to me in the moment I saw it it wasn’t. Small favors…

The blueberry cake just came out of the oven–wait, there it goes… Now we just have to get Laurel home.

Strange, strange shadows this evening: sharp and long and very dark, slicing the brightly lit outside in zigzags.

The bigger birds and one squirrel didn’t care but the finches, titmice, and chickadees went home to bed, leaving the birdseed untouched from then on.

We drove through that weirdly semi-Decembery black and white light and went to Nina and Rod’s. Where old friends were gathering and looked at the eclipse with special goggles and chatted into the night.

And almost forgot to actually sing it. To a very good man: Happy Birthday, Rod!

What’s your favorite color, I asked her a few weeks ago.

Red, she answered, looking at me…

Went to the bridal shower for my friend Marguerite‘s daughter tonight. (Quietly rejoicing that Marguerite and her mom, too, for that matter, were there to see the day and in good health.)

A red mink/cashmere scarf may have appeared. A soon-to-be bride may have looked across the room in great thanks. A future husband, good man that he is, may have gained even more incentive to put his arm around his loving wife. Yes.