Alison is too out of it to post tonight. As one of the children said, “Another part bit the dust” I just left her side and she is pretty beat up. Believe it or not but she is frowning while she drifting in and out of it. The anesthesia knocked out her already bad hearing, but that seems to be improving slowly. They are trying to get her pain under control. She does not remember much of the day. They were happy with how it went. Maybe in a few days she will be, but not right now. Don’t expect much for a few days as she needs to recover. I will show her comments tomorrow if she is up to it.

(Scarf adapted from the Wanda’s Flowers shawl. Chloe Sparkle, this is the leftover dyed-by-me baby alpaca from your shawl.)

Pride. I could have been knitting. But the pride got me.

I am not the handbag-for-every-outfit type. Buy one good practical plain leather purse, preferably one that won’t snag lacewear every which way, and wear it out.

Which I did. I mean, it’s really worn out and I should have replaced it about a year ago. It’s big, it’s comfy, anything you want you’ve got it right there with you and you could stuff almost a whole afghan project in the darn thing–t’ain’t dainty.

I do have a nice, small purse, and when I say small, it’s iffy whether the cellphone can squeeze in.   Maybe not so practical.

So guess which one went downtown with me this afternoon?

We haven’t gotten a utility bill since May.  I’ve called and been told, Oh, you’re all paid up.  But wait, tell me, how does that work exactly?…

So given what tomorrow is and wanting things squared away and done, I simply went down to City Hall to see the printout of the bill that never came and to get it taken care of once and for all.

There was no bill. Our solar installation coincided with their changing how they processed households with solar systems, and I ended up in an upstairs office while they tried to figure out how to get their computer to generate one. Ever.  Four people were trying to figure out for about an hour how to let me give them my money; it was pretty amusing.

Finally, they cried uncle.  Good thing I came near the end of the workday, I guess.  I gave them an estimated amount that was pure guesswork against the coming amount (electric, water, sewer, refuse, gas–the city owns them all, and we only opted out of the first) and they gave me a much-desired receipt.

I’d had a feeling to take my knitting; but…  I was simply going to walk up to the counter and hand them a payment and that was going to be that.  It didn’t occur to me to put my knitting bag in the car just in case, I mean, why would I?

I could have brought my jaded, faded, coming unsewn old purse and that scarf project would have been finished.

Although, then I would have been sitting there wishing ruefully I had thought to bring more knitting.

Okay, now, back to work.

It’s Sunday, the Sabbath for us, and I want to put aside yesterday’s mess and let the quiet of the day in.

And it’s Fast Sunday. The first Sunday of the month, we adult Mormons and children of varying ages as they feel comfortable doing so put aside food for 24 hours.  We donate the money (and then some, hopefully) that we would have spent on our own tables towards feeding those in need: thinking of others, perhaps feeling what some have to go through who have so little, putting ourselves aside for the moment.  Trying to focus on serving God and all mankind.

Or else simply going growly and hungry and complying out of peer pressure. Or not even.  It’s up to each to decide what they’ll do and how they’ll approach it.

It is, in its best, a discipline that shows that our spirits are masters of our bodies and not the other way around, and, as well, a time when our prayers feel intensified as we dedicate our fast towards some particular person or persons in whatever kind of need.

I used to be more fully a part of this.  But my health is what it is, and I’ve been counseled to skip the fast and not feel guilty about it.  Certainly the full 24 hours’ worth, at least.

Wistful, then, is more the word.

My niece Rachel contracted a virus and has been ill for several weeks while trying to manage a busy householdful of small children.  I am sending up an especially heartfelt prayer for her today.

I have in-person friends and blog readers that I know of who need that caring and thoughtfulness, too, and I’m trying not to miss anyone.

And, as I sit here typing this, I suddenly realize I need to say a prayer for the in-the-wrong-place collection agency guy: he so needed the changing that only comes through love, even though he’ll never know I did such a thing, and I need it to help me see him as a hurt person and let it go.

If you remember this, I told very little of the story at the time. It involved the hospital bill, the ER physician’s bill, the offer of a discount on the hospital only if I paid it in full that month–which was what I’d called to do anyway–and I paid immediately in full on both amounts, separately. (Because while they had me on hold forever trying to decide whether they could take my money for both in the same department, the neighbor’s baby got locked in her car. I got back to them later.)

Stanford then took the discount figure, which was about five times the physician bill, wrote it up as being the physician bill, and sent it not to me but to a collection agency. I had asked for a receipt; instead I got a call out of the blue from a man who was very abusive from the get-go, demanding I not call Stanford, demanding I immediately give him my credit card and bank information, trying hard to intimidate me into immediately giving him a large sum of money that had no basis in reality.

My reasonable reaction was to think, who on earth are you, how did you get my phone number, and why on earth do you think I would be so stupid as to do that? Identity theft, pure and simple. I simply said to him I had no business with him whatsoever and hung up.  He immediately called back and launched into a tirade.

Of course I immediately called Stanford: after I’d printed out the documents proving I owed them not a thing.

Stanford admitted they’d turned it over to collections, admitted the whole thing was utterly botched, apologized, and assured me my balance was indeed zero.  Getting them to that point, however, took several phone calls and way too many hours.  The woman I got on the last go-round had the presence of mind to go and check hours later, just to make absolute sure, she said, that it stayed fixed–and it hadn’t. She fixed it again, and called me again to let me know.

Soooo…  I got a bill today.  I do expect one for the recent surgeon pre-op appointment; I didn’t get that.  We’re back at January/February.  They straightened out the discount/physician bill mixup–wasn’t that nice of them?  And charged me, yet again, for the hospital bill co-payment. We maxed out our out-of-pocket of ~$9000 for the year on that co-payment. In April. When they first sent me that bill.

And I have next week coming up…

If nothing else, this whole scenario is an example of the need to keep newspapers alive. Action Line time. I called in the big guns.

Ah, my, trying to figure out a way to write about this one in a way my mother won’t object to…

Okay, first: in answer to the question about whether I named the toy white cell Sam sent me? Leuk, of course, short for leukocyte.  Leuk! Leuk! Use the Farce!

Ahem. Next: I have a few skirts made from a microfiber polyester suede-look fabric. I love natural fibers, but these have earned their keep. They’re pretty imperturbable, indestructible, and in my experience, given that they don’t absorb stuff, they are definitely un-stainable. (They also seem much more a California fabric to me than something I’d wear back home in 100% humidity and heat in the summer.)

On to our story.

Ways to be of service do not always come in pretty packages, and when they don’t, the chance of the moment is completely in how you unwrap them.

I had a pre-op appointment at the hospital early this afternoon. They were very thorough. They wanted to know absolutely everything.

And I drove that poor nurse nuts.  She was clearly not having a good day before she ever laid eyes on me, and in comes this fuzzy-memoried woman who can’t remember what year she had which complication of lupus or Crohn’s. How long have you had…  How long has this…  Sixteen years or eighteen?  One month of really being an issue, or…?  (How do I know how much is an issue to you when it’s not to me and it hasn’t been to my doctors?)   Blood pressure 86/45 ON the med to raise it?! Do you feel dizzy?  You *don’t*?

Nah, this is normal to me.

She got on the phone to my cardiologist’s office asking for further details to be faxed in, and in came another nurse with an EKG machine. The first one asked me a few questions, rolled her eyes at me, and let the EKG begin.

At the end, (it was normal), the EKG nurse drew the curtain for me to get dressed again and left, and the irritable nurse suddenly heard a sharp exclamation of OHMYGOODNESS! And then, since there was a sink and soap on my side of the curtain, a, “How do you turn on the water!?”

“Foot pedals.” And then she called to me, in rising concern, “Is everything all right?”

Oh my goodness. In the grand scheme of things, well, yeah. In the moment, no.  Going to tuck in my shirt, I had somehow hit the little loop at the top of the two-piece ileostomy bag and–it had never even occurred to me that such a thing could happen–the thing had burst apart across the inside of my lower clothes. I shut it back up and washed my hands, but my stars. It was bad.

I thought back to one doctor who’d told me confidently, “And now that you’ve gotten comfortable with the bag…” where I almost interrupted him to ask sweetly and innocently, Oh–did I say that?

Here’s one saving grace: hot cocoa for breakfast does not stink in such circumstances. (An aside to Dad: I am SO justified! Neener neener. Heh.)

I apologized to the nurse for stinking anyway, feeling that it’s always good to care about one’s impact on others.  She assured me she smelled not a thing.

Thinking back, I was a tad rueful, surely, but I did not get upset. Sometimes things just happen.

And from that point on, she thawed.  She knew and I knew there was nothing I could do till I got home and showered, and I think whatever was wrong with her day, she was probably thinking it wasn’t as bad as walking down the hallway hoping that… my problem didn’t get…worse… (Where’s that guy with that mopping machine?) I wasn’t entirely sure that thing was entirely secure now.

But you know, when that nurse comes back to where she can laugh again in her life, whether that’s tomorrow after a good night’s sleep or whether it’ll take a little longer than that, she’ll be swapping this story with other nurses for a very long time to come. The ileostomy patient who flipped herself off.  Ohmygoodness.

That blessedly indestructible skirt kept my not-tucked-in silk blouse completely clean all the way home.  Nobody walking down the busy main hallway at Stanford Hospital could tell anything was wrong as I went back to my car.

And there was a jumper, for wearing post-op, made out of that same fabric, waiting in a box for me outside my door when I got home.

The staph infection came roaring back on cue.

The antibiotics have begun.

The show shall go on. No delay.

The pharmacist said how to take the stuff four times a day while out cold was the surgeon’s problem.

But–no sitting up for two weeks post-op!?  How am I supposed to do thank-you knitting afterwards?  Plan ahead, I guess, and work hard.

The ruby yarn got swatched today–I was determined to play with it at least some to get it out of my system for now, and now I know better what I’ll be doing with it, what changes to make to adjust to gauge.   To be knitted up the rest of the way in its own good time.

A small thud.  A bird hit the window behind me but kept right on flying as I turned to see, veering away from the glass and out of danger, not feeling so great for the moment but thankfully okay.

(Photo taken the second time it came to drink.)

I sent a note off to a friend, and I’m adding in a few phrases here to give more context:

I just went outside and one little finch on the patio did not fly away from me. I got up quite close to it; something seemed wrong, and looking at its eye, it clearly was blind on one side. The eye near me was swollen and dead.

I stayed there, kneeling next to it, wishing it well, and finally softly said something to see if it could hear me, since it hadn’t responded to the sliding door opening. It swiveled its head around, looked at me with its good eye a moment, and then flitted off to the safety of the tree.

Which answered my question as to whether it could see where it was going. I’m glad it at least has that. It was a little breathtaking having it so close for so long, but I went afterward and told Richard what I’d seen, needing the comfort in the face of the little thing’s suffering.

And Diana, on the receiving end of that email, with the wisdom of having been both participant and observer in such things, reminded me that it is harder to witness suffering than to live it.  When it is ours, we deal with it and adjust, enjoying what we can do and getting through what we can’t.

The little finch flew back to me awhile after our exchange.  I had set out a shallow pan of water; it perched on the edge and drank.  Somehow, that completely lifted my day. I had been able to provide what it needed and, in this dry climate, could not easily find on its own. And it let me know I had indeed made a difference to it.

Re the palm trees in yesterday’s post: Richard’s reaction was, Oh, they trim those all the time.  Then we drove past them this morning, and he went, Wow. They really did!

Re the acorns in Tuesday’s post: I’ll admit it now, one of my reactions was, oh my goodness, look at all those, that’s almost as big as *my* stash!

Re the surgeon: kudos to him for his reaction to my saying, in response to his asking if there were anything I was putting off doing before the surgery, that I’d wanted to go to a knitting conference in Portland.  (Saying “Sock Summit” to a man I’d just met, much less one about to cut into me, was just pushing too far–I wanted this guy on my side without starting out by weirding him out.)

He got this wistful-looking smile on his face, eyes off in the distance, mouth absent-mindedly halfway open, and then repeated the words,  approvingly but a little wide-eyed, “A knitting conference.”

Yes, I told him, with Richard nodding his head, and explained that I’d written a knitting book (still on sale at Knitpicks) that was selling very well.  He loved it; he told me his daughter was a knitter and that he was going to have to go buy a copy.

Okay, I already liked the guy on the spot and now I’m totally a fan. And in case his daughter doesn’t know about it (note that I have no idea how old she is) I am so going to pass along the word about Stitches West next February right in our own backyard for her.  Heh.

Yeah, (checking the Ravelry membership stats, 398, 424 registered users as of this writing) there are a few of us other knitters out there to help keep her company there.

One blocked Monterey scarf, here you go. The patterns didn’t line up together with the yoke-to-body increase row missing, so it took some playing with. I’ll post later how I did it.

Today, I had to drop some files off for the surgeon and found myself coming back via the main road into Stanford for the first time in months.

So.  Here‘s a link to an older picture to give you an idea of what the area has always looked like, give or take a few trimmed-off dead fronds; the view is an announcement that You Have Arrived  at Stanford University.

I didn’t have my camera this afternoon, and even if I had there was no place to pull over to use it.   But my stars!  The trees!

I thought, okay, I can see doing that. Maybe.  Under duress.  We used to have a date palm and one of our kids fell into it and had to go to the plastic surgeon’s–the fronds are as sharp as sewing-machine needles and the trunks are nothing you’d much want to touch either if you didn’t have to. Drunk students? Did someone sue the University?  Why did they do this?

Poodle cuts.  They gave the palm trees poodle cuts.  Shaved them smooth as can be all the way up and liposuctioned the trunks into rigid verticality, then turned the crowns into slicked poofs above, leaving the fronds at the top announcing, tadaaah! with their arms thrown out wide. Dig the new haircuts!

Poodle palms.  Huh.  There’s got to be a good reason, but I don’t know it yet.

I never knew which book to turn into *the* book so it never actually got put in one. Yet.  Once I do, that copy probably has to go up on the shelf for admiration purposes only.  The thing waits.

What a difference an s makes.

I know, I know, I butcher the quotation marks thing on my blog all the time.  That’s not entirely pure laziness; I usually only use them when I’m very sure I’m quoting someone verbatim, and given my writer’s ear, I do tend to remember emotionally powerful conversations very well.

But.  I had a job as a copy editor years ago, checking for grammar and spelling and usage back when Spell Checker was not yet written and continuing for awhile after it was; common sense tells you it’s more than just the spelling that gets hashed.  My mother used to giggle a bit at the mental images conjured by every time the Washington Post would talk about a “grizzly accident.” Not a whole lot of big brown bears in downtown DC streets or the freeways nearby.

So it was a combination of obnoxiousness and hopeful helpfulness on my part:  the first time I noted a typo in a Harry Potter book I thought, well, it’s a shame they didn’t catch that when everything else is so well done. Okay.  But when I noted a plot change from one book to a later one due to an errant s, that was just too much, and I noted a second typo as well and wrote it down along with the plot error. Scholastic got a note from me.

Never trust something where you can’t see where it keeps its brain!  In one book, one of the Weasley parents is warning Ginny* that. In a later book, the line is a flashback and a memory–and Mr. Weasley has become Mrs. Weasley.

Or the other way around. The response letter from Scholastic is dated nine years ago, so forgive me for not being sure now.

Either way, their thank you note included a signed bookplate and picture from JK Rowling. I was surprised and delighted when it came; as an author myself now, that bookplate especially means all the more to me now.

I think I’ve answered my own question. I need to go re-read the whole series, find out which book the s error snuck in, and put the plate in that one. No fair skimming ahead to find out.

*Thank you, Diana, got that corrected.  Ginny not Gina (smacking forehead–of course!)  Okay, now, that’s funny!

I checked my stash when I went to take this picture after getting home–I was surprised at how few I had left.  Time to replenish.

The story: sometimes it’s more about the parents.

There’s a Costco a mile from our house and there were things needing picking up; we don’t shop on Sundays, and waiting till Monday was going to be a pain.  And…  Things were such that if I didn’t go right then, nobody was going and it was twelve minutes to closing time.

I’ve been trying to avoid exposure to germs especially right now.  We don’t need any delays re the surgery.  And yet.  I ignored the crazy bod and asserted, hey, I’m on it, and somehow nobody objected.

I knew I had to be in and out of there pretty quickly and grabbed the few things on the list fast before the ohmygoshthestoreisclosing crowd got too big at checkout.  I had one moment standing in line where I felt like take a deep breath, c’mon, you can make it.

I needed a distraction from the Crohn’s noise, and it turned out, I got it.  There was a toddler in a shopping cart near the door who had been out and about just a bit longer than she could handle. She wasn’t in meltdown mode, but she was quivering on the edge.

And so, it looked like, was her mom, who was gamely trying to keep her daughter happy.  The mom’s dress proclaimed her as non-mainstream.  Whether she was new to this country or not, I don’t know, although so many people are in this area–but one thing I do know is, it’s wonderful but it is also hard to be the mother of a small child.

Little ones mimic not only our words as they learn to talk, but also our moods. They are absolutely unerring in picking up on how we feel. It is so easy to scoop them up and cheer them up and make their entire world wonderful; it is so easy to be cheered up by them; but the burden of parenthood is that when we’re stressed, it doesn’t take long before they are too. And they can be fairly loud about making it known that they want everything fixed NOW.

Which too many in the world at large tend not to approve of, which doesn’t make matters easier.

And yet.  They encourage us to live up to the best in ourselves to make them laugh again too by the very fact that they come around so easily.  How many middle-aged parents, remembering what it was like when their children were little, will make smiley faces and play peek-a-boo with a little one in a cart?  We remember. And we borrow back from Time the delight of pleasing toddlers: all little children are our children too now.

That mom looked like she was trying, but please (glancing in the direction of her distracted husband) get her out of this place and let her go home.

Costco requires its members to let their receipt be looked over on their way out the door.  There was another lineup–again, not too bad.  I pulled my cart over and waved the guy behind me forward as I fished in my purse.

There was just one in there: a bright green handknitted hummingbird from the women’s cooperative in Peru, with a red throat and a flower at the end of its beak.  Cool. I took a few steps over and handed it to the mom:  “It’s for helping cheer her up.”

She looked at me and at it, stunned. She said nothing; I don’t know if we had English in common.  “It’s a finger puppet.  Merry Christmas,” not wanting to invoke religion at all but rather the idea of a gift freely given and not expected back.

I returned to my cart and was almost immediately up to the door guy, and just as I turned going out, done, I glanced back–to where she was waiting for me to. She caught my eye, smiled, and waved.

And her little daughter was happy.

I floated all the way home, feeling like, and *that’s* why nobody else could put things down just then to run to the store before it closed!

Re last night’s post, I almost deleted the whole thing; everybody has billing bugs from time to time, and how boring is that?

But that second paragraph demanded to go up, somehow. I don’t know if it’s because I have a dear friend who was a battered wife for too many years (not anymore, thank goodness), but whoever it was for out there wherever you are, it was for you.  But then I felt I had to give enough context to explain where that one was coming from.

An oddball twist came with today’s mail, and for once I am totally on Blue Cross’s side: someone put in a claim (surely someone simply keyed the wrong code) of there having been cardiovascular surgery done on me two weeks ago. On a day I was quietly sitting at home going nowhere in particular.  And the charge for said supposed surgery?

Nineteen dollars.

Blue Cross demanded and got a $19 discount on that one and assured me there was no co-pay.  Um, yeah.  Ya think?

Meantime, the Monterey Sea Silk shawl, as soon as I rinsed it and laid it out and the lace patterns were settled into their proper places, had me going, And THAT’S why I knitted this! It felt like just one of the most gorgeous things I’d ever made, the way a finished project is supposed to feel like, and I wanted to dance on the spot.  It was late, I only rinsed it rather than a serious blocking, but still.

I’m following it up with a scarf out of topaz Camelspin using the same lace stitches  in a straight line rather than a circle, just to hedge my bets on which article of clothing the recipient might prefer. Either way, I’m quite happy with it.

This came today. Michelle and I both about died laughing.

“Dear” (misspelled my name),

“As the medical director for” (community hospital not covered by my insurance, touting its cancer program), “I am pleased to bring you some important news”…

“You may have been reluctant to schedule a colonoscopy procedure because you have the idea that it’s unpleasant”…

“Take a moment and schedule your colonoscopy today.”

Right. I’ll get right on it.

I thought I heard the doorbell this morning when I was just barely up and functioning, and went to check just in case. I opened the door to see my older next-door neighbor standing there.

He took one look at me and did a doubletake, then tried to recover by saying he’d tried to call first and nobody had answered. I explained that my hair was wet so, sorry about that, no ears in yet.  We took care of what he needed–we’d already told him and his wife it was fine if they plugged their fridge and freezer into our system while some work was being done at their house, our meter’s running backwards these days, no skin off our noses, glad to help. His contractor was here and he just needed to plug it in now.

After I closed the door I fled to the bathroom mirror. Yup. It really was that bad. Ah, well, (gotta love Silicon Valley) at least the Google truck didn’t drive past just then to take pictures of the street to post online forever.

I was outside yesterday watering the fruit trees. I suddenly realized that in the quiet of the evening, I was listening to birdsongs, and wondered what species I was hearing.

And thought thank you oh thank you, Sonic Innovations, from this previously-untreatable-110dB loss-at-8Khz user. It had been the $6400 question (literally), and they are so worth every penny.

Mourning doves walk so delicately with their tails brushing the ground like a bridal train and the slightest curve to their beaks in perfect counterpoint to the roundness of their heads; they are graceful birds.  This surprised me. I’ve always known what a mourning dove was; I’d never really spent time observing them before.

I write this as one perches close just outside my window, patiently observing *me,* looking me steadily in the eye every time I glance up.

I’m beginning to be able to tell some finch individuals apart on that feeder. The one that amuses me most is the red male that sticks his whole head in the opening and tosses it madly side to side, sending down pinata showers–licorice, eww, hershey’s kisses, nah, till he finds the one variety seed he likes best.  Sweets to the cheep.

A new-to-this-yard interloper of a squirrel with a particularly bushy tail that had never met a predator in its protected little life is clearly remembering its first: after she got incensed that his insolent teenage reaction to her opening the door was, Yeah? So what, lady? without even bracing itself, she became a screaming “GET OFF THAT!” wild woman running at it flailing her arms.  Followed by his five-foot flying leap to the ground, heart pounding, after not getting any seed anyway.

It’s never tried to jump on the feeder since, and if it sees me coming near will even stay away from the stuff on the ground, looking at me, hesitating, pleading tremblingly at me, Don’t DO that.

(I was afraid it would learn the one way to beat the anti-squirrel system and I wasn’t about to give it a chance to.)

But.  I would rather have it hoovering the concrete below that male finch than stealing my apples. Come to think of it, I’ve only found one chewed apple so far this season–on my fence, the top half gone, so you know what put it there. (Mentally calculating birdseed cost vs. the dollar value of homegrown apples.  Oh.  Well, it’s just apples and orange birds…)

Forget it, chickadee: you can’t peck a hole in the bottom by hanging upside down and going at it from down there. And if you could you’d be in for quite the surprise.

I found a place that sells dwarf mango trees with full descriptions of habit, color, fruit fibrousness or lack thereof, shape, and flavor, shipped in three gallon pots and that could grow here if it doesn’t freeze.  The site says put Christmas lights on it if the temps threaten.  Hey!

Richard’s immediate reaction was to not want to be the neighbor that never seems to take the Christmas lights down all winter.

To be continued.