I turned on the computer this morning.

I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen the Washington Post have nothing on their home page but the headline, along with the top half of a picture to scroll down on to see in full: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade.

I gasped.

I’d actually thought that somehow with all the public feedback and blowback, all the explaining of the real world implications, from ectopics to you name it, they would hear us. That they would see the humanity behind the outcry, if not the doctrine of stare decisis. One thing that draft leak did was to clarify for the public just exactly how that would play out in actual lives and why it mattered.

Who voted them to be theocrats over us? What about state institution of one particular religious point of view? Wasn’t the whole point of the founding of America a trying to get away from that?

For the record, the official Mormon Church position on abortion is essentially that it’s between the woman, her doctor, and her God. That ideally it should never be done for convenience, but medical matters are simply medical matters and nobody else’s choice to make in any case.

I was as pro-life as anyone when I was young, but the older I’ve gotten and the more I’ve seen of how things play out across lives of people I know and of people I only tangentially know, the more adamant I’ve become that no one has the moral authority to decide whether a woman should take on the life-changing tasks, the risks, the bodily changes, often permanent, the discomfort, the pain, the putting her life on the line, not to mention the rest of her life, for a pregnancy–except the person going through it. And her doctor.

I badly needed a distraction. I drove to Andy’s Orchard and got my apricots and peaches and threw in some sweet cherries too in anticipation of seeing Richard’s face light up. Heading out of the parking, I spotted Andy himself walking over thataway, stopped the car, rolled down my window and yelled, Hi, Andy!

He smiled and called out, Hi! with a wave back. Made my day.

I got home in time for the plumber and his son (and offered them some, but they had both a peach and an apricot tree at home, the son said, quite happy at being offered, though.)

Turns out: they couldn’t turn the main to the house off so as to work on the valve. Turns out: that wasn’t the only thing broken, the city’s was, too. Which, if they touched and anything went wrong, they warned me, the city would charge me for it and it would be prohibitively expensive, making it sound like, And you don’t even want to know.

They offered me a choice. I could make an appointment with the city, which would likely take about a week, and they could come back then–because they had to be there when the city turned it off and when they turned it on again–or.

It was a Friday afternoon at 3:25, I figured there was no chance.

But there is a substantial amount of water in that strong drip below the toilet and it adds up fast (the bathroom was flooded when we woke up even though we had something underneath to catch it) and wasted water in this drought apparently got the city’s immediate attention.

And so we did it. With my permission, the plumbers killed a $225 hour waiting on the city guys, who graciously stayed long enough for them to do what they needed to do so the city could turn it off and then on again in one trip.

The city main valve is replaced. Our main valve is replaced. That toilet’s valve is replaced. The toilet is fixed. The other toilet that usually is fine but sometimes gushes randomly so we’ve simply been turning that valve off when it’s not in use? The one that the valve has started throb-pounding hard when you do that? Yeah, it’s got a washer loose inside and it’s going bad. So that valve’s replaced. They didn’t have the part on hand for that second toilet, so just keep turning the valve off for now and we’ll deal with it some future time.

They did it. $700 later we have reliable, nonleaking bathrooms again.

Fifteen minutes after they left, the doorbell rang, and it was my friend Anne now of Oregon. We had such a rare, grand time catching up. I’ve missed her so much since she moved away.

Anyas, peaches, getting stuff fixed, friends.

Antidote after antidote. Small on the scale of things but huge re the day.

The cherry on top? Commenting on the reef afghan I was working on, turns out the plumbers’ wife/mother is a knitter.

(Picture of Tamien, the male peregrine fledgling, after being rescued and returned to the roof at SJ city hall to try again on the flying thing yesterday.)

It was after hours. The plumber didn’t answer. The toilet broke, and when I went to turn the water off below it, it maintained a steady drip on the floor regardless of anything I could do and how long has that been going on?

Which is when we nixed the Amazon toilet part order and went for the phone.

All I could think of was an inner whine of, But tomorrow’s when I was going to go to Andy’s to buy Anya apricots and peaches!

So we’ll see. You think I could dangle ripe peaches as an incentive for the guy to come in the afternoon?

I finished clearing some old Piuma cashmere out of my stash today that was very very bright. Blocking helped lengthen it a bit as the water eased the lacework flat but that’s all there was. Fern lace. That bit of STABLE is over: I have now outlived a small portion of my stash.

While munching a couple of dried slab Blenheim apricots from Andy’s and considering how they should be even sweeter this year because we haven’t had fires clouding out the sunlight. No smoke particles.

An hour later someone posted this article.

That’s my route home from Cottage Yarns. Man. Glad I didn’t go today. Mandatory evacuations is not when you want to get in anybody’s way. But that shaded area on the map… I fired off a note to a friend whose daughter and family had finally managed to buy an old house and had done some of the remodeling themselves to really make it nice for their two little ones to grow up in.

They’re okay. Yay for firefighters who are willing to work at a fire when it’s 102F out. We cannot pay them enough.

Near a substation, looks like? Waiting for PG&E to be found at fault in 1, 2, 3…

A clerk at Trader Joe’s I hadn’t seen before. Mid-60’s, I’d guess, older than most of the ones there. Old enough to have seen a bit of life, and his “So how’s your day been” sounded more sincere than I would have expected as he held my eyes a moment. He struck me as a genuinely nice guy.

I kind of brushed it off at first and asked about his, but the wall crumbled quickly. I found myself saying I’d been at my uncle’s funeral today. (By Zoom, because we’d been exposed to covid so I wasn’t going to pass any chance of that to the flying public nor my mom.) He looked wistful. I quickly added, He was 101. He died in his daughter’s arms as she told him she loved him.

He smiled warmly. “It doesn’t get better than that.”

“At home,” I added, nodding. I told him that my uncle had been doing a research project and had finally said, Well. Someone else is going to have to get that Nobel.

At that, the clerk loved this man he’d never met and we parted warmly.

(For the record, Robert Fletcher believed that Einstein was wrong, that the speed of light was variable, and he pursued his theory and published on the subject.)

So here’s a story from the funeral:

My aunt and uncle had eight kids. Someone decided to make them hand felted placemats and apparently they warned that the colors would run if you washed them, so everybody was afraid to use them. They were beautiful, they’d clearly been a lot of work, and especially with kids they were sure they’d be ruined the first time.

So they saved them for Christmas and brought them out for the big day, with warnings to all the children on down to the youngest not to spill ANYthing on those.

Aunt Rosemary went out to the kitchen to bring in the dessert.

One of the kids–I noted they didn’t say who–whispered that they’d spilled on their placemat!

Uncle Bob’s reaction: Quick! Switch it with your mother’s!

Aunt Rosemary came back to the table demanding to know what was so funny, because they were all just totally losing it. And then she was laughing just as hard as the rest of them.

Another story:

Again dinnertime, and Aunt Rosemary found that someone had left the tap running in the kitchen and said in exasperated snark, You’re going to empty the ocean if you keep that up!

Hey! Science! Her physicist husband immediately tasked the kids with finding out: how much water comes out in X minutes?

What is the average depth of the oceans of the world? (I can just picture the Encyclopedia Britannicas being pulled off the shelf.) Etc. Okay, then, how many gallons of water would there be in all the oceans of the world?

They had to concede in the end that it could only be a rough rough estimate but they proudly presented their mother with their conclusion: to drain the oceans through that tap? It would take a  L  O  N  G    T  I  M  E.

The missionaries checked in to ask if it was still okay that they were coming for dinner tonight.

I’d totally forgotten I’d signed up a month ago.

We do that, though, we feed these kids along with everybody else and in gratitude towards those who helped feed my own boys when they were out there.

As I remember the woman who asked me my son’s favorite cookie recipe, baked a batch of those cranberry bars, and then since he was no longer in her area she and her husband got in their private plane and flew it to him still warm from the oven!

I can never match that story, but at least I can put on a dinner. I had cream, and chocolate tortes went in the oven just as fast as I could get them in there.

But the point wasn’t the meal. It’s that somehow that act of sitting down together in one’s home to break bread allows a coming-together and a tell-me-your-story that went round the table and welcomed in the love. Man, it felt good.

It had been three long years since we’d had dinner guests. Maybe it wasn’t the wisest idea quite yet? But maybe it was just exactly what kids who missed their families on Father’s Day needed the most, and it was a privilege to get to fill in the best we could.

We sent them home with half a torte and raspberry muffins.

The summer I was ten, we drove around the country, coast to coast, Mexico for an afternoon and Canada for, inadvertently, two weeks while we waited for a part to be shipped in to repair our family’s camping trailer while we were stuck at Moose Mountain Provincial Park.

We played volleyball over the little camping-friendly net we’d packed until someone mis-bopped the ball into the campfire. It did a slow zzzzzzzleflop.

There was a radio station that was holding a contest and first place prize was a week’s vacation in Regina, Saskatchewan. Second place prize? Was two weeks’ vacation in Regina.

Not quite sure how Regina felt about that.

But anyway.

At some point in–I want to guess Colorado?–we stopped by a cousin of my dad’s.

She was older. She lived in a stone house. It was perfect. I had never seen anything like it and I completely fell in love and promised myself that someday I, too, would live in a stone house. I’d still like to, to the point of having priced out adding such a facade to the front of ours and noping out.

My cousin Heidi sent this link. And yay verily it is indeed a stone house. And then some. I mean, I mean, just…wow.

Having to call on a Saturday you know is never going to be good. I asked Richard if we should just wait till Monday, because it wasn’t actually cold yet, but he insisted on getting it done because I like me a comfy warm shower. I love that man.

I went looking. The contractor whom we’d spent $2000 on a weekend hot water heater replacement call, a company that only did water heaters but also the ones who were available when no plumbers we knew were, had emailed me the receipt. Hunting at the speed of Gmail is definitely the way to go–there it was. March last year. Date, amount, phone number, name of the company, everything. Yes it’s past a year, but one can hope.

It turns out the warranty was for six years on parts, which no plumber has ever offered us before, and given how we’ve gone through water heaters, that extra amount paid for itself today.

It turns out the reason the shower was barely lukewarm the last two days was not that the thing was failing–it already had. It was that it’s been so hot the last two days that that’s how our water got warmed enough to still be tolerable in the morning. Barely, but it was. The water heater is in kind of its own little cubby and the only access to it is from outside; protected, temp wise, but not much. So, yeah, the guy said the gas had been cut off altogether and that it was an expensive part. But it was covered.

$179 worth of labor later, not only is it fixed, he said this was a new model that turned out to be having lots of problems with that part so not only did he replace it, he replaced it with an older type that was more reliable.

I think that was the cheapest fix-it call we’ve ever had.

He emailed me the receipt.

I did a quick grocery run and walking into Trader Joe’s, some random tall guy with a square face and fading blond hair just ahead of me took one look and his face instantly lit up into the biggest smile.

I…like most women, don’t go around encouraging strange men to maybe follow me around, so I gave a polite nod back and went about my business. That’s just how it is, and that was fine.

Our paths crossed again coming out and he hesitated just a moment with that radiant smile again, like he’d found a friend and it made him so happy and he wanted somehow to share that, and this time I slowed down to give him a good smile back (with my eyes and inside the mask) to let him know I was definitely acknowledging him and appreciating the greeting and the moment.

Because it had finally hit me: what he’d seen. It wasn’t me.

It was the vyshyvanka. The Ukrainian embroidered blouse with the traditional little tassel tied at the front and more embroidery down the sleeves. He knew what that was and he knew it conveyed solidarity, whatever my own background might be.

I wonder how many people back home he told about it.

It came!

No bought article of clothing has ever brought me to tears before, nor was I expecting it to.

I hadn’t been at all sure it would arrive at all; I’d thought of it more as a donation on a personal level to someone in an area of the world where–well, there was one guy there who told a reporter he’d found a phone number in the glove box and called it and confessed, I’m so sorry. I’ve stolen your car. I watched it for two hours and the key was in and my family was under fire and we had to get out and I’ve taken them to relatives in the east.

Basically, along with the profound apology it was, How do I get your car back to you now? Is it even possible? Are you okay?

The man who answered the call exclaimed, Thank G_d!  He owned four cars, he told him, he’d evacuated his own family in one and he’d filled and parked the other three in areas where it seemed people were most going to need that help to get out. He couldn’t know who they were going to be but he knew he could do something about it.

Every single car had now saved people, and in every single one, they’d found the number and had called him to let him know where his car was and to apologize.

And every one heard that same grateful response.

Good people looking out for each other.

Quite a few people in Ukraine are artists doing beautiful work.

Zelensky had pleaded with people to keep paying their taxes if at all possible so that the infrastructure, the utilities, things could be kept running for the people and be repaired after shelling.

Which is a very good reason to help a small business from abroad.

No photo can convey how beautiful this soft shirt is with its radiant viscose cross-stitched embroidery and how beautiful it instantly made me feel when I put it on. (I turned one sleeve slightly sideways so you could see the pattern better.) It deserves a far better photographer than I. Whoever Marina is out there, thank you so much, and I pray every day for you and for your country.

I knew she’d wanted to. I’m thrilled she was able to: it came!

(A side note: the address that is the name of this blog at gmail is still working. Work’s been intense for the resident geek and my main one is still on the fritz.)

Random and then suddenly it wasn’t anymore:

A friend made a comment out of the blue yesterday, and it took me straight back to when the folks were visiting when the kids were young and Dad hoped out loud that he could get to see his old Army buddy while they were in California; when he told me the town I said that was near the Monterey Bay Aquarium, about 100 minutes away, so we could make a day trip of it all. So we did.

That moment when the two of them laid eyes on each other for the first time in 30 years. Good memories. I had been wishing for several years that I could remember the guy’s name so I could let him know his old friend had passed, if he was still around himself.

So then my inbox clogs when it has no right to and I was vacuuming up old emails and tossing them to make space (and then it jammed like an antique typewriter anyway and won’t even let me do that and I’m sorry and the resident geek will work on it tomorrow) and one of those old emails…had Dad mentioning Walt.

I had his name.

I kept that email.

I went looking for an obituary. There wasn’t one. He’s still alive. Hit by a car at 95 at the start of the year and had a long recovery ahead of him at the time.

Someone had interviewed him in spring 2020 for an oral history project, by Zoom because of Covid, and it seems almost quaint now that they were hoping that by the fall this pandemic thing would be over with.

I knew Walt had done a lot of children’s theater in Carmel and some children’s cartoons back in the day.

Turns out the early Charlie Brown TV specials? The kids’ voices? Those were his kids. Till they got too old for it while new specials were being made. Turns out his were not made in Hollywood–they were made in Burlingame, ie between my favorite yarn store I went to yesterday and here. That was a surprise.

Turns out not only was he in the Army with Dad and I was nodding my head at some of the places he got assigned to–yup, yup, Dad, too. Having never made it into any actual war zone for having been too young when it all started, he re-enlisted for Korea out of a sense of duty and ended up sent to a desk in the Pentagon. Writing he was good at. Soldiering, no way to know.

And I quote:

My friend whose husband just got his PhD and they’ve been getting ready to move away…after being so careful for so long, they and their boys came down with covid last week. Thankfully they had all been vaccinated so it wasn’t as serious as it could have been–but.

I offered to bring dinner.

They are well loved; I had to wait my turn.

Y’know, I love a good split pea soup. Celery, onions, green onions, red pepper, chicken broth, halved grapes, an intensely flavored Californian EV olive oil and ham. (Theirs is THE best olive oil out there. It is like the difference between a rock-hard tasteless grocery store peach and an Andy’s Orchard peach.)

It was the first time I’d tried cooking the split peas first in an Instant Pot. There’s no rhyme nor reason to the recipes out there; one said 15 minutes’ pressure, another, 30. Hmm. Risk grit or liquid? Thirty it is. (Two boxes of broth to a 14 oz bag of the peas.) Verdict: definitely the only way to go next time.

The vegetables sautéed while that was going on and then everything into the dutch oven on the stove for an hour or so because I just couldn’t get the IP to maintain the temp I wanted for simmering.

I hauled out the hazelnut chocolate torte recipe. I have two 24-mini-cupcake pans, mostly because I’d forgotten I’d already bought one. Good thing! That recipe was the perfect amount for filling both, and it is way easier to freeze some for future breakfasts in that form.

Aubrie had reminded me that Eric was allergic to dairy, and of course we know that one well. I melted cocoa butter for the butter. Turns out it’s a very stable fat with a shelf life of 3-5 years–I checked, because mine was about a year old. Not a problem. Worked great.

Two paper plates full of those, a bar of freshly made chocolate, a box of Andy’s slab dried Blenheim apricots that they love, some cherries from the Stella–hey! Getouttamytree! I chased away the two squirrels and picked some before they could.

And some fresh juice. Because when you’re sick you have to have juice. It’s the rule.

I decided to watch a few minutes of the Depp/Heard trial yesterday and the closing arguments today by Camille Vasquez. I was agnostic on who was at fault, going in, and I wasn’t about to spend days mesmerized by the court proceedings but I do have a relative who went through a hellacious divorce from someone with Borderline Personality Disorder, as Heard has been diagnosed with, and I guess I wanted to be able to understand better what he’d been put through.

As his lawyer put it to the judge, Visualize the genders reversed: we wouldn’t be here, because he’d be in jail.

I wondered if Vasquez would eventually say something like that. She left it at “…reversed?” and let the jury fill the rest in in their minds. She didn’t have to say more, it was all right there.

I was blown away at how good a lawyer she was: she anticipated what Heard was going to say, she remembered exactly when Heard had completely contradicted that under oath, she had the photos and the recordings in the evidence right there at her fingertips point by point. She remembered who had testified when and what they had said. She did not allow Heard to talk over her.

At the last she said to the jury that the question before them was, were they going to believe Ms. Heard and her sister?

Or…

The names went on and on and on and on of people who had testified in the case supporting Johnny Depp’s version. She noted their professions: doctor. Nurse. Both his and hers. Police officer. Friends, fellow actors, the TMZ reporter Heard had strung along. People who had been there when Heard had said things had happened and they said no they didn’t–or that Heard had done it to Depp, not the other way around.

She explained Borderline Personality Disorder and how the defining characteristic is an intense fear of abandonment. Every time Depp removed himself from the room because of her behavior, she became much worse while demanding he stay right there with her. Taunting him that nobody would believe him that she’d hit him because he was a man. Vasquez played the recording again.

“I Hate You Don’t Leave Me” is a book that explains how such mentally ill people think. I read it years ago when that other case closer to home was going on. It’s not my story to tell, but I will say Heard played that part well both in court and in those recordings from when she and Depp were in private.

I’m so glad he got out, too.

I don’t usually lift other people’s pictures but I wanted to show you this one before it’s sold to show you what I’m talking about.

In the middle of the war, the Washington Post interviewed people and had an article, bless them, on the traditional embroidery and clothing of Ukraine and the women who create it. Vyshyvanka is the word but they said it carries memories of the Soviets’ efforts to erase the village-by-village patterns in order to basically de-Ukraine the country.

So President Zelenskyy simply called the traditional day of celebrating that part of their heritage National Embroidered Shirt day. Simple, to the point, and good marketing for his people.

One mention jumped out at me:

Woke up running a slight fever but got up and stayed up and didn’t mention it because it was just a slow-start morning, right? Plus I didn’t want to interrupt his meeting. So he didn’t know.

Finally, no, enough already, and at about 2:00 I went to go lie down, telling Richard, Wake me up in half an hour. Um, maybe forty.

So he tried, but nothing doing. I was not getting up yet.

At the hour, he came in and, knowing I don’t like insomnia at night after too long a daytime rest–

Okay, here’s where I explain about being toddlers and preschoolers in church together sixty years ago. Little kids need movement and song and dance is their thing.

So here’s my 6’8″ husband holding his arms over his head for a sun or a tree, take your pick, singing, Innn the leafy treeTOPS* the birds say good morning. They’re first to see the sun! They must tell everyone! Innn the leafy treeTOPS, the birds sing good morning! as he leaned to the right and stood on that foot, then clapped the other against it then leaned to the left and clapped the right foot against it in rhythm the best he could, swaying back and forth with his sun held proudly high.

You goof!

I hadn’t thought of that song and especially those movements in just forever. I was laughing as I put my hearing aids in.

And then he had to sing it again so I could hear it this time.

*(That’s the highest note so you have to sing it the loudest. It’s the rule.)