Michelle was going to be dropping by and I thought about asking her to pick something up at the store on the way; we’re trying not to drive the Prius any more than we have to before it gets worked on, and given the amount of time the car was going to need, they told us the job would have to wait till Tuesday.

And yet.

Somehow I just felt pushed, is the only way to describe it, to go do a quick dash to Trader Joe’s; they’re within a mile, and we’d gotten reassurances on the car, just go.

Which is how I came to be not only outside but driving past the neighbor’s house when their dog got out while nobody was home.

I was surprised. They’re really careful about that.

I pulled into my driveway. Keeping an eye on him, I texted the mom.

When he saw me watching him he trotted from the far gate to the front door as if patiently waiting for it to be opened for him. I wasn’t his people but he knew my face and maybe I would do?

That nonstop limply hanging tongue on a cool day said I’m thirsty; I asked her, Would it be okay if I got him some water?

Turns out she was mid-flight. The person who’d come by to take care of the dog must have goofed. She was so glad I’d seen him.

I looked for what bowl would work well from a dog’s point of view and got out my late mother-in-law’s oversized white Corelle one, you know, the one that won’t even fit in the microwave. Holds lots. Splash all you want.

Just then a large brindled coat trotted quickly past my kitchen window along my side of the fence.

Oh so that’s how you did it!

I went out there and where there’s a sheet of plywood barring his way where that one section had fallen down and still not been repaired yet, he’d dug and gotten it pulled down somehow and had gone past my kitchen and out my open gate. He was just quickly retracing his steps, now that I wasn’t outside watching him nor letting him in his house.

Busted.

I set the water down on their side of the plywood, figuring that even though that’s not where his water bowl goes, a dog of all animals is going to be able to smell that it’s there if he wants it. Then I set the plywood back up. It would come down again if he wanted it to enough, but for now he was back in his own fenced yard, he didn’t have to be panting anymore, he was safe.

I just hope no skunk vies for that water in the night. My neighbor will be tired enough.

Tony and I couldn’t talk politics at all, but we could definitely talk fruit trees with enthusiasm.

I’m pretty sure he would have loved watching one of my apricot seedlings grow up, knowing he was nourishing something both rare and the best to be found. He loved to cook, and he would have done really great things with those in a few years.

But it was not to be. Last night our Italian friend peacefully passed on at a ripe old age as his beloved garden was starting its new season of blossoms and green and fruit and growth for his wife and daughter to hold him close by.

The check engine light came back.

I made an early appointment so they could get right to it. The guy had an idea what else it would be if that battery cable he’d tightened wasn’t the whole problem. They’re not open Fridays so I didn’t want it to become longer than a one-day job.

I got a call a little later: the code coming up was to part of the drive chain and that should be covered under warranty–I’d want to take that to the dealer. No point in having him charge me if they would do it for free.

So in the one small bit of time that the others could spare I got driven back over there to pick up my car to take it to Toyota.

Where they ran the code and got the diagnosis but also looked up the date we’d bought the Prius from them. Fifteen years or 150,000 miles’ warranty on the hybrid drivetrain by law in California, and we were at 100,000 miles.

And 186 months, not 180. No warranty. But they could give me the estimate on the spot: $4261.

I…wow. Thanked them, took it home (having previously been assured it was okay to drive for now), and called my mechanic again and told their admin woman that number.

She was as staggered as I was.

When the guy had said that to me, I was standing there holding her company’s estimate in my hands and he knew that. $660 for the same job. Which suddenly didn’t sound so bad, not bad at all.

And this. It’s not the only reason, but, this is why I try to keep the little guys in business.

Went in to the ENT today, got my ears roto-rootered–it’s like they’re constantly trying to push those foreign objects out that I put in every morning and they don’t need to be any deafer than they have to be–and then the doctor asked if I had anything else I wanted to ask him about.

Yes.

He sat up straight to hear it.

I told him how I’d had Meniere’s as a teen with episodes of the room spinning around fast, and how this was nothing like that. But: since about late January, if I tilted my head backward, I’d get a sudden attack of dizziness. Relatively mild compared, but still, and I got it when putting eye drops in my left eye but not so much my right. If I did back exercises, knees up, roll slowly to the side, right side, no problem, left side, bam! But only the first time. Lie down at night, wait to the count of, oh, about five, and bam! Dizzy, and definitely not from standing up too fast, not a blood pressure problem.

Yes, he explained: it’s particles in your inner ear. You lie down, and they slowly settle down. I have it, my wife has it, my parents have it. You’re being a snow globe.

Is it permanent?

Often not.

Okay, then! In the grand scheme of things that sounds like about the most benign malady one could possibly hope for. Cool. I reminded him that I’d been in a year previous for testing for an acoustic neuroma on the left so I’d just wanted to make sure nothing had snuck in past us.

Oh no, no, nothing like that, no worries.

We chuckled at the whole Santa-in-a-glass-bubble image and we were done.

But I thought I’d pass the word along in case anyone else is going through that.

My sister-in-law from Texas.

Our niece, daughter of Richard’s late oldest sibling.

Our daughter.

Take out.

The fortune cookie that said, A gathering of friends brings you lots of luck this evening. And it did, for sure. But not quite enough to finish that James Christensen puzzle together before they called it a night for the aunt who’s on Eastern time.

I wasn’t as much of a help as I might have been on that; I tried, but finally told them (having been to the doctor this afternoon with everybody at the clinic wearing face masks so, no lipreading possible) I solve puzzles aurally all day long, do you mind if I knit?

Not at all.

And then, since the niece was wearing her cashmere cowl I’d given her as her experiment to see if that was the one animal fiber she could tolerate, and turns out she loved it, I confessed that the 50/50 cashmere/cotton afghan I was working on was–for her. I didn’t quite say, and now that I know it’ll be comfortable for you I can really dive in and stop hesitating.

Thirteen inches and it is on its way. Man, that feels good.

My sister’s got an Anya seedling! On its first true leaves! Go little apricot go! (I forgot to ask if I could show off her picture.) Ed. to add: Thanks, Marian, here it is!

Meantime, a large glossy postcard arrived at our house for Larry: it offered a chance to do good for future patients, it offered a large bonus for signing on, and they really really wanted someone with his expertise to come be a psychologist working for them. And they’re right, there are a lot of people who could use a good therapist right now like no other time I’ve ever seen.

But there’s one problem with that.

Larry sold this house to us 35 years ago when he retired and moved to Hawaii.

I don’t think he’s going to be taking them up on that offer.

In case you don’t hear back from me right away tomorrow.

Last week we were 15-20 degrees warmer than normal and it was quite pleasant.

This week, not so much: the mango tree has just started a major flush of growth, which means the buds are about to burst forth and some may have, and now it’s under layers of frost covers against possible freezing tonight (she typed, thinking of all those peach blossoms, too.) It’s cold out there. It was cold all day despite two layers of sweaters and a working furnace.

And so of course tomorrow is the day they’re turning our power off from 8-5 to upgrade the electrical system in our neighborhood. The fridge and freezer must not be opened, no food will be heatable. Oh you were going to be working from home? Not Wednesday you’re not.

I haven’t worn thermals since Alaska, but I’m going to. The hot cocoa’s going straight into a thermos first thing in the morning, and I’m going to need it after uncovering that tree out there.

But we did get a hundredth of an inch of rain last night with this cold front and that’s at least something.

I just read the fine print on the notice: shutdown may be canceled without notice due to weather or unforeseen circumstances.

Meaning, if the power is on you still don’t dare open the fridge because that might be right when it cuts off. Or totally not. Come on, guys, how hard is it to shoot an email to a few dozen households?

So we’ll see how it goes.

Oh.

My.

Gosh.

I called Edgepark, the company that handles my ileostomy supplies. There had been a problem.

They said basically, not our problem, you need to talk to the manufacturer. The rep offered to go get me their phone number. I said, I can go look it up myself. She insisted, and I thought, well okay, let her do her job so she looks to her boss like she’s taking good care of the customer, so I waited.

She came back and gave me the number for dealing with that.

I called, not sure if they would answer after 5 pm Eastern time, but they did and I explained that I had had three (name of the) bags come unglued in two weeks and that had never happened in the thirteen years since my surgery and what should we do next.

The young man on the line listened patiently but then asked a question with some confusion.

I explained, I had to stop everything and shower and replace all three components and it was a good thing I was home and I haven’t been doing anything different. (I didn’t say, And that stuff retails at about $100 per change. Yes, if you don’t have a colon nor insurance, it costs ~$33 a day to use the bathroom. For the rest of your life.)

The light bulb went off for him.

We’re Hollister the *clothing* company. (He didn’t say, As in, a top brand among teenagers. Linking to thank them for hiring such a sweetheart.)

My own light bulb went sudden full-blast spotlight. Ohmygosh. Edgepark Medical gave me your number as being Hollister medical supplies!!

He very helpfully offered to go look up that number for me but this time I said (between snort-giggles at this point because he was being so nice about it and you KNOW he’d just gotten a great story to tell his buddies) that thanks, I’d go look it up myself.

(Not taking any more chances.)

Finished the intarsia section on the do-over and would have finished the hat but for the hands needing a break. It’s more stitches and smaller needles than my usual but after all the plain beanies it is deeply satisfying to do something complicated that the recipient is so looking forward to.

On a different subject: my late father-in-law was a lawyer for the Justice Department in his day and there was a case that he flew out west for to argue against a woman who had declared herself the inheritor, by long-ago treaty, of the entire San Francisco Bay and a lot of the surrounding land, from what he told me.

There’s a problem with that: Federal law says you cannot own navigable waterways. Sorry.

For that matter, in California you cannot claim to own the beach. The public must have access. A tech billionaire who wanted privacy took that to court and lost again and again, but the answer stayed no, as well it should. Splashing in the ocean is not for the rich only.

With that, then, I know these were built in 1960, but having the tide come in under your living room? Yeah it’s really cool, I grant you that; $2,649,000 for that view is not a surprise.

The stonework in the kitchen that echoes the flow and colors of the waves is just glorious. So well done.

But. But. One little offshore earthquake and your huge investment will be completely under water.

I got sent to a new doctor today, someone who was evaluating whether I should be in a sleep study; the referring doctor wanted to cover all the bases.

Masks are still required here.

I warned the nurse about my hearing and the lipreading being blocked and even mentioned that I’d given some thought to cochlear implants; when I started to tell the doctor, his eyes smiled and he told me, Yes, I’ve heard.

His voice was helpfully low-pitched but he had to repeat himself a few times, and after a few minutes he finally asked me with both compassion and a giving-it-to-me-straight the line he’d clearly said many times before: “Have you considered getting hearing aids?”

It was all I could do not to fall on the floor laughing. Dude, you are 36 years late to that party. I have a veritable museum of the technological advances over the years, including the 1986 pair whose squealing feedback every time my hair crossed my ears actually cost me 15 dB permanently. Thankfully they don’t make them like that anymore. But what I said was, “I have them–or there would be *nothing*. We’re talking 100, 110 dB.”

Bless him, he knew what that meant. So many people don’t. He did a small “wow!” and okay, then. I didn’t say, well I’m still at 85 and 90 in the lower frequencies, having made my point that I am emphatically not one of those old people being vain and avoiding the things and deliberately making myself miss out on human interaction.

“What happened?”

I told him I’d overdosed on baby aspirin as a toddler when Mommy wasn’t looking and set up an allergic reaction to it and it was years before anybody connected the growing loss not to fevers but to NSAIDs.

Ah…

And I went out of there randomly chuckling all the way home. Have I thought about… Right. Yes, yes I think I have.

But at least I was able to reassure him that loud noises don’t keep me up at night.

(Found the second color I was looking for, found the needles, and most importantly, the brain cleared from those falls to remember how I did it, so Emily’s replacement hat can finally begin.)

Warning: the rest of this post is a Get Off My Lawn.

I was googling to make sure I was understanding a particular architectural term correctly: floating. Because it was being applied to something that I didn’t think was, in order for the realtor’s listing to sound fancy.

Personally, I would say the correct word for this type of staircase has more to do with a direction and an article of clothing men don’t wear save with bagpipes in hand and kilt hose, myself. Do these bother other people?

Taking it further, I don’t know if it’s still there since they did some remodeling a few years ago, but we were invited to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco with my folks by my cousin when they were in town and it was new.

The floor of the top floor was glass–if I remember right, in alternating stripes of opaque and clear. But what about earthquakes?! All that potential falling glass not to mention people. Wearing a skirt and looking down at the crowds below looking up, I emphatically did not linger. I did not wish to be Exhibit A. I did not want to be reminded of fourth and fifth grade when all the girls learned to layer up with shorts under their skirts in defense against those boys whose behavior was not corrected by the teachers nor staff.

I most certainly had opinions on what the gender of that architect had to be. I’m sure it just never occurred to him.

Or worse, it did.

I’ve been to the post-earthquake DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park since then, but not that one.

I have questions.

I got in the habit in my teens of walking several miles a day, and so there were a few times where I really stretched my legs and walked past whatever house used to be where this one is now. If memory serves, my older siblings’ friend Frances’s father was the original developer. (Or was that the next block up.)

So who…thought this was how they wanted it to be now?

Ten thousand-plus square feet, but only half of them finished. You can’t have a garage. The wallpaper in one bathroom is peeling away and the print on it is oak grain painted pink. I know, that was a thing when I was a kid, but it’s been years since I’ve seen the like.

A mansion built in 1985 and it had Formica? Are those cabinets Ikea? A lucite towel rack from the late ’60s when that was a hot new thing?

On the other hand, picture #15 has an excellent yarn storage system in place, bar none.

It says the flooring is carpet, hardwood, and marble, and a lot of it surely is, but honey I recognize that by-the-roll vinyl pattern in the kitchen because I saw it in the showroom in ’95 and didn’t want it in mine.

But what really threw me? Was picture #5. On the left.

I’ve seen that before.

I had to walk into the other room to look at mine to compare. Surely that’s an Anne painting. My sister. From the tour of Europe with our art dealer dad where she came home and painted so many of the cityscapes she’d seen. That’s how Dad liked to frame them, too, and her work was some of his most popular. There are several more shown less clearly that could be as well.

So that explains the mystery of the rest of the house: they’d spent their money where it mattered.

The sunlight only had a few minutes left and I excused myself from my knitting group Zoom a moment to step outside to cover the mango tree to hold in the warmth from the incandescent Christmas lights; it was 34F this morning, and since I had had it professionally pruned on Friday, I could only assume the cuts would make it a little more vulnerable right now. If it freezes it dies.

I always try to do that really carefully because those covers are big, it’s an awkward process, and it’s easy to trip on them. Not to mention I have no sense of balance.

I was not remembering that I must never be distracted nor in a hurry at this.

I found where my shoe had ended up as I took the measure of the outcome. Nothing seemed broken. Fingers unhappy. The rest will let me know (and it’s starting to.) I found myself unexpectedly a bit dizzy. Having fallen four days ago tripping over a box at the front door, one big toe was going, Are you kidding me. Again?

I came back inside and found myself suddenly short of breath as I was turning the camera back on to my friends. I didn’t say anything to them and in fact kept knitting the plain beanie I was working on thank you left hand but I did confess to my family after it was over.

I got me a loving but stern talking-to from both of them. I got lectured on the value of me vs the tree. I got told to be careful. (I know, I know.)

Tonight’s the coldest night in the forecast for the next ten days, and things should be warming up from there so hopefully we’re done dealing with this for the season.

And then.

I got a wonderful note back from my niece re the afghan I’d just finished for her daughter whom she’d given my name as her middle name: she is thrilled, it is gorgeous, and by airplane or mail, by whatever means they will all be very very happy when it comes.

She, hesitating and unsure in the asking, had one request, though: I had once knit her a hat and she had loved it very much. She didn’t quite want to say it but her mom/my sister had encouraged her and said she should, and–would it be possible I could knit her another one like that? Because it had been just so perfect and it had meant a lot to her. She had checked the Lost and Founds everywhere. It was distinctive, but no, they hadn’t seen it.

Her email yanked me right out of my self-pity and straight into happy anticipation at such an easy way to make her world right again. I’d needed that. The afghan needs the security of arrival by air by me after Omicron gets out of here, but seventy stitches’ and about fifty rows’ worth of a hat: that, I’d be willing to trust the post office with.

My left hand might want to wait a day or two to start.

But not if I have any say in it.

An elderly person dear to me got hacked yesterday.

And today, another elderly friend, chatting like she does and asking after my family, told me happily about the quarter million dollar check that had arrived by FedEx from Publisher’s Clearing House and how nice it was that they look out for the elderly and disabled like that and had I signed up for that, too?

I advised caution.

No, no, she’d taken it to her bank and they’d accepted it.

I reminded her of a mutual widowed friend who, at about 90, was swindled out of the house she’d owned free and clear for decades and had found herself thrown out on the street in utter bewilderment.

There was no unconvincing her.

I linked to Publisher Clearing House’s own website where they warned against frauds being committed in their name and say that even banks have been fooled into thinking the checks are real–until they find out they are not.

I asked if she’d called PCH to make sure it was real. She hesitated, then said she had, and I thought, if you did, did you look it up online or did you call the scammer’s number? Because there is nothing legitimate about this.

So since she was a friend from church I got off Facebook and mentioned it to those in a better position to step in and help; she sure wasn’t listening to me.

To which one of them said, could that have been a fake? Basically, (she didn’t quite say outright) was the person they were trying to scam–you?

It was indeed a duplicate of her profile. Reported now.

I guess I learned a little humility myself on the gullibility index today.

They can’t say it out loud, but Fox and the like have got to be really really hoping the unvaxxed Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, thrown out by one court and reinstated by another, fails.

The trial was delayed by her Covid diagnosis. Of course.

With thanks to Lee Ann Dalton for the link, I can only wish that others who’ve been persuaded by such might read all the love in these words.