Today:

1. Enjoy the sunflower sprouts.

2. Be glad the twice-a-month gardener day turned out to be the day after the neighbors’ guy pruned their stuff and saved labor by dumping it all on my baby peach tree on our side of the fence and leaving it. Debate telling the neighbor, who would surely never know otherwise. She’s about 90. I offered my guy a bonus for the extra time spent and he just waved me away with a chuckle: it happens. The peach tree only lost a branch or two, thankfully. (Not that it had very many in the first place.) It will have extra sunlight for a couple of months, so that’s good.

3. Get a visit from Richard’s sister who flew in this afternoon to see the California relatives, take her out to dinner, have a fine time, take pictures (not posting her picture). Wish for better lighting, resolve to finally fix that entryway one that blew in the power failure.

4. Find slightly more sympathy for the neighbor’s gardener. But not a whole lot. (Honey, you got the entryway, the edge of the living room and family room, the kitchen, and the top of the dining room table.)

5. Be glad it fell after he stepped far enough away from it that none of it hit him.

When you try to transition to the new time by getting up the moment you start to wake up the five days beforehand and then tire yourself out enough that you accidentally oversleep by 45 minutes the Saturday morning before the Daylight Savings Time change so now you’re almost two hours behind…

Yeah. Maybe next year I won’t try so hard.

And to think I considered not going to that dinner.

I had biopsies–“just one more?” the doctor said apologetically this afternoon–to rule out uterine or endometrial cancer. Probably just autoimmune related but worth making sure.

I was bleeding, I was tired, all my body wanted to do was rest, or barf, and what on earth that had to do with anything from that procedure I do not know.

But there was to be a get-together of half a dozen women friends this evening that I’d baked a chocolate torte for. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks and I knew that it would be energizing to go. I had a ride.

Man. We had such a good time. I feel so great. Laughter really is the best medicine.

And everybody took a piece of leftover torte home to their husbands so they wouldn’t feel too left out.

The power of suggestion while eating lunch and looking up.

Below was a line of dark, dark cloud with its upper edge gone wavy on the wind current, above it, another dark dark cloud with its lower edge likewise as wobbly as a Romaine leaf edge. And in between so much brightness bursting out of the bun!

A sun sandwich.

If you take a bite does it rain tomato seeds? (Looking at that waiting Burpee’s packet calling out to me.)

I once saw a very old cookbook in a used bookstore with the exciting news printed across its upper cover that, Yes! It had recipes! For this rare tropical fruit. Are we excited?!

Bananas.

I remember that every time I think–or used to think–how glad I am that rambutan is so rare. Not so sure about that now; dragonfruit (is that a transliteration? Marketing?) is showing up in the local Safeway these days. I haven’t started carrying an epipen to restaurants but the day could come. The memory of my mouth and throat being on fire and my airway closing so close to entirely shut like that–yeah, you don’t risk that again.

I have family with allergies to foods they have to actively avoid on a daily basis, far more than I ever have to deal with, so I read this with great interest.

The FDA has approved a new med that interrupts the inflammatory cascade, stopping it from becoming fatal. That doesn’t mean go eat a peanut butter sandwich, but.

Being able to eat out without fear on the menu. That’s huge.

Man, am I glad my taxes help pay for medical research and oversight and, as a dusty old page for Democracy declares in Article 1, “provide for…the general welfare.”

He asked us, and nobody knew.

He asked them, and they knew who.

He grew up where I did and went to the same Cabin John Regional Park that we knew well.

They changed the subject (I remember that discussion and thinking, but that’s not what he’s asking, folks) and talked about climbing in the fighter jet or riding the train. I silently remembered being able to watch a beehive at work from inside the train building and being reassured the bees could only exit to outside.

Everybody remembered the Porky the Litter Eater‘s trash-mouthing: you push a button and you get to hear the recording of Porky telling you that he likes to eat trash. You put paper in his mouth and it whooshes away. I remember us kids standing in line to get a chance to feed him and listen to his loud Oink oink oink!

And there was a totem pole.

As a kid I wasn’t sure what to make of all those faces looking woodenly over us: did they approve? The grownups said it was carved by hand, and that was cool, so, okay.

So here’s this guy who paid more attention to it than I ever did, who now lives in Alaska and credits some of his interest in the place to that totem pole, and who had always wondered what the story was behind how a children’s park just outside Washington, DC got one installed. A genuine Native totem pole. What it had meant to–somebody, enough to get it there.

Fifty-eight years later the history of it seemed lost to time.

So he posted to a group in Alaska, and right away got, My father-in-law helped carve that! They had not only not forgotten there, they still had the program from the ceremony.

Alaska Public Media has the story. And a photo of the guy at Cabin John Park, and man does that take me back.

So then I found this description of why totem poles were built and what they represent. The art of creating them started making a comeback after it finally became illegal to loot them and sell them to museums out from under the communities.

The Cabin John one was commissioned and paid for and that father-in-law got to work on it as an 18-year-old apprentice. I hope he made many more. I just love that he was right there when his daughter-in-law got to tell him, Hey, Dad, people in Maryland want to know about that one you made them!

Form signed, face normal, days’ worth of intermittent fever over, and back to the Social Security office at long last.

This time, a mom with two kids came in and the younger one was getting antsy. My specialty. A pink panda and a hippo and the mom and I made friends on the spot.

After weeks and weeks of carrying it around I finally got that purple cowl to the point where I just need to finish the repeat it’s on, bind it off and call it done.

They seemed better staffed this time and they had the thirteen people ahead of me out in less than an hour.

The woman who handed me that form to fill out last time was dour and efficient. The guy who took care of me this time was young, cheerful, helpful, and efficient.

I walked out of there so giddy at having the thing done done done! that it surprised me. I hadn’t realized it had been bugging me that much. One letter in the mail from them and the classic Medicare+supplement plan will officially be a go.

As my friend Donna marveled out loud to me yesterday, How did *we* get to be the older ones?

And then, just before getting in my car, I told the middle-aged guy who was struggling with a walker and trying to get his dad out that the door to the building was a long way down on the other side and the parking over there was open now, including handicapped spaces. He might want to drive over there instead.

He thanked me very much and was putting the walker back in the trunk with his dad’s door closed again as I turned my wheel and out onto the street.

Eleven years. So she was 79 when she drove here from Woodside.

Mary (her website) was a musician, a composer, and a woman much admired for her gentle graciousness. She was also a knitter. That post is about the day we got the call that my mother-in-law’s cancer had finally taken her, and Mary’s showing up for us, having no idea, meant so much.

She was 90. Her funeral yesterday was overflowing with people come to pay their respects. I went, but there were so many stories to be told by the speakers that I just could not wait to mingle afterwards; I absolutely had to get home and take my next antibiotics dose. I’m not messing up on those, and I didn’t have it with me.

Thus my surprise at church today when I did a double take, stopped dead in my tracks in astonishment, and then threw myself into Kim’s arms. Then Karl’s. Thirty-two years since they’d moved to Colorado, thirty-two, our kids were babies together! But they had come. Because of Mary and all the love she had brought into their lives, all these years later, they had to come.

We’d lived here about six months when Karl had mentioned to someone that the person they were talking about was actually his great-grandfather. Richard heard that and went, wait–that’s my wife’s great grandfather! And that’s how we found out we were second cousins.

And old friends too, catching up. Man, it felt so good.

One last gift from our Mary, and you could just see her smiling up there over it.

Since I wasn’t the first patient of the day this time and I happened to be at a point in the afghan where it had fewer strands than usual, I decided to take it with me. I figured there would be more waiting time. (There was.) I don’t usually consider it a portable project but I wanted to–show off, yes, but also to sort of introduce myself with it now that we were seeing each other for the third time: this is who I am. This is what I do.

The lab report had come in this morning. Staph.

I am really lucky it responded to those antibiotics. I promised I absolutely was going to continue to follow through to the end on them.

She worked on the site some more and I’m to come back next week and the next and to wear this tape over my eyebrow for a month. It absorbs the topical antibiotic for you while protecting the incision.

I have wondered if she’s blamed herself for my picking up that infection three weeks after that biopsy. But it was in no way her fault. She had prescribed that same ointment then and I’d thought, A, it’s just a pinprick, B, antibiotic overuse is not something I want to contribute to, and C, I’m allergic to so many of those that it would just blow up and itch and we wouldn’t know for sure if it was an allergy or what and why go through all that.

Actually, in normal life I’m really good at following doctor’s orders or speaking up with questions but wow did I blow it on that one. I’m using the stuff now, that’s for sure.

Given how much she had exclaimed over the afghan when she walked in, I totally had my confirmation re knitworthiness.

So as she was getting ready to go, trying not to take too much extra of her time I told her that I’d finished this one this morning (I’d finally run the ends in) and then offered her a choice: a soft Mecha hat in earthy oranges and purples with an Arrows lace pattern to it or a leaf lace infinity scarf in a soft off-white. That one was cashmere. (I didn’t say the secret-knitter’s-word cowl because I’d had to explain that an afghan meant a blanket. Her accent is slight but that meaning for that word had escaped her education to that point. And that was okay.)

She chose the cashmere, as I was sure she would, swooning over the both of them and in disbelief that I was sharing it with her.

And now she will never have to wonder how I feel about her work. She cares and she’s good at what she does and man did it feel great to be able to offer that view of herself back to her.

I thought about it for about a nanosecond, but, nah, you don’t want to see a picture.

In the morning I’ll be back at the doctor’s who did that little bit of surgery. I’m hoping to get a little less Frankensteined.

She sent me the new biopsy results in great detail, some of which I will have to run past the family microbiologist for translation. Basically, it was a benign tumor of a hair follicle with the complications we already pretty much figured out–inflammation and infection, as I read that. But she made sure I knew that that particular one was never going to turn cancerous. Even though, rarely, that general type can.

Having had a squamous-celled growth removed from that same eyelid decades ago, that was very good to hear.

7:20, right on time even though my alarm hadn’t gone off (the sound, yes, the vibrations I needed to know that it was sounding, no) and it was a mad scramble.

The antibiotics, started Friday evening, had helped some. Not quickly and not entirely but most of the swelling, which by Sunday had gone from a half inch above the eyebrow to most of my cheek, was gone on Monday. Just the upper eyelid still. Yay.

She had wanted to see it.

And so bright and early she was physically removing that persistent infectious thumbprint’s worth. A new, topical antibiotic (but continue with the oral one.) Come back Friday.

And hopefully that will end that.

But you know what? Back in–October I think? October’s when my sister got her afghan. But just before I sent it off I found the big metal yarn needle I’d dropped by getting up from the floor and putting my knee on it.

Two or three weeks later that knee started being achey and a little stiff–but on the side now, not where I’d skewered it, which was healing. The pattern of hurting in the morning and then easing off was typical of lupus, so, eh. It wasn’t terrible.

Still, I’ve thought for months now that I really ought to drag myself to the doctor over it just in case something was going on because none of my other joints were doing that.

Those antibiotics that are only mostly-helping on my eye socket seem to have completely cured my knee. All that time and it was that easy to fix? At long long last all that is entirely gone and it is wonderful.

(I’ve never seen an amaryllis quite like this before. I was going to take its picture outside but this is as far as it got.)

So it turns out the rules have been changed re those phytosanitary certificates: credit cards only. Which was the opposite of the previous rule and it surprised me because usually government entities in California don’t want the surcharges from the banks. If I could come back down, I was asked–or, she offered very generously, she could drive to my house for it.

It seemed a very small amount of money to waste that much of her time over and they were busy; I could come, no problem.

So there I was again.

I waited till she was done and then said, I don’t know if you’re allowed to accept it in your job. But I like to spend my Zoom meetings making simple hats that I don’t have to look at my hands for, and then find people to give them to. I’d love to offer you one.

I’d brought four to choose from, and she oohed and aahed over how pretty they were.

It looked like a work-from-home day for everybody else I’d seen the previous time. As we chatted briefly I bragged a little on my afghan project; she considered that a moment and said, It’s like a quilt, only in knitting.

I thought that was a really cool way to look at it.

But she said reluctantly that I was right, she wasn’t allowed to accept one. I tucked the hats away and said that I was going to think of her, then, when I looked at them.

With great fondness, too. I was glad I’d not only gotten to meet her but that life had offered us that little encore. All the best to her. And Ellen had gotten her tree safe and sound!

(Medical stuff. Sorry. Here, let me throw an afghan picture in there. Wait. Does that creek look like a top-down sock with the toe needing kitchenering to anybody other than me?)

——-

It’s weird, I said.

It IS weird, the doctor answered.

The lump started growing back last week. At first I thought it, nah, couldn’t be, that’s just from the biopsy.

But then it grew by the day, quite a bit faster than the first time (which was Thanksgiving to Jan. 9), going from a hard little round thing hidden under the skin to a large swollen angry red spot that someone in a lupus group Zoom meeting yesterday commented on–she could see it.

The original had never gotten to that point.

I messaged the eye doctor two days ago. This time it wasn’t an occasional small twinge, either, it was definitely painful and itchy. I got an appointment for next Friday.

By yesterday the only reason I wasn’t running to the clinic to see any doctor, anybody! was that I had a long-scheduled dermatology check today. And dermatology seemed a logical place anyway.

So there I was.

She looked at the pathology report to reassure herself of the biopsy having been negative. But then how–?

So. The lump is gone, the lump is back, it’s thumbnail sized and the eyelid is red and puffy. I picked up a prescription for a steroid cream and came home exhausted and starting to feel a little feverish.

After about an hour with my feet up, without even having done or taken anything yet, there was the most unexpected sensation: like it was receding. A little, but, hey! I got up and looked in the mirror and my eyelid did look less puffy and it hurt less. Huh! Yay! I’ll take it!

But now my upper cheek was. And it wasn’t when she snapped a picture for the other doctor. Doesn’t hurt, though.

So weird.

At least everything’s still working fine.

The dermatologist is going to keep close tabs on this with the eye doctor. She made sure I knew I was to call if I needed it for anything, any time.

It’s surely a complete non-sequitur, but I am so glad I got both my Shingrix shots!

The good news is that if you pay for Priority Express Overnight they guarantee it will get there when they say it will.

The bad news is, when it doesn’t, you have to wait seven days to file while they hope you’ll forget or lose the receipt or interest and go away.

The good news is that the apricot tree arrived safe and sound.

The bad/good news is, but not till this afternoon, which means I now have to remember where that receipt is (it’s tucked in my Sierra Club Engagement Calendar by the computer to make sure it stays right there and in mind.)

So that splurge of a shipping fee won’t have been after all. If they only refund to the difference between the timing I paid for and what I got, I’m fine with that, but it sounds like the full fee.

It came! She got it!

The other thing I did yesterday was to go to the Social Security office.

I officially changed to my married name with them years ago but the IRS never got the memo. Social Security always had it right, at least, and I no longer had to worry about the state refusing to cash the check for my driver’s license renewal. (Checks. Boy that *was* awhile ago.)

It finally tripped me up again. The Boomerbenefits.com person told me the only thing for it was to take my documents back to their office and walk it through.

The Social Security people told me to take the taxes under my full name problem to the IRS office, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Given Jean’s funeral, I went in the afternoon, a little afraid they would close promptly at 4 and kick everybody out who was still waiting. My previous experience had been back when W Bush signed the Patriot Act and messed over millions of women over how official their married names were or not: the databases had to match.

It was hours and hours in a building and part of that town I’d never want to be in again among people who really didn’t want to be there nor work there.

This was closer and much nicer–nothing fancier than a good paint job and decent flooring and no dirt, but what a difference that made, and they were much more efficient. And actively helpful.

But since I didn’t have an appointment there was still about a 75 minute wait. I pulled out my purple cowl project.

A woman about my age (I can just see her smiling on reading that) walked in, saw how closely placed the connected chairs were, saw that there were only a few individual seats here and there but it was all definitely going to be too close to strangers, and hesitated and nearly walked out.

I smiled, “I don’t bite,” and she chuckled, looked relieved, and sat down next to me.

We made friends on the spot.

Turns out she’d always wanted to knit or crochet. She had even bought a crochet kit for–I think she said a sweater project?–and she’d tried a few times to teach herself how to do it, but it seemed too much to master all at once and it had sat there for years.

I told her, sometimes you need to simply start with something else, maybe something smaller, and then come back to it.

She looked at me. And the small, make-time-useful portable project in my hands. Yes. Yes, that made a lot of sense, thanks.

Eventually they called my number, they called her number, and that was that.

I walked out of there regretting that I hadn’t offered her my name or email so that she could ask any questions or get help getting started; it was the crocheting that had stopped me from offering, it’s been so long I’d be looking at YouTube videos myself.

On thinking about it later I realized the difference would be that I only need to refresh the memory on what term goes with what and the rest would come right back to me.

I did mention to her that I’d found knitting easier on the hands.

The SS office’s website had warned that there was very little parking but I’d pulled in going, Four spaces?! There are only four spaces?! How does that work!

Turns out the rest of them were on the far side of the building, y’know, where I ended up finding the front door, too. Oh.

And so as I was wishing I could ever see her again, walking along the outside of what I now knew to be Windows 5-12 inside, a small red car about the age of my Prius slowed down.

And there she was, waving hello, glad to see me again, too. My face totally lit up and so did hers.

I really hope she gets her sweater and her new skills she’s long dreamed of. I think the chances just went way up.