Sing it with me, Have a piece when he is done…

Andy: Mom and Dad can do it. I flew before anybody. I can do this, too, I know I can.

The fledgling stands on the prey with both feet, gripping it hard, preparing to take off to eat breakfast someplace more interesting than home because it’s no fun when there’s no sibling around anymore to try to grab it from you. Grip, flap, lift: an initial try at getting it up to the light fixture. Nope. Go back, grab it again (how DO the folks manage talons and wings at the same time?) get it up there, did it, great!, okay this time lift it up to the ledge.

He did it!

Then, starting at about 7:30 in the video, yelling all the way as he drags it and its drag against the concrete turns him slowly around in the little wind tunnel he’s creating and suddenly Whoops!…

Every cat who ever licked its paw in a defiant show of, I meant to do that… Yeah.

—

(P.S.) If you’ve ever gotten on your own case about not getting something done, you’re in good company: this house is like our first one, which was a split-entry where the builder only finished the upstairs and left the downstairs as framing and insulation only so that first-time owners could afford a place and put in the sweat equity themselves. We did that.

Fifty years. I’m seeing the raw plumbing for maybe a bathroom, possibly a downstairs laundry room if they once intended a separate living quarters, a bedroom, closet, and family room down there at the least. It’s a nice house.

But that insulation and lumber have been waiting a long time for someone to put up with the hammering and disruption and noise. (Can we get rid of the ivy while we’re dreaming.)

I got the new hearing aids yesterday.

I opened the door today and a siren went by, closer than the road even comes as far as I could tell and I asked where was that?! Thinking it was coming right next door.

Oh, over on X road I’m sure, was the answer.

That was two streets away. No way. But then it turned a corner and faded and clearly she was right. Huh. You mean sirens can actually sound like sirens again?

Some sounds are too bright but the brain has already adjusted somewhat.

One of the sources of improvement, though by no means the main one, was better-fitting ear molds–but I warned the audiologist beforehand that a previous new set had had to be whittled down because with my connective tissue disease, being tight against it meant it bled. And if it’s not tight, you don’t hear as well. I knew the tradeoff all too well.

So the new ones went in. She programmed them as I sat there, then had us talking for me to figure out how these were working, and did one more test where she took them out and put them back in with a wire alongside them all the way into the ear canals to test how they were actually carrying the sound.

While I was thinking, one more bit of space taken up. I can’t…

They came back out again so she could be done with the wires and I had her look at the left ear. It was already red.

So the upshot is, I do hear better with the new aids. Mostly. There is still brightness that drowns other frequencies out but that already seems to be calming down in my brain: I’ve had recruitment before and I know it goes away and it’s a sign of where the old aids were failing and not conveying sound. The brain overreacts to sounds it hasn’t heard in awhile but you just keep going till it doesn’t. Just like a new eyeglass prescription may be the correct one for your eyes but man it feels weird for the first hour and day.

She said that these molds do conform and shrink just a tiny bit with the wearing.

I’ve found I have to put them in and not touch them for anything because the slightest movement against them sets off that inflammation. Which I did today. Then I was wearing them not quite all the way in, which didn’t work. I gave up and put the old smaller-mold ones in to give my ears some time to calm down because I really want the new ones to work at their very best.

The sound is comfortable on the old ones. The fit is, too.

The difference is, now I know what I could be hearing and wasn’t with them.

I just have to work my way through that adjustment period. Carefully and bit by bit.

The mass shooting at the Valley Transit Authority yard in San Jose this morning hit far too close to home. A neighbor whose kids grew up with ours we were pretty sure used to work that shift if he doesn’t still and every few hours over the course of the day I looked to see if they had released the names of the victims. I did not want to call Ingrid and make me be one more thing she had to deal with. So not my place. If he was gone, there would be a right time to come offer a hug.

Just like they walked a few blocks over to our house and offered company and love a few weeks after I got out of the hospital in ’09.

Those names were released tonight. Her husband, a fellow Ham radio volunteer with my husband, was not on that list.  Deep breath.

But eight other families and sets of neighbors and loved ones….

We have to do better. We HAVE to do better.

I did not get my new hearing aids yesterday: they were supposed to have come in by then but they hadn’t.

I did not meet the termite guy today: when he wasn’t showing I finally called, explained that I was hearing impaired, and had I gotten the day right?

The woman checked: our appointment was for next Tuesday. I thanked her.

The hearing aids are now at the office and someone canceled an appointment so I’m in for tomorrow.

But I have not yet finished this cowl. So, as a potential option, I guess that one’s going to have to wait.

P.S. Today the youngest San Francisco peregrine, a female that had hatched four days after the others, soared gracefully off through that sky like she’d been doing this all her life. (Unlike the jump up/fall down/swim in the Bay/get rescued drama of her sister.)

While over at the San Jose nest, the first egg of the pair’s do-over attempt not only hatched early this morning, but by afternoon was begging to be fed. And was. Usually they consume the rest of the yolk and that tides them over till the next day, when they have a little more strength for holding their heads up with beaks open.

But this one just got right to it.

With thanks to Anne for the heads-up, Mark Rober, former NASA engineer and the guy made famous by putting out boxes for porch pirates that sprayed them with stink bombs and glitter while shooting videos of them from inside the box, has posted another Rube Goldbergian squirrel course in his yard. Enjoy.

Last night changing out of my long sleeves into my pj’s I noticed the veins in my hands and arms were very swollen, deep blue, and you could see them going from my hands wrapping around my arms on up to near the elbows. Puffy. I checked around. It seemed to be mostly there.

“That’s inflamed,” said Richard, with both of us aware that my lupus did this all over early on in the disease and the doctor guessed afterwards that I’d had cerebral vasculitis. That’s where my face blindness and short term memory damage originated from. I was 31.

Urgent Care was closed by then and he asked whether we should go to the ER. Insurance punishes you heavily if you go straight there ($13k bill last time), even when the doctor tells you to. We knew we would spend a very long night awake and go home near dawn beyond exhausted, which would greatly exacerbate the whole autoimmune flare thing, and chances are they would probably just dismiss it anyway; at an hour when all we wanted to do was fall into bed it seemed like the best way to treat it was to get a decent night’s sleep.

I was antsy and didn’t sleep well at all. But it was gone in the morning. Breathe.

My GI doctor said I could see her next Monday or come in and see someone else if I needed to on those Crohn’s symptoms; again, my call.

Today was not perfect but it was improved on that one, too, and I was able to eat normal meals, so for the moment Monday it is. But I will change that in a heartbeat if I need to.

So today there were more birds in the yard than I’ve seen in awhile. House finches in breeding season: you never saw such a brilliant red. A western tanager flew up close to  the house, the jasmine’s white buds promise their exquisite scent on the way, the pomegranate sent out more bright red buds, and we shared a few blueberries straight off the bush after dinner. The newest apricot seedling began a new set of leaves and after its faltering start seems to really be taking off.

It felt a good day to drink every bit of that in.

I’m going to go top the day off with a few rows of a bright blue soft wool hat and then call it a night.

I want to show you the thick Meyer lemon flowers, white on the inside, purple on the outside, quite pretty, blooming in front of a rather large lemon that was waiting for us to hurry up and finally pick it. Citrus takes about a year from early bud to ripe fruit.

But my phone is now on strike entirely and not sending any photos, even after two days. (Michelle took the orange juicing photos.)

The audiologist told me Tuesday that the new hearing aids would bluetooth directly from an iPhone. Which is a huge improvement over having to wear a gray electronic pendant from your neck that freaked out the TSA and was heavy enough to hurt with a connective tissue disease, and it flipped the phone signals from ear to ear with a rubber-ball-bouncey twang instead of going straight to both ears, so I rarely rarely used it. They had not filtered out electronic interference on the first model, as far as I could tell.

Does that depend on how old the iPhone is? I asked her, because mine’s a 6s.

She winced and said she wasn’t sure.

Like the hearing aids, it’s failing anyway and I guess I really should replace it.

Except–we now have a termite guy coming, and if anyone has any experience with such, please tell me because I have no experience and no idea.

I’d show you why I called him, but…

I’m trying out that lobster shell compost. It was black and velvety rich and finely crumbly in the hands and you could just hear the plants swooning. I mixed it in to about 60% organic bedding soil and pretended I knew what I was doing. (I only buy organic after getting soil from Costco a few years ago that was full of little green plastic beads.)

The youngest Anya seedling is the guinea pig. It’s pretty dwarfed in that 15 gallon fabric pot but given the vigor of its roots I didn’t want it to grow through my 5 gallon in a month, seeing as how it is, in fact, a tree.

On the other hand, it’s too heavy now to move it much. So it’s in a good spot because it had to be.

The fabric pots dry out fast, but the other apricot that’s in one is looking really healthy and happy. They do not like soggy roots so those are a good counterbalance to my tendency to overwater based on the fear that I can’t go out in the bright summer sun to rescue them before evening’s safer UV levels.

The bigger thing is: I finally went to the new audiologist today. It felt so strange to just go do a normal errand out in the wild like that.

She was a peach. And she was thorough. I’ve been dealing with hearing aids since I was 27 and never before has someone tested to see how well I lipread.

There was the standard man’s voice speaking words into one ear, then the other, where you try to repeat each word back. She chuckled at one guess: “Well, that’s creative.”

But then, taking her mask off from the other side of the thick glass, with the lighting not super good for it from my view, she went through what was clearly the same list of words as I sat in the anechoic chamber–and I zipped right through those with confidence. Only had two I didn’t quite get. It was absolutely revelatory to me. I had NO idea I was that good at it. I knew how much I need to see people’s faces, but…!

She examined my hearing aids and said they were eight iterations ago, and now they can do all these other things.

Cool. That’s what I was there for. My old ones sometimes turn themselves off randomly and are clearly at the end of their lifespans.

When she said Oticon would take two weeks at their end, I asked if I could pay for overnight shipping? I want to be able to hear grandkids sooner rather than later. She checked into that and, yes, they could do a rush job on the whole thing, sure.

A week from Monday my cracked ear mold will be history, I will have much better background noise cancellation, and we’ll see how it goes.

And even with that rush she charged me about $1500 less than the last time/last guy. Nice.

As she was writing things up, there was a computer screen next to me with two audiogram charts (no name visible) with five slightly wobbly lines that curved up a bit and then down again with Xs and Os marked along the way for right vs left ear, but these other lines too were marked for–tympannometry? I don’t know, and five seems odd when you’re talking ears but that’s what was there.

When she got done, I motioned towards the screen and said, “It looks like middle school band members trying to read the music.”

She glanced at it and guffawed. “You ARE creative!”

My apologies for using someone else’s picture, which will embiggen if you click on it, but I know when that house is sold the original will disappear. I’ll link below to be fair to the realtor and owner.

My great-grandfather founded a paint and glass company that in its day was the biggest one in the western states. It’s been gone forty years now, but a little bit of knowledge did make it down to me.

And that is that painted walls reflect off each other and darken each other.

Just like yarn spun from wool is just a bit darker than the raw fibers, and knitted things from that yarn are a little darker still. They reflect on and within themselves.

We once picked out some palest peach paint for a kid’s bedroom and by the time we finished the fourth wall it was all a deep dark anxious orange. Check the paint chip–yeah, that really was the one. So not what we wanted, and I knew I should have known better. I went back to the store, bought some very nearly white light blue and gave it a do-over that turned the room the color shown on the right side of the photo above–I mean, seriously, that’s exactly it. But at least this time I knew how much darker than the chip it was going to look.

All of that was over mid-century mahogany paneling that after decades of the wood and glue drying out was a fire hazard anyway, so we later replaced it entirely with wallboard. Color: eggshell. Our contractor said it was more restful on the eyes than glaring white. I figured, kid, you want color when we’re done, put up a picture or poster, it’s a lot easier to change than the walls.

Anyway, so I came across the photo and it stopped me in recognition: I have lived this. All those shades of blue: they’re all the same color, even the same can of paint, all of it, even that dark dark bathroom back there.  And you’re going to need strong light to get even the foreground to stay how it is once the sun goes down.

Just in case anyone was planning on painting any rooms any time soon.

I’ve often thought I should ask you all, although, no, we’re not moving, so it’s a moot point anyway: the houses with rooms and racks and coolers for wine–if you don’t drink, what do you do with those? Leave them as is for future buyers? Rip them out? Store your balsamic vinegar sideways and hope it doesn’t leak? Try to freak your Mormon friends out with Martinelli’s in there? (Not to worry, we’re on to it.)

What other appliance fits in the space of a wine cooler in the kitchen? (Am I even calling it the right thing.) Can you take it out and put in, say, a second dishwasher? For parties? Since they’re both about parties (once you get past the first dishwasher any extras are definitely for parties and usually found only in bigger houses than we’d ever buy.) Right?

But this is taking it to a whole new level. My cousin found a house with a door that opens to a cave in the hillside, (note the fake window in picture 32) and her friend instantly said it would be great for her husband’s winemaking.

I’ve been in California too long–I looked at those pictures and thought, but egads, what would you do in an earthquake? Major heebie jeebies.

That’s a beautiful Tudor, even if it has an upskirt staircase, but really: isn’t that more Frodo’s natural hobbitat?

As one who sometimes blanks on the word I’m trying to say, it made my day reading someone’s mention of their Chinese student trying to find chicken at the grocery store but unable to think of what they were called in English.

So the kid grabbed an egg and went for a clerk and asked: Where is its mother?

I sent that picture hours ago… Okay, so, something to look forward to tomorrow.

Meantime, to make up for yesterday’s house listing: there’s a line of look-alike homes in a row down the block from this one and it may have started out as one of them and been added onto.

But WOW. This guy did woodwork like we do yarn. 

I had to laugh at the 1950s bright red and chrome dinette set. I was not expecting that.

Look! They’ve got a pomegranate juicer on top of the fridge! Not a lot of those around.

Nice sized house, big lot, overlooking the golf course, across the street from the Portland Yacht Club–and a lower than average price. Why, in a market where such things are being snapped up in under a week, has that one been sitting there for over three months?

My guess? Picture #19. 

Someone who leaves a blatantly racist trope on their wall for the whole world to see online is announcing who you’d be buying from. They’re suggesting what your neighbors will be in agreement with because they’re certainly not embarrassed to have them see it. They’re deciding what kind of person should live in their house after them.

And so no new family does, day after day after month after month.

Edited to add: Imagiknit in San Francisco is having a 21% off sale through Saturday. Malabrigo is rarely on sale, so I thought I’d mention it. (There’s more after the pattern books, keep scrolling down, they have a lot.)

(Note: the camera’s particularly off on the upper right, sorry.)

Yesterday was warm but today was not.

Well good then.

I don’t own a lot of short-sleeved clothes because I’ve had sun-sensitive lupus a long time now, but there was this blue sweater with a darker royal blue cardigan that it looked good with and because of the perfectly-timed change in the weather, those two were just the thing for walking across the fairgrounds at the height of the afternoon.

And it was what I’d worn when I got my first Moderna shot. Don’t forget the big floppy gray wool hat that’s a little loose and really silly to wear that close to the stiff breezes coming off the Bay. I chuckled at myself as I made myself pick, yes, that one, heading out the door. I might have face blindness issues, we might all have half-face-blindness issues right now, but if I couldn’t recognize them at least I could make it so they could recognize me from a distance.

And that they did.

I saw one of them as I stepped out of the building afterwards and started around the corner and asked, Are you the guy I talked to last time?

He knew exactly what I meant (me, inwardly: Ah, I thought you were one of them) and he nodded, No–but he is, as the other stepped into view.

I thanked them again for taking care of so many people. I didn’t ask again if they’d been allowed their own shots yet; I know that California’s now opened it to everybody over 16, if you can find one, and workers at the site would be high on that list.

Do you like blue or brown? I asked the one I’d had that conversation with last time.

He laughed in surprise and puzzlement.

Sandwich ziplock bags: I pulled out three tightly squished Mecha Malabrigo hats, in Stone Chat, the most poetic name for a colorway ever, in Denim, and in–I don’t remember the name but I remember it took me a month to make myself finish it because it was gray and gray blue and gray green and gray purple in a gray month and at the time I was craving brights and flowers and colors and getting out of the house and enough of this quarantine already.

But I knew it would be exactly the right thing for someone someday so I even ran the ends in and now that someone was standing right in front of me and he loved it as he accepted that small bit of my knitting in utter disbelief.

I turned to his friend: And you? Which would you like?

Me, too?

He picked the browns of the Stone Chat.

I told them they were wool but they wouldn’t shrink in the wash–but they would get all fuzzy, so I’d hand wash them myself, but whatever.

Just then the third guy came over to see what we were talking about.

He, though, looked like this was sure one day when he needed someone to do something nice for him. Whatever was bringing him down, I wanted with all that I had to somehow make it better.

He didn’t get a choice on the color but he didn’t need one. He was blown away. It was enough.

Everybody needs a grandmother who loves them and knits for them, even if I’ll probably never lay eyes on any of them again.

We didn’t hug, any of us: we all knew there’s still that allotted two more weeks.

I left them to exclaim amongst themselves and try on their new hats and then once out of their reasonable response space the wind teased me and I was off chasing after my store-bought blindingly monster-brimmed floppy one that doesn’t protect you from the sun if it doesn’t stay on.

But I caught it and got it back on and it had helped do what it had been needed for. It was enough.

Houses. Just because you spent a whole lot of money on your remodel doesn’t mean your house here, 2 bd 2ba on a tiny lot, even with a lake easement, is worth essentially as much as–

–this one, more than two and a half times the size on three times the lot in the same zip code. 

Besides, I figure ya gotta have space to scandalize the neighbors by ripping out the bushes and planting fruit trees.

But the burning question is, do they have a bakery around there that’s as good as the one that delivered these for a certain tall person’s birthday this week. I think not.