I hadn’t signed into freecycle.org in months. Somehow it just felt like I should, and so I did today, wondering why I was wasting my time on this.

Wait.

Someone had posted two weeks ago that they were looking for some vinyl or linoleum flooring, not a lot, basically enough for a bathroom redo by the sound of it.

When we remodeled thirty-one years ago our contractor’s wife owned a candy shop and he had put an industrial-grade linoleum floor in it for her and then installed it in our kitchen and down the hall and bathrooms. Ten year warranty. Meant to last.

For thirty-one years we had a rolled up remnant of that stuff tucked away.

I hauled it out of there and gave it a look. Eleven inches at one end and five at the other were a waste of time–too yellowed, too kinked.

But the rest of it, from inside the roll? It laid almost flat with no effort and it would be easy to make it entirely so and the color looked great. Like new, which essentially it was. 48.5″x 98″ before cutting? I think they got the sixteen square feet they wanted.

I remember what it was like to want to do some work on the house while having to pay for that house when we were young and raising kids….

A minivan pulled up.

They were so happy to have it. I was so happy to see it literally gone for good.

The leaves, crinkled and brown, have all given way to the season on my zucchini plant.

So it was a surprise to look out the window this morning and see brilliant upturned yellow on it. I went outside to check: it had! It had bloomed! How?

But once I got close enough to really see it I saw the rest of the story. Something out there in the night had likewise been delighted to find a flower and nearly all of the lower side of it had been eaten clean off, leaving just the top and the inner edges of the sides to go Ta Dahhh!

I chuckled, glad that my plant was still providing sustenance to the world out there. It didn’t have to be for me.

So. Today the wound care doctor had him come in.

He told Richard the other guy was full of it. Don’t do it. A PCC line with antibiotics was his recommendation.

(Note that PCC lines have their own infection risks.)

Richard came home going, Who’s in charge??

Me, pointing out what he knew: Doing the other is permanent.

But after a few more minutes knitting and considering the thing, I went back over to him and made a pronouncement. YOU are. It’s your body.

Okay, wound guy had then said to him, You need to go back to the Infectious Diseases guy and have him….

He saw it coming and had already come to terms with it. I didn’t and it threw me. I’d thought, we fought that back once and we’ll do it again.

The wound care guy two weeks ago had said we’re done here and took him off the antibiotics he’d been on since August.

Four days later the bone infection came back. No (over the phone when he tried to be seen again) you’re fine. Yesterday the visiting nurse called the guy and read him the riot act from our kitchen and asked my sweetie, Who’s in charge of this anyway?!

Well, he saw that guy, and the podiatrist, the family medicine doctor, and the infectious disease guy and the answer was, nobody, as far as he could tell.

So today was all the everybody elses. One appointment turned into three with just enough time for him to surprise me with a text, hurry home and grab a quick bite and me for my retina appointment and then head back to the clinic.

Where, when it was my turn, they took pictures and then waited for my surgeon.

The before and after were up. I had been looking at repeats of the same image through two years of screenings–but wow! That one was WAY worse than those had been. No wonder I was having such a hard time seeing those last few months! I’d had no idea it had come that close to tearing through the retina. I had gotten seen and had had it taken care of just in time, and the recovery was and is much easier because of it.

There’s still a bit of red, though, and he wanted me to go back to full dose on the steroid drops and then start tapering off again. But he was pleased with my progress.

Richard, though.

Suddenly he was getting estimates of one week to three months and they’ll schedule it when they schedule it and let him know.

Any travel plans are entirely up in the air right now. I don’t know how long it takes to recover from a partial toe amputation but we’re about to find out. After all this time that we’d thought we wouldn’t have to. He’s totally okay with it. I’m trying to be.

But at least it’s only part of only one toe at this point, and that is far better than it was.

We picked up his new antibiotic on the way home.

Radiology department. They took him to the exam rooms for awhile. Sent him back to me. Made him wait. Made him drink something. Made him wait. Ran him through a CAT scan.

The waiting room was very small. There were five chairs, full most of the time; the receptionist let someone take the sixth chair next to him from time to time since no one else was on duty just then. Except for when there was.

I had two hours to knit quietly.

I had put on a green turtleneck this morning, and before we’d left had decided the only gerdan I had that really went with it was the huge sunflower one. (Photo is from when I got it.) It’s kind of loud, but–why not. It might make someone’s day. So I did.

Two women came in. They were clearly mother and daughter, the ages of mine and me.

The younger woman checked her mom in and settled her in a chair in the other corner, standing next to her.

And from there she glared at me.

I considered whether to offer her my seat. But the only place I could go other than where she was standing just then was behind the door swinging open, and I cannot stand for long periods of time and it would be weird to move over close to her mom in her place. There was no other spot, there was no room.

Just then they called Richard back, so hey, that makes it easy, there you go.

She tended to her mom a moment and then returned to glaring at me. Standing. She refused to come sit next to me.

Huh. Okay, whatever.

My knitting did not distract her eyes, though the receptionist or her mom did a few times. Right in the eyes. I’d never seen her before in my life. I was the only one she glared at and that glaring was what she wanted to do with her time. It struck me as unspeakably sad. And yet her mom smiled quietly at the staff and was clearly grateful for their efforts. I was glad I had wool and wood needing my attention and distracted myself with thoughts of some future happy recipient loving that shade and softness.

Finally they were called and the mom shuffled painfully, slowly down the hall with her daughter looking out for her. Good for her.

I mentioned them to Richard on the way home. They had passed him in the hallway, turned out, with the daughter translating for her mom.

He voiced the same thought I had had, the only one that made any sense: maybe they were Russian. Maybe they have a son or brother fighting.

We do have a number of Russian ex-pats in the area.

But why, I wanted to somehow ask them, would you find fault that a stranger supports people who don’t want to live under Putin’s murderous rule when you didn’t want to either and you got out?

Many many moons ago, there was the annual December Birthday Club party (we unwrap a present we got ourselves and sing Happy Birthday To Us) where Virginia, who always got something funny, gave herself a hand mirror.

Only, when you picked it up it activated two things: a light sensor and a laugh track. (This is the closest I could find to it.)

Put it down flat, it’s silent. Pick it up to check out that wisp of hair out of place and it guffaws at your vanity. Loudly. Busted.

It was hilarious and I had to know where she’d gotten it. Alright then. So I ran down there and bought one for my dad for Christmas, because there was no one who could laugh like my dad.

How to ship it across the country, though, between the glass and the electronics.

An arriving package solved that problem: it was full of those (hated) styrofoam peanuts.

I took a plastic grocery store bag and filled it full of those peanuts and slipped the box inside and tied the top, then put that inside a larger box with other stuff for the folks with the bag safe at the center of it all.

I got comments from my folks Christmas day about how that was such a good use of those peanuts: they didn’t go flying all over the room when they opened the box, they cushioned everything while at the same time they were contained. Nice. They talked about the other stuff we’d gotten them.

But what about…? I had to know and finally asked, That bag. Did you look inside it?!

No, why would we?

Dad…

It had been tossed. It got retrieved.

And that is how I later got told that Mom and Dad threw a party and Dad snuck that mirror onto the long low (mid-century modern and all that) side cabinet to see who it would catch. Which of course it did. Thankfully the victim had a great sense of humor, and the friends of my parents I knew growing up all found out where that had come from. Busted right back.

Virginia loved that story.

And I mention all this because I got my Aftober Prize of No Particular Worth ™ from Afton today: the ever-changing annual item in celebration of having finished a project in October that everybody in our online knitting group looks forward to every year.

I opened the envelope and went oh that’s cool, I like that. Put it down and walked out of the room.

A few minutes later I walked back–and spotted what was now half-hidden in the rug. Oh wow, look at that!

I’m not going to describe it because others haven’t gotten theirs yet, but, it had been well packaged and hiding inside that envelope and then flipped out without my seeing. I almost never knew it was there.

And I laughed and laughed and missed my dad and thought of my mom (I can just picture her going Oh you didn’t at Dad when she heard that laugh track going) and of Virginia too, gone about 25 years now. Look what she started.

Thank you, Afton!

The A-fib thing when he was in the hospital: cardiology put a heart monitor on him after he got out to see how well the meds were working.

Two days later, it fell off. Just, plunk, on the floor just like that. Now what do we do??

They had a solution I’d never heard of, although it took a long wait for an operating room: an implanted monitor, good for five years of readings. About the size of the tip of a matchstick, they said.

(Can’t we just buy an Apple watch? I guess not.)

Looking at the incision tonight he said wryly, Y’know, they didn’t say whether that was a wooden matchstick or a paper one.

Get there by eight, they’d told him; we’ll have you out by about 11:00.

Last night I considered dragging the afghan there and decided emphatically not. I went stash diving. Did I find a ball of yarn for the rheumatologist I wrote about yesterday? I did not. What I found was just the one, it felt like, for the cataract surgeon. I had a few already-done Mecha hats but none had ever felt quite right and this skein in my hand demanded to be it instead. It totally was the boss of me.

In Rios. In ribbing, like for the retina guy; they’d operated together, let them be twins.

It felt so right that I didn’t even mind doing the 1×1 stuff again. I figured I wouldn’t get very far during his operation but at least I’d get some of it done. I cast on and did two rows before bed just to give it a running start.

Heavy traffic. Different town. Eight o’clock. Signed in. Waited.

They finally called him back, and once he was set up on the gurney with his pretty new bracelets they called me to come join him while they waited for the surgeon. (It always amuses me that at every surgery setup I’ve ever seen, spouses are not allowed to be there to watch the other undress for it. Ever.)

It was after eleven when a nurse pulled back the curtain and basically said, You guys still here? Let me go check on that doctor.  …Followed by, She’s almost ready. She had someone ahead of you.

Waiting…

I read a news article on my phone from time to time to give my hands a rest. But I did learn that I can knit on size 5s comfortably for longer than I can the larger sizes; I’d forgotten that.

But then it’s been a long time since I’ve done a six hour long block of almost continuous knitting.

Two more inches, then the decreases. And here I’d thought it was going to take me a week.

Eighty stitches, 1×1 ribbing throughout, Malabrigo Rios, US size 5 needles.

Last week, I was sitting in the waiting room at my cardiologist’s working on this when who should come out but my rheumatologist.

He wasn’t expecting me and didn’t see me with my mask on so I called out his name as he went by.

He spun around in delight. I introduced him to my daughter. He looked at the knitting in my hands and exclaimed, “Oh, that’s pretty! Who’s it for?”

“The doctor who operated on my retina two weeks ago,” I told him, realizing as I said it that, wait, in all these years, I’d never knit anything for *him* and I’d known him a whole lot longer.

If it occurred to him he never let on. He cheerfully said to Michelle, “If you live long enough you’re going to need two things: a cardiologist and a rheumatologist.” And then he laughed at his own joke.

But it WAS funny, because the last time I’d seen him, a year ago, he’d sent a message afterwards marveling that “After all these years, for the first time, the ANA is negative.”

ANA being antibodies to the nuclei of one’s own cells, ie the single most definitive marker for lupus.

So I’d lived long enough to, in fact, not need him–assuming that holds.

“The system is fluid,” he told me years ago when I asked if an allergic reaction now meant one forever because I had seemed to have had less of a one on an exposure, and I’d thought it always went the other way, ie getting worse each time. Curious. I’ll take it!

Anyway. So today I finished all but weaving in the ends for this other guy.

Maybe there’ll have to be an appointment made, remission or not.

Or maybe I can just drop one off at the desk in his department with a thank you for looking out for me all these years.

I’ll have to actually, y’know, decide on yarn and colors and knit one before I can start debating delivery methods.

Every day that eye is noticeably just a little better than the day before. The weird little pale volcano erupting in plumes of fast pale smoke that then fall into its center as it collapses and vanishes, haven’t seen that one today. As one friend memorably told me ages ago when I was describing a head injury, Alison: most of us have to use illicit substances for that! (To Marshall in Singapore, that line stayed behind when you moved away.)

Come to think of it, the fake fruit fly–it’s too black and too solid and way too fast and too jerky to be any floater I ever had and besides, they cleaned out the floaters–that’s gone, too. What a relief. I’d been thinking that one was surely permanent.

I hadn’t even noticed its absence till I started typing this. Double-checked. Yeah. It’s gone. Oh that is so good.

It is amazing how instantly one can take normal for granted the moment normal returns.

Now to finish that 1×1 ribbing hat. Twice the hand motions, twice the stretch, twice the time to do, but I can knit one of those with my eyes closed. Two inches to go.

After several renditions of Are you sure, given that I wouldn’t hear it and he would and he’d be having to wake up just to wake me up when it went off, I set the alarm last night for 4:45 a.m.

My plan, discussed ahead of time, was that I would get up to say goodbye and to make sure her ride was coming and if there was any problem with it, I would wake her father up all the way and we would take her to the airport: him, to drive, me, to make sure he was safe coming back and not falling asleep.

At 4:42 a.m. I dreamed a bullhorn going off right in both ears and jump-startled awake. Oh. Right. Turned off the real noise before it could start.

Hugged my kid, who just glowed, and all was well. The 36-year impromptu wool stole for Rebecca is in Boston now.

I hope all who wanted to got to go to the No Kings day today. I so badly wanted to and we were going to, but I never did fall back asleep and by the time ours started at 1:00 p.m., I just couldn’t pull it off. I was with you all in spirit and onscreen (BBC video here) since I couldn’t pull off being on scene. I was so wiped.

So how was it in your town??

He came. He tested. He verified that we had a new cord and plug, that those weren’t the burned ones (because clearly, they weren’t.)

Yup. Brand new, put in by the electrician who rewired the room after it (waving a hand at the scorch marks on the wall.) Then when he plugged it in the front of the machine went boomBOOM!

I heard the sound of a drill. He was on the floor, taking the front off the bottom of it.

He came out of there kind of shaking his head, going, The board was sparking. I have never seen that before!

Does that mean I get a new dryer.

He affirmed, It *is* under warranty. He considered a moment. Let me call my rep. I’m going to come back Monday with a board.

About 40 minutes later, the phone rang. Clearly he had talked to her and I’m guessing she had thought of one last way this might not have to be Speed Queen’s problem: had the electrician opened anything up on the machine?

No, he only replaced the cord and plug. He considered it briefly but didn’t want to mess up our warranty.

Monday, he said. See you then.

The last thing in yesterday’s busy day was an email.

When I got nowhere with Speed Queen after the first repairman was–no need to rehash–I sent a message to the dealer, figuring they would have more clout than I ever could.

There’s that three thousand dollar electrician repair bill to make clear why this matters to me, but I just want a working dryer for my warranty.

Always buy from an independent if you can. The guy wrote back, Let me talk to my SQ sales rep.

A few days later I had a referral to a new repair company and was told to tell them our dryer has a short.

Their guy is coming tomorrow.

Putting wet clothes in a metal box and pulling them out dry less than an hour later sounds insanely luxurious right now. I can’t wait. I feel like singing along with this grounds crew guy outside the elementary school. (Did the windows in yours open like that, back in the day? Mine did.)

Doorbell.

First, the plumber, who looked at the installation below the wretched refuse of the teeming tides of the kitchen sink and shook his head at whoever had set it up like that.

Yeah, I told him, we spent $40k on repairing the mistakes the remodeler left behind (like the rain that had come into overhead light fixtures here and poured out an electric socket there, for starters. That was fun) but that we didn’t know about that one.

He shopvac’ed our attempt at Drano-ing the darn thing, poured it out at the toilet, and got to work on the rest. Those pipes had to go.

While he was under there making noise…

Doorbell.

Hi! I said brightly, Are you Dotty?

She looked at me like what the ??? No, I’m Sue, as she walked in, while I was like, ??? I moved the bin of yarn over to her. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me to please get it out of her way.

Ohhhh. The home nurse who comes every two weeks to inspect the wound on his foot? (It wasn’t the nurse I remembered and they always came on Friday and this is Wednesday) so okay then sorry about that.

Because she had come sixteen minutes after Dotty had texted that she would be here in fifteen to twenty.

Right on cue:

Doorbell.

This time it WAS Dotty, and we introduced ourselves to each other. I’d been sure she couldn’t possibly want all those pounds of 2/28 merino (ie 1400 yards per meter) on cones, but she very much did and was thrilled with all of it. Alright then!

She’s a weaver but this was to be a gift for her cousin, who had looked at my photo and said, Yes please!

We got a good laugh out of each other when I tried to offer her the bin to take it home in and she groaned, I have..so..MANY, and I laughed that I did, too, that’s why I was trying to get rid of it. Fellow fiber enthusiasts: we were friends on the spot. We compromised on a trash bag and dumped it all in. She was walking down the street to her car (it was a little crowded around our driveway) and I started to run after her with one more lace weight left behind, she didn’t see me and it hadn’t been in the photo nor the list I’d sent her; I went, nah, she’s good, and went back inside.

The nurse needed cheering up.

I went out back and clipped two pomegranates off the tree. They do not give them up willingly–you have to show them who’s boss. I put a bright pink-red fruit by her, saying, That’s for you; she looked up in surprise and smiled for the first time.

The other one went to the plumber.

He finished up after several hours’ work and I asked, having waited for two days for when I could finally do this, if I could turn the dishwasher on now.

I already did, he smiled.

Good man.

Oooh. I replaced a hearing aid battery. They give a loud little tune at death but his machinery must have been louder.

The nurse stopped to say thank you for the pomegranate on her way out. I mentioned the face blindness and you could see her going, Ahh, now I get it. (It was her second time here.)

Meantime, while she and the plumber had been working, I finished the scarf rescue of the UFO. No side ribbing; my fashion consultant liked it with just the top and bottom done. Stop now.

Twist my arm.

I’ve been quietly thinking how glad I am that I dumped a large number of cinnamon sticks out by the pomegranate tree when the squirrels started showing up. It actually did keep them from stripping the fruit this year, or at least, so far. The plumber was happy for his but the nurse was the one it really made a difference to. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of it before Dotty left.

It feels so good to be able to run water in the kitchen again.

There was a glacier at the bottom of the freezer where the water dispenser had leaked; it’s been there for some time because you couldn’t get at it without going without a fridge. We’d tried previously, with two hair dryers on it full blast nonstop but it just didn’t dent that block.

I’m still on take it pretty easy mode but her time here is winding down.

And so we ate down the stuff in the fridge over several days, she moved stuff into the big freezer and then put ice packs around the little bit still in the fridge, opened the freezer door, and left it to sit overnight.

She had emptied the ice maker. I scooped the cubes up into a quart container for one last try at keeping the fridge side cold.

Then I tried putting a pan of hot water on top of the ice block. Five times. I taped the open door button closed so the light could go off. We’d slid the “Colder_____Off” to Off already. Huh. Couldn’t unplug the thing without moving the whole fridge and nobody’s back here was going to be able to do that.

There was still impressively solid ice in the morning. But surely underneath it was quietly giving way.

But the towels arranged against and below it were not soaked. At least the one on top was damp.

I tapped at the block. Nope! Wow.

At 11:03 a.m.–she laughed when I told her what time it was–I smashed at that ice once more and then gave a mighty yank to the wire drawer and it came! Freed at last! I knocked the ice out of it into the sink.

About four hours later she dumped some hot water on it to make that clump finally finally go away for good and that was that. (I was thinking, No wonder it takes a week to thaw a turkey in a fridge!)

Now we can fit dairy and dairy free ice creams in there without the twain ever meeting. Look at all that space! Organized, too!

But the real incentive was, that fridge was bought in 1994 and this was either going to prove once and for all that it and its broken shelf support here and missing cover there had to go because the fridge side just wasn’t staying cold enough–

–or it would fix that problem.

It’s been 24 hours since I put the ice cubes in to help the fridge side stay cold overnight. There was just that quart container.

I typed the above and out of sudden curiosity walked back in there and dipped my hand into it.

There was one last ice chip still floating at the top there.

They used to make them like they don’t now, didn’t they?

A potluck tonight, and the speaker afterwards was an old college classmate of mine in town for his high school reunion.

He’d built a house near his folks and his kids had grown up with ours until they’d moved away for his job. It was great to see him.

So.

Tom did a trip around the world in 72 days, ending in September, joined at different times and places by adult members of his family and extended family.

I knew I’d heard of Svalbard somehow but I had to look it up afterwards: it’s between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole, and he described a warning sign saying Do Not Go Past This Point Unarmed.

Very few people live in that large area, it’s mostly tourism, mining, and research.

One resident told him, the polar bears ate a guy two years ago. And four years ago.

(So by that, we’re about due, right…) So he asked the guy, Have you ever seen a polar bear?

No! And I don’t want to!

It was noted that they do outnumber the human population there and that they, along with tigers and crocodiles, are the only apex predators who actively hunt humans, and that if you see a low-lying rock there might be one behind it hoping you walk by. They’re willing to wait. Take your time.

He and his nephews climbed an icy mountain there in a storm. Tom’s advice afterwards was, Don’t.

Turns out Svalbard is where the famous Norwegian Seed Vault is. Ah, that’s why I knew the name.