Someone playing with his best friend…

And two hats that need to go in the mail in the morning, Malabrigo Mecha on the left and baby alpaca on the right, a little extended Christmas in a box (after I run those ends in).

Assuming I don’t come down with the flu like my sweetie did Friday morning (yes, that morning, after the travel and exposure and the stress and the worry and the late-night messages.)  And if I do, well, those hats will get out there in their own good time, then, but I think I simply need a good night’s sleep.

Meantime, a Happy New Year to all, and may 2018 brighten our hopes and strengthen our compassion.

Photo: my father-in-law at his granddaughter’s wedding last summer.

Now that the grandson in Chile has gotten the word I can share the story.

Christmas day, my husband called his father across the country to wish him a merry one. As one does. To his great surprise, his dad was only able to get out a few sentences and then gave out and ended the call.

Dad?!!

Richard immediately called his brother, whom Dad was staying with for the holiday, and it turned out he’d been trying to talk Dad into going to the ER. But that was the last place Dad wanted to spend Christmas in.

The next day he simply took him in.

There was some hope of recovery that first day and maybe even the next, and Richard wanted his father to be allowed to make the decision whether he wanted him to fly in to see him in that condition: autonomy is a thing too easily taken away from the elderly. I wanted to book the ticket like right now and he wanted to honor his dad’s wishes whatever they might be and we both struggled over which was the most right way to look at the situation when, as the far-away kids, we knew the least.

You know when the phone rings at 2 a.m. your sister-in-law’s time it was not good news. But he was still with us.

Meantime, I confessed my dilemma to the good woman at University Electric that afternoon as she wrote up the sale and she moved us up in the queue and got that washing machine delivered the next day. (I went back today to buy an extended warranty and so I could tell her in person what a great job her installer had done. She was very happy and proud of him to hear that–but, she wanted to know, how was my father-in-law?)

Oh honey. Thank you. But…

Richard’s sister had called again in the dark hours our time yesterday morning: Dad had slipped away.

He had missed his wife. He had missed his daughter who died of cancer at 48. He was a good man and a funny man and I will forever remember as a kid asking my mom what that word meant when my father declared of his old friend, “He’s the most gregarious man I know!” (The most like Greg? Greg who?)

While Dad seemed past the point of being able to respond, his son-in-law at his bedside named each of Dad’s children and grandchildren by name and told him they loved him.

Spencer told us that when he said Mathias’s name, for the first time, Dad smiled. (Photo: Mathias’s first Christmas, playing with the box.)

That is a gift to my sweet grandson to carry forward for the rest of his life. I am so glad my daughter and her family made the trip from Alaska recently to let her Grampa meet her baby boy. While they still could. Because you never know.

The University Electric people not only delivered my washing machine but rather than just dump it and run, one of them checked the room’s outtake, pronounced it smaller than normal (yeah, we had a contractor on the remodel who cut a lot of corners, I’ve heard that line before on other things–we had to replace all the gas and water lines the guy did. Major $) and he was concerned that the drain hose might lift out from the water pressure because of how fast that machine rotates.

He took the time to let the water fill up and then started it spinning.

See that? How it went up?

I did indeed. (I didn’t tell him I had memories of my mom’s machine, when I was a kid, sometimes working itself loose and spraying the room with soapy water. Let’s not.)

He took the black nozzle-ish piece off to make the end smaller and tested it again. No lift–that hose went much farther down in and it stayed down in. He was satisfied and assured me it was how it should be now and that I would have no problems with it.

I paid for delivery and got delivery and plumbing trouble-shooting and a correct installation. I have not only found my washer, I have found my dealer for all future major appliances. I like these guys. And I’ve waited a long time to be able to say that.

A few hours later, I was talking to friends at a wedding reception. And one of them said, So if I want this machine I have to go buy it–tomorrow, right?

Since we don’t shop on Sundays, my answer to him was, Yes.

He just might.

On the list of things that suddenly really don’t matter, but still need doing, and knowing I would regret it for twenty or thirty years if I didn’t get to it before the January 1st cut-off when they get taken off the market: I did, I found a local place that still stocked it. There was even a slight discount on the closeout. I bought my all-metal-parts, all-mechanical-controls, no-electronics Speed Queen washer this afternoon, this one. (Time.com’s a fan.)

Tomorrow the new one will be installed and the old one will go.

Our new Speed Queen washing machine will probably last us the rest of our lives.

And we are home. So much to tell. This isn’t one of Richard’s shots of Elon Musk’s Space X launch, it’s the one I took several minutes later. We were 300 miles south of where it took off and it still took up a huge chunk of the sky (this was the small part).

We said goodbye to our son John at the airport as we went our separate ways tonight. Same airline, different gates, our baggage checked in by different agents.

Arriving home, my smaller bag (thankfully mostly empty) was AWOL. He called just a few minutes ago to say that while he was waiting and waiting and waiting for his big bag (just like we had just done), lo and behold, mine, with our tag and name and airport on it, had shown up instead and he’d recognized it. Had his shown up first of course he would have been long gone.

He needs his a lot more than I needed mine. We’re holding out hope–hey, it worked for the two of us; meantime, that’s one $50 Southwest voucher for us when we retrieve ours at the airport when it gets in instead of making them deliver it.

The most surprising moment of the trip happened at church: I saw an old friend who with his family (a few years younger than ours) had moved out of our ward probably twenty years ago.

I knew that his wife had been very ill of late. I knew she had been in a coma for some time with her survival by no means certain–but I had heard nothing since and I didn’t quite know how to ask.

I asked how she was–and he, beaming, motioned, She’s right here!

Oh. My. Goodness!!!

Hale and hearty and enjoying a family reunion, just like we were. I tell you. That was one great moment.

Of many.

Washing machines. So here’s what I’ve found so far.

There’s a reason the newer HE machines take an hour to clean your clothes: the enzymes in their detergents take up to an hour to clean away the soiled bits. If the machines work faster than that and your clothes come out still dirty, guess who gets the blame? Manufacturers don’t believe consumers pre-treat anything anymore and they build them on that assumption and if that means you get stuck waiting forever, oh well.

Speed Queen is the only brand still making machines with all-metal parts built to last decades; they wash the clothes, as the name implies, fairly quickly–and well–and with no electronics to go bad.

For about one more week. If you can find them. I found myself reading through pages and pages of discussion on the subject and stumbled across the statement by one reviewer that the government was requiring electronics by the end of the year.

Say what? How did that make sense?

So I called Speed Queen and got tossed to a technical-side guy there with a charming Midwestern accent who talked up the new model coming out and the electric parts behind the knobs now.

Electric? Are we meaning electronics here? I had to pin him down a bit: So are there going to be motherboards? (Having been quoted over $800 plus labor on a stove, on an oven, then on the other oven, all in upper-end major appliances under six years old. I am so done with that.)

He didn’t quite want to say yes, but, yes–and then he explained. You can set the machine to the size load you want, but the government doesn’t believe you won’t do anything but set it at extra large every time so they’re requiring sensors that automatically set the water level to match the level of the clothes. So, yes, he said, that reviewer was right: the old mechanical-only knob machines are only allowed to be sold through the end of this year.

If you can find one, he warned.

Suddenly my ability to face shelling out the kind of money those cost just shot way up. There’s a reason washing-machine sales are up so high and it ain’t quality in the other brands.

The rest of it is all still all-metal parts, he assured me.

I had one other question, the big sticking point for me: I needed a machine that could spin out hand washed woolens without spraying water on them; could theirs do that?

Only on one of the cycles, he said.

I only need one. Cool. Thank you so much.

Since I hung up the phone, I’ve had to wonder: Speed Queen had a twenty-year warranty on those all-mechanical machines a few years ago, while other manufacturers were cutting more and more corners and designing theirs to die at five or six years so you’d have to replace them. They were even discontinuing parts, said another person on that same thread, for not-much-older machines so you couldn’t keep fixing them.

I live in California. I know how to conserve water. Speed Queens were dunned for using too much, but someone in that thread actually measured the water going into the spray function of an HE machine and found it used about the same amount.

What I’m thinking is, someone doesn’t like the competition that comes when lots of people like me (and that’s probably most of us by now) want a machine without the stinking failing motherboards anymore. I wonder how much their CEOs donated to which members of Congress to shut down their competition?*

Because you know this Congress is absolutely capable of doing that.

Meantime, Speed Queen is putting their electronic ones through the ringer to try to make them as reliable as the old reliable. They have a reputation to maintain.

A klieg-light heads-up to the other major-appliance makers: you, too, could grab away a fanatically grateful share of the market if you made things that didn’t break down constantly. Like you used to.

*(Edited to add, turns out Rep. Upton of Michigan is an heir to the Whirlpool fortune. No surprise.)

I just spent some of my blog-writing time reading the owner’s manual of the Speed Queen washing machine which I do not yet own. I’m only interested in the mechanical-control models, despite the company’s heavy pushing of the electronic ones; one reviewer says rumors are that they want to discontinue the plain but enduring knob-only type. I’m thinking maybe I should simply go get mine while I can.

Washing machine sales are up 35% in five years and you know what? There’s a reason for that. Less competition, more corner-cutting, and a whole lot of unhappy customers, and the grandson of the Whirlpool founder in Congress (hello Rep. Upton in Michigan) is making himself richer with the push towards tariffs on other brands.

The American-made Speed Queens cost more up front but they cost a lot less over time. Plus our electricity bill would go down with the clothes needing a lot less time in the dryer, any dryer.

If our repairman doesn’t find a used motor soon to justify keeping our Whirlpool limping along, there’s no point in throwing more money at it, and maybe not even if he does if it means losing out on my chance to get something I know could last as long as either one of us.

For now, I can only do half loads spaced widely apart.

One big chunk of change and then done. It’ll probably have to happen soon.

(On the phone) Did I work for you before?

You fixed my hot water heater, yes.

Bernie came. Bernie worked hard. Bernie cut roots. Bernie opened up that sewer line and he had us flush the toilets a bunch of times, and then again, to prove things were as they should be now. But Bernie did not have time right now to look at that dripping tap because he had four solid days’ worth of customers waiting on him and some had Christmas guests coming–he needed to git.

He did not make a point of saying, but I squeezed you in because you couldn’t use any water and that stinks and the weekend is coming right at you. It was true, but he is not a man who needs to fish for compliments.

And in the time it took me to go across the house after he left, the laundry and the dishwasher were starting to catch up on their jobs.

I was never so happy to pay a plumber bill.

I baked Phyl and Lee a chocolate torte yesterday and didn’t manage to finish glazing it with the ganache until just after they’d shown up at our doorstep last night–with a surprise gift from Prolific Oven with “Happy Birthday Alison” on it. What comes around…

We stopped by and visited Betty today, and if she didn’t remember who I was this time she sure didn’t let on. Fifteen or twenty minutes was enough, she was starting to fade, but she wished me a happy birthday and I wished her one, too, a few days before her 93d. Richard asked her her favorite Christmas carol and then sang it, with me coming in and out (mostly out) depending on whether I could remember the next lines or not–it wasn’t one I knew well. His was a voice of angelic intention.

Came home, started a half-load of laundry, all we dare do till that machine is repaired or replaced–and there was a gurgle in the bathtub. Did you hear that? He knew. It took me a moment longer.

It wasn’t just one bathroom, either. Don’t turn on that dishwasher.

We have to decide which plumber to call in the morning, fully aware that we were once given a $7000 estimate on ripping up the front yard for the complete sewer line do-over that has been coming for some time.

Yeah… But our daughter sent us video of the baby’s first crawling, we got to FaceTime with him yesterday and this time he knew exactly who those people on the screen talking to him were, we got to likewise see the grandkids in San Diego across the electrons and Parker, who is somehow already turning seven next week, proudly played Hark How The Bells for us (with two hands!) on the piano.

And life is pretty darn sweet.

Good times, good friends, a good day, good night.

It’s all Costco’s fault that we didn’t wait.

Richard actually went there on a Saturday in December, grocery list in hand. Brave man.

Boy did he come home with a grin. They’d goofed and forgotten to change the “fresh fryer legs” on the ticker thingy to the type of thick slab of beef that they slapped the next label on as they weighed it–nearly four pounds, yes, but under five dollars?

He asked at checkout to be sure because, um, hey guys, and the clerk called the manager over because that was the protocol but she already knew what the answer was: this was their mistake and his good luck.

Then she admitted that one had come through like that yesterday–and it was prime rib.

The mind, it boggles.

So. Back on Black Friday, we were at Sam’s house, of course, and she happened to have an Instant Pot, which has been the big fad of a kitchen gadget of the last year or two; I asked her what she thought of hers.

She LOVED her 6 quart. Uses it all the time.

Amazon was selling the 8 qt cheap for the day…

I looked at hers and we debated, bigger than that? No. Too big, too much counter space, there’s just the two of us at our house; it was a shame the one her size was at full price–but even that might be a bit much for us. I had no experience with them and I just didn’t know.

So she and Michelle drove me to Target so I could check out the 3 quart mini version in person (which they happened to have on sale, even if I didn’t want to schlep it through airports.) That I can definitely do, sure, I told them, looks good. It would be great for throwing dinner into while I drive off to get Richard from work in the evenings. I could time things and then have them kept warm if we ran late.

I fished through my purse on the very off chance that…

I did! I had them!

I’m in a lupus study at UCSF that once every year has me on the phone answering questions for about 75 minutes, and in response they’ve sent me small gift cards to Target the last two years. I’d never used them.

The upshot is that we ordered that Mini Instant Pot from them and it cost a grand total of $11 including shipping and taxes.

Sooo… Then the question was, when do we open it? What label do we put to this thing? Birthday? Christmas? And there it sat.

Till Richard came home with that roast today that would in no way fit into our suddenly-tiny toy. Well, alright then, and he whacked it in half and we can try two different recipes with it.

We read through the instructions. We prewashed the tub. We ran a steam cycle to test it like they say, and then we started that first pot roast.

Did I remember the part about putting the carrots and potatoes in at the last ten minutes? I did not. In with the seared meat they went.

Ten minutes later, the kitchen was already started to smell like the Sunday afternoons of my childhood.

Twenty-six minutes left. Not that I’m counting or anything. (I hopped up to check just now and Richard instantly wanted to know, too.)

Proofread post. Edit. Get up and check. Twelve minutes.

Oh wait–that should have been ten more minutes on that recipe oops I read it wrong, but we didn’t figure out how to add more time till after we’d already pronounced it good enough and dug in. And it was already tender enough, although next time it will be more so.

Yeah. I think we’re going to like this gadget. Band, meet wagon.

A plea was sent to our church from another one for help filling the requests of some recent refugees. There is a local drop-off point.

Reading through the items, so many of them so basic, reminded me of one of the Sonoma fire survivors describing being at the store in a daze: he needed nothing. He needed everything.

It is sobering how a list like that makes one realize just how much we have.

Usually one sees requests for money as the most effective way of getting people what they want (not to mention the autonomy of being allowed to make choices despite their poverty), but in this case they’d put out into the world what specifics they felt would be most helpful in their personal circumstances. The age and gender of each recipient was listed.

That pea coat that never quite was right on me color-wise and simply sat there unworn–it could warm someone who’s actually cold, and it was in the size requested. Those cotton sheets on closeout we never opened because they turned out not to be deep enough for the mattress–they’re brand new and could offer someone else a good night’s sleep. That boiled-wool sweater, unworn but too good for Goodwilling it and risking its going into a landfill. Someone could love it just as much as I’d once hoped I would. Stuff that was just stuff to us was actually needed just as much as we needed someone who would actually want it and here was a rare chance to know where to bring it.

When, really, one wants to simply throw the doors open and say take whatever you need and then let’s sit down to dinner together (teach me how to cook like you!) to celebrate our good fortune that we’ve found each other.

To life!

What I didn’t mention yesterday was that at one point as I helped hold the washing machine tilted back while Mike worked, my foot started to slip out from under me while his hand and the edge of his head were or at least had been underneath that thing. I gasped, “Watch out!” as I grabbed hard at it in horror.

At the time, I caught it, he caught it with his other hand, nothing happened and phew, that was close. So glad he was okay! Next time let’s prop it up with something, okay? That was too close.

It took me awhile to put that together with the consequences.

Now, I have a very mild case of scoliosis, I’ve been rear-ended four times, I know the exercises one does for one’s back and that sometimes it’s just going to hurt  for awhile.

But this was something altogether new. I tried to carefully get up this morning and found myself on the floor unable to move whatsoever.  Pain I could push through, but the muscles on the right utterly refused to support my weight and I was frozen on the floor just as I’d landed, immobile. Uncross the feet? Can’t. Crawl to where I could pull myself up, Mathias-style? Not possible. They were on strike.

Y’know, this could make for a very long day down here. Bathroom. Ileostomy dressing change morning. I don’t ask for much but those were non-negotiable no matter what I thought about it.

Richard heard me, woke up, and came immediately to the rescue.

Eight years ago, I took one single Tylenol and remember it. The big Crohn’s flare that January left lesions on my liver, so on general principles I don’t touch the stuff even though it’s the only painkiller I can take.

He offered me two, from a new bottle he’d recently bought just in case–he’d just had a feeling I might need them sometime after all–and I was very glad to have them. I’d had no idea we had any. He got me an icepack. He talked me into taking the nap that I needed after last night.

The day improved, definitely. But normal looks a long way off.

I figured I was allowed one good whine about it and this is it. Meantime, my husband’s a peach.

Mike-the-repairman came. First thing he did was he tried turning on the washing machine.

Dang if the thing didn’t turn right on. I was gobsmacked. I had tried… and I’d come back later and had tried again, and …!

He asked a few questions and since I was the one who’d been using it and the space in there was tight, Richard, who’s on vacation, went back across the house to what he was doing.

Mike got down and looked at it from underneath while he and I both held it up out of his way a bit. (I had emptied the water out earlier as best I could, cupful by cupful into about ten small-dyepot loads in case he had to pull the thing out. It was a surprisingly lot.)

The motor was not dead but it was on its way out. Do small loads, he said, don’t do them back to back like when it died, let the thing cool down. A new motor would cost a couple hundred–he was going to see if he could find us a used one.

And with that he left us with a machine working for now and refused to let us pay him anything yet.

Quite to my surprise my back went on full-on strike the next time I tried to bend over. I had a doctor’s appointment to get to. Richard offered to drive me, good man that he is, and he dropped me off and then went off to check on Betty. That had not been in today’s plans but it suddenly made sense, and that was worth a day’s muscle twinges for sure and it made it feel okay.

Meaning, as Rachel Remen writes (in one of my all-time favorite books), is the language of the soul.

And it has an alphabet all its own.

The repairman will be here in the morning.

Meantime, a friend who’s turning 93 this month had a small stroke this week along with some cardiac funkiness and just returned to her assisted-living facility today from the hospital. She’s been blind from birth, her hearing’s going, and although she remembers Richard–he once worked for a company that developed the software that read her her longtime computer, and for years she would call him as a friend for help about it, which he was glad to do–but she no longer remembers me. So when we found there were no parking spaces for blocks around and that the long walk in the sun was going to be a hazard to my own health, Richard hopped out to go visit her while I drove over to the chocolate shop. It seemed the best thing to do at that point; in her disorientation, I wasn’t sure my presence would be a comfort anyway.

I’m glad he got there so soon after she was discharged: he was able to find out what bothered her. The AL staff had moved her bed while she’d been away, not enough that a seeing person would be bothered but she could no longer find her computer nor her things nor was she capable of walking to go search for them. He got the staff to let the bed be moved back. A few feet–and having time to listen–made all the difference to her.

The doctor came by, and quietly told him that everything he could say that could help her reconnect to her memories would help. Betty had lived in Alaska decades ago, so, Richard told her about our Thanksgiving in Anchorage with our baby grandson and got her reliving the days.

She worried whether her seeing-eye dog, naming one of the ones she’d had over the years, had been fed well enough while she’d been away.

He’s been gone for several years.

I, meantime, got to go see Timothy and Adams, both. It had been awhile and I had missed them and it was a comfort to see them. The 65% hot chocolate? Well, yeah, I’d missed that, too, sure.

Richard texted that he hoped I’d ordered him one, too.

I grinned at my phone. 85% dark, just how you like it, coming right up.

We waved to each other as he spotted the car across the street from the nursing home again and we discussed as we drove off how we could best help her next. From his description, I wasn’t sure how many more nexts there would be, and he wasn’t sure, either.

And yet.

“Betty’s a tough old bird,” I pronounced, and he agreed strongly. He told me then that she had wondered herself if things were coming to an end now.

He’d told her, “You’re here as long as you want to be, Betty. And we’re with you.”