I’m so tired let’s see if I can proofread this right. Happy tired.

Their goofs meant I totally won. Not enough other people could find them, I think.

We had this one spot behind the plum tree that was a perfect space, now that the weed trees were gone, for another, specifically a bigger tree than some of the others I’ve put in. Not being in a raised bed meant that much more allowable height, and it likely wouldn’t shade the solar there even if it got out of hand (which it won’t.) And the neighbor on the other side of the fence there had once so hoped out loud that we would plant a peach near enough to reach over her side a bit.

If we put one there it could go that far but it wouldn’t have to–perfect.

And I could plant a standard size without having to look for a semi-dwarf.

The only problem, and the thing that had stopped me previously, was the roots I would have to deal with that would surely be left over from those weed trees.

I only considered it because I’d fallen in love with a gorgeous specimen of an Indian Free peach two weeks ago, the last one at that nursery, and by the time we decided that yeah, we really did want it it was long gone and from every other retailer I called, too. Bare root and potted both, sold out.

That’s what happens when Dave Wilson, the grower, describes it as the all-time best-tasting peach they know of.

And: Indian Free (developed and named by Thomas Jefferson) does not get peach leaf curl disease. In our foggy area, this is huge. It produces in September and October, long after my others are done for the year. The peaches are tart and presumably, like my Yellow Transparent apples, uninviting to squirrels until full ripeness–at which point, suddenly, wow. The peaches, anyway.

Once we’d agreed on it I didn’t want to lose a year’s growth to having to wait. One last try. I clicked on Where To Buy for the variety one more time this morning, even though I hadn’t found anything at all within three hours and I’d spent an hour and a half on the phone yesterday asking.

But I’d wondered about this one retailer I hadn’t called–because clicking from Dave Wilson to ProBuild had been a complete bust, a page that said they sold building (only) materials. The end. Well then why…?

How about if we try clicking “handout”? For another retailer, that had been a dead link so I’d ignored them all but let’s try it.

Turns out ProBuild does have a nursery on the side with a list of what they stock but the page is not on their site but on Dave Wilson’s instead. Huh.

Indian Free. There you go.

I called them.

Sure, we have five! Bare root. Do you want us to reserve you one?

I told them nah, I’ll be right there–well, as in, coming from… Thinking, it would only be about an hour, right? I figured I was safe and I wanted to pick it out myself. (I had to pick up the dishwasher part on the way. It was an hour and a half.)

Those who have driven the steeply twisty Highway 17 over the mountains with slow trucks and heavy traffic and quickly-alternating vivid sunshine and dark under the redwoods will understand when I say I felt like I had to pry each deathgrip finger off the steering wheel when I got there, but I got there.

More or less. There was no sign with that street number. There was no sign that said ProBuild. I saw a nursery, but I wanted the one I’d talked to and I did not want to make that return drive in rush hour traffic. I figured I just hadn’t gotten there yet. (Wait! Is that Golden Fleece?! Gunilla! It was, or at least their old place, but I did not dare take the time to find out.) I kept on going, but no, the numbers were going the wrong way. Turning back, it really was San Lorenzo Nursery at 235 River over there. No sign of the word ProBuild anywhere, not even on the construction-supplies place next door.

I looked around a bit and asked for help, and when I explained the lupus/I need to stay out of the sun thing, the guy was wonderfully helpful.

I saw four. (Come to think of it now as I write, maybe they’d put one aside for me over in the area marked Holding after all–I’d better let them know I already got it.) I picked out the one with the thickest trunk. “There aren’t any on Citation rootstock, right?” (Semi-dwarfing.)

“No,” he apologized.

I hadn’t expected one; “They didn’t make any this year, though, I don’t think.” (He agreed, with a look on his face of oh, so this lady knows!)

They hadn’t been planted in paper pots as the season had gone on. The price hadn’t been quadrupled. There was a long sand and soil bed that he pulled the one out of for me and then he wrapped up the bare roots in plastic for the drive home. The tree was still dormant. This was good.

$19.95 and no tax on food-producing plants. Twenty bucks for a lifetime of perfect fall fruit, and from a really nice group of people.

I drove back over 17 with the tree going from the far back to partly into the passenger side next to me. I knew now where the mudslide had been, where the lanes were going to be narrowed. I was in no hurry. (Yank that wheel lady and you’ll have a faceful of twigs.)

UV levels went down to 1 and it was time to start.

I hit root. Root. Another root. Chipping away at the biggest there was a sudden smell of eucalyptus. There were earthworms doing their best at it all. I pulled one way back, then got sensible and got out the clippers and got rid of it.

I ran off to get Richard. And back home again. We were losing sun time fast and you don’t leave a bare root tree drying out.

In the end I did my best and simply straddled it over the chipped-away big root down there in the dirt, knowing it was dead and this was alive and the peach would win. Not perfect but I’d made a pretty darn good big hole and it would do. I mixed in soil amendment and raised the level around the trunk to just so high below the graft point like I’d seen the pros do.

I stepped back and looked and it was suddenly just overwhelmingly gorgeous. That’s a big, healthy tree. I can’t wait.

I stopped by the local nursery today and they told me the back wall along the fence is where they kept their bamboo stakes. Six feet tall, a set of six, seven bucks. Hey.

And so the frost cover won’t rest against the mango tree leaves anymore–and I spent a fair amount of time up on my tiptoes trying to get that thing over those stakes and back down firmly to the ground all around.

With all that extra space above the tree to heat up, so far at four hours after sundown there’s only a ten degree difference between the outside temp and underneath that canopy, but unless we have another severe cold snap that should be enough and I can always take them back down again while the tree’s this small.

And I won’t accidentally break off the tiny beginning of a leaf at the tippy top while taking the cover off in the mornings now. I know, I know–that one hurt, enough to get me off my duff and to go track down those stakes. Thank you all for the suggestions.

Oh, and on a side note? My friends Mel and Kris are going to be at Stitches West again this year. YES! Buy yourself some fine pottery (I’ll bet they’ll have yarn bowls) and tell’em I said hi. I put in a special request for rice bowls with extra high sides, perfect for berries and ice cream. Save me some.

Rita: here (at the end) and especially here, where I knew in that moment that I might well never see her again. But I felt I was seeing her with all essence of strangerhood stripped away and she me and somehow it was enough.

I hadn’t seen her since then. Last Sunday I found myself thinking of my old friend. She’d been one of the patients who’d founded our lupus support group way back in the ’70’s, reaching out to others, putting an ad in the paper and seeing who might show up, offering, Let’s talk. She’d been a young mother when she got hit with it with kidney failure, bam, right out the gate.

She was middle aged and I was a young mother myself when I joined the group shortly after diagnosis, and in my first year or two got my first echocardiogram and saw my heart on a screen, had my first EEG, and briefly had kidney failure myself. I held on tight to the hope she offered and I wanted to be as kind and as thoughtful and reflective as she was some day when I grew up. And I simply wanted to get to be her age.

I am where she was then, in surprisingly decent shape all things considered, and I do now what she did: I come to those meetings to give others the hope I had so much needed.

I picked up the local section of the paper and flipped to the back.

I admitted to myself that I was looking to see if her obituary might be in there. Not something I’d done before nor that I wanted to find, just, it seemed the thing to do. Nope, no sign of one.

The emails came in last night and today. I guess I’m not the only one in the group who’d been thinking of her–two others had tried to call her.

Turns out they had found a tumor that explained why eating had become so hard and she had opted to simply observe where this new adventure might take her as it chose. It was a thing to learn, not fear.

She left us a little over a week ago, and I like to think she was letting us know. She was ninety-two or three, not sure when her birthday was.

I still want to get to be her age. And because of her I can see that I might.

It seems we will have room for yet more fruit trees, with a call in to Chris at Shady Tree for a bid on two more weed ones that are shading the solar panels (and my mandarin and mango. Richard stood by the Page with a UV meter and it read zero at 2 pm, thus the yellowing leaves and my willingness to let a little more bird habitat disappear for a few years till the new catches up.) Montmorency? Lorings at last? Let the plotting commence.

And then.

We were at Costco, looking at a monster package of cherries. Rainiers–I’d like to try them, but that was a month’s supply. Now it might have been different had they looked like they hadn’t just traveled a long way over a long time and then been left out unrefrigerated, but as he wondered how we could eat them all it yanked my thoughts to our Stella cherry, to all our fruit trees as they grow up. That box (which we did not buy) potentially represented only a few branches’ worth.

For a brief instant the sheer volume to come overwhelmed. Countered instantly by, but see the difference is that we’ll be eating and freezing however much we want and then giving just-picked totally ripe homegrown to all comers, and surely there will be no shortage of those. A sun-warmed, dripping-ripe full-flavor peach is hardly the proverbial and much-maligned foundling zucchinis abandoned on doorsteps in the dead of the night. ( A side note: make zucchini bread, using butter, brown sugar, baking powder not soda, and, the most important part, substituting ground pecans for a quarter to a third of the flour. That will justify any zucchini planting you might ever do.)

And the picking of that fruit means this necessarily sun-deprived lupus patient will have reason to be outside at dusk for many a day, getting some badly-coveted fresh air and the satisfaction of doing good in the process. It’s like you cast on and then the trees do all the knitting for you.

Cherry on, then.

If I say it was a crabfest it’ll sound totally wrong–people were totally good to each other.  It’s a Bay Area tradition to serve newly-caught Dungeness off the docks to celebrate the new year. The (non-sun-avoidant members of the) groom’s family tried providing some of those themselves, the Texas contingent adventuring for local flavor while they’re here, but Grampa told me the sea lions got most of the bait. The fishermen didn’t mind helping out, I’m sure.

There’s a whole lot more than a calendar becoming new. Two families together, the young and the old and the in-betweens. A rehearsal dinner and almost done.

The father of the bride smiled warmly as he told me, See you tomorrow!

Got some bad guys and some good guys for you today.

Back in September, when I caught the flu with all the autoimmune flaring that went with, I was barfing nonstop from the Crohn’s. The lupus was going nuts, too, my blood pressure was tanking, and I needed IV fluids, fast, just to start. (There would be chest and abdominal x-rays too.)

There were a lot of other people around with early-season flu, too, but for whatever the reason, when we called my doctor her nurse emphatically told my husband not to take me to Urgent Care but rather straight to the ER.

This was not a decision made by us. She insisted. She said if we went to Urgent Care they would simply send us over to Stanford, and we knew what the co-pays on the ambulance they would insist on would be, not to mention it would tie up that ambulance unnecessarily.

Turns out Anthem Blue Cross requires in their fine print that you verify with each health care provider before seeing them each time that they are still in contract with Anthem. Doesn’t matter if they were in-network for all the years you’ve had a policy with them, they reserved the right to yank that at any time. Doesn’t matter if you’re in an emergency with no capability of sitting on hold on the phone for two hours. Etc.

Now, by the contract we’d signed at open enrollment, if you go out-of-network in an emergency they’re still supposed to pay such a percentage and even though it’s less, it’s still a substantial amount.

Anthem and Stanford were in a contract dispute. Anthem never notified us in any way, not so much as an email, nor by their terms do they have to, and our trip to that ER was a life-and-death emergency with my already-very-low blood pressure. As far as I’ve been able to tell since, that day we had and we still have no in-contract hospital to divert to, either; I could be wrong on that but Anthem certainly hasn’t offered us any information to the contrary.

So we are paying for insurance to cover things they will not cover despite selling us a policy on the grounds that they would. I’d call that fraud, myself.

So, out of network, painful, but I thought we’d be out about a grand. Someone on the phone at one point said three. Ouch. But we waited for a bill. And waited. And waited, while the two sides hashed it out.

We got a notice finally last week from Anthem, and a day or two later a letter from Stanford.

And this is what Anthem said:

Not.

Covered.

Except this one unclear thing here that was probably that IV and only that IV, or maybe one individual doctor they were not in dispute with. But whatever, so, one thousand paid towards the claim and that was all it was going to be. “Your responsibility”:

Twelve thousand nine hundred ninety-nine dollars.

Breathe.

Hello? Out of network percentages, at least? How can they…?!

They don’t care.

Then came a letter from Stanford Hospital.

And they said, It is not your fault that we and Anthem Blue Cross are currently out of contract, and your health is more important. We don’t want you to be afraid to get medical care when you need it.

They said they will only charge us what our co-pays would have been had everything been as we expected when we went in there, as if all prior contracts had been in full force.

Multiply that times the whatever number of patients, given that Anthem covers something like a third of all the people in California, and what their bills could be and that Anthem should legitimately be covering and refuses to… Staggering. Just staggering.

I just felt (and these words look so faint on the page compared to how I feel) that Stanford deserves my praise and my thanks as loudly and as publicly as I can offer them.

Okay, y’all, I am writing this down for me. Not for you–shoo, run along, go read the ad for the drunk kleptomaniac pet kangaroo that beat a burglar senseless (but didn’t run up the home insurance rates because it wasn’t dogbiting!) and that needs a new good home. Cheap! But only to a serious animal lover! Steel wallboard a plus.

Me, I’ll sit here quietly transcribing this for the ages. My ages. Because, as she reminded me while trying not to quite say it, they’ll be coming down on my head in no time, but meantime…

Sunday School was going on and two people were in that room who were clearly sick–so I quickly excused myself and sat down around the corner instead on the steps to the stage, glad for my knitting. I don’t like the sense of exile; I don’t like the germs; I do like staying alive. Should I have been reading scriptures to be a good example while being a bad example to the random eight-year-old going by? Ya wanna make something out of it?

Okay, then, in baby alpaca/merino/silk it is, the essence of softness in heathery royal blue, and I sought comfort in pretty yarn and good intentions of the season. (Hey, Morgan, now that I’ve already started this, what are your girls’ favorite colors?)

MJ, just a little younger than my mom and not in class just then either, came up to me.

“Have you been painted?”

Doubletake. Have I what? Surely I didn’t hear that one right?

She repeated, “Have you been photographed or painted?”

Total head tilt.

“Because you’re gorgeous.” I looked around to the other side to see who she was talking to, and I meant that.

So did she.

She asked me how old was I going to be next month? (We’re fellow December babies.) She described a little of what aging does to one’s face; I told her I’d had skin cancer off the top of my head and in the surgery had accidentally lost my grandma eyes, but I assured her I had had grandma eyes and said with a grin that I missed them.

“They’ll come back,” she nodded, and said I had it just right right now and someone needed to photograph or better yet paint me as I am. Right now, at the peak of perfection, basically.

This from the most-original-60’s-version-Earth Mother I have ever had the great pleasure to know. I so was not expecting a conversation like this. She was quite serious. (It dawns on me at last, proofreading this, that her late husband had been a serious photographer. The connection clicks: she was missing him a lot today after spending Thanksgiving with family with him absent and I didn’t catch it in time to remember him to her. I will now.)

I told her helpfully that my sister Anne was a professional water color artist, and with that she was satisfied. “Have them take lots of pictures,” she counseled me one last time before she headed for Sunday School, for Anne to work from or for my grandkids to marvel over later or to convince me or what I wasn’t entirely sure.

That stupid hair I was fussing over this morning while wishing I were way better at fussing with it?

For today, it totally would do.

Okay, y’all can come back now, I’ve put the vanity mirror down. Did anybody snatch up that kangaroo offer?

Celebrated Small Business Saturday at Cottage Yarns and Purlescence. Two 100 g skeins of Cascade cabled baby alpaca/merino for a grand sum of $5.77 from the latter’s sale table, with that AmEx promotion? Yes please.

Three’s the magic number of shops, so from there we celebrated at Timothy Adams for hot chocolate and truffles. We tried first to buy outdoor heating cables from the local plumbing supply place but no such luck, so, the chocolatiers win.

And then, having been up early yesterday and then up way late for an airport pickup and then a busy day today, I suddenly crashed. I was trying to do all. the. things. but admitted how hard it was catching up to me and Richard told me to go put my feet up. Take a rest. Sit. Now.

And that is why the baby hat is (finally) done. The next one will be far faster because now I actually know what it looks like when I’m done with that particular doodle idea. And I’m tired enough that I didn’t realize till I hit publish that I hadn’t even taken the thing’s picture (she edited).

It almost matches the yarn I bought today to make a baby dress with–close enough to look, rather, like I just missed.

So I will have to make a new hat and that new dress and it will all be good. Because you can never have enough baby gifts waiting their turn.

First, a side note to Peter and Terry if you should read this: my father would like to offer you written memories of Marcelline, if only he knew where to send them. If you leave a short hey I’m here in the comments section, your email address will come to me and I will pass it along but it will not show on this site. Thank you so much.

Meantime, hawk sightings nearly every day of late and quite the territorial displays. Glorious. The male flew in next to the window this afternoon and–well, he was saying something right at me, but you’d have to ask him. He seemed to wait for an answer but all I could offer was that I loved having him there.

The crows are staying well clear.

Speaking of which. There are neighbors with a tall old persimmon tree that bears heavily this time of year.

The last year or two, whoever had been helping them harvest didn’t and once the fruit was overripe and grossly sweet, every crow and raven in miles was going at it for several weeks, the whole tree one loud heaving mass of flapping black wings, and when that source was spent they went looking for more to claim in the near vicinity–and they drove out my Cooper’s hawks for a goodly while. Hunting doves is enough work without being constantly mobbed and stolen from.

So I confessed to the one neighbor that I’d had an ulterior motive in asking his wife if they needed help with the picking: I love Hachiya persimmons, and I wanted to thwart those corvids.

Boy were they with me on that one.

And so it was that near dusk today, with their strong encouragement (Please! All you want! Take it! Give lots to your friends!) I went in their back yard and picked a big bag’s worth and then walked from house to house, offering it out.

One took the whole bag. Cool, that works.  I started over.

I was amazed at how tiring picking and carrying the stuff around could be.

They will ripen (they’re almost there), I will puree, and I shall have frozen persimmon for whenever I need a fix out of season. As long as I don’t inflict them on my husband, we’re good.

Lots of living crammed into a single day.

I went to the funeral mass of the woman who had been my dad’s last surviving high school classmate, a beautiful service for a woman who’d lived her 88 years loving every person who’d crossed her path. Every time my folks had flown into town Marcelline and Bill had invited us all up for lunch and Dad and she had swapped stories in that beautiful home overlooking the Bay far below and we’d had a grand old time. Many fond memories.

Bill passed earlier this year and now he has his sweet wife back.

The family invited me on up to her house afterwards and I was glad to go. I’m going to link to a blog post about Marcelline and Bill here so that they can find it.

It did mean that I ended up spending twenty minutes out in the late-afternoon sun.

I came home and checked in with Richard. He’d wanted to go but his job had done the two-ended candle thing of late, a lot harder to do when you’re not in your 20s anymore, and he was simply wiped–he was sound asleep when I walked in.

An old friend of ours from back in his doctoral days at Stanford was in town to give a lecture tonight, one of several, and again, we wanted to go.

And again, Richard had to pass, and at the last second I called a friend nearby and asked if she were going? I’d done sun time so I wasn’t sure driving home after ten was going to be wise; could I bum a ride?

Sure! (She knows my lupus re the sun.)

And so I went, again offering Richard’s regrets but glad he was finally getting some rest.

I came home to find the phone had rung after he’d woken up: our niece was stranded and could we pick her up?

Because I’d caught that ride he had the car now and he could. He could always rest again afterwards, and did.

I can just see Marcelline, who so adored her nieces and nephews, making sure ours got taken care of too when she needed it. Looking out for others was the way she’d lived. Go call Phyllis. (I thought of it and didn’t do it and then I felt it more persistently.) Go call Phyllis. I called Phyllis.

Good friends make for, as Chan likes to say, no coincidences.

My doctor told me to get my flu shot as soon as I, in her words, wasn’t very sick.

And so Richard was going to leave work early and get me to the clinic before their flu-shot nurse called it a day at 5:00. I just wasn’t up to running lots of errands on my own yet.

The lights were not with us. We got there 5:02, no dice. Oh well.

It was a moment of truth: I just really, really didn’t want to have to worry about going through the last two weeks all over again if I could do anything about it–I wanted that shot done with. (He’d already gotten his.) And so we drove across town to Costco.

Pro tip: that was the fewest people I have seen in that store in ages, 5:25 must be the right time to go.

Not to mention the fewest infectious agents around us and for me to be around them.

There were questions to check off: are you currently sick? I simply left that one blank and they did not call me on it. Do you have any immune disease such as AIDS or cancer? Uh, yes no no–so, yes.

They made me wait 15 minutes while they shuffled paperwork. I had not brought my knitting, deliberately: my hands needed a break after major baby blanket time, but I’d forgotten my book, too. It is a sign of how quickly I’d run out of steam that I forgot that I could simply read the news on my phone.

I sat on their bench that faced a towering display of Men’s L/XL incontinence help (charming), noting the heavy towers of pallets to right and left, the emergency exit door thataway, and plotting my duck-and-cover should the quake strike. I’ve been under swinging chandeliers before, but at least they were anchored to the ceiling. Get away from those aisles. (The bored mind in earthquake country.)

And then they called me into a back room and the deed was done. I cannot begin to tell you what a relief it is that that is so. I have my flu shot. The world is a slightly safer place.

I was 31. They did tell me cerebral vasculitis. Nothing at all to compare to what this woman went through, but at the same time so many parts of her story sound so familiar.

I was someone who never forgot a face. Suddenly I wasn’t remembering them instead, even having trouble, when I was tired, recognizing my own husband’s. I suddenly couldn’t spell anymore, my short-term memory was gone, and I remember the time I ordered something over the phone and had to have the sales clerk read the numbers back to me to make sure I’d read those squiggly things correctly: Tell me the name of the item back to me, too, just to be sure. Letters were far easier. Still, I could tell which numbers they were just fine if she told me first what they were, kinda hard for her to do, y’know, so we did our best. (Online ordering didn’t exist yet.)

It helped clinch my lupus diagnosis.

Read what Christine Hyung-Oak Lee can write now. She’s amazing.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings I was not home to do my usual watering but for just long enough to keep the pots of tomato plants going and I was off.

There was a one-plant surprise party for me Monday way across the yard over next to the cherry tree: having weeded there last Wednesday, I know it wasn’t there then.

Okay, then, squirrels do bury food for the winter, but squirrels don’t even like tomatoes–they just steal the juices out and toss the rest.

Curious little mystery. It’s a vigorous little grower, maybe we’ll even get a harvest out of it.

Meantime, thinking about yesterday’s post some more, I realized that I have no idea what time my car actually got done and my showing up to ask might have been right as they finished. In my hurry to finish the post and call it a night I neglected to mention that the mechanic had asked me for my cell number so he could tell me when it was done.

I explained the hearing impairment (I’d forgotten my bluetooth pendant to my Iphone) and that in that noisy store, I would never hear it ring; I asked if it would be possible to text instead?

He thought about that for a nanosecond and decided, with no question in his voice, a firm Yes. He added quickly that it would be from his personal phone, not the store’s (I’m sure so that I would get it despite its being an unfamiliar number.)

Now, we have a cell plan with unlimited free texting, which they don’t offer anymore; we’re grandfathered in, along with two of our kids and my parents. This guy probably pays by the text and he was willing to offer that out of his own personal pocket to a customer. He didn’t have to do that–and in the moment that he did, there was a certain joy in his face in the offering.

They’ve got a good guy there.

I got two notes back from Costco customer service this evening. The first was an automated, we don’t answer after hours but we will get back to you tomorrow.

The second, sent soon after by someone who had read it anyway and clearly had felt compelled to answer, was a note thanking me and saying they would forward my email to the manager so that Luis could get the recognition he deserved.

And now I was the one who was smiling. May that little moment he created not be buried but come to full fruition for him.

It is supposed to rain come Thursday, a whole .12 of an inch, but still, actually measurable rain as opposed to last week’s random scattered few drops that couldn’t even clean a skylight.

The first of the season in California always brings a string of accidents from all the months of accumulated oil on the roads as the surfaces all go slick in a way they will not after a good washing-away, an annual phenomenon I’d never heard of till we moved here.

It was time. The new tires went on today.

The mechanics forgot to tell me my car was done. I was in no hurry to walk outside and risk the UV exposure, so having commandeered a padded chair I found inside next to the photo lab I simply sat. And knit. And watched the reactions of passersby to the randomness of a woman knitting at Costco.

The photolab guy kind of sneered and silently but clearly wished me out of there. One woman made up for that when she stopped midstep at the sight of my needles: she looked thrilled, and almost, almost struck up a conversation. I would have myself but I let her decide at her own comfort level, wondering if there was a language barrier–but I would have told her that really, there was not. Her face lighting up like that had said what I’d needed and I wanted to tell her thank you. So I smiled greatly in return.

I knitted on. That purple scarf for my cousin I’d been meaning to really get going on? Now I have. I really like how it’s coming out, which is when a project about knits itself, y’know?

When my hands needed a break after two and a half hours I finally did get up and go back outside and in the other door to ask after that car.

Oh, right, here’s your key!

And so one sense of satisfaction at a needed job getting done became closer to two.

(Edited to add the next day: when it got past 5:00 I saw my chance at redeeming the interaction between me and the photo lab guy. I asked him what time the tire center closed up for the night, I mean, y’know, I hadn’t missed…?

He said he was pretty sure they had the same hours as the rest of the store and that everything was okay. And in that moment, he got a chance to help and he did so gladly and we both came away better off for it. Good for him.)

I always thought having a hyperactive immune system with no sense of direction ought to be useful for fighting off cells that actually shouldn’t be there. Say, cancer.

Looks like I was right.