She was so thorough. She went over everything.  *Everything.*  For an hour.  She thought of things to ask that I didn’t think to mention.  When she was unsure of something, she went to go ask the woman she described as her mentor, and she was passionate about her work and about taking care of people in emergencies.  This wasn’t just a job, this was important to her.  I was really, really impressed.

It was time for renewing my MedicAlert membership and I hadn’t gotten around to it:  I never wear the necklace, the engravings on it are way out of date, I’m doing well and not worrying about it anymore, and, eh, I’d let it slide.

So they called to ask if I wanted to renew?

A few things have happened in the last year, actually, yes…  My stars, they even had a code for “allergic to Hollister brand stoma paste” to check off.

Mindful of my dislike of the too-long chain and the too-big emblem on that necklace, I asked for not only a bracelet to replace it, but a really small one. Sure, no problem.  Measure your wrist, we’ll add so much for the closure.

I want a little extra give to it.

Oh, no, that half inch closure is plenty.

I want a little extra to mine.

Oh, no, really, this is the way you want to go.

It came today. It had been measured to the larger emblem I didn’t buy and turned out just slightly shorter, with the closure, than my wrist measurement. And I laughed: not perfect after all! Oh, but she’d been SO close…

(This is my personal endorsement of MedicAlert. It’s a good idea and a good organization. If you need it, do it.  But don’t get the necklace if you won’t wear it because you like wearing your own necklaces like I do. I’d stayed away from the bracelet because I was afraid it might fall into my knitting and snag it. I looked around at Knit Night and noticed, for the first time, the wrists with MedicAlert bracelets on them–three, I think it was. I guess it must work out after all?

I’ll find out after my new wrist chain arrives.)

Okay, that phrase dates me.  But boy does it fit: Lost In Space. I’m writing this for the sake of the million other people who own one of these in case they haven’t heard yet.

Seven years ago, my husband’s co-worker stood in line on University Avenue in Palo Alto to be one of the first when the doors opened to buy the hottest new gadget: a cell phone that actually did web browsing, email, IM, calendar and calculator functions, and even had a camera.  This was unheard of.  He brought his prize into work to show off, with the upshot that my husband stood in line the second day the thing was out, after some discussion with me, and proudly brought one home too.

“You bought that for me, didn’t you.” It was not a question.

Well, no, not really…

“You’re going back to buy one for me, aren’t you.” Still not a question.  Now, normally I don’t aspire to owning electronics, I really don’t. But a phone where someone could reach me where I didn’t have to hear it?! Honey, that was mine.

And it turned out to be a really good idea for both of us to have one, of course, because that way he could reach me from wherever he might be without having to have a computer at hand.

We went back together.  What was really amusing was when the clerk handed me the box with mine in it: there were two young adults photo’d on it, Having Fun!

It was a ‘you know you live in Silicon Valley when…’ moment. I had a few years previously sat next to the mother of one of those two at his and my daughter’s high school graduation and had told the woman what a nice kid she had.

And the reason I mention all this. Those phones are Sidekicks. We still have them. (I’m on my second, Richard’s on his third; we’ve dropped them enough times, etc etc.) T-Mobile sells them; Danger manufactures them.

One of the selling points was always that all the information on your phone, your contacts, your emails, etc etc, is sustained offsite as well as in your phone, so that if you ever lose the thing, you haven’t lost all your information, it’s right there online ready to be tapped into again.  Again, this was revolutionary at the time.

Danger sold out to Microsoft recently. Microsoft, whether as an act of deliberate sabotage or complete incompetence and indifference, did not support what it had just bought, and the end result is that all that online backup has suddenly and utterly vanished. If your phone battery dies before you recharge it, if you reboot your phone as their service people were completely wrong in advising when people first started having problems, EVER (or till further notice, as they frantically try to undo what they did)–poof: everything in your phone is gone.  All your contacts information, sorry, you don’t have it anymore. It’s gone.

My stars.  No more forgetting I’ve left my phone in my purse and not recharging it overnight. I can’t remember my own parents’ new phone number without that thing.

I guess the good part is, if we wanted I-Phones now instead, well, our contract’s been broken by them and we can leave without penalty.

But by golly I’m a bit antsy about my info. Enough to go blog about it to warn others with Sidekicks.

(Oh, and this shot is just to show that the leaves here are trying their best to turn while it’s actually Fall.)

Just a quick note to my little sister (whose house is thankfully a good ways uphill) and everybody else in the Atlanta area: my prayers are with you.  To Chuck, who’s at the Shepherd Center there, you, too.

But I did all that, I’m done with all that, months and months of that, just, no! No more of this too tired to walk across the house nonsense.  Nonono.

Okay, whine over.  This is temporary, this is the easy stuff, it’ll be over in days.  My apologies to the Purlescencers I exposed–Thursday night I felt peachy-fine.

Wednesday I had had a follow-up at Stanford because my feral immune system seemed to be revving up against what was left of my dissolvable stitches and I wanted it checked out; I’m not supposed to start bleeding again now. (None today, finally.) But if I’m allergic to that suture material they needed to know.

The new Cancer Center, which is where my surgeons work, has waiting rooms that are quite small and partitioned off from each other, I imagine as a way of cutting down passing germs between immunosuppressed patients.

And so the man who came into Section A clearly feeling miserable had nowhere to sit but quite close to me.   (Dude.  Three words: face mask, reschedule.)  Friday I woke up with the flu.

I took that picture yesterday of the knitting I’d gotten done up till Thursday night partly as a way to try to entice myself to do some more–go, feel productive, work with stuff you love, go!  And then I went back to bed.

Today I might manage it.

Alison is too out of it to post tonight. As one of the children said, “Another part bit the dust” I just left her side and she is pretty beat up. Believe it or not but she is frowning while she drifting in and out of it. The anesthesia knocked out her already bad hearing, but that seems to be improving slowly. They are trying to get her pain under control. She does not remember much of the day. They were happy with how it went. Maybe in a few days she will be, but not right now. Don’t expect much for a few days as she needs to recover. I will show her comments tomorrow if she is up to it.

One blocked Monterey scarf, here you go. The patterns didn’t line up together with the yoke-to-body increase row missing, so it took some playing with. I’ll post later how I did it.

Today, I had to drop some files off for the surgeon and found myself coming back via the main road into Stanford for the first time in months.

So.  Here‘s a link to an older picture to give you an idea of what the area has always looked like, give or take a few trimmed-off dead fronds; the view is an announcement that You Have Arrived  at Stanford University.

I didn’t have my camera this afternoon, and even if I had there was no place to pull over to use it.   But my stars!  The trees!

I thought, okay, I can see doing that. Maybe.  Under duress.  We used to have a date palm and one of our kids fell into it and had to go to the plastic surgeon’s–the fronds are as sharp as sewing-machine needles and the trunks are nothing you’d much want to touch either if you didn’t have to. Drunk students? Did someone sue the University?  Why did they do this?

Poodle cuts.  They gave the palm trees poodle cuts.  Shaved them smooth as can be all the way up and liposuctioned the trunks into rigid verticality, then turned the crowns into slicked poofs above, leaving the fronds at the top announcing, tadaaah! with their arms thrown out wide. Dig the new haircuts!

Poodle palms.  Huh.  There’s got to be a good reason, but I don’t know it yet.

I never knew which book to turn into *the* book so it never actually got put in one. Yet.  Once I do, that copy probably has to go up on the shelf for admiration purposes only.  The thing waits.

What a difference an s makes.

I know, I know, I butcher the quotation marks thing on my blog all the time.  That’s not entirely pure laziness; I usually only use them when I’m very sure I’m quoting someone verbatim, and given my writer’s ear, I do tend to remember emotionally powerful conversations very well.

But.  I had a job as a copy editor years ago, checking for grammar and spelling and usage back when Spell Checker was not yet written and continuing for awhile after it was; common sense tells you it’s more than just the spelling that gets hashed.  My mother used to giggle a bit at the mental images conjured by every time the Washington Post would talk about a “grizzly accident.” Not a whole lot of big brown bears in downtown DC streets or the freeways nearby.

So it was a combination of obnoxiousness and hopeful helpfulness on my part:  the first time I noted a typo in a Harry Potter book I thought, well, it’s a shame they didn’t catch that when everything else is so well done. Okay.  But when I noted a plot change from one book to a later one due to an errant s, that was just too much, and I noted a second typo as well and wrote it down along with the plot error. Scholastic got a note from me.

Never trust something where you can’t see where it keeps its brain!  In one book, one of the Weasley parents is warning Ginny* that. In a later book, the line is a flashback and a memory–and Mr. Weasley has become Mrs. Weasley.

Or the other way around. The response letter from Scholastic is dated nine years ago, so forgive me for not being sure now.

Either way, their thank you note included a signed bookplate and picture from JK Rowling. I was surprised and delighted when it came; as an author myself now, that bookplate especially means all the more to me now.

I think I’ve answered my own question. I need to go re-read the whole series, find out which book the s error snuck in, and put the plate in that one. No fair skimming ahead to find out.

*Thank you, Diana, got that corrected.  Ginny not Gina (smacking forehead–of course!)  Okay, now, that’s funny!

I’ve been trying all day to think of how to post about today while still following Thumper’s Admonition.

Hmm.  I will say that having raised four teenagers (who are all perfectly lovely adults now), I know that the angrier a person gets over something that is unreasonable, the more you know they know they’re in the wrong.

Stanford blew it.  Today I finally got through to someone with authority in accounting who was as appalled as I was–and gave us her name!  Who acknowledged that yes, I had paid my bill in full and right away, sorry for issuing a duplicate billing instead of the requested receipt, it’s all fixed now.

If ever there was a day I needed a knitting pattern that required a lot of attention to help me take a deep breath, well, I’m glad I had Monterey to work on afterwards. I got to where I’d been going to stop, decided it was still too short, and just kept on knitting.

Richard came home from work and made me laugh. I so much needed that.

I have just one more row calling me (unless I go on again…) and then the castoff.   Hopefully tomorrow I’ll show off the finished shawl.

Translation from yesterday for the hearing-impaired-impaired: “Would you like that warmed up with a little sour cream?”

Wombat was more fun.  Here’s a good link to lots of information about these down-to-earth koala relatives.  They are marsupials, but have the characteristic of rodents in that their teeth grow all their lives.

Alison’s health is not the problem right now, but our ADSL provider, Speakeasy.net,  is the problem.  They are  dropping a large percentage of all the packets coming to or from our house.  They are not willing to acknowledge the problem, but with this current level of service she can not get to any webpage, or email server.

Fixing requires them to first acknowledge that there is a problem.  We are still stuck at admitting the problem exists.

The blog is not affected, just her access to it.

I like the last one down on the right…

http://www.tundracomics.com/content_sub1.asp?SUB1_ID=40&SUB_ID=50&CAT_ID=45

I have a pic, but I am not sure I am supposed to post it.  After I get that cleared up I will add it if I am told to.  We had a set back today, nothing all that unexpected, but she is back in the hospital.  They put a tube in her nose to drain her stomach, and it makes her look like a very cute and small elephant.  She does not however really like this tube as it is very uncomfortable.  Hopefully they will figure out the cause of this set back and get her going forward quickly.  She actually is stronger than she has been, but not being able to eat, and a few other issues have landed her back with the experts.  We spent 9 hours in urgent care, and the ER before they got her settled in her new room.  She got her first ambulance ride, and first visit to the local ER.  (I always took the children in when they got hurt, so I did not realize she had never benn there before.)  I did not think to bring the laptop on what we thought was a 2hr trip to urgent care, so I am posting the status for her.

It took a minute to pull it together when I stumbled across where I’d put it down.  A flyer for my book, a plastic sleeve for it…

…Crum. Okay, so I must have gotten distracted while looking for a mailing envelope (which would be kept near the laundry, and there’s always laundry needing doing, and…)  Someone wanted that.  I was going to mail it to them. I have absolutely no memory of who or where they were. If that was you, I apologize!

I did find the cotton/cashmere and redid that one spot. My friend Nancy dropped by, looked at it, and she thought the sweater was okay, but I think it’s definitely a work-in-the-garden sweater now.  Or good for a walk in San Francisco along the wharf while the seagulls hope for a handout.

Gotta watch those flyers.

Tiny Tyrant’s comment made me guffaw and cry uncle: okay, I’ll post!

I got there a half hour early in case I might get any argument as to whether I actually had an appointment, given their system’s mess-up, and with the traffic, who knew how long it would take me anyway; rush hour here starts at 3:00 and I was scheduled for 3:25.  (That muffled sound you just heard was everybody in Vermont patting themselves on the back that they don’t live here, with their thick mittens on their hands and their lined overcoats drawn tightly around.)

It was quite crowded.  I plunked down on the floor while in the first line–I don’t do standing for long stretches very well, and it seemed at first as if this was going to be a very long one.  But it got going in good time.  As soon as I got out of that line, a man offered me his chair, which was very sweet of him, but he didn’t see that there was an empty one behind him.  I did.  So I would say we both won: we both got to experience his kindness, he got thanked for it, and we each got a chair.

It did feel very slow.  This is more due to the fact that I was obsessively clutching my F 143 number tightly in my hand so as not to have to start over and not get bumped to the non-appointment line–and that made it impossible to knit.  I had my ticket to speed.  But in all honesty, I was out ten minutes after my appointed time.  They simply wanted a new picture is all; the clerk knew no particular reason why.

I’m casting on a smaller project to have a more portable one to throw in my purse while hoping that doesn’t mean I’ll run out of knitting to play with.  You never know.

Trade in an old decade or two and you get to report into the DMV in person.  They want to know: has anything on my license changed since they issued the original in ’87?

Well, the hair isn’t brown anymore.  And the height–I could stand an extra inch there, don’t you think?  How about that birthdate.  The ’50’s are so…so ’50’s.  I don’t even remember them anyway.  Bag it.

They now let you make appointments beforehand, supposedly so you don’t have to stand in long lines.  The automated phone system, though, wanted me to go to the Redwood City office–which happens to be closed.  It’s being remodeled.  I think I’ll try again.

On hold… I think whoever programmed their system to play an eight-second song while you wait was very, very optimistic.

Bag that. Try online.  Okay, got it, hit the confirm button–

–and get random computer squigglings.

Good old DMV.  Still its same old self.  After all these years, isn’t it good to see: it hasn’t changed a bit.

(Edited to add: the one back home in Maryland was pretty good, actually.)