On air. As the reporters interviewed.

I am not by any means someone who feels there is no place for gun ownership. My husband and sons were taught at a rifle range at scout camp when they were younger. Grizzlies will happily eat you in Alaska. Etc.

But the blunderbuss and frontier of colonial days is not what we have now and our laws need to reflect current reality–and technology. If that requires a Constitutional amendment I’m all for it, although I will point out that before the current makeup of the Supreme Court the original version did the job quite well.

Parents cannot legally leave small children unattended but in Virginia a toddler by law can shoot a gun as soon as he is able to hold one up long enough to do so. Any size magazine. Cheers.

The thing about politicians is that by being voted into office they have a little more power than the rest of us do and we willingly give them that power.

And then some of them claim they have none because, y’know, peers. Or they sell it, or at the very least sell us out.

When someone invented a gun that could only be operated by its owner he got blasted by the NRA and sent death threats. Here was a champion of the Second Amendment who was threatening the income stream of the other gun manufacturers–because you wouldn’t want to have to, y’know, pay for any kind of licensing agreement on his invention.

Death threats. For trying to make guns safer.

There is now on average a multiple-victim shooting every day in America.

Every single politician who has voted for there to be zero restrictions whatsoever on guns is choosing to be complicit in those murders. Full stop.

Drying: a warm hat in half bamboo half pearl flecks. (My airport project a few weeks ago, finally blocked.)

Yet more zucchini to ditch somewhere on someone. Maybe I’ll take some to knit night tomorrow.

With Ellen. Twinset Ellen of Minnesota, who propelled the whole Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign, where she got about a hundred knitters together online, with India T of New Hampshire as our third organizer/cheerleader. The idea was to create a hand knit hat for every member of Congress to send them tangible testimony from their constituents that we wanted them to stop fighting and to sit down and do their jobs working together, and one House member actually referenced our campaign in a speech on the floor! He wanted us to succeed and that did us a ton of good. We felt heard.

We didn’t quite make it before the weather got too warm to consider wearing hats and people kind of gave out. But we got one for every Senator and at least half of the House and mostly coming from the members’ own districts.

It’s all her fault. I threw out a stray what if/if only and she went YES if, let’s *do* it!

A huge thank you to every one of you out there who knitted those.

She’ll be here. I get to finally meet her in person, and we’re going to Purlescence together. To say I. Can’t WAIT! does not begin to tell it.

So, Donald Trump’s campaign released an ad via Twitter: the Donald, the flag, and faded into its background stacks of hundred dollar bills, the White House, and a small group of soldier trudging across a field.

Except, as Mother Jones pointed out (and the Washington Post ran the story too and then apparently took it down, so take this whole thing with a grain of salt if need be), if you do a search for images of World War II soldiers, then (allegedly) that same photo pops right up.

And it’s Waffen SS soldiers. You had to know the uniform or at least look it up, and whoever it was at the Donald’s offices didn’t think to do so, says Mother Jones. He blamed it on an intern (does he pay his interns? Just curious) and it quickly got taken down.

So (if true, and even if it’s not) it proves the old axiom: those who don’t know history are doomed to retweet it.

——-

And I was going to leave it right there at that punch line, but a box arrived in the mail this evening, completely unexpected. It was from Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns. I knew she’d been playing with color gradients but I had no idea and absolutely no expectation of anything whatsoever, much less that she would surprise me with some of what she’d been doing, and look at all that…. Wow! Gorgeous, gorgeous, soft stuff. Just, wow! She did it simply to make my day. I am totally blown away. Thank you, Melinda!

I was waiting at the pharmacy at the clinic, knitting away, and found myself looking at the project in my hands and up at the harried clerk who has known me by name for a couple of years now. No not this one–not her color. But I do have a skein of that one she has on…

And with that it felt like I was reclaiming a part of myself that had been too quiet of late. Anticipating making someone happy with my needles–man that felt good already. Thank you Karin for jumpstarting my needles!

And at the other end of the day, I probably should have picked that round zucchini: it was big enough and I was watering it, which would make it a more likely target even if the squirrels hadn’t chewed on it yet. But dinner was already cooking and I knew that there was no way I was serving zucchini in any way shape or form for tomorrow’s dinner. No matter how homegrown. Nuh uh.

It was the hottest June 27 on record in Washington DC, as many people let us know that day. The year ended in zero. The President was someone whose grandson would later talk a reluctant waiter into making the number 47 famous. (Political families and political junkies, both of us.)

Jon Stewart, and then Malala.

Those who forgave. So soon and so freely, even in their anger and their pain beyond comprehension: they are the ones with the power to change how we all talk to each other about that which wounds and divides us, they are changing the world by their loving, by their actually being what the rest of us could only hope we might. But that we never want to have to know if we could.

Alison Kraus‘s “I’ll Fly Away” with The New Yorker’s cover.

While over here, I want to rage at that stupid, stupid state law that keeps a wretched symbol endlessly at full height and to tell the South Carolina legislators, Take that Confederate battle flag down. NOW. Your shame is flapping in the wind for all the world to see in front of the statue of a man who represented the worst of what the Civil War was fought over. Stop with the willful blindness. Gov. Nikki Haley claims CEOs in her state don’t care but I do and I will boycott South Carolina and every business in it till it’s down. BMW, Denny’s, are you listening?

And then there are the families at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, not shaming but offering understanding so that we can all become better than this, so that our children’s future might have greater light. Reclaiming their church as a haven of safety offered to all who seek it.

I aspire to be like them when I grow up.

It was a drought year the year we moved into this house and that one lasted seven years. Then we remodeled. (After the ’89 quake our kitchen cabinet doors kept falling on our heads–they had to go.)

The contractor did damage to the aging roof and we ended up with seventeen buckets catching the incessant water leaking inside. It rained so much that winter that a beam he’d had waiting in the yard for a few days warped enough to soon crack the new window set against it–so that had to be replaced. We named the inside downpour roof juice and joked that if the legislature should ever again need to end a drought, all they had to do was re-remodel this place for us.

I’m waiting….

And then it turned dry again. So we’ve been pretty good at not wasting water for a very long time now. The San Francisco Bay Area, for whatever reason, has been better at water conservation than the whole rest of the state and is under slightly less drastic cutbacks. My one fault was frequent laundry loads, because having gone through that one good-sized earthquake I just really don’t want anyone to be out of underwear when the next one hits.

Relandscaping this past year, though, with the extra water that new trees need and with sixteen fruit trees–when they said cutbacks were going to be mandatory, I thought we were totally hosed. So I bought us more underwear. More favorite-color-blue oxford shirts for him. Bigger laundry loads done less frequently, well okay, and I have thrown some loads together that my momma taught me not to mix, but, drought, so, yeah.

Not because we wanted to, but, we bought a much more water-efficient dishwasher. We replaced that outside faucet at last, and although that wouldn’t show up in the bill yet, that will make a difference, too. And tonight, with Richard’s back giving him grief, I unloaded four monster bags of mulch from the car.

I just went to pay the utility bill and just kind of stared at it a moment. There’s a line where you can compare how much you’re using to how much you used in the same time period last year. It doesn’t show you two years ago, and that’s the number the state is comparing against, but it still definitely gives us an idea.

Our city is under a mandatory 24% water reduction starting June 1. I was sure any laundry savings was being offset by my trees.

I had to do the math to make sure we hadn’t already hit that target. We are so very very close that replacing that tap was all we needed and laying down that mulch will top it off.

Gee, maybe I could have planted that pomegranate I wanted after all.

Next year.

Hey, Jerry Brown, maybe just painting the outside and redoing the driveway would be enough this time?

Thank you, everybody. Today was definitely better.

And… The outside faucet now refuses to turn all the way off. Yow. This is so much not the time to be wasting water— $135 for an hour of a plumber’s time tomorrow will be money well spent, for my sense of guilt as much as avoiding being fined.

Meantime, five fire hoses full time, 100 gallons a minute each for eight weeks, the most pristine Yosemite-area water in the state when free recycled water was available right nearby but, y’know, then you’d have to pay the truckers… That link gives a whole new meaning to Candle in the Wind.

I can’t fix them (ah, okay, here’s the followup article) but I can fix mine.

Needed to buy some birdseed, and since it was right off the freeway stopped on my way home by Yamagami’s Nursery to check out the fruit trees.

And boy did they have nice fruit trees. If you wanted cherries or peaches this very year it looks like you could have exactly that.

No Lorings in stock, though; they would have to order and find out if one is available. I texted messages with Richard and came home, for now.

But when the sun was low I picked that spade back up and dug that planting hole a little deeper and now, at last, that spot feels ready for whatever will go in. It will not stay bare for long.

A side note: I know vaccination is a hot topic right now and that there are strong emotions on both sides. Hear me out, if you would. Measles is *the* single most contagious virus known, and if you simply walk through a room hours after an infected person did you can catch it. I have an immunosuppressed friend from my knitting group who got quarantined from work this week because a co-worker had been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone at Disneyland, the disease leapfrogging up the state. That’s an awful lot of quarantining and lost wages and lost time.

Our daughter the microbiology PhD was telling an anti-vaxxer the other day, Sure, if you get German measles you’ll be sick and you’ll probably recover and you probably won’t be one of the unlucky ones who goes deaf or gets pneumonia or meningitis and all that. You’ll probably be okay.

But you don’t do it for YOU. You do it for every pregnant woman. Because it is horrendously dangerous to a fetus in utero at any stage of pregnancy and extremely likely to kill or brain damage them for life. You do it for them. Because you’re a good person.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times wrote THE article about the events in Paris today that most needed to be written.

We are all Charlie.

We got a phone call tonight: having been frustrated by the problem for some time, our daughter was finally appealing to her tall dad to help her with some burned-out lights. They needed to be reached so she could see them and know what size to order and she felt too unsteady to risk trying. There were I think six in her kitchen ceiling and three by now had gone dark.

We went over there and helped her unscrew those bulbs. Then asked, why wait on shipping? There was a hardware store almost around the corner.

It seemed to me it wasn’t just the lights–it was that her injuries having been re-ignited last Friday, she needed to fix something to brighten her day that was within her power. Especially today. But she was not up to going to the shop, maybe multiple shops, to look for new ones, and she hadn’t been about to risk another fall by trying to even start the task alone.

Well, we could go, we offered, glad to help. And so we bought new bulbs, a grand total of $12 for three flood types, in LED no less–boy have prices come down–and came back over. With her big strong daddy again holding her steady standing on a chair, she screwed those new lights in herself.

I turned the switch on on the wall. We looked upwards in great satisfaction. Such a difference!

The darkness is a very small part of the world but it tries to claim great power. It deceives only itself. We are greater and we shine everywhere. Every good person in every religion or none who is trying to live by love. Love for those we know, love for those we don’t, love to all simply because we share our humanity and find it good.

We bring the light. We are Charlie.

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.

I’m tempted to talk about how stupid the cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s funding are, but let’s just go straight to the point (even if the research relevant to this post was paid for pre-sequester.)

So: there’s a drug long approved for treating HIV that they knew had interesting characteristics, they just didn’t know what all else it might be applicable to.

And now they know at least one new thing.

Thirty million Americans. That’s how many they expect to have dry macular degeneration within the next five years, thirty million people going slowly blind and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Till now. AZT and its newer, easier forms can be used off-label right now and they hope for testing to begin soon for this to become an approved use.  Ebola may turn out to be another and if so, they want to know. And they don’t have to spend hundreds of millions to find out safe dosage levels, whether humans can tolerate it at all, etc, etc., since that’s all been done long since.

AZT was first tested not for AIDS but as a proposed cancer treatment, which it failed at. When you do medical research you never learn just the thing you set out to learn. There’s always more to see.

(Like this, for instance. I mean, who would want to miss out on that little moment?)

Maybe I shouldn’t write about Open Enrollment. In some ways it’s worse than doing taxes, isn’t it?

The system I’ve been trying to work through seems particularly opaque to spouses this year: it appears that only the employee is allowed to view the options. Hello, community property state? This does not seem to me the most productive use of his time; why wouldn’t they want the free labor I could give them?

Remember this guy? I did get to see one page that I believe was talking about continuing the employer’s plan we’ve been on.

We finally wouldn’t be making the deductible the first time we fill a prescription come January.

Twenty. Six. Thousand.  And since that’s not enough, and four hundred dollars.

Twenty.

Six.

Thousand.

(Editing the edited comment: finally found that page again. That number was the out-of-pocket maximum for out-of-network. Given that our insurer and Stanford Hospital were out of contract last I heard, we could actually hit that number.)

High-energy days are a wonderful thing.

Got up early this morning, voted first thing, (epic photobomb here. Look at that guy’s eyes!), was glad to see that the ballots were paper and verifiable and wore that little sticker proudly all day.

The cowl and my cousin’s hat and scarf are now in the mail.

I participated in a product testing trial, one of those quirks about living in Silicon Valley where there is always some new thing to prove the merits of and got paid just enough for my time to cover a mango tree with FedEx shipping from Florida. I like the idea of trading a little time for something solid and present and lasting that could grow and produce great fruit for a hundred years, with thanks to Dani from India for the guidance on what variety to get. (Yup, I still want my mango tree. So there you go.)

I headed from there to my audiologist to get the wax out that was blocking up the hearing aids–I once broke an earmold trying to do it myself. Um. Now they’re sending in for a new one. (It’s not just me!) There was a spare on hand that’s not a great fit from when I was very thin post-op but it’ll do fine for now.

There is, so far, a particularly bright spot in the election news here: the one-term Superior Court judge who repeatedly simply did not know the law, who did not understand why people were upset when she asked a criminal defendant before her–from the bench, in court–for a date–she seems to have lost. Her opponent, who by all accounts is very well qualified, spent almost nothing. That he is winning is a great justice. (Update: he did win. Good thing.)

And it is past bedtime and the local newspaper hasn’t updated any election totals in three hours. Time to give it a rest.

Prop 45 is too much power! to give to one man! in Sacramento!

Yeah, that he would be able to say no to Anthem raising its rates 40% without justification? We gave that same officeholder that same power over car insurance rate increases and now Californians have some of the lowest auto premiums in the nation.

The phone rang. Richard picked up the receiver and actually listened to the robocall.

Then he said the candidate’s name to me, questioningly, not sure he’d quite heard it right.

I had read every article over the past month about the various people running but that wasn’t enough: today I spent hours rereading them, sample ballot in hand, going for second sources, researching the propositions on the ballot some more and trying to feel like I would be using my voting to the best of my ability come the morning. It is a sacred responsibility.

Note to this election’s big spenders: I read every flier as it came in the door and only one single one gave me any actual and factual information. Thank you for keeping the Post Office solvent but every dime you spent on those was wasted.

He wrinkled his nose going, Tell me that wasn’t someone I wanted to vote for because I don’t now.

Yeah, I told him, that’s the one running against Tuck. Tuck is supposed to be competent, thoughtful, and honest, vs the guy you just heard who has vowed to waste more taxpayer money to appeal that teacher’s tenure case rather than fixing the problems in the system that got the case filed. Here, I can pull up the article and you can read for yourself.

We both agreed that teachers need to be protected from bad administrators and bad parents, very definitely. At the same time…

We had some of the best teachers you could ever hope for for our kids, but just a very few who…

Let me say it flat out, you have to be able to get rid of the terrible ones. (The one who accidentally blew up her classroom during a sixth-grade demo of science that she did not understand did get, and it is a very good word for it, fired on the spot. No injuries. Other than that, she was actually a strong improvement over a particular one I’m thinking of.)

Then there are the candidates who will be deciding what our new voting machines are going to be: a previous Secretary of State had approved Diebolds that could be hacked in 30 seconds; the one after, a career politician termed out of her previous office, had run on a campaign of fixing the mess but then had done nothing. She updated nothing. She left cities and counties with unusable machines and no means to get out from under and oh look, we have an election again, don’t we, well now didn’t see that coming.

Who we vote into just that one state office impacts all the others. If you’re in California, here’s what the Merc had to say. Vote Pete Peterson over Mr-where’s-my-next-campaign-contribution.

To my American readers, change millions of lives for the better including your own Tuesday. Vote!

Tomato plant pictures: the volunteer that’s a month old and a view of its new buds. Hoping to get Ellen in her much colder climate some quick-grows for next year from this thing.

And then there’s the heirloom variety still going after six months.

Meantime, yup, tried the cranberry juice, tried the vitamin C, but still woke up with a trip straight to the doctor. Thankfully there are still some antibiotics that have not yet been made useless by the unethical feedlot practices of the big bioag producers, and so I am no longer passing blood.

Never mind all that–I was just sick enough to put my feet up and get some serious knitting time in and I’m delighted at how much I got done.  The 45×60″ I want while using size 4s is a very long slog but I can actually tell the difference from yesterday. (Pass the icepacks.)