Celebrating at Dandelion Chocolate this morning.

A day well spent.

Nighttime San Francisco Airport is always gloriously colorful this time of year as you drive in, from the towering trees to the rendition of the Golden Gate Bridge in holiday LEDs.

A quick hug, a rollaboard being pulled towards the brightly lit waiting doors, and we came home under the orange supermoon to a suddenly quiet house with happily planned leftover pastries for the morning to console ourselves by.

She’d made sure her vegan chocolate carrot cake in its pretty little box was at the top of her backpack. Right there under the zipper. With a grin.

We were on our way home from the airport a week ago at a quite late hour with all three of us utterly exhausted when he realized in horror what he’d left on the plane. He got out his phone and filed a report. We expected never to see it again.

My phone, not his, got a voice mail yesterday–go figure. Maybe because the flight had been booked with my name first? Southwest’s baggage claim had it. Would we like to come pick it up.

YES!

Michelle drove, I came with. She ran in to retrieve it; being able to hear in a noisy airport is a good idea.

And so I got out, walked around the car, and sat in the driver’s seat, expecting to be told at any moment to move along.

If you’ve ever priced portable cpap machines (it was out of pocket) you know why it turned out to have been locked away among the valuables. That required the supervisor, who had stepped away moments before we pulled in and was suddenly nowhere to be found.

I was a ways past the last door out of the building, facing the longterm parking, and it was the least busy I have ever seen that terminal. Nobody would want to pick up their person from where I was if they didn’t have to. And they didn’t.

At long last one of the traffic enforcers walked up to my window. I told him what we were doing, and that if he needed me to circle around the airport awhile I’d be happy to. He nodded, looked down the road behind me to gauge how much in the way I was–ie, not at all–and told me that if arrivals picked up I’d need to move on but for now, *shrug*, and with that he turned and walked back towards where incoming cars would actually want to be.

She came out the door at long last, cpap triumphantly in hand, we switched places again and she drove away as I wondered how much being a white-haired older woman in an old car had played into all that. Maybe the guy wishes his folks would give up the keys: maybe he didn’t want me on the road when I’d had the good sense to let my kid drive me there. Maybe he just saw a chance to be nice when it didn’t hurt anything to.

We were trying to get every minute out of the visit before she flies home tomorrow.

A huge thank you to Southwest for tracking down that machine and getting it back to our airport and us. The writing on the ID tag had rubbed off.

The info is back on it now.

(Edit: he just showed me the covid vaccine card with his name on it in a zip pocket. So it did have that to confirm it for them. Good.)

No water coming out of the air intake at the top of the sink? It’s the dishwasher, not the pipes.

Got that scheduled.

Off to the clinic, where I told the nurse dilating my eyes, My calendar says Dr M followed by a quick check by Dr. R but only Dr M shows on my online appointments and I did see R a few weeks ago when there was a problem. Will I be seeing both?

Oh yes, she assured me, we always have you see one and then briefly the other when you’ve had the two surgeries done in tandem like that.

Dr. M came in, was pleased with my progress, went to go and I confessed to having knit each of them a hat. And that I’d then kept on going, so, choose a color?

There were five (there was also a dark blue), with a sixth color on the needles.

He loved the dark green stripes. He was thrilled.

That was fun. So I waited for his colleague to come in.

And waited. And knitted. And waited. Eight rows.

A different nurse came in, flustered, not sure how I would take the awkward news that I’d wasted my time and saying, You don’t have an appointment with Dr. R. He’s seeing you in March!

That’s fine, I assured her. I explained about having confirmed with the original nurse but it’s no big deal–just, could I ask her one favor?

?

Could you take these to Dr. R and ask him to pick one? (I figured she could interrupt him at a more knowingly timely moment than I could.) Meantime I would go to the waiting room to get out of the way.

That instantly changed everything, and when she came back to me she was radiant.

I would have sent her off with one, too, but I was afraid of a contrast between that and the unknown nurse who’d given me understandable but wrong information that perhaps had tied up their room, and I let the thought go. Didn’t know her name, didn’t want to take the other one’s time chasing people down again.

Still wondering whether I got that right.

But she was already showing me that making him happy had made her happy. She made it be enough.

(Mark my calendar. March. Two nurses. Maybe more. Be ready.)

Our house is reminding me of the two-year-old Chevy we bought in the late 80’s that quickly got us introduced to every tow truck driver in town.

So.

Still waiting on the Speed Queen dealer to answer my I’m-no-longer-asking re dryer replacement. I sent off a firm note yesterday. A few hours later:

E:24, it said, and being the Bosch of us refused to go any further.

I cleaned the dishwasher filter again. I turned it off again. On again. Reboot.

It worked up to the same point as last night and then for the third time, that same error code. And we have our dairy-allergic daughter in town for a few days and really really don’t want cross-contamination happening–we need that dishwasher.

Not draining, explained their troubleshooter page, asking, Did you recently get a new disposal? Then the installer didn’t remove the cap.

No, but we had the entire plumbing under the kitchen sink replaced October 15.

Richard had no doubt that was it before I’d even Googled.

I didn’t remember the name of the plumber nor could I find his workup sheet. I was sweating this.

Yay blog: I found the date. Yay plumber: he’d sent me an email receipt.

I called, and if you know me you know how desperate I am to get this done to do that, but thankfully the person who answered had a deep voice and we muddled through.

The work had a 30 day warranty.

The guy hedged. I said point blank, Having it nineteen days out of warranty on an eight hundred dollar job bites.

He sounded almost relieved, like I’d just made up his mind for him, and said he’d send a guy out to do diagnosis first thing in the morning, no charge. He said something else, and I couldn’t make it out, and I am hoping hard for no surprises.

So we have to be ready for a repair guy at 8 a.m. who might not get here till close to when I have to leave for the eye doctor’s but Richard will be here and they’re coming.

I’ve seen a few small feijoa trees growing around here but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the fruit for sale in the chain grocery stores; they have a short shelf life.

Andy Mariani grows them. I don’t go to his farm but once or twice in the late fall to pick up some slab apricots and, during the holidays, stuffed figs, so I guess I’ve always missed the season. But today I did and there they were and I was curious and brought a box home.

I cut one of the green eggs in half. I gave us each a spoon to scoop it out, as one does.

Dang.

Instant memories: the lavender-infused angel food birthday cake at a nice restaurant that smelled wonderful but I’m sorry, it could only taste like the round decorative balls of impossibly slippery soap at my grandmother’s that made it so her nose could tell from a hundred feet if you’d washed your hands for dinner like she’d told you to do. And how the whole dinner tasted like your hands.

My experimenting with a dessert using a new extract and an exceedingly polite friend (hi, Kelly!) telling me apologetically that she and rosewater just had not made friends yet.

Not that I could place which brand in the distant past it was, but this I can tell you: that fragrant, ripe feijoa had a flavor that could go straight to your head.

Now what do I do with the rest of this crunchy shampoo?

My seat mate on the plane to Seattle was wearing a teal blue outfit. We got to talking towards the end of the flight; she’d been admiring the hat I was knitting for some time. (It had a specific recipient in mind.) She showed me pictures of her quilts and I found myself exclaiming over and over: the woman was a gifted artist. My stockinette beanie suddenly felt quite plain.

Before the trip, I had gone looking to see just how many things kicking around were FOs that just needed the ends run in so as to be ready to be gifted. I was a little horrified to find that the answer was eighteen.

That’s a lot of Zoom-meeting hats and cowls knit during non-hat-wearing months so they hadn’t gone anywhere and the incentive to spend those last two or three minutes on them just hadn’t been there.

I picked one at random and ran those silly yarn ends into the backs of the stitches and wondered what had taken me so long. And then felt done.

Why was I not feeling the need to do those other, y’know, seventeen, c’mon, hon…  shrug

I stuck the really truly finished one in my jacket pocket to make sure I would have easy access to it in case I didn’t finish the one on the needles. You never know… But also–that shuttle bus from the car rental place can be really cold up there.

The hat in my pocket was teal blue.

She was as thrilled as I would soon be by Heather’s socks.

And that is how you get those 17 other stragglers out of here and on their ways to where they were meant to go all along.

For the record: yesterday was the day that for the first time ever, a Red-tailed hawk swooped around our patio coming right close to the window with me on the other side, wings spread wide and deep orange tail outstretched, to the pomegranate tree and then to complete the circle away to the bay laurel, to look around and check out the digs here. In my yard.

I have seen them up in the hills many times but never here much less right! Here! Glorious!

And for the record, yesterday was the day my friend Heather L utterly blew me away. She was half-afraid they wouldn’t fit or that their stitches might be too uneven or or or.

Oh honey. Wow. Wow. Wow. They could not possibly have been a more perfect gift of love and skill and talent. Wow. And the colors! And trees to welcome that new hawk to perch and observe from: may it forever feel at home here. Wow.

Late late flight last night.

First things first: Mathias demonstrates how to properly read a book.

Lillian, the proper way to draw after you’re all exuberanced out. But the drawing itself is absolutely imperative and so you must.

XKCD today. I love how the older memories are in gray, the more recent in black and white and easier to see clearly. Pure poetry. I love the confirmation that his wife is still okay. Beautiful piece and very close to home.

Meantime, over here it looks like all systems are go! We’ve got us some memories to go make.

Scene: the bank, since I was in the neighborhood anyway and I needed to get this dealt with. We had had a very unwanted surprise bill from FedEx for a tariff fee on the heels of a delivery and it was a lot.

Then 47 played Taco Don (Trump Always Chickens Out) and that particular tariff, at least for a little while, disappeared.

FedEx sent us our hundred dollars back. Who knew it could work that way? Only, the check was made out to Self. Do not ask me why. The teller had to ask his manager because that was just too weird–but then this whole tariff/no tariff/who’s got the tariff nonsense is weird. We all shrugged a who knows? and they processed it.

So there we were and then the teller, who up to that point had seemed stressed and probably counting the hours till he could get out of there, said dutifully, Is there anything else I can help you with?

Well, I said: Could you make me a couple of pies?

He cracked up. He smiled warmly. He asked after my Thanksgiving and I wished him a happy one and it was so gratifying to be able to pay forward the gift yesterday from the single dad at church to someone else when they needed that.

A night of very little sleep (too much dark chocolate pie last night but it was good), a morning that started earlier than it had any right to even though it was our usual time, so so tired but it was time to get up.

A few minutes later I saw it before he did.

He had stepped on who knows what, but since he couldn’t feel it he didn’t notice it. It was even a whole new toe to worry about, not the old one. I followed the blood across the hall, across the carpeting, so much on the carpeting, and then where it had obviously started. It was bad.

I’m tired of collecting Southwest future travel do-overs.

He cleaned up his foot while I tried my best to clean the carpet. It was too early to be having to work that hard and that much. I did not succeed in getting it all. It was time to go, and we made it to church on time. Breathe. The meeting hadn’t started yet so I pulled out wool and needle and started casting on a hat because boy did I need my hands to switch to the language of happy anticipation.

He tried to tell me I should be setting up my phone for the Zoom caption. I told him I was doing this (waving the needle) for me. Which was nicespeak for (and we did talk it out over lunch later), I am just barely holding it together right now worrying about you and being frustrated with you and this is how I am not bursting into tears out of sheer fatigue and worry and yes you are right and I don’t want to hear it while I have these thirty more seconds to do this so zip it buddy.

Just then someone dropped a little notecard in his lap and smiled and continued walking on past.

I put my yarn away the moment it looked like the meeting was about to start and, for the sake of the both of us,  just immersed myself in the good spirit that others had brought to the moment. It was there, waiting for me to find myself in it again. And what a story one woman told of the power of Love and the redemption wrought in her life!

After the meeting, we finally opened that envelope.

It was a handwritten note. From a single dad.

Saying how much he enjoyed and admired Richard for this, me for that, and that he had just felt moved to say so out loud.

I sought him out afterwards and thanked him. I told him, You could not have known. You had no way to know. But that was the day we most needed what you took the time to give us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A pie potluck, 4-5 pm, dinner was not being served, just pie. Anyone who wanted to could grab the mic and say something they were grateful for.

Which is how one woman who’d invited her friend found out that her friend was my neighbor across the street. We all had a great time catching each other up.

I wonder how many others walked in the door at home afterwards and said, Do you still want dinner?

Not really, I’m good. You?

Nah. It was all I needed.

(Embiggen to really see. The picture was taken this morning.)

While so many trees are dropping their leaves and skinny-dipping their way towards winter, the California Coffeeberries are dressing themselves in sweet-smelling blooms, ready to provide: the bees and hummingbirds, for now, the berries to come, everything else. The density of the branches in the spring provides perfect cover for many a bird and nest. This, not the bird-poisoning-berry non-native Nandina, is what everyone should plant here. (It can survive down to -20F.)

I wrote that. Stopped a moment. Considered the thing. I put down the computer and slipped on the gardening shoes and walked outside where it was cold and dark and a bit wet from a storm and leaned into a flower cluster, and oh my word, took a deep breath.

I had been admiring it all day. But I had somehow forgotten to go and take in the whole of it.

60×68″ unstretched. I finally got a satisfying picture that looks like what it looks like. The childhood peach orchard in the rolling West Virginia mountains, first version. I tried to take another with it all smoothed out about five minutes later so that you could see the raptor soaring where the clouds were parted, and maybe even the wild violets blooming, but it was too late, the sun angle wasn’t having it.

I finally made myself sit down and check every end–yes they were all run in, yes I always do as I go along, but what they’d needed was to all be trimmed just so, nice and neat. Done.

I finally feel comfortable post-op driving to the post office.

I finally sewed on the tag that personalizes it.

We’ll talk tomorrow about my finally actually getting to the post office because I considered the rush hour traffic and, no. But the requested muted-colors version is boxed and ready to go to my sister, where it will fit in with her paintings.

Let me just make sure first she isn’t traveling over Thanksgiving.

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

Wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A minivan pulled up.

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