I went to a lecture once years ago by a Stanford professor who, with his grad students, had designed an aid to hearing aids: it was a kind of horseshoe-ish necklace with six microphones set in it, using the wearer’s own chest to help screen out background noise while relaying sounds up to the hearing aids. That which is straight ahead of you you can hear.

He tested it out on a woman with profound hearing loss on a very busy street. They faced each other and he spoke with that tremendous amount of low-pitched background noise going on right there, the very worst for wiping out the highest frequencies where the consonants of speech reside–and she heard every word clearly.

He said that when he told her it was a prototype only and that she had to give it back she burst into tears. She was desperate to own it. I can well imagine.

He then searched for a manufacturer willing to pick up on the idea but last I heard several years after, none had. He was custom-making them one by one at six grand apiece as any request came in.

At the time, six grand just staggered or I’d have asked for one, too, and we certainly debated the idea and the cost and wished. Only, my hearing aids didn’t even have the telephone coil that his setup needed in the first place, so there would have been replacing them, too, although, I have since. I don’t have t-coil now, either, I have blu-tooth going to a device connecting my phone and my $8888-a-pair aids and having not thought about him in awhile until today, am suddenly wondering if he’s still making them and if he’s updated his technology… (But can we come up with the funds. Same thought, just like the old thought.)

All this by way of mentioning an article I stumbled across about a company that was making special glasses for doctors to use during surgery and a friend of one such doctor thought they looked cool, could he try them on?

The right person in the right place at the right time asking the right nonchalant even almost flippant question, having no idea.

It apparently had not occurred to the company that they had created a solution for red/green colorblind problems, but suddenly they had a huge potential market and they are running with it.

Just in case you know someone this applies to. And whatever they’ll cost, let me tell you, it just can’t be all that much.

I was knitting in the waiting room today. My choices included kidney stone, kidney cancer, or an infection that would respond to antibiotics within four hours.

Yes please on the latter.

Thank you lab work. One dose down and just like they promised, it’s already starting to kick in. Sweet success.

Meantime, we hit 32 degrees last night and it was 43 under the mango cover–just above the limit of 40F where the inflorescences (flowering sets) die, not that there were any of those to worry about but one wants no cold spots.

Oh wait. While I was sick this past week–

–looks great to me!

(Views are from one side of the trunk and the other. Future leaves and branch in this one, inflorescence in the second view: we could actually get mangoes this year.)

(And then I go to…) Huh. My iPhone isn’t sending photos for some reason, even after I just deleted a hundred or two and I have no idea why. Anybody?

Well, anyway, trust me, the cluster of buds, it’s there.

And I might actually get that monster 250g worth of merino/silk hat finished while the weather’s being terrible in other places.

Edited to add, Richard to the rescue!

Our neighbors thanked us for the extra sunlight for their garden after the tree cutting last summer.

A week ago, I was weeding and found one plant that was different and was amused that it looked like a carrot top as I yanked it out. I was standing on my side of the fence from that garden.

Oh wait. Look at that size 00000 orange thumb needle under there. Who knew.

Today I went out and near that same spot, it looks to me like a strawberry plant (and I know they grow strawberries.) Think I’ll keep this one awhile and see what it does.

Let me say upfront that it’s nearly impossible to rile my husband. He’s calm, steady, seeks for understanding, he’s my rock. So I can’t imagine that he was anything but matter-of-fact in his statement. Me, on the other hand, I think I struggle a little harder at staying charitable when someone hits me right where I live. Literally. Even if we tell them they don’t know, they can’t possibly know, we remind ourselves, only those who live it can.

Although, the doctors and nurses at Stanford Hospital certainly do a good job of it. Good people. Yeah… That, “Oh I remember you!”

Our ward shares its church building with another ward and at the beginning of every year we flip which one has mornings and which the afternoons, whose toddlers get their nap time, who gets to sleep in.

There is an elderly woman in the other ward who–and this is the first year she’s done this–has decided she didn’t want to make that switch so she would just join ours. She probably has her favorite seat that her ward knows all about and she always goes there unless someone beats her to it, and that’s fine. We do too, going for where I’m most likely to hear, assuming no one else is there yet.

Two weeks ago she sat down right behind us (we always get there a little early, she, a little late) and started coughing hard. I apologized but got up and moved as far away as I reasonably could without making a scene (scoot down that bench…) Our ward knows. She had no idea, so we explained after the meeting was over and hoped that was that.

Last week someone beat her there–he was from out of town, visiting his grandkids. Directly behind us, clearly sick, coughing deeply. Given how fast and how hard that same cough would hit me a few days later, I can understand why getting ready for church he’d probably thought it wasn’t much. And I can certainly understand wanting to spend every minute with your grandkids you can (this being why I’ve been wearing face masks to church since Madison was born–I don’t want to be limited in when we can go see ours. But last week I forgot to bring one and there you go.)

The brainstem lupus had me fainting in the shower this morning, saved by the shower chair a dear friend dropped off last night when she heard. The tyranny of the ileostomy is that it does not care that you’re too sick to deal with changing the dressing every third day, you absolutely must and you must do every step right because one four-month staph infection is enough.

Hopefully all of this will be very short-term. I prefer my Crohn’s flares being in the past tense–and for the most part, they are, this is nothing compared to those two big ones: when my life was saved by an experimental med, when my life was saved by major surgery.

Michelle’s idea is that we should ask permission to place a box of face masks at the entryway for all who might need one to help themselves to. I think I should have one and a spare in my purse as it is.

Richard went off to church this morning. That same elderly lady sat down behind him after he got there.

And again she was coughing. A lot. While asking after me.

A short and sweet, “My wife is very ill. Someone was coughing right behind her last week.”

We bought plane tickets before all this started to go see our grandkids and to celebrate a birthday. Assuming we’re healthy.

—–

P.S. Rereading this I’m thinking, can you tell I’m ready to be done with this? And remembering the nurse I once apologized to at Stanford who comforted me with, and I’ll never forget the kindness of her words, “It’s okay to be grumpy: when our patients feel well enough to be grumpy it means they’re getting better and they want to go home.”

Read an article about noise and light pollution and its effects on the wildlife. Now, that subject could be an entire college major and this was one relatively short article, but at least I did learn a few things about what the Christmas lights on my mango tree might be doing out there.

House finches are late risers and couldn’t care less. Alright then.

Robins wake up several hours earlier and get to start foraging before anyone else can beat them to it.

After we planted that tree and started turning on its lights every night I started seeing robins in my back yard for the first time in all the years we’ve lived here.

Curious.

Last night Richard took care of the mango tree for me.

Tonight I turned the warming lights on and covered it over myself, claiming a little bit of normal life even though I’m far from feeling it–but it’s proof that today was better than yesterday. By far.

Still needing anti-nausea meds, though–the Crohn’s has been announcing itself along with the flu. Hopefully it will all settle down when the germs are over.

Nope, no Stitches.

Woke up too sick to get out of bed, started barfing nonstop, went from no cough to “sounds like pneumonia” in three hours (X-ray was clear for now) and spent five hours getting fluids pumped in me at Urgent Care. Just got home.

Not what I wanted.

Mel and Kris Kunihiro were going to custom-make me some extra-talls of their rice bowls for me to pick up. I’ll see if I can reach them on FB. I would gladly reimburse anyone who picked, say, four of them up for me if they have them.

Okay, back to bed.

(Ed. to add in the morning, they didn’t bring those bowls so that part is all good; we can wait till next time I see them.)

First peach flower of the year. I wish I could send a whole armful to New England. (Don’t miss that second video down on the Washington Post site…)

Not quite a snowbank of them yet.

Two days till Stitches!

Before and after. Kind of horrifying but you have to do it or you get a weak misshapen tree that won’t produce well. Cut off the top at planting, the videos from the growers said, down to three to four feet, max. Leave three to five branches for scaffolding. If there’s one that twists back on itself, cut it off. You want to create a vase shape over time so that sunlight can reach the inner center to make all the fruit sweet and you want a wider angle coming from the trunk than straight upright to make for stronger branches to bear their future load–watch those angles and choose the best, spaced around the tree. Trim.

Yeah, you see the wishful thinking in those red spacers? The first photo was taken Saturday. It took me awhile to work up the courage.

This morning I managed to make myself cut them down to six. Good thing the tree is still dormant, because I think I’m not quite done yet. There is just such a twirly twig, but it’s clear it was reaching in the direction the light was most dominant where it came from and since snapping this picture I’ve been able to mostly straighten it with another spacer–and it’s growing in the direction I want.

But it’s flimsy compared to the others. It has not yet convinced me it gets to stay. (Edited to add Wednesday morning, it’s gone now.)

I managed with great effort to cut the top off, as one is supposed to do, but the cut edge was sloppy, going down and then back up again like a check mark. It was misting out as a reminder that everything I’ve read or watched says take it at an angle so that water can’t collect on the healing cut.

Richard hadn’t left for work yet so he went out there for me and did a better job of it. But that is one good sturdy tree and it’s going to grow just fine, and in a place where it has space to spread nice and wide, unlike my smaller semi-dwarfs along the other fence.

This Indian Free peach is for my neighbor. The one with early dementia whom I had so many good long chats with last summer while there was an opening between our yards while her husband was gradually replacing the fence (I want to have that kind of energy when I’m his age) sawing the lumber on his back patio and putting the boards up a few at a time, day by day. She wished I had planted one of those peach trees near enough to grow over to their side when all this was done. And she would pick’em, too, if they did! she grinned mischievously.

And now I have. The best-tasting peach there is, according to the grower, one that does not get peach leaf curl disease, one that will thrive and grow and create bonds between neighbors long after she and I are both gone. It is planted close enough to spread a bit over the top there and yet far enough away that if some future neighbor halts it at the fence line it will do just fine with that, too.

She’ll never remember wishing for those peaches nor how many times she’d said those same words. But I do.

And so these last few months I kept coming back to the thought of her sitting beneath peach blossoms, inhaling the essence of spring and of love and finding a place to feel centered come what may. Of her picking ripe or even not-yet-ripe fruit as it makes her happy.

Of offering both her and her husband a place of peace.

And so I tracked down that variety and I drove over that mountain and with my husband cheering me on, I dug out as many old roots as I could and at last I planted her her peach.

Who knew, who could possibly have known, that it would feel so joyful. I mean. Wow.

The outer pot is the one the pear tree’s roots were cut out of, and with no soil in it I’m using it to keep the Page’s from growing through the paper pot to the ground.

So. We dug the Page up and put it in there to recover from its too-dark-in-winter location (oops) that it was losing its leaves over. It needs a good year of recovery because citrus, being evergreen, especially dwarf citrus, produce new leaves slowly.

Not that that’s stopping it.

It wants to do what it wants to do. I stopped counting at 83 flower buds. Sometimes even if you can’t make it right away, for creativity’s sake you just gotta have your stash on hand. (Still. I’m pruning those off when they get a little bigger.)

Another grand performance by the Cooper’s hawk this afternoon.

A raven later cawed a few times at the top of the Cooper’s nest tree but despite the momentary swagger did not hang around long.

Meantime, deadlines are a wonderful thing: I finally finished a cowl I’ve long been wanting to wear to Stitches this coming weekend, and as I did those last few rows I was thinking about another yarn I’d been wanting to have done by then too by way of showing the dyer see what I did? but I’d never actually quite figured out just what that was going to be.

As I was casting off I thought, y’know, that other is in the same natural color as… I’ve got it! Only took me a year, but, yes!

Can I pull off a design-and-knit by Friday. The race is on.

After yesterday’s 82 degrees, the first two peach buds of the season swelled and turned pink on the August Pride today.

We have the sweet, sweet sound of the dishwasher doing its second load. The part was the right part. The repair worked. And it didn’t die after one round like last week. Would I go to that parts place again in that sketchy part of town where the owner had to unlock the door to let me in, um, probably not. (The guy in Fremont hadn’t had it.) But we don’t have to shell out yet another hundred-forty for the motherboard after all and that is a huge relief.

Coopernicus (pictures of him here) did a swoop around the patio and together we got to see him with wings and tail stretched wide right on the other side of the window. Gorgeous. A birdwatching trip from the comforts of home.

I did a quick run this evening to the local Trader Joe’s to buy a favorite thing for my favorite man.

Frozen green figs. Who ever thought you’d find… Well okay so I got that too.

Going to my car, there was a man sitting in his next to mine, waiting, lights on. Clearly his wife too had run in for just one thing and was being distracted by all the finds one finds in that store.

And facing the rear in the car seat in the back was a very little girl.

Her mommy had left. She couldn’t see her daddy. Bedtime was bearing down on her too and she looked like a baby who wasn’t quite crying yet, but it was sure coming.

I smiled my best grandma smile and waved hi at her.

She stared.

I waved and smiled again and put my fresh-pressed apple juice in the car. I’d bought four. It was going to be a squeeze in that fridge but my Richard likes theirs better than anyone else’s.

She looked like she might be okay with being here after all.

The man rolled down her window and I told him, Cute baby!

But what he’d wanted was for me to hear: “Bye!”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

“Bye!”

We waved and bye’d at each other a few more times, the world a friendly place for a child too small to have more than a word or maybe two that she could reliably express yet, but by golly she got to put it to great use and she made my day.

At the last, I changed it on her to a double-word sentence of “Bye bye!” and reluctantly pulled my car out of that spot, time to go.

She made Richard happy too when I got home and told him about her.

I just looked at the remote-read on the thermometer under the mango tree. Forty-six and heading down. Time to turn on the Christmas lights to keep it warm and safe for the night.

It’s been a good day.

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.

Found a guy who said he’ll call tomorrow when he has the dishwasher part in. Beats waiting two weeks on Sears.

It wasn’t till hours later that I realized that Sears, on the other hand, would let me return it if it doesn’t make the machine work. Here’s hoping supporting the little guy over the big corporation turns out okay.

Went to open the oven at dinnertime and yelped and then walked around the corner to show Richard what that was all about–holding the door handle out to him, the one from the upper oven, the one that, like the right half of my stove, still works. (We wrestled it back in place. Dinner was inside there–we were motivated.)

And after all this we need to figure out what’s wrong with the leaking fridge, although so far it’s still cold where it needs to be cold.

I think my kitchen is on strike.

Milk Pail turned 41 today and Steve threw a cheese tasting party in celebration and that it wouldn’t be the last. We got the invite.

Seeing the Wensleydale with cranberries, I said, “I’m going to tell you something I bet you don’t know.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

I told him that Wensleydales ate too much for how much wool they produced and so the commercial flocks pretty much had vanished except for one flock (actually might have been two, come to think of it) hanging on preserving the breed. And then the handspinning market found out that there was this rare really cool lustrous wool to play with and that was the start of its comeback.

“Cool!”

Milk Pail is the little shop that spent years and finally successfully fought off a developer who’d wanted Steve’s land. The problem being that Steve had had an agreement to share parking with the other businesses surrounding his but one by one they had all sold out to said developer, who proposed building eight to ten stories in a solid block around Steve’s till he starved and sorry about that, pal. The mayor even told the guy’s rep to shorten those in the plans so that they could make better use of Steve’s land when they got it. Charming.

They did a test run by illegally cutting off another small shop from its customers, and its owners caved and sold.

Not Steve.

Years.

City council meeting protests. Standing-room-only turnouts, again and again. Appeals to reason. Because Steve had owned his place so long (the distortions of long-ago Proposition 13 being the unspoken elephant in the room) he could keep his prices very low; a new owner would have to pay current-market-value-rate property taxes in one of the most expensive parts of the country. Local zucchinis at fifteen cents? Ears of corn at twenty? Triple-creme brie? Manufacturing cream for your chocolate torte, which no one else sold? You want local, Steve even owns his own cows now, having saved someone’s family farm.

You had the most and the least well off in Silicon Valley calling the eclectic little place their favorite shop and coming together in their day-to-day, being human together no matter their circumstances. And that is no small achievement.

Steve knew our car situation and that there had been times when Richard had taken time off work so I could go to those city council meetings, and he made a point of telling Richard how grateful he was for that and that I’d not only gone, I had told him when I wouldn’t be able to make one.

It told him the fate of what he’d poured his whole life into mattered not just to him. That had meant far more to him than I had ever had any idea of.

And, he continued, “Have you seen the video? You’ve got to see the video!”

I cringed but I quoted: “If. You. Shaft. Steve!” and we laughed together at that moment when I’d stood at that podium. “Yeah, I kind of lost it.”

“You should show it to your kids! Save it for your grandkids!”

“Four, two” (almost), “and one month.”

“Yeah, okay, a little young yet,” he agreed. “But still. Who would have guessed it. I mean, with your religious background, and you’re a…knitter! I mean-! He grinned, “You really took them on!”

“Yeah, she can be a real rabble rouser,” said Richard, and we both kind of explained our Washington DC/political family backgrounds: you speak up when you see an injustice. You just do. (But then, one does anyway, I would hope.)

And I remembered the city council meeting where I had cast on at the start and cast off at the hours-later finish, wound the ends in with my knitting needles and presented Steve with a hand knit hat to tell him the community was behind him. It was later that I would be telling that city council how good they had it to have a business like Steve’s creating some of the better moments in Silicon Valley and with that memorable phrase announced that my family and I would take it as, then they didn’t want our business. Any of their businesses. Anywhere in Mountain View, if those politicians pocketed that developer’s money and looked the other way. “We have our own,” and I stormed off before their timer even beeped.

Totally earned Tiger Mom cred in his eyes that night. He was unfailingly soft-spoken and kind but someone needed to stand up for him and give it to’em like they needed it given to’em. Darn straight.

I handed out a few Peruvian hand knit finger puppets to two sets of parents for their toddlers tonight.

We had a great time, and let me tell you, that Wensleydale with the cranberries? I have a new favorite cheese. Clearly it wasn’t just the handspinners. I can’t wait to go stock up at the shop.