It’s a surprise. I don’t know a thing about it. I’ll distract you with an amaryllis photo (Lene, that’s yours in the white container, far left).  The thing is all wrapped up in bird-themed wrapping paper over there, right next to the 25 lb bag of birdseed. I wonder what it could be.

Michelle was wondering out loud yesterday what the family should get me for Mother’s Day.  My friend Robin then sent me a link to one of her favorite stores when I mentioned to her that a birdfeeder would be really cool. Our next-door neighbors have one, with the result that I’ve seen a red-tailed hawk right outside our window here, and there was the never-to-be-forgotten moment when I pulled into my driveway, got out of my car, and there, perched at the edge of the neighbor’s roof at the closest point of it to where I was, quite close, stood a golden eagle. It looked at me. I looked at it. It looked at me.  Hmm. A little big for prey.  Came in a crunchy container, and it might get back in and you know how hard it is to undo that overpackaging with one’s talons.

So I wanted something that would help pull the outdoors up closer to my window, a little friendly competition with the feeder next door.

Robin’s link was to the local Wild Bird Center.  Michelle and I hopped in the car today and headed down to Los Gatos.  We were helped by an enthusiastic ornithologist who wanted to know what kinds of birds we wanted to attract?

“Pretty ones.”

She laughed.  Ooookay…  Obviously a fussy customer here.

I asked about the feeder I’d seen online that flips the squirrels off. No, literally. She told me the price of those (yowsers!) and that they have a $30 part that has to be replaced about once a year, and added, the squirrels learn quick to avoid them so then where’s the entertainment?  She doesn’t sell them.

Ah. Well, it was just a curiosity.  Besides, then I’d have to keep the feeder close to the ground and I’d be watching the little beasties anxiously like a mom whose 16-year-old just took off on their first solo trip behind the wheel.

She sold Michelle one that closes up the restaurant at the weight of a squirrel and is perfect for songbirds.

And I don’t know a thing about it till Sunday.  (Michelle wanted me to come with her to make sure the one she got would be one I’d be pleased with.)

I’m all a-twitter.  Heh.

My friend Russ, Marguerite‘s husband, played tonight, and I missed Knit Night, but oh goodness, you should hear the St. Michael Trio play!  Three men who trained for musical professions, but one went on into medicine, one into software, and one is a CEO.

I think, though I may be wrong, that Marguerite’s Celebration of Life is how they got started playing together. When I wrote that post, I was referring briefly to my Crohn’s hospitalization of ’03; I had no idea, of course, what was coming.  Just to clarify.

And now they’re Artists in Residence at Menlo College and deservedly so.

They autographed my CD for me.   It’s official: I’m a groupie.

One of these days I’ll learn that the picture looks better if I take my hand out of my pocket or over the shawl and then in the pocket, but vanity aside, here’s the finished baby alpaca shawl I was working on. It’s the Tara’s Redwood Burl pattern, though more in the color (it’s greener than this in real life) of a tiny redwood sapling’s baby needles.

Burls are like pearls to an oyster: something interesting and beautiful created by the living thing’s reaction to an irritant.  I’ve been fascinated by redwood trunk patterns ever since we moved to California, and that pattern was my second attempt at trying to capture the essence of some of them.

Just some background on how that redwood-colored shawl in “Wrapped” got its name.

Oh, and that’s the baby plum tree my kids gave me for Mother’s Day last year, growing like a weed.

(Ed. to add for those who asked: the doctor at the ER said the bloodwork was clean, which I interpret to mean that as for This Little Piggy, Richard Had None.  He’s feeling a fair bit better today; thank you for looking out for us, everybody.)

(Note on the book: I’m a backwards author. When people ask me in person to sign their copy, I ask them if they’d be willing to sign mine too.)

Yesterday I had a mammogram done, came home, grabbed Michelle and went to the insurance broker’s to sign her up for health insurance, came home and dropped her off, went back to the clinic to the infectious diseases specialist, came home, grabbed a bite and typed that draft–

–and then Richard said, “Let’s go.” It turned out he hadn’t kept anything down since the afternoon before.

Dude. You’re supposed to say more than “I don’t feel well” in answer to your wife’s questions before that point.  I *can* cancel appointments, you know.

I had a half-finished scarf in my purse, which certainly wouldn’t hold me, and I’d finished my shawl project. I had about twenty seconds to decide on yarn and pattern, no time to print out nor look for a hardcopy of a new one, so I grabbed some Kidsilk Haze and Shelridge Farm laceweight, a pair and then, thinking about it, a second size of needles, just in case (good thing!) and my book.  I didn’t think in the rush to grab the Jerome Groopman book I wanted to finish.  And off we went.

Urgent Care sent him to the ER at Stanford, where they wanted to know if he had (I kid you not) swine flu. Richard happened to mention that one of his co-workers was in the hospital and had spent a week in the ICU, of what, he didn’t know yet.  Lovely.

I got to row 35 on my Wanda’s Flowers shawl before my hands made me stop.

We had assured the ER doctor that we had Zofran anti-nausea meds at home from my Crohn’s flare, no need to go looking for an open pharmacy at that hour. We got home, I added that bit to the draft, Richard de-wonked the computer so it would actually post while I looked for the Zofran… And it had fallen into a drawer.  Took us both looking till 2:20 before we could fall into bed.

You’ll forgive my not posting a more complete story of the evening last night?

This is the post I hit send on after Richard said, “Let’s go.”  My computer froze and it didn’t post.  We just got back (love that timestamp) from taking him to the ER. He’ll be okay.

————-

The infectious diseases specialist was wonderful! The first thing she did coming in was to exclaim over my knitting in my hands and my shawl and to sigh that it’s a lost art.

Okay, hon, you just made friends right there.  I was charmed.

When I told her I had come because I needed another opinion and some reassurance because I’d gotten such conflicting information, when I said the stoma nurses had said not to change the bag more often than every two days, she immediately said, “That’s right.”

It was exactly the appointment I’d needed, and she wants me back a week or two after the antibiotics are finished.

Let’s just hope she doesn’t google, find this, and realize I’m already looking at my stash and scheming.

The moving van came Thursday.  I went across the street to say goodbye to our neighbors moving home to Ireland.

It turned out they were staying till Saturday, with a mattress to be left on the floor for them to sleep on.

What about Jack? I asked.  I offered to go look for our old porta-crib that had gone through four kids and was none too new looking, especially after being tucked away for 20 years, but hey.  Michelle and I gave it a good dusting-off and took it over. We couldn’t make them stay, but we could make their leaving easier on them.

They returned it Saturday on their way out in better condition than when they’d gotten it. They are such nice folks. They will be missed.

A quick trip to Costco, where we saw someone with a flower tucked into her hair.  Not only that: it was a zinnia.  There are those who will understand why I was thinking, how perfect is that?!

When we got up closer, I could tell it was silk.  That’s okay; not everyone has the real thing at hand, It needed to stay fresh looking through her whole shift at work, and her heart was definitely in the right place.

I wonder if she’s a knitter yet.  Heh.

I was actually on the verge of deleting the draft I was writing yesterday, thinking who wants to read this stuff, when that phone rang.  It was so stunning to me that that nurse would call immediately after I’d finished the last sentence and that she would initiate it when I thought that was something I had to do, and I hadn’t, that I had to add in her call and put that post out there.

The upshot is, she found an infectious diseases specialist covered by my insurance, a woman who happens to have a particular interest in prosthetics.  There you go. I got the necessary referral arranged and Monday in I go. Perfect.

The samples arrived from the manufacturer this morning.  Not even afternoon delivery–they paid the extra for FedEx morning arrival.  Go Hollister. Go stoma nurses at Stanford. Wow.

I am feeling considerably more cheerful today about the whole thing, as one might imagine.

I’ve definitely got some thank-you knitting to get done.

TMI from a tired blogger:

The good part, I suppose, of looking up staphylococcus aureus (yowsers!) is that I’ve become even more obsessive about washing my hands. Rubbing my sleepy eyes after reading that article landed hard in the Thou Shalt Nots.

I went back to dermatology yesterday.   Then called the stoma nurse today: leaking bags waking me up in the middle of the night four times in one week on top of that still-there-staph aureus infection is kinda getting old.   Not to mention expensive–if I use too many in a month, I get to pay for the extras at about $30 retail a shot.

The stoma nurse pulled strings and has a different type of skin barrier being overnighted to me now as samples (bless her!) to try that hopefully won’t give way, and said the weeping skin won’t heal if the adhesive is being pulled off too often–keep it to every other day, no more.

The dermatologist says the skin needs an antibiotic gel applied twice a day in order to heal.

Uh, guys…

Just as I finished typing the above, the phone rang. It was a nurse from my husband’s employer, wanting to see how I’d been doing since February and could she help with anything?

So she is now going to confer with an infectious diseases specialist to see if she can get me any more information.  While I’m sitting here marveling at the out-of-the-blueness and the timing of her call. Wow.

Meantime, some knitting is still actually going on over here, slowly but surely, on my new Grafton needles handmade in–I’ve come to really love the place–Vermont.

I spent today watching this little Picotee slowly open up.

Quite a few of my older amaryllis bulbs have been blooming with unusually short stems this year, including these two and the budding one lurking behind them.

They’re typically marketed as Christmas presents and bloom around the winter holidays on towering two- to three-foot stalks, their leaves lasting eight months or so.  Then you quit watering them, let them rest for one and a half to three months, start up again and wait for them to rebloom.  Rinse, rest, repeat.

I like to have some in full flower as far into the year as I can, so I stretch out the drying-out periods to stagger the timing; last year I had flowers all the way to the end of May.  Cool!

So. Around the middle of this past December, I did a mass watering of my several dozen older bulbs to get them started, knowing some would respond quickly, some slower.

But I was already three weeks into my Crohn’s flare, and as many know, it got bad fast after that. Carrying heavy pitchers of water around was something that got given up real fast. I worried about killing my bulbs off–one watering in the middle of five months?  But there was not a thing I could do about it.  And they just were not the first thing on anyone else’s mind during those days, as one might well imagine.

Mom eventually planted the ones Dad gave me for my birthday and took on the watering.

My older bulbs could have put all their energy into sheer survival mode, green only.  Some did. But some, with the beginnings of buds already formed inside the bulbs, were determined to bloom the moment it became possible, however  it could be done.

And those are the ones with the short stems now, giving it all they’ve got. A green hummingbird enjoyed them a few days ago.  And suddenly our roses are blooming en masse to celebrate spring too; I almost caught a honeybee in this picture.

Lene? The bulb you gave me a year ago started to send up its first two leaves right away, then they died off in the drought. I started watering it anyway when I could again.  It took it weeks to respond, long enough that I wasn’t sure why I was still trying, but now it’s got two unusually wide, healthy young leaves making up for lost time.

Amaryllises need four leaves producing food for the bulb for them to bloom the next year.

I can wait.

I’ve got all the time in the world now.

My friend Kristine, whom some of you may remember from here after this happened and whom I first met when she lived in San Jose before she moved home to Vermont, lived and wrote this in a way that makes the world a better place. Don’t miss it.

Our friends Glenn and Johnna bought a new house and invited a few friends over to see it last night. One fellow there whom I didn’t know looked at my gray hair and commented that he was right behind me. I told him, yeah, but I’ve already got the hearing aids and the cane–beat you!

What I didn’t know, is, he was Glenn’s friend from New York City who happened to study composition under Thelonius Monk. Joel Forrester, whose tune is the theme song for NPR’s Fresh Air, sat down at Glenn’s piano and launched into a performance on the spot for everybody.  Absolutely incredible.

Now, it was Sunday, and my family and I live by very old-fashioned ideas about not working and trying to live in such a way that we don’t make other people work on Sunday if we can possibly help it.  (Or for others, to honor whatever day they choose to celebrate their own Sabbath if we can.)  Which is why I told Joel I wanted to go to Amazon when it wasn’t Sunday anymore and buy all his CDs.

He promptly handed me three along with his card, adding his autograph when I asked, and told me he lived by the honor system and to send him a check whenever the day felt right to me.

He will find that it was postmarked today.  And I happily have new music to jazz up my knitting time.

(I’m throwing in some pictures that would have been in Friday’s post if I’d been home near my own computer. Our son Richard graduated with a minor in organ performance, and the chance to play on the Mormon Tabernacle Organ was his favorite professor’s graduation gift to his star pupil.)

My husband’s boss let him take the time off to fly with me for the kids’ big day. This was a real gift, considering all the time Richard missed while I was ill–with, again, his boss’s insistence that he not feel guilty about spending every day at my bedside in the hospital. He did work from there on his laptop, at least.

Anyway, after the Convocation Thursday (the perp walk was by college the next day), there was a family trying to capture the day taking turns holding the camera, one person out of the photo each time. There was the younger kid, about 14, playing the standard role at that age of obnoxious  teasing little brother, and the parents and the older brother were trying hard to laugh it off and be patient and understanding in the crowds and in the emotional intensity of the day. (And when I say crowds, I counted about 100 empty seats in a building that seats 22,700. We weren’t going anywhere fast.)

Noticing them, I asked if they’d like me to take a picture and let them all be in it together. Oh! Yes! Thank you!

And then, being me, I stumbled as I tried to get them into the camera frame, and said, Here. You better let him do this, he’s steadier. Richard!  And Richard stepped over to snap it for them.

They all gave this posed-smile look and I thought, hey, we can do better than that: so I stood on my tippy-tippy-toes to give my 6’8″ husband bunny ears behind his back while he aimed the camera, grabbing the role of  the little brother for them. But do you know how hard it is to give bunny ears behind a tall guy wearing a fedora on his head?

It worked. They cracked up.  Best family shot ever, I’d say.

Off in a few minutes to hear my son Richard play the Mormon Tabernacle Organ in Salt Lake City, with his wife and in-laws with us.

Lots of snow up in the tops of the mountains, the perfect weather here far down below, with blossoms on the trees that in our own climate were gone over a month ago and all of it celebrating with us–what a perfect day.

Took the kids and my folks out to dinner tonight to the kids’ favorite restaurant, an Indian one where they all love the food and where Michelle can easily enjoy a meal out without wondering about the ingredients; the staff knows her and they know her dairy allergy.

She told me they had gone out of their way quite a few times for her, that they had offered to make her items not on the menu and had been willing to give her points on how to cook like they do, sharing enthusiasms over this method here and that spice there.  They had been careful in taking good care of her–creating a new twist on the phrase that whom you serve, you love.

The fact that the manager afterwards made a point of telling me she would be missed was quite something to me. He totally made my day.