Hobbits In Rivendell - NFHN Reader

Well! It’s been a minute since May.

We’re still here, friends – upright, and if not in our right minds, at least close?

(Oh, hush – as close as we get. You know what we mean.) It’s been a gloriously healing summer. Leaving Casa de Depression was the best move, ever, even if we weren’t quite sure that we should. It’s been great, though – not having to create landscaping from nothing was relaxing. Casa Plácido has quite a yard – a weird yard, but we only seem to DO weird yards. This one is a full third acre… on a 40% grade. The ground cover is mostly rosemary bushes gone wild, and the owners, a couple who live in Barcelona, stuffed every fruit tree they could into the ground before we left. Fig trees? We got two. Olive trees? Four. Apple, Bartlett pear, Asian pear, persimmons, plum, mulberry, cherry, lemon, and grape vines, blueberry bushes? Er… yes. This is not to mention the five sequoias, fourteen rose bushes, and bougainvilleas, geraniums, lantana, hibiscus, and the narrow strip of lawn. It is, obviously, pure chaos. But, it’s the kind of chaos we can get behind, the kind of chaos which makes you shake your head in bemusement, laugh, and feel like a tiny corner of the world is good.

At least it’s the sort of chaos that has allowed us to make friends easily. We’ve enjoyed singing off and on with a large Presbyterian choir in Livermore since 2017, and now that we have joined them full-time, we’ve certainly cemented our welcome. People ask us wonderingly if we have a farm, as we returned in September bringing baskets of pears and bags of apples to share. Nowadays we get random texts of unidentified apple pies, and pots of apple sauce. It gives us a good feeling of community – something we’re relearning how to build. I don’t think people realize how gradually they withdraw from the world when stuff is falling apart. It was somewhat necessary, as it took all our energy to meet deadlines and work expectations, so it felt like we needed extra rest, but now that we’re beginning to feel better, it feels like we let a lot of things just… go. It’s a slow road back from that, but we’re getting there.

We spent a lot of time doing only what was necessary, and put off a lot of care we needed to do when Himself was a consultant. Being employed by a global company means we’re taking advantage of them providing health care (for however long that may last), and finding specialists. T. has finally gotten another rheumatologist, and D. a neurologist to address the familial inheritances he’s been given, and both of us have visited the physical therapist. All of that medical tuning up has coincided with an exciting summer of Disorders We Couldn’t Have Predicted. T’s latest one they believe is MEWDS – which stands for Multiple Evanescent White Dot Syndrome. It’s a delightfully descriptive name and an annoying optic nerve inflammation, leaving her with huge floaters and coruscating bright flashes which have occluded her sight in one eye. For someone who makes a living on screens and writing, that has been rather terrifying, but one of the reasons we moved into this house was that we knew that T’s medical issues aren’t going to clear up. A home with a beautiful yard and peace was a gift we could give to ourselves. Room for our people to visit whilst T might need to lay low is also a benefit.

On the professional front, D’s work at his new company is going well. While the state of discourse on artificial intelligence reaches a fever pitch, the company he works for has used it since the 80’s for necessary but boring things like modeling traffic patterns. It takes a certain kind of brain to be able to communicate well with computer “intelligence,” and Himself is so far fairly adept at it, and is finally, slowly, losing the feeling that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and that everything is going to blow up shortly. Occasionally he goes in to the office, but is grateful to conduct most of his work online, as his boss is in another state, and some of his clients are in another country. Working from home is still a blessing we won’t ever take for granted.

Meanwhile T has had her eleventh book release and her fifth with HarperCollins this past week. We were happy to see its cover represented on the cover of the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine for September. One can’t buy that kind of free publicity, and even though her book was merely featured because of its color and a Valentine (being ripped in half – the issue contains a feature on romances, which her book is not, but …close enough?) she’s hopeful that it has been put before a few more librarian and bookseller eyes. Though she’s still a fairly quiet author, her books are steadily gaining wider regard. This past year saw two international publications licensed – one to France, and one to Romania, of all places. As T’s long-time agent (since 2005!) is now retiring as of her book release last week, she’s beginning the tedious process of finding a new one, feeling rather like she’s starting over on the dating scene – to which she says “Ugh.” It’s a good thing, though – new blood will catalyze new perspectives, at least in theory. All that newness will certainly give the desired neural plasticity a fighting chance, right? Right. There’s nothing like chaos to keep the brain young. Or something.

Speaking of chaos… yes, there’s much going on in the world outside our doors, beyond the “last homely house East of the Sea,” as J.R.R. Tolkien described it when he wrote The Hobbit. Once you walked past that house, things in the realm became Wild, and the world outside the Shire was unkind. We’ve always liked the thought of our own home as a bastion against the unkind world – and God knows what’s out there, especially lately, is painfully, irrevocably, and horrifically unkind. We hope our return to writing here – intermittent though it will still likely be – will give you a few brief moments of beauty as a fortress against this cruel and bombastic moment in our world.

Though there’s always something happening, and a lot of news to doomscroll, there’s also a time to close the paper, turn off the phone, and go outside. Don’t forget to appreciate the things that you have loved, and have voted to preserve. Don’t forget to hydrate, wash your hands, and touch grass. Reach out to friends. And remember, you are well-loved – may that fuel you to pass on an act of grace in return.

Happy Weekend

Friends, it’s been a looooong time since we posted anything here. Like, well over a year, long.

During that year, I’ve been a little bit short on work, to the point where we missed rent a few times. We’ve lived in a house we call “the depression house,” as it had so many things wrong with it – including a hideous landlord – that we basically just existed. I did land contracts enough to keep us going, but not to get us ahead in any way.

We had some health issues, which took up a lot of our thoughts (and money, frankly). Running around to different doctors, trying to figure out what’s what. Finally landing with a doctor who said, “oh, that’s X, 25% of the people with it don’t have the marker.” And so treatment can finally begin.

And now, I have a good job. This job, which I began right at the beginning of the year, is a full-time job, the first non-contract job I’ve had since 2005. With all of the benefits, vacation, etc.

We moved out of “the depression house” earlier this week – Tuesday, in fact. So we’re now in a house chock full of boxes, trying to figure out where everything should go. We have an awesome kitchen, with tons of storage, when we’d pared everything down to fit into the last house. It’s disorienting, to say the least.

So, that’s the goings-on. We’re still singing in choir, and I’m singing individually as well.

This house is wonderful. Eventually we’ll learn to enjoy it. Probably after we’ve unpacked. 😀

-D

I was cooking breakfast* this morning and working on a couple of the last bits, such as shredding some cabbage, and went to put that cabbage back in its bag. The bag is nowhere to be found. Nowhere on the counter, nowhere on the stove, not in the recycle, not in the trash. Not fallen on to the floor somewhere. Not in the dish drainer. Not in the spice cabinet. Not in the veggie scraps bin. Not even in the microwave. I am certain that the cabbage came out of the fridge in a bag, because I had sliced a chunk off of it previously. Mysterious mysteries.

* Breakfast was what we call hash.

2 cups spicy rice** (preferably leftover),
way more cabbage than you think you need,
454 g of tofu (i.e. one brick),
two eggs,
125 g of pepper jack cheese.

Sear the cabbage for a bit,
brown the tofu cubes on a few sides,
toss the rice in and warm it through,
crack in a couple of eggs and stir,
throw in the cheese when the eggs are cooked or nearly so, and you are done.

** Spicy rice:

one can of fire roasted tomatoes,
enough water to bring the liquid volume including those tomatoes up to three and three quarter cups,
two cups washed rice,
one dried pasilla chile,
two dried guajillo chiles,
one tablespoon of vegetable bouillon,
one tablespoon of some habanero or other spicy pepper paste,
one teaspoon applewood smoked salt,
one teaspoon ground cumin,
three sliced green onions.

Remove the seeds from and finely dice the dried chiles,
slice the green onions,
mix everything together in the rice cooker,
press go on the rice cooker.

Hope you’re well!

-D

Well, friends, it’s been nearly a year since we posted here. Some of that’s just life, some is that blogs have kinda gone by the wayside. Some is just not being in the habit, some more is that I don’t think that the posts are emailed out automatically & so our friends don’t see them. In any event, I’m going to try to get the photos out more frequently, and also to at least say “hello” up here from time to time.

Here, have some lizards. And go visit the photos for a few thousand more new pictures.

-D

High summer, and we are among the living.

It’s it’s hard to believe how much has changed, when it seems that staying so close to home, so little does.

We took pictures of the yard when it was flat dirt, and when Himself was tilling and planting – but the pictures don’t do it justice. There’s nothing that can describe dead ground suddenly becoming alive… a sun-baked stretch of clay becoming a DIY meadow for dragonflies, butterflies, a league of lizards, two nesting pair of mockingbirds, a scrub jay, countless goldfinches and house finches and all the pollinators – at least three types of bees, by striping pattern, among numerous others, including tiny, jewel-green flies (whose ironic common usename is Green Jewel Flies. Can’t make this stuff up). Despite the clay soil and the fox leaving calling cards early on, somehow, this is the best garden, yet. We have giant zinnias. We have giant marigolds. We have …color and life and birds swooping around, and the odd tiny kestrel come calling, the ubiquitous crows, as well as the hooting of owls at night.

We are still here – and how are you?

We didn’t start out with the idea for a DIY meadow. We just knew we wanted… something to see. The entire back wall of the house is dedicated to windows, and we needed something other than flat ground and dirt to look at, as year turned. The extra rain we had this past winter really encouraged us to take a chance and drain the little pond that had settled itself into the center of the old fire pit – and T’s family giving her gardening supplies for her birthday in March sealed the deal. She received seeds she would have never otherwise purchased or tried growing. Just flinging the seed out there onto the newly tilled ground and hoping for the best made a big difference.

A study from the University of Colorado (funded by the American Cancer Society) published in January 2023 in the journal Lancet Planetary Health found that people who started gardening saw their stress and anxiety levels decrease significantly. This wasn’t WHY we started gardening, but it’s been a definite, positive by-product. This was a stressful winter workwise for Himself, with a lot of political shenanigans and nonsense going on. (Ironic that even working for yourself can be political.) Work hits its ebbs and flows, so there was less work with more annoying people. Odd how that works. T meanwhile slogged through finishing a novel that she didn’t want to write (but was under contract for). Dreading one’s work made it (at first) much harder work than she expected, and that took a lot out of her. And then, the health outcomes she was dreading came to pass – the new biologic drug she’s on showed wearying signs of not working, and, worse, brought on the hemolytic anemia she had carefully worked to prevent for years. Staggering with exhausting (and wishing that weren’t literal), depressed and discouraged after the long winter and uncertain Spring, both T&D needed a win.

Which was where gardening came in. Gardening, friends, is an act of faith.

One must believe in the potential of this weird looking bit of woody …something. It’s dull and tiny and one must toss it in the dirt like detritus, and think, “Okay, we’re told you have all that you need inside of you to do your thing. Go.” And then one must wait. Five to seven days, ten days, fifteen, and that woody bit of nothing …transforms. It pokes up through the soil, completely changed into the likeness of a plant – a tiny bit of green, which, in a few more days produces true leaves which determine what it will be. An act of faith, the substance of which is hoped for, the evidence which is now seen. To quote Audrey Hepburn, to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

The pandemic zeitgeist invented something else called… rage gardening. People were so tired and fed up with things in the world that sometimes the only thing they felt like doing was hitting something… so they went out and hit the ground with a pick axe. (THIS is contraindicated – those suckers are heavy and you could hurt your back, and then you’d feel so much worse…Start with a hoe.) Ripping out plants, flinging away rocks and chunks of clay, yanking out weeds and sharply cutting a hoe into recalcitrant soil has continued to have its uses. Especially for T, for whom holding a hose to water some days requires sitting down, beating on something until she is breathless is helpful. There’s very little that individuals can do to change things, yet we are subtly shamed and castigated for the warming planet, for the political situation, for the stupidity of book bans. There is very little that is our fault, yet there is a lot which is our responsibility, and sometimes the very little we can do to control the depth of the handbasket in which we are going to hell wages war with the choices we can make to turn the lives of our community in a positive direction. Sometimes, life is exhausting. There is so little we control – but how many weeds are growing next to your zinnias? That, you can manage.

Obviously, not everyone gardens in a temper – that sounds exhausting, to say the least – but ripping out things and turning soil has left us understandably exhausted. At least that chronic fatigue makes sense. At least in the garden, frustration can be a source of good, to give us space to process what we know, that bad times won’t last forever, that we’re being cradled, held, and looked after, even when it doesn’t feel like it. That joy comes in the morning.

Gardening then becomes a portable magic. Carried from the parent plant, seeds, via bird poop, wind, rodent digestion, or some intrepid gardener who glares at the squirrels and frets at the finches stealing “his” seeds (sound like anyone you know? Maybe????), these bits of the future go out into the world, not knowing where they’ll land. But, land they do, and they recreate themselves, reinventing themselves to fit where they need to be, over and over and over again.

“It is a greater act of faith to plant a bulb than to plant a tree . . . to see in these wizened, colourless shapes the subtle curves of the Iris reticulata or the tight locks of the hyacinth.” –Claire Leighton, Four Hedges

Gardening allows us, even briefly, to take some of that mute, unseeing, seed-like faith into ourselves – and to wait steadily and patiently for what’s inbuilt to do its job – giving us space to wait with grace for in another day, a solution, a new medication, an ending to crisis.

We planted two types of melon this year – neither of them remotely “normal,” because seed catalogs arrive the day after Christmas, when it is dark and one’s resistance is at a low ebb. (Well played, seed companies.) T was enticed into purchasing two heirloom-ish things she’d never even heard of, one a single-serve Tigger melon, which begins a deep, striped green, but which is a deep, striped orange when ripe, and the other, a mastodon-sized, orange-fleshed monster.

The largest watermelon is about four to six pounds already, which we consider shocking – we’ve never successfully grown decent melons without “help” from the deer in the from of either stepping on each one of them, or taking a bite – one single bite – from each, because grazing animals are sometimes complete dorks. TBH, we’re afraid to hope the Tigger and the Orange Crush or whatever its called – actually come ripe. So far, however, they’re doing their thing, and sending out distinctive leaf-shapes on sturdy vines to colonize the shady area beneath the bushes along the fence.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the house we have at last count twelve Georgia Roasters – a Comanche Nation heirloom variety of squash used in the Three Sisters planting method (the squash, maize, and pole beans thing) – six or eight delicata squash, and a handful of birdhouse gourds ongoing. (Why we chose to plant those next to each other is a short, dumb story – we had old, old gourd seeds and didn’t think they’d germinate. Joke’s on us as both birdhouse gourds and roasters will grow a ten foot vine FROM ONE SEED. The morning glories are climbing them, and the vining is almost visible if you stand still watching them long enough. The race is on to pull down the neighbor’s fence).

The roaster squash, relatives of butternut, are just HUGE so far, and we’re not even close to their full weight, which sometimes exceeds fifteen pounds EACH, and they exceed the length of a forearm. We are excited to have overwintering hard squashes – something we’ve also not ever tried to grow. We also have birdhouse gourds going – we did those once and they were fun. We made all these cute birdhouses and gave them away — and the one we kept, a windstorm blew down and shattered, disappointingly. With the 35 mph winds we had last winter which blew down the fence we’re going to be much more careful with these.

The season is waning – we are collecting seeds and already seeing the fading of the intense colors and the drying out of the vines as the squashes and gourds begin to ripen. We have harvested and collected seeds ready to unleash into the soil to create another shorter, intense flowering season before the El Niño rains promised/threatened come and soggify the soil into unresponsive clay lumps again. We’re hopeful that the next growing season will be easier – that the green compost we turn into the sandy, clay soil will attract more worms and rejuvenate what tends to be basically worthless. We’ve had an amazing season without knowing what we were up against, and now plan to turn rice hulls and other organic material into the soil in hopes of helping it do even better.

Having access to an outdoor space is a privilege, one we’re aware of, and grateful for. Our world is smaller and circumscribed, and as you might expect, living with restrictions as we do, due to T’s autoimmune disorder, is sometimes annoying. The world leaves those chronically unable to participate behind, ever well-meaning but inadvertently too fast, and expecting everyone to keep up. We as a society don’t do well with protracted anything. With chronic illness, there’s almost this sense of “aren’t you done with that YET??? Nope, we’re not, and we might not be, for many years or ever. Happiness is dealing with what you can and letting the rest go, however. We haven’t contracted Covid, by the grace of God. We haven’t had more than a passing stomach bug – no serious illnesses other than the one(s) already here. Part of “the rest” that we’ve let go has been the things and people we expose experience firsthand, where we go and what we do. We hope to continue to make adjustments and figure out to live within our restrictions. We hope to hear how you’re doing. We hope someday things change. But, until then, there’s the garden – and the internet – and the blessings of friends who send good wishes, which we cannot take for granted.

Hold onto those things, and don’t let go.

It has been a very long time since blogging, or even pulling pictures from the phones. Some of that is that we’ve basically just been staying home, where nothing is really newsworthy. Another part of that is getting settled into San Ramon, including everything from unpacking to getting the yard tilled and planted.

How are you?

It’s been a minute!

We’re still here, in the Year of Our Lord Twenty-Twenty-two. We’ve missed sharing a few details, these last few months:
A Stanford specialist for T, a quasi diagnosis from said specialist, a new editor for T, and an abrupt departure to a new house. (Workwise, things have remained fairly constant for D, for which he’s no doubt thankful, but there’s always the possibility for changes there, too.) We’re still standing, though, with much to be grateful for, and no more than the usual aches, aggravations, and inconveniences. How about you?

On hearing that we were moving house, one of our Scottish friends said, “AGAIN!?” Since in the fourteen years since we’ve known her, she’s been safely ensconced in the selfsame house whilst we’ve been in … four now, since our return from the UK…we can appreciate her incredulity. We keep thinking that we’re going to settle in and just be, get to figuring out where we actually want to settle and buy something, and then it all seems like too much effort, and then the economy has another hiccough, and says “nope” once again. Aided by our rent rising by two hundred dollars last year, and finding that the house next door sold and was being entirely gutted and remodeled hastened our exodus. You’ll never believe how much your concentration shatters until you have a jackhammer going next door. Finding a larger place at four hundred dollars less a month immediately available made the inconvenience of a rapid uprooting and packing a little easier to bear.

We’ve moved into a neighborhood with neighbors that bring over pumpkin bread and wave on the street, which is heartening, and D’s beloved voice coach is three blocks away. Our Presbyterian choir is the same distance away timewise, but via a more direct highway, so we’re tentatively rejoining them for their holiday choral pieces, T fully and miserably masked, which remains a trial, but a trial she can live with in favor of leaving the house periodically. D continues to work with metal, wood, and experiment with other mediums, most recently clay, while T continues her slow progress with German, Dutch, Spanish, embroidery, and ukulele (when her hands cooperate), and pretending she knows how to decoupage. Mostly staying home continues to give us delusions of artistry.

The new house is 1960’s weird, and the unpacking is taking longer than usual, as our episode of Keep, Donate, Toss continues. There is a lot of discussion and bittersweet realizations about the things that have changed in our lives… For example, prior to now we could dream (READ: pretend) that someday we’d be the rustic hiking sort, and really use tent we bought at the early years of our marriage. We imagined family trips, weekends away, … a lot of things that never came to fruition, and, in the Pandemysterious Present, with T’s wonky immune system remaining compromised, will not come to fruition (although outdoor gear is still a great way to hang out for us now). We should probably get rid of the tent, but it’s hard letting go of the We Who Weren’t, and never will be. Not every decision is agonizing, but as the donate pile in the corner of the front room ebbs and flows, we know it’s time to be realistic. We move more than most people (NINETEEN moves in our married lives. NINE.TEEN). We aren’t able to interact with either people or food the same way we used to, so all the entertaining and meals are probably not going to happen in the same way. Additionally, we likely won’t retire in this house. We need to move more lightly through this world so it’s easier to get where we’re going…wherever that is.

Which – ugh – means a bit more winnowing.

Meanwhile, as the autumn deepens, the season of changes has hit T.’s work as well. She discovered that she is unexpectedly losing her editor, Katherine, while still under contract with the eponymous Katherine Tegen Books (an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books). It’s a little unnerving changing horses midstream (or swapping barrels going over Niagra, or whatever folksy aphorism you might supply) but fortunately, she’s already met her new editor, and holds out hope that all will be well come December. Her next book comes out in January, and she’s currently working with the new editor on a cover concept for the 2024 novel under contract. Hopefully after that more contracts with this company will materialize, but we’ll see…

The Autoimmune Thing has not improved, and for varied and boring reasons, T endured the nearly six months wait time to see a doctor at Stanford University Medical Center. We could launch into a rant about the length of time it takes to see a specialist, kvetch about the general cruddiness of insurance companies and out-of-plan doctors, but we would grow old before we finished being ragey, and who has the time? Suffice it to say it has been, thus far … a total bust.

This shouldn’t have been a shock. Americans, with our bias towards worshiping the intellect, tend to imbue doctors with godlike qualities. Add to that a big-named research hospital, and just gaining entrance to the hallowed corridors makes some feel as if they ought to genuflect. All that know-how! All those smarts! All that expectation built up in patients that there will be The Answer. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case for us.

The rheumatologist did due diligence with blood work, but test after test after test (SO. MUCH. LABWORK.) couldn’t bring him the definitive answer which he was after. There was no satisfying “Aha!” and no big reveal which pointed to dramatically to…anything. He repeatedly admitted that the blood work showed “something,” but not “enough.” The “not enough” became problematic. Every visit, the doctor asked a series of questions, the same questions, and T repeatedly answered them… and round and round that went. Since it’s impossible to “perform” illness on cue, this began to feel… awkward. We did the best we could in documenting the problem, sending photographs of rashes, blotches, and writing essays to describe pain and sleeplessness, rating joint disability on numerical scales. Eventually, the doctor did what he called a “push test,” told T. to stop eating red meat and do some yoga, and that she likely had fibromyalgia… and that he couldn’t help with that, as there was no real cure.

D, who attended the visits, was incensed. T was…bemused, especially since she’s been a vegetarian since she cut teeth. This has been an expensive, frustrating exercise, but it has taught us something… We’re just not sure what yet. While working on being grateful for the experience, we’re mostly focusing on the discovery of all the things we now know this autoimmune thingy is …not.

It’s like Formula 409, right? Nobody remembers the 408 things that didn’t work. Something will break with this, and that will indeed be something to celebrate. Meanwhile, T’s focusing as hard as she can on gratitude. She is deeply grateful for all the friends who keep in touch, we are both grateful for the fantastic rain, and the opportunities outdoors in the cold, for the days when work is interesting, and T, for days her body feels good enough to take a walk. (As not necessarily one of nature’s natural bluebirds of happiness, T’s just trying not to turn into a permanent grump. It’s relatively simple to become self-pityingly Grinch-y with chronic illness.) Thank you, friends, who have asked when we were next going to “say something” on our blogs. We’re still here. We’ll be here…

Meanwhile, while we miss the garden from the last house with its multiple fruit trees and big songbird population, but D. is looking forward to the next few months of rebuilding a yard which has just had the lawns removed. The landlord indicated that he was in the process of putting in a bit of green and some xeriscape, which D. enthusiastically embraced. Already we’ve heard an owl at night, seen a striking little kestrel casually perched on the back fence, and met the neighborhood crows and a pair of nesting mockingbirds, not to mention the ten thousand dun-colored sparrows, black phoebe and hummingbirds fighting cutthroat battles for feeder space. T. continues to quietly hope that all the birds we’re inviting to the yard will tip the balance on the earwig population (eeeugh).

Hope springs eternal.

Be well!

First off – before we get going – Happy Summer! ’tis the season for salads, as the world continues to be tucked-in-the-devil’s-armpit temperatures. This is a really great savory salad addition. Enjoy!

Now for the rant – no, not that one. This is a new one:

We don’t often talk about accommodation in our family. Our sister JC uses a wheelchair, and when she got her first chair, T’s father ripped up all the carpet in the downstairs of the house, and tiled it. The pantry is no longer a narrow closet under the stairs but a wide space next to the fridge, with sliding barn doors. Things are at varied heights, and our sister’s closet in her bedroom has been rebuilt lower. None of this is an out-of-the-box solution T’s parents bought at The Disabled Store (if there’s any such thing, it’s ridiculously, prohibitively, SUPER expensive – like her wheelchairs). They just figured out some things, and made them work. It’s an evolving process.

We have learned, living with our sister, that casual ableism – subtle discrimination in favor of able-bodied people – is A Thing, an insidious thing, that exists. At her private, Christian elementary school she was carried around like a piece of furniture – or, more realistically, like a fondly disregarded cat or a rag doll, even though she was a child too old to be carried – and honestly, how safe was it for the school to allow other children to carry her? When she was older, she had to go up long inclines to even get to the wheelchair ramp. Our church was recently updated and modernized – and still lacks some basic ADA accommodation, including a ramp to the platform. Wheelchair users aren’t expected to actually, you know, be among the people giving the sermons or prayers, apparently. The family noted this, and basically accepted it in silence… because, what could we do? We’d asked a few questions to a few people, and gotten chagrined or blank-faced non-answers. Disabled people weren’t in the plans, and the plans would go forward as they were… because casual ableism Is A Thing. (NB: Some people feel we should have made more noise earlier. Probably. It’s hard to overcome conditioning when you’re in the minority, though.)

We almost expect organizations to fail JC, because they do it so often. When she went to beauty school, they put off her enrollment for a solid month because they were ~~working on getting her a special cart at her height, a special chair for her clients, and specialized seating in her classroom~~ basically panicking, honestly. She did get to go to Disneyland, and she got to go first on all the rides, which was A Really Good Experience, but even though they had time and means to prepare, she had to buy her own specialized equipment. Her beauty school sent people to wash her client’s hair for her… because they couldn’t figure out how to make the world work for a disabled stylist, regardless of what they promised when she enrolled.

Being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2018 gave T more understanding and compassion about casual ableism than she’d previously had. When some days your hands don’t work to open jars in the kitchen, or carry heavy platters or a cast iron skillet… you have to make adjustments. When you can’t sit comfortably in every chair… you sit in your cushy chairs at home. You wear your mask everywhere, even though you hate it and would like to burn it with the heat of a thousand suns. You re-learn your life in a way that makes you hate yourself less for your shortcomings, you make allowances for the people who make assumptions, and who don’t understand… but you resent it with the heat of those same thousand suns, and those suns go nuclear over your baby sister.

So, when JC texted us six months ago, excited about attending her first concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater, we wished her eardrums luck, and didn’t think much of it… until she posted on Instagram that the venue was awful. “What happened?” asked. First, no one knew where the disabled parking lot was, and when they finally found it, they wouldn’t let her friends park there, even though they had a placard and a clear need. The parking lot was unpaved and difficult to navigate in a wheelchair. When they finally got in, finally found someone who knew where the ADA accommodating seats were, they discovered they had to go down a flight of eight stairs.

The woman on staff asked, “Can’t you walk down eight stairs?” and rolled her eyes when JC said she could not. And told her friends to “be quiet” when they protested this.

We aren’t the nice people in the family; that’s reserved for …somebody else, maybe T’s parents. What we’d like to do is focus the light of those thousand suns at the Shoreline with a giant magnifying glass… but we’re just offering advice as asked, and quietly seething and ranting on our blogs instead.

Some people just don’t get a break. They miss most of their senior year in high school because of surgery. They miss out on doing “normal” things with friends because they have to have friends whose cars are big enough for a wheelchair or who don’t mind breaking it down and putting it back together to get it in and out of a vehicle. They end up back on a kidney transplant list less than ten years after the first time. They’re in their twenties before they’re comfortable and confident enough to go to their first concert. It’s not fair, and while howling that into the stratosphere and a quarter won’t even get you a cup of coffee, we just had to say it out loud. With EVERYTHING ELSE horribly wrong in this country and this state and this world this week, this is icing-on-the-top of a bitter casual-ableism muffin of Not Fair, and we are going to do something about it.

Yeah, yeah, something without the sun and a magnifying glass. Probably.

x-posted@fiction, instead of lies

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as you say “nothing much is going on here,” life happens:

The move you’d intended to make last year suddenly seems possible,

The weed that you meant to pull turns out to be four feet tall, and flowers,

And you find yourself held hostage by a very tiny, very loud white-crowned sparrows, who decided the perfect place to build a nest in a burner in the camp stove in the backyard that you were just getting ready to use to roast some peppers for salsa. The sparrows are not amused by your presumption.

Things happen on a very small scale these days, but things are happening nonetheless – mainly Spring, and its corresponding encouragements that the Earth endures, and that we will, too.

How do you find yourself, here in the year of our Lord 2022, Phase Four of the Endless Pandemic? We hope you are well. We are… still here. Still playing with metal, fumbling with embroidery, failing at gardening, and signing new contracts for work, thank God. Still managing school visits and business meetings in this strange, Zoom-centric existence. You?

Last summer when the State reopened for travel, many people eagerly grabbed suitcases and scheduled flights. We were still getting second shots in June, so were hesitant to take off – and were deeply disappointed when travel restrictions were reintroduced as Delta variant cases in California skyrocketed. We We’ll do something next summer, we comforted ourselves. Surely by next year we’ll find a little bit of time to go somewhere everything is safe.

Nope. “Everything” is never safe. That’s probably the truth writ largest and most clearly: we never were safe before a pandemic, and now we’re reminded at every turn that nothing is permanent and nothing can be counted on. In 2019, we had two big trips planned with dear friends to celebrate an anniversary that we put off… and we’ve now had to put that trip off repeatedly. Nothing we planned looks the same anymore, and our friends have a new family member, and all the conferences we’d thought to go to have long since been moved to Zoom. As there are likely to be more challenges ahead, we finally went ahead and took one the trips we’d put off for so long. We went to Iceland.

We chose Iceland because of its convenient location (just a little longer than a flight to New York), low COVID numbers and their robust vaccination response. Nearly their entire population received the two-shot vaccination and they seem to be boosted in the 70% range, country-wide. They no longer require any Covid Information was splashed all over to tell us how frequently all of the air in the plane was sucked through the HEPA filters (every three minutes) and the statistical probability of getting COVID germs on a flight if you’re wearing a properly fitted mask (one in forty-three thousand) but it was still difficult. Due to T’s worsening autoimmune issues, we really have heeded medical advice to cut our risks and stay home. Getting on a plane when we rarely even get into the car seemed very odd, and wearing masks for eight hours straight was… not something to leave one in the frame of mind to whimsically enjoy air travel again. We were reminded that people are loud and generally chaotic, and the whole thing was a bit stressful. We were quite ready to deplane when the time came.

Still, the inconveniences of the trip faded with the delight of meeting our friends at their air terminal and greeting our newest, drooliest member of the gang. (And then we spent forty-five minutes trying to figure out how to put his car seat into the rental car, which was a little reality check from all the rose-tinted happy of being together again.)

Traveling with a five month old and two women with autoimmune disorders meant we were neither going very far or very fast, but we so enjoyed every geyser, every glacier, every waterfall, lake, pond, and lichen-shrouded boulder that just riding in a minivan was a treat. It was wonderful to have a baby to squeeze, and he was every bit as charmed by us, as we were by him – it really does get boring drooling on all the same people all the time. It was delightful to engage in wide-ranging conversations that didn’t require a good Zoom connection, and cooking and eating together – even the simplest foods, because none of us were energetic enough for anything gourmet, was just a shared happiness. (The taste tests of Random Icelandic Flavors were amusing as well.) Iceland has a very, very low speed limit (90 kph – about 55 – on a two-lane highway 112 – 69 on a four-lane freeway) and permafrost, sand, -and-volcano ash roughened roads, so we drove slower than we wanted to, and more than we wanted to (which was a difficulty for our friends who drive on the other side of the road in the UK) and we were all tired, and it was windy and very cold sometimes and some of us were carsick, but we made it work. Traveling with people means you really love them – because honestly, traveling with another family shows ALL the cracks we normally like to hide, no? Five days was short for our usual length of trips – we prefer to go somewhere and sit for a minimum of fifteen days – but the five days seemed a reasonable amount of time for a first foray back into the world of Man.

Had we realized the risk, we might not have done it. We hadn’t remembered that a new (since January) requirement for reentry to the U.S. is a clean COVID test. We then understood how risky it is to engage in any kind of traveling if you don’t work solely on your computer — we’ve had asymptomatic friends who tested positive wand were obliged to stay where they were overseas for an additional five days until they tested clear which seems to be …strange, since no one tests people on the way OUT of the U.S…? We were grateful not to miss our flight or be required to come up with a week’s worth of new lodgings. That’s an expensive new wrinkle in travel, isn’t it? At any rate – everyone arrived home Covid-free, exhausted, and grateful.

We took our trip just before the newest sub-variant of Omicron sent cases skyrocketing again, just like last summer. We’re probably not going anywhere for another six months at least (well, nowhere out of the country, anyway – we’re past time to move to a new town, since the landlord raised the rent so much last year, but stay tuned on that), but we cherish the memory of every waterfall, every giant, honking gull dragging something flopping from the surf, every sulfur-scented spring, and every puddle of drool.

We looked up and realized that the world here is the same, while the world internationally (Russia, Ukraine) has gone insane. We’ve not pulled pictures from the phones for … months. And we’ve generally stopped blogging here.

In the spirit of at least saying “hello,” here are a handful of photos of a chime set going through the process. The final row is the finished chimes, held in different light.

We hope you’re well. I hope to write more frequently, but … well, we’ll see.

-D