The wind woke me up at 3:30 this morning and I lay in bed for the next two and a half hours until the alarm finally went off, unable to sleep. It was so loud, so intense outside, and I kept getting up to check on things, random thumps and crashes and bumps. It was almost a relief when the alarm finally went off at 6am, because by then the sun had started to rise and I could finally look outside and see what had transpired during the night.

Today was garbage day in our part of town. Garbage cans and garbage were strewn everywhere. The cans themselves, some still full of bags of trash, had been blown into little groupings. Later in the day, I saw our next door neighbor heading off to rescue his can; he laughed and noted we’d better go fetch ours from the garbage can nest as well.

Driving to the bakery for breakfast, the streets were littered with garbage and greenery. Whole branches of huge trees were scattered here and there on lawns and sidewalks and streets. Heavy basketball hoop stands, their bottoms filled with cement, lay on their sides.

The traffic getting to work was horrible; it took me nearly twice as long as usual to get there, and I saw ambulances passing by on the highway shoulder, going both directions. I never saw an accident on the way to work, but on the way home I heard that the freeway had been temporarily blocked due to a fallen tree.

I got to work and discovered that the office had no power. My boss was already there, and we were the only two who would have been there anyway. He’d drained his laptop battery on the plane coming home last night so couldn’t get anything productive done if he stayed, and without access to the company network, I couldn’t do anything useful at all. So eventually we both gave up and left – him to find a coffee shop or bookstore with a wireless network and an electrical outlet, and me to go home to chart out the final draft of my pattern-in-progress and then finally, to sit down and knit. I did check my work email a few times during the day, but there was nothing in it to worry about. There were power outages at Richard’s office too, although he’s been working from home all week so he wasn’t so lucky as me, to get the unexpected free day.

This evening, when we came home from dinner I peered outside to check on our trees, since a few had been getting dangerously buffeted by the wind and I was worried about them. Turns out it wasn’t just the trees we should have been worried about. Two entire sections of fence between us and our neighbors have come down, both squarely on top of the poor little tangelo tree. I knocked on their door but no one was home, and so Richard and I heaved the fence chunks off the tree and stacked them carefully on the nearest flat, dry surface. The tangelo tree is still young enough that it is mostly just green branches, not old enough to have developed anything resembling a trunk, so I grabbed the only thing I could find that resembled a plant stake (the pole from an old bird feeder that fell apart a few years back and slammed that into the ground and then tied the tree to the pole with a plastic bag. I didn’t want to use string because that would dig into the bark, so the plastic bag seemed like the only possible option for a temporary fix.

The tangelo tree wasn’t the only victim of the wind and the fence. The apple tree had also fallen completely over to one side, and was smashing the pomegranate tree. After nearly five years this apple tree has finally started to produce not only flowers, but actual fruit, just this summer – fruit that we could not eat, of course, because the worms got to every single one of the tiny little apples, but it was a promising start, and now it is entirely possible that it has been damaged enough that it might die. I am frustrated by this because it is one thing to be patient and wait for several years once; it is another to face the possibility that we may very well have to go through another five years of waiting before we get any apples of our own.

We called the hardware store to see how late they were open, but there was no answer, so next I called my parents to see if maybe they might have something we could borrow to stake up the tree, and amazingly, they still had the poles that had been pounded in place to hold up their trees, which are old enough and massive enough that not even this kind of crazy wind storm can take them down. So we drove off to my parents’ house, expecting to have to dig some poles out of the ground, but it turned out my dad was able to just break them off at the base, and so back we came home, to hammer two poles as far into the ground as we could, and then scrounge up a few more plastic bags to hoist the tree back upright. I am not enitrely sure that our makeshift system will hold – the tree still tilts slightly toward the pomegranate tree – but at least it is no longer lying on *top* of the pomegranate tree, and so I am crossing my fingers that this will at least keep it up through the night. Tomorrow morning we’ll call the gardeners and see what they recommend, and also likely hit thehardware store to get some sturdier poles. The fence will just have to wait until the neighbors come home, so we can figure out the best way to get it fixed.

While we were out there, trying to rescue the trees, I noticed that the wind has had one good side effect. The pomegranate tree has been blown completely clean of all the spiderwebs, and I could see just how many pomegranates it actually has. I am in awe. There are more pomegranates on there than I had realized, and some of them are massive in size, and some of them are starting to darken from yellow to red. So I am crossing my fingers and hoping that despite the wind and the birds and the worms and everything else that has attacked our trees and prevented us from getting anything more than one single, solitary white peach this entire growing season, the pomegranates might just pull through and make up for all the rest. Assuming, of course, that the apple tree stays up and the rest of the fence doesn’t come crashing down and put us out of fruit possibilities for the rest of the year.

I have, over the past year or two, developed this nasty habit of letting this journal go – not because I don’t have anything to write about, but because I feel that I have to catch up; to write that one missing entry before I do all the others that have come since then, and then of course, weeks pass and I feel more and more guilty that I am letting it just sit here with nothing, all because I cannot get one damn entry written to let the backlog out.

The current reason for not having updated is that I still have yet to upload the pictures from DragonCon – mainly because I know that a lot of them are going to require some work (my spiffy new camera doesn’t like taking pictures indoors so much; something about the lighting) so they’re not just dark blobs, and I really wanted to link to the pictures when I wrote up my DragonCon recap entry. But that’s not happening any time soon for a number of reasons (not the least of which is that I am currently trying to write up, and knit, a pattern to submit for actual publication) so I need to stop waiting and just write, because otherwise the words in my head just go away. And I am tired of letting that happen.

First of all, a long overdue update on my dad. He is doing so very much better, especially now that he is out of the hospital and back home. He was discharged from the acute rehabilitation clinic after only two weeks and sent home to continue physical therapy on an outpatient basis. He’s walking with a cane, but it seems like that is going to be only temporary, and he’s had a chance to play both piano and organ and know that when it comes to his music, he’s going to be fine. We are all perusing recipes and finding ways to make things with no added salt and I have decided that this can just be one more part of my own determination to find ways for Richard and I to eat a healthier diet.

DragonCon was fun. A lot of fun. Quite possibly the most fun time I have ever had at DragonCon. We stayed in the Hilton, which meant we had to do a lot more hiking back and forth (since the bulk of the panels and events took place in the Marriott and the Hyatt). But this also meant that we had a nice quiet room in a hotel that was not (unlike the Marriott and the Hyatt) completely full of Con attendees, and thus we could both get at least a little sleep. We got to see Ellen Muth, who played George on Dead Like Me, and a whole host of cast members from Battlestar Gallactica (the new one), and we went to a ton of panels, and we stayed up very, very late listening to silly sci fi/fantasy spoof music, or watching hysterical mockumentaries about gamers, and we watched the parade (Richard’s first time watching the parade, actually) and had fun checking out all the wild costumes, and met an online friend of Richard’s who turned out to be a very cool graphic novelist, and we ate mediocre, over-priced sushi and bought t-shirts with snarky sayings on the front and overall, it was awesome.

Since we returned it’s been back to the usual, mostly, with extra stuff here and there to keep us on our toes. I was really determined to not be in choir this year at all but I am feeling so guilty about bailing on the only other tenor that I have decided to at least stick it out through the end of the calendar year before fleeing (we’ll see if my steely resolve lasts). Checkers has now decided to live full-time in the computer room and we rigged up a little ‘cave’ for her in the bookshelves above the file server and I have decided that if it makes her happy to be a one-room kitty, well who am I to try to convince her otherwise. I got to go with a bunch of other knitters to listen to, and meet one of my favorite blog reads (and authors), the Yarn Harlot, and it was very cool. Richard is giddy about getting to go see Neil Gaiman in Berkely in a few weeks and we just found out that Terry Pratchett is going to be coming to a bookstore only an hour or two away in October and we are both also very giddy about that. The weather’s starting to cool down enough to make us all think that maybe autumn is finally here, and even though I know damn well that just when we start to relax and enjoy the cooler weather, it will turn on us and resume being unbearably hot and nasty out just in time for Halloween, I am still pretending that maybe this year things will be different and the summer heat truly has gone away for good.

Since yesterday was his first day in rehab, we all figured we would wait until the afternoon to go visit my dad, to give him a chance to settle in to his new routine. It worked out well, because I have had this weird thing on my arm that looked kind of like a strange and miniature volcano, and when I finally called the advice nurse about it yesterday she thought it sounded like I’d been chomped by something, and told me I should have it looked at. My lucky little sister got to go with me to the hospital, where the doctor poked at my arm and said that it might be a bug bite or it might be some kind of bizarre wound reaction, and either way, I ought to keep an eye on it. So he wrote me up a prescription for what turned out to be massive horsepills of antibiotics. Lucky me.

I worked feverishly on the lace stole that was supposed to be done last weekend (ha) and my little sister whipped up some banana bread and a white peach crisp that I was far too tempted to just insist we eat ourselves, and we went through the usual laughing phone calls with my mom, accumulating a list of stuff she needed us to pick up at my parents’ house and bring to the hospital. And then Richard and my sister and I all piled into the car and drove off to see how he was doing, and the very best thing to see was him in his regular clothes again, having finally gotten rid of that oh-so-stylish hospital gown.

This morning it was hard to drive my sister to the airport and hug her goodbye. I am so very glad that she came down and stayed with us because it made it easier to bear all of this with her here. And I know how much it meant to my mom to have someone else at the hospital with her to handle all the scares and worst case scenarios and news that the doctors kept bringing in.

It seems impossible that this all started barely over a week ago, and even more impossible that my dad could have progressed so quickly from lying like death in his hospital bed hooked up to too many machines and IV’s to count, to being able to scoot around in a wheelchair and, even more amazing, even stand on his own. There is still so much work ahead for him and for my mom and for my whole family to adjust to all of this – figuring out a new diet and doing some temporary reconfiguring to my parents’ house so however he comes home – if it’s a with a wheelchair or a walker or a cane – he will be able to have as much freedom of movement as possible until he gets better. But I feel like there is hope, and that finally, my dad is starting to see that there is hope too, and that will somehow make the next few weeks or months or however long it takes feel less like the forever that the last week has been.

I went to the hospital on Wednesday night and got to see my dad actually sitting up for a little bit – a definite improvement over the past few days. What was even better was finding out that he’d improved so much they were transferring him out of ICU and sending him off to Telemetry. They also sent him off for an MRI, which confirmed the fact that his carotid arteries are dangerously constricted, so the doctors are beginning to discuss how (and when) they can treat that so it doesn’t get any worse.

Thursday night I did not get to the hospital at all. I needed allergy shots, and I knew that by the time i got done with those and turned around to come back to Sacramento, it would be time to turn right back around and head home. So instead I went home after the shots and called my mom and my little sister, who were at the hospital most of the day, and told them to call me when they were heading out, and that they were to come to my house for dinnner so they wouldn’t have to have yet another meal of hospital food, and instead of visiting my dad, I made what is quite possibly the best lasagna I have made so far. I used whole wheat noodles, which don’t get so mushy when they’re cooked, and I chopped up a zucchini and a yellow squash and half a white onion to stir into the cheese mixture as a filling, and added in a few cloves of garlic, minced, to give it some pep, and oh, was it good.

Yesterday my boss and I were eying the clock and debating whether we could just leave a little earlier than we might normally leave, when my cell phone rang, and it was my mom, calling to tell me that my dad as doing so well they were ready to discharge him, and that he would be going to an extremely good acute rehab program in Sacramento. So there was my good excuse for leaving work a little early! I zipped off to the hospital and waited while they discussed paperwork and insurance and everything else, and then we followed my dad off to the next phase in his recovery. Later, my little sister and I drove home together and stopped by Baker’s Square for dinner and had a completely unhealthy meal of fried cheese sticks and artichoke dip, followed by pie, because sometimes junk food is the only way to overcome a week full of exhaustion and stress and also pie is a perfect way to celebrate one’s father graduating from ICU to Telemetry to Rehab all in the space of three days.

In the middle of this thing that is going on with my father, the rest of life still must go on. That means going to work (and jumping every time the cell phone rings), and doing laundry, and paying bills, and scooping litter boxes, and dealing with cats who need medical attention too. Yesterday morning I dropped Sebastian off at the vet and then had two reasons for leaping for the phone every time it rang. Since he is nearly 15 years old, going under anesthesia is a risky thing to do, so I was half afraid that the vet would call to tell me that he didn’t make it through the surgery. But despite my worries he came through just fine, although he now has no more teeth at all (before this he was only down to his four front fangs, so it wasn’t like he had a lot left to lose). I picked him up from the vet last night, drove home, deposited the growling, wobbly cat into the upstairs bathroom and shut the door on him so he wouldn’t hurt himself, and then turned around and drove back to Sacramento to go to the hospital, because after Monday’s not-so-good news, I needed to see him and reassure myself that he was doing better.

And yes, he is doing better. They’ve got both an occupational and a physical therapist visiting him now, both of whom were able to push him to a little more progress with his right side. Now that he is coming out of the drug-induced fog he was in all weekend, he stays awake a little longer and can carry on actual conversations. And today when I arrived I discovered that he is doing so well that he finally could be transferred out of ICU. So as of this evening he’s been moved to a more ‘regular’ hosptail room; even better, they’ve removed all but one of his needles and tubes. He looks less like a Borg and more like a normal person.

I have decided that all of the crazy roller coaster of the last few days has all been to prove to us just how lucky my dad really is. Bcause of the stroke, they did an ultrasound on his carotid arteries on Tuesday, and followed that up with an MRI this afternoon, and discovered that they are both full of plaque, and the left one is seriously, almost dangerously, constricted. Basically that stroke could have happened at any time and it is only a *very* lucky coincidence that it happened now, and was mild enough that he’s going to recover, but serious enough that they ran these tests. So now we know that the problem is there and they can treat it, eventually, somehow. I catch myself thinking about what *could* have happened – because it sounds like the stroke was inevitable, and likely sooner rather than later – and it is really hard to stop myself from going down that self-torturing mental path.

So instead I am focusing on the mundane things of life. Emptying and reloading the dishwasher. Feeding and medicating an extremely pissed off (and now toothless) cat. Figuring out a way to finally get a good night’s sleep, now that one more hurdle has been jumped and we are all one step further down this (very long) path until we can put this whole thing behind us and (oh, please) never have to go through this again.

There are moments of funny in all of this. The current one centers on the fact that when we arrived at the ICU on Saturday there was a sign on the waiting room door, stating that the Waiting Room Is Out of Order. All the furniture had been moved into the hall, so obviously they were serious about it. But it struck us as funny – the waiting room was out of order. They have since moved some of the furniture back in and opened the door, and it is pretty obvious that the room suffered from, as my little sister puts it, a ‘Water Event’. The smell of mildew is so strong in there that eventually my little sister and I dragged chairs back to the hall. We weren’t alone – there was another family there who had the same idea and we all shared a few smiles and small talk about the room.

I’m noticing that everyone we run into – in the waiting rooms or the elevators – seems so quick to make small talk. We all share the same exhausted, worried expressions, but the chance to chat about something as mundane as a damp carpet, or the fact that the elevators tend to make us nauseous, means that it’s just a few more seconds of not having to think about the real reason we are all there.

When we are there, my knitting helps keep me sane. It seems so silly to write that, but it gives me something to do with my hands, so I don’t pass the time while we are in the waiting room focusing on how slow the time is going while my dad is undergoing some new procedure or test or assessment.

My little sister, being a pastry chef and a lover of all things pastry, bakes when she is stressed or worried. So this afternoon she whipped up a bunch of things. My mom and dad were supposed to have friends over for dinner Friday night (obviously it was cancelled when this all exploded at us) and my mom had a batch of pretzel dough rising in the refrigerator. We weren’t sure how much longer the dough would last, so my sister cooked those up, along with brownies and muffins and other things, and brought them in to give to the ICU and Surgery staff. They tease that they are finding ways to keep my dad in the ICU longer just so they can get more goodies. They are lovely, wonderful, talented people in the ICU and they have been taking great care of my dad, but I am so looking forward to being able to put the ICU behind us, and never seeing them again. I suspect that this is a desire that they completely understand.

The whole thing is very much a roller coaster, and today was a day with a lot of downhill. My dad had been having problems moving his right leg, and they thought they’d taken care of it by giving him some blood thinners to clear any potential clots, but he woke up this morning and it was worse. So this evening they called in a neurologist to assess the situation. He talked to the three of us (my mom and my sister and I) to let us know how things were. The bad news is that it seems pretty likely at this point that my dad suffered a stroke during the surgery. The good news is that it was mild. His mobility on that side is limited, but the key here is that he does have some mobility, which means that the neurologist thinks the situaton is extremely rehabable, and he will (eventually) be okay. It doesn’t make it easier for my dad right now, since he’s frustrated and exhausted and a little scared, but it means that there is hope, and that is the thing I am holding on to very tightly right now.

My little sister called last night to say she was flying down because she needed to be *here* for this, so I picked her up this morning and we went to the hospital pretty much straight from the airport so we could be with my mom. The surgery took over five hours, and I cannot imagine having to sit there, waiting, alone. I think it was better for all three of us to be there together. We talked and laughed and asked the cardiac nurse a million questions when she came in to give us an update and we did a little bit of crying too, but managed to time it just right so only one of us was crying at a time. I brought my knitting because I knew I would do better with something to keep my hands busy – just focus on the stitches and the pattern and not on the clock and how it was going so slow and how it seemed like they should have come out to tell us it was done by now, minute after endless minute.

My dad had six bypasses done, which is a number that is high enough that if I think about it long enough I will start crying again so I am just thinking to myself ‘multiple bypasses’ and when it comes to the number there is a little bit of ‘la la la la’ going on in my head and maybe that makes me silly but I don’t care. The important part isn’t the number anyway; it’s that he went through the surgery with flying colors and the surgeon came out to say that it went really well, and everyone else kept telling us how well it had gone and how pleased they were with how he was doing.

They took him to ICU and told us we could see him in half an hour, so we got lunch at the hospital cafeteria and then went upstairs. I thought I was prepared for it because the cardiac nurse showed us a picture of what we would see – this figure in the bed with all the tubes and the machines – but I wasn’t prepared for how it would look on him. He looked so small and frail and still and my sister and I kind of lost it a little in the hallway outside his room, standing there holding each other without making any noise until we could pull it together again and not cry. He was still pretty much out when we saw him and he was doing a little coughing from the tube and my mom and I could tell it was really freaking out my sister even though she was trying really hard to stay calm. So my sister and I went and sat in the waiting area and we talked a little about all the crazy things that kept popping into our heads ever since we first found out about this, last night.

My mom wanted to stay until he woke up, so my sister and I headed home. We stopped at Ben & Jerry’s on the way because we were both in serious need of some comfort food and ice cream is definitely comfort food. Then we went to the grocery store and bought all the ingredients for pizza fondue and peach pie and came home and my little sister, who is a pstry chef, made the pie. My sole contribution was to hand her things from the cupboard and also take care of the crust, and let her roll her eyes at me because I do not own a pastry brush.

My sister and I were planning on eating dinner and then going back to the hospital to sit with my mom and see my dad if he was up to it, and also to bring her some pie and a tomato from her garden (because we stopped by my parents’ house on the way home and yes, this time I not only remembered that they have the alarm system, I managed to enter the right code and turn it off before any alarms went off and police were called) so she could share a little of the comfort too. But my mom just called and she is headed home, or actually, home first and then to our house to join us for fondue and pie. They’ve removed the breathing tube several hours ahead of schedule and my dad is responding to simple questions and he recognized my mom and has even been doing just a little teasing with the nurses, although he doesn’t stay awake for more than a few minutes because he’s still feeling the effects of the anesthesia. About halfway through the conversation my older sister called so I had one phone on each ear, on the line with my mom on the house phone and my older sister on the mobile phone, and it felt really good to pass on the good news and have such a good reason to laugh.

I am feeling a little bit jumbled right now. I’ve been dealing with some kind of lovely pressure headaches all week that keep slamming me down – had to leave work on Monday because I felt like I was going to throw up from the sinus pressure, and more have come, one for every day of the week. So I have not gotten a lot of sleep this week and I am feeling fuzzy and drained from that, but that is all very unimportant compared to the latest, which is that my dad went from going in to the doctor for a routine physical this afternoon to being scheduled for a stress test and then an angiogram and then for quadruple bypass surgery first thing tomorrow morning. My sisters and I are all trying to remain very calm and we are reminding ourselves that people get this kind of thing all the time and they come out perfectly fine, but it’s one thing to know that about random people we do not know, and another to face it when the one going under the knife is our dad.

So I am taking deep breaths and I am knitting lace because it requires me to focus on just the yarn and the needles and that doesn’t leave room for my sinus pressure-addled brain to go racing through all the what-ifs, and somehow we will all make it through tonight and tomorrow morning and come out the other side still okay. Please let this all come out okay.

Checkers has a service announcement for you

Really. She needs to know. Who?

(The paper bag she is sitting on, by the way, is my extremely high-tech cat hair and hairball repelling protective covering for my laptop bag, which is underneath. We are all about providing high quality lounging areas for the cats around here).

I went to a knitting group Friday night and it was lots of fun. We all got to discussing the importance of financial planning, especially for women, and then segued the conversation, completely seamlessly, into kntting with cobweb weight yarn. I do so love going to knitting group. You never know what topic is going to come up next, but it’s always guarenteed to be animated and fun.

My parents went to pick up the youngest nephew yesterday morning, and he spent the whole day with them. The first task of the day was to make a birdhouse, so when I went over to meet them for lunch, he proudly showed me all the birdhouse parts. He is 5 now, and chatters away at a mile a minute and I don’t always catch entirely what he’s saying, but it’s kind of fun to watch him go. I introduced him to the joy that is dipping your grilled cheese sandwich in ketchup, and then he and my dad went outside and washed cars, mine included. Or rather, there was some scrubbing, but there was also a lot of ‘grandpa, you can’t get me! grandpa!’ until my dad sprayed him with a hose and then he would tear across the lawn, squealing and laughing hysterically before racing right back to do it all over again. He is the goofiest little kid – I can see he inherited his sense of grace from the same place I got mine (or rather, my distinct lack thereof) because he is just as prone to oblivously walking into things as I am. He’s learning to read now and I suspect he’s going to be just as voracious a reader as his older brother is, once he gets the hang of putting all the words together.

I spent the rest of the day mostly being lazy, curled up in bed either napping or knitting. I’ve got this idea that I can finish a lace stole by next Sunday, as a donation for a silent auction (it’s also a great way to use up some lace yarn from my stash). Richard was off at a writer’s group brunch, so I had the house to myself, and spent the day watching fluffy shows on HGTV and occasionally poking at sleeping cats just to hear them squeak.

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Three fun things we’ve recently discovered:

The first one is Library Thing. It’s a really cool site where you can catalogue your entire book collection online. Naturally we did this (or rather, Richard did a majority of ours) because there are far too many times when we have a hard time remembering important stuff like which Terry Pratchett books we do or do not own. I also did a separate one for my knitting book library, just because I can.

The second thing we’ve recently discovered is the online cartoon Two Lumps. We’ve both read through the entire archive, and I’ve added it to my daily reads, mainly because the author has somehow managed to capture Azzie’s personality completely in Snooch.

And finally, the third fun thing we’ve found is the Sci Fi reality show Who Wants to be a Superhero?. I normally shy away from reality shows because they’re just so annoying (we will not discuss my current fixation on HGTV’s Design Star, because even the most determined of reality show avoiders have their weak moments), but this one had us both laughing hysterically from the start. We have even talked my parents into watching it (assuming we can ever figure out how to extricate the older episodes from our DVR to a videotape so they can catch up). It’s over-the-top cheese, and it’s silly and fun, and I am not-so-secretly rooting for Major Victory to win, if for no other reason than his delighted exclamation, when he saw his costume make-over for the first time, of ‘Captain Shiny Pants!”.

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Finally, one more brief note about my girly parts (if you want to avoid, check out Kitten Wars instead!).

When they were done with me yesterday they gave me a bunch of paperwork, most of which I did not look at because they also gave me some very happy drugs which made me kind of spacey and floaty, and also, bizarrely, they gave me a picture. I am not sure why they gave me a picture of the inserted plugs, because I didn’t ask for it and I have no idea what I am supposed to do with it, but now I have this picture. Brightly colored, no less. So far the best suggestion for what to do with it has come from an online acquaintance, who suggested that i silk-screen it on a t-shirt and write on the back ‘Ask me about my Fallopian Tubes!’.