nearly the Last of the Garden

Just before Thanksgiving I took this picture of the harvest that was sitting then on my table.

The avocados came from a friend, grown in a backyard in Santa Clara.  Yummy and buttery, possibly the best I've ever eaten.  I shared one with a friend on Thanksgiving and the other with another friend on the Saturday after. The seed from the second one is in a small pot of dirt outside.  It will be interesting to see if it survives and sprouts leaves.

The tomatoes became

part of a plate of dinner for me and the salad on Thanksgiving.  There was so much going on on Thanksgiving, that I didn't have time for pictures. The meal was one of the best I have made for Thanksgiving.  A turkey meatloaf, subbed for the bird, since there were only two of us eating. Fresh herbs combined to make poultry seasoning.  Amazing what that did to the meatloaf.

I made pumpkin custard, which is pie filling without the crust and then totally wrecked the calorie saving virtues of it by making hard sauce. Decades ago at a very memorable Thanksgiving with friends in Chicago I ate hard sauce for the first and only time in my life up to this year.  After looking for a recipe on line I have to say it is basically butter cream with booze.  And it is good.  Rum in the pumpkin and rum in the sauce.

The ways in which the garden has provided stability and blessing and great culinary delight in my life is part of what I am so grateful for this year.  Rain and weather that is not so cold as it was in November are two more blessings that I give great thanks for.

It's been a long time and reading of late

It's been so long since I've posted that I've nearly forgotten how this works!  Good to see that Blogger is still here and that it works in much the same way that I remember.  Clearly, I have some revising to do.  Yesterday I was so taken with toggling between preview and edit that forgot to save.  So my lovely post disappeared.  My fault, not Blogger's, although it would have been nice to have had it ask me if I wanted to save.  (Sort of like Zen, the computer in Blake's 7--a sci fi show I loved but haven't been able to find on DVD.

Been reading a great deal in the last year.  Two neighbors have given me good recommendations and I have found some on my own.  The librarian who pulls books for me for the SOS program finds more for me from time to time.

Recently I read Alice Hoffman's The Dovekeepers. Absolutely wonderful book set in Babylonia at the time of the Fall of Jerusalem, it is the story of the siege of Masada.  Strong women characters, a totally different way of life and history that I had not read before, made this one of the most absorbing novels I have ever read.  Will be a television mini-series soon with one of my favorite actors, Cote de Pablo.

Maggie Anton's novels Rav Hisda's daughters take place in the same Mediterranean world a couple of hundred years later.  So far I have only read the first one and I think the second may be in the tote under the table waiting for me to read very soon.  Again they feature strong women characters and open up time, place and Jewish culture so that they are marvelously different from novels set in modern times.

As a student, I majored in medieval history, so Maggie Anton's Rashi's Daughters, were particularly absorbing for they gave me a look at the Middle Ages from a Jewish perspective, set as they are in medieval Troyes.

Highest recommendations for all of these books from a reader who reads too much! Can there be such a thing?  (If I would spend half the number of hours in the day that I spend reading, writing.... I won't go there.)

So this is a kind of test post, to see if I can get it right this time. (And I found the one I thought was lost!  Google gets more points.)

My Holiday Open House

My Annual Holiday Open House will be this weekend.  Here is the flyer that I made for it.

Please come to my

Holiday Open House
Let me help you with your Christmas Shopping!

 Note cards designed and made by me and by my friend Fe Langdon from photos we have taken!  Blank inside so they are suitable for all occasions.  All cards were $4.00 and are now $2.00

Christmas Blessings Potpourri
This is a special and wonderful smelling mixture of herbs and spices with the meanings for Christmas.

Herbal Moth and Insect repellant sachets.  Several kinds to fit a
number of likes and dislikes. All of my herbal products are
perfect for stocking stuffers and appreciation gifts. (They will ward off bugs from your clothes and books.)    

Vintage mouth blown glass ornaments, new

Vintage tin boxes (perfect for the sachets or fill with tea bags,
candy or other small gifts), new

At my house

Saturday, December 14, 2013, 1-5 pm
Sunday, December 15, 20113, 1-5 pm

Also available by appointment. 
Please contact me at mamm@pobox.com

Always available, year round and twenty-four seven at my Etsy shop
http://www.etsy.com/shop/margueritemanor

If you would like to know my address so that you can come to it please email me at mamm@pobox.com.

Thank you so much.

Thanksgiving, Counting Blessings

It is hard to believe it has been a year since I have posted here.  Time to get back to it.  It is good to begin with Thanksgiving and a reflection and recollection of blessings.

First I am always grateful for my parents.  Although they have not been with me on earth for too long a time, not a day goes by that I do not remember them with love and gratitude.

Second I am grateful for family and friends, especially those friends whom I have known for decades and with whom I am growing old.  For the youngest member of my family, who at sixteen months, charms and delights us.  For the oldest of my friends, who at ninety and a half (as he himself said two days ago) reminds me of my father.  A member of the "greatest generation", he reminds me of Papa and also of how much thanks we owe to those who have served in our nation's armed forces.

For those among my family and friends who served in the military, I am grateful and in this month of November that also includes Veteran's Day, I honor you.

For my 'best friend" from high school, our small Catholic girl's school, herself a Marine, I am so grateful.

For all the neighbors, especially three women who have become like sisters, who help me, befriend me and give me their time, I give thanks.

For the faith that my parents taught me, even when it wanes at times, I am very grateful.  It is so much a part of me that I once told one of my professors at the Divinity school, a very famous Catholic theologian, that "Catholicism was in my bones and blood". He looked out the window for such a long time, that I feared I had offended him.  When he turned back, he said simply, "mine too".

I am grateful for the gift of a first class education, for the teachers, especially the Sisters of the Holy Cross, who taught me in high school, my advisor and mentor at Stanford and the professors at the Divinity School.  Thank you.  You were all blessings in my life.

For my garden, especially the rose this year, which bloomed and bloomed.  Each one is so beautiful, so unique and they have a kind of patience and humility that only plants have.

Every day, I give thanks for the caring and superb team of medical professionals who cared for me at Stanford Hospital and Valley Medical Center's Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Unit. It has been three years.  Hard to believe that it has been so long.  I am almost pain free now, as nerves that had been damaged from overuse have healed.

For a diet that came out recently that I have been following for seven months, I am thankful.  If I live long enough I may solve my lifelong weight problem (or win my lifelong battle, depending on how best to phrase it.)  More, I hope, in later posts.  For now I am grateful for the seven inches I've gotten off my waist. Hurray!

For the people who invented computers, the Internet and all the technology I take for granted, I give you thanks.  For the people who invented durable medical equipment, especially the power chair I am sitting in even as I type this, I give thanks.

For the gift of still being alive slightly over sixty years after I was paralyzed from the neck down by the poliomyelitis virus, I am grateful. And that that virus, a nasty thing,no longer afflicts so many people I am also grateful

Praise and Thank God this Thanksgiving.  Thank you to all of you who are my friends.

I am grateful to Google too, for making my little blog possible.  I hope to be better organized to post more often.

        

Plain Brown Loaf

Several months ago I discovered that the bread I had been buying as "whole wheat bread" was not what it appeared to be. After wheat flour, its next primary ingredient was soy flour!

I cannot eat soy, since it is incompatible with the thyroid medicine that I take. It explained why I had not been feeling well.

I opened the Safeway online website and began to examine labels. Too much soy. Not good.

Time to begin baking again. I have a wonderful beer-batter bread recipe, but beer has yeast, which in turn is on the list of things that may cause one to break out in hives, which has been a problem for several years. I have been trying to devise a diet that would lessen the occurrence of hives.

Soda bread seemed appropriate. St. Patrick's Day was approaching so that made it even more timely to make soda bread. I found a nice, tasty Irish Soda bread with raisins and made it several times. This most certainly was not what my ancestors made before they immigrated, though and I really wanted a whole wheat loaf.

 Finally, I found this recipe, http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/irish-brown-bread-10000000522965/"

 So yummy!  Highest recommendation to all of you who bake.  I have also made it with 1 1/4 c buttermilk substituted for the yogurt.  (And sweet milk soured with vinegar, I believe it would take one tablespoon, could be substituted for the buttermilk.)

It is becoming my house bread.  I am filled with gratitude for my plain brown loaf, my ancestors who surely made something similar and the Internet for making the recipe available.  It is a good, even wondrous time to be alive and I am glad.

Reading and more reading

Several years ago a kind neighbor who is another avid reader began to bring me books from the public library. Then she found out about SOS, short for special outreach services, a program our public library has that pairs volunteers to a person who cannot go to the library and with the help of one of the library staff, delivers books. My library card stays with the librarian who emails me once a month to ask what my wants are and I respond with requests.

In November I requested books with a holiday theme and discovered Jan Karon. This marvelous writer wrote a Christmas themed story, called, I believe, Shepherds Abiding and I loved it. The next month's bag of books included In the Company of Others, which is truly one of my all time favorite books. Set in modern Ireland with flashbacks through a journal to the nineteenth century I was transported. The characters are also a bit older than I am instead of thirty-five years younger, so this helps a great deal, too.

I have read a great many mysteries over these past few years too. A lovely recent one was The Laughter of Dead Kings by Elizabeth Peters. Her Amelia Peabody series is one of my all time favorites, along with Marjorie Allingham's Albert Campion series, and Dorothy Sayers Lord Peter.

Many of these books are "cozies", stories featuring amateur sleuths who have some other occupation in their lives than police work and who just happen to keep finding dead bodies and then figuring out who the murders were. They feature florists and chefs, bakery owners and quilters and they take place in knit shops and other small town venues.

Tonight I will go back to reading one of the chef's as she solves a murder.

I prefer stories that have good puzzles, interesting to quirky characters and one or few murders. I don't like the really, really dark stories especially since I read before going to sleep, but mainly because those are the kind of things that I am trying to avoid too much of on television.

Another favorite of mine is Earlene Fowler whose stories feature a heroine who is a small museum curator in a town on the Coast of Central California. Wonderful characters and very good writing make her books very good reads.

I have read most of Susan Albert Wittig's China Bayles series twice and think highly of them as well as the series of stories set in the Edwardian era that she co-authored with her husband under the pseudonym, Robin Paige.

If you have any books to recommend to me, please leave a comment.

I am so grateful for this service from the library and to the volunteer who brings my books and has become my friend.

Travelling by Internet

I have never been to Tennessee, but the other day a little of Tennessee came to me. Via the gift of the Internet and the United States Post Office, blending new and old technologies, beautiful beeswax candles and delicious, piquant honey arrived at my door. Here is a photo

I bought these items though Local Harvest http://www.localharvest.org/

I could not find candles near by so opted to go to the Heartland. Local Harvest is such a great venue. It can put us in touch with local producers, especially to see who vends at our Farmer's Markets and who provides Community Subscription Agriculture boxes in our local area as well as help us find more regional specialties all produced with care in small batches by small businesses throughout our country. This is an excellent way to help the economy become stable again!

I am grateful for this little bit of Tennessee and for the woman whose fine handwriting on the address label as well as her care in packing in addition to the products themselves showed me a glimpse of someone who cares about what she is doing to earn her living. May she, and all of us, prosper.

Bread, the Staff of Life

A friend gifted me with the most sumptuous and scrumptious loaf of bread that I have ever had. Here are some pictures.

My bread never rises this high! I need lessons, or maybe I just need more patience.

My friend, who is a busy, busy person, said that she has found the time to work bread making into her schedule because the cost of bread has risen so much! I have seen this in my own grocery shopping. It is a comment on the bad state of our economy, I think when something so basic as bread becomes unaffordable.

On the other hand, it is good to regain control of something so basic as the bread that we put into our mouths by making it ourselves. Somehow, I think we need a revolution in this country to regain our time and do for ourselves the things we have allowed big companies to take over for us. So I will be making bread again.

First, though I want to know how my friend gets her bread to rise so much. Oh, and it tasted every bit as good as it looks!

I am grateful for bread, for the time to make it, for the friend who shared it and for friends to break it with.

Art by my Friend, Fe Langdon

Today my friend Fe, whom I first met when she came from our local church as a communion minister, brought me lunch from our local Hobee's.

Fe is a gifted photographer and artist. She has been making cards for about as long as I have and in the course of our conversation as we talked about our art and craft, as well as catching up on our lives, she shared her website with me. The website, which she designed herself, is at this url

http://www.mycomfortcards.com/

Fe has expanded her art by taking classes in the book arts and graphic arts programs at Foothill College. Trained originally as an electrical engineer--Fe holds a Master's in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University--her eye for the artistry in nature is, I believe, inspired from that discipline and then transcended by her spiritual quest and gentle personality.

I commend her art and her website to you. She will be away for part of this month and part of next, so if you send her an order, please be patient. She will respond, I am sure.

Fe is one of the people who gifts my life with her friendship and I am so grateful for her and grateful to be able to share her art with you.

First Wheelchair Lap Throw

My knitting lately has consisted of making lap throws that will fit the needs of a wheelchair user. These need to be sized so that they do not drag and catch in the wheels and they need some way to hold them in place so that they don't slide off the lap of the user.

The first problem is solved simply with the use of a measuring tape. The second is solved by attaching a tab with a buttonhole so that the tab will loop over the user's seat belt and then button onto the throw. A pocket is also part of the design, made to sit on the person's lap.

Here is a picture of the one I am currently finishing made from red, white and blue Lion Cotton (yarn made in America).

The ungainly looking hole is actually a knitted in slit for a pocket that will be added to the wrong side. Here is the pocket before it is sewn together and then sewn in.

The tab is made but not yet attached, so that will be a photo in the next post.

The pattern will be posted on my Etsy site as a pdf file for immediate delivery. I plan to donate a portion of my sales for this and similar patterns, to Valley Medical Foundation for the Spinal Cord Injury Unit's use.

The most difficult part of the design, I think, will be writing the instructions for placing the pocket to be sewn into the throw. I got it wrong several times before I got it right, just in the doing yesterday, so writing it will be an interesting challenge. If it is truly never to late to learn, then I guess it is not too late to become a technical writer, even if it is just for my own patterns.

I am so grateful today that the heat wave has ended and I am making progress on projects I have been planning for several months.

Fourth of July, 2011

Technically, I am a day early. Once the Fourth of July was a holiday. Now it is a long weekend. For a while last week, it looked like it was going to be a winter holiday complete with cold and rain. Now it has warmed up considerably. Better for watching fireworks displays and back yard barbecue. I am engaging in neither--will probably watch the Capitol Fourth special on PBS.

I love red, white and blue not only for the signal of patriotism that they bring to mind but because they are a gorgeous color combination. My knitting project is a red, white and blue lap throw designed to be sized for use by a wheelchair user, like me. (Will post soon.)

It is difficult to get excited about red, white and blue, in the patriotic sense, this year, because the economy is still such a mess and so many other problems abound, here and abroad.

It is also difficult not to be cynical about patriotism because there has been so much co-opting of it by politicians serving their own interests and not the common good.

The spectacle of California's annual budget debacle, which occurs ominously close to the Fourth of July each year, was mitigated by the fact of a signed budget. It would have been a better budget if the sales tax and vehicle registration taxes had been extended.

A total government melt-down at the Federal level looms large and threatening if the debt ceiling is not raised. This must be done. I am disgusted by the posturing of politicians who threaten the well-being of every one of us by their blustering.

Social Security and Medicare, the biggest fuller of budget deficits, could, I believe, be fully funded, with a small increase in payroll tax or getting rid of the cap on the amount of income that is taxed. (In other words, tax all of it--the percent might actually decline.) What a federal budget drain could be eliminated if we would just pay for what we need! Instead, we cut providers payments and threaten deeper cuts and changes in these programs. We have a government that creates dependency and then threatens to pull the programs away--not a great model of a "social contract".

We then feel helpless to do anything about it, although we can do more than we think by participating in government. Voting, writing letters, joining caucuses and action groups, setting up new co-coalitions are all things that we can do.

It's also a good time to think about buying American, and buying small. Patronizing local businesses and helping to set up more. How can we invest in one another, not in giant corporations?

2011 is such a time of discouragement and disgruntlement with our economy and our government that it is difficult to feel celebratory. Maybe we need to look to the Founding Fathers, who got together and did something about it.

What can we do after the bunting comes down and flags are put away and grills are cleaned? Let's make something together--a more civil, decent, healthier and more economically viable America.

I hope so. I think we still can. After we give thanks for the Declaration of Independence and for our freedoms and our democracy, lets get involved in it again.

I am grateful today to have the Fourth of July to celebrate. I am grateful too for beautiful weather, for a friend who is expected this afternoon and for friends who visited on Friday. Grateful, for the opportunities to think about what can be done and hopeful that more will be accomplished.

Today, this eve of the Fourth of July, I am asking myself what more can I do, how can I become more involved?

Juneuary

Normally, it doesn't rain in Northern California in June. Today I woke to the sound of rain on my gravel roof. Real rain, not the drip-drop, wish we could do it, but we're not quite making it sound of the last week or so. According to the weather forecasts by next week it will be warm. We'll see!

Since it has been so cold this spring, I have put off pricing cooling devices for the outside of my house. Many yards, which used to have trees, have now sprouted umbrellas. According to neighbors whom I've talked to, these actually do work.

I have also looked at shade sails online and at coolaroo screening and bamboo or vinyl shades. I know that the day will come when I will wish that I had swathed the exterior of the house in something. Hopefully, those days will be few and not during the longest days of summer.

Volunteers from a local group, SILVAR, Silicon Valley Association of Realtors, came a few weeks ago and rearranged my living room furniture!. It looks and feels so much nicer now--I wish it could have happened ten years ago!

Then a young friend, who had some brief vacation time between the end of school and the beginning of her summer internship in the nation's capitol, came and moved more furniture from one bedroom to another and inside of the one that is now my sewing room.

All of this makes me so happy and so grateful. The house that I have lived in all of my life is finally becoming my home.

So I may be a little chilly today but I am profoundly grateful, too. It is a day for doing cozy things and puttering at decluttering--putting back the things that were moved so the furniture could be moved.

Thank you to everyone who has been helping me so much!

A Roll Around My Neighborhood

Yesterday, while friends worked on my yard, I took myself off for a roll around my neighborhood to look at the roses and other blooming things. So many pretty yard treatments! When I returned my friends had moved into my backyard. It has been almost fifteen years (maybe longer) since I have been in my backyard. Yesterday I looked at the pavers and thought that the wheelchair and I could do it. (Probably not regularly, though. I don't want to wear out my chair.) Here I am sitting in my own backyard!

Here are some of the roses that captivated me as I rolled and photographed what I saw.

The white roses where fragrant as well as beautiful. What a lovely day. I am so grateful.

More Made in America

A few posts back I wrote about "Made in America". Here are a few more knitting projects made from American Yarn,

This small pink bag, made with a crocheted button and designed to fit over a wheel chair belt first appeared as a swatch. It is made from Caron, Simply Soft. The button is so cute! These buttons are also great fun to make. At the beginning, the little project doesn't look at all like a button, not even button like. Then at the last pull through, pop, a button! I found this tutorial, www.beatknitting.com/2008/11/crochet-button-tutorial.html

I hope to have a pattern for this little beauty up on Etsy before too long.

The next two projects are made from a pattern that I adapted from a kit. I believe that the seller is Country Wool, http://www.countrywool.com . Country Wool carries yarn from Brown Sheep Company.

Here are the pictures

I am grateful for the fun that I have with knitting; that the things that I make are useful and pretty and that I can still find yarn that is made in America.

Easter already

When I last posted it was still early in Lent. Time has been telescoping on me, but I am spending time in tinkering and crafty and cooking pursuits. (Anything to avoid writing, which is what I should be doing!)

Friends gave me this lovely lily

I have been making Feta and Green Onion scones following the recipe for Savory Cheese and Green Onion scones on Farm girl foodie (link under blogs to the right.)

I am going to watch the Easter Vigil from the Vatican on EWTN, savor the music and the beauty, while remembering friends near and far and some gone now whom I celebrated with when I was young. Our priest, who always sang the ite missa est twice with the alleluias after it, because he couldn't resist the sheer joyful beauty of it.

A blessed, joyful and beautiful Easter to everyone. I am so grateful to be here and to have these memories and traditions. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to my life so far.

Spring Not

And then it got cold. Some elevations near me received snow. Very pretty in the news. Not so much so for gardeners near those higher elevations.

The news casters talked about the last two times it snowed in the Bay Area low enough for it to stick in San Francisco.

In February 1976 it snowed and I have pictures of Papa scraping snow off the windshield of my 1964 Rambler Ambassador. That is the nearest that car came to snow.

In January 1962 I woke up one Sunday morning (at least memory calls it a Sunday) to look out my bedroom window on a backyard that looked like someone had taken a giant sugar duster to the yard and sprinkled powdered sugar all over it. I couldn't believe my eyes and I hurried out to the dining room to open the floor-to-ceiling drapes for a better look! Wow! It wasn't powdered sugar at all ! It was snow. I woke up the rest of the family to come see my amazing discovery.

This time it did not snow at the lower elevations as predicted on Thursday and Friday. In fact, it barely rained. Some weird convergence of pressure systems made for unusual weather.

Is it global warming or some other source of climate change, or just odd weather? Humans have always noticed and talked about the weather. After all, at its extremes weather can wreak havoc with our lives, remind us of how fragile we are and how much we are not in control of nature.

Maybe that is why we like the theory of global warming so much--it puts us in a central position and in control. Not to say we should be wasting fossil fuels the way we do, but I do think there are other reasons not to waste.

I would love to see less waste, and I would love to see the true cost of our wasteful misuse of nature's bounty factored into the cost of the things we buy and discard so haphazardly. I have wanted to see that since I was an undergraduate in college in the 1960's and a fellow student in Econ 1A raised the question of how we could or should factor in the cost of the use of non-renewable natural resources. It is a disappointment to me that almost fifty years later we still don't have any formulas for doing this.

If someone knows of a history of climate or weather that I could request next month from the library as one of my monthly books, I would appreciate it. The historian in me questions some of what I hear as science. (Just a skeptic at heart, I guess.)

I am grateful to live in a free society, where I can be a skeptic, and where I can even show what may be my ignorance without worrying about reprisals. Grateful too, very grateful that I have a warm spot to hunker down in today, more than enough tasks to keep me busy--which ones to choose first--and that the weather is warming up.

A blessed Sunday to everyone.

Signs of Spring

Daffodils blooming in the ground and in the flower pots show that spring is here. Flowering plum blossoms, with their beautiful pink flowers, are opening to the longer days. Blue hyacinths and grape hyacinths bloom. I would go out and take pictures to illustrate this post except for one major un-Spring like thing--a blast of cold air is coming at us from Canada. Rain, mixed with snow and snowflakes are predicted for tomorrow and Saturday.

It is so cold that I just want to hunker in front of the space heaters.

Girl Scout cookies are another sign of spring. Two boxes of Thin Mints--my absolute all-time cookie favorite have arrived and disappeared. (I definitely cannot eat just one Thin Mint!

Another sign of spring is cleaning! I am rearranging the middle, and smallest, bedroom in my house to be a true sewing and crafts studio. This involves a lot of packing and hauling things from one part of the house to another. Then unpacking and inventory work is completed.

Far more fabric has emerged than I would ever have thought that I had, saved for decades. Books that came home from graduate school and were neatly stowed beneath the bed await disposal in the garage. (Either the local library for their on-going friends sale or the Salvation Army will receive the books, I hope.)

Less yarn than I thought that I had has emerged--guess I've knitted most of it and don't really have a stash-exceeding-life-expectancy after all!

It is a good day to re-do my Etsy shop, which I have been re-arranging, read blogs and research recipes. Spring will come. In the meantime, I am grateful that it isn't any colder than it is! Praying also for no power outages, like the one that hit Toledo earlier in the week as a result of an ice storm.

Stay warm and dry everyone!

Equipment for Independence

I am using a power chair now. A friend took this picture of the chair.

Slide boards are an integral part of the day's routines now. The first is my wooden one.

The next one, my acrylic triangle board, custom made by TAP Plastics, is a work of art and of community. The whole team of Physical Therapists and one of the Occupational Therapists pitched in to help, taking measurements, snapping a photo and emailing it to me and finally drawing templates. I loved the process and the way the team interacted. It was so great. I think of them whenever I pick this board up, which is several times a day.

I think this is a thing of beauty.

I am grateful for these tools. The power chair allows me to get out of the house. Two weeks ago a friend walked with me, in the mild spring weather we were having, showing me the route to take to our local shopping center, where I got my haircut. This week I will go out for a doctor's appointment and I began the year with a trip in the rented wheelchair van to go see another doctor in San Jose. Three outings in the first five weeks of the year! Wow! If I don't count going to hospitals last year, this is more than I got out in the last two years.

I am grateful for friends who are helping me to develop new skills too.

Home from Rehab with New Equipment and New Skills

It turned out that all of my "amateur" efforts to resolve my pain were not enough. On Oct 30 I could not stand up to get out of bed. On Oct 31, with the help of very dear and kind friends who are like a second family to me, I went to the ER at Stanford University Hospital. There I was "admitted for observation" and a team of experts determined that I should go to the Spinal Cord Injury, Rehabilitation Unit at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center--also known as Rehab 1.

While most of the patients who come there do have spinal cord injuries, some do not. Some have broken bones that are mending, and some like me, are "old polios", with post-polio syndrome. (It is a premier center for the treatment of "post--polio syndrome" as well as spinal cord injuries; it is in fact, where my "post polio syndrome" was first diagnosed over twenty years ago.)

It is questionable whether I will walk again, partly because it was deemed that it wasn't (and isn't) safe for me to be doing it especially since I live alone, and partly because the pain was caused by the spinal stenosis creating enough nerve damage that it may not be possible for me to walk again. Of course, I hope that with time the nerves will heal. On the other hand, my parents probably hoped that for a good part of late 1953 and much of 1954......

Needless to say, there are grief issues surrounding this. (And that is probably an understatement.) There is also good news. I came home in a power chair (on loan until my own is delivered) I have a new haircut--from a mandatory recreational therapy outing--in the power chair--to the little hair salon across the street from the rehab center. I went out to lunch--another outing--something that I haven't done for so long that I can't remember how long.

I was cared for with such gentle kindness and marvelous competency that I miss everyone enormously. The nurses are the best. They come from all over the world. I fell in love with them and will remember them for a very long time. (The nurse assistants also.)

The PT's (Physical Therapists) are the best I have ever had except for one young woman who worked with me in Chicago in my halycon graduate school days. They are in the same league. I miss working with them six days a week! I miss the gym equipment and I am doing the exercises that they taught me. I do not want this body to become "deconditioned" again!

The best OT (Occupational Therapist) and one of the finest people I have ever met brought me home within the first three days of my admission to see whether the house was suitable for me to continue to live in. (It was, thank God!) She determined what changes I should make and friends pitched in to accomplish the heroic task of moving things around so that a hospital bed could be delivered. (Power up, power down makes transfers easier.)

Then she taught me how to transfer with a slide board, use various new equipment for (ahem) various daily tasks. Then she brought me home again to make sure everything was in place. It was--almost. The hospital bed people had delivered the wrong bed. She quickly got it sorted out and they--just as quickly corrected their error.

I am now sleeping in the "pretty room", that I blogged about so many, many posts ago when my young friend, now about to graduate from college, painted it that summer after her high school graduation. It is satisfying to fall asleep and wake-up to the color scheme I chose and the rose curtains that my sister made that year.

If there are any typos here, please blame them on the squirrels--they have been distracting me for at least the last hour with their antics in my trees where they are finding a Thanksgiving feast of their own.

I have so much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. I have always thought of the old Beatles song, "We get by with a little help from our friends." I have gotten by and am getting by with a great deal of help from my friends, old friends and new ones. Thank you everyone!

Heat Waves, House Guests and Chronic Pain

I see that it has been a long time since I posted. The weeks flew by, punctuated by heat waves during which I mostly stay away from my computer. The house heats and heats and finally feels like it is going to explode. Then it cools. Relief that I can almost feel in the rafters.

My family visited briefly. The visit was marred by a heat wave! We are just finishing one now. The days are shorter, so the heat is not so oppressive and the fall light and colors give the experience a different quality from the high heat of summer. Somehow, with the knowledge that winter is coming, the heat is not so difficult to bear or so oppressive.

This morning as I looked out of my bedroom window I saw a trio of great red globes hanging low on my neighbor's pomegranate tree. Beautiful, beautiful fruit of fall.

Chronic pain has been plaguing me for month. A combination of sciatica, spinal stenosis and arthritis. I think that, with the help of the web, I am finally getting the positioning of pillows and bolsters arranged just so and the morning pain is lessening. The web has also yielded information about herbal and homeopathic remedies that are helping somewhat.

I am waiting for a package that contains a bottle of MSM, a supplement that I wish I had known about earlier. It will be interesting to see if it lives up to its reputation.

Gratitude filled my heart this morning when the pain on arising was not so bad. It is a beautiful day and the hummingbirds are feeding on the pineapple sage. My favorite time of the year. So I will hang on the gratitude and let it carry the day.