Suzy Says

The Battlefield

I kept hearing about how weighted blankets are comforting and help one to sleep better. Who doesn’t need more comfort and better sleep? So I decided to get one.

Blanket One weighed 15 pounds. It felt pretty heavy just wrestling it from the PO box to the car and from the car to the house. Not to mention up the stairs. I was a bit disconcerted to discover that it was much smaller than expected, barely covering my queen size bed when the blanket was placed sideways. Hm.

Once under the covers, it felt a little heavier than I expected. I wondered if I just had to get used to it. Later, I felt too warm and pushed it off, even though it was supposedly “cooling” as well as weighted. I ended up sleeping under just the comforter. I tried it a few more nights, and it was still too warm and too heavy. So I returned it to sender and exchanged it for…

Blanket Two, which weighed a slightly more svelte 10 pounds, and upon being unfolded from its case, was much more size-appropriate. It was nice that it was less heavy, but it was still warmer than I found comfortable. Let’s just say that I dragged out the fan I thought I had put away for the winter. I wanted to try to get the feeling of being hugged and the better sleep. But as you know, we are a family of bad sleepers, and I didn’t get the magic of a much better night’s sleep, as reported by most people. Also, I am bad at relationships, so maybe the hugged all night thing isn’t for me, either. In my single days, I always went to the guy’s house so I could escape. Also, they would not know where I lived and turn up at unexpected and inconvenient times hoping for a rematch. Presumably those who enjoyed the all night hugging feeling planned things to facilitate more hugging rather than less.

Long ago when I moved to California, I was mystified by why no one believed in insulation or window screens. It gets cold (and hot) here, and there are bugs. At the old house, it was basically like sleeping in a tent, and was around 10 degrees warmer than the outside temperature overnight in the winter. It was pretty common to see my breath when I woke up on winter mornings, especially since I was too cheap to have the heat on overnight after Henry Etta died. But at the new house, it is so well insulated that I can hardly hear the rain even when it’s storming out, and the house does a pretty good job of keeping the heat in during the winter and the heat out during the summer. Imagine!

There are even screens in the windows, but they are not Dodge-proof, like the metal screen door on the balcony at the old house. So no opening the windows to cool down the room and facilitate the great weighted blanket experiment. Even when it was 32F/0C outside overnight, it was too hot and I kept pushing the weighted blanket off, even the 10 pound one. I looked into getting a 5 pound one, but they only come in kids’/twin bed size, so that’s out. At that point, I gave up on the weighted blanket concept and moved on to Blanket Three, the cooling bamboo blanket.

It appears that the third time is the charm, since the cooling bamboo blanket with my lightweight comforter is just about perfect. I feel like Goldilocks (Suzilocks?) and the three blankets. This one’s too heavy. This one’s too hot. This one’s just right. At least the bear (or bears) in my story stay outside the house.

A YEAR AGO: A fun and silly Girl Night with my sister (and extremely tolerant brother-in-law).

FIVE YEARS AGO: A crazy, happy Thanksgiving.

TEN YEARS AGO: Working on Christmas cards. Which I am also doing now.

I love my birthday, but I have never liked my name. Susan Jean is about as dull as you can get. I have always felt that I deserved something more glamorous, though I don’t know what that would be.

My much-loved maternal grandfather, HoHo (named for his distinctive laugh), used to call me Suzy. When he died, I was only 15 and I was crushed. I didn’t want anyone calling me by his special name for me. But after a couple of years, I missed it, and my family and close friends started calling me Suzy. At work, I’m Susan, but here and in my real life, I’m Suzy. A little more sparkly than Susan, who sounds so dull and responsible. Both the Susan in the Narnia books and the one in the Swallows and Amazons books certainly were. Even the Divine Jane’s Lady Susan was pretty obnoxious.

My mother, whose enjoyment of the sparkly I inherited, wanted to name me Amy Victoria. My paternal grandfather’s middle name was Victor, for the Queen (both of my grandfathers were named Ernest), so it would be a compliment to him as well as the Old Queen*. Despite that, my English father vetoed the idea, and they somehow settled on Susan Jean, the Jean for Dad’s only sibling Jeanne. I would like it better if I, too, had the French spelling, but what can you do?

Mom didn’t give up on Amy Victoria, though, and when she was expecting the next baby after me, Dad agreed that this one could be Amy Victoria. He even gave Mom a little pin:

The baby turned out to be Jonathan David.

By the time the last baby came along, many years later, the AV idea was forgotten, and it was decided that the new baby would be called Colin if he was a boy and Megan if she was a girl. The baby turned out to be the Megan Fairbanks (Mom’s maiden name) we all know and love.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I were Amy Victoria. Would Amy still live in San Francisco? Or maybe she would have stayed in New York state. Maybe she’d be better at relationships and marriage than I am. Maybe she’d have children. Or maybe, just maybe, she’d be just like me. Maybe a Suzy by any other name is still a Suzy.

* Queen Victoria fascinated me from a young age. And I have to admit, I love the Royal Family. My English father could not care less about them, but I do. I made him take me to see the open State Rooms at Buckingham Palace once. He enjoyed it much more than he expected.

**I have always loved this Elton John song. It is from Honky Chateau, which Mom played a lot and is one of the first albums I can remember.

A YEAR AGO: A wonderful afternoon at the Symphony.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Getting ready for Thanksgiving.

TEN YEARS AGO: Skipping Thanksgiving. I did that this year, too.

What makes a Monday Mondayer? Getting a crown installed!

Faithful readers may recall that I had a sudden and inexplicable hole appear in my tooth last month, revealing its ancient silver filling. Fortunately, it did not hurt. Unfortunately, it required a crown, bringing my personal collection up to three. Crown One: a filling fell out right before a) a national holiday; and 2) a trip to Detroit to testify in front of the Grand Jury. Spoiler alert: the crown was the fun part.

Crown Two: following the first (and I hope, last) root canal of my life, so expensive and upsetting that I cried afterwards. Again, the crown was the fun part, but to be fair, almost anything is fun compared to getting (and paying for) a root canal. I also learned that getting a crown is the inevitable result of getting a root canal.

Crown Three: this one. As I have learned the hard way over the years, I never really seem to get numb. I always feel part of whatever they are doing to me. I followed Dr. Megan’s prescription of taking an omeprazole every day for a week before the procedure, but I still felt the poking around and post installation like I did last time. I flinched and made a noise of discomfort, and the dentist genially said, “It must be waking up!” Dentists are masters of understatement. When I used to get my braces tightened, the dentist would tell me that it would “be a little tender” by dinner time. Translation: it will hurt like hell before school ends, and if you’re lucky, you might be able to eat Jell-O for a week.

But the post’n’poke was a total joy compared to a new sensation called a “heart race”. Have you ever had or heard of one of these lovely things? The dentist accidentally got a vein with one of the four shots of anesthetic, and told me that it was perfectly normal to feel the way I did. Which was like I was having a bad panic attack. My hands were shaking, I was freezing, and I was freaking out. I tried to calm myself by watching the bees in their hive through the operatory window and breathing deeply. Eventually it passed, but man, it was horrible.

So far, the third time has been the worst, rather than the charm.

On the bright side, the technology was great. Instead of making me gag by jamming countless containers of glop into my mouth, they took about a million pictures in there with some kind of space age looking thing. This was translated to a sort of 3-D mill that shaped the crown. On the screen, I could see the progress (just 12 minutes!) and it was very accurate. It just needed a little tweaking to fit perfectly. The dentist said that crowns made like this were much more accurate than the old, gloppy way.

He put the crown into a kiln to be baked and hardened, again showing the progress on the screen (15 minutes!) and then cemented it in. No temporary crown or extra visit. I was back at work in less than two hours. So maybe the third time did have some charm after all.

TEN YEARS AGO: Coming home from San Francisco.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: How to get nowhere.

Willow and her Babies

The kittens have been growing and changing, and it’s been really fun to watch the evolution along with John. I know he always envied me for having seen Buddy born and then grow up, so now it’s finally his chance to have that life-changing experience.

He’s been sending me photos and videos nearly every day since they were born in late September, and they have cheered me through some dark and stressful days and nights, I can tell you that. Another good reason for being on good terms with your ex-husband.

Here are a few recent milestones.

Peach started eating solid food before Daisy, though they were both still nursing at that time.

One of the charming stories John told me was how Peach was determined to use her mother Willow’s grown up litterbox rather than the baby litterbox. She could get into it, but had a hard time getting out of it. So Willow would go and lie next to the litterbox so Peach could climb onto her and then to the ground. John said this happened many times and it must have been something to see. Willow is a really good mother. I suspect that this is not her first rodeo, though I’m thankful it’s her last.

Here they are enjoying a heated bed which used to belong to a wonderful, very old cat named Abraham. Like me with Henry Etta, John rescued Abraham from the streets at an advanced age and was able to give him a peaceful and loving last couple of years. None of John’s other cats liked the bed, but the kittens give it two paws up:

Apparently Willow does not like to be caught playing with the kittens, as if it’s beneath her or something. So John was pretty excited to catch this video of them all playing together one morning.

Here’s Peach trying to escape the kitten room:

I wonder how long it will be before they blend into the family. At this point, I think they are already home.

A YEAR AGO: Hula classes!

FIVE YEARS AGO: The joys of Benedict Cumberbatch in “Hamlet”, followed by an excellent dinner.

TEN YEARS AGO: Buying sneakers can be harder than you’d think.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: I still think pretty much anything can be or is an Olympic sport. Also that the Olympics are on constantly, instead of every four years.

I am excited to announce that Megan is working for none other than the extremely prestigious Stanford University!

While not one of the Ivy League schools, it is very highly regarded worldwide and counts among its alumni one US President (Herbert Hoover, for the curiously inclined), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. 85 Nobel Laureates have been students, teachers, or staff there. So she is in good company.

Megan works part time at the clinic where I work full time (and sometimes more), and one of the nurses who also works there thought Meg might be interested in working on a project related to health outcomes for local diabetic patients. As you know, Megan’s husband of nearly 30 years is a Type One diabetic, and through that and many years of working in emergency medicine, Megan knows a thing or two about diabetes. It is something she really cares about as well.

So Megan applied for the job, went through some Zoom interviews and email exchanges, and voila! She was hired, at an hourly rate significantly higher than any of her other jobs, to work on this project.

Stanford is a couple of hundred miles away, and the focus is on patients in our community, so she will be working from home. This means that she needs much better and more reliable internet at home than she currently has. The same folks who valiantly installed the internet at my new-ish house are due to investigate the family estate soon, with an eye to installing it there as well. I am hopeful, because they also managed to somehow install internet at my old house, about a quarter of a mile way and in obviously similar terrain. I think Mark did something creative with repeater boxes and other things I don’t understand to make it happen, but hopefully this can also be done at Megan’s house.

Despite the technical difficulties to be solved, I am really excited for Megan. It’s interesting and valuable work, and it will look great on her resume, too. I am hoping it might lead to more work like this for her as well. I am even prouder of her than usual!

A YEAR AGO: Recovering from the PGE-inflicted power outage and septic system-inflicted grossness.

FIVE YEARS AGO: The pleasures of First Friday in our small town.

TEN YEARS AGO: Walking the dogs at Big River.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: Some sporty musings.

The only source of heat in – I guess I shouldn’t call it the new house after more than a year and a half of living here, but I lived in the old one for a decade, so the new one still feels, well, new – my current abode is a heater impersonating a wood stove. It has faux logs and is powered by the ever-expensive propane. It also needs electricity to work, just like the cooking stove, rendering it completely useless during the inevitable power outages. You may recall that I pretty much froze my butt off during the extended outage inflicted on us with apparent impunity by the dictators at PG&E.

When I first moved in, it was late May, but there were a couple of chilly days. I could not get the heater to light, and since Rob is now 20 minutes instead of 2 minutes away, I had to resort to asking my landlord for help. To be fair, I did count on Rob for help with things that my actual landlord should have handled, but Rob tended to be more responsive and have better solutions to my problems. So in my relatively Rob-less, relatively new house, I have to call on Danielle.

She came by, and before investigating the situation, asked, “You aren’t very handy, are you?” This was before she used about a hundred matches trying to light it and finally contacted the repair guy. Of course, it was the Memorial Day weekend, so he wasn’t immediately available. I think she was a bit embarrassed. While it’s true that I’m not handy, this was not really proof of that fact, since she also could not get the heater to light, and when the repair guy appeared, he couldn’t, either. He had to order a part and then come and install it. After that, it worked fine all winter.

Our seemingly endless summer has seemingly ended, and with a hard frost warning and cold winds blowing around the house, it was time to turn on the heater. But it refused, sitting there dark and cold and stubborn. I had failed to notice that the pilot light was out on the heater until I wanted to actually use it. I should have noticed, since the pilot light keeps the top of the heater pretty toasty, and it’s Dodge’s favorite place to hang out unless it’s very hot outside. He hadn’t been lying there lately, now that I thought of it, so the pilot light had probably been out for months without my realizing it.

Another call to Danielle. Despite her handiness – she milled the wood for the house and built it – she could not get the heater to light, though this time she refrained from editorializing on my (quite genuine) lack of handitude. Once again, she had to call a repair guy. This repair guy talked to himself as a sort of running commentary, so I never knew if he was talking to me or not. He basically dismantled the whole thing and was doing a lot of clangy things. When he took the top of the heater off, there was a mat of Dodge hair, like dryer lint. My contribution to the repair process was to remove the mat and dispose of it.

Eventually, he had it going again. He did say that if it continued to go on strike, Danielle was planning to buy a new heater, which would have to be located against an outside wall. This was a little alarming to me, since it would have to be placed to one side or the other of the back door, this ruining the room’s symmetry, though another option would be next to Rob’s bookcase, below Saffron’s glorious paintings:

which would look better, but would be less efficient, since it would be in a corner. The current heater is about 25 years old and apparently heater technology has improved during that time. But I’m hoping we can just keep it going for now, especially since winter is here.

A YEAR AGO: The horror of the PSPS. I hope that never happens again.

FIVE YEARS AGO: A foggy Halloween.

TEN YEARS AGO: A beautiful way to remember lost loved ones.

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: What to do with that pesky leftover wedding jewelry.

It was a perfect sunny day – the perfect day for a mini road trip. The sky was a cloudless, deep blue (I always think California skies have a certain depth and strength to their blueness that is special to the Golden State), with that clear, golden light of fall.

As I left the house, I noticed that Mr. Bear has a new technique:

He gets extra credit for creativity, but it’s less effective than his usual method. At least it left most of the trash in the can, instead of spread out everywhere. On the other hand (or paw), there is a bear-induced hole in the garbage can. I really thought he would have moved on by now, but some guys seem to find it hard to let go.

Putting ursine thoughts and destruction behind me, I made my way to the beautiful Valley through the ancient redwood trees. Sunlight filtered through the branches far above as I wended my way to wine country, where the vines were turning red, orange, and yellow, our version of fall color:

This time, I finally stopped to take a photo of this sign, which I have admired for years:

I don’t know who Art is or was, but I love his sign, which I consider to be art.

I headed to the General Store in Boonville, where I ordered a chicken salad sandwich and a lemonade and repaired to one of the wooden picnic tables overlooking the main drag:

I watched cars, people, and dogs go by in the balmy sunshine. It was probably around 80 degrees, a beautiful day to enjoy the warmth of a late fall day.

On my way home, I stopped in at Gowan’s farmstand:

It was brimming with pumpkins, apples, squashes, and other autumn produce:

I picked up some fresh walnuts, almonds, and sweet apple cider to take home with me and remind me of a perfect day in the beautiful Valley.

FIVE YEARS AGO: Oh, Roscoe. You were such a little rascal. I miss you every day.