pameladean

The COVID test has about seven minutes left before I will read it. David and I are going to my mom's, which is also my brother's, for the holiday. We used to have larger gatherings, but my mom is very COVID-averse (she's 92, so yeah) and also had such a bad reaction to a COVID shot in 2021 that she won't get any more, so she's essentially unvaccinated at this point, so we don't bring anybody with us, even though they could test too. I don't feel the tests are quite good enough to push her about taking more risk.

ANYWAY, my reading list is overflowing with good wishes, so I thought I would return them all. I hope where you are today and what you are doing are where and what you wish them to be. We could not get any mincemeat, so I've made an apple pie. I had ideas about cookies, but ran out of time.

It is raining here and plans to go on doing so. It was raining, and it was going to rain. I don't see any blackbirds, and NO WONDER. Yesterday I went out in my raincoat and continued the task of edging the back sidewalk so the new (battery-powered, hooray!) snowblower will actually fit through it. We'd thought the path was 19 inches wide, and it had narrowed to more like 12; but as it turns out it's two feet wide, and much sunken. Anyway, I never expected to be out in the rain in 50-degree weather, edging a sidewalk with a sharpened shovel on Christmas Eve in Minnesota.

Test is negative, must run. It has been A Summer and I hope to do a catch-up post soon.

Love and joy to you all.

Pamela

Cameron has posted a brief excerpt from Courting Hellfire, the novel I described as pursuing her in an earlier post.

Here is a link:

https://wandering.shop/@LateOnsetGirl/110197144054091726

You should be able to see this even if you aren't logged into Mastodon.

I haven't read as much of what there is of this novel as I have of the other one, but I'm very much engaged and exited by it as well.

I was going to correct that typo, but it amuses me so much that I can't. Of course, I meant to say, "excited."

Pamela

It is the fifth of April. Google Photos, which likes to cough up old pictures labelled things like "One year ago today" and "Sunday Spotlight" and "Remember this Day?" has shown me that for about the past five years, by this time, the winter aconite was blooming in my yard.

It is a very short plant possessed of considerable dispatch, but it is sure not blooming any time this week, being buried in snow and unlikely to emerge until the several days of warmth that are forecast have passed, and perhaps more.

There are a few small signs, however, that I am cherishing. The neighbors' ancient peabush hedge has buds on it, despite several of its trunks' having fallen, as a few do every year, into our front yard. No neighbor in the entire history of our life here has ever done anything with the peabush hedge other than to try to corral it on their side with some paving stones. It is not a native shrub, but the birds seem to like it. In terms of alarm and annoyance, it pales beside the Japanese knotweed, which once caused both Jon Singer and Teresa Nielsen Hayden to blanch and cry out for Roundup, which neither of them ordinarily would do.

A few robins always seem to stick around all winter -- you can see them eating hackberry berries in February, an amazing sight as they hang upside down in below-zero weather -- but the other day a huge flock of them was darting about three or four back yards visible from the second-story windows of our house. They seemed to be finding something to eat. They used to eat rose hips from our yard if the cardinals, unabashed year-round residents, hadn't gotten them all first. But the roses went on strike last summer, so there are no rose hips. The red maples are blooming, though, so maybe robins can eat either something living in them or the buds or flowers.

House finches have been singing loudly for a couple of weeks. I haven't heard the "cheeseburger!" yell of chickadees yet, but there has been some shouting from the cardinals. Gray squirrels have been frisky on and off. And the house sparrows have come to squabble in the hackberry outside my bedroom window, occasionally on the windowsill itself. This phenomenon and the fact that the neighbors have started letting their black and white cat outside on balmier days (I wish they would not) has provided a lot of entertainment for Saffron. She seems aware that the windows should really be open by now, leaping impetuously onto the narrow sills whenver I go to look out or raise or lower a blind.

The other night I became obsessed with the idea that I could not change my plans to make lasagna, and must must must have vegan mozzarella. Cub was out, but I put together a quick Wedge order. There's a new liquid vegan mozzarella that allegedly browns, bubbles, and firms up when heated, rather than being filled up with stabilizers that are good if you want to shred or slice it, but make most current vegan mozzarellas go weirdly gritty or crunchy when heated too far. I got that, and enough other stuff to provide free delivery. I got texts about the progress of the order and finally an email notification that it had been delivered. This was perplexing, since ordinarily there's a text with a photograph of the bags sitting on the front porch. We are still doing no-contact delivery when feasible.

I went downstairs and looked around the porch. No bag. I checked the porches of the neighbors on either side -- groceries have been delivered to both of them by accident. No bag. I used my phone to tell Instacart that my order was missing, and entered into a lengthy chat session during which I was finally asked to please "check the perimeter of the property," since Instacart had decided the groceries had been delivered to the right address. A few days before I'd have laughed, as the property was encased in snow and ice. However, there had been some stealthy warmer weather, so I thought I'd just look outside the back door; and then I saw that the path to the garage was mostly clear. In my sweatshirt and sneakers, as opposed to layers of winter garments and boots with ice cleats, I ventured into the the dark yard. The temperature was in the low forties, heading down; but the bite in the air present when the forties make a visit in January and hastily retreat again was missing. I went along around the side of the garage. The driveway was still snowy, and there were no bags of groceries soaking up the wet. I went back in and reported this. The customer service representative offered me three different kinds of refund, since it was too late to dispatch anybody else with my vegan cheese and I didn't want it tomorrow, I wanted it now.

I said I'd like them to credit the account, please, and as the little ellipsis showed they were doing that, I realized where the groceries probably were. We have a large plastic tote on the front porch for the protection of outgoing parcels. Delivery people often put things on top of it; they don't really like just plopping things down on the bare concrete. But they rarely put anything in it unless it's pouring rain. However, there was my bag of groceries.

I apologized for bothering the customer service person, and was thanked for my honesty. That's kind of dismal to consider.

As a nice ironic postscript, I will reveal that when I went to make the lasagna, I saw that I didn't have a new box of noodles, but four remaining in an old box. I had thought of getting more noodles but not actually done it. A quick search revealed a bouncing happy website that was sure you could substitute pretty much any other kind of pasta for lasagna noodles and it would all be perfectly fine. I ended up using penne pasta. It was a pasta casserole or bake, not lasagna, but it was fine. The bouncy website thought the best substitute was manicotta, boiled, cut and flattened, and I thought this was ingenious; but we didn't have any manicotta, whereas being without penne pasta is very rare for us.

Later on I searched further and found a recipe for lasagna made using wonton wrappers. I mean, they're flour, salt, and water, and flat; but I thought they might not need as much cooking as actual pasta and might disintegrate. I might try this one day.

The liquid faux cheese tasted good, but the bottle discourages liberal application. I will ignore this next time. Also, covering the pan with foil so that the noodles will cook properly prevents the cheese from browning. This can be adjusted as well.

On the whole I was glad that the reluctant spring had yielded up safe surfaces for my quest for missing groceries, since braving ice for such an aberrant lasagna would have been unreasonable.

Winter aconite from other Aprils:

I know many of you aren't on Mastodon and some don't want to be, so I'll let you know here that Tor is going to reissue The Fortunate Fall as part of their Essentials line. It will be reissued under the name Cameron Reed, but with the old name on the cover in smaller type, to help people reconnect with the book. The exact date is still to be determined, but probably sometime in mid-2024.

I am so joyous, I cannot really even tell you.

Pamela

This is pretty last-minute, but I will not be attending Chicon after all, so I have a membership for sale. We paid $170 for it and I am happy to sell it for that. Or if that's too much, make me an offer. I'm not sure demand for this membership is particularly great.

I have already missed both Minicon and Fourth Street this year because of general fear of COVID coupled with a strong intuition that adhering to good COVID protocols -- which I fervently support -- would take most of the fun out of conventions for me.

I received confirmation of this suspicion recently. Everything is fine; I did not get COVID. But this is what happened:

I had a small grocery order coming from Aldi's, via Instacart. I'd put together an Aldi's cart and a Cub cart with all the vegetables I habitually order and compared the prices; and Aldi's wasn't just a little cheaper for produce, it was a lot cheaper. They don't carry a lot of things I want, but for produce they were definitely a win.

I don't meet the shopper at the door, just have them leave the groceries and go down to collect the groceries a little later. Neither the shopper nor I need any additional risk even of that sort. The shopper duly texted me that she had delivered the groceries, and as is now usual, and much appreciated, included a photo. The house was not my house, but I knew exactly where it was. So I put on a mask, somewhat haphazardly since I expected to swoop my groceries off the steps and leave. The people in that house aren't ordinarily home during the day.

The groceries weren't on the steps. I went up onto the outside stoop and peered into the screened porch. No groceries.

"Hello?" called a voice. "Did you have groceries delivered?"

"I did!" I called back. I moved away from the screen door to the top of the concrete steps, but did not go back down into the yard, which would probably have been a better idea. A young woman and a little dog came out onto the porch, the woman talking very fast about how confused she had been to find groceries on her porch. She'd already put the perishables in the refrigerator while trying to figure out what to do, but she would get them right away. She came back with my two bags. Again, the better move for me would have been to go down into the yard and ask her to just leave the bags on her stoop. I just stood there. As she opened the screen door, she said, "Now I don't want to get too close, because I have COVID right now." She wasn't wearing a mask.

I'd been focusing on whether the little dog would make a break for it. I grabbed my bags, thanked her reflexively, and bolted for home.

This was not an exposure by CDC standards, but those are worth, well, if you pay taxes, much less than you paid for them. I wore my mask into the house and told Cameron, and then emailed David and Lydy. Lydy's response was the very salient, "Grocery delivery is supposed to REDUCE risk!"

I had effortlessly decided to quarantine from the downstairs, but Cameron and I had to decide what to do upstairs. There's only one bathroom for the two of us, and my office doesn't have a door. In the end, we masked up for ten days and didn't eat or watch TV together, and kind of vaguely tried to keep some kind of distance. We have four air cleaners upstairs, mostly acquired for either pollen or smoke mitigation, though I did get the big one with COVID in mind. The weather was cool for the first five or six days, so we had windows wide open and fans deployed as well. I did rapid antigen tests at days 3, 5 and 10. All negative, no symptoms (except that during this time the pollen count went up and I had allergy symptoms, naturally). Before going on a rescheduled visit to my mom's, I did two more tests, as David and I always do, and those were negative as well.

This was probably all unnecessary, aside from the tests and probably the postponement of the visit to my 91-YEAR-OLD mother; but we agreed that it had been good practice.

And it showed me very clearly that I hate wearing a mask, particularly in hot weather, day after day after day. I could complain about it endlessly, but I feel very embarrassed about my reaction, given how many people wear masks for hours and hours just to work and stay safer -- including Lydy! But I will just say that putting on the mask made me feel that my intelligence had contracted and shrunk, and also that I was about a million miles away from anybody I might be conversing with. Many people can't hear me through a mask, either, as I noticed when wearing one to MinnStf events and other outdoor social events in 2021. This was confirmed during these ten days; so I have to bellow, which introduces another unnatural element into the conversation. Since one of the major pleasures of a convention for me is getting together with friends for a meal, and I wouldn't want to do that under current circumstances and with my health issues either, the combination of these factors made me decide that I might as well stay home and help Cameron wrangle the five cats. I also can't take Paxlovid, which is another thing that gives me pause.

Thinking it over even more obsessively, while I enjoy conventions and miss going to them, they are also a source of some considerable stress to me, which has always been worth it for the personal interactions and intellectual stimulation. But when you add the drawbacks of the mask and the lack of communal meals, it's just all stress all the time.

But for people with greater social and organizational skills,  lower risk, and/or better mask tolerance, there's the membership available.

It won't be a tragedy if I don't sell it, since it provides access to the virtual part of the convention as well as the physical.

P.

Minicon 55, twice postponed and long anticipated, is being held in person this weekend.

I am not attending most of it, having decided that doing so is a bit too risky for me personally.

At the moment, I'm planning to ride in to the hotel with David on Friday, to attend the panel "Archiving SF," which runs from four to five p.m. and in which he'll be showing some of the photos he's been working on by various fannish photographers including himself. I might put my head into the art show to see his handful of prints hanging up. I'm hoping to have a chat with Jo, and wave or yell behind my mask to a few more people, but then I am going home and sadly staying there. It looks like a really good program; I would attend many panels, ordinarily, out of this batch; I would plant myself in the music room and just listen to every single musician's concert. I would have meals with good friends and acquaintances and a few new people, with luck.

But for me, with my comorbidities and diabetes, I think it's too risky. Minicon requires vaccination and a booster and masking in public spaces except for those designated for eating and drinking. I think these precautions are sensible, but maybe not for me. So David cancelled one of our hotel rooms, and I have not had to do a lot of laundry.

I hope everyone who goes has a lovely safe time.

Pamela

As many of you know, I usually make the pies for our family celebrations of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I also sometimes make a lemon meringue pie for David's birthday, but those are usually well-behaved. The holiday pies have always been a bit dicey since I took over from David's mother in the oughts sometime. They are never beautiful except by accident, but they are tasty.

David must have a mince pie for both holidays if at all possible; fortunately, the canonical mincemeat comes in a jar. If Lydy were here she might have made an apple pie, but she is out of town. I've made an apple pie myself quite frequently, and often I've made a vegan pumpkin pie. This has won cautious approval from the omnivores; the tang of the tofu, they say, makes it more like cheesecake, but often they eat some. Cameron and I like the pie quite a lot.

Thanksgiving's pies were fine, if sporting the usual raggedy, somehow distracted look that appears to be the hallmark of my pie crust. I hadn't been able to get my usual brand of silken tofu (Mori-Nu), so with trepidation I used Nasoya. I've had a lot of trouble with Nasoya, but it goes in the other direction: that is, if Nasoya brand tofu claims to be extra firm you can't be sure it won't fall apart in your hands when you try to take it out of the package. But the silken tofu is always silken. All of it is very soft. To my surprise, the pie was really great. Nasoya is less tangy and it was more like a pumpkin custard and less like a cheesecake. Cam and I liked it very much and the rest of them were less cautious in their approval. The only glitch in the Thanksgiving pie preparation was that I absent-mindedly made two two-crust batches rather than one of each. I put the extra dough in the freezer.

With Lydy gone and the core Christmas group being very small because my mother is 90, is very nervous about COVID19, and gets notions, and with my brother being allergic to pumpkin, I decided not to make a pumpkin pie at all. My brother had expressed interest in a tofu chocolate pie, so I decided to do that.

This required one two-crust pie and one one-crust pie. I had the dough for a one-crust pie in the freezer. So I made the two-crust pie recipe. I used the shortening I'd used at Thanksgiving, which claims to be Best By August 2022. I'd put it in the refrigerator after I made the Thanksgiving pies. When I opened the ziploc bag, I got a whiff of, well, shortening, which seemed weird when it was cold, but I don't usually refrigerate shortening. I made the dough. I chilled it. I rolled it out. It behaved really beautifully. I put the bottom crust in the pie plate and started to fold up the top one. Something seemed off. I picked up a scrap of dough and tasted it. It wasn't dramatically awful, but it was off. A sharp, weird taste, not flour or salt or water or shortening.

After quite a lot of yelling -- Cam was out shopping and David was downstairs, so I could be free with my expressions -- I put all the dough into the organics recycling and went downstairs to see if David and Lydy had any shortening. They had an eight-ounce unopened stick, which smelled harmless and proved to be so. I made and rolled out the dough for the second time, after washing such of the dough-making utensils as I had foolishly put in with other used dishes. That was all yesterday. I put the second batch of mince pie crusts in the refrigerator overnight, with the frozen lump of dough left over from Thanksgiving so it could thaw out.

Today I put the mince pie together and put it in the oven, where nothing bad happened to it. I took the thawed lump of dough from the fridge and rolled it out. It behaved badly, but not monstrously. I coaxed it together and put it in the pie plate and smashed the edges with a fork and pricked it all over the bottom. I tasted a scrap, and it tasted fine. The mince pie had ten minutes to go and the cats were piteously reminding me that they had not been fed for a century, so I put Saffron's thyroid medication into a pill pocket abd gave it to her with some Greenies; Cassie just got the Greenies. Then I sat on the sofa waiting for the timer for the mince pie to go off. Cassie sat next to me in case I had any treats in my pockets.

From the kitchen, I heard a thumping sound. I got up and went in. Saffron was standing on the dishwasher, the main work surface in that kitchen, licking the bottom of the pie dough. The cutting board the pie plate was sitting on is slightly warped, so every vigourous lick made the board thump against the top of the dishwasher. Otherwise, had she jumped down quietly enough, I would never have known. I had put all the other phases of the pie dough into the microwave, which is very capacious, to keep cats from messing with them, but I had honestly thought that if any cat did that, it would be Cassie. Saffron was unconcerned to be discovered and got down resignedly when I said, "Get down from there" in a low tone because Cameron was asleep. I put the defiled pie in the microwave.

I knew I would not do this, but I thought, "Well, hey, ten or twelve minutes at 425 F, surely that would sanitize it." I did some internet searches. Cats have licked a lot of pies, but mostly baked ones. Cats, as I know perfectly well, have a vast array of pathogens in their mouths. Cats lick their butts, for heaven's sake. I threw out the dough, washed the cutting board, the rolling pin, the pastry cutter, the top of the dishwasher, and the pie plate, got the last of the downstairs shortening out of the fridge, tossed a lump of margarine in with it, and made another batch of dough. This behaved middlingly, but by then I really did not care. I smashed the edges with a fork, pricked it all over, and shoved it into the oven, whence it emerged not long ago looking all right to be filled with chocolate tofu mixture when I have made it.

My mother is having a reaction to her booster shot, so I will also be making mashed potatoes and two kinds of roasted vegetables. But none of them are likely to cause anything like this amount of trouble, as long as I don't leave anything with olive oil on it sitting where Saffron can find it.

When Cam got up I went into her office, where Saffron was sleeping peacefully in the chair she considers her own, and said, "I'd like to introduce you to your new cat. This is your new cat. I have no cat."

I hope you have no tribulations at all, but that if you do, they are no worse than these.

Pamela

Hello, you all. I am in that exasperating (to me, at any rate) state where I write entries in my head all the time but I never post them.

This requires posting, however.

I've often mentioned my long-time partner Raphael in this space. Some of you have met Raphael. If I manage to start posting again, you will not see that name any more. I'll be talking about Cameron. Her last name is Reed, though I don't usually use any partner's last name here. She is the same partner and the same person, but she has transitioned. Her pronouns are she or they. I guess, if you know her from long ago and have taken pleasure in Hellsparking the pronouns, you could still do that.

This is a profoundly joyous and very welcome development, though I'm sorry she ended up going through most of it during an ongoing and mishandled pandemic.

It's National Coming Out Day, so I guess I'll mention that I'm bisexual.

In other news, the upstairs furnace doesn't want to start up, the friend who has been nursing it along for us is laid up with both the flu and an injury, and I am worried about getting actual repair people in because I fear that they will reflexively red-tag the furnace even though it probably just needs a minor adjustment. It is as old as the house, which was built in 1916. It's no longer powered by coal, and was retrofitted with a pressure tank a decade or so ago after the replacement expansion tank in the upstairs bathroom began leaking after only a few years of use. The previous one also had leaked, but only after about 90 years.

I have the names of a bunch of companies that will definitely red-tag it and am trying to run down one that won't.

Other news, other news. The year 2020 has apparently done a real number on my executive function. It's somewhat better after several months of taking Vitamin B12 to address a deficiency. After I get my COVID-19 booster next week, I'll have lab work done and we'll see where my levels are and whether more improvement can be expected.

I had some weeks of very good productive work on the perpetual revisions of the novel currently called Going North. I'm stalled out again now, partly because I'm working on other long-overdue necessary matters like taxes. I've had to clear all or part of my desk twice in the past year and a half, once to address a hole in the screen of one window and again to make space to replace the air conditioner. I eventually accomplished these necessary clearances by shoving everything into a series of paper bags. Sorting would still be going on (as in fact it is) and I would have had no air conditioner through several more very nasty heat waves and would still not have one now, if I had insisted on things' being sorted as a preliminary. The paperback fiction aisle containing K through just-barely-W is still packed with stuff from my office.

The yard is a jungle and I have 48 species tulip bulbs arriving sometime this week.

Hiking has been a little erratic because of heat waves and thunderstorms, but the hikes we've had have been really beautiful and contained many interesting moments. There's a dearth of meadowhawks this year, it seems, but we did see some autumn ones on the last few hikes, as well as spotted spreadwings at the Carpenter Nature Center. We saw a prince baskettail snatch a moth out of the air and devour it just over our heads, dropping the wings at our feet. At the same spot just before, we had seen an osprey descend with enormous force and speed and snatch a fish out of the water. We saw a beaver swimming the length of a long pond to bring back water-lily leaves, one by one, to its lodge. We saw green herons. We saw a great blue heron, standing in the shallows of the Mississippi River, catch its own fish, spend several geometric moments moving the fish around without dropping it to get it lined up with its gullet, and then gulping it down. We saw many other things that I'm not recalling at the moment. Most of the common skimmers, ebony jewelwings, American rubyspots. Oh, and orange bluets. Montissippi, a regional park in Wright County with a fabulous dragonfly and bird population and the worst portapotties known to us, provided a generous array of darners and bluets mating and ovipositing; also, later in the year, a pileated woodpecker hammering away on a dead cottonwood branch. We've heard it before and since, but that was our only viewing.

All these hikes were with Cameron. I also went with Eric for two nights at St. Croix State Park, where a friend had planned a camping and gaming weekend for people still skittish about ordinary gatherings. I don't game, but Eric does. It's a beautiful park, and we had a fine time exploring it. We did not see the dragonflies I had hoped for, but finally we went down to the canoe landing where the rental canoes are, when it was early enough in the day for the river to be sunny, and saw several dragonhunters, a majestic and alarming kind of clubtail that preys on other dragonflies. Eric had seen one of those before when we went to Wild River together some years ago. But  at the canoe rental landing at St. Croix, he also saw his first American rubyspots. We also very much enjoyed hanging out with friends in what at the time was a safe manner.

David and I have been taking rapid antigen tests and then going out to have lunch at my mother's about every other week. The pandemic has been pretty hard on her as well, and she is still going nowhere except her front steps with their little garden or her back deck. I hope she may venture out more after a booster and after Minnesota's horrific community-spread numbers go down, if they ever actually do.

I started reading new fiction again after a lengthy period of being basically unable to do so. As a result I read Katherine Addison's The Witness for the Dead, decided that it was a little too soon to read The Goblin Emperor again, and accordingly reread The Angel of the Crows and then actually took the heavy hardcovers of The Doctrine of Labyrinths from the shelf, to the great annoyance of my cat, who does not want to be a book rest and resents the space the books take up on what she believes to be her pillow. I've just started The Mirador, possibly my favorite volume of the series, and it's very hard to do anything else but read it, which is not helping any of the projects that require attention.

I'm looking forward to getting my booster so I can feel able to see Eric other than outside again. He's acquired a roommate, which he had intended to do for some time, and I am still very paranoid about COVID because my diabetes will make whatever level of infection I get much worse.

Nobody in my house has gotten sick yet.

Minneapolis politics is really wild right now. I have a lot of opinions but lack the energy to argue about them just at the moment.

I value all of you exceedingly and am glad every time any of you post.

Pamela

That is to say, however much of a cliche it may be, it never rains but it pours.

David was selected by the state lottery and got vaccinated yesterday in a cavernous sports facility in Eagan. He said the National Guard was handing out second masks, repeating, "Blue side out! Blue side out!" and also directing traffic in the parking lot and foot traffic inside.

Also yesterday, I got my notification from HealthPartners that if I was quick like a bunny to make an appointment,I could get vaccinated at one of their locations. They've started on people 65 and older after being stalled out at 70 and older for what seemed like forever.

This morning I woke to a text and an email informing me that I had been selected by the state lottery system to get a vaccine by that route.

I hope this means that a lot of people who have been waiting and waiting will be vaccinated soon. I don't know if it's the addition of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to the mix or the promised huge increase in production of the other two promised by the companies that make them, or both; but it certainly is welcome.

I also got a mysterious claims lettter from HealthPartners from December 11 saying that they were writing to let me know the status of a claim from a provider designated only as IBX. They said the claim needed additional review and would probably be resolved within 21 days.

Once I got past all the Blue Cross stuff when I searched on IBX, I found an outfit that proclaimed, "We are IBX, one of the world’s largest biorepositories. A global leader in biobanking, bioprocessing, and analytics."

The date of the claim was 12/11. I certainly had no medical procedures done that day, but claims are often presented some time after the actual medical service in question. We all ordered saliva tests from the state after Lydy tested positive for COVID, and Raphael and I sent ours in on December 11. The tests are supposed to be free to us, paid for by the state, but maybe they charge your insurance if you have any. In any case, it was a strong reminder of how things are trying to look up.

P.

By which I mean, the COVID-19 virus. I got my first shot today. HCMC, having sent me an invitation and let me make an appointment, did not blink at the fact that I had to abandon them in 2017 because I couldn't get an insurance plan on the marketplace that counted their clinics as being in-network. They just did the thing.

It was pretty fast and smooth, but there were a lot of people in there. I am not used to that any more.

When we got home and I was walking through the back yard to the door, a cardinal was calling and calling from one of the mulberry trees. I was very glad to hear it.

Pamela