Tiny Tuesday

We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kind of bird these feathers I stick in a tiny jar on my desk come from. I don’t really care. I just like the way they look....but it was too hot to go outside.

Today’s excitement:
We were able to sit on the porch in the morning for coffee. The paper was a step too far, but I did enjoy watching Michelle’s speech at the Democratic Convention. She minced no words about the shambles her husband’s successor has made of things and brought tears to my eyes because of her sincerity and goodness. She had a necklace on that said VOTE.

A guy named Ryan arrived with our new ‘Phantom Screens’ to replace the three sets of French door screens in varying stages of decrepitude. He wore a bandana over his face which seems to have become the most ‘manly’ solution to the face mask question. He looked Gene Wilder in ‘Blazing Saddles’ except for the baseball cap. In Berkeley nobody had screens on doors or windows. We just all pretended we didn’t have bugs. Once we moved, we realized that compared to our rural location here, we didn’t.

Ali arrived a bit after Ryan and repaired to the garage/attic and other unpleasant places to try to track down the problem with the battery and the inverter. We tried to stay out of his way as we were all feeling dispirited/frustrated and hot! He finally found an inverter technician who spoke his language and seemed to help him a lot.

Every time Ali tested circuits, things went on and off, beeped and beeped again. Some beeps were familiar to me, others were not. I did hear the obnoxious buzzer that signals our first Sonoma County fire evacuation text alert of the season. I wish that they could figure out how to send them only to the people who are being evacuated so we didn’t have yet another thing to worry about that we couldn’t do anything about.

Ali left promising to come back tomorrow. He seems to feel that he is making progress. Sorting out wiring seems a bit akin to figuring out which food, out of all the foods we eat is the one thing we are allergic to...

Considering the fact that Ali is soldiering through chemotherapy at the same time as he tries to solve this problem, he really is doing yeoman’s service for us and is almost unfailingly optimistic and cheerful.

The least we can do is bring him ice water and check that he hasn’t passed out in the attic or fallen off a ladder in the garage...