I have been at home for the last couple of weeks and I feel much better than I did, say, a month ago. When I entered the hospital, I had a hemoglobin level of 7.6 – the hemoglobin level measures the red blood cells which carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body – because my primary doctor, after looking at me trying to breathe and my blood test results, told me to go directly to Sequoia Emergency to check-in. After a blood transfusion and two iron injections, I left the hospital with a hemoglobin level of 9.5 – still not very good, it should be between 13.5 to 17.5 – and I felt much better although that should not be confused with feeling good. A week ago, my hemoglobin level was 9.0 which indicates that it is going down, going down from being too low to start with. The problem is that nobody knows the cause; my doctors’ informed theory is that I’m leaking blood somewhere, which can be serious, and my uninformed, but hopeful, theory is that a pill I am taking, Pantoprazole, is inhibiting red blood cell creation (and to be fair to me, that is something that occasionally happens).

We are now engaged in what can only be called a siege campaign to find the cause and the doctors are rolling up their big tests. Last Friday I got a Covid test, not because anybody including me thinks I have Covid-19 but to allow me to go into the hospital for a barium x-ray which I got on Monday. The barium x-ray made sure my gastrointestinal tract is clear so I can have a capsule endoscopy this Thursday. The capsule endoscopy is literally swallowing a camera/ transmitter which then broadcasts 3d, color, pictures to sensors taped onto my stomach. What a time to be alive, medicine is changing almost daily. Twenty years ago, I had my aorta valve replaced and they had to open me up and jack my ribs apart to get to my heart. Now, they are replacing heart valves by fishing a replacement valve up from the groin (in my imagination, the valve looks a little like the little paper umbrellas that used to come with rum drinks). In a week, I have a Zoom meeting with a hematologist to get – sort of – a second opinion so, maybe, we’ll see.

In the Life Going On department, what a strange Spring this has been, colder than usual – much colder, it seems to me, but that may just be because of my anemia – with almost no rain. No rain, as in this is going to be a major drought year. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor update, 97.5% of California is in some stage of drought. Another year of drought and the fires are already starting. But, at long last, the state is starting to go after the problem rather than just chase fires. According to the Sacramento Bee, the state will spend $536 million on preventing fires through forest and vegetation management, clearing fuel around rural homes and retrofitting buildings in high-risk areas to help them survive fires. Actually, chasing the fires has been a lot of the problem. Fire used to be part of the Western ecosystem. When President Trump said we should be raking our forests, we all laughed, but he was right – in a very simplified way – clearing out the undergrowth or letting fire periodically clear out the undergrowth means that the fires are not burning hot enough to kill the bigger trees and that means that big hunks of flaming tree limbs are less likely. Cal Fire has been relentlessly going after those fires for a hundred years and the result is a huge buildup of kindling that, when burned, produces fires that kill everything in their path and cause local firestorms. Now, at long last, with a newly passed budget of $536 million – too small, but better than nothing – Cal Fire is going after the underbrush.

Closer to home, our neighbor, the owner of the big open space behind our home, along with the Woodside Fire Protection District, has cleared a large area of the underbrush in the open space that backs up to our lot and we are going to clear some more in the area downhill from the newly opened space. It saddens me that we are getting rid of so much habitat, especially because the brush is quail and rabbit habitat and I love having them around, they are so much fun to watch. Still, it should be easier to sleep during Fire Season which is now, really, eleven months out of the year, twelve months this year with a fire near Gro.

In the backyard, this has been an especially good year for the Kurt Heath Memorial Dogwood – the pink flowers, stage left – and the Fremontia, the yellow flowers, stage right, despite the cold weather. The Dogwood was planted by Michele when her father died in 2000 and the Fremontia, our state bush, fell over a couple of years ago and is now making a comeback from what used to be a small side branch.

The Formula One racing season has started with three stellar races this year and it promises to be an interesting season with Red Bull and Mercedes being pretty evenly matched. I’ve been wondering what to write about Formula One, not so much to convince anybody to watch it as much as to acknowledge that the season has started. I have been following Formula One since I was about 14 or 15 and I read The Kings of the Road by Ken Purdy, a book about impossibly exotic cars, many that raced in Europe in places like Monaco, the Nurinberring, and Monza.

In those days, I would read about the races between the red Ferraris and Maseratis, the silver Mercedeses, and the British Racing Green Vanwalls; fabled cars driven by legendary drivers, impossibly fast cars with engines that burned exotic fuels – like the 1955 Mercedes W196 that burned a mixture of 45 percent benzene, 25 percent methanol, 25 percent 110/130 octane petrol, three percent acetone und two percent nitro-benzene – and put out a raging unheard-of 256 horsepower (BTW, today’s hottest Honda Civic puts out 306 horsepower on everyday gas).

As an aside, fuel is still a big deal in Formula one racing, Ferrari uses Shell, Renault BP/Castrol, Redbull/Honda uses ExxonMobil, and the Mercedes AMG/Petronas Team is a partnership between Mercedes and Petronas Gas Berhad, which bills itself as Malaysia’s leading gas infrastructure and centralized utilities company. The teams use gas, transmission fluid, and engine oil which must have the same ingredients available in any gas station for standard cars but the fuel and oil are custom formulated for each race to accommodate specific track and weather conditions. Lewis Hamilton, the current World Champion and Mercedes driver is the only Black driver in Formula One and has been very vocal in promoting more Black people in the sport. One of them, Stephanie Travers, is the Trackside Fluid Engineer for the Mercedes team and is the first Black woman to stand on a Formula One podium (an honor given to one member of the winning team in addition to the driver). End aside.

Of course, I never actually saw any of those 1950’s legendary race cars or even heard one in real life, I read about them and their heroic drivers, about two months after the fact, first in Road & Track and, later, in Autoweek. Now, I can even watch them on television, in real-time at 2:00 PM European time if I want, which I don’t because that is too early here. But I do watch them on our DVR recorder the first thing Sunday morning (and qualifying on Saturday morning). Now the cars are hybrids that weigh less than half as much as the old cars, put out close to 1,000 horsepower on, sort of, gas, and race around the world. The cars are still a good part of the fascination, however, and I am anxious to see them this weekend in Spain, then, in two weeks, in Monaco.

To be continued with President Biden.