Eighty stitches, 1×1 ribbing throughout, Malabrigo Rios, US size 5 needles.

Last week, I was sitting in the waiting room at my cardiologist’s working on this when who should come out but my rheumatologist.

He wasn’t expecting me and didn’t see me with my mask on so I called out his name as he went by.

He spun around in delight. I introduced him to my daughter. He looked at the knitting in my hands and exclaimed, “Oh, that’s pretty! Who’s it for?”

“The doctor who operated on my retina two weeks ago,” I told him, realizing as I said it that, wait, in all these years, I’d never knit anything for *him* and I’d known him a whole lot longer.

If it occurred to him he never let on. He cheerfully said to Michelle, “If you live long enough you’re going to need two things: a cardiologist and a rheumatologist.” And then he laughed at his own joke.

But it WAS funny, because the last time I’d seen him, a year ago, he’d sent a message afterwards marveling that “After all these years, for the first time, the ANA is negative.”

ANA being antibodies to the nuclei of one’s own cells, ie the single most definitive marker for lupus.

So I’d lived long enough to, in fact, not need him–assuming that holds.

“The system is fluid,” he told me years ago when I asked if an allergic reaction now meant one forever because I had seemed to have had less of a one on an exposure, and I’d thought it always went the other way, ie getting worse each time. Curious. I’ll take it!

Anyway. So today I finished all but weaving in the ends for this other guy.

Maybe there’ll have to be an appointment made, remission or not.

Or maybe I can just drop one off at the desk in his department with a thank you for looking out for me all these years.

I’ll have to actually, y’know, decide on yarn and colors and knit one before I can start debating delivery methods.

I knew they wouldn’t be anything near Andy’s but they were pretty and I was missing fresh peaches. What I’d forgotten, though, was the likelihood that Costco late-season US-grown ones would be clingstone. And clingstones that had never been allowed to ripen.

After several days, they were beginning to soften up but the nose knew. Oh well, that had been a given all along.

They held onto those pits like a toddler guards its favorite toy, and when I finally managed to work them loose, my peach halves lost a chunk of their innards.

I scraped the mashed-up bits off as best I could and put them back in the centers.

Hey. I filled the centers with raspberries. Melted a quarter cup butter with maybe a bit more than that of brown sugar and some cinnamon (lemon would have been good, too–next time) and spooned that over the raspberries and took their pretty picture and then baked them for about an hour.

Stuffed peaches, there you go. Is that a thing? It is now.

He needed seconds to use up his ice cream. As one does.

So many approval processes that had to be gone through, none of them done because he didn’t want to be told no. He wanted to punish the country for Saturday’s protests in the way he knew would hurt the most.

And so the wrecking ball arrived today. At the White House. OUR White House. The People’s House. Our beautiful national symbol of hope to the world. Smashed in and torn apart.

The 9/11 attackers couldn’t do that to us because we resisted well enough. But Donald did.

Every day that eye is noticeably just a little better than the day before. The weird little pale volcano erupting in plumes of fast pale smoke that then fall into its center as it collapses and vanishes, haven’t seen that one today. As one friend memorably told me ages ago when I was describing a head injury, Alison: most of us have to use illicit substances for that! (To Marshall in Singapore, that line stayed behind when you moved away.)

Come to think of it, the fake fruit fly–it’s too black and too solid and way too fast and too jerky to be any floater I ever had and besides, they cleaned out the floaters–that’s gone, too. What a relief. I’d been thinking that one was surely permanent.

I hadn’t even noticed its absence till I started typing this. Double-checked. Yeah. It’s gone. Oh that is so good.

It is amazing how instantly one can take normal for granted the moment normal returns.

Now to finish that 1×1 ribbing hat. Twice the hand motions, twice the stretch, twice the time to do, but I can knit one of those with my eyes closed. Two inches to go.

After several renditions of Are you sure, given that I wouldn’t hear it and he would and he’d be having to wake up just to wake me up when it went off, I set the alarm last night for 4:45 a.m.

My plan, discussed ahead of time, was that I would get up to say goodbye and to make sure her ride was coming and if there was any problem with it, I would wake her father up all the way and we would take her to the airport: him, to drive, me, to make sure he was safe coming back and not falling asleep.

At 4:42 a.m. I dreamed a bullhorn going off right in both ears and jump-startled awake. Oh. Right. Turned off the real noise before it could start.

Hugged my kid, who just glowed, and all was well. The 36-year impromptu wool stole for Rebecca is in Boston now.

I hope all who wanted to got to go to the No Kings day today. I so badly wanted to and we were going to, but I never did fall back asleep and by the time ours started at 1:00 p.m., I just couldn’t pull it off. I was with you all in spirit and onscreen (BBC video here) since I couldn’t pull off being on scene. I was so wiped.

So how was it in your town??

He came. He tested. He verified that we had a new cord and plug, that those weren’t the burned ones (because clearly, they weren’t.)

Yup. Brand new, put in by the electrician who rewired the room after it (waving a hand at the scorch marks on the wall.) Then when he plugged it in the front of the machine went boomBOOM!

I heard the sound of a drill. He was on the floor, taking the front off the bottom of it.

He came out of there kind of shaking his head, going, The board was sparking. I have never seen that before!

Does that mean I get a new dryer.

He affirmed, It *is* under warranty. He considered a moment. Let me call my rep. I’m going to come back Monday with a board.

About 40 minutes later, the phone rang. Clearly he had talked to her and I’m guessing she had thought of one last way this might not have to be Speed Queen’s problem: had the electrician opened anything up on the machine?

No, he only replaced the cord and plug. He considered it briefly but didn’t want to mess up our warranty.

Monday, he said. See you then.

The last thing in yesterday’s busy day was an email.

When I got nowhere with Speed Queen after the first repairman was–no need to rehash–I sent a message to the dealer, figuring they would have more clout than I ever could.

There’s that three thousand dollar electrician repair bill to make clear why this matters to me, but I just want a working dryer for my warranty.

Always buy from an independent if you can. The guy wrote back, Let me talk to my SQ sales rep.

A few days later I had a referral to a new repair company and was told to tell them our dryer has a short.

Their guy is coming tomorrow.

Putting wet clothes in a metal box and pulling them out dry less than an hour later sounds insanely luxurious right now. I can’t wait. I feel like singing along with this grounds crew guy outside the elementary school. (Did the windows in yours open like that, back in the day? Mine did.)

Doorbell.

First, the plumber, who looked at the installation below the wretched refuse of the teeming tides of the kitchen sink and shook his head at whoever had set it up like that.

Yeah, I told him, we spent $40k on repairing the mistakes the remodeler left behind (like the rain that had come into overhead light fixtures here and poured out an electric socket there, for starters. That was fun) but that we didn’t know about that one.

He shopvac’ed our attempt at Drano-ing the darn thing, poured it out at the toilet, and got to work on the rest. Those pipes had to go.

While he was under there making noise…

Doorbell.

Hi! I said brightly, Are you Dotty?

She looked at me like what the ??? No, I’m Sue, as she walked in, while I was like, ??? I moved the bin of yarn over to her. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me to please get it out of her way.

Ohhhh. The home nurse who comes every two weeks to inspect the wound on his foot? (It wasn’t the nurse I remembered and they always came on Friday and this is Wednesday) so okay then sorry about that.

Because she had come sixteen minutes after Dotty had texted that she would be here in fifteen to twenty.

Right on cue:

Doorbell.

This time it WAS Dotty, and we introduced ourselves to each other. I’d been sure she couldn’t possibly want all those pounds of 2/28 merino (ie 1400 yards per meter) on cones, but she very much did and was thrilled with all of it. Alright then!

She’s a weaver but this was to be a gift for her cousin, who had looked at my photo and said, Yes please!

We got a good laugh out of each other when I tried to offer her the bin to take it home in and she groaned, I have..so..MANY, and I laughed that I did, too, that’s why I was trying to get rid of it. Fellow fiber enthusiasts: we were friends on the spot. We compromised on a trash bag and dumped it all in. She was walking down the street to her car (it was a little crowded around our driveway) and I started to run after her with one more lace weight left behind, she didn’t see me and it hadn’t been in the photo nor the list I’d sent her; I went, nah, she’s good, and went back inside.

The nurse needed cheering up.

I went out back and clipped two pomegranates off the tree. They do not give them up willingly–you have to show them who’s boss. I put a bright pink-red fruit by her, saying, That’s for you; she looked up in surprise and smiled for the first time.

The other one went to the plumber.

He finished up after several hours’ work and I asked, having waited for two days for when I could finally do this, if I could turn the dishwasher on now.

I already did, he smiled.

Good man.

Oooh. I replaced a hearing aid battery. They give a loud little tune at death but his machinery must have been louder.

The nurse stopped to say thank you for the pomegranate on her way out. I mentioned the face blindness and you could see her going, Ahh, now I get it. (It was her second time here.)

Meantime, while she and the plumber had been working, I finished the scarf rescue of the UFO. No side ribbing; my fashion consultant liked it with just the top and bottom done. Stop now.

Twist my arm.

I’ve been quietly thinking how glad I am that I dumped a large number of cinnamon sticks out by the pomegranate tree when the squirrels started showing up. It actually did keep them from stripping the fruit this year, or at least, so far. The plumber was happy for his but the nurse was the one it really made a difference to. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of it before Dotty left.

It feels so good to be able to run water in the kitchen again.

An antique of a UFO unearthed in the dig, started before I’d ever even heard of Kaffe Fassett, that’s how old it is.

For cabling, it’s kind of…plain.

I slid it halfway off the needle to get an idea of how wide it was in real life. 48″unstretched. I remembered it only vaguely: I had stopped because it was using up yarn faster than newbie me had anticipated and what I’d wanted, it could never be. There were a few skeins tucked away with it.

Whichever baby missed out on a blankie probably has a kid in high school of their own by now.

It was fascinating listening to my daughter instantly knowing who it had to be for and how I could finish it off so as to be usable for them. It was washable wool, it was soft enough, you know she’ll love that you made it, do it, Mom!.

How then could I not?

There was a glacier at the bottom of the freezer where the water dispenser had leaked; it’s been there for some time because you couldn’t get at it without going without a fridge. We’d tried previously, with two hair dryers on it full blast nonstop but it just didn’t dent that block.

I’m still on take it pretty easy mode but her time here is winding down.

And so we ate down the stuff in the fridge over several days, she moved stuff into the big freezer and then put ice packs around the little bit still in the fridge, opened the freezer door, and left it to sit overnight.

She had emptied the ice maker. I scooped the cubes up into a quart container for one last try at keeping the fridge side cold.

Then I tried putting a pan of hot water on top of the ice block. Five times. I taped the open door button closed so the light could go off. We’d slid the “Colder_____Off” to Off already. Huh. Couldn’t unplug the thing without moving the whole fridge and nobody’s back here was going to be able to do that.

There was still impressively solid ice in the morning. But surely underneath it was quietly giving way.

But the towels arranged against and below it were not soaked. At least the one on top was damp.

I tapped at the block. Nope! Wow.

At 11:03 a.m.–she laughed when I told her what time it was–I smashed at that ice once more and then gave a mighty yank to the wire drawer and it came! Freed at last! I knocked the ice out of it into the sink.

About four hours later she dumped some hot water on it to make that clump finally finally go away for good and that was that. (I was thinking, No wonder it takes a week to thaw a turkey in a fridge!)

Now we can fit dairy and dairy free ice creams in there without the twain ever meeting. Look at all that space! Organized, too!

But the real incentive was, that fridge was bought in 1994 and this was either going to prove once and for all that it and its broken shelf support here and missing cover there had to go because the fridge side just wasn’t staying cold enough–

–or it would fix that problem.

It’s been 24 hours since I put the ice cubes in to help the fridge side stay cold overnight. There was just that quart container.

I typed the above and out of sudden curiosity walked back in there and dipped my hand into it.

There was one last ice chip still floating at the top there.

They used to make them like they don’t now, didn’t they?

A potluck tonight, and the speaker afterwards was an old college classmate of mine in town for his high school reunion.

He’d built a house near his folks and his kids had grown up with ours until they’d moved away for his job. It was great to see him.

So.

Tom did a trip around the world in 72 days, ending in September, joined at different times and places by adult members of his family and extended family.

I knew I’d heard of Svalbard somehow but I had to look it up afterwards: it’s between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole, and he described a warning sign saying Do Not Go Past This Point Unarmed.

Very few people live in that large area, it’s mostly tourism, mining, and research.

One resident told him, the polar bears ate a guy two years ago. And four years ago.

(So by that, we’re about due, right…) So he asked the guy, Have you ever seen a polar bear?

No! And I don’t want to!

It was noted that they do outnumber the human population there and that they, along with tigers and crocodiles, are the only apex predators who actively hunt humans, and that if you see a low-lying rock there might be one behind it hoping you walk by. They’re willing to wait. Take your time.

He and his nephews climbed an icy mountain there in a storm. Tom’s advice afterwards was, Don’t.

Turns out Svalbard is where the famous Norwegian Seed Vault is. Ah, that’s why I knew the name.

There are shelves to either side and there used to be a high stack of bins up the center blocking one’s access to right or left or any of the yarn without wrangling each bin sideways one by one to get it entirely out the door there and over the furniture and into the room. And then the next. And the next.

Now you can just pull the one you want straight onto or above the middle of the open closet floor.

She did the lifting, I did the sorting, and two friends have made initial claims on the better of the old yarns.

So much space had been taken up by half-empty ziplock bags inside the bins. On the other hand, the only sign of moth damage after all these years was to two skeins that inexplicably were not in one; they went straight to the trash outside.

I found that I did in fact have leftovers of possibly all the colors from making a llama/wool (remember Classic Elite?) baby-cabled sweater in the 90’s in which each half of each cable was a different color, a la Kaffe Fassette. I’d long wished I’d made it a cardigan. There is one untouched skein in the background color and all those accents; I could actually cut it open and do that now.

Naaahhhh… It’s not soft enough to put in the time, but it’s good to know I could.

I found the front of a more elaborately cabled handspun sweater in two colors (should have taken that picture) from my very earliest spinning and dyeing days. It’s fabulous. But I knew halfway through that it would never be finished: the teacher I was taking classes from had us try dyeing with unsweetened Koolaid, more or less on a lark and because she knew we would hear of other people doing that.

I got some pretty nice colors! And I used them in that sweater.

So then I tried dyeing small batches in lots of flavors to see what range I could get.

Which led to my calling my neighbor and apologizing if she found any pink hairs on her cat because it kept insisting on lying on my wet wool–and I knew my teacher’s light gray cat had dyed itself green by climbing into the actual dyepot she’d set out on her porch to cool.

I have long chuckled at the idea of the neighbors doing the dishes and looking out the window to see a green cat waiting for its hair to grow out!

Next, I wanted to see how colorfast this stuff was. Using commercial dyes that are meant to be dyes made more sense to me, but on the other hand, any summer grocery run will net you some of this when you need it. So I left little bits of it outside in direct sun for two weeks, the neighbor’s cat notwithstanding.

Three things happened: some of it changed very little or not at all. One color blanched at the thought and faded fast into the palest of grays before the time was up.

And the rest (or what I could find of it)?

Our kindergarten teacher found the nest when it blew off the roof of the school: it was made of bright pink koolaided wool woven with twigs and leaves and a downy feather or two. But the pink! The wool! She knew I’d be interested and waited to show it to me and I instantly knew exactly where that had come from–and we’re a quarter mile away!

I wondered how many others there were out there. Clearly it wasn’t just the wind picking the stuff up.

So, yeah. All that colored cabling work, cherry I think was the darker one, that one… Well, at least it held up in a dark closet for 31 years.

But I’ve had an inherited half of a cotton sweater front serving time as my favorite dish towel for a long time. I can rip this thing back to the start of the armscye (or just leave it as is) and shrink it into a trivet. Or a dust mitt. Or a dishtowel. It deserves to be used and enjoyed; it’s waited long enough.

Let me go read the new inscriptions on those bins so I can figure out which one it went back into.

Out of the eleven, there are four empty bins now.

That green and blue that slipped onto the other side of the back of the bag.

Mo-hair, Michelle remembered with a laugh from one teenage recipient asking me quizzically thirty years ago. MO-hair! Tell me, he demanded, What kinda animal is a MO!?

He was in foster care and admired Richard’s and my Kaffe Fassette coats of dozens of colors and in his enthusiasm ended up with a vest of his own from the leftovers.

I saw him recently and thanked him for changing my life: his reaction to what I’d made was what got me started on seeing how important it is to knit for others.

There might still be a few other skeins in there all these years later, here, let me see.

Backing up a bit: I was thinking some of the bins in the family closet had some empty space by now that could surely be put to use, but it’s really hard to wrangle them out of there and heavy lifting was out of the question.

A certain someone was happy to dive in there for me if I would go through them. It would make it easier to get at the puzzles and games, too.

Consolidation has begun.

Five games (how did we end up with three Balderdashes? Answer: because people kept gifting it to us) and a stack of puzzles that still had the original shrink wrap on them (no missing pieces on those!) all got claimed by friends today.

Some of the yarn… Showed its age. Not by its condition–I store wool well–but by the archeological dig of my knitting history as I went through stuff.

Thirty-five years ago really soft wool yarns were hard to find.

I remember the first time I found baby alpaca. The late Robin and Russ sold it in–I think it was 25 gram skeins. (Edit: 40g.) Today I re-found some of that, all dyed by me because at that time you could have it in brown or you could have light brown but I didn’t find white anywhere till later.

Back then, too many of the really fine-fibered alpacas were being turned into shearling rugs rather than sheared, while the farmers were paid by the pound for the wool, and spikier thicker fibers weighed more for less work.

But as the hand knitting market for the good stuff grew, the quality improved. I thought my discovery was so great then, and compared to the rest of the market it was. But (picking up skein after skein today) I’d hesitate to even grade it as baby alpaca now. It’s okay, it’s just not swoon-able.

So I’m stuck with the same problem I had the last time I did a major overhaul of that space: what do I do with these? I have them because I liked them but to actually sit down and knit I’m always going to reach for something that my hands love as much as my eyes do. The really good stuff is stored in the other room.

In particular (eyeing one bag of white loopy boucle and measuring it at 1.23 lb including its ziplock) what do you do with this (it came out of the alpaca bin but I’m sure it’s wool) that just isn’t getting any more enticing over time? How does one in good conscience keep the good stuff for oneself and fob the lesser off on someone else?

And yet, at the time I bought it, I was that someone else who was delighted to find a natural fiber yarn I could afford.

Oh, and, the seven ounces of aran weight purple-blue wool/angora. Who put meh wool with angora in 2002? Or: given that the words angora and mohair were at the time used interchangeably to describe mohair goats till the trade association came down on it to stop the confusion, is there actually any rabbit in there at all? And yet, it does have that softness mixed in. Hmm.

I’m not driving yet, re the post office, and Michelle’s flying home soon. Hmm.

Michelle looked around at all those bins and exclaimed, clearly trying to undercount it to be nice, You need to not buy any more yarn! And the stuff in the other room–you have enough for, for, like, two years!

We both heard Richard guffawing quietly in the other room. Oh honey.

I knew better. I knew better. I thought I’d checked. Surely I’d checked.

Maybe eight years ago? Colourmart had a 50/50 aran weight cashmere/cotton yarn at a very good price, and then they put it on sale.

I bought a bunch, and then a bunch more. I made four afghans out of it (note to self: Amy Jessie Lucia Colette) and I pretty much used it up–oh wait there’s more, so I used that, too.

And then the price went up but it was the same best-of of those good fibers, and now it was 66/34 cashmere/cotton. Hey! Washed and wound some of that mill-end up, too, another huge ball ready to go.

Can you see where this is going.

I was about to bind off the top of the afghan and then start in on picking up the sides to match. I compared it to the beginning edge, wondering at how different the gauge was from when I’d started all this, when…

Do you see it.

I suddenly, finally did.

My one consolation is that the slightly beige one has to be the one with more cashmere in it, because cashmere does not naturally come in the bright pure white that sheep’s wool and of course cotton can. And it is cushier. So clearly it was the cashmere-ier yarn at the end and the 50/50 at the start.

I would have mitered the darn corners if I’d known I would have to do all four edges at once.

I could simply get rid of the edgings altogether, though that would make the afghan shorter than I’d prefer and the stockinette green and blue would curl.

But knitting in a backwards direction from the connecting row at the starting edge will jog that whole new part sideways by a half stitch and look funny. (Will a non-knitter notice or care.) But I don’t know that I have enough of the 50/50 to do the whole thing.

Well fudge.

When I was a kid there were some shows on TV that had, across the bottom of the screen, the lyrics to the music being played, with a dark little ball bouncing off each word as it conveyer-belted away off the screen in a single line with the next ones incoming. As an adult I assume that was to help kids learn to associate the sounds with the letters and help them start to read.

I’ve got the little (smaller than yesterday!) bouncing–well, more like wobbling–dark ball at the bottom. But my eyeball just doesn’t have the built-in captions to match. Someone ought to get on that. I mean, this is Silicon Valley and all that, right?