Happy Valentine’s Day!
Wednesday February 13th 2013, 10:09 pm
Filed under: Life

Richard caught the cold that I’m just about over, and so it was that I went off to the nearby Costco to buy him some juice: orange, strawberry, mango smoothies, get-better stuff.

It was 5:30.

The place was almost woman-free. I have never seen such a stream of men coming in and out of there, and alone. They didn’t have to go but a few steps inside the door, either: there was a huge long wooden pallet set-up going between the front door and the registers, grab’n’go. Not just roses; this year for $50 you could get roses plus greenery plus probably baby’s breath (I tried not to look too close) and everything your sweetie who doesn’t know you’re stopping by there on your way home from work so you can surprise her in the morning could ever hope for.

I totally felt like an interloper who’d accidentally snuck in on their secret.



Water changes everything
Tuesday February 12th 2013, 11:44 pm
Filed under: Knit

Finally cast off and blocked that project tonight. I think I’d been putting it off because after all that intense knitting, it was hard to give it up–not the project but the sense of anticipation and discovery in it.

It went into the water with, well, this is nice enough, I guess, to, after it came out, WOW, this is one of the prettiest things I’ve ever knit!

The only difference was the soaking and then the setting it out to dry in its now-finished form.



Bangs
Tuesday February 12th 2013, 12:12 am
Filed under: Life,Wildlife

One of these days I’m going to have to replace that picture over there. When the hair started coming back in after my skin cancer surgery 19 months ago, I knew there was just going to be a very long time of it looking goofy no matter what; why not grow out the bangs at the same time to match? Nothing else in all these years had given me the courage to spend a year looking bad, but hey, long as I’m there anyway….

So when the new hair got to the length of the bangs last February there you go. (And  now there’s a new bunch growing in and it looks like I’m just starting to grow that part of my bangs out. Of course.)

Speaking of bangs, there was one at the window behind my head this afternoon and I turned just in time to learn that it takes three wing beats for a Cooper’s hawk to stand in the air and then U-turn after its still-fleeing lunch.

I got to see my hawk. Cool.



What Grampa wrote
Sunday February 10th 2013, 11:50 pm
Filed under: Family

My cousin, it turns out, has a binder with all my grandparents’ love letters to each other while they were engaged and were in different states for part of that. I had no idea.

“Frances Marion, dear,

….I am just begninng to realize how completely the thoughts of you filled up my life. I wonder that I got anything else done. I watch every corner with a half conscious hope that you will come around it. As I sit alone at lunch or dinner, I look up suddenly once in a while to catch your eye–not there. I am most happy to know that I can go peacefully on now , secure in the knowledge of your love and faith in me. It stands about me like a guard, and an inspiration. May God always keep it so.”

Signed and dated June 22, 1922.

And as another cousin chimed in, “m’dear” was Grampa’s word.

And world. They were married 72 years.




Can’t keep a good project down
Saturday February 09th 2013, 11:14 pm
Filed under: Knit,LYS

Some things you just have to take on faith. The back side of unblocked lace always amuses me by how it seems to have no possible relation to what the thing will be.

The pattern is a mishmash of doodle and old notes finally coming together. I thought I’d be out of yarn by now (Manos Allegria from Purlescence) but I’ve got 40 more grams out of the 100. So I’m knitting more and writing more and finding out more and I’m liking it more and more. (And this time it will be repeatable.)

It was the most colors I could think of to pack on the plane in one skein last week. It’s hard to put down.



Morro rocking it
Friday February 08th 2013, 11:16 pm
Filed under: Wildlife

Don posted a picture of Morro Rock on his blog.

My friends Nancy and Jerry moved south and to the ocean to build their dream house two years ago, where they have a beautiful view of that massive watermarked landmark that sits just off the beach.

But I’ve also long since been interested in the place because of the peregrine falcon sites there, as described by Glenn Stewart, the biologist who was crucial to bringing them back from near-extinction.To those new here, I was one of his San Jose nest-camera volunteers three seasons ago.

Normally, peregrines are very territorial and will not nest near each other’s scrape nor hunting territory. But on Morro Rock, where you have the whole ocean to feed you (they do catch fish), there’s a nesting pair on one side of the rock and there’s a nesting pair on the other side of the rock.

They do not cross paths. They do not venture into each other’s side of the rock nor water. Nor has a third pair been allowed to set up shop, just the two twosomes and to each their own, only. I’d love someday to go visit Nancy and Jerry, exclaim over their new house, and watch those falcons with their rocket-speed highdives in person.

To Morro, two, Morro, it’s only two, Morro, it’s only a Bay away.



Cashew!
Thursday February 07th 2013, 11:58 pm
Filed under: My Garden,Wildlife

Oops, Don, I think I’m in for it after all, my apologies for the germs.

At the first loud sneeze, a squirrel leaps ten feet off the porch into the air.

At the second loud sneeze, the same squirrel lopes three feet in no particular hurry. Stops.  Looks back over his shoulder at me: if I want him to go any further away than that at this point, there’s going to have to be a stale nut thrown past him, a little incentive, and I’m not going along with it. He gives the bushytail version of a shrug–he got over it quickly, so hopefully I will too.

I had a request for a picture of the beginning of the peach tree budding, so here it is, with a reminder to me that mylar strips are in its future. They have that certain snake-like charm. There will be leaping away and there will be staying away. (Right?) I intend to get the budder deal of it.



Been there Don that
Wednesday February 06th 2013, 11:48 pm
Filed under: Friends,My Garden

Maybe you’ve already seen the video of the two-year-old who can sink a basketball so well. The kid is as good as a mom tossing a piece of mango peel across the kitchen into the trash: never misses. Baby giggles time!

Meantime. Don has a friend with lupus he wanted to give a copy of my book to, and so I drove over this evening to drop it off and we had a great visit. I just really hope I don’t end up passing on the germs of the guy who was sitting next to me on the plane on Monday.

And while I’m doing that hoping, blogs and emails are wonderful but in-person time beats all. Thank you for the excuse and the invite, Don. And for the knitters, two words: Stitches West!

(Oh and. I checked my peach trees today. The Tropic Snow has buds definitely swelling up and starting out, the August Pride, barely but it’s starting, and the Babcock is being a little more patient. It is the most amazing thing to plunk something so inert in the dirt and watch it coming to life!)



With all due joy
Tuesday February 05th 2013, 11:48 pm
Filed under: Family,Friends,Knitting a Gift,Life

I like the fact that when you knit from a cone, you only have to weave the beginning and the end ends into the fabric. No joining of skeins in the middle.

It’s not that the skein lengths are the problem: it’s my memory of the baby quilt a friend lovingly made my youngest. It was a great quilt, bright and cheerful and colorful and with little shiny slippery ribbon ties all over. (With, thank goodness, a cotton batting inside that could never bunch up.)

John at a year old discovered that he could undo those red ribbon ties. I would put him to bed and he’d work his fingers carefully into those little knots and tug here and there and pull. Great dexterity very young, interested in fibers, clearly a future knitter. (I’m still waiting.) Once he was asleep I would take it away from him, retie all the ties (0r at least the ones he hadn’t pulled all the way out) so that it wouldn’t become a game with Mommy to him because then we’d lose them all, and then cover him back up again with his favorite blankie.

I know what little fingers can do to ends.

My daughter-in-law would like a baby blanket made out of a soft synthetic such that it can be dragged around and abused and used without her wincing or gasping over what her little boy or the laundry might do to it. But I just wish I knew how to find a baby-soft worsted synthetic/blend on, you know, a cone… Any suggestions?

And yes that is an announcement. We are starting into the third trimester now. Parker is going to be a big brother, and the new baby boy is due on my husband’s birthday.



We knew you when
Tuesday February 05th 2013, 12:12 am
Filed under: Family,Friends,Life

And we are home.

Which seems both so very ordinary and so strange.

Had a great visit with my parents while we were in Salt Lake: my mother-in-law had wanted her ashes  buried next to her daughter’s grave there.

Her brothers and some of their families would be able to attend that way (not to mention my folks).  There were people who’d retired there after careers in Washington, DC, and I had people re-introducing themselves to me who’d known me since I was born.  Who knew. Edna Lou, who said she’d worked for my dad (wow, that would have been, what, 1953?! ’54?) Wow.

And there was the doctor who–I asked Richard later, that was him, right? Yes–was a close family friend of my in-laws and my parents and to whom my in-laws took their daughter when she was a teenager for some diagnostic tests. She was given a contrast dye to scan her kidneys, in the hospital as I remember the story, and promptly went into anaphylactic shock. It took a team working hard to bring her back, and in that moment of relief as she came to, she looked up at this good man she knew from church and declared, “My dad’s a lawyer and” (with extra emphasis) “my brother’s 6’8″. You better watch it.”

Everybody in the room cracked up.

And here my Ft Worth sister-in-law was, with her three grown or nearly-grown kids.

Cousin Michelle, younger than me, is fighting breast cancer and it was not caught early. “This last year’s been real rough,” she told me.  Her husband looked around at the happy crowd at the luncheon, laughed at the toddler who played games with the cane with me and declared, “We need to all do this again. For a happy reason.”

This morning as we packed up the rental car to go, somehow it caught my attention and I found myself bending low for a closer look. I knew I would want a picture, but even with the fingerless gloves on knitted by (you know who you are, and thank you), it was too cold to pry everything open to get to my Iphone in the this inside the that. We needed to go.

There was tiny frozen rice everywhere: as if the wall of fog had shattered into perfect little frozen grains of it on the ground. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like it before and I’ve certainly lived in snow in my life. It was like the weather was trying to throw a wedding. Or perhaps wishing Michelle and her love a long and happy life together.

We were coming in for landing when my seatmate opened her window at last and I had a sudden moment of, wait, it looks like snow on the ground here, too?! But of course it was the late sun coming blindingly white off the waters of the San Francisco Bay.

We are home.

I filled the birdfeeder.

Things are so much the same and so different.



Cheryl’s
Sunday February 03rd 2013, 10:23 pm
Filed under: Family,Life

Saturday, graveside. The family had wrapped things up–when our niece Jessie turned back. Her brother’s small children had started to quietly play in this exotic ice you could slide a little on; snowballs had not yet been invented in their world. They’re California kids.

Jessie showed them her mother’s grave marker and told them about their grandma. Their eyes were fixed on the spot: in their experiences, Grandmas were people who loved you, always ready with a hug, not gray rectangle stones with words carved in them like a book. And soon there would be two, for their great grandma we were laying to rest.

A little later that day they were gleefully chasing yellow balloons and coloring Curious George pages at the surprise birthday party for their great- grandpa after the funeral luncheon. To Life!



Stranded
Sunday February 03rd 2013, 9:46 am
Filed under: Family,Life

Raised cane with a small toddler Saturday: I offered it to her, she got it, walked away on me, teased me over her shoulder with an impish grin and then turned back all the way around and carried the trophy over her head, presenting it way high to me. So big!

I would say thank you with a big smile and a slight bow. She would grab the cane back. Repeat.

I tried a variation where I asked for it when she was only a few steps away; that was breaking the rules of our new game and she said No! with a little dance. She knew how to say that word.

And so we went on for some time. Twice, someone tried to rescue me, stranded in the luncheon crowd without my balance-on-a-stick. I told them we were fine, no problems.

Richard’s cousin’s second daughter might not remember much later, but in this crowd of family but strangers to the little one I wanted her to come away knowing she was loved and to be happy she was there. And her big sister too. And that, that was worth the sitting and the giggling for a little while aside from the adult conversations.

Not to mention how fun it is to have a toddler accept you as her friend.



Peruvian knitter to the rescue
Friday February 01st 2013, 11:20 pm
Filed under: Family,Life

He had a sniffly nose and he didn’t like being in a strange place at nap time. He started to let it be known.

My sweetie had replenished my Peruvian hand knit finger puppet supply for Christmas.  A bright, multicolored bird.

Ah bah duce, he confirmed to his mommy as she got out a bottle while I was quietly purse diving.

Richard and I offered the puppet to the parents. All three faces lit up. “Duck!” as the little one reached for it.

It was the perfect toy: new, soft, pretty, and just the right size for the moment.  The dad grinned and gave a thumbs up.

I just wish I could thank the knitter in Peru. She saved their day.



Rx: yarn
Friday February 01st 2013, 12:01 am
Filed under: Family,Life,LYS

Called my sweetie adorable, and he says he’s not a-door-able, since he has to duck to go through them.

Silly person.

Meantime, same pharmacy, different clerk, again, this one looks at the total and is staggered. I try to explain that $468 is so much better than last time. Now I think we’re at least where we’re only having to pay 20%.

This doesn’t seem to make her feel much better.

(Yeah, me neither.)

But while I was sitting waiting for it, another knitter watched my first few stitches for my new project and promptly plunked down next to me and we had one of those wonderful conversations that a shared love of yarn helps happen so easily.  I told her all about knit night at Purlescence, a store she didn’t know about, and that it was tonight…

…And then, my apologies, I just didn’t make it there. Things got done that needed to get done but I simply ran out of time to make the trip.

But I do hope I get to see her there next week. *waving hi*