I was curious.

So I beat two eggs, added in a heaping tablespoon of thick and only slightly sweetened Greek Gods yogurt, then scooped out between a half to maybe 3/4 cup of sourdough starter. That was it. Whisk.

I debated whether to make it into muffins, except the oven wasn’t hot, or pancake style. Let’s go for pancakes, with raspberries on the side on the plate. I melted butter in the pan since there wasn’t any fat anywhere else and it made for a good, crisp outer edge in contrast with the fluffy inner.

The flavor was so much better than your standard baking-powder version. I am definitely playing with that idea again. Feed the sourdough starter, pass the maple syrup–those were good.

The other thing is we finally got the ball rolling again on the driveway after seeing how fast a new one went in next door. I’d been avoiding it because of the hundreds of contractor cold-calls I’d gotten last time I even so much as looked online–proof that oh yes they do most certainly sell your private data.

I consulted Angie’s List.

One very nice guy came and he measured, discussed, said he’d need permission from the city to cut tree roots within three feet of the trunk where the walkway had been lifted and needed to be lowered back down, etc etc. Richard was inside on the phone walking my mom through troubleshooting her printer, so I was the one dealing with him.

When he got all done I glanced over at the new driveway next door and told him that it had been my inspiration for getting off my duff. “Someone’s flipping it,” nodding at the For Sale sign.

“They did it rough,” he said, wincing. You could just see him thinking, For all that work and all that money, to not do it right…

I like contractors who take pride in what they create and he suddenly had my full attention.

These turned towards the sun faster than I noticed and so some of the flower stalks from Dad’s bulbs had to be rescued and brought inside. In a vase inherited from my mother-in-law.

My folks and my in-laws were friends clear back to when they were neighbors as newlyweds, and somehow this just feels perfect.

It turns out that the mill George Washington built is still in operation–and that it was cutting-edge technology in its time.

Turns out you can buy cornmeal from that mill. Add in shipping and it wasn’t the most cost-effective way to go, but then I haven’t bought cornmeal in years so I figured two pounds was the right size to last me for awhile. Besides. It was just so cool.

I do like making cornbread that is all or almost all cornmeal, no or almost no flour: it’s tasty but very crumbly, and I tend to throw in an extra egg to hold it together and extra butter, but I haven’t had teenagers to feed in awhile so it’s kind of fallen by the wayside.

My order came today. Somehow the bubble wrap felt like a severe anachronism. Really? I mean, really? (The shipping peanuts were the potato-starch type, which was great.)

But then I cut through to what was underneath those bubbles and, yes, they were right–they absolutely needed to keep that thing from bursting out all over, because a historic-style tie made out of a strip of muslin is only going to get you so far; it needed to be held as still as possible as it bumped through the mail.

I should be typing this to you with a review of how the cornbread came out, but the bag was just too pretty to wreck its very first day here so there’s sourdough rising in the kitchen instead.

Finally, finally, the skein of Rios in Archangel arrived–and in a colorway that can vary by a lot, it was exactly what I would have picked out had I been able to go into a yarn store. It was postmarked May 7, so they got it out the next day and it only needed to travel across the Bay, but shipping is what it is at the moment.

I have not replaced the ten stitches across three rows that I mistakenly knit in the wrong weight yarn; if it really bugs me I can come back and do that later. I just wound up the new and got to it and man did it feel good after being exiled from my project for a week.

The seahorse is the one that started me down the path of one multicolor yarn per critter and the rest solids. Its multicolor was a bit…much, even if the original intent was to have it hiding amongst the seaweed, but after its face and punk-rock mane got done I liked it.

The octopus has a yellow body continuing into the lower part of each arm and a varying pink/peach along the upper and I wish I could show the colors better because in real life, every time I look at it, it, most of all, makes me want to pick the work up and get back to it to see what happens next.

It’s kind of an inverted under-the-seas ’60’s hippy sun sketch. I like it.

Sometimes a comic strip can, in one panel, say it all.

For those who can’t or don’t want to click, including a disabled friend of mine, it offers big spikes on a graph for March and April for the words, sewing machine, webcam, Andrew Cuomo, flour, pangolin.

Underneath, a caption that says, I want to show someone from 2019 this Google trends graph and watch them to try to guess what happened.

A few photos.

If you want to take pictures of squash blossoms, you have to do it in the morning: they shout Huzzah! to the new day and then step back to let the leaves do their big sugar-making job with the sun. This evening there was a second tiny zucchini growing, and I haven’t even gotten the plant in the ground yet. (I’m dithering: I’m liking having it on top of the old barbecue grill where the critters can’t get at it. Hopefully. But then it’s not a winding vine yet, either.)

Two picotee amaryllises opened up on Mother’s Day.

Fig, iris, apple in the back.

And best of all this last one.

At first glance it had gone down fitting exactly into the space and there seemed no physical way to undo what I had just done short of tearing the plumbing apart.

Happy Mother’s Day to you, too, I thought at the rogue jar of jam. Nobody turn on the disposal. Because that would be extra fun.

My hero looked it over and thought up a plan. It involved bending heavy wires with pliers and getting them under it and lifting it out. Not as a single piece going down and across underneath (how, anyway?) and up again but more like the feet on a long stick figure.

I was, to the say the least, skeptical, but trying to be supportive like he was trying to be supportive, so we gave it a try. And then several more, with one holding the flashlight and one…

Not working.

I went looking for the tongs that had been used to retrieve something from behind the washing machine–oh look, it got washed and put back in the kitchen where it belongs, fancy that–and looked at it skeptically. There was no way there was room for that jar and those tongs together.

But when you have a plan B and you don’t have a plan C (that you want to consider) you at least try.

I utterly failed.

Not right away, not till the jar had dropped hopelessly back several times, but, HE DID IT!!! He got it out!!! We don’t have to call a plumber tomorrow!

Sometimes, when you really need a Mother’s Day present like that, you get to have it.

And an atrocious pun that my Dad would have roared laughing over.

Another Milk Pail pick-up day, and the blueberries got turned into the compote for these custard cups. Almost no guilt and quite good.

Meantime, my cousin Heidi stumbled across this article about a real-life Lord of the Flies situation in 1966, except that that book was written by a violent alcoholic.

Six young boys from Tonga got shipwrecked together for fifteen months onto what was literally a deserted isle: it had previously been populated–till a slave dealer had kidnapped everybody, leaving behind the crops and the chickens whose descendants later helped sustain the kids till the day a boat captain just felt like going a bit out of the usual route that day.

The kids had prayed together; they had given themselves timeouts when they found themselves starting to fight rather than letting it continue. They behaved the way their mothers had clearly taught them.

They totally rocked that intense shelter-in-place.

A few hot days, and quite to my surprise we had a third apricot seedling yesterday. I thought that thing was surely long dead in there, I’d been watering it since February and the other two had come up about a month ago a week apart but somehow I kept going. How cool is that! A new baby tree! I was not expecting that at all and it just worked out anyway.

Someday I’m going to be that neighbor who’s bugging everybody, trying to find kittens a good home, only they’ll be apricot trees. Really good ones.

It seems to be a vigorous grower like seedling #1; #2 is much slower, which I’m hoping means it will be naturally dwarfing, but I guess I’ll find out. If they need pollenizers (most don’t) then having visible differences early on is probably a good sign–given that they have one parent in common if not two. I may end up learning to graft so I can combine them on one.

So I was feeling pretty good about that tiny bit of green joy and I walked outside to get the mail and as I came around the corner of the sidewalk, standing in the front yard next door was a woman with an older woman just beyond her, daughter and mother, I assumed. Turns out they’d been looking at the house. Turns out our assumption that our neighbor’s buyer was simply in it to flip it was correct, and it was put on the MLS for the first time today after three weeks’ intense work that the place had badly needed.

Friday is the day realtors look over the new listings. There were two Tesla X SUVs between our houses.

I imagine they have to disclose that the place was originally red-tagged for mold and plumbing issues, because for all the markup it’s still below market. It needs serious and expensive tree work that can’t happen till after nesting season is over, but still. The place is gorgeous now.  It’ll sell fast.

So we chatted a little while and enjoyed each other’s company and now she knows that if she buys the place she’s got a friendly face next door. Looks like we’d have three generations there and young children to play with the ones across the street, and that would be so cool for everybody.

Never did see the guy on the roof again. Clearly, they were done.

Why was that one strand so thin…

Oh. Oh rats. It was Arroyo, ie about 300 yards per skein vs the 200 yards per 100g skein of the Rios, and it looked it, and I stopped, found a similarly-dyed skein online in the right weight–judging by the picture, wish me luck–ordered it from across the Bay, nice and close by, put the afghan away and hoped.

I really wanted to work on it.

And went out and checked on the mango tree because I needed that.

So the plan is: I’m going to get the new yarn, weave a strand around over and through kitchener style over all the existing stitches in that grouping–ten, I think–and then work the original strand back out of there with the replacement already in place.

Or maybe it would be simpler just to undo the entire three rows but I don’t want to. 

They are ubiquitous where I grew up, but here, you have to be willing to buy new bulbs every fall or dig the old ones up and store them in your fridge all winter and not mistakenly use them for dinner. They’re poisonous, so you really don’t want to make that mistake.

But not to the local squirrels, who go straight for them as soon as they’re in the ground. I tried to plant some years ago and found it a lost cause.

But today brought a surprise.

One of my kids sent me a picture of two beautiful flowers in loud, random-brushstroke stripes, a petal on each curling and twisting while the others grew straighter, with the question, did I know what these were?

Tulips!

I said that historically, tulipmania in Holland four hundred years ago was set off by the search for specimens like these. They were gorgeous.

I went back to my afghan–I finished a fish, yay! I just need to tighten up the strands running behind so they don’t show–and thought about all the new random variants in a short time that made ordinary flowers into something never seen before, more beautiful, each as individual as the next, costly and highly sought after.

Caused by a virus.

Glancing next door from my kitchen this afternoon, there was a fire extinguisher.

On the roof next door. Just sitting there, nobody in sight.

Okay.

A little while later I went to get the mail and heard a man arguing loudly but saw no one. Came back inside and looked out the window again.

The extinguisher was gone. His back was to me, his phone tight to his ear. I decided that given that he was not having a good day it might be best *not* to stand on a chair nor to open the door in order to get a better photo as the heated conversation clearly continued on, I mean, c’mon, leave the poor guy alone.

He was sitting on a very large canister.

Of gas.

On the roof.

To his left, that mostly-dead very tall tree.

These things do not play well together.

But it has a very large nest in it so you can’t cut it down right now.

Maybe.

Anne couldn’t find my address so she had to rat herself out and ask. I’d ordered some Holz and Stein needles and a Mel and Kris deep-dish pie plate for picking up at Stitches back in February, which I missed due to a if not the virus.

So Anne had picked them up for me and waited for me to get better. But before we could plan it–we do not live close and the whole thing was heroic on her part as far as I’m concerned–the early lockdown was announced.

Today we became officially slightly less locked down.

The doorbell rang.

She had on a mask, I put on a mask, but these past few months have taught me that I lipread more than I think I do. So Anne stepped even further back and hung hers askew so I could see and we chatted a few minutes, which felt like heaven.

She brought me my needles, she brought me my pie plate…and she brought me a Mel and Kris yarn bowl as a surprise!

She had no way of knowing how much I’d wished for weeks that I had one while working on the ocean afghan–well, and forever before that, too. I finally gave up a few days ago and started doing the intarsia Kaffe Fassett style, where instead of trying to untangle whole balls of yarn as you switch sides at the ends of the rows you simply break off as long a length as you think you can manage and pull it and the next through again and again and again and just deal with weaving in all the extra ends. It’s faster and so much easier.

This is the yarn bowl I would have picked out if I’d been the one picking it out. It’s gorgeous. (So is the pie plate.)

Anne also brought the news that since so many of the festivals and art fairs they make a living at have been canceled this year, Mel and Kris are now selling online. Shipping is what it is because pottery is heavy.

Those pictures of the 8″ pan I make my fruit cobblers in? It’s labeled as their mini pasta.

The roasted radishes were definitely the way to go. Sweet, soft, no heat–and pretty.

This peach tree nearly died of leaf curl disease last year, but look at it now.

Milk Pail is back! Sort of.

Their old store is being bulldozed by the developer but it turns out they had a warehouse that they’d held onto, and they still had 45 years’ worth of connections to all kinds of suppliers.

In this ongoing shutdown, a lot of farmers are hurting badly and a lot of grocers are having a hard time stocking their shelves.

The newly retired Steve missed his customers. His daughter, back in college with the burden of stocking the shelves gone, was up for part-timing it now.

You could create a lot of market for individual small farmers if you were packing take-what-you-get bags of produce and olive oil, etc etc for several thousand customers via a drive-through.

And so, in a riff on the Community Supported Agriculture movement, they have started Brigadooning it on weekends. Order on Tuesday, pick up during your chosen hour on Saturday or Sunday, put your name and order number in Sharpie on a piece of paper and hold it up to the window with the back window rolled down or the trunk popped and they’ll just swing your order right in there with a smile, a no-touch contact but definitely a human one.

Last week for their first run it was mostly an assortment of marvelous cheeses with a few accompaniments.

Some of it went in the freezer, because there are only the two of us.

But the response was so enthusiastic that it was definite proof of concept, so now you can order bags of produce, too.

Man, it felt strange to get behind the wheel of the car, and did you ever notice how intense the leaves of all those trees that aren’t in my yard are? And almost no traffic.

Up one side of the parking lot, stop, roll the window and share a moment of oh it is SO good to see you all that went both ways, and back around the divider to the other side of the lot and away.

My first take on the radishes was, what on earth could an ileostomy patient possibly do with those?

There had to be something. Which is how I found this page. Roast them like potatoes and it comes out like that? Now I can’t wait to try.

Keenly aware that every vegetable in my fridge is one someone else didn’t get to find on the shelves, I made a big pot of soup and cleared out what was left of the older as I fit in the new, and it came out really good. Vegetables are food and flavor, not aspirations and intentions. We are definitely eating better.

Has anybody else been cooking a lot more since this shutdown started?