Someone asked the folks who run the baking pages at the Washington Post how one could find frozen pitted tart cherries.

Since I have never seen them sold frozen in any grocery store anywhere I’ve lived, I thought I’d pass their answer along.

Granted, 25 pound buckets and 7 pound buckets times two would take a lot of freezer space. But oh, they’d be worth it.

With planning and a bunch of ziploc bags I got about twenty pounds of my English Morellos in mine last year, but that’s a small and malleable amount per and mine weren’t frozen yet.

Still. The pitting is already done. (It takes me about an hour per pie’s worth; tart cherries are small.) You decide how much sugar. Orders can be split if you don’t mind hacking at frozen stuff–or just get the case of two.

The shipping sounds like a lot till you figure in the cost of dry ice etc, and yet to my house at least it totals out to $5.57/lb for the 14 lbs and $4.50/lb for the 25. Which is less than they cost fresh here.

Those carefully hoarded last of the ziplocs are suddenly looking warily my direction.

Stoneware pie plates make the crispest crusts.

I just might need to do some baking tomorrow.

Done. Finally.

First I had to sign that I knew that I was going to lose eyebrow hair follicles permanently. I told her, well, then it’ll match the other eye: I fell down the stairs with a glass baby bottle when I was a baby.

She did a double take because she hadn’t seen that, looked closely and marveled at the scar, That must have been big!

Well, I don’t actually remember. But I was very lucky.

The biopsy results should be in in a week, but if it was anything it was skin cancer, in which case they’ll do Mohs surgery to make sure they got every cell of it. She thought likely it was not. I told her one of my kids had melanoma in her late 20s, caught by an astute doctor who just didn’t like the looks of that (and it wasn’t what she’d come in for at all, but he caught it.)

She was glad I’d brought this in and gotten it dealt with.

My lump is gone, that part of my face is numb, and the relief is intense. It is done. Thank you all for your prayers, your thoughts, your messages, and your friendship. It means the world to me.

And doing all the things to keep myself productively busy.

Thirteen more hours….

We were visiting our oldest’s for Thanksgiving when she offered me some lupus-protective sunblock for the walk we were about to take with the grandkids: and that is how I found the lump in that upper socket.

I just figured a zit was about to pop in a weird spot. It didn’t. I mentioned it to the optometrist, who immediately referred me to the right eye doctor.

It has grown since then. Not a lot. It is harder. A little. But definitely.

They could not get me in before January.

All this time I’ve been ignoring it, going, it’s no big deal, I can’t do a thing about it yet if it is, things have always turned out okay so far so this one will, too.

The theory on that anti-tumor-necrosis factor that granted me these last 20 and a half years is that it could cause cancer about twenty years out, and since I was trying really hard at the time to still be alive the next day that sure sounded like a bargain to me. It was.

So it’s kind of interesting to find myself trying not to freak out after all this calm nonchalance now that the appointment is only two days away. I don’t know if I’m finally giving myself permission to feel the possibilities?

No! Because I said so. Look at all that yarn and plans (acknowledging that I have let myself down with a bit of a knitting slump of late) and hopes waiting on me. My grandkids. Time. I want all of it.

Just typing that out loud makes it sound pretty overwrought. Good. I’m quite happy to go back to the no-big-deal.

I just want to know–but when I do, maybe I’ll just want to be back to where I didn’t have to know yet, and I know that, too.

You know exactly what I need to do here: get those needles moving. Create some love to put out into the world.

Being told out of the blue today that an old friend has inoperable stage 4 cancer says that sometimes things turn out a very big deal and life is so fragile and you just never know. Love your dear ones.

Me, I’m looking forward to helping my oldest granddaughter in her pursuit of learning to be a lifetime Knitter with a capital K.

Happy Birthday to my sister!

It’s finally getting down to cold enough tonight that I had to cover the mango tree for the first time this season. This has never waited till January before.

Meantime, last Labor Day I mentioned heading to the Kings Mountain Art Fair via the shorter route that I’d forgotten I’d promised myself I would never drive again, even more so with part of the northbound lane, it turned out, having fallen down the mountain from last winter’s storms. This is the much easier road I took home with much better visibility.

Um.

And yes that’s an origami-style (totally stole that description) Tesla Cybertruck that that guy probably made history when he hit. I’m picturing the high school basketball chants of, We are #1! Hey!

Poor kid…

Laying flat it’s 22.5″ across, 16″ shoulder seam to shoulder seam, 25″ long, and 26″ from bottom of the cuff to top of the shoulder seam.

I mean, it sounds like I did a pretty good job of following whatever pattern it was, but it sure doesn’t look that way on me. The yarn isn’t terrible but it’s nothing special; it’s either a third or a quarter mohair mixed with acrylic. I had just started knitting again after reading Norman Cousin’s Anatomy of an Illness after my lupus diagnosis and this was back when wool yarn was only described as wool, not sold by breed nor micron count nor softness (or at least not as far as I knew.)

The ’80’s were all about the mohair anyway.

So I have this very plain white hand knit sweater that swamps me, particularly those Princess Diana wedding dress-style puffed sleeves. The photo understates them: they are not shy.

If anyone wants to save this from whatever fate awaits it in the Goodwill box, let me know and I’ll send it right out to you. If you’d like it on you, it’s on me.

(Edited in the morning to add with a laugh, hey, you guys, didn’t mean to scare everybody away. It’s okay to come out now.)

Yesterday I asked my brother if he’d like some Andy’s apricots.

He knew what those slab Blenheims are like, and Yes he would absolutely love that.

He texted today that he was coming home. (YAY!!!)

Emergency room medicine, I told Richard.

My non-apricot-loving husband got this impish look on his face and told me that that was copyrighted thankyouverymuch.

It doesn’t count if it’s not ice cream on the way home from the ER?

Nope! he grinned. Tradition!

It would be kind of hard to ship Cherry Garcia…

I found a box big enough for a single pound; there was space for more but not for another box, so I emptied most of a second pound into a ziplock and used that for padding.

I’ll just call it emergency medicine. It is on its way.

(I had no idea what was about to happen when I suddenly decided on Friday to make one last long trek down to Andy’s farm before he closed his shop from January 1 till May. I had some of his apricots to tide me over–but I bought a few more anyway. And there you go.)

That amazing evacuation of a plane on fire with smoke already in the cabin.

Turns out, Japan Airlines not only gives a safety lecture at the beginning of their flights, they show a video of inflated emergency chutes and how wheeled luggage and high heels can destroy them. How reaching for your luggage (and having bags fall towards people as you rush and then stop to pull up the handles) means you and those behind you might not make it that far anyway.

Although I imagine the actual flames on the other side of the windows might have concentrated the mind.

Not one person on Flight 516 grabbed their baggage. All three hundred seventy-nine people got down those steep chutes and off that plane in time with not a single serious injury.

Because they’d been informed when there wasn’t an emergency on how to think it through when there was one.

And on a different subject: things are much better and it looks like my brother might be able to go home in a day or two, now that he’s post-op. Going straight to the ER had been the thing to do and they got him in time. I am so grateful. Thank you all so much for your prayers and good thoughts sent his way. You guys rock.

The view out one side of the house vs the other, just before nearly an inch of rain let loose. That patch of bright blue was gone in not much more than the time it took to walk back over there.

Somehow, I didn’t knit today: I wound yarn. I got it ready for when I’d be ready, and it felt just right.

(p.s. This has nothing to do with anything, but I saw this photo and went, Wait. Who thought that was a good idea? What homeowners insurance would be caught dead covering that house? Who would buy a house that couldn’t be insured? Who *did* this? And if the Zillow link doesn’t come through, it’s the 23d photo here on Redfin. “And she’s buying the stairway to heaven…” Can you imagine hauling a couch up to that loft?)

The tops of hats are my least favorite part to do: to keep from growing any gaps between the knitted-together pairs of stitches and those around them, I pull the yarn consciously taut, and I tend to keep it taut all the way around those rows. It makes for a dense, warm top of the head, but it’s a pain in the hands to squeeze those needle tips in there over and over.

But hey, you’ve got two pairs of size sevens tied up till you do, so….

I needed to go finish yesterday’s hat. I didn’t really want to–I wanted to start something new, something brighter, something cheerful on a gray day.

And then the phone rang. It was my mom.

My brother is suddenly in the hospital and he’s going to have a rough go of it for the next little bit and we are all praying hard.

I sat down with that hat and realized it was offering a chance to control one small thing in my life and have it come out the way I wanted it to, right now, no waiting. Make it.

Even working the ends in felt like a relief. Whoever it’s for, including possibly a doctor or nurse taking care of him, it’s ready, and I need to go start another one.

Begin the New Year as you mean to go on….

I hoped to see a particular someone at church today and gift him with a hat in thanks for a kindness of his, but I found myself wanting to make extra sure he got a color he liked.

Turns out he was off visiting elsewhere–but so were McKay and his bride, only, here.

McKay grew up with my kids, so much so that when he ran into my daughter in college someone asked her later if they were seeing each other and she told them, No! That would be like dating my brother!

His family moved away when he was in high school; I was in the hospital when they left, which makes it easy to remember it was 2003, and I hadn’t seen him since. Although I did get to send him and his bride best wishes via Facebook when they got married.

He wanted her to see where he grew up.

And I had two Mecha hats, no sign of that other guy, and plenty of time to knit more for him. But only one time to be able to hand these two theirs in person.

And with that bit of incentive, the cowl I was working on got finished this afternoon (picture pre-blocking) and the next hat went from an unwound hank of good intentions to 2/3 of the way done.

You never know when you’ve got to be ready for anything.

Wishing a Happy New Year to all.

Knitted. Boots. Made of a fine strand of leather. $4,100.

Huh. Wouldn’t those be scrunchy socks in no time? The designer’s gold button will help pull those right down.

Yeah, I did. I looked. 1 mm “yarn” is as fine as I could find but you’d want a longer skein of it than I was finding on Etsy. Kind of a fun idea, though, and leather slipper bottoms are easy to find.

What I want to know is, how does it look where they ran the ends in and does it feel okay to walk on them?

I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s an article in the San Jose Mercury News that describes how this happened yesterday.

Agitate a particular plankton type at night with the energy of the waves from the correct angle and intensity and have the moon’s light just so, and–

–you get bright glowing blue waves in the dark in southern California. So cool. YouTube link.

New Jersey had Chris Christie’s famous, “Get. the hell. off the BEACH!” during Hurricane Sandy. (Also the famous drone photo of him enjoying lounging on said beach with the crowds all gone, drink in hand.)

Combine a King Tide (the highest of the year, according to the state) with a big storm coming at us over the water and that was basically the message officials tried to get out there today: do not come running to sightsee the effects. Especially do not bring your kids to play in the ocean. Do not come near it. The waves are going to come in twenty to as much as forty feet high and you do not want to be pulled in and you will be pulled in. Stay far away from the shore.

I guess these good folks didn’t think this was too near. 

Yeah, don’t do that.

It does look like those kids had a ball while they were rolling like one.

Yeah no, don’t do that.

We had a spur of the moment lunch out with old friends, a great time, and a restless toddler at the next table where two couples were doing the same thing we were.

A panda puppet. Happy faces.

On a side note, if you take my favorite blueberry cake recipe, use Forager cashewmilk yogurt because the dairy-allergic kid is gone and it needs to be used up (but real butter because I can again), swap 2/3 c of the flour out for 2/3 c of almond flour, and sprinkle the tops with half the blueberries and then maple sugar and bake for 23 minutes, it makes eighteen blueberry almond maple muffins and they came out very very good.