My arthritis has been flaring for the first time in a long time–too much sun, I guess, and some heavy lifting I shouldn’t have done–and I knit one row today and stopped for fear of doing damage.  Ice and (I hope) tomorrow for that.  But I got day-t0-day stuff done that needed doing, watched the squirrel watching the day, and all the while you could almost see that flower opening up; it looked like the bud above it, this morning.

And I went off to buy birdseed to take good care of my flock.

Where I encountered someone I’ve seen just a few times who, when I said, with no previous conversation, that I’d like the patio mix and the sunflowers, expecting her to ring those up too, tried to tell me, rather tersely, that those three and a half inch square suet cakes I had at the counter were not my 20 pound bags of birdseed.

Wait, come again?

Yeah, that confused me as much as it does you.  What on earth?! I smiled sweetly and said, Yes, I have a suet holder. I feed lots of birds. (I didn’t add, a suet holder plus three kinds of birdfeeders and a giant sugar pine cone the chickadees love to dance on and I have nuttall’s woodpeckers–a male today at last, so there’s a pair now!  And juncos and titmice and house finches and goldfinches and Bewick’s wrens and pine siskins and bluejays and  chestnut-backed chickadees despite being at the edge of their range and drab California towhees that let you in on the secret by seeing they really do have a lot going on when they’re up close and a brightly-colored Eastern towhee going neener neener at its cousins and mourning doves and the occasional brown-headed cowbird that had taken over the bedroom and the fridge at some other bird family’s nest and a yellow warbler and what am I forgetting here, bright erratic hummingbirds, the Cooper’s hawk and a red-tailed hawk, the brief lamented budgie, the Golden Eagle next door–and then a mockingbird, the day after our trip last week, finally showing up on the porch for the first time after all this time to stand there staring me down from right there at the other side of the glass to demand, So where are MY favorites?  And so I’d read the packages and had picked out two suet cakes this time, one, my usual, and one that had dried mealworms in it. Mockingbird? You’re welcome.)

If I can’t be outside, bring the outside to me.

If only I understood why on earth she seemed put out, still, that I was buying that suet.  Huh.  Here, hon, I wanted to tell her, maybe you need to learn to knit. Maybe some feathery lacy patterns would be just the thing.

Or to take some time watching a black squirrel happily birdwatching on a perfect 72 degree Bay Area day.  Eight, nine, ten… And that’s just the ones on the feeders.

(I really needed some knitting time afterwards to bring things back to normal, a book wasn’t enough. I may just push my hands into it tomorrow anyway and maybe it’ll even help them recover.)

I think I can live with that.

Meantime, on the peregrine scene, Kekoa left dinner with his sister and mother on a tower at San Jose State University early in order to claim his window ledge first. Maya ate awhile longer, and when she came in, flew to a louver several floors below him. Hmph!  *I* can have my *own* window, so there! With the camera looking straight down from above, the tip of her tail showed.

But then her beak, and then all the sudden her wings and tail were spread wide and she was flying out of there. She circled just out of view, clearly, because she almost immediately reappeared next to her brother.

She gave him a push from behind. Just, you know, to see. Window? Corner?

NO. MINE. I got here first.

Oh okay, be that way, and she settled down for the night next to him. But notice, no feather pulling, no beaking, no running a talon through his tail.

If only my kids had learned to behave that much that fast!

It was quite windy today and the juveniles seemed to sense it wasn’t the best day to totally wing it off a perfectly good solid surface.  But that didn’t stop Kekoa from playing push-the-peregrine: he took great delight in scurrying down the runway towards an unflappable parent and making them fly off, again and again. Eric, one of the fledgewatchers, caught pictures of one such episode here.

Kekoa’s favorite spot was on the eastern end of the ledge, with his sister below him most of the time. Although Maya got in a good one: she made it up to that top ledge herself, walked towards him, and then looked she was going to keep right on going.

HEY! His beak opened and one could just hear him squawking, STOP IT! Or I’ll tell MOM on you!

She stopped just shy of shoving him over. You know, enough to get a rise out of him (almost!) , not enough to get herself in trouble.

Siblings.

The parents have again spent the day watching over their young, ready to swoop down alongside and show them how it’s done should they go over.

There’s one there right now: on the louvers below the little guy, who joined his sister in the nestbox but scrambled right back out again. I didn’t fly! I can’t go to sleep yet!

He is as I type on the lower ledge behind the nestbox, the parent present and watchful as ever. It’s quarter to nine.  He just snuggled against the wall. Cold concrete–not a warm sister.  Not even the wood of the corner that they like to put their heads into.  Crum. His eyes closed a few times.  He turned and looked dowwwwwwwnnnn, straight down. He turned back and huddled away from that for now.

It’s dark. How do I get back home! He’s thinking, but he’s outside the box.

Okay, I typed that and stopped to watch instead of doing the intermittent glance. He got up and started pacing that low ledge. C’mon, piece of cake, I’ve done the ledge-to-ledge thing before. He made it up there despite the dark, (yay!) walked along it till he could peer down into the nestbox where his sister was settled in for the night. Safety. At last.

And then suddenly he wheeled and flew off into the dark, wings spread wide and flapping.

Oh.

Huh.  Well, count that one a redesign for that bottom part.  Better I decide now, at least.  I remember now, I kind of squeezed the rows on that first one, writing down as I went what I was doing, because I never did find its last ball of yarn so I only had so much yardage–not a problem on the second shawl.  I made sure of that.

I never do this, but by golly I am so tired of wanting to get to the next project that I’m going to just go launch into it before I go to bed.  I mean, this is really pretty yarn but I am just so ready to look at other colors. (My get-well afghans have tons of colors, and hey, they certainly worked.  You all don’t know how grateful I am every day for those.)

And yes, that’s my Dancing Queen bud on its second day.  When it wants to come to be, it makes it happen!

Oh–wait…  Okay.  I’ll swatch.

It *is* nice, when I think about it, to be able to re-write the endings any way we want at any time when it comes to knitting. Just like you all helped re-write mine.

A new character showed up in the neighborhood with a stylish zorro streak on its other cheek and reverse eyeshadows– half circles of white right above its eyes, fluffing out to  make it look bug-eyed head-on. The wicked witch of the nest: I’m moulting! MOULTING!

And the other thing: I had the Red virus pass through about a third of my amaryllis patch last year, probably in part due to their lack of care while I was ill. One is supposed to throw away such bulbs quickly so that bugs and the wind don’t spread the disease.  I was in no shape, having had my belly unzipped twice, to go lifting any pots, nor did I particularly want to. Besides, there were memories in those flowers and I stubbornly wanted to give them every chance at hope.

Nearly all recovered and they show no signs of the virus now. From everything I’ve read, that wasn’t supposed to happen, I was risking losing the lot of them. But yet again, my amaryllises present a metaphor for what I went through as they look peachy-fine now anyway.

This is my prized Dancing Queen (yeah, I need to go clear away the old stuff). It may be a fairly small bud for this variety, but hey! I can’t wait to show it blooming.

And life continues on in its quiet, unspoken strength.

The parakeet came back to feed many times today.  I wonder, if I were to put a bird cage with an open door out there, whether it would climb right in and make itself at home–but I’m perfectly happy watching it being perfectly happy.

And yet.  Not so much when it hit the window flying in a panic along with the finch flock–going not quite in the same direction as the others, being not quite one of them. It seemed okay afterwards, but it sure sharpened the caged life vs. longer life question about it for me. I tell you–personally, I’ve gone for longer and found it’s okay for it to be that way.

This picture is for Rachel: I’ve started in on the Malabrigo Silky she wound up for me.

Meantime, I got the perfect Mother’s Day present from my daughter-in-law and older son: “Outwitting Squirrels.” Okay, you already know it’s going to be good!  And then the author quotes the owners of bird stores in Cabin John and Potomac, Maryland–I bet his kids went to the same schools I did.  The guy had great fun writing this.

My favorite part? His tale of a woman in Massachusetts who found some old LPs in her attic. She strung them on a rope separated by knots with her birdfeeder below: no squirrel could climb that stair-eo.

Then she got to watch them trying to jump down onto the top LP to hang downwards towards the feeder.  Here came the first: it got spun off into the snow.  Hey…! Cool! Do it again!

She described it as a line at Disneyland, waiting their turn. No food but almost as good.

I mentioned it to Richard and his reaction was, “Like the buffalo.”

Wait, the what?

And then he reminded me.  After the musk ox got reintroduced to Alaska, the buffalo did.  “Where the deer and the antelope play” had nothing on these guys.

Okay, so if I ever seriously think about parakeet cages I’m going to have to provide it a lot of toys. They’re members of the parrot family and can talk; I wonder if I could teach it to knit.  Or at least recite my line-by-line lace instructions so I don’t lose my place.

I guessed, looking at my brown fluffball, that I had enough qiviut left for perhaps five more repeats.

I somehow got eleven out of it (with very few inches to spare).  That little ounce just went on and on and on.  Yay!

Meantime, the darkest red amaryllis, my favorite, opened its first blossom today. I’ll never see its second beyond the bud stage:  I took a deep breath, cut the stalk, and walked it at dusk down the street to a neighbor whose 90-year-old husband is ailing and who needed that.  I didn’t want to inflict the plant on her–not one more thing needing taking care of. Just a flower, smaller and daintier than amaryllises normally are due to last year’s necessary neglect. A survivor.

Which meant that a normal bud vase would do the job–it wouldn’t tower and topple over. It’s all good.

It was gorgeous and she could watch the process of the living blossom for herself as the second opens.

Meantime, after taking this photo, I rinsed the qiviut scarf and laid it out to dry.  No blocking wires for it. I didn’t even manipulate a yarnover up between stitches when I found I’d missed one–I frogged it gently back down to that point and did it over, wanting no tension against those fibers.  Go gentle gentle gentle on this stuff.

Which brings me to my question tonight: my daughter does not care for the undyed musk ox color.  I have read that dyeing qiviut damages the fibers, and after all that hand combing of the animal in a specially designed, enclosed holding pen, the hand de-hairing, then all that hand-spinning, all that hand-knitting, all that was done on the part of three different women along its way to get this thing to come to be in its exquisitely glorious softness like nothing I have ever knitted before or probably ever will again, the last thing I want to do is take away from that softness.

I also happen to want the recipient to like it.  Color is so much of the experience of wearing something.  I’ve never met her. I can only guess what she’ll think of it.

I could, theoretically, simply dunk it in water with dye stirred in and it would take up the dye. However, without any simmering heat, it wouldn’t be dyefast–can you imagine her wearing, say, a white cashmere sweater and getting caught in the rain or even, for goodness sake, sneezing! and having dye run permanently down that sweater from her scarf?  Or on her winter coat?  So you see that if I dye it, I have to go through the whole process no matter what it might do to that qiviut.

Grayish brown it is, then.

I decided the best way to thank Rachel for the gift of her time and her wrists Saturday was to pay it forward: by knitting up and giving away the qiviut fiber she’d spun up and then had insisted on giving back to me. That had been on my good-intentions list for awhile.

Procrastination, however, had not cured me of being a little afraid of touching it. One must experiment, one must frog a little, when playing with a new yarn of a very definite length and no more.  One must see what kind of width vs length vs pattern I could get out of it.

Well, now I really owed her, so today I’m here to say that Rachel’s superfine handspinning of dryer-lint-fine qiviut is something that will stand up to being (oh so very gently) ripped out. It did fuzz a bit when I did. Just those first few rows–umm, wrong needle size. Didn’t like.  Try again. Um, wrong stitch count, won’t have enough.

I thought.

I expected to just whiz through that small ball in no time.  It has been thwarting my expectations in wonderful ways.  Out of 24 g, I really have 16 still left?  Really?  Unblocked, I’ve got 20.5″ already–I was expecting to get a cowl’s worth but instead it’s going to come out an actual scarf. (I didn’t knit it in the round out of sheer optimism.  Definitely paid off.)

Details: the lace pattern of the main body of the Michelle shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort,” plus an extra stitch each edge for a solid selvedge. I cast on 27 stitches on size 4.5mm.

I bought the fiber hand-dehaired from the owner of the animal.  This yarn is so exquisitely soft, the best qiviut can be, and oh, it is so warm. Can you just picture having your own Alaskan Musk Ox to comb the undercoat from?  Or even making socks out of this stuff to keep your feet really really warm on the ice? (But the idea of wearing holes in it! No thank you–I’ll knit my own holes in and call it lace.)

Because–Frankly, my dear, I don’t qiviut a darn.

My horse could have won the Kentucky Derby and that yoke would still have had to go.  Sometimes, the visual difference in a knitting pattern between slip two stitches as if to knit, knit the next stitch after that, pass the two slipped stitches over the knitted one, ie, sl2-k1-p2sso, vs. the faster slipping just one stitch, knitting two together, then passing the first one over, ie, sl1-k2tog-psso, is striking.  The first gives you the middle stitch pretty much going straight up with the other two leaning in towards it from the sides, the second gives you two stitches leaning sideways against the third.

I have leapfrogged over that little problem: that yoke is ripped, reknit, and on beyond.  I find it always feels better to get past where I’d been the first time, if possible, before I put a frogged project back down again.

And now it’s blooming again on my needles and I totally love it. It was well worth the rip.

One skein of Plymouth Dye4Me merino/silk/cashmere, down to the last 4g.  This was one of these times when I was glad I had a second skein in reserve, just in case, and when I was glad I had a  scale that measures in grams so I could safely judge whether I had enough yarn left to do one more pattern repeat or not.  Made it by the skein of my teeth.

It is sprawled out in the other room, off the needles, taken a break from being all wound up.