First, thank you to all who have written about Ruth. My hope is that her husband aka The Roketman will follow the link back here and read your words and mine and find comfort in them.  I am told there was a spinners’ guild meeting yesterday with him present, with tears and funny stories told on his wife.

What I wanted to mention for this morning.  Yesterday, my husband and I went off to Costco a little before they closed, and ended up in a slow line well away from the busy central aisle.

Very shortly a young couple with two little girls pulled their cart up behind us: three and a half year old twins, identical as far as I could tell, and absolutely adorable.

The mom looked really frazzled, the dad less so, but clearly it had been a long day; it showed in all of them.  As the wife went off to grab one last thing somewhere, my husband looked at the dad, smiled, and said, “I remember the days.”

When your children are little, there’s nothing in the world so comforting as a middle-aged stranger who thinks they’re adorable rather than a pain for being fussy.  And when you’re a parent, that is one of the perks of getting to that age. One twin grabbed her sister’s head and pulled it into her lap and rocked  back and forth a moment.  The other enjoyed the closeness at first, laughing, then decided to assert her individuality and pushed away hard. Normal sibling stuff.  She got her daddy to let her out of the cart, and then promptly laid down on the floor, swishing her arms and legs full circle.

“Wrong climate for snow angels,” I laughed, and the dad’s face lit up and he laughed.  He mentioned a trip to Tahoe they were looking forward to.  The other twin experimented for a few moments with the fact that she now got to take over the leg holes in the upper cart for both sides–it was designed to seat two–and then, when it wasn’t fun to take over her sister’s territory if her sister didn’t notice nor care, asked to be let out too.  Whereupon she flopped down on the floor a moment herself, looking the very picture of exhaustion, then leaped up and ran around her twin like a sheepdog herding her.  Never letting herself get too far away from her sister.  Stay close where it feels safe from the big world.

“I wish I had that much energy when I’m tired.”  Again, the dad laughed in response.

Next time Costco exhausts me, I will picture myself on the floor making snow angels.  Maybe one of their 25-lb bags of powdered sugar would help.

A side note: I like to answer every comment, but there was a problem with my email that hopefully is fixed now after I noticed that some of the ones on the last post never appeared in my inbox.  If you didn’t hear from me, I apologize.

Okay, another one just for fun.  That one top and center–boy does that bring back memories of exclaiming to a friend way back when when we were all in our early 20’s, “You bought a PINTO?  Your first new car, and you bought a PINTO?!” having many growing-up memories of my neighbor upset at his because the darn thing ran only when it felt like it on alternate fifth Saturdays of the month.

Well, the salesman had talked him into it, and it was cheap…

(I need to go car shopping. I really, really don’t want to.)

Jetblue does that flight once a day. Yesterday’s was cancelled. We’d heard there were delays due to smoke, and yesterday’s had been delayed so far into the night that Jetblue bagged it.

I was really afraid, with my asthma, of coming home to what we would find with all those new fires. So just picture my excitement, after all that worry, as we drove down the freeway: look! You can see the lights on the hills! Look! You can see the Oracle tower clearly! LOOK! It’s CLEAR!!!

Richard, pleased, said the seabreeze was blowing a good one tonight. And all was right with my world.

As we got further south, the sky started to muck up again, but that’s okay; I can handle it now. I saw that air further north. Maybe tomorrow I go hang out at Creative Hands yarn store (are they open Mondays?) in Belmont. How often will I ever get to claim this about a LYS: it’s for my health.

Jessie’s wedding was wonderful. The skies back home in northern California, at 1100 fires now, not so much. There’s a huge temptation not to get on the return flight in a few hours.

And then yesterday, driving across the foothills of Salt Lake City, one could see the smoke plume and the fire from clear across the valley: exploding propane tanks inside a burning building way out in the industrial area. Alright, alright, I’ll get on the plane–can’t run away from it, can I?

1. A bird’s-foot view:

Lene posted a photo she took of bird tracks that were probably made by pigeons, and it instantly hit me that if you turned them towards you and drew a circle around them, you had the Peace symbol. The Dove of Peace–I wondered, whoever drew the original, was that their inspiration? So I googled, found this, and have to think they did not make that connection. But it’s fascinating how well the two symbols converge.

2. Catapulted:

I was reading reviews of the Shake Awake, a silent alarm clock to put under one’s pillow, and had to laugh at one person’s descriptions of why it was such an improvement for her sound-sleeper hearing-impaired son: she said that before that, they’d had to throw the cat at him every morning to get him to finally stir.

3. Toucans help too:

I had a cardiology appointment this week, and if ever a doctor is likely to be suddenly interrupted and delayed, it’s a heart specialist. (It was just a follow-up to verify that yes, I’m fine there, my cardiac cough went away when that lupus flare did this past winter.) Definitely a bring-your-knitting appointment. As I waited, a very well-dressed elderly woman was wheeled into the waiting room by her attendant, who caught my eye, nodded at my stitches, and silently smiled at me.

The old one in her string of pearls and silk sat there in her wheelchair looking terribly bored and unhappy; it took me awhile to glance down from my knitting and notice that her lower legs were scabbed over in signs of old sores, many of them. Her shoes were perfect but her skin gave her away. She avoided eye contact. I noticed her attendant had pearl earrings on too, and I thought, you’re both generous souls, then; good for you.

I thought about it, then searched in my purse, looking for a particularly bright and cheerful one. And intricate. I wanted intricate. Something particularly nicely made. I found one, a toucan-looking bird, and just as the nurse opened the door and called my name, I reached across the small aisle between the seats and offered the old woman the finger puppet. A child’s toy? But an adult’s delight as well in the skill and pride that someone, somewhere in Peru had put into creating the piece.

The old woman’s face totally lit up in surprise and delight, and behind her, her attendant’s did too. So did the nurse’s. I didn’t want to delay the office by stopping to describe where I get those from, that no, I didn’t knit it, so as the door closed behind us going down the hallway, I mentioned to the nurse. I figured, if the patient wanted to talk to her about it, she could tell her herself. If they had time. The nurse’s call, not mine; the important part had already happened.

It’s hard to be old and lonely. Saying to somebody that they are noticed, even just in a small moment, can make a world of difference to them, and the rest of us too. It was so easy to do.

4. Now she sees it:

My daughter had an eye doctor appointment and I don’t even remember why I came with and waited for her, but I brought my knitting and did. A woman, I’m guessing Chinese, was walking past, saw the work in my hands, and stopped on the spot and came over and sat down next to me. It is amazing what you can convey with pantomime: she had never seen circular needles before. I demonstrated how you use them just like straights, and that no, the circular shawl I was knitting wasn’t a closed circle, it was back and forth; I pulled out my book and showed her how it would look finished. Oh! Then she wanted to know how to do lace. I taught her on the spot. Ssk, slants this way, k2tog, slants that, purl into a yarnover this way. By the time I left, she had it and she was thrilled. I couldn’t ask her how long she’d been knitting, I couldn’t ask her anything not communicated with waving hands and needles. But there is a universal joy in sharing knowledge and in learning how to do something new. I can just picture her running to me, wherever she is now, with her needles in hand to show me what she’s making now.

5. It’s all your fault:

And if you bought ME a Shake Awake, this being California, I’d probably need that cardiologist, thinking the San Andreas was going off bigtime.

First–happy birthday, Dad!

I love this town. My folks lived here the first year they were married, before they moved to Maryland in the early 50’s, and when they found out we were considering a job offer here, worried quietly–but didn’t tell us till we’d accepted the offer–that if we moved here, we’d never leave and we’d always be far away.

They were right. It’s been a good place to be.

My husband and daughter and I on impulse ditched the all-week leftovers last night and went to a place new to us, Thaiphoon, for dinner. You have to love a restaurant that introduces itself to you with a pun while referencing Real Weather (and the food was good). We do miss having a greater variety in the sky and air; it brings you, as one friend noted, closer to nature when the weather’s bad. The interesting nature award will probably have to go instead to the mountain lion that was sitting on our orthodontist’s fence a few years ago. Or the golden eagle eyeballing me as I got out of my car at home. I’ll take the eagle, thanks.

As we ate, there was a small toddler at the next table who looked very much like my sister’s twins did at that age, with very strong opinions and a gregarious charmer when he was happy. He’d fit right in. I thought, let his mom have a good night out with her friends; one Peruvian fingerpuppet coming right up. Happiness won out.

There is a local artist, Greg Brown, whose late mother-in-law used to play the organ at our church, her territory for decades–till a young teenage upstart of a show-off started horning in on her turf a few times a month. If he goofed, she let our son know with a grin: “Great improvisation there, Richard!”

Greg is famous for his murals on some of the downtown buildings. Check out this one, my favorite. Or this one, up in San Francisco. Or this.

This is also a town where once upon a time two new Stanford MBAs looked at the pet rock craze, where someone had just made a fortune peddling plain old pebbles with fun packaging, and they were sure they had a one-hit wonder in them, too. So they wrote, “Juggling for the Complete Klutz,” making good on their goofing off, expecting that that would be that. Thus Klutz Press was somewhat inadvertently born: the authors, like us, stayed. Klutz is a local institution whose one vividly-painted retail store is named “Klutz Intergalactic Headquarters.” Where they sell, should you need it, extra rubber chickens.

We walked from Thaiphoon last night towards Couppa Cafe for some hot cocoa as the evening foggy chill set in. We saw a jewelry store a few doors down. With a rubber chicken standing guard just inside the window: don’t steal the rings, or you’ll be henpecked.

I so love this town.

Meantime, just for fun, given all Richard and Kim’s wedding festivities of late, I had to share this picture I shamelessly stole from cuteoverload.com:

It was just making sure there’d be lots of leftovers for it, too.

Just an FYI for anybody who might enjoy knowing something I never would have thought of, had it not been for my friend Phyllis: what we did for Saturday’s flowers is we ordered them straight from the grower, freshroses.com. They’ll send you a sampler of colors to choose from in person before ordering for the big day, if you want. Five of us arranged them that morning into a few large arrangements and a small one for each table. Remember that the eye likes things in odd numbers: flowers high, medium and low in an arc, (there were five red roses here, not four.) Tuck some limonium (I know, it sounds like flooring material, and this arrangement lost some on the left in the car on the way home) and tree ferns around and behind, tie a matching ribbon at the neck of the vase, and there you go.  It’s much easier to pull off than I would have thought.

My camera’s on the fritz, so this is from my phone.

Nordstrom’s: zero. Zip. Nadda. Ain’t got’em. Doesn’t even carry Birkis anymore. (What!?) The guy was a prince, but he got desperate and tried fancy flipflops–you know, it being a Californian wedding and all, right? Mellow? Casual? Uh, sir… Didn’t matter. Couldn’t get my feet squeezed through and Cinderella’s wicked stepsister was out of luck. There simply was not. one. pair. Not even that he could put a rush order on, not at any price.

I’m debating putting in an aside here: pointy toes? They’re bringing back pointy toes? My stars, do you know how dainty pointy toes look on a double-EE foot, how far forward you’d have to extend the toe box for visual balance? Dudes. Errol Flynn could swashbuckle his way down the castle steps with those as backup swords. For him, though, they could be well heeled to the hilt. Heh.

So I went home and googled my size. Looked for the flats. Zappo’s had one pair left in this shoe and three left in that. I actually got to choose. Done.

(Toute being French for “all.”)

Michelle and I needed to go shoe shopping. Not my kind of thing to do: trying to buy shoes for me in most stores is like trying to buy qiviut in Walmart. They ain’t got’em. EE width in a formal shoe? Uh, no.  Try Nordstrom’s, lady. 

So Michelle shopped and didn’t quite find what she wanted right away either; I, since I look at shoe stores as something to escape from, thought that meant we were going to be out of there in no time. Right. I should have pulled my knitting out about fifteen minutes earlier than I did, but hey. A lovely African-American woman about my mom’s age was being dragged around shopping with a woman about my age, and as I knitted away, I grinned at the older one, “When the yarn’s gone, we’re done.” Totally cracked her up.

And then from a number of aisles over, Michelle’s voice, suddenly: “I heard that!” The woman about doubled over, laughing.

I had to shoot a picture of these with my phone when I saw them: did the person who designed them think of Tutenkhamen too, with those bright gold and lapis stripes?  Put these on, and you, too, can walk like an Egyptian.

“But, officer, it was really just way too big a stick for her, I was afraid she was going to trip and break her beak and then where would her babies be, I was just helping her out, honest…”

I put some wool roving out on the back patio a few weeks ago in anticipation of nesting season and waited. It stayed there. I thought that perhaps the dyed wool of previous years had been snatched up sooner (or was I trying too early), that maybe the red caught their attention better–I wondered, are birds colorblind?

Today I sat down to my emails and found myself being constantly distracted by jays and doves and shadows of who-knows-what flying sideways over and over across my vision; there are floor-to-ceiling windows to two sides in this room and a translucent awning on the patio just outside. And then suddenly I realized: the wool is gone.

I stopped and watched a mourning dove struggling with a stick that looked so big I didn’t see how she could possibly lift it, much less use it in a nest. But she wanted that one. She tried again and again, stubbing the end of it on the ground, not quite getting it balanced in her beak, not being able to simply open her wings yet and take off with it, not being willing to let it go despite the abundance of tiny twigs under that olive tree.

Then a large and brilliantly blue jay flew right in front of her, squawked loudly with its wings wide open, and rushed her. If that mousy little gray thing wants that one so bad it must be the best one in the yard. Mine. The dove spat out the stick, scuttling away fast. The bossy jay grabbed it in triumph and flew gleefully in the opposite direction. See? Not too heavy. Piece of cake. Mine.

Jay, honey, you are going to have fun when your kids are teenagers, with that kind of example to grow up by.

I went looking, then, and found some samples of carded wool so old that the sheep they’d come from had probably died of natural causes by now. I opened the little packages and pulled each one out. Sheep 101–now there’s a poetic name. 102, 103, …109. I pulled the almost-felted-by-now cottonballs of cotswald and romney and merino into fluffy bits and put them out on the patio.

The mourning dove watched me and who’d. Alright, bird. I hear you. I went back outside and moved some of the fluffs over to where that stick had been, safely further away from where the resident human perches.

So far she hasn’t come to it. But the jay did. It flew down away from the wool, *picked up a stick in its beak, dropped it, hopped closer, picked up another, repeat from * till length of time desired. It hopped to just shy of the wool, finally, considered a moment–what the heck was a herd of moorit and albino gophers doing here?–turned its head away, grabbed a tiny stick, and flew back off to the left like the first time.

Since I started typing this, I’ve seen two jays fly at it and consider it. Almost ready for it.

I’ll get you, my pretties, and your little friends too.

p.s. Lene, your amaryllis’s second bud just opened up. Here’s today’s shot of it. Happy spring!

Thanksgiving. A time for family gathering around: let the pun times roll!

Bilingual turkeys speaking chicken with a knitter’s accent: BlOCK, blockblockblockBLOCK!

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has a new exhibit, and I’d like someone to explain to me why the young African River Otter, after zooming past an obstacle in the water, stopped and head-butted the sandy floor. I think it was one of the male twins they said had been born in the past year. Meantime, a larger one on land above him stood on its hind legs, eyed the crowd with his white whiskers making him look like an aging champion, and pumped his paws high in the air, Rocky Balboa style, twice. We were totally charmed.

And watching them cavort, it hit me: water ferrets. My brother once mentioned to me that he hadn’t been emailing much lately because his new pet ferret was entranced at his typing, and would scramble onto his shoulder every time and take a flying leap onto the keyboard.

I could just see these doing that, just pleading with you, type me a river. Water ferrets.

Judy, I found this: http://carderock.net/carderock.html which has one very badly-worded sentence about 2/3 of the way down on the first page about the naming of Cabin John, although, the history on that page is fascinating: for instance, the first settler who stayed and farmed in the area was the great-grandson of a man who arrived in Virginia Colony as a Scottish prisoner of war of the Cromwell government. I did not know that any of the colonists were POWs.

The site does explain something I never knew about the rock quarries on River Road: they were used for building the canal! Makes perfect sense, but I never knew that nor that they were so old. When I was a kid, we were strictly forbidden to get near them; those steep rock faces dove straight down.

I believe the stone entryway of the house I grew up in came from there… (Dad?)

Here’s another, from cabinjohn.org, giving the various theories–the folklore about a hermit was the story I grew up with–saying that Captain John Smith was the first to explore that part of the Potomac, and that Cabin is probably a corruption of Captain. It says, “The following is a description of the Cabin John area as recorded by Captain Smith in 1608: ‘The river … maketh his passage downe a low pleasant valley overshadowed in manie places with high rocky mountain from whence distill innumerable sweet and pleasant springs … Having gone so high as we could with the bote, we met divers savages in canowes well loaden with flesh of beares, deere, and other beasts whereof we had part. Here we found mighty rocks growing in some places above the ground as high as the shrubby tree .’ ”

I went looking for the CD of photos my friend Karen (of water turtle fame) took, to add to this post, but haven’t found it yet. I now know one place I want to point my camera when I go home to Maryland for Stitches East: I want a shot of that quarry. And the tiny stone house, the old innkeeper’s lodge at Seven Locks Road, that is the oldest building in Maryland, next to that quarry.

I can’t wait to go home. I’m so glad I have Stitches East in nearby Baltimore as an excuse.

“Do NOT call into a disaster zone. Email them.”

Yes, dear, I know. We live in California: it’s a given that you’re supposed to have one out-of-state person that everybody knows to call to hear the news. Things happen here. But Minnesota? Who makes plans like that in Minnesota?

My husband’s aunt’s house was a half mile from the epicenter of the ‘89 Loma Prieta quake. His grandmother called and woke me up at 4 am, trying to get word on her daughter. I groaned to him, hours later, “Your grandmother got the time zone differences backwards!” I was later told she’d been dialing the phone all night. She kept saying to me, over and over, “I couldn’t get through! I couldn’t get through!”

I’d had nothing I could offer by way of comfort; we hadn’t heard either. Turns out that, although the house was trashed, her daughter and her family were okay. There were even funny stories: like the electric shaver, attached to its cord, that bounced across the bathroom, down the hall, down the stairs, into another bathroom, and the wall landed on the cord. Great. Now, just how do you lift it off it to get it out again? Um…

My husband got his ham license and his Disaster Services Red Cross certification after that. Next time the lines were down, he would be able to help get the word out.

New York. My brother was able to call the folks. My cousin, at work a half block from the Towers, got the word out the next day about seeing the planes hit and walking miles home. Leigh Witchell from the Knitlist and I spent two weeks trying to track down any word on Madlove Gina; turns out she’d just quit her job in the Towers and gotten a new one in Jersey. Hated it. Wanted to go back. When 911 happened, she did go back–as a volunteer, to help, knowing that people she loved were in there. Anything she could do.

There were New York shopkeepers who stayed put as the endless streams of people walked past them out of there, handing out water to strangers in need, over and over. Heroes. They didn’t decide it was too many people for them to be able to make a difference; they made a difference.

Email. Do not overload the local phone lines, let the people who need them most immediately, the ones who are right there, have them. Wait. I waited.

Dave was away on a business trip. Wanda was feeding the kids dinner. I don’t know if that trip had anything to do with it, but they did not cross that bridge a few exits down the highway to go to the Twins game. There is a guilty relief that the people I love are fine, but it doesn’t lessen my compassion for the ones who can’t say that. My heart goes out to Minnesotans.

Eight embarrassing things, Adrian? Who, me?

1. I’ve definitely and happily led a very Mormon life: no drinking, no smoking, not even coffee for a vice, although I definitely like my hot cocoa and my dark chocolate. Valrhona. And Scharffenberger! Gotta be at least 70%. I read somewhere that dark chocolate, and knitting, too, are ways to lower your blood pressure. Given that I take meds to raise mine, which otherwise likes to give readings like 80/40, don’t tell on me, okay?

2. I can’t always think of a new punch line on my feet and often just cough up old standards when chatting with new acquaintances, like, “My husband” (who is 6′8″ to my 5′5″) “and I grew up together. He just did more. I knew when to quit.”

Trust me, after 27 years, he’s heard that one a few times.

3. Okay, here’s one for you: once upon a time, my little sister and I were supposed to entertain two visiting cousins our ages for an afternoon by canoeing with them up a lock of the C&O Canal, which runs alongside the Potomac River. My sister’s canoe kept bumping into ours–I think she was trying to race us, but I’m not sure–and I, being about 13 1/2 at the time to her 12, found it highly annoying. I pushed hers away hard with my paddle and accidentally flipped her canoe, dumping my indignant sister and younger cousin into the canal, where you couldn’t see past the first few inches into the thickly stagnant water. Ew, gross. (For those who’ve read about my water turtle in my book, it’s been cleaned up a fair amount since then.) I got yelled at a good one later by my mom, who wasn’t about to put it past me that I might have done it on purpose. I was righteously indignant, because I hadn’t done it on purpose–but probably only because I knew that I would never get away with it if I did. Part of me found it quite satisfying. (Anne, don’t read this. Oh, wait–your twins are 13 now, aren’t they? Want me to take them to Swain’s Lock?)

4. I occasionally totally forget that my car and my balance were smashed by a speeder seven years ago, and I do stupid things because I assume I’m still normal. For instance: re the story in my book about visiting Helen. What got edited out for lack of space, was, I told my friend Karen I wanted to touch the Potomac before returning to California, that that was part of going home to Maryland. Trouble is, we were at a lock of the canal where there was no good spot to do so; the embankment was a bit steep all along the river there. But! There was an overturned, bleached-out, ancient wooden canoe (it’s those canoes again) that the waves were lapping against, keeping it firmly in place against the bottom of the embankment. I would just step carefully off from up top, onto the canoe, just jumping a little and then balancing onto my knees, you know, and reach over and splash my fingers in the water over the side. No biggy. Right?

Karen, good friend that she is, tried really hard to talk me out of it. This seemed like a really dumb move to her.

Uh uh. No way. I was going to touch my beloved Potomac before I flew back, and that was that.

What I couldn’t see, was, that canoe was totally rotted out, so that when I landed on it, the first knee to hit it simply crashed right on through. And you know? The detritus washed up along the edge there didn’t smell so great. (Yes, Anne, I had that coming.) But I got my splash! Reached over, laughing, while Karen was just rolling her eyes, going, Some people.

The hard part was trying to stand up again without crunching through the rest of it, on a canoe that was swaying with the water, with little sense of balance on my part. Karen grabbed my upstretched hand and somehow we got me back up to her, though. What are friends for.

We got rained on at the last, to add to my muddy knee. And then we went to stop by her elderly stepmother’s: who had a white carpet and a white sofa. Who completely ignored my mud and our being wet and invited us warmly in.

I wanna be her when I grow up.

5. Can’t top that one. Think I’d better quit for tonight. Thank you, Adrian. This post is all your fault, and I’m quite glad.