Heading out the door tonight for the Mountain View meeting to defend the continued existence of Milk Pail–for the record, it was the Environmental Planning committee meeting in the council chambers, not the city council itself–I decided I needed a mindless project for it and I didn’t have one. Needed two circs in a size I didn’t have available–well, then, 8s it would have to be, what goes with 8s?

And so I grabbed two leftover half-skeins of that baby alpaca and decided to knit them doubled, hoping I would have enough. I weighed them: 50 and 52 g. Sounds okay.

I cast on as the meeting began at 7:00 sharp. Hmm, too short, rip. Started again, guessing at the eventual size and give of the ribbing; it wasn’t a gauge I normally knit hats in. Sixty stitches. Okay, hope, go.

The seats in the chamber were filled. There were people along the walls and a few sitting on the floor, the place was packed–and you know which side they were on.

The meeting started out sounding really bad, though: the developers went on and on and didn’t seem to get challenged much. Gradually, though, I started to breathe as person after person got up to speak from the audience when it was our turn. (I didn’t; not being a resident of that city, I didn’t think they would allow me.)

The thought came to me, you know, this yarn is about the color of Steve’s hair, I bet he’d like it…

One elderly fellow had to be told he couldn’t speak again, he had to let everybody else have their four minutes. He waited patiently till all were done and then he came down to the podium a third time, and this time a gentle chuckle went around the room. The subject at hand was only the commissioners’ first of the night and we were well over two hours in, but they heard him out.

Dang–in my town they’d have cut the mike. They never did.

I had no scissors, I had no sewing needle, and even individually, those two strands refused to break for the amount of effort I was willing to put into it.

Well then. I wound in the first end with my knitting needles and somehow managed to get a tie-off, and then a second tie-off on the top of the hat. Turned it right side out, done, with the two almost-gone balls of yarn inside still attached.

Afterwards, Steve let me catch him for a moment. I apologized for the lack of scissors and told him he’d have to snip the yarn but it was ready to go, done. There’d been a lot of cold wind blowing his way of late, and… I hope it fits.

We won! The worst round, and there will be more rounds to come, but, we won!

I should stumble more often. I am really really really pleased with how this is coming out–it was hard to put down.

As the afternoon wore on, to give my hands a break I was reading and then grumping over some news: Arizona’s House approved a bill that went below and beyond to actually allowing employers to demote or fire any employee who uses birth control even if it was paid for out of their own pocket. This sentence was removed from the old law: “A religious employer shall not discriminate against an employee who independently chooses to obtain insurance coverage or prescriptions for contraceptives from another source.”

Their Senate looks ready to pass it.

Wow.  Anyone who’s ever had a bad boss (I certainly have), raise your hand… I wonder how fast the Supreme Court would take that one on.

And so I turned on the stereo, looking for relief from all that.

Alison Kraus began singing a cappella.

A young dove flew in and settled in on the patio. Watching me. Learning a new song. Tilting her head up to pay particular attention when I sang too. She relaxed into her spot on the concrete and stayed there as long as the album played, the very model of being still within the world.

Acknowledging the gift, I turned back to that beautiful, radiant yarn and knit in increasingly happy anticipation of its arrival home.

I was one of many who wrote to the folks funding his show, but finally, enough–I needed an antidote to all that.

Her timing was perfect: my friend Jade called and came by in the afternoon. We’d run into each other at Stitches for the first time in probably three years and were interrupted, and it was such a joy to just sit down and spend some time together, this time with a cheerful, “Hi, Jade!” from Richard. And I do like to show him off. He’s a good one.

And then as soon as the sun was down enough, he and I went to Milk Pail to get manufacturing cream–and it was in stock this time! Yes! We got the last one. Totally lucked out.

And so (bwaahaahaa) at around ten, after checking with her beforehand to make sure she would be up and it would be okay, we delivered a late-night snack, a still-warm chocolate torte to Becca’s door.

It felt so good to see her so delighted. It did me much good. Chocolate torte: comes in self-serving sizes.

And so I share this memory:

Thirty years ago, we were living in a married grad student apartment complex, a set of four buildings facing each other with playground equipment for small children in the middle. There were several of these.

And quite a few of the women in our courtyard started getting hang up phone calls that summer. So many that it began to become a subject mentioned and oh yeah me too and talked about around our little playground.

What we did not know is that he apparently wanted to know who was home when: the one single mom who lived there (just one; doesn’t that sound quaint?) was being stalked. Till the day he broke into her ground-floor apartment through her window and threatened to kill her young daughter sleeping in the other bedroom if she didn’t cooperate. She was raped by a man she had never seen before.

She called the police after he was gone and was transported to the local hospital, where they examined her–

–and then refused to do anything to make sure she hadn’t gotten pregnant in the last half hour or so. The ambulance had taken her to the local Catholic hospital.

She had to find her own transport from there in the middle of the night to the other one in town to clean off that man’s filth.

That could have been any one of us at any time and we women knew it.

There was no way she wanted a child of hers to have to accept how it had been conceived. Or to be from that man’s gene pool, and on into the generations to come. No way she wanted to have to tell her small daughter why she was going to be a big sister now–can you imagine trying to explain that one to a four-year-old?! And no way she was going to let a violent rapist dictate the rest of her life and her child’s and possible future children’s.

“A bad man hurt my mommy” –I have never forgotten that phrase–and in their own home is a heavy enough burden for a young girl to grow up with.

Now. I am not a Catholic, granted, and my own church calls abortion not murder but rather “like unto it,” to be avoided if at all possible. There are times when that is not possible–you cannot grow and produce a living baby from a mother who has died of the pregnancy.  But in a situation like this one, when there isn’t even a single cell dividing into two yet, to me there is no question she did what she had to do.

But whatever choice a woman may make or may have to make, that woman is to be loved and supported unconditionally, as are we all.

I understand where people like Rick Santorum are coming from, believing that all life is sacred. I feel that yes; yes, it is. But it is also messy, and I feel that must be taken into account.

I guess I am still incensed that a half hour later, when conception probably hadn’t even taken place yet… (And yes, the ambulance driver totally blew that one.)

I want to tell all those men who testified in Congress on the subject of contraception–this wasn’t even about abortion but contraception!–allowing no woman to give any opposing viewpoint, that I will do everything I can to vote them out of power and out of office.

The other part of my neighbor’s story? Her bike was stolen, too. Another neighbor reassured her that some men are good and kind by giving her his, a good one, even though we were all grad students living on nearly nothing and that was his main transportation. It was what he could do.

Earlier, someone had given us their window air conditioning unit when they’d moved away; our baby had had heat rash, it being 108 humid degrees in our upstairs apartment, and they wanted to make our lives easier, since theirs were immediately about to be so with their graduation and new job to go to. Here. Take this.

About a week after that event that devastated us all, and just before we ourselves moved away, we gave that AC unit to that single mom. Not only were she and her daughter going to be far more physically comfortable with it: nobody was going to be able to break through that window again without first making enough noise for her to be able to call for help.

It was what we could do.

That having worked out so well, a box from his dad showed up two days ago despite our saying we had no such player. Reel-to-reel tapes. Now there’s a reely current technology.

Could we would we?

Uh…

A check of Ebay revealed non-working machines and one listed in the hundreds; Richard remarked that there’s a rubber part that wears out, and at the ages of these…

But the box was here.

Oh and. His dad mentioned that Uncle R had had a machine and had donated it to a tech museum and it was in our town! Maybe we could ask to borrow it back?

Uh…

So I put a note on our ward chat list, feeling like that was our last chance. Someone from church responded almost immediately, saying her husband was determined to hold onto one of every technology that might have family recordings on it, and so, yes, they had a reel-to-reel; would we like to borrow it?

Blessings on Sue and Ken, the problem is solved and now we just have to get started.

(Anyone get that Rose Mary Woods reference in the title?)

p.s. Watched my first Republican debate tonight, transfixed by the political theater. Gingrich wants a lunar colony with hopes for it to be the 51st state by his second term. Really. Maybe they could just aim that $99 billion railroad at the sky.

If you want to see an interesting chart of where your congressperson stands, go to Propublica’s page here. But note that half of Congress isn’t telling yet as I write.

Where are your representatives on this? Do they have any technical expertise or, if they’re uncertain, are they willing to learn from people who do? Do the merits of a cause matter to them?

Rupert Murdoch presented himself as an arbiter of moral authority on the subject of SOPA/PIPA, bashing opponents of this poorly written, poorly thought out legislation.

Follow the money, because he certainly always does.

Okay, let’s go back to InfoWorld. They have a story about seven people running two companies that allegedly raked in $175 million via pirated movies, books, software, etc, the very thing the supporters of SOPA and PIPA are talking about. The alleged perps are in various countries oversees.

And with the help of the court in Virginia and the help of those countries, four have been arrested and the sites have been shut down. All done under current law here and abroad. The system as it now is worked. Are there still problems in some countries and on other sites? Yes of course–my own book has been pirated and there are dishonest people stealing it and I know that. Life is imperfect.

But throwing out the due process clause of the Constitution–it’s just unfathomable. Utterly unfathomable.

Progress has been made but it’s not over by a long shot. Please keep writing/calling/emailing your representatives to defeat SOPA and PIPA. Your Internet and mine depends on it.

p.s. On a happier note, I got to see and hold Jasmin and Andrew’s newborn daughter Genevieve tonight. Dimples and thick dark hair and the cutest face you could hope for. She’s absolutely perfect.

The Awl writer wasn’t convinced about this whole Occupy thing. She states strongly that she believes inflammatory rhetoric shuts down rational thought (boy, ain’t that the truth) and so it took two weeks before she decided to go see for herself what it was all about there in Oakland. She had no use for potential mobs.

What she saw was not what she expected to get.

I puzzled all day over her saying the news helicopter left and then the ABC and CBS twitter feeds shut down simultaneously one minute before the police moved in on the crowd (and we all know how that went). Wouldn’t the press want that story? Why would they stop? Are we really and incredibly at the point where the UK was recently, where only the rival Guardian was keeping tabs on the likes of Rupert Murdoch? No, I just don’t believe that. I mentioned it to Richard, hoping he had a reasonable explanation.

That was easy, he felt: the chopper had to refuel, as they said. The cops waited till there was nobody above to keep an eye on them–and then both feeds would have stopped together like that if the cops illegally jammed them.

That’s a big if. And yet–those feeds did stop. The writer showed screenshots.

The mayor of Richmond next door was so angry at the mayor of Oakland that she announced loudly that she would be marching part of a ten mile trek with the protesters. Good for her.

Don asks what a solution would be. I have one, for starters: I would sit the entire Congress down in Mr. Heacock’s high school American History class that I was in during the school year ending in this country’s bicentennial celebration, where he went on at such great length and passion about the enduring importance of the Glass-Steagal Act to this country’s financial stability that I have never forgotten it.

Education–and funding good education (remember when you could fund a full year’s college tuition at a state school off a teenager’s summer job? I’m only 52, not a GI Bill generation, and I do)–rocks.

Sure!

And so that’s what we did yesterday afternoon.

Setting out, though, we hadn’t seen each other in awhile, so I reminded her that my hearing in a car wasn’t great.

That, as it turned out, was a good thing.

She was sure we were on the same page politically, and had a lot of opinions; while I struggled to keep my eyes on the road but still keep up with what she was saying, she was enjoying her audience. We are quite fond of each other.

She didn’t like how her favored presidential candidate was being treated by the press. I sympathized.

Wasn’t it terrible how Obama was trying to force everybody into one big union?

“Huh!” I said with a smile, delighted I’d heard her that time without having to make her repeat. “That one would grab big headlines. I read the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even our little Merc every day, but somehow I missed that one.”

She went on at length about the healthcare bill. I, blissfully deaf and cheerfully missing the point, got a word in: wasn’t it wonderful that my daughters were going to be able to get health insurance now? When one got turned down for no good reason whatsoever, and the other–well. She’s covered under one of the university micro-plans that the bill is phasing out, meaning that, till then, her maximum allowable coverage for medications is $2,000 a year.  Her doctor wanted to put her on a med that costs more than her annual income; she needs that med to treat her ITP, and appealed to the manufacturer because they do sometimes provide a cut rate for those in need, but they turned her down on the grounds that she has insurance.

Which it isn’t, really. But after next year, I think is the time frame, she’ll be able to get covered. Isn’t that wonderful?!

Finally, the woman tapped my arm, smiling, and said, “I think we’re on different sides; let’s talk about something else.”

We had a perfectly lovely time of it all. She got to meet new people with a deep interest in things she’s been wanting to learn about, she got her feeder, she got some seed, she added in a suet cake and wire cage after I got more to refill mine and we talked about how to show the birds the place was worth checking out: hang a stick. Let them perch near it first to get a good look.

And I think she actually heard some of what I had to say: because I was able to avoid the distractions of negative emotions and to concentrate on just enjoying the time I had with her, without letting all that Ailes America rile me up.  Who knew that deafness could contribute to maintaining a sense of closeness.

I avoided the temptation (but I won’t here) to stir things up by quoting Thomas Friedman from when he put context around the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators for those who don’t get it:

“Citibank sold a package of toxic mortgage-backed securities to unsuspecting customers — securities that it knew were likely to go bust — and, with the other hand, shorted the same securities — that is, bet millions of dollars that they would go bust.” He quotes the Wall Street Journal as saying, “As a result, about 15 hedge funds, investment managers and other firms that invested in the deal lost hundreds of millions of dollars, while Citigroup made $160 million in fees and trading profits.”

To women of her age, that could well have been part of her own retirement going poof. It is criminal.

We, yes, we, are the 99%. Heck–I guess we’ve all been put in one really big union, haven’t we?

A few days ago I saw a big fat old gray one chase a young slender black one away and across the yard, up a tree six feet or so, and then the black one jumped to a nearby trunk and came down…

But the gray one, who’d raced notably slower than the other, was stopping to catch his breath.

The black one stopped and turned around and watched him. Meantime, another small black one took advantage of the whole scene by sneaking around both of them and going for the patio.

The next day: a smallish black one was nibbling peacefully away at what the birds toss down, minding its own business; had another started nibbling, he’d have shared, the young ones often do.

The big gray approached slowly, cautiously from behind, easing over to the side to stay out of the line of view, watching carefully, gets closer, closer, and then LEAPS onto the black one from behind to bite him! They instantly turned into a rolling, struggling, circular hamster ball with tail fluff coming from behind, totally out for blood, neither willing to give up. The gray’s got the weight but the black’s got the agility and speed.

Yin yang motif. How they roll in a circle like that just amazes me. But hey guys, I don’t want to see anyone hurt.

I opened the door and called out to them to stop, but I could have been a chickadee for all they cared. I threw a shoe halfway to them, careful not to have any chance of hitting them but trying to break it up. They could not have cared less, I was harmless and they knew it and the attacker and attacked weren’t and they knew it. It went on for what felt like a very long time.

The black one managed to grab the gray’s head face to face and grip it between his paws long enough to confirm for me where the tattered ears on the bigger ones come from.

They leaped in a blur up to a tall but empty flower pot, rolled in, continued with me trying to figure out by which tail tip showed when who was winning, and finally both leaped to the lip at once, apart. The gray stared away. The black one looked straight at me.

Having established himself, I think that’s the one that tried to take me on via the skylight later. I’ve wondered what my gray hair looks like to them.

They breathed hard a few moments, then reenacted the previous chase scene, except this time the young black squirrel was doing the chasing–and neither of them was moving very fast but rather clearly gingerly, and the gray was going to the right across the yard and away from the trees that offer a view of the patio. Vanquished. Away with the bully.

The gray came back today. Nothing around but the birds and me watching from inside, but it was clear he was scared. He approached slowly. Warily. He started to reach a paw to the patio–and pulled back, fast! Tried again. It took four times for him to work up the bravado to come onto the concrete and dare stand under that birdfeeder again.

Be careful whom you pick on.

(The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America includes, for good reason,  “…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”)

The reactions of Wall Street, the New York police, several DC politicians in particular…

Some here may remember what I said (though I gave few details at the time as to why) after a guy in Stanford Hospital’s billing department stole my name and number and tried to make me give him my credit card information over the phone for a supposed bill collection agency for an amount that, actually, I had overpaid my account by because they were slow to update their system and had re-billed it. So clearly he thought I was an easy target. The man was sufficiently vicious in tone that I considered calling the police.

What I wrote was: “The angrier someone gets over something that is unreasonable, the more you know they know they’re in the wrong.”

The protesters have my admiration for their efforts not to show anger, not to give any justification for the crackdowns that have happened, but simply to demand that the laws favoring the 1% change in order for us to have a more just society that creates hope for our future. My favorites so far:

1. A sign held up saying, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who believes in free health care for all. You’re thinking of Jesus.”

2. Here is the long version by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, professor at Columbia University, writing for Vanity Fair; below is what he said to the protestors in person. He noted that he and they were not allowed to use a bullhorn to address the crowd, not allowed to make themselves heard by any means other than the crowd repeating his phrases loudly to try to pass them towards the back. He wondered to them why this should be so.

But there are video cameras in smartphones and there is YouTube. (Blessings on those at that link who offer a transcription for those of us who need it.)

“Our financial markets have an important role to play. They’re supposed to allocate capital and manage risk, but they’ve misallocated capital and created risk. We are bearing the cost of their misdeeds. There’s a system where we’ve socialized losses and privatized gains. That’s not capitalism! That’s not a market economy. That’s a distorted economy, and if we continue with that, we won’t succeed in growing, and we won’t succeed in creating a just society.”

Amen.