The New York Times ice cream recipe called for six egg yolks. Thus a pound of strawberries met its fate along with a pint of cream.They call for either a half tsp of lemon juice or a half tsp of balsamic, and who squeezes a whole lemon for a half a teaspoon? I had some Bistro Blend raspberry balsamic from the guy who used to sell that top-notch brand at Stitches West. Unfortunately, the pandemic eventually did the company in–but if you can find anything like it it went really really well in there.

But the leftover egg whites.

I went looking for this almond meringue recipe but then didn’t really want to double it. So before I forget what I did since I was totally winging it:

3 c almond flour

2 3/4 c powdered sugar

1/2 c melted dark chocolate, random bits added till the semi-liquid got up to there

1/2 c melted butter

1/8 tsp salt

I started by whipping those 6 egg whites with a tablespoon of sugar to the hold-a-peak stage. Then I mixed the butter and chocolate into the almond flour/powdered sugar bowl and folded the egg whites in.

I ended up laying it out in a large flat rectangle on top of parchment paper on a cookie sheet. 350F, 25 minutes.

It was very good. It would make great cookies, too. I didn’t realize till afterwards that I was riffing on my chocolate hazelnut torte (and it was a lot simpler to do.)

Then the timer hit 4 hours on the cooling strawberry ice cream mixture and into the machine it went. Because we needed a second big dessert on the same day, right?

Actually, third. The NYT says to strain the cream mixture, and what that left us with was essentially candied scrambled eggs. Which was as weird as it sounds. (Where’s a little kid jumping up and down to take it off your hands when you need one.)

The ice cream? Definitely esteemed-guest-worthy, too.

One of this year’s fledglings parallaxing at sunrise today. Raptors bob their heads before taking off to gauge the distance and trajectory of what they’re aiming for–but this one made me laugh.

And it made me remember.

I wrote about it at the time it happened 15 years ago and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here at least once since. It was such a powerful experience.

Today fellow knitter Clara Parkes asked on her Substack, If there were one thing in nature that you could become one with, what would it be?

There were fun answers, beautiful answers, and here was mine. Since it’s behind a paywall, I thought I’d share it here, too, where members of the falcon community can read it:

I was on the camera crew for a season monitoring the peregrine falcon nest high up on San Jose City Hall. I would love to be able to spread my wings and coast on the wind like one of those magnificent birds.

As I sit here remembering: one of the chicks at first grew big enough to explore the concrete HVAC ledge outside the nest box, its feathers for flight beginning to grow in, no longer a ball of white fluff.

And then it moved more slowly and after a day or two, quietly passed in a back corner of the nest.

The parents fed their other chicks and soon they were teaching them how to not just fly but transfer food mid-air, how to hunt, how to dive at over 200 mph, all the peregriney things.

And then the father came back to the wooden box the UCSC biologist had installed. It had a layer of gravel to mimic the rocky cliffs of nature. He stood there facing the remains of the one that had perished for some minutes while I at my computer, hand hovering over the mouse, waited to see what he might do next.

And what that was was something that had not been observed before in that species, from what I’ve been told: he bent way over towards his son’s body and then with the top of his head, the most tender, vulnerable part of his own, pushed it down, down, to give a burial to his boy where it would be left undisturbed.

It was astonishing and profoundly moving. Love. Love is the entirety of the universe. I want to forever be part of that love.

It’s that time of year again: wake up, pick enough cherries for a pie, pit them, strain the juices back to the fruit, freeze in happy anticipation of good times to come, then go take a shower so you won’t walk around an impromptu redhead. The tart cherries ripen at the rate of about one pie per day.

And on a side note. I am quite sure the photographer did not notice, not when she took the picture and not when she posted the picture on the real estate listing. This is outside that house’s kitchen door.

Picture #30.  Look at how nice and cozy that thing is in its corner, waiting for lunch.

This is a long read but a good one by a Constitutional law professor and the then-President Rex Lee of BYU, a man held in high esteem in the Mormon community a generation ago.

At some point in his first term, someone called out the new Senator Mike Lee on the discrepancies between some of the stuff he was spouting and his dad’s scholarship on what the Constitution actually said. His dad had passed not long before.

Lee’s terse response was, My dad was wrong.

The Deseret News, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, posted an editorial today denouncing Lee’s vindictive, deceitful, and cruel posts on X that one could only describe as gloating towards the targets and survivors of the assassinations in Minnesota.

When Senator Tina Smith, who’d been on that hit list, wanted to ask him why he’d done that, he put his phone to his ear to fake a phone call and ran from her. She cornered him in the cloakroom to just, plain, talk about this and why he had done this, calling out to his sense of decency as if he had one. But that famous old-fashioned “collegiality of the Senate” tradition of the ages: she claimed it and offered it and he let her explain to him why what he’d said was so painful because he knew it would be front-page news (again) if he did not.

Lee often justifies himself by claiming he’s an upstanding member of the Church. Yeah, I’d love to be a fly on the wall when his bishop asks him if he lives a life of integrity in all things?

But here’s the thing: if the Church excommunicates you, they never say so publicly. Your choices are between you and G_d.

Nor can I remember any time when they’ve denounced someone publicly.

But that editorial did and they demanded he apologize to his victims.

And if he does not do so, and as publicly as that X post was, then anyone somehow still wondering about him has their answer.

We’ve been doing a random assortment of wooden puzzles of fewer than 100 pieces after dinner of late (with thanks to Holly for introducing us to Nautilus.)

Somehow after a lifetime of not doing puzzles he’s got me hooked on those little ones with him. If he weren’t there I would never bother but 75 pieces away from a picture of a coral reef together? When it’s so gratifying to see him having such a good time? Sure.

We’ve done those five or six little ones enough times now that we did three tonight zip zip zip. He admitted to boredom.

I called his bluff and pulled out a 500 piecer of shore and ocean. That one last edge piece is still defying us somewhere but the center has a bit of progress showing. My resistance to the idea of having to wait for the entire finished edge before filling in the center might actually be rubbing off on him.

I just finally got up and looked and exclaimed, 10:32?!

Maybe I’ll order a new little one after all.

I know, I know, don’t leave it like that!

It really was too small to bother with this morning. It will really be too big tomorrow night. It’s pretty Goldilocksed right now.

What the plant really wants is to vine all over the ground, shedding yellowing leaves behind as new ones grow green in front while creating a thousand vegetable baguettes (aka baseball bats) in their wake.

But it’s confined to a pot to keep it up and out of rabbit reach.

I may have to rethink that after I pick it. As long as I get that one zucchini free and clear of critter bites, I can take the gardening win and let the plant do its thing from there so that it doesn’t stop and think it’s done.

Two Tesla dealerships two cities apart. Organizers were hoping for 7000 people and to have an unbroken line from one car lot to the other.

The town paper counted: 20,000 to 22,000 came.

Overall, the protesters–just the ones in the US–were said to be 5.2 million, with people pouring out onto the streets in defense of democracy across Europe, too. (Update Monday: It was 13.12 million!)

The assassin in Minnesota was caught before he could carry out his written intention to kill more Democratic lawmakers across the Midwest.

While here in my tiny corner of the world I finished the brown hat, printed the pattern for a more involved one, realized it was a mismatch for color and weight vs what I have and debated how to take it from there while casting on not a single stitch for it. Yet.

We went to a potluck tonight and time and food with friends was a welcome respite from the worst of the news of the day.

To dear friends of ours in Minnesota: we are so sorry.

I debated to the very end throwing responsible disease management to the wind and joining the local No Kings protest. I badly wanted to be able to tell my grandkids I had, to set an example of standing up for democracy, of the right to peaceably assemble to petition one’s government.

But once again in the end, having done blindness, kidney failure, and cerebral vasculitis in autoimmune reactions to summer suns, I just couldn’t make my husband worry like that. And I wanted to see those grandkids grow up.

But color-wise I was dressed the part because that at least I could do.

Someone else there had on white stripes against red, her pants blue, and I knew without asking. The refugees in that family were only two generations ago.

We caught each other’s eye but didn’t say anything: not in someone else’s home while two older people were there who already know where we stand and who break our hearts.

The kicker being that one of them emigrated here, many years ago, after falling in love with an American.

Good friends

Great birthday party

Good night

So all in one day, a whistleblower engineer from Boeing was set to give Congressional testimony about a particular plane, while said plane model went down in India, killing hundreds. Meantime, one of my Senators was being briefed and heard that Kristi Noem was speaking to the press down the hall, so he went there to ask her questions.

Congressional oversight of the Executive being in his job description. A member of the Senate actually doing what he signed up for.

But he was Hispanic.

He said who he was and started asking his questions–and was immediately manhandled, shoved out of the room by quite a few people in uniforms, pushed to his knees and then the floor and handcuffed behind his back. Noem blamed him for not identifying himself, which, of course, was the first thing he had done.

It is a requirement in this Administration that one be as quick with a lie as 47 himself. Because it is always the underlings who go to jail before the boss does and he wants them guilty as sin in every way so they’ll support him in hopes they don’t take the fall. But they will.

You definitely wouldn’t want to vote for Noem for so much as dogcatcher now. Just ask her kids.

Meantime, Israel flew over Iraq and attacked Iran, saying it was taking out its nuclear capabilities and personnel.

Meantime, Gavin Newsom rewrote his original plea to the court, upon which–praise be–it sided with the State of California and found Trump’s orders spurious and in violation of the Constitution and ordered the National Guard, which Trump had deployed without food nor lodging orders because who cares about them anyway, to be returned to Newsom’s control. So, among other tasks, they can be free to monitor–wait for it–the border.

But not today. Tomorrow at noon. Hey–we’ll take it.

I think the protesters need to bring them pizzas and pillows.

And Saturday, if the troops are somehow not yet gone, we need to celebrate No Kings Day with flowers to put in their gun barrels. (Wincing at the National Guardsman who took aim and shot an Australian reporter in the back with a rubber bullet yesterday as she stood in the middle of the street with no protesters immediately around her: shot for telling the camera what was happening.)

Remember when those flowers and sweet entreaties to join the protesters’ more righteous side helped overthrow Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines?

Oh, and one more thing: in Ukraine someone’s cat took out a Russian drone. I just hope the cat was okay.

Part two.

We got to see Janna and her husband. We walked into the presence of such an immense sense of love.

She was joyful, she was exhausted, and I hope at just under an hour we didn’t stay too long. I have more experience than most at how wonderful and tiring it is to see people even when you love them so much when you’re so ill and we were all trying to be mindful of that, though I’m not quite sure we were mindful enough. But man, it was good to see her and to meet her prince of a husband. (Her first one died years ago.) He is so good to her.

I had four more hats ready (Richard says five), including one begun in the airport, and two balls of yarn to ask if she’d like those colors next. She said sure. She had one on that I’d mailed earlier.

But she gently let me know that all of these were really more than she could wear.

Not knowing that I had thought of her beloved as I packed this thick warm greens-etc Mecha one and that earlier one and was thinking of her granddaughter and her two older sons and the son I’d knit the Christmas stocking for years ago: her mom had knit one with the name knitted in for each of her grandchildren–but he hadn’t been born yet when she died.

When Janna told me that of course I made him one.

I had never knitted such a thing before and I couldn’t find a pattern for one with the kind of cabling I wanted, so I just winged it. I can do socks, right?

Um. Sometimes letting the object be its own size swatch has its idiosyncrasies, not to mention Malabrigo Rios is not sock yarn.

So I asked her if he wishes he had one that weren’t so big and she exclaimed, He LOVES his big stocking! You can fit anything in it!

We all laughed.

He’s in his mid-20s now. We sat there a moment with the unspoken thought between us that his future children likely won’t know their grandmother, either.

An experimental med in ’03 snatched me back at the edge of life. If only. You never know.

I will have my work cut out for me. I’ll let him and his future love decide what size to aim for.

But meantime, any of her family who want to wear a Malabrigo hat in solidarity with her in this beautiful month of June, maybe when the hot sun dips below the mountains? I think with these last two coming along, if she wants, we’ve pretty much got them covered.

And I can always knit more.

Part One.

All my siblings came. Mom got feted, Dad’s stuff got divided between us, and as my older brother said afterwards, “I am amazed and grateful for how well everything went.” Everybody was mindful of everybody else and trying not to be too eager about any one thing: we didn’t own it before and if we didn’t own it after, what’s the difference, right? So. Your turn.

There was a painting I loved. The others noticed the two gouges in the paint before I did, two white canvas spots showing, about the size of the inside circle when you hold thumb to forefinger.

Bryan, who along with Anne has entered juried arts shows and done well, instantly offered, “I can fix that for you.”

Two days later my sister was holding it out for me to see.

Now, I’d been expecting to have to pay to ship it to Atlanta and then to our house and to wait for however long everything took.

But, but–where were the spots? You can’t even tell! Where were they? as I bent close to see.

Bryan happened to come in the room in the middle of that, so I said again, “You can’t even tell!”

He laughed. “That’s the point!”

I just couldn’t get over how very very perfect and untouched it looked.

He was staying at a cousin’s; we were at a hotel a half hour from there.

So it was with great delight this morning that I looked up at the TSA station where you retrieve your stuff and exclaimed across the conveyor belt, “BRYAN!”

He looked over, laughed, and we got one last big hug across that metal space before he raced off to his flight while they finished patting me down. (Holding my arms above my head while circular glass walls move rapidly the way they do, close to my face, makes me fall down. So, yeah.)

So, so glad we got to go.

The eyases are flying well and their air traffic controllers have gone home.Thank goodness for those who do that work.

The blowup between Musk vs. 47: things are about to get even more interesting as they try to expose and tear each other down in order to build themselves up. As bullies do. Popcorn!

Meantime: the South Carolina legislature. A special election. A 24-year-old African-American Democrat vs the older guy who’d been county Republican chair.

The kid won his primary by eleven votes (the state required a recount, which bumped it up from ten) and then won the race 70-29%.  The voters chose the hopeful, idealistic young person wanting to do good.

The other guy said, well, G_d has other plans for me, then.

Yes, dear, He does: He didn’t want it on your eternal conscience that you would have helped deny lifesaving healthcare and emergency help to “the least of these My brethren” because He loves your soul, too. But He needed the voters to help Him out on that, because He loves them enough to let them learn from, thank heavens, their triumphs as well as their mistakes, and they totally came through.

Almost 71%. We can do this!

She said maybe brown.

It’s going to be over 90F. I’ve got some dark brown ready to go after this but for the moment I’m thinking let’s try a lighter version and see how it flies. I can always keep going.