We just walked in the door. The earthquake was in Alaska. My laptop was dead and I couldn’t access my email till we got home, but I can now. After 19 days I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do–and pictures to share.

Crashing for now. Type to you tomorrow.

Sunday: I startled her into a laugh, and it was a warm, welcoming laugh that left me wistful that I couldn’t stop right there and chat and become friends for life, because it instantly felt like we were now.

Up to that moment I had been a bit consternated, and the rain wasn’t helping any. Church was over, the building was emptying, and I was glad to have found someone still there I could ask as she finished clearing things from a children’s classroom.

“Excuse me–we went outside looking for our car and it wasn’t there; is there another parking lot on the other side of the building?”

I’m sure no one had ever asked her that before, and the chance to so easily make my day easier delighted her.

“Yes, there is,” she nodded as she laughed in surprise.

Richard, meanwhile, was already ahead, determined to find that car without having to be out in that rain any more than necessary. You have a problem, you apply logic, you solve it. Which is fine.

But I wouldn’t have missed that moment of mutual delight for anything.

A massage chair, not too hard a one. I looked up at their big screen and had this brief moment of, I didn’t know those could ripple.

5.1 or 5.2, depending on whom you ask. We like our earthquakes at entertainment-only level like that.

We were heading for a pizza picnic at the park where there was a playground designed for 2-5 year-olds, and before we left I grabbed my ready-for-anything jacket. After all, it was 5:00 and it gets cold fast at sundown, right?

Oh wait. Sundown takes several hours in September in Alaska. There is not that precipitous drop from 63F there would be at home.

Sam grinned and said to two-year-old Mathias in the back seat, Grammy’s a Californian.

Clearly this was meant to be an in-joke between them, even if he had no idea what it was about.

Grammy is uh Caff Phone uh!

Sam laughed and said it again.

So he did too. They were having a great time.

We got to the park, I looked at the kids playing in t-shirts and my sweater and left the down jacket in the car.

For the record: the lemon mousse topped blueberry compote tarts at Fire Island Bakery were worth several trips there. I’m going to have to figure out how to make those.

Just by way of apology for the radio quiet these last two weeks.

It’s weird to get ready for one season when I haven’t let go of the old one yet. Turtleneck, anyone?

When you have a new baby sister you love and you get to go with your best friend and you get to run outside and you get to find blueberries and pull them off of bushes and you get to eat them and your fingers turn purple this is how it feels.

We were sent pictures of Mathias carefully kissing the new baby.

And an observation that will probably be referenced with a grin at both kids’ future weddings:

“Apparently we made a strategic error when we named the baby something that sounds like ‘Alien’.”

She beat the odds again.

It’s time to go meet the dog and cats and make her big brother wonder why she isn’t being returned to that hospital where she belonged.

I actually have hair. I don’t have cancer nor chemo nor baldness; I have no right to complain.

And yet. It happened not once but twice and I was done.

It took me a year to get up the courage to try again.

I took recommendations. I wanted the reassurances that only getting through it could offer me. I did not ever again want to spend that kind of time intensely rueing having so much of my hair chopped off above my ears after saying I only wanted the bottom trimmed below my shoulders.

Krista from knitting gave me Kimber’s name and told me I would love her.

It took me over a month to finally reach out to that number, but today I found out she was right. I do. I cannot tell you the relief it was to have it matter to her that how I wanted it was how she did it. She asked lots of questions. She listened.

I love my new haircut. It’s actually how the old stylist used to routinely do it, plain and simple and hippy earth-motheringness with a little bit of a shorter sweep across the side of the face. That face in the mirror, said the woman with lupus-onset prosopagnosia, I recognize.

I can trust someone with my head and hair again and that feels like no small thing.

Here, let me give me a close-up.

Remember when I dug out a long-abandoned scarf project, turned it into the front of a baby dress, extolled the virtues of a stash of UFOs, yadda yadda, and knit the back to match?

Today I went to go put them together.

And suddenly realized why my subconscious had been dragging its feet on getting that done for so long.

Huh. How could…

Well, out of the original 100g skein of yarn on that front I had 54 g left, so, there was nothing for it but to cast on with it and have a do-over.

Maybe that other dress back will morph into something else in its own time, too. Who says hats can’t have seams, right?

Or a really, really full sleeve. (Nahhhh…)

Or something.

Oops.

Quiet puttering and a lot of catching up on my reading today.

Didn’t feel like running around catching up on errands, and I wondered why for awhile.

It gradually came to the surface that it just felt like this was the time to consider the world and the wonder of it all, to have no distractions but simply to take it all in. There was this deep sense of happiness at Lily being in our world now.

As the messages came in telling of things she’s already doing on her own now.

Go to San Diego, we said. Go see the grandkids there before the baby comes.

Lily had other plans.

We stayed up Friday as updates came in as she arrived, then got up at dark o’clock to catch a flight south. Played hard. Talked baseball with the older boys, who were surprised Grandma knew anything about it, played Chase me! with Maddy, helped 11-month-old Spencer pretend he could walk on his own and took the last flight home after our pizza.

Where I posted a picture of Lily Sylvie, transposing the letters on her middle name and wondering if it somehow looked funny before falling into bed.