He saw it coming and had already come to terms with it. I didn’t and it threw me. I’d thought, we fought that back once and we’ll do it again.

The wound care guy two weeks ago had said we’re done here and took him off the antibiotics he’d been on since August.

Four days later the bone infection came back. No (over the phone when he tried to be seen again) you’re fine. Yesterday the visiting nurse called the guy and read him the riot act from our kitchen and asked my sweetie, Who’s in charge of this anyway?!

Well, he saw that guy, and the podiatrist, the family medicine doctor, and the infectious disease guy and the answer was, nobody, as far as he could tell.

So today was all the everybody elses. One appointment turned into three with just enough time for him to surprise me with a text, hurry home and grab a quick bite and me for my retina appointment and then head back to the clinic.

Where, when it was my turn, they took pictures and then waited for my surgeon.

The before and after were up. I had been looking at repeats of the same image through two years of screenings–but wow! That one was WAY worse than those had been. No wonder I was having such a hard time seeing those last few months! I’d had no idea it had come that close to tearing through the retina. I had gotten seen and had had it taken care of just in time, and the recovery was and is much easier because of it.

There’s still a bit of red, though, and he wanted me to go back to full dose on the steroid drops and then start tapering off again. But he was pleased with my progress.

Richard, though.

Suddenly he was getting estimates of one week to three months and they’ll schedule it when they schedule it and let him know.

Any travel plans are entirely up in the air right now. I don’t know how long it takes to recover from a partial toe amputation but we’re about to find out. After all this time that we’d thought we wouldn’t have to. He’s totally okay with it. I’m trying to be.

But at least it’s only part of only one toe at this point, and that is far better than it was.

We picked up his new antibiotic on the way home.

Little goals that push the progress along: I want to split-splice the third skein on before I have to haul this to the retina surgeon’s waiting room tomorrow. Got less than an hour left on this one.

The fluttering orange wings caught my eye.

And made me think wistfully of my late neighbors, who had planted milkweed in their small garden for the monarchs. It’s probably still there; the new family would do the same.

But to the mystery of how monarch butterflies know to follow their migration routes going north and then south across multiple generations to finish the task, there is also this: how do they know, out of all the miles of terrain below, where their favorite food is? Should it disappear, how do they find the next patch nearby?

What is it like to see the world from a butterfly’s view?

Where most human faces turn to see them and smile, glad for the moment.

Huh. If you crop it enough you can get the HEIC photo to come out as a JPEG on the re-send and it comes through here.

For whatever it’s worth: I always knit the seed stitch at the sides more loosely when there are yarn overs in the main body, because the moment water touches them they’ll stretch out more than the seed stitch when knit at the same tension. So I give a little bit of extra over there.

Thankgsiving travel: a millionaire with a real answer to the required FAA cutbacks. Wow. Who knew that even that was designed to favor the oligarchs?

Edited to add Abigail Disney’s text in case the link doesn’t work:

“Private planes make up nearly 12% of all flights. Instead of grounding 10% of commercial flights at 40 major U.S. airports, why doesn’t the DOT ground 100% of private flights instead?

So good luck traveling in the coming days, unless you can afford to charter a plane! Because yet again, the Trump admin is prioritizing the interests of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.”

We were waiting at a red light and I was admiring the flowers in the strip in front of the gas station. They cut back somewhat during the drought several years ago, but there is always something in bloom there. Always. Someone clearly puts heart and soul into it, and occasionally I’ve even see the guy at it.

Their immediate neighbor is a garden center.

And it hit me: if you’re sitting there manning that booth all day bored and watching people fill their cars–but also watching people just a few feet further away filling their cars, too, only with flowers and plants and colors and hopes and trees of blooms to come–

–yeah, that’s a temptation I would happily succumb to, too. And it definitely makes their spot much more inviting than the other gas station across the street that sees no reason to spend time nor money on things that don’t bring in money.

Oh, but (looking at where the cars line up vs where they only do when this side of the street is too busy) they do. Even though those flowers are their own reward, they do.

After all the intarsia, man, monocolor knitting goes so much faster!

Sean Dunn has been exonerated: the man who had twenty officers sent to arrest him after he threw the Subway salami foot-long (video) he’d just bought at a Border Patrol agent in order to deflect the goons, as he testified in court after they’d tried to charge him with felony assault. And it had worked! They ran after him!

He had been warning people in the neighborhood that the gay bar over there was hosting a latin night so, look out, Trump’s guys had come.

Note that he was arrested and released but then they decided they wanted to arrest him again. Don’t want those pesky onlookers. His attorney offered to have him surrender to the authorities but they refused to accept that surrender and those twenty men broke his door down instead. It’s more fun that way.

Jeanine Pirro at the Justice Department announced he’d been fired from his job there.

The officer who got sandwich-snipered said he’d felt it through his bulletproof vest. That he had mustard stains on his uniform and a piece of onion hanging off his radio antenna.

So scary.

Only problem is, the thing was still neatly wrapped up when it hit the ground and the video proved it. The BP guy had lied under oath.

The other problem is that one of the silly-in-order-to-make-a-point cliches of law school is the prosecutor who’s so good he can indict a ham sandwich–and here we are. Two grand juries had refused to indict the guy, though, so they’d had to make do with only a misdemeanor.

The jury thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

It was (and I am going to borrow freely from others’ comments here)

A salt with a breadly weapon.

BOGO at Subway’s when ICE shows up: one and Dunn!

Lettuce us celebrate that he got out of the pickle he was in. Now he can ketchup with the rest of his life.

Clearly, it doesn’t take years on the job to become a seasoned officer.

Hero goes free because charges were bologna.

When asked for her take on it, Pirro said, No condiment.

Jury foreman: Salami? Where’s the beef?

Trump’s Justice Department is out of hammunition; the defense is on a roll!

So what if he had a machine bun? Second condimentment rights!

If the sandwich doesn’t split you must acquit.

I’ll just add, I think the Pirrotechniques quite blew up in her face.

Note to self: 157 st, Rios, US 6, Libra color way, ~40″ in unstretched seed stitch, will widen out with the lace pattern.

The big blue project I’ve envisioned is going to take me awhile to find all the right skeins to go with the main color, so in the meantime I’m using up some good yarn in my stash for a good reason. There was a false start last night, a frogging, and a restart today.

(Oh, and, the hospital funding measure passed! The tax assessor race looks like it will go to a runoff but the one we so hoped for is way ahead.)

Writing this while awaiting our election results to start to post.

The doorbell rang this afternoon: a young woman doing some last minute canvassing for Proposition 50.

She was too young to remember the days when voters fervently wanted this stupid gerrymandering to be over with and, after years of trying, got a proposition on the ballot that neither party much wanted that set up an independent redistricting commission. Its members were required to be balanced between the parties.

But we did it and it passed. The districts finally made sense. We don’t have seats like what Georgia did, where Marjorie Taylor-Greene was certainly going to lose her first re-election bid so their legislature ran a rope down the cliff to swing it around in a town an hour south.

Today Schwarzenegger was claiming credit for that commission. No, sir. We did that.

So you would think Prop 50 would fail–but what is often skipped over in the national press is that this wasn’t imposed on us: the voters were being asked if the voters wanted to temporarily suspend our commission and adopt a map specifically in direct answer to Texas’s non-Census-year attempt to wipe out Democrat-held seats there. Right there in the official Voter’s Guide, the why of this, and what that new temporary map would be.  We got to choose the districts. Come the next Census, we would go back to our commission, or before, if we said so. We decide.

Texas having put a literal bounty on the heads of women fleeing its draconian laws, making no exceptions even for molar (turning into cancer instead of a fetus) or ectopic, there is no way we’re going to have them rule over us on a national level.

We already voted, I told the woman, but the smile on my face matched the hope in hers and I added, Absolutely, we voted for it, and thank you for doing this!

We had two other things on the ballot: the tax assessor’s office that was surprisingly important and a 5/8 cent sales tax to cover the Federal cutoffs to the hospitals to keep the smaller ones open and the larger ones fully functional.

I don’t like it much, he said last night as he filled in the Yes circle.

I don’t either, I said as I filled in mine, But we have to take care of the poor among us.

That was a given for both of us.

Now to go hit refresh on those California and local results… Sixteen minutes after the polls closed and they’ve already called it: 50 passed!

And now it’s finished, because…

Him: We need to go to Urgent Care.

Me: Blink. Right now? Are we in a hurry? Do I have time to use the restroom first? Find yarn?

Today…

I had to figure out fast what the next carry-around project was going to be and to grab a second needle for the decreases on the current one, because the last time he threw me like that ended up in super-long waits at UC for two days and then his five days in the hospital.

After being on antibiotics since August, they had taken him off last week. And now one toe was turning raw again.

It was a quiet day at Urgent Care and they got him right in. Back on the boot and the toeless sock, after a single day of covering that foot in his favorite bison silk sock and a normal shoe for the first time in all this time. Back on antibiotics. Back to the wound care specialist who told him last week that it looked like we were done now.

(P.S. And then we ran just now and got our ballots in at the box to make up for all that. We voted! Man, it feels so good.)

Two conflicting thoughts:

I have a lot of Malabrigo Rios.

And two, I thought I had a lot more. (The greens, how could there not be more greens. Maybe because I keep using them all up.)

I do, actually, I have a couple of dyelot bags of ten and I have close to this many more individual balls that didn’t make the cut: I was sorting out the ones that had noticeable brown or black added to the dye bath. I wanted bright. (Which is why that lavender from an indie dyer.)

I’m not sure all these will still make the cut and there are a few that are so screamingly loud that they risk being that stuck key on a piano that demands the hands hit that one note again and again, visually speaking.

Most of these are leftovers from the ocean afghans so they’re not full skeins.

But what I do know is that sometimes you have to stare at something awhile and sleep on it a night or two while it seeps through the brain before you really get going on making something you’ve never seen before.

Which is why the plain-and-fast Mecha hat I started last night is almost finished.

It’s your decor, I texted my sister, showing her colors but no details, and your choice. Do you want bright? Or subdued?

Subdued, she wrote back.

I’d been thinking more and more that she would; I’m glad I asked. The one I knitted last year does match her paintings better.

My fingers were getting antsy after spending yesterday and today trying to figure out what the next big thing was supposed to be. All this yarn, all these half-baked ideas, no sense of certainty.

I cast on a new one tonight because the Matisse Blue said that even if I knit it early last year it was next. I told Richard it was to make Y design. But Z is already going Hey! No, me, ME! I counted the stitches again to tell it to hush.

Let me go knit a single row while I remind it that I, in fact, am the boss of me. Not my yarn.

Sometimes.

We almost never get trick or treaters. We always hope.

It’s the day of the hat, the Cat in the Hat hat that makes him about eight feet tall. After all these years of being scrunched into a box 364 days a year, it was just slightly wrinkle-ish in the middle but once it was on his head it stood proud and tall in its fine bright stripes, trying to make his intimidating height into a relatable and good thing from a small child’s vantage point.

Not once on the doorbell.

I just walked in the other room where he was and guffawed. His hat! (While he looked at me like –What?)

The top half had fallen in on itself and then flopped over. Like a tired kid on candy overload needing to be put to bed and put over its parent’s shoulder as they carry their little dragon home.

(Now if I can just get a photo of the finished afghan to come through here.)

I grew up near the C&O Canal and always walk part of it whenever I’m back home. So historical footnotes on the subject tend to get my attention.

How is it that nobody ever taught us this one?

At the beginnings of the C&O and the Erie canals, and after traveling to Niagara Falls where he saw a ship run aground and all that had to be done about that, one bright young man foresaw the problem in the canals if the water should get too low in one section.

So he thought up a device to lift them. Someone made a model of it for him and he submitted it to the Patent Office, where it got approved.

The inventor?

Abraham Lincoln.