We have some Cherry Garcia in the freezer, he said. We need some.

Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s said in protest at a Congressional hearing yesterday, Congress kills poor children in Gaza and pays for the bombs by kicking poor children in America off MedicAid.

This good Jewish man stood up and said Congress needed to let food into Gaza for starving children. The cameras were rolling. He spoke again and again on behalf of the little ones as they zip-tied his arms behind his back, giving voice at long last to his anguish and to that of so many millions of other people, knowing that a famous rich white man and a political donor at that, they might at least pay some attention to.

He was frog marched out of there during his arrest.

Here at home: some for him, some for me. Cherry Garcia was always his favorite and definitely not mine, but in that moment it seemed like the best ice cream there ever was and I knew I wanted to never turn it down again.

“In solidarity,” Richard pronounced, raising his bowl to me and to Ben out there somewhere in thanks.

Question. Weaving or knitting? (Embiggen to see the rest.)

Answer: Yeah, pretty much.

It’s banding day and I had a tab open to watch. But it turned out banding happened nearly two hours after they said they were on the roof getting ready to rappel down and I thought I must have missed it.

Plus there was less to see: in all these years the parents have vigorously defended their young, coming in close but never making actual contact. Till today. (Screen grab courtesy San Jose City Hall.)

UC Santa Cruz professor Zeka Glucs had her GoPro camera on top of her helmet. But not for long: Hartley, the female, swooped in, talons out, and knocked it right off her head. They hope the damage is not too much and to be able to retrieve at least its initial video. One fierce peregrine mama coming right at it in 1, 2, 3…!

Imagine having a raptor that can dive at 241 mph coming right at your head.

The count is indeed three females and one male, the one that’s two days younger. Females are a third larger because they have to be able to cover all their young since they do most of the brooding and keeping the young warm before they’re old enough to thermoregulate.

The parents tend to fill the tallest beak first and from the get-go Little knew the drill and would leap up for it again and again in order to get as high as his sisters, showing how energetic and fit and survival-worthy he is and intercepting like a basketball star.

These parents bring lots of food and those young are well fed. And healthy!

(Edited to add photos retrieved from the GoPro!)

Hey look! The computer found one of the photos from Mother’s Day!

Today I found a place that still had some Holz and Stein circular needles and crochet hooks in stock, the ones made from leftover wood from making musical instruments. How they had them I don’t know; the company quit exporting to America around 2000.

They are the best knitting needles I have ever used.

I had a pair that I had knit nearly every project in my book on. I had it in my bag when I went to a booksigning by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee in Santa Rosa, about a ninety-minute drive from here.

It vanished there. I still miss them. I can only hope that whoever found that circular either used them and loved them too or found someone who would appreciate what they had.

The only thing I’ve found that comes close–and they definitely come close–are the hand carved ones by Tom Diak in Vermont. After a hand injury sidelined him for awhile, he’s gone back to making interchangeables but not the plain circs I’ve bought in the past. I keep hoping. Full confession: I have never bought interchangeables, period. I once had a tip come unglued from a cheap needle with hundreds of lace stitches smushed together on it and the idea of the tips coming off, even deliberately, just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

This vendor had the size my current afghan is being worked on. It was slippery yarn on slippery needles, which got traded a few days ago for a dinged-up old wooden pair that just hasn’t been doing much for me  either. And now! Actual, sturdy, perfect-tipped, perfectly finished Holz and Steins! I can’t wait till they get here!

The price was about what I paid thirty years ago. Which was very expensive then but they were tools for a lifetime.

As long as they don’t hop out of your knitting bag at bookstores.

What Holz and Stein pairs I have now have been mostly knit-at-homes since then. Just because.

Do you have favorite needles? Am I being silly about interchangeables?

Called my mom and we didn’t talk long because my niece (not the one she lives with) answered the phone while waiting for Mom to come to it and explained that she and I think she said her sister were whisking her off for dinner with them. A whirl of happy to hear from you’s and they were off.

We should all be so lucky at 94. Made my day. And it was great to hear from my own kids. Hope you all had a good Mother’s Day, too, whether you are one or have one.

Just for fun, here’s video of a peregrine chick in its first attempt at climbing out of the nest box.

Banding day is Tuesday, based on the hatching date of the older three. It’s supposed to be before they start being able to wander out of the box so that they don’t scare right off the low edge of the runway when this big human suddenly rappels down from the roof while the parents throw a fit.

But this big eyas, and the one that copied it a few minutes later, didn’t read the memo.

Personally, my guess is that they’re going to declare it three females and that the one that hatched two days after the others is also smaller because he’s a male. But we’ll see.

The Musicians in Residence at the local college put on a concert tonight: violin, bass, and a piano played by a dear friend of ours.

And not just a concert but a lesson on Claude Debussy. Russ gave a bit of history and a demonstration of the heptatonic scale typically used in Western music, with a picture of it on a bar of music on the screen behind him. Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music children singing Do Re Mi appeared next to demonstrate and the audience chuckled.

Then he showed the pentatonic scale (five notes in an octave instead of seven) and played it. Then the whole note scale, no sharps or flats. Neither of them sounded like much with so many sounds missing.

But then he started playing some familiar gorgeous Debussy piece whose name I didn’t catch, and then another, using those scales. The fun begins when you mix them up between the two hands or instruments.

See! He said, bounding enthusiastically up from the piano bench and waving his arms at the audience. You can try this at home!

The next screen: You TOO can convert classical music to Impressionism! You just need six things:

1. You have to say it in French!
2. Pentatonic scale.
3. Use the sustaining pedal a lot.
4. Whole note scale.
5. Unusual rhythm.
6. I had a hard time seeing the last thing through the tall head of the guy in front of me and Richard doesn’t remember so I can’t tell you and
7. I’m not actually typing the numbers 6 or 7 but this computer program is expecting me to because I typed that you need six things so it is bound and determined to put a numbered list of six things here and won’t let me type anything without auto-adding those numbers and won’t let me delete the numbers after I do. It’s creating an Impression of what I’m trying to say. Russ would laugh and laugh at that.
8. And then, 8, after I said that and hit Save Draft there was no sign of any of the numbers on my Preview page, including the ones I actually typed and the 8. it put before any of the rest of this sentence.
9. So we’ll just have to see how this blog post plays out. (Still indented, too!)

The news today was horrific, again and again and again.

The new pope was the one great and shining beam of hope. A good moral leader calling on the best in ourselves towards one another is exactly what the world needs right now, badly.

I made myself walk away and pick up my knitting. I will still have nightmares over what people caught on camera being done by our own government on our dime and in our name to innocent people and without so much as a warrant.

But I talked a little to my sister and then I knit for her and tried to be a good voice in the world and found I felt just a little better because I had.

Slippery yarn on slippery needles: I ditched that circ at long last and was surprised at what a difference it made in how I feel about working on this. I’m not having to death-grip them every moment for fear of constantly losing stitches, like the 50 off one end while the other end dropped just a few.

My father grew up in Nevada. Ain’t a whole lot of freely growing lush green around there, and he took so much delight in what grew spontaneously in our yard in Maryland: *wild violets! The tiny wild strawberries, the buttercups, (hey, look! Science!) and under the tree canopy, the mountain laurel and the dogwoods. He played suburban dad with the lawnmower and the grass and all that but he and Mom taught us to love what was there. To blow on a dandelion seedhead and watch how it all floated on the breeze rather than freak out at the weed. To know a chickadee from a titmouse. To notice how the grackles were shimmery purple in the sunlight and black in the shade in disguise.

*That link is to an Etsy shop because all the good pictures I could find were from sites that were either telling you how to kill them off or else selling them.

It was a day of constantly running around getting lots of things done, and when it was time to sit down and figure out the specifics on the next stage of the afghan…

Let’s see, that motif would add up to 12″, do I really want that much space taken up for that, and where should I put the…

Nuts to this, and I picked up my carry-around cowl project and went to town on it. No counting, no decisions, just idiot-proof knitting that looks really pretty, it doesn’t have to be what I planned doing it just has to be done, go go go go go.

The sour cherry that was wearing a tutu has now changed into a bridal veil.

While down below, same tree, the petals have become a ground covering and the first of the fruit is on its way. 

Packing at the end of the most recent trip home, she’d tried, but it just didn’t all fit in; did I have a rollaboard she could borrow?

You can have it, I told her, or borrow, whichever works for you. I quite liked that one but it was just a little small so I hadn’t actually ever used it. The local Costco had cleared them out at all of $13; those FULs sold out in a flash.

I got a text today telling me she was sure I wouldn’t mind. She was sure this was what I would have wanted to do with it.

Oh honey yes and amen.

A single friend of hers had just found out she had breast cancer and then died a week and a half later. Her grieving family had come to collect their daughter’s things the best they could.

My daughter had given them her luggage for it. On a whim, feeling silly about it because she couldn’t see how that size would work out, she grabbed the FUL bag too in case they could use it.

It was perfect. It was exactly the thing that exactly solved a problem and they were so grateful.

They are not people of means, she told me, and this is what I could do.

I nearly cried. In pride in my child, in grief for theirs, and I thanked her for letting me help, too, without hesitation even when I didn’t know yet.

And now I know why I found and bought that bag.

One thing about pomegranate flowers: they are not shy. They start shouting in color before it’s officially spring and keep on coming till the earliest fruits are already ready to pick. Carefully.

Dandelions are nature’s cheerleader pompoms. Pomegranates are her bullthorn.

The green baby alpaca is here! No extra costs that I was told about.

Meantime, I…I… I’m torn somewhere between I have no words and I have lots of words but wow, if you ever wanted to find a fellow knitter in the wild and the KNITTER plates are already taken this is definitely the way to do it: this pattern on Etsy.

I’d just be afraid someone would rear-end me while staring at it. Don’t count the stitches, don’t count the! *Crunch*

Also: I skipped out on the whole Knitted Support Chicken fad but a pelican with fish in its beak? That pattern, I bought. My grandmother at 96 had a large glass candy bowl out next to her for my young kids when we visited; I can just see me in my easy chair at that great old age, pelican by my side offering finger puppets to one and all.

Although one could also put wrapped candies in there for the future great-grands, most definitely.

That’s what Gram did. There were several pounds’ worth in there. While my mom and I were trying to discretely nudge the kids to just take one (they were 5, 7, 9, and 11), Gram got a twinkle in her eye: she ignored us, looked straight at the kids, and said, Have some more!

They each picked and unwrapped and ate a second piece.

Have some more!

(Glances our way from the older two, like, uh, are we allowed?)

Have some more!

There was no hurry, they were being on their best behavior, they took turns.

Have some more!

She got them going to where they ran out of pocket space and were stuffing them, in one case, down his socks, desperately hoping Mom and Grammy (us two generations in between) were somehow, uh, not noticing, while Gram was managing not to laugh. She got all the way to her last, Have some more! when finally there were no more left to have. And she was quite fine with that.

We were walking to the car afterwards when the seven year old burst into tears.

What’s wrong!? Didn’t you have fun?

I DID! But I feel like I’m never going to see her again!

I gave her the biggest hug, suddenly wanting to burst into unexpected tears myself.

It was true. Gram quietly slipped away a few months later, a flight away from us. I figured out that what she had been doing, having lost her own mother as a young child, was making it so that her great grandchildren would remember her and how she had been on their side.

And they do.

So here’s my question: if you order yarn from a country (Britain) that’s had a 10% tariff slapped on them but I think that tariff has come and gone but it looks like it’s back, and the company didn’t add it to the bill, is everything peachy fine? Did Colourmart absorb the cost? Does it get stamped due on arrival? How does this work if the tariff gets re-slapped while it’s in transit? I see references to manufacturing there being under what we were supposed to learn was a terrible idea via the Great Depression, but retail sales, it seems unclear. It’s yarn, not a car.

It seems to be taking longer than usual to get here.

How do you run a mail-order business when your fixed costs are someone’s bouncy laser light on the wall that a cat is frantically clawing at?

Meantime, I finally got going again on that afghan start that I’d mostly ripped out and I’m past where I was and let me just lecture my future knitting self right here that yes it was absolutely worth the do-over. Much better.

But it will need more of that green shortly. I know Colourmart is trying.

Last night:

And so the Grinches puzzled and puzzled till their puzzler grew sore.

Maybe tomorrow, she said, I don’t want to do any more!

So they set it up on the spiral, (it’ll never go viral) with a few pieces missing. With the sections not connected, the thing’s kind of listing. A history of Earth, trilobites to elephant girth, under the same blue sky but what changes by and by!

Today:

Y’know, I told him, every time I walk past that darn thing out of the corner of my eye some part of my brain registers layered chocolate cake.

Him: Me, too! in surprise that he wasn’t the only one.