Coyotes, once exterminated in San Francisco, have been back for about twenty-five years now, forming packs and territories and creating really cool sound effects for people in lockdown during Covid. There are about 200 now.

Several dogs being walked have been taken, with small white dogs being the apparent preference. A five year old child playing in a group at the park got attacked recently and needed stitches. That aggressive coyote is no more and they would test its brain for rabies–if the current administration hadn’t laid off the Federal civil servant who does that. It’s in a freezer, waiting for sanity to return.

One young male feeling the population pressure swam to Alcatraz.

The San Francisco packs’ DNA all tracked with animals from north of the city–they did not come up the open space preserves on the peninsula. The assumption then was that they came trotting across the Golden Gate bridge, but there were so few in Marin County that there would have been no reason for them to take that risk weaving among all those cars.

But here’s where it takes a turn: two different sources told this coyote enthusiast that the leg-trap ban that passed in a state proposition so angered one guy they knew that he blamed the liberals in the City by the Bay and sought revenge.

By using a different trap, a loophole in the law, set to hurt (badly) but not kill.

And then, having separated them from their packs and territories, he drove those injured coyotes across the Golden Gate Bridge and set them free in the Presidio. Repeatedly.

I don’t think he was expecting them to become celebrated, but mostly they have been.

Although I imagine the parents of that little kid would like a word.

I knew the acidity of that dish was a bad idea.

Never mind what I was going to write before the result so rudely interrupted me. (At least this is rare.) And granted mine was from Crohn’s, not cancer.

But if you’re reading this and you’ve been putting it off but you know you should, go schedule a colonoscopy. Yeah I know they’re fun. Trust me. Do it.

The eye is pleased with things in odd numbers, when the number of things is low enough to be able to tell. So, three trees, right?

There will be four members of that family when this goes to its recipients. One tree for each of them, because you don’t want to leave anybody out.

I wrestled with those conflicting ideas; each redwood is up the hill from the one before so I’ve had time to stare and study and decide. But in the end, that baby won: he is getting his own. (Starting in a couple more rows.)

They are all done gansey style rather than in a lace pattern that would present more obviously because yes I have yarn overs where the waves lap the shore below, but where the blanket will be covering the baby up while he’s very little? Let’s keep that a solid fabric. For warmth. For at least partially avoiding little fingers yanking on the holes. And because I’m the knitter and I said so.  

I had seen pictures of the pattern and impassioned reasons for making the red hat with the sharp decrease lines at the top with the braided chain and tassel below. A knitter resurrected the pattern from the history of Norwegian resistance against Nazi rule; the Germans eventually caught on and threatened to arrest anyone who wore one.

I still didn’t much like the pattern.

At the same time, I could see how it would be the one you’d want to be wearing while protesting ICE. It’s like the pussy hats ten years ago: everybody would know you took the time to make your protest known. Others could find you in solidarity. The photos from the Woman’s March showed just how amazing that could become.

Today I actually found the website where the pattern is (Ravelry link to it here. Crochet version here.)

Here’s how the New York Times got my attention about it: it doesn’t matter if you’re going to knit that hat. What matters is that that five bucks for the pattern is not going to the designer nor their yarn store–it is going straight to the people helping people in Minnesota right now. The ones taking people food and clothing, the ones helping them pay their rent while things are so closed down.

ICE is arresting people without warrants, holding them in the Whipple building, stealing their phones and coats and then dumping some of them at the snow at the back of the building. Frostbite can set in fast. Volunteers are there to rescue and warm them. I want to help with that.

Needle and Skein‘s owners have given out $250,000 so far in $5 hat pattern sales plus donations from people who want to do more. There’s a major run on red wool yarn.

Five bucks. My next Zoom hat. Who’s with me.

The light is returning and the birds know it and they have started to show up more, picking out nesting spots, the hormones just starting to kick in.

I knew better than to park directly under our street tree–it had three nests last year, it’s a popular spot even if the storms took one–but I did it anyway. Habit.

It is safe to say our old Prius is a mess. And it’s not just the birds; the tree drips this time of year. I kept waiting for the gas gauge to go down enough to fill it at the carwash place.

Finally!

You put in the credit card, the little prompt comes up, Do you want a carwash today? Yes/No.

Except that–it didn’t. Huh. Maybe they changed the program. I’m sure it’ll ask me if I want that added after it’s done filling then.

It didn’t.

I considered. I puzzled. How does a carwash place not let you pick to do the carwash? Did they move that function over to the screen where you punch in your code right before it starts up? But what code? There were no temporary signs posted, looks like you could drive right on in like always… I mean, my car may be old but it really really needs a good cleaning off. My neighbors would surely be ever so grateful.

Just then a big white utility van pulled in. It turned around. It backed up to the end of the carwash building. And on the side of it, in large print, were the words, CARWASH REPAIR.

Oh.

But, but… That carwash is just there, it has always just been there, it works, I’ve totally taken it for granted.

Who knew there were enough carwashes and enough of them breaking down in close enough proximity and close enough times to warrant a clearly successful but also clearly very limited-in-scope business with a nice truck like that? And logo, too?

Well, as the old GPSes used to say, Recalculating… I found the standard gas station squeegee and soapy water and washed my own silly car. Not the whole thing–it was way too much to do to whoever might encounter that bucket of water next–but at least the front and back windows and the worst of a side one. Took me three tries and some fingernailing to get the bird poop off the windshield but it felt great when it was gone. I could see clearly again in all directions!

All the way home I felt the poem of it: that truck was the good people of Minnesota and elsewhere coming out to repair and restore our democracy and our rule of law we had so taken for granted. Clarifying the view.

While I did the small things I knew how to do to remedy what I could while trying not to burden others.

I parked on the other side of our driveway when I got home so that the birds could create their homes and live their new-life lives of the coming Spring with only gratitude from me.

There have been two visiting nurses since last summer (plus two substitutes we never saw again) making sure Richard’s bone infection in his foot doesn’t get worse.

The one who comes most often got a hat last week.

The other, the head honcho, comes much less frequently so I was delighted today when it was her. She’s the one who read one of his doctors the riot act over the phone from our kitchen when he was refusing to acknowledge that the infection was still there and still needing to be treated–when in fact it was spreading.

Got that tamped back down just in time. Let’s not do the sepsis thing, okay?

While she worked, I was in the other room going through the the finished-hat stash, wondering why I hadn’t run in the ends on that blue one, and so that got done.

But the one in the Indiecita colorway: that was the one. I was so sure of it. I moved it to the top of the stack and then admired all those pretty colors in the sunlight, both the brights and the quiets in those hats, before getting back to the afghan at hand.

She finished up and the front door opened.

Wait! I ran to her. Teal Feather, Blue Jean, Volcan, Piedras, and the Indiecita, I held them out: Pick a color.

Oh there was no question that one on top it’s gorgeous! She laughed for surprise and joy and put it on her head and gave me a hug and about skipped down the walkway, so happy! She got to have something I made! She got to have colors she loved! It’s so soft and warm!

I tell you: she’d earned that. She had so much earned that.

Dannette stopped by today, one of my old Purlescence friends. That shop’s been gone about ten years now.

An Anya apricot seedling got us to finally reconnect in person. I had two up for grabs: a 42″ one in a big pot that was going to be a handful to transport and a 24″ one in a one gallon pot. Both were started last year and I’m sure the one will catch up quickly to the other once its roots have some space.

The big one had clearly sounded good beforehand because it’s a nice-sized tree but in person, the small one was so much easier to just pick up and put in her car that it was an easy call.

We caught up a bit. The cute baby that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee bounced in her arms after a book signing that we carpooled for to San Francisco is somehow 12 now, with her oldest in high school.

I reminisced about being at knit night at Purlescence when I excused myself and walked outside to take a call and then walked back in and announced to the crowd, This is my son. He’s calling to say he’s engaged! The whole room roared congratulations and huzzahs as I held the phone out for him to be able to hear.

His oldest is in high school too, now.

Times change around us, we get older, but with friends you just pick up right where we left off.

She’s finally going to have her apricot tree!

Coming along. The gansey-stitch redwood trees on the right have begun.

It was reported that about a hundred of Alex Pretti’s neighbors joined in near his home last night in the bitterest cold to light candles and sing together, “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine” in tribute to the way he had lived his life.

It is not in our church’s songbook for children and there were so many choices they could have made–and yet this was the one that was picked and planned and practiced before his name was ever known to the world.

We had stake conference today, the gathering of five wards in one grand get-together. Not just our ward but most of the Peninsula. As part of the service they called all the little children ages three to about eight to come to the front and sing. Several of the youngest needed their mommies or daddies to walk them up there when they saw all those faces looking at them; some followed older siblings boldly, ready for this.

This Little Light of Mine.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one fighting back tears at that simplest of deliveries of a message that hit home.

G_d knew. He knew. The grief and the horror soon to come and how much we would need this very thing.

The message, through young children, that our one, own, inept, imperfect little light matters, that we must each hold it up against the darkness. Together we do create a brightness and it will prevail.

I don’t know how to cope with it other than to write it out. Feel free to skip if you need to for your own sake. It’s been so much.

I was not going to watch the video. Which quickly became videos, because so many Minnesotans have turned out in the bitterest cold to bear witness with their friends and their phones.

But my friends are there and they are experiencing this madness in person, and so in the end I did.

A woman found herself somehow a little too far away from others and the ICE predators went after her. They sprayed her in the face and as she bent over in agony, they pounced, pulling her downwards to beat her.

The white tall male ICU nurse from the VA had been recording but that quickly became not enough for him and he went to her aid, moving as if to first tend to her stricken face and then trying to pull them off her.

The last decision in his life was to defend the innocent from harm no matter what they might do to him for it.

ICE pulled them apart and pushed him to his knees, they bashed his head with tear gas canisters, then spotted what he had a permit for. One reached down into the scrum and walked away with it–how ’bout them jack-booted government thugs some claim their 2A rights are all about–and then, with him disarmed and on the ground and never having threatened them in any way other than with the truth-telling of his phone, they shot him in the back. And again. And again. And again. And again.

All this started with electing a man who rapes children who resurrected the South’s pre-Civil War Slave Patrols against all non-whites.

Now the dementors he’s let loose are fighting anyone who won’t surrender their every right as an American, especially against anyone who by showing compassion shows them who *they* are so they respond with murderous fury.

The state sued to have the scene be preserved for investigation. ICE defied them.

First they came for… goes the poem.

Maybe, said my sweet husband a few days ago, trying hard to find any way to make any sense of the ongoing horror of all this, maybe all this will be what finally gets America to turn away from her racism for good.

When spinning fibers into yarn, there’s always this tradeoff: how much twist vs how much softness do you want.

Twisting adds friction. Friction helps hold the fiber ends in place. It adds to the longevity of the garment you make the yarn into. Too much can make even pure rabbit hair feel like the roughest burlap. (I did that once just to prove it. I didn’t waste much, just enough.)

Now, I would never even aspire to buy a dress like this but I might daydream knitting something like it. At thousands of dollars and that brand name you would expect it to be of the softest baby cashmere, spun to hold onto that sweet feel. Scrumptious. (Although disappointing that they don’t show the model’s face. C’mon, Loro Piana, you’re using her coloring to stage your product well but skipping out on her humanity? Less than cool.)

But.

For me it would have to be dyed a color not associated with ICE uniforms.

Why I don’t think I would attempt to make one with potential mill ends of such yarns: picture sitting down in that thing.

Pilling is going to happen the most where the most contact does, especially with the addition of weight against it. Can you see walking around in an extremely expensive fuzzbutt alert?

I may just be fable-ing fox and grapes here, since you’d have to have far more money than I to even begin to consider buying such a thing.

What Aesop probably never knew is that the coveted grapes–as I think of how intense wealth has skewed the humanity of some of its more notorious owners these last few years–are poisonous to canines.

The look on his face when I told him that number!

Okay, there’s a plumber I like, Lee, good guy, a one-man show, been doing this a long time, knows his stuff, but he wasn’t available last time I needed one.

I thought about calling the company of the young guy who had come in order to ask him to, y’know, fix his mistake, if it was his mistake, but I just couldn’t. $850 and I’m still dealing with all this and my carpet’s been wrecked and the sunk-cost fallacy was becoming a little too literal.

It must have kept bugging Lee, because when he was done he felt compelled to talk about it.

I thought the other guy had said he’d replaced everything under the sink but the faucet. Turns out he had not. The two on-off switches were very old and they had failed.

I could attest to that–I’d tried one more time last night to see if I could get them to close and the result was that that five gallon pot couldn’t manage that much overnight. The floor of the cabinet was at last starting to dip heavily downwards and the edge of the carpet in the living room was wet again.

Yeah, he said, they forgot to put a washer in. That’s why it still leaked. That part? he said, pointing to the U-tube. Costs $16 and an hour of his time at most to put in. Then he explained, That company got sold about two years ago and the new owners are pushing their people hard for upsells.

Ah–so that’s why the guy waited for his friend to come over to get me a quote on how he was going to fix the damage to the cabinet floor and the wall behind it. (As I suddenly realized I was apparently paying the first plumber per hour for that, too.) I told Lee, I wasn’t feeling it. Didn’t agree to going forward with it.

He spelled out his own bill: $50 and $22 and $8 for these parts, $80/hour for his time, to say, And THAT is how it’s done.

Nothing drips.

Everything works.

The new faucet looks gorgeous. (Richard laughed when I said that to him. I said, It’s not what you would have picked? He said, No, but it makes you happy and that’s what I want. He is a sweetheart.)

The refrigerator line is hooked up again.

Next time Lee’s too busy I am absolutely going to wait till he’s not.

Went to the post office yesterday and was quietly admiring the sweater of the woman several people ahead of me. She had nothing in her hands.

The line did not move by a single customer in ten minutes and I was debating putting my boxes on the floor and pulling out the latest hat project. But didn’t. Finally it was her turn, and I couldn’t hear the conversation, I just got the faces and the tones of voice: sweater woman presenting what she thought was a reasonable request, clerk lady quickly turning to sounding like what I can only describe as almost triumphantly unhelpful.

Finally, the lady in the thick single-ply blue top-down hand knit gave up and turned to go in disgust.

I’m picturing myself back when they told me they could not pay out the insurance on a package that was a “this must never be lost” but was, and being blown off and being told it had to be missing for one more day than that before they could make good on it.

Five minutes after I got home I got the message that they had miraculously found it. Right there in that building after a month or two AWOL. I guess I’d put the fear of payout into them.

I hope they didn’t lose something she’d knit for someone.

Whether her issue gets resolved too or not, I wanted her day to go better than that, so as she went past me I asked her if she’d knit her sweater.

She had–but in her moment of trying not to voice how she felt at that clerk she took it out on the yarn: she grabbed a bit of fabric near her elbow and told me, Yeah, but it pills!

It’s beautiful! I said as she continued on by.

And it was.

And that’s the last thing she heard walking out of that post office.

I got the same clerk. She knew I’d seen all that. Maybe she even was glad I’d tried to make things better for the woman. Or maybe it was that because we were actually doing a transaction, her job required that she ask me at the end to click the pointer at the screen to mark whether I was smiley face or sad face at how I’d been helped.

Her face was such a funny mixture of pretty please!!! and this bared-teeth smile that was trying too hard that I fought back the ‘you have got to be kidding me’ impulse, the laugh-out-loud one, too, and gave her her hoped-for smile.

One for each of them. Fair’s fair.

Next year there will be no happy anticipation of the best ten days or so of the summer when the Kit Donnell peaches are ripe at Andy’s because there will be no Andy’s.

Raintree is a nursery my sister shopped at when she lived in Washington. Loved the place.

Nobody else seems to stock that variety this year, or if they did, people who know a good thing have snapped it up. I sure hope so. It worried me that a big wholesale grower has taken it off their list; it cannot be allowed to vanish when Andy’s goes. He and Kit created it. The peaches are too juicy and the skins too thin to hold up to commercial mass production. The flavor!

Today we finally decided and now Raintree’s stock is officially down by one.

When I put its roots into the ground we should have music to celebrate: how about, Another One Bites the Dust?

So I was doing my walking time last night and saying a prayer, telling G_d the obvious and that I needed to know what to do about that water coming up into the rug.

Suddenly I knew. I KNEW. I mean, I didn’t know know but I knew!

So of course I ran to Richard to tell him that.

Well, go and look, then!

And there it was. The dishwasher was running and the water was streaming out underneath the sink to the ruined cabinet floor. Yes a $$$ major plumbing fix happened last month, but not that particular part. But that’s why I hadn’t thought of it, I thought everything under there was fixed.

I put my biggest dye pot underneath it. I didn’t know if it would run like that all night or just while the dishwasher emptied or what.

There were over four gallons in the morning. I couldn’t just empty it into that sink (actually I probably could have), I had to carry it outside. On second thought, I hope the detergent doesn’t kill the Chinese elm on that side of the house, I should have carried it down the hall to the bathroom but my back was distracting me.

A new faucet is on order.  The old one leaked a quart or two over the course of today, a whole lot less than I was afraid of, and I am not turning the dishwasher on again till the new Delta and its intact supply lines are in there.

Phew.