We seem to have talked the hand splint people into restocking. Good, and thank you for the help. If my husband should ever happen to step on one and explode the beads everywhere I know where to go, and I’m glad others can get those, too.

Meantime, I walked into the main post office about 4:00, looked at the long line of people stretching across inside the building and starting to double back, masked, but, Nope! Nope nopeity nope, not today.

My family of origin does a round-robin at Christmas, one sibling each each year. There are six of us.

I can never remember whose turn is whose–except that Morgan, when offered, loved the idea of a peach tree for his new house last year and proudly told us this summer that he’d eaten his first three Kit Donnells from it already: they were small but great.

One of my older sisters had a huge pine fall in a big wind storm a few months ago. It missed the main part of the house but there was a crane involved in lifting it off the destroyed patio awning and they did some remodeling in the aftermath.

So there was this big bare newly sunny spot in her back yard.

I asked her what she thought and got a good bit of enthusiasm back and so a bare-root Baby Crawford peach tree will be coming her way, a variety that ripens a few weeks off from Morgan’s so they can extend each other’s seasons in the sharing–and I sent her a pound of Andy’s dried extra-ripe Blenheim apricot slabs to hold her till it comes in a few months.

That Baby Crawford variety exists thanks to Andy. My siblings have/will have the varieties I most love from his farm.

So. I was all done with the Christmas shipping and I recycled a bunch of boxes I’d been saving just in case anything else popped up.

My little sister happened to mention on my birthday Sunday just to make sure I knew it that it was my turn to give to her this year.

Wait–but I thought–

–she was right.

Thanks, no trees for her–what she *really* wanted was some of those apricots. She knew how good they were.

She clearly had been really looking forward to them.

I’m quite glad I got it wrong because trees need all the head start you can give them and I would have wanted to give that one anyway and Christmas gave me an excuse, so, no regrets–more like total glee that two of my siblings get to grow their own peaches now, three, because the oldest already has her own.

And that is how I ended up back at Andy’s today.

I picked up a bottle of poison oak honey there, too, because that deep caramel not too sweet flavor and how else would she ever find out it existed? Or trust that with a name like that it would be okay to even try?

I don’t know how often the Honey Ladies rescue bee hives from that particular plant or want to and that is the only variety of honey I’ve ever succumbed to utter squirrelhood over: there’s a half gallon bottle of it buried deep in the cabinet to make sure I never run out.

Which I keep sure of by occasionally buying another small jar to actually, y’know, eat. But this one’s going to Anne.

Tomorrow. Along with three pounds of apricots. Hopefully there’ll be a less busy hour to ship them out.

Maybe I should add to that last post that after 40 years of marriage we’ve learned we each know best what we want and so “go buy it and it’s from me” is the norm here re gift-giving. Yes it’s great fun finding that one most perfect thing–but there’s no reason to sweat over it.

He was working again today, sitting up. His feet were getting cold, so I’m going to give a shameless plug here for my friends Ron and Teresa’s bison silk socks, because they were that one most perfect thing I found a few years ago and after trying them out he asked for more. He had a pair blended with merino, no silk, but after that first softer upgraded pair that was all he ever wanted on his feet again. Socks for Christmas was a longtime in-joke between us–until those. It’s still an in-joke but with definite appreciation thrown in now.

You can throw them in the dryer as well as the washer, but I don’t, and they were hanging where I’d left them drying waiting for him to be up to needing them again. I ran and got him a pair.

It was nice to have something so easy to do to make him so much more comfortable in his day.

My 6’8″er is a big guy and he’s been walking around the house in those pairs of socks since our quarantine began in February and they show no signs of wearing out. I’d say that over time they’re proving less expensive than wool ones.

Did anybody watch that trailcam video of a possum shoving a skunk into a pond and running away that I linked to yesterday?

Although really, that was just for me. It was that kind of a day and I needed anything to make me laugh. My husband woke up so sick–I spent the day trying to get fluids down him and increasingly wondering whether I should be calling for help, having gone through dehydration a few years ago so bad I ended up at the ER myself.

You really don’t want to go there right now if you don’t have to.

The kids called and I told them how it was. My friends Phyl and Lee came by with a birthday cranberry coffee cake, not coming in, not coming close other than to hand it to me outside and we visited a moment. I confessed to feeling overwhelmed at that point.

A whole lot of prayers started going up besides my own.

At 9:30 pm to my astonishment he sat up and drank a bit of apple juice and even ate a little bit of soft food. He wanted custard? Absolutely, and I ran and made custard. He ate a little. Today he finished off the lot of it as he worked.

The doorbell rang in the afternoon with a birthday present. He helped me eat some of that, too.

Deep breath.

Oh wait. I forgot to tell him that Sak had a pandemic-induced $75 postpaid price on that gorgeous tooled leather zipped tote that is as close to replacing my beloved cabled-knit-stitch-embossed one that is just too far gone now as I am ever going to find and did he know he got me a really pretty purse for my birthday? A bit hippy-dippy but then so am I.

Let me run go tell him that. He’ll feel great knowing he got me something so cool.

(Runs and tells him.)

He grinned and joked and teased and laughed and man it’s good to see him feeling that much like himself again like that.

George Schultz, who turned 38 the day I was born, turned 100 today and wrote a beautiful essay for the Washington Post.

He writes of attending a wreath-laying ceremony in Leningrad years ago, where his Russian counterpart and the interpreter found themselves in tears.

He answered their unexpected vulnerability with, “I, too, fought in WWII, and had friends killed beside me,” expressing his gratitude for all those who’d fought in this battle for having defeated Hitler–and with that he turned to the graves before them and gave them a crisp soldier’s salute. Their sacrifices and their loss mattered to him.

And with that he won the Soviets’ trust and by that trust the treaty to reduce nuclear warheads later got signed.

One man, in the right place, doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do and it changed the world.

Offering hope that in our own politics we can do a bit better than the possum and the skunk.

I’ve mentioned a few times the hand splints I wear at night that gave me back the use of my hands when I was hit with an onset of what was at first assumed to be rheumatoid arthritis thirty years ago and that are still essential to my being able to knit. Custom made. But they wear out. That’s gotten hideously expensive.

There had to be something out there, there just had to be…

Flipping through the pages. Carpal tunnel. Nope. Or rather, yeah some but that’s not most of the problem, those are way too short. For broken hands. Nope. Don’t want it past the middle joints of my fingers but I do want it up to that point. For stroke. Nope nope nope.

Many Amazon search results later, I finally found some off-the-shelf ones that were what I was looking for, just about infinitely sizeable and with the functions I was going to that physical therapist for (details in the review), and my relief was so intense that I wrote the highest-praise review they could ever have asked for–but not till I’d tried them for several nights running to be sure. I’m sure.

These are better than my old ones. I did not know that was possible. That beanbag pouch!

If you knit (or even if you don’t) and have had any problems with your hands, these were $13.99 each and at the moment it says they’re almost sold out. Get a pair. You’ll be glad you did. Hopefully they’ll restock. Let’s talk them into it.

I’m still lining mine with old thin cotton socks with the heel and toe cut out, just like I did with my plastic ones for thirty years, because old habits and all that.

Edited to add, this one looks very close to it (even if the initial picture doesn’t) but I haven’t seen it in real life yet to tell for sure.

Edited 12/16: The ones I bought are being restocked now.

Rain. Glorious, cold, shivery rain. Not the hundredth of an inch of a few weeks ago but an actual soaking that promises to continue on into the next week. It’s about two months overdue but better late than never.

Jimmy Fallon was laughing about it, because what else can you do, so I had to check it out and it’s true.

One person in my family loves Yankee Candles so I went to a crowded mall some years ago, something I rarely do this time of year (or any other, to be fair), and bought her one in a jar for Christmas. Or was it two. Vanilla scented, and even just sitting there unlit it was like having baked cookies in the room.

But it’s true. This year the company got slammed with a fair number of bad reviews: people complaining they’d been sent candles with no or almost no smell at all, wanting to know what had gone wrong with their manufacturing this year? It was just not up to snuff.

My husband grew up making spritz cookies with his mom and siblings every Christmas: most often done with the Christmas tree mold, green food coloring in the dough for that certain parched-pine look and red hots for stars. Add sugar glitter.

It was a wonder to him that my family had done no such thing. I didn’t even know, when we got married, what a spritz cookie was. Oh, that’s the name for those. Oh okay.

Food coloring and kids was enough of a potential and a few times actual disaster (on the bathroom cabinet! On the outside wall! It’s paint on wood!) that–yeah, and so most of the time when he wanted his Christmas spritz he got them because he went out and bought that food coloring and he made them with the kids himself. Me, I’m more the chocolate chips in oatmeal or cranberry-pecan pie bar type. I did at least pitch in occasionally, but most years they did it all.

We went through at least three different spritz makers, including a battery powered one to shoot them out of at one point so they could mass-produce them faster to take to the neighbors, but getting them not to come out too thick was hard and the more easily controlled hand-press type was just the way you do it and the imposter was abandoned.

But the best part, always, always, was making paper plates of them and ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and seeing their faces light up that the kids had done that for them.

The next generation has now taken on the task and declared it good. You put the stars just so.

Remodeling goof number one: twenty-seven years ago, the latest fad from Thermidor was to put a pop-up vent behind the cooktop. Someone we knew had that and she liked it. What sold us was the contractor saying that it would be far quieter than your standard hood because the motor for it would be on the roof and far away, and with my hearing, a lack of background noise is something to be highly sought after.

What he didn’t know is that the sound would reverberate all down that shaft, making it a lot louder than a standard one would have been. And when the part down at stove level refused to retract and close anymore it became a source of very cold air in the winter.

Goof number two: the architect’s specs called for a 30″ stove, but Richard wanted five burners. Okay, so, 36″. It wasn’t till the contractor installed the cabinets that he realized that he hadn’t changed them to match.

Meaning, our cabinets have overhung the stove from both sides all these years, which is great for the finish. Not.

And you can’t put in an overhead vent now because it would have to hang from below the cabinets and that would not leave room for the pots, much less stirring or seeing into them.

Unless you can put in a 30″ vent for a 36″ stove and I imagine the county would not be real happy with that idea.

So then the choices are to find another cooktop that shallow or look in the back of the yarn closet to see if we still have the leftover Corian piece (I’m not sure we do) and try to find someone to seam it when it’s 27 years old and make it still look good so we could have that 30″er. Or just replace the entire countertop, vent, cooktop, and did I mention the fridge is that old too and has been fixed several times and is leaking and just needs to go?

Nobody seems to make cooktops that shallow because they don’t make those vents anymore. With good reason: by pushing the stove forward the way it does, I have caught my sweaters on fire twice. You know how they say wool extinguishes flames? Let me tell you, it does. Angora got shaved close so it’s your friend too and that sweater looked like it had had a major procedure done at the vet’s but in both cases the fire went out before it got up to my chin and it didn’t take hold in the sweater, just blackened and shriveled the fuzzies on the surface.

Yeah. Fun times.

Apparently you can get a better, longer lasting finish on the wood of the cabinetry now than we were allowed then. With ours, you can see where the sun came through the skylight directly.

Lots of end-of-year sales, and a hubby going, One more month at least. We have to have the vaccine first before we let people work in here.

We really don’t want to re-remodel the kitchen. We just want a working stove.

We’re going to have to replace our gas cooktop. Like, asap.

We remodeled our kitchen 27 years ago with high-end Thermidor appliances and they were a disaster: the low-cycling burners were designed so that they fused shut and never worked again if you were ever to turn them to high (as explained afterward by the repairman, who was sympathetic, with the warranty getting us nowhere with the dealer) and both ovens’ motherboards fried just outside of warranty, with a quote of $850 plus labor for each. Same quote as the stove. We replaced the double oven and kept the half-dead stove. The other half actually outlived the average stove by a dozen years.

Another repairman later noted that self-clean ovens tend to fry their motherboards and that one should not use that feature.

So. I’m suddenly trying to learn everything I can about 36″ cooktops.

A Thermidor will never come in our house again–he felt as strongly about that as I do.

My problem is, scrolling around, there was one and only one whose looks stopped me in my tracks–I LIKE that one. Bluestar? What’s a Bluestar?

So I went looking for the price, rolled my eyes, said well of course it is, but still: more expensive than Viking? Yow.

I would dearly love to hear anything anybody loves or hates about theirs, any size or brand. Consumer Reports in my experience has become less reliable than some of the appliances they describe, other than obliquely by letting people publish reviews on their site.

For reliability, I’d be going with Bosch, whose appliances I’ve actually been consistently happy with–except that they don’t make one. (EDIT: Lowe’s has one! And for $1200 less than the Bluestar!)

Anyone?

Hoping the paywall doesn’t get in the way, please go read this: an essay by a Jewish doctor tending to a man with severe covid who was covered in tattoos that conveyed that his new ER patient would be happy to see that doctor and the black and Asian nurses tending to him dead.

In that moment, though, the only thing he wanted was to survive and he begged breathlessly for help.

I am grateful for the doctor’s honesty in saying that, internally, it took him a moment to deal with it.

I kept wanting to tell him, it’s okay to be human.

It is clear that the experience left a good man even more determined to be more compassionate towards all. He didn’t get to hear what happened to the guy after that; ER doctors pretty much never do. All he could do was silently wish him well wherever he was now, and hope.

I want to throw in a little of my Mormon faith here: in the life to come, when we come into the presence of the immensity of the Love there, if we have always tried to follow it, whatever we may call it, however we may think of it, every time even someone who doesn’t believe in God at all Thinks Good Thoughts towards the well-being of someone who needs it, we have served that Love.

We will recognize it and belong to it and it will claim us for its own.

Because we always did, by our own choices. No matter what we called ourselves or it here.

Thank heavens for the good examples along the way that help us see how we want to be like when we grow up, all our lives long, like this man.

I wonder if his patient had ever experienced selfless love like that before. I sure hope it changed him for the better.

We’ve all heard about how Dutch Elm Disease wiped out elms across North America.

Turns out, that’s why pollen season is so bad now.

There were so many dead trees and so much replanting.

And I quote:

“1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture. The book advised: “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.”

And that became How It Is Done. In species that have male and female trees, males were planted in urban landscapes everywhere and that became what was available in nurseries, since they grow new specimens from cuttings, not seeds, and it was just how it was till nobody knew or noticed anymore.

Until the guy in that article. Who is campaigning to get cities to pay attention to what they’ve got and diversify.

Another quote:

“Where human sperm each have a single tail, or flagellum, gingko sperm have around a thousand. “Once the pollen gets in your nose, it will germinate and start swimming up there to get to where it’s going,” Ogren says. “It’s pretty invasive.”

Mercifully, he only described the one tree as being that way.

And now climate change, I presume because it’s mismatching the temperature cycle from the sunlight cycle, is inducing all these poor lonely males to throw even more pollen in the air.

Whereas had they planted all female trees in the first place there would be no nuisance seeds and no pollen.

Who knew?

There were three people being helped and one ahead of me in line at the post office. Even this early, I’ve never seen so few there in December.

But the stuff I ordered for the grands to come here first so I could wrap it–those haven’t come yet. So much for bypassing Big South American River. Turns out Monday we go on total lockdown for three weeks, and I don’t think going out to ship presents to young children counts as an essential trip under the new guidelines.

2020 is almost over.

We’ll figure it out.

Legos came in plain squares and rectangles of mostly red and blue and the occasional green or yellow when I was a kid, one or two sizes each and plain and hard and uninviting and I remember my grandmother wanting me to go play with the ones in her basket and me feeling like, Are you kidding me? How old do you think I am? Toddlers build towers!

As they got far more sophisticated I didn’t see for the longest time why a kid should just assemble from a directions sheet whatever someone else had dreamed up. Why not use their own imagination?

As if I ever did with them, so never mind.

But yarn! I remember watching my mother’s hands assembling plain straight string into beautiful, warm, cabled sweaters. Her projects always got my attention and the firmest determination that someday I was going to be able to do that, too. I remember studying the puzzle of her motions, the steady, accumulative loop-over-loop.

My husband’s family has always loved puzzles.

Watching my seven and nine year old grandsons showing off their Lego creations over FaceTime, I finally really got it: they’re putting together not just a puzzle but a 3-D one that helps develop fine motor coordination and their ability to envision what comes next and to check and correct and not be satisfied till it’s right and when they’re done, it’s not just a bunch of plastic bricks that fall right back apart but an actual toy that they play with with pride.

It teaches them about taking care of things that have unseen fragility.

Of things falling apart, of resilience when they do if they get a bit too exuberant flying their planes and that if work must be done to repair it, it means something to you, then you sit down and you spend the time and you repair it.

A frog/reknit, if you will: the resources remain, all it requires is you.

If their baby brother plays bam smash crash at them you forgive him, because, he doesn’t know, and they’re old enough that they get that.

But soon enough he will and it will be his turn.

Their sister’s already there.

But for her sixth birthday, and to be as different from Christmas the next day as possible, I decided she’s ready for the tactility of making her own fabric, too.

The old-fashioned metal loom from my childhood, with that bit of a loop shape at the top of each little bar to help hold your work in place. Cotton loops: you can make an actually useful (if small) potholder, unlike acrylic which could melt in high heat. Harrisville did it right.

That present, at least, is being sent straight there.

Re all that Christmas shopping stuff, there was one thing I hadn’t actually done yet. It just seemed like I needed to know more about it first, if for no other reason than that the one on the wishlist was discontinued and Amazon was suggesting something that sounded like the latest version, but it wasn’t something I knew anything about. Best to check.

So Christmas present or no, I asked that child’s spouse last night whether this type of fishing reel was a good substitute for that one. Same weight and length and apparent strength, anyway.

Text in return: I don’t think this message was intended for me.

Me: It is, it’s from their wish list.

Stunned silence.

Return text in the morning: our toddler likes to bang on keyboard keys at any opportunity.

Concurrent return email from said spouse: I don’t know how that ended up on my list. I don’t know what it is! Thanks so much for checking.

And now there is something that person actually wants on its way to them from a list that’s been carefully gutted and cleaned.

You know, there are a few things in knitting that I admire greatly because the thing is gorgeous and it is a thing that I will never do.

The new Knitty (a free online knitting magazine) came out, and my friend Anne’s mittens are in there and those look like a ton of fun and if we ever needed mittens here I’d make a pair of those in a heartbeat.

But man. Those socks. Those knee socks. Wow.