The power was going to be down for eight hours today for system maintenance work at our end of the city, they warned us.

So we cooked our way through a bunch of stuff in the freezer and fridge this week. Remember the ice in the paper cup with a penny on top for checking how much your freezer has thawed out? Turns out ours held on better than I would have imagined–and that penny was very comforting. Highly recommended.

So. Got up. Made our morning hot cocoa, constantly checking the time. Yesterday’s blueberry/orange and pumpkin/chocolate muffins (use’em up, use’em up, make’em shelf stable bake bake bake) were ready.

Finally, 45 minutes late, the lights went out–with my phone immediately buzzing loudly that they were going to stay out those extra 45 minutes.

Its aging battery is good for about two hours of actual use and there would be no recharging today. No electronic distractions.

I am late to knowing about it, but a week ago someone mentioned Clara Parke‘s book “Vanishing Fleece” and my copy arrived yesterday.

My hands need frequent breaks these days and that book was just the thing to alternate sets of rows with.

Her description of the shop “A Verb for Keeping Warm” was so descriptive and so “Yes! That’s IT!” on my part. I had no idea she’d gone to college with the owner and I loved that she’d been there, too.

She lives in a town that a friend of mine from high school did for years and was a state representative from. You know I have to ask her if she knows… And my friend’s husband, who was the reporter/publisher/the everything of the town’s local paper before he died.

The baby afghan progressed. Amazing how much faster it goes when it’s 105 stitches fewer and no intarsia. The book got read cover to cover. Even after the power came back on at five hours.

To my fellow knitters? I came away with the thought, we’ve done more than we knew to help keep the last of American woolen mills alive. And we need to do a lot more.

This was ten rows ago and now, right at 4×4″ from the edge, I am onto the start of the patterning.

Or rather staring at it. Doing the numbers again, trying to figure out how it could possibly be off center across the row by seven stitches when the count came out right but then but but but.

I’ll get back to you on that.

Edited to add: Oh. Duh. Got it. Fixed. Onward!

I’m finding I’m enjoying the start of the gray baby blanket. The Rios is silky-soft with a bit of luminousness in the daylight and just that slight bit of heatheriness. It has happily claimed my time ahead.

I found a pattern I really like but I didn’t like how it starts, and it has this weird upward poof at the center. Less so for the author’s, really much so for some who’ve made it.

I thought of various fixes, including crocheting a flat circle and saying the trees are growing out from the world, but the idea of not knowing how it all would really pan out till I’d made an entire blanket–but wait. Actually, the thing that I think really stopped me was that it was a forest scene.

I love it. Someday I’m going to knit it (and get that center right.) But it needs to be the deep green of the woods back East that I grew up in and that is not the color the expectant mom wants.

So I was thumbing through my Barbara Walker stitch treasuries again (every knitter should have the red and blue ones) and a quick dash through a little of Ravelry again–and this time I found it.

And (grabbing a different Treasury) that should be in there, too.

Gauge swatch time.

Math.

Eyeballing.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I’ve got it, and it’ll tell me more the further I go but I think this one is actually already all planned out, totally unlike last time.

If I told you it’ll have a forest after all would you be surprised?

And it is a go!

I got myself to do 1876 stitches in ribbing yesterday because knitting is a stitch marker for time and I knew I would always remember that I’d finished it on Mother’s Day–as long as I actually did so.

I did it! I finished it! I told Richard. And then confessed… Except for running in the ends of that ribbing.

Well then it’s not finished.

Grrr/he’s right/okay. Did it.

And there you go. My Catoctin Mountain afghan with the nearby pick-your-own orchard. I’m hoping for much better pictures later–there’s a lot of detail in those clouds, and I’m still debating about embroidering some moss on those boulders–but I couldn’t wait to show off.

When someone who needs to know someone knows, knows who needs someone who knows…

Jean’s daughter spoke in church today. Someone had left a glorious tulip arrangement at her door. Happy Mother’s Day? No note.

Later she saw an elderly neighbor, who said it was from her: she knew it was her first Mother’s Day without her mom and just wanted her to know she was thinking of her.

Somewhere in the conversation she mentioned how good it was to have her husband home.

? Why wouldn’t he be…?

The neighbor’s story spilled out of her.

They had, for all these many years, driven to Yosemite every year to renew their vows, so of course they went this year, too.

Her husband had decided to take a hike (and by the sound of it, it was one he knew well.) He would be back by–

–but he wasn’t.

Hours later, it was dark and there was still no sign of him. She notified the rangers. A search was begun.

He had lost the trail. He had fallen. He had hit his head and found himself in blood and confusion.

Some time in the morning after he went missing, a rescuer found the 88-year-old man, suffering hypothermia, and took off his own warm clothes and wrapped them around him. To guide him back to safety, he had the old man put his hands on the rescuer’s shoulders–and the rescuer then had had to walk backwards.

But they did it. He found him, he got him to safety, then to the nearest emergency room.

The elderly man insisted on renewing his vows with his wife back in Yosemite.

Then she drove him to the hospital here.

And now he is home.

He is still with her.

And she thought of how much Jean’s daughter would be missing her mom, and did something about it, and thereby gave herself permission to tell a kind, caring friend what the two of them had just gone through.

Knowing how much comfort Jean’s daughter would take in her beloved’s safety and recovery.

Now it’s just a matter of defeating the critters. Wish me luck.

Typing fast, it’s late, we went out for ice cream afterwards…

Went to a concert a friend was playing in. Ran into another friend: someone who got one of my apricot seedlings two years ago, only now it’s about this tall, she said, waving her hand at the top of her head.

Cool!

A weird little puzzle for you:

I am knitting the ribbing with two strands, one large ball, one smaller. They sit there side by side getting occasionally yanked as I pull the next bit of yarn towards me, but they are not rolling around each other and they’re not entangling nor really moving much at all.

So how in the name of physics is it that the strand of the smaller ball keeps getting wrapped around the other? Always in the same direction, and to the point that twice a row I have to stop and unwind them lest the growing kinks wreck the feel and look of the thing.

The two splitty strands in a very dark blue against black wooden needles with the yarn constantly weaving back and forth for the knit one purl ones means I can’t really take my eyes off what I’m working on to investigate the shenanigans of those two balls as I go.

But it’s been consistent. And mystifying. If the yarn were overspun, that might at least feel like it makes some sense even if it doesn’t, but if I let a length of it hang down from a ball it hangs straight. As it should.

Huh.

…Which I never do…

…And I won.

Now to start on the other side with the other ball. (I didn’t have to splice on the cast-off, I didn’t have to splice on the cast-off, I can’t believe I didn’t have to splice on the cast-off!)

Picking up stitches along an edge is right down there with doing seed stitch: things I tend to put off.

I promised myself this was the week, and today I picked up the afghan, now in its fifth month, and I did it, I picked those up. One, two, skip one, one, two, skip one, one two, skip one….

Because (and I learned this long ago the hard way) knitted stitches are not square and going sideways from the ones you’re working from in ribbing, if you pick up every single one you’ll make a ripple that will never lie flat, not to mention the extra yardage and time it takes that you could be spending picking up more stitches on the other side and getting that over with, too.

Seven rows down seven to go on this side.

It feels like a mystery that somehow after all this time, that’s all it needs and then I won’t ever get to knit on this particular afghan again. Right when it’s at its most glorious.

When I give people things knit in superwash wool, I tell them it won’t shrink.

Although, a more accurate description would be, it boomerangs.

Sheep’s wool, unlike from other animals, has these microscopic scales that, when you add in water, temperature change, and agitation, interlock and latch onto each other: the wool shrinks and sometimes it ripples all funny but it can be very useful for all kinds of purposes when you want it turned into felt.

A superwash treatment coats those scales so they just sliiide right on past each other.

All by way of saying, my carry-around project suddenly isn’t anymore and in my surprise I forgot to take its picture first.

As it dries it will shrink back closer to the size it was coming off the needles, with some variance for the fact that lace stitches of themselves relax out the moment they’re wet.

So. Malabrigo Rios, Gemini colorway, US 7 needles, 90 stitches to start, and if you look closely there’s this slight jog (more like the jogger was limping) about a third of the way up where instead of doing a plain row between the yarn over rows, I put in an extra yarn over at each point where the next one would go, ie on the equivalent of the wrong-side row. That took my stitch count to 99 to give a little bit of shape rather than just a straight tube to the thing.

Not only is the cowl wet, it’s upside down in the photo. But that’s okay, we can still have nice things.

Someone was at church today whom I saw at the play last night but did not recognize.

I had no idea she was the granddaughter of one of the members whom we had all been asked to pray for a few years ago: she had been pregnant, then the pandemic began, then she found out she had stomach cancer.

It had not looked good.

Today is the first Sunday of the month, when in the Mormon Church people take turns coming up and addressing the congregation as the Spirit so moves them.

She stood.

She was so grateful for all those prayers, and for the ones she knew were to come because there had recently been some bad news again… And that was all she said about that.

The important part, she wanted us to know, is that our good works matter. Our love matters. It matters. Always. Never hesitate.

Later, during a Sunday School discussion, wanting her to know she was not alone on the human front as well as the heavenly, I described being in a hospital bed fifteen years ago too ill to do anything for myself much less anybody else and very very close to death.

Except: I was still me. If I had to go through this (and obviously I had no choice in the matter), then the one thing I could still do was I could pray for every single person who came into my hospital room.

And you can’t pray for someone, and mean it, without loving them.

One doctor confessed later that he’d written on my chart, Patient looks deceptively well. Do not be deceived. Because I was too cheerful.

I said, I knew that the doctors and staff in the hospital see people in their worst moments. If I could love every one of them, that could reverberate forward through all the years they serve there. It could help them to see the best in other patients in whatever circumstances the way I was doing with them, it could potentially ease the burdens on thousands and thousands of people.

The young mom was going, emphatically, YES! YES! You could see the relief in her face that someone got it, how she’d felt and dealt with her own experience a few years ago and that was rapidly coming at her again, someone knew, that what it had been like for her had been like that for me, too. And the result had been blessings. So many blessings. Oh the stories we both could have told each other.

I so loved her for her loving–everybody.

And renewed my prayers for Jordan. And her family, and her medical team. That much, I can do.

And it is no small thing.

We will all be telling the tale with a laugh for a whole long time to come.

We have in our ward a woman whose heart belongs to the theater. She’s been writing plays for the community since before I was born, often at the church with and for the kids.

But it had been a number of years. Colette is 91 now. The bishop asked her if she wanted to do a production again–and she was instantly the happiest I’ve seen her in a goodly while. She felt seen. She wanted the kids to feel seen. We’re on!

And so there were rehearsals every Tuesday for Jack in the Beanstalk. Two wards were involved, not just ours, over a hundred people got into it.

Tonight was showtime.

So: Jack lives in Texas. His mother is a witch, a sweet fairy godmother type, sparkles and all, but a fairly inept one. She tells him to sell their cow and go buy some magic beans so they can make their fortune.

Bull, he corrects her.

Right. Bull.

So off he goes, wandering through various story lines, including: Hawaii (we have a seriously good ukulele player in the ward, and watching one of the hula dancers I suddenly realized oh that’s right her mom grew up there), there was Mary Poppins and adorable little girls who about brought down the house, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat (which I think was included in honor of the late JoAnne K, who’d sewn that incredible coat years and years ago for one of those productions and which instantly delighted a whole lot of us adults who knew. Joseph was the tall teenage second-generation of these productions), there was New York City with little boys wearing Mickey Mouse ears and long narrow tails and throwing pizza boxes and chip bags in the air in great delight. Rats in NYC.)

And at long last a dance and a solo by a bunch of men in suits with briefcases playing Wall Street.

They had been searching. They needed a logo.

They saw Jack. He had a bull! That was it! That was perfect! Sell it to us!

No can do, says Jack: I promised my mom I would only sell it for a beanstalk.

WE CAN DO THAT! They exulted. Out came half a poster from offstage: Bean. We have an IPO and we can make you part of it! The rest of the poster came out, then another on the other side, spelling it out: LL Bean stock!

Four falcon chicks now, getting dinner this evening. They’ve grown visibly since the last one hatched twenty-four hours prior.

I think the rest of this weird day is requiring a Thumper’s Admonition–but we got one business entity’s screwup hopefully fixed and the other figured out and about to be. But it took a lot of time.

At least I got some cowl knitting done while on hold.

Well that was a surprise, as I looked up and saw the worker. Had no idea that was going in.

And then the double take: how did they do that without there being any hammering sounds? And it’s not just me, Richard didn’t hear any either. Curious.