Knitting charts are emphatically not my strong point, but I’d found a moose (Ravelry link) that actually looked like a moose and I went to start adding it in today.

And stopped halfway across the row, feeling silly.

It was backwards. I knew that.

This is where being married to a computer scientist comes in handy so I thought I’d pass this on.

Go to your pdf. Go to pdfux.com and scroll down to find what you want your pdf to do. There it is: flip. Click that, drag your pdf where they say, and there you go.

We had eaten the last peach, and I needed a skein of brown that was not the ones that I had.

It would be a fast dash into the LYS; you don’t leave Andy’s ripe fruit in a hot car any longer than you have to.

Which is how I stopped by Fillory Yarn on the way home.

I’d been told months ago that there was now a Thursday afternoon knitting group there; I hadn’t been thinking about it at all but yes there was. I had wondered from time to time if any of my old group had started coming again post-covid, but I didn’t recognize a single face.

One woman at the table said, Oh sorry, and leaned over to move her purse so I could stoop down to check out the Rios in browns near floor level.

I picked up two slightly different colorways from two different bins and, looking up at her, asked, Which one would you pick for a moose? I need a moose in my landscape.

She wasn’t expecting that and laughed a little.

I told her about the moose in Alaska that had stood at the hood of our car and looked in at us inquisitively like, What ARE you?!

She told me about a moose she’d seen and how cool it was. She was quite definite: That one.

I’d actually been leaning towards the other–but as I mentally pictured it with Cian I knew she was right and was glad I had asked.

Wait, though. I found a third skein in its bin that had less variation to it. Yes! And I wouldn’t have found it if she hadn’t been so sure, helping me see what I needed to see. I owe her one, whoever she is.

A little bit of conversation and then I had to run rescue my peaches and nectarines and Green Gage plums from the heat. But I came away feeling like, it’s been four and a half years since I had an in-person knitting group. I think I’ve finally found it.

So now I just have to knit that moose before next Thursday so she can see what she helped make happen.

Got in to the ENT rather early this morning to get my ear canals unclogged. Badly needed.

I was a bit early, he was actually surprisingly late, but I figured I had about four hours left on that skein. No rush. I do need more cowls in my FO pile, hats don’t do it for everyone.

Lovely man, got it done so carefully. I turned to thank him for my extra hearing.

And found myself looking him in the eyes and asking gently, Are you okay?

His whole body exhaled as he said, I just put my son on a plane to New York.

I debated asking which university but simply said, Monday I put my Boston daughter on a plane, too.

Parent to parent in that moment, we knew.

He walked out of that exam room with a warm smile on his tired face.

A chance encounter at the curb before they leave in the next day or two and all of us grateful for it. Messages sent are a help but eye to eye is so much better.

We’re not using our second recyclables bin this week, I said; do you guys need the extra space?

Oh thank you yes we really do.

What they put in my bins last week could have gotten them rejected: that would be considered trash, that one could have been too heavy, but now they knew what the stricter rules are with the city’s new contractor.

It was not going to be a problem, and I knew they were good for it.

The issues of last week were irrelevant anyway, as long as you sort right: tomorrow’s the big Clean Up day where you can even set furniture out and they’ll take it. Slap a Reuse label on good stuff and it’ll get donated to charity instead of being landfilled.

I apologized for any stress I might in any way have added to all that they’ve been going through and thanked them for their realtor who introduced me to her contractor who cleaned out our shed for us for a good price.

At the last, the sister wondered what on earth to do with the big Rubbermaid bins her mom had labeled Block Party: where should all that go? Paper plates, bowls, cups, it was all still perfectly good.

I’ve been trying to get the annual block party going again, I told her; I’d be glad to take it.

I didn’t say, I got zero feedback from the neighbors on my initial query on the subject–but if I were to say that in her parents’ loved names and with their party stuff let’s do this and celebrate our late neighbors who brought us all together in the first place and kept us going for years and years, making so many connections and memories, and now we have six new sets of neighbors to welcome in in this square block since the pandemic–

–I think for that, yes absolutely a good number of them would come. With her parents’ help we were halfway there already.

Watsonville farmland, 247 acres of broccoli, beets, and lettuce by the ocean that flooded out last year and this.

With lots of private, state, and Federal funding, 65 acres of Beach Ranch is being turned back into the tidal wetlands it once was, offering a buffer and protection for the other coastal areas and leaving room to retreat further if need be into the other acres that will be rented out for farming as long as possible. Migratory birds will still have their estuary as the slough downstream gives way. Other farms will have greater protection as the area calms the sea and absorbs winter storm runoffs.

Sometimes money can buy common sense.

It was Stake Conference, which means a Saturday evening adults-only meeting and a Sunday one for the combined wards in the area. It’s a glorious zoo of old friends running into each other. Carpooling is highly encouraged; we did.

We got there early and I pulled out the ball of yarn and needles I had tucked into my purse on the way out the door to start the next carry-around project.

Someone I didn’t know at all cried in delight, Another knitter! and came over and sat next to me with her own new project. I got to see on her phone some of her greatest hits, and she is good! She got to see a few of mine.

Six months from now we’ll have another such meeting and I’ll get to ask her how that one came out.

Then the meeting was about to start and we both tucked it all away.

It’s become a tradition: before Michelle flies off we go to Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco, and with their new early-morning hours we had the place to ourselves at 8:30 a.m.

They currently have a crisp almond pastry with a filling made from the juicy part of the cacao fruit, which as I understand it typically dries out during the fermenting process with the beans. They describe it as tasting somewhat like lychee–which I love but would never dare try again after having a near-anaphylactic reaction to its cousin, rambutan. From cacao? That I could do.

And now I want to find a source of that (if there is one for people who aren’t chocolate manufacturers) because it was very very good.

With a shout-out to everyone’s inner Mikey. I’m… I’m….

Okay, picture the scene.

It’s the early 1800’s, you’re a fur trapper, you get a whiff, go oooh, and a quick trip to Madagascar to grab a bottle of vanilla to put in your brownie mix is just not happening that day.

Since you’re going to be skinning that pelt anyway once you find that thing the animal’s not going to need the rest of him so it’s all yours.

The ultra-anti-skunk: glands in the same place, different effect. Beaver butt vanilla flavoring. Castoreum.

Don’t forget the ice cream.

So, y’know, just update those dairy farms, we can squeeze a few beavers between the cows and hook them up too, right? You could make that ice cream on site. If a cow leg comes too close the little guys will chew them out, they can stand up for themselves. The cows can argue back but they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.

This has been an actual thing for 2000 years and nobody ever told us this in high school science class?

I got more than an inch done on the new afghan while my daughter was working from home, but the picture is stalled in the ether somewhere. Which just means that when I do show you any progress there will be a little more of it.

Man, it feels good to see something new coming to be.

Didn’t go Monday. Didn’t end up going Tuesday, but c’mon, when you’ve got your daughter in town, in August no less, ya gotta have some of Andy’s divine peaches for her and we’d finished off the last previous one together, so off I finally went.

Maybe going on a long drive would get me out of my head a little better.

Some acquaintance-friends who are grieving and under pressure were not thinking straight and did something stupid because they did not think it mattered, did not think we would find out, and did not realize just how many problems they were causing. It was likely physically beyond either of us to fix it if it turned out it went as far as I was afraid it might (later: turns out it didn’t.)

Grief is not a get-out-of-rude-free card.

Forgive as you would want to be forgiven, I told myself again and again. Make it better the best you can, not worse. A year from now, this will be nothing.

Miles and miles and at last suburbia gave way to golden hills and quiet.

Andy’s Orchard. There was the woman I’d given the hat to last month. It was so good to see her.

And then–I think it’s been two years since I’ve seen him, and probably only once since the whole Covid thing–Andy himself stepped in from the back room to talk to her.

He saw me and his whole face lit up in the warmest smile, and I tell you, he had no way to know how much I needed that. Such a lovely man. The two of them turned my day around completely just by being there and by who they are.

I brought home some perfect Kit Donnells and a variety of deeply golden nectarine that Andy himself had brought home two seeds of from the then-Soviet Union. Silk Roads.

And thought wistfully of these friends who, having no idea what they were missing, were last week the only ones who have ever turned down my offer of an Andy peach.

Today’s announcement. Harris. And now Walz. Integrity, honor, calling out to the best in all of us–and the joy! The officer turned teacher and coach turned Representative turned Governor saying, ‘Yeah I’m a monster, I fed the kids so they could learn.’ You knew he knew what he was talking about in those classrooms, he’d seen it.

And if you feed all the kids, nobody feels singled out and embarrassed for being visibly poor at that lunch room counter, no lunchboxes get accidentally left on the bus, no parent has to scramble to make sandwiches in the morning while trying to get a distracted kid out the door–and the mass production of food means it actually costs less anyway.

An avid hunter who got gun regulations passed in his state, a politician who is willing to say that kids shouldn’t have to worry about being shot in school–and he has done and will do everything he can about it.

He got criticized on Fox for looking older than he is and Walz just laughed, Yeah, you’d lose your hair too if you ran the high school lunchroom for twenty years!

We’ve got this. But don’t take my word for it and never take it for granted. Vote!

Seed stitch is so  s l o w. Finally got past it. And we’re off!

So very good to have our daughter home for a visit. So good.

We even shared our anniversary-celebration Dandelion hot chocolate mix with her. She surprised us back with chocolate from–Dandelion. Well there you go. Raised that one right.

A friend’s milestone birthday celebration and an arriving plane that was four hours late and so was the hour and nothing got written last night.

Fire-sky rainbow at sunset. (And no, we’re nowhere near the fires.)

Kind of looks like the arc of a firefighter’s hose, reaching as high and as far as it can go.

The air is so seeded that, with the fog rolling in for the night, it’s supposed to rain any second now. Not even a hundredth of an inch, just enough to draw a few Dalmation spots on the ground below.

(Walks outside, holds a hand upward, a single drop lands on it.)