The Miyoko (vegan butter) had come to room temperature for the cookies, but she’d forgotten and suddenly realized she had to do XYZ before leaving for the meet up with her friends and–oops.

I can bake them, I offered.

She texted me a recipe to squint at and, being so much my child, told me of the things she does just a bit differently. Triple the cinnamon. Double the vanilla. Use chocolate chips instead of raisins. One cup of flour, one and a half cups of oats, old-fashioned, not quick (did that). Half sugar, half brown sugar.

Then she ran to do that errand that had to be run.

Even embiggening it I had a hard time reading it and my phone kept turning itself off fast.

Every cookie recipe everywhere says one teaspoon of vanilla, so okay, I put two. And then found the recipe said a half? Who puts a half a teaspoon of vanilla in a batch of chocolate chip dough? Too late.

The Miyoko went squish when I tried to cut it. Much better to have a bit much than not enough if you’re not sure. Cold butter you can displace in water to check the measurement, but warm Miyoko? No. So let’s add maybe that’s a tablespoon but who can tell.

The big Costco brown sugar bag had never been opened but nevertheless was fairly dried out. I mostly filled the measuring cup from it and used a little white sugar to fill in any gaps–so much more flavor than plain white. Plus I wanted to squish as much as I could of the rest into my small OXO container for it and be able to securely tie off the rest of that bag.

It calls for baking soda and baking powder? Why do people do that to perfectly good cookies? (I actually went looking for the baking soda but I so dislike the taste of it that all I had is that five pound bag under the bathroom sink along with vinegar for clearing out drains and darn if I was going to pick that up to wreck a perfectly good batch of cookies. Double the baking powder it is–like the vanilla, it had only called for a half teaspoon of each in the first place.)

The second sheet of cookies came out of the oven just as she was walking in the door to get ready to walk back out the door.

She tasted one. She pulled a face.

Did you triple the cinnamon?

Oh! Dang. Sorry, no I didn’t.

Weak, she pronounced them. Needed more cinnamon.

But quadruple on the vanilla! They’re vanilla oatmeal chocolate chip cookies!

I did not tell on myself over it being almost all brown sugar. Some dire secrets are meant to be kept close.

Man, it’s good to have family visiting! And man did I get a lot done. Kinetic energy squared!

My hubby helped overbuy on frozen foods on Thursday, I told C at church, and there was no room for the chocolate torte in there anymore. It got moved to the fridge, where there wasn’t really space for it either; it had to go. Could she take it off our hands?

She couldn’t believe it. She told me if I wanted to cut off a slice for myself/ourselves first she was totally fine with that. Were we sure??

Her kids are home for Christmas break and I knew that getting rid of the whole thing was not going to be a problem and that it’s one of her favorite desserts.

But what I said later as I dropped it off at her door was, My daughter’s in town. She’s allergic to dairy–but she remembers how much she once loved these.

Ah. We were not eating it in front of her. Got it.

She sent me off with some oranges she’d just picked from her tree in happy anticipation of sharing back. They are so good.

You know, I thought to myself yesterday while cleaning out the back of the fridge of stuff that had been ignored while I was sick from Thanksgiving until a week ago, The chances of someone showing up at the door go up astronomically when you wash something really stinky down the sink (turning on the disposal to try to be fully rid of it and debating tossing the washable Rubbermaid containers. Where’s the baking soda.)

Those were pretty bad. The stuff in them should never have been saved over the five days we were going to be out of town at the time, much less since then but were because I had been too flattened to do any kind of a deep dive in there after we got home.

It felt so good to get to it and have a clean fridge at long last–even if the kitchen didn’t quite smell like it yet. Yow.

I stepped out of the room a moment and didn’t hear that doorbell and wasn’t the one who answered.

I am told it was the new next-door neighbor, showing up at our door for the first time, bringing oranges from her tree and not just homemade chocolate chip cookies but ones with grated peel from that tree and man were they good.

There’s a pocket door between the front door and that sink but it’s almost never closed, so we’re talking a few steps apart. First impressions and all that.

I imagine it’ll be a story to laugh over with her and her husband for years to come.

She’s home, she’s home!

I hadn’t heard of the Cube Rule of Food? Oh, Mom, she told me, you’ve got to see this!

And now you get to.

It was a day when friends rallied ’round without any idea how much that meant and how vital their timing would be or even any idea that I needed them.

Debbie had spent some time on her sewing machine and these two beautiful pieces showed up in the mail with a lovely card.

Afton decided out of the blue to text me.

Other friends emailed to say hi.

We were going along having a perfectly normal day when suddenly Richard at work in the other room heard me gasp.

My cousin Kathryn, the oldest of the 29 grandchildren on that side and the cousinly matriarch to us all by her warmth and love and hospitality, died in post-op Christmas day after lung surgery. I was stunned.

Having the later afternoon off, Richard told me that I’d been so wanting to go to Andy’s Orchard before they close at the end of the year: their holiday stuffed figs have long been a favorite. But being sick and then not being sure I was up to doing that drive had kept me away.

Who cares about traffic. Let’s go, he offered.

And so we did.

There was an atmospheric river coming in and the skyscapes were glorious as we came around each bend in the road. It looked as if the ocean had jumped the coastal range to produce tides and lakes and ponds of clouds surrounding the road but clear sailing down the freeway itself.

We got the slab apricots that are so good, fresh persimmons, daisy mandarins (a new variety to me; my own trees aren’t ripe yet), a jar of honey. Sour cherry syrup to whip into some cream and add to almond muffins, or some such to come.

But the apricot- and honey-stuffed figs were sold out. They did have some small plain dried figs. I bought a box as my consolation prize.

The lady who works there carried my stuff to the car, having no way to know how much my back appreciated that, and gave me a fond farewell with a “See you next year!”

The car needed gas.

Richard did a search for a Costco gas station between there and home and somehow, the route that put us on had us turning…south. Ten miles? We live north of there. I was thinking, Stupid Waze tricks. Richard’s response was, Do you want to be on an adventure? Or not?

That suddenly sounded like a really good antidote to the day–more time together meandering through rolling hills greening up from the previous rain–even if it was going to put us in the middle of a big southbound traffic jam for awhile that we would otherwise have dodged. Sure! Why not.

The not-till-midnight rain for our town started up intermittently down there. We were not planning on it nor on it turning cold that soon. It was okay. We were on an adventure.

Filled the car. As long as we were right there, we went into the Costco–and the one thing we were looking for was cheaper than at our own Costco. Lower rent in farm country, surely, and we had insulated bags in the car, so that worked out great.

Waze warned, Do not take 101 through San Jose at rush hour–go around.

Richard marveled, It never tells me to take 85! It’s longer!

We’re on an adventure, I reminded him. It was a prettier route, too. The undeveloped hills to the west–and the skies had spread out to layers of blueness towards lightness above. Paintbrushed.

And so we ran away from home and came back again and started in again on setting it in order for Michelle’s arrival tomorrow.

And so the living continues on.

Family time via phone and computer. Chocolate Bouche de Noel for breakfast. Celebrations. Love. And I finally got a Cuisinart 14C replacement for the food processor that died and can make hazelnut tortes again. Yay!

We got to talking phones with our older son. I told him I’d figured out that the retail price of the iPhone 16 Pro Max is $20 more than the quite-a-bit smaller, lighter 16 Pro, but if you pick the Max, Verizon charges you $200 more over the course of those three years, so, no, I’m back to wanting the Pro.

Your Mom’s hands fit the smaller phone anyway, his daddy chimed in.

Which cracked the kid up. If you’ve ever played Rachmaninoff on the piano, an octave is my limit and forget the rest but an octave and throw in a bunch more notes will do him just fine. He in fact has the 16 Pro Max via a previous such promotion–and overheard someone saying to someone else that that really big phone on my 6’9+” son looks like a normal sized phone on anyone else. Like it had been scaled up just for him. And it’s true, he said, it’s the perfect size for me!

But you’re a teeny little thing, he teased.

Am nawww—oh right. I guess to him a 5’5″ woman would be.

Pick a skein, any skein. Rios? Great. Start the ribbing.

Get bored. Doodle.

Try to figure out where the doodle wants to go from there because it’s kinda floating around untethered up there.

Look at the thing awhile, consider that today is the rare matchup of both Christmas Eve and the eve of the first night of Hanukkah, and realize you could do this many rows straight up from this point and then put a couple of knit stitches upwards at the tops. It would turn them into what some people would instantly recognize as dreidels and others would have no idea. Thank you to my childhood friend Wendy, now fighting pancreatic cancer, for teaching me as a kid how to play dreidel.

(Examine front side and back, reversing vs not reversing it.)

Almost do it.

Consider that you don’t want the hat to only be worn eight days a year. Skip the tops. It’ll be our secret–but I could, now, next time.

Continue on.

Wishing a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, blessed season of the solstice and every joy and celebration to all. May there be peacemaking on earth.

His number is the one they spam, poor guy.

Which also means he knew more than I did, so that when Verizon’s site suddenly announced the phone offer was ending in an hour and forty minutes, he said there was no hurry. We hadn’t gotten all the info we needed; one of the kids wanted to go to see them in the store first; we weren’t ready. But that offer would reappear within days at the most, he insisted. Probably wouldn’t even expire.

Okay, so I didn’t need to know right this very minute what color our youngest cared about or what model his sister preferred. Hopefully. Or how we were going to get their new phones to them without having them being cut off from their service for a few days.

Two hours later, they’d added a new iPhone 15 option and seem to have deleted the Apple Watch add-on, but he was right, the basic offer was still the same.

And then he explained.

Verizon has always had far better coverage than T-Mobile. They use different technologies, and the wide open spaces of non-coastal America is a big challenge for the latter.

But T-Mobile has now cut a deal with Space X’s Starlink and all the sudden nearly all of Verizon’s advantage is about to disappear. Granted, signals from satellites have a hard time going through multiple buildings, he said.

Me: Meaning you might have to go outside to get a signal?

Him: Yes. (While knowing exactly where I was going with that. Sun? Lupus? Let’s not.)

But that, according to him, is why Verizon is offering free thousand-dollar phones to get you to sign a three-year contract. The competition and market are about to change a lot, and they know it.

I chatted with one of Verizon’s agents this afternoon, explaining my problem of four new phones for four lines but three separate cities for the new phones to be picked up from. (Two, if we wait till a plane lands at the end of the week.)

Not a problem, she said: I can mail each person their own.

Right after that chat there was an offer on their home page for free overnight shipping for each new line. I can just picture the agent yelling, Hey, Fred, tweak this for these guys, will ya? I’ve almost got the sale here!

Beautiful music and readings straight from Luke. More music. Young children lighting each other’s candles (fully and safely electronic, pretend you don’t see them pushing their on buttons.) A light lunch afterwards with time to visit.

A chance to thank Monica and her family in person for those homemade cookies.

Sharing a new-today picture of our son’s kids with those who’d been part of his own village when he was growing up. The oldest is clearly doing what his daddy did at that age: growing half an inch a month, so much so that we’d done a double take, having seen him just three months ago and, wow. You look at the feet of the next oldest where the camera catches him in the act of standing halfway to tiptoe, trying to keep up. Kids. They’re just like all the kids who ever came before them. Forever adorable, as I’m sure we at our best are even now to G_d.

The young parents I gave finger puppets to. Getting to meet the parents of one of them, visiting from far away.

Love and instant community whether we know each other or not.

Every day should aspire to be like today.

Let me quietly state for the record just so that in later years I can find when this actually happened, someday when we’re replastering and repainting: tonight we were setting up the Christmas tree in its usual corner.

Every year I wish we’d bought a flip tree, fully aware that we’d bought the wide, lush Douglas fir that they don’t sell anymore because I’d fallen in love with it back then. It comes together in five large, awkward pieces, and you have to find the dangling cords and connect 1 to 2 and 2 to 4 but not to 3 etc etc to get the lights to work. Never ever lose that diagram in the bag. (Found it!)

I said something about skipping the whole thing because of our backs but that was way too bah humbug for him; he wanted that tree up. Okay. Because of course I really did, too, and we were late enough at this point as it was.

He got the base down and went for that first big chunk to fit into the slot at the bottom.

I was in the next room going through ornament boxes when I heard the low loud BOOM and came running.

He said his head hit the far wall. I pointed out the quite large dent in the side wall; from what I saw of anything, that’s where his head clearly went but he thinks that was where his hand went. Uh, one boom, one big dent, but more importantly, are you okay?!

While he caught his breath I worked on getting the next four pieces out. He objected to my lifting piece #2, but after that let me wrestle #3, 4, and 5 out of their bags and bring them to him, both of us knowing that we are still buying milk by the half gallon so that I can lift it without too much of a tweak. If he was letting me help him with those pine pieces he was hurting more than he wanted to let on. Falling is not fun when you’re 6’8″ and big.

We did it. We got it up and I decorated while he went to go lie down a moment.

He said that no he didn’t at all need me to take him to Urgent Care but that if the slightest sign of a head injury showed up he would let me know. He promised.

I found his ibuprofen.

He loves his Christmas decorations and I take comfort in the fact that it’s going to comfort him that it got done and is so pretty. He always remembers, far better than I do, how much of a difference it makes to make that difference happen every year.

We talked ourselves into it. Because who doesn’t want to go into the downtown (parking is fun!) Verizon store during an intense promotion on the Friday before Christmas? I mean, it’s like car shopping! Everybody’s! Favorite! Thing! To! Do!

It took a couple of hours, actually, and then a spur-of-the-moment declaration of really wanting to see how the thing felt in my hands before ordering it, and he wanted to, too; his phone was also getting old (even if not ten years old like mine).

It was actually quite quiet in the store. We were surprised. Probably helped by the fact that the company claimed that the offer was only available online–but note the big sign out front touting the same offer to get people to come in.

Nothing got bought. But we found ourselves sold on a particular one each, and for me, it was not the one I would have expected: a certain somebody egged me on to make sure I got the one I *really* wanted, with all the bells and whistles, given that I hang onto mine so long; I figured, geeks gotta geek. Ask me if I mind.

So that was step one. Maybe they won’t be out of stock. Maybe I’ll be able to actually take good nighttime photos soon. Maybe I won’t get stuck with that lime green that is so not my thing in order to get that price. ($5.55/month/36 months comes to an extra $198 total for a thousand dollar phone.) Maybe, just maybe, they make covers for iPhones, y’know? (Otterbox, Lumens series, green, yes, yes, that’ll do nicely.)

One of the little curiosities from checking the local Wunderground weather site is its description of how many hours of daylight there are in each particular day.

Earlier this week it said there would be twelve fewer seconds of it on the morrow.

Then eight.

Now five.

It’s like the sun is slowing down getting ready for the big party on Saturday: Solstice!

I need to remember to check then to see if the earth holds its breath lightly or will it already be inhaling for the songs of spring that want to be sung.

I saw two ravens flirting at the top of the tallest pine yesterday, clearly marking their spot towards any passing Cooper’s hawk.

Like people who spread their blankets out on the early July grass to stake out the best place to watch the fireworks when hey, guys, it’s only 2 pm.

And then the yarn laughed.

I’d forgotten how much mulberry silk lace weight likes to jump off the needles, and ended up removing 30 stitches from the cast-on; don’t need that extra repeat across, nope nope nope. I know that as soon as I get enough rows done the weight will help stabilize the work. To a point. It’s never going to weigh much at all.

This looks to be both easy and elegant–and something I’ve never knitted before, and I want to. Magic Waves, with an extra stitch each side for stability.

It’s a gorgeous yarn. It’s a lace weight with so much softness but significant strength, so one could trust it not to fall apart after all the work that would have to go into it. It was a splurge a couple years ago, but then, 500g of laceweight will go a very long way.

It’s what I want to knit next. It’s been a long time since I’ve knit a wedding-ring shawl (ie one that can be pulled through one.)

I thought I had just the pattern, but it feels like no that’s not quite it. Nothing with this can be ordinary.

It’s 90% mulberry silk, perfectly spun, with 10% vicuna, a shimmery light-blonde of a yarn. Cashmere has nothing on this.

From what I’ve read, Peru decided the way to recover that never-domesticated endangered species was to return to the traditional ways: to place ownership of the wild herds in the hands of the local villagers. Which would also give them jobs. The chacu returned, the rounding up into corrals with shearing and releasing along with the incentive to protect theirs from poachers while being allowed to sell a fiber that my LYS once sold under lock and key at $300/ounce once it got off the CITES list and could be legally sold–if sourced from Peru….

And I somehow snagged this Italian leftover mill-end designer cone of the stuff. Yes they stretched it out with the much less expensive silk. For me, that only makes it better.

My fingers don’t like knitting on size twos anymore. That’s okay. They can take their time. A lot of time.

Maybe I’ll incorporate that Dayflowers lace sequence into it after all; it was always a favorite. But it won’t just be that.

Open to suggestions here.