The forecast had said an inch and a half, then suddenly jumped that by an inch last night as it was starting to come down.

We got 3.22″ of rain. It was a good day for not going anywhere out there.

So.

My ear molds no longer fit (changing the size of your ear canals is the weirdest part of changing weight), I’m going in next week to get new ones made, but meantime it makes every bit of wax a problem and sound isn’t getting through well enough anyway.

I forgot I was holding one hearing aid in my hands to clean it when I heard…

What on earth was that? I listened intently. Screech. Another skunk vs raccoon fight? A little early in the season for that, isn’t it? Although, I guess, food, anytime, though I didn’t know what the source might be. Neighbors talking loud enough to hear across the yard and through the glass? I mean, no, but, what?

I finally got up and walked in the kitchen, asking, Do you hear that?

Hear what?

Just then I looked at the screen behind him and instantly remembered what was in my hands and not in my ear.

‘Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here.’

Well, I was now!

My friend Ellen sent me this picture some time ago and I’ve had the tab open ever since. Any time mine are bothering me I want to say to the ophthalmologist, yeah, feels kinda like that.

It’s a honeybee.

I would say waiting for a good meal to catch its eye.

Old story, but… Our honeymoon, in a comic strip. For us it was marshmallows being toasted over a fire. Just one skunk at first–but it came up right between us and was brushing its tail against my new husband’s arm as it reached over the fire and settled our surprisingly emphatically held opinions over whether a fast burn-and-crisp-and-melt (me!) or a slow browning (him) was the proper way to campfire the thing.

His slightly browned one was it, thankyouverymuchdon’tmindifIdo.

While his face silently begged with everything that was in him at me not to laugh. Pleeeeeeeeeease?!!!

We left the bag on the picnic table as we edged away after it was done. It called its best buddies over and the four of them threw a party. They ate them raw. Heathens.

Good times.

A Wallace the Brave strip just for us. And then this one. (Someone may have been laughing her way through the archives. )

Our phones came today and I spent way too long trying to learn my way around a sometimes very different system before I go out into the wild with it. Still needs a protective cover.

But look at all those options for the hearing impaired!

First peach flower of the year. (Tree pruned by a tumbling raccoon its first year. It got that one first-year peach, though, so it was okay with that.)

p.s. Wallace the Brave, just for fun.

Had to run some errands and was going to be within a half mile of a local yarn store that I seldom step into. I know what I like, I know they have some nice yarns, and I know that what I buy the most of, they only carry a little of.

But they do have a few colors of Rios, and checking online first they had Whales Road in stock. Worth a look. I didn’t need it, but one skein in a lighter morph if possible for where the coral is closer to the surface could be a nice touch. (Turned out theirs were darker than mine.)

I don’t think I’d ever seen either employee before.

One of them was wearing a sweater I instantly recognized–that was a Caitlin Hunter pattern. Caitlin knits Alaskan motifs and I have two grandkids who were born there and I love her stuff.

So I asked her, Is that the haddock pattern?

She looked at me a moment. Another heartbeat. Then said, Yes.

It wasn’t till I went to go look it up this evening so I could link to it here that I had my forehead-smacking moment.

Halibut. Not haddock. Right. I knew that. It was a gorgeous sweater.

But either she was humoring me or she was blanking on the word, too. I’m guessing the former. I’ll just have to go back sometime so we can have a good laugh over it together.

We did it, we finally did it. We talked about it at Christmas when they had a good deal but there were too many unknowns in the air re the other lines on our account.

Verizon has non-stop promotions, says he, they’ll still have this up after Christmas.

Nope. They had offers, just not of the ones we wanted anymore. I checked almost daily.

Yesterday they changed that.

The one thing I needed to know was, would the heavier phone be too much for my hands.

It was raining. That is absolutely when you want to go to Verizon during a good promotion. We learned that lesson long ago.

The display models were leashed to the wall with a bulky apparatus covering most of the sides so you couldn’t really tell what the heft of the phone itself would be, and I lamented that fact.

The saleswoman, who was clearly enjoying the fact that we were the only customers in there so she didn’t have to be pulled in multiple directions at once, thought about that a moment.

And said, Well, I can’t hand you a 16. But I can hand you a 16 Pro: mine, and she did.

It has a better camera, it has better battery power, it’s a little longer but not much wider–but it’s an ounce heavier and the moment I hefted it I instantly knew the one thing I’d had to know: would holding those 7.03 ounces, like during the two hours of reading captions in church, damage my ability to knit as many hours as I wanted to.

The answer was yes. I thanked her very much, gave her back her phone, and she rang up the 16. Which currently is free with my trade-in (which made her laugh when I told her it was an iPhone 6) and that three-year commitment not to switch to their competitor. Fine by me.

But we both upgraded on memory (but it doesn’t have to be teal! You wanted teal, get the teal) which means the models weren’t in stock. (The future Otterbox will cover that teal right over.)

Well, if you’re going to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the mail you might as well be using them to knit. Got six rows done today.

There was a demo tonight to a large and eager group (oh yeah) of women at church tonight about how to make your own chocolate truffles. The guy had printed out the basics, which was very helpful for people like, y’know, me. We were handed one of his as we came in and after the lecture and demo made four of our own: squish it, work it, roll it, dip it, done.

My question, which I did not ask because I had no way to know if he’d already addressed it, was, how do you assume the cream in the ganache is safe when the truffles are left out at room temperature like he said they should be? He was adamant that they not go in the fridge.

From what I was able to find afterwards, the answer is, it has to be at least 50% chocolate, and more is better. Liqueurs help, too. (For those who eat such, I don’t.) It’s the amount of available water that is the problem.

I brought mine home to share in the morning, when the chocolate won’t keep me up all night but mostly because I thought that in all fairness the men should have been invited, too.

I’m living dangerously. Having never gotten sick from eating anyone’s truffles, I’m leaving them on the counter.

So far, anyway.

Update: and then, having written that, I went back to the guy’s instruction page and turned it over. Oh. There it says refrigerate leftover ganache and only roll and coat the truffles you’re going to eat that day.

Okay, then. Common sense and caution wins out after all. Mine went straight in the fridge.

Earworms: the music memes of the brain. After being stuck with one long enough, he transferred it to his mouth and then I got stuck with it. I hadn’t heard that one in decades.

Thus the following conversation:

‘Old Screwball was a racehorse,’ he sang.

Stewball. I still heard consonants when I was a kid, that’s a t, I told him.

I always thought it was Screwball, he insisted.

I went and looked it up. Nope. Stew not screw.

He was trying to remember some of the words in a later verse.

It’s, ‘I bet on the silver, I bet on the bay, if I’d a bet on old Stewball, I’d be a free man today.’ I always assumed that meant a slave wishing he’d been able to buy his freedom.

Is THAT what it means?!

I always thought so. (There are reminders of that hellish institution where we grew up, including a blacksmith shop just down Seven Locks Road that was used by George Washington.)

Turns out it’s an old folk ballad about a real race. Peter Paul and Mary recorded the version we knew growing up, but Stewball was an actual racehorse and the song was sung by, among many others, slaves in chain gangs dreaming of freedom. My heart broke a little reading that.

1741. How many horses, I asked him, have been so famous that 300 years later we know what year he was born?

Not many, says he.

He’ll even sing it as Stewball, just for me.

I don’t think I ever met him but I knew both the person who had the conversation with him and the person who’d referred him.

There was a college student who got a job in DC that he thought was really something. Democrats were the enemy, and he got assigned some cloak-and-dagger type excitement on behalf of the President himself. Pretty heady stuff for a kid just starting out.

Until someone asked him at church, Are you honest in your business dealings?

He said yes, because of course he was…but then because he did feel he was honest, he stopped to backtrack a moment, suddenly a lot less sure of himself. He explained what he was doing at work.

He got counseled to quit that job immediately, and he did, and thus rescued his name and future from infamy.

That was the day before the Watergate break-in. He had been doing preparatory groundwork for it, though I’m not sure he knew that.

He would be about 70 now, and he instantly came to mind when I read that the hackers going from Federal department headquarters to Federal department headquarters plugging in their servers and wreaking havoc on the workings of our entire Federal system under an unelected, unvetted billionaire who’s not even a Federal employee and has zero legal authorization to bypass Congress on any of this, while falsely invoking the authority of US Marshalls if the professionals didn’t comply, are all probably thinking they’re doing the country a great favor.

And they are college students. Or just graduated. With not a clue how the world really works nor the impact nor the treason of what they’re doing. The youngest, 19, went to our local high school and I wonder what his parents think of the job they now know he has. I mean, that’s too young to even be fully myelinated and he’s doing this?!

Creating the biggest data breach in the history of mankind and putting every single American’s financial security at risk. And that’s not even starting on the assault on our laws, our democracy, and our system of government. Not just the civil servants but members of Congress were locked out of the building when they showed up to ask questions.

Did those kids stop to think that Elon Musk–a man who came on a student visa but ghosted the college, ie an illegal immigrant–could now empty nearly every bank account in the country? Or let Putin do so? Or sell every piece of data in the Treasury to China, while Musk makes false demands to clear out the entire Civil Service coupled with severance offers of illegally high amounts that will not happen?

But back to the hackers. Every single dime the Federal government sends out or where it collects from is now exposed and at risk. Already there’s been a report of an automatic Social Security payment not going through but labeled Pending, with its intended recipient wondering how on earth they’re supposed to pay rent on time.

Gee, that’s a great story they get to tell their grandkids someday.

It is a crying shame that apparently there was nobody along those very young mens’ paths to ask them this one simple, direct question: Are you honest in your business dealings?

And if that doesn’t work, then, Would you be proud to tell your grandma what you’re doing?

Little by little….

You can’t get a great deal of detail into little fish compared to the ones in my first Ocean afghan what with the limitations of drawing in wide V shapes. But that just means it’s a new way of exploring what my needles can do.

The folks who bought the house next door a few months ago were thrilled at being offered an apricot tree.

Of the three Anya seedlings I had left, this one was as nearly perfectly balanced as you could ask for, a beautiful specimen. It’s the one that grew only a few inches tall its first year after its growth tips had died while we were out of town (the 4″ vitamin K-uptake-killing coir pot hindering leaf production did not help) but it was still alive so I kept watering it. Last year it hit 53″. It’ll be standing on its tiptoes to wave hi over the fence before you know it.

I explained that I’d chosen a smaller one for my yard for its late leafing-out and its slower growth for my limited space. I’d almost put the big one in anyway just because it’s such a perfect, healthy tree.

Big was fine with them. They knew exactly where they wanted to plant it, and when they told me, I told them that’s where the former owners had kept their garden for years. A very good sunny spot and it’ll have plenty of room. Very cool.

They told me of losing a plum tree to disease at their old house and how hard that had been.

Their big tree on the other side of the house, I told them, is a Santa Rosa plum that was there when the sellers’ parents had moved in about 60 years ago. They will have their plums back.

So now this tree has been dolly’d to its new home. And if by chance either theirs or mine ends up needing a pollinator–and having one always helps anyway–there will be one right on the other side of the fence, same mother tree but already clearly just different enough.

While the adults were talking, their little boy discovered our toy corner and in great excitement with each discovery arranged all our Hot Wheels into a curved-just-so traffic line behind the big yellow Tonka truck leading the way. And life is good.

Welllll, the package was pretty. The contents were in the what’s not to love department. So I bought it.

Fire-roasted root veggies (sweet potatoes/carrots/parsnips/onions) in a giant Costco freezer bag were a bit daunting after the fact. I knew the fiber content was beyond me as a colectomy patient, and yet there it was.

Unless…(she thought, staring at the bag a couple of weeks later.)

The Cuisinart. Not the blender, I didn’t want puree, although, close. Into the pot. Throw some Trader Joe’s frozen fire-roasted bell papers in the machine, just a couple of twirls of the blade. A little broth, a half hour simmer, let’s just see what we get….

Hey.

There was a whole lot more where those had come from.

The second time, I oven-roasted an entire Costco pack of cherry tomatoes for half an hour and then those I did puree and threw in the pot with the root veggies that were by then looking vaguely like sandpaper grit floating at the top. (The parsnips: like pimples just waiting to be popped. Hey, I’m trying to give you a visual, where are you going?!)

On an oh just try it, I added the leftover third of a cup or so of pumpkin puree in the fridge. And some sausage.

Half an hour more of simmering from there. You can’t quite make out the pumpkin specifically but it really added to it.

I’m writing this down so I remember what I did where I can find it and because I’m actually hoping now that they’re still selling those root veggie bags. There’s a potluck next week and that was really really good.

The only problem is, I am forever now going to think off it as parsnippimplepopper soup.