Early on in this whole pandemic thing, when everything had been on lockdown and particularly so in our area, the county north of us decided that a customer could buy something online and the shopkeeper could hand it to them outside now. You could have that close a contact, briefly. Youcouldn’t browse, you couldn’t go in, you couldn’t touch their credit card machine, but you could do that.

This is when they were still trying to figure out the details of how covid-19 is spread.

I talked to one of my local shops, saying that what I wanted was two bags of a particular blue Malabrigo Rios that matched so that I would have enough for an afghan. I knew that officially it’s ten skeins per bag equals one dye lot; rumor, though, is that they’re matched up in groups of ten but that the mill produces more than that in each lot. But that’s a rumor.

So.

I wanted twenty skeins. I’ve found matching bags in the past, but I wasn’t going to be able to go in and eyeball anything.

Turns out the whole supply-chain mess meant the shop didn’t have and couldn’t get them in from Malabrigo for months.

But maybe her yarn rep had them on hand, she wondered.

Turns out she did.

Once those were delivered, I swung by the shop, they handed me the bags out on the sidewalk rather than frisbeeing them from, y’know, six social feet away through the car windows and all that and it was so good to see actual human faces again, not to mention old friends.

(Unspoken: Still here. Still here. And you too! Stay that way. Thank you for wearing those masks. Pray those vaccine researchers get their studies finished fast.)

I waited till I got home to see if my initial quick impression was correct. It was.

She’d been so relieved that the two bags matched like her rep had been sure of.

Now, here I interject a quick story about my folks visiting the dye works for a tapestry weaver in France at a time when they decided they needed just a bit more of this one color for their project, so the dyer was asked to create more.

He asked Mom if this and this matched.

She said no, not quite, and why. But no, sorry.

He hadn’t thought it was discernible but since clearly it was, he added just a touch more to the pot. There you go.

So blame it on the genetics. Here I was, staring at those blues, going, but they’re just not quite the same. This one’s more vibrant. This one’s darker. You can put them in all kinds of different lights and it doesn’t change the fact. It’s certainly not a huge difference, but…

So instead of becoming the next big project they’ve sat there for all this time because I can’t use them together unless I separate them by enough other colors and space that the difference might not matter, in which case I would no longer need twenty skeins of Matisse blue because half of the afghan would be something else altogether. Which has had me wondering if I should ask my friends who do diving and photography if they have a particular reef photo I could use, to riff on last year’s fish theme.

I’ve been musing about trying to match the one or the other, but I don’t know if inventories are back up yet.

Here, let me finish this other project first before I worry about it too much.

I just like to know what’s ahead.

I was in a knitting group meeting by Zoom today where they asked everybody, What is the yarn that you’ve been hoarding and not knitting that you most love?

I told them that Colourmart had some heavy laceweight 150g 98/2 extra fine merino/vicuna yarn that was really nice stuff, but that every now and then–twice that I know of–they’d popped up a few cones of some with 7% vicuna content. It’s cobweb weight but it sells out fast.

So, having knit two 7% cowls, one for me and one for a friend and swooning at every stitch–nice stuff!–I’d been stalking the site to see if any more showed up, y’know, like during an inventory check or something. For months. (This is after I’d plied it on my wheel and sworn I’d never do that part again–I should have paid the five bucks for them to do that on their machinery. Cobweb weight is super fiddly to get right when you can’t see what you’re doing because it’s black and my spinning was wonky, although in the finished cowls, who could tell. Or care. So soft!)

Suddenly one day there was this one single cone of not seven but 10%, and not only 10% but it was blended with extrafine cashmere. No sheep.

I ticked the ply box and picked a number: twelve strands, the maximum, for a thicker yarn to work with. $55 total for 5.29 mill-end ounces, when pure vicuna retails for $300/ounce.

As one of my friends described it later, I bought it so fast I showed speed streaks.

It’s black, of course, which my eyes would rather knit later rather than now, but the thing that’s actually holding me back is that there’s only the one cone. When it’s gone there may never be another. How would I risk letting anyone feel left out of receiving the one best thing, and how on earth would I choose who should get it?

One pandemic side effect is that I ordered glasses online, something I thought I’d never do. Two pairs. One as much like my old glasses as I could find, the other the same frameless idea that I’ve been wearing forever but with deeper, rounder lenses.

I wore the former until they got caught on a mask I was taking off and the nose pad went flying off somewhere. Was there no glue to it? Okay, you’re done. The other pair looked great on, so, backup pair to the rescue.

Then I got a new prescription.

I still really wanted to keep unnecessary exposure to a minimum, so I went back to that website and ordered a single pair: that bigger rounder type. Same company same glasses same size.

They fell off my face if I looked down. What?

I kept wearing the old ones a couple of months.

I decided this was getting ridiculous and put the new ones on this morning, determined to get used to the new prescription and get that adjustment over with.

Oh. Right. The falling thing.

I took them off and put them end to end with their earlier twin for the first time.

They angle off to nearly 4″ wider by the ends of the temples. They were mediums, not extra larges.

So I tried to very gently bend them towards sanity, and succeeded enough to keep them from being an overt hazard, but after a few hours one of the nose pads hurt.

They need adjustment. Badly. They need someone who knows what they’re doing.

My dilemma is, that’s part of what you pay for when you buy them in a store and I didn’t and nobody owes me anything, except the online place, and who knows how long they’d sit in transit going back and forth or how they’d fare–after all, they came in a case but there was no padding inside that case in the first place and maybe that’s how we got here.

So a shout-out to the local opticians and a thank you for what they do and I won’t do online again.

Just pretty please bring frameless types back for those of us looking for them?

If your grandmother was like my maternal grandmother, she had small, mostly round, decoratively molded soaps in her guest bathroom in soft pastel colors, heavily perfumed and slippery as heck in your hands, bouncing off and around the sink when you were trying to actually use them.

She would know if you had indeed washed your hands for dinner as she’d asked you to or if you’d tried to get away with skipping out on that step (not that I ever did.) While the scent interfered with your tasting your food.

And that is why I think of Gram every time I take one of my new heart med pills. It smells strongly, and tastes strongly, of good old-fashioned lavender soap. Why, for the life of me, I do not know. And you try to swallow it fast so it doesn’t leave that lingering soapy taste on your tongue.

Chocolate is the antidote.

My longtime arborist stopped by today because I wanted a quote on some pruning that was higher up than I’m willing to go. He was surprised when I asked him at the end if he liked dark chocolate–why, yes, he does, very much–and then opened the front door and grabbed him one of those plisse’ things and told him what it was. That was fun.

The somewhat less fun but worthwhile thing was going in for a mammogram yesterday.

It created one of those weird moments where the pandemic makes invisible people real, and necessary, where you never knew they even ever were: there was a little window on the arm into the innards of the machine, just a few inches across and with a light inside so you could see how the thing flexed as they moved it in place next to the squish table thingamagummy.

And it was dusty. Quite. Inside an enclosed space with no opening as far as I could see, with that little light at the back showing just how the tiny, uneven, fuzzy bits cascaded down the little diagonal whatever in there. Dust bunny-foot, mid-hop.

I marveled out loud, the tech being an amiable sort, and she knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Oh we’re not allowed to touch those.”

Turns out the manufacturer has people whose job it is to clean those inside parts, which the patients are never exposed to, so, given covid restrictions and workers out sick (or maybe they’d quit) and the fact that it would physically affect nobody to just leave it like that for the moment, there had been no one on hand to do that particular job that I would never even have known existed.

I’m still left with the question hanging of, why? Why did they make it that way?

So that this whole x-ray vision thing can be a two-way street between patients and our non-robot overlords?

Two years from now I’ll be looking to see if it still looks like that. Which is the weirdest way to get a patient to book the next routine appointment ever.

I was afraid I didn’t have enough bar molds, particularly because I like to pour the chocolate fairly thin. It seemed a good time to try my Silikomart Plisse’ mold.

Richard munched one of those and I think the verdict is, they’re big enough to feel guilty over but small enough not to feel too guilty over.

Some years ago, San Jose’s Redevelopment Agency commissioned art for a park that was supposed to be of the god Quatzalcoatl of the indigenous Natives.

Jerry Brown on his second governorship later axed Redevelopment Agencies across the state, declaring them to be how the rich siphoned off taxpayer dollars to fund their private projects at the great expense of local police, libraries, and schools. Which is true, and that banning was long overdue.

So.

The sculptor offered a serpent with wings outstretched. One city counsel member thought it gorgeous. The head of the agency, who basically answered to no one, was afraid its pedestal would invite the homeless to take shelter underneath and he totally nixed it.

Alright then you get the serpent god in its coiled form.

The artist gave that admiring city counsel member a smaller version of it, and hers, made in what looks like weathering copper, is beautiful.

The bigger one for the city?

Plaster of paris, according to that first link, although I would think that would apply to the model but not the finished version; stone, according to the second. But either way, painted black. Hides the facial details nicely.

And yes, the late artist’s mother will tell you the poop statue was an act of revenge.

Someone tried to sue it out of the park by saying it promoted religion, but they lost, and there it stays.

With no more RAs around, the public gets to have public input on public art now. But oh, we do on this older one. A little late, but, we do.

Begin as you mean to go on in the year.

We were down to our last half a bar of homemade chocolate and only still have that because we didn’t want to finish off our supply entirely on our drive home from Salinas on Saturday. It was time.

You start off running the cacao nibs through the Cuisinart to make the pieces fine enough for the melanger. There are professional ones made to last that you wouldn’t need to do that for; ours, I think we’re safer babying the thing.

But it has been a good machine for us.

You put a half cup in, just a little, enough that the stones have something to work against but not so much that they seize up (ask us how we know) and then, a little at a time, gradually add more nibs. There’s about six cups in there now.

There’s a change, audible even to me, when the last of the hard bits suddenly begin to stop spitting upwards and bouncing around and free-for-all-ing in Brownian motion but start to join the slowly liquifying rest as the roughest edges are ground away by the friction and motion and weight of the stones against them. The growl from the machine gives way to humming its steady chocolate song as the cacao rides its rollercoaster up and around, over, down, over, up, around, and back the other way and again. The sharp acidity that hits your nose at the start (some varieties definitely more than others) mellows, even before the sugar arrives awhile later.

It’s meant to be like this, it’s how it makes those rocky little pebbles become what we were looking forward to all along and why we put up with the work and the lifting and the noise.

(I wrote this and then did the math and now .6 lb of sugar joined the 2.4 lbs in the melanger. 80%.)

To be on the safe side because we were exposed to other people yesterday, we didn’t expose more other people to us today: we did church by Zoom.

Which means that during Sunday School I turned my camera off and picked up my needles that had ribbing and a few plain rows and made surprisingly good headway on the next random hat (thinking, and this is why I have a Malabrigo Mecha stash.) I did a bit more afterwards.

Then at 5 p.m. I had a knitting group by Zoom, and brainless patterns are definitely what you want while conversations are going on and you’re trying to read the captions–even when your heart is on that complicated lace-and-cables over there.

And so yet another plain beanie arrives in the world, needing the ends run in but otherwise ready to go. To… I’ll have to find out. But we woke up to 29F and deep frost this morning and someone out there badly needs some soft warmth on their head.

This Sunday hat thing could get to be a pattern.

People were vaccinated. People got tested.

And then we prayed hard, took a deep breath, made the decision, and drove. No airports. Cars only. Except for an elderly aunt in southern California who I don’t think drives anymore, the one we were being the most careful for. Masks on all.

Richard’s cousin was having her eight-year-old son baptized this morning and that is a fine reason for people to get together to celebrate.

Her brother and his family did the twelve hours from Arizona.

We did two hours from up north.

Her in-laws came from I have no idea where.

Etc.

I had missed several of these family gatherings due to having had pneumonia or bronchitis at the wrong times and I hadn’t even met her youngest–and he’s in kindergarten now.

(Who’s that guy with the long gray hair?) From across the room, he happened to turn around. (MICHAEL?? Long!? Gray?!?) I made a point of telling him I loved it, because it was gorgeous, and he chuckled and said his sisters had offered rather eagerly to cut it. But he’d been finding he liked it this way.

And so we had a grand old time, with lunch at his sister’s afterwards.

She and her husband had bought a fixer-upper and after a year of work had pulled off a gorgeous job of it, and I’m sure they enjoyed how much it got exclaimed over.

But the best part of course was the visiting, and the seeing the kids in such different sizes than they were, and how interesting they were to talk to.

That view. I instantly saw why they’d fallen in love with the place. (Avocados 4/$1, said a sign near their street.)

Um, that flying saucer thing? That’s someone’s plate and toasted cheese sandwich photobombing against the double-paned glass. Oops. For when Johnny’s sharing pictures of his day at some point in the future.

The lovely old aunt got talking about now vs back in her day, and turns out she’s a Golden Girls fan.

One of the younger cousins exclaimed, Oh! That was my favorite show when I was a kid!

We had a TV when our kids were young enough to be distracted by Sesame Street while I was trying to throw dinner together. When that died, a friend’s grandma looking to unload her old one fobbed it off on us: picture a huge 1960’s set made to look like built-in wood furniture with a silvery sparkly panel where the speaker was. My parents had one newer than that when I was a teenager. We watched one presidential debate where we debated which candidate was which as they stood there in their wavy-edged shades of green.

When at last we got offered a trip to the dump for it, off it went.

Several years later, our daughter’s friends, finding it unbelievable that we didn’t have a single TV in the house, all chipped in and surprised her at her 13th birthday party with a new one of her own.

The next morning, without texting even being a thing yet, they collectively went, Oh wait–maybe you don’t have one because your parents don’t want one? Do we have to take it back?

We told her, no, it’s fine. But there will be rules. Homework comes first. Etc.

And so our other kids started hanging out in her room with her to watch shows their friends had been talking about.

Later that year, she caught I think it was strep throat–and we had an old VCR still and she wanted to watch a Star Wars movie, so, sure, we dragged it out of the closet and set it up for her.

Look at the colors!!! she exclaimed as the opening started up.

Five minutes in, her low-rung-manufacturer TV suddenly went black. It never came back on. It hadn’t even made it to her next birthday.

We never did get around to replacing it–but our computers eventually pretty much did.

So with that intro: today I found out just how much we all missed out on all those years. Reading about The Golden Girls in random news articles so that at least I knew what it was while it was on the air in no way compares with (and probably everybody but me has already seen this, but) watching The Herring Wars, where Betty White went off script and ad-libbed with a straight face and had her co-stars convulsing with laughter.

Those five minutes were from one of the greats. And she was a lovely, lovely person. She will be so missed.

I’ve never bought a season of a TV series before but it’s time for that to change.

After a day of distractions and things that got done that needed to but that were not knitting, I finally sat down and got a few long rows in on that afghan.

And was surprised at how joyful it felt. Any sense of work or long slog still to go or any of that just fell away and all that was left was, this is beautiful and she’s going to love it so much. So much. I can’t wait.

The record for December snowfall in the Sierras has been 179″ for forty-two years.

We just hit 210″ and the month isn’t over, although the current storms probably are–but there’s a new wave arriving Monday. We’re at 70% of normal for the season so we need to keep going, but it’s been a great two weeks.

Meantime, up in the Pacific Northwest, Little Lily lou-who who is no more than two thinks a half dozen inches or so of snow is a very very good reason to ask for hot chocolate. Nonstop.  I am so proud.

Note to self: next time, finish the row you’re knitting before you go do that flying leap thing.

The top of the freezer is dedicated to ice packs and most of the time I think that’s way overkill but every now and then, just every now and then I think, that’s actually a good thing.

And it really did help. Just hoping my gauge wasn’t too funky while my fingers were frozen. (Yes I did. I’m stubborn like that.)

Meantime, way more fun, a new song for the season: Masked Christmas. Jimmy Fallon playing chess with his golden retriever. Because of course he did.

After all that drought.

When the ground is hardpack-dry, water just rolls right off it rather than soaking in.

But when it’s been raining on and off for a week, never too much at once and yet relentless, it apparently starts doing what you’d expect and want: I saw this big pond this morning, ran across the house and grabbed my camera, came back and outside and snapped its picture.

Huh. And considered a moment–and walked back inside and across the house to Richard to show him how much water there was out there (but thankfully not against the house anymore!) and told him the picture was showing the ponding as being shallower than it really was.

Then I walked back outside. I wanted to see if I could get it to photograph better–to show how I’d seen it.

And now it was that much less.

The ground had absorbed it that thirstily and that fast.

On the other side of the house, I have a plastic trash can under the eaves that had a little garden debris in it and its lid had been left off. The roof is dripping on it, but still: it’s full. Of water. It’s full!