A potluck picnic in the park.

A family that had recently moved here from Boston.

I asked the wife if by chance she knew Grant…?

YES she knew Grant!!

He’s my cousin.

Then she asked me if I knew Tina?

Yes, she’s my cousin!

We bought her house!

And then, having moved here, they’d sold that house, with the closing being today in fact. I told her that Tina and her husband had moved to take care of her dad. He quietly passed away at home at 101 last year with family by his side.

Then she asked me if I knew Julie? She adored Julie, too, and Julie’s husband had gotten his PhD at Stanford, so maybe we’d met them?

Yes, she’s my *oldest cousin’s daughter!

No way!

(*My sister corrects me: Julie’s dad is the second oldest cousin, his big sister beat him to it.)

Richard’s Uncle Bill was laid to rest today at a good old age.

Many decades ago, he really wanted to be a pilot in the Navy but was told he was too tall.

Where there’s a will…

So he had a buddy sit on his shoulders all night long to compress his spine, went in in the morning, got measured at exactly the upper limit, and he was in.

There was a Carolyn Hax chat at the Post today, and I always know I can widen my perspective and come away a little better person for reading her peacemaking.

Or she’ll tell it to you straight when you need to hear it.

A woman wrote in, an avid gardener with pollenizers here, veggies there, an herb garden on the side. They’d bought the house three years ago. Her mother had found out she was terminally ill and so dug up her own sage and thyme bushes and gifted them to her daughter for her new house before she passed.

The writer’s father-in-law hated her yard and was not shy about saying so.

And so while the couple was away on vacation, he paid someone to come over to their house, rip out the front and side yards and replace them with what he thought it ought to look like. Why plant flowers when you can have neatly edged mulch?

She was furious and he was furious at her for not being grateful, after all, he’d spent a lot of money on this.

Carolyn was furious, too. She said taking the woman’s husband up on the offer to replant her things together as much as possible would be putting her marriage first and she said if she were going to offer any advice on this that’s what it would be, but no, she most certainly did not have to apologize to her FIL!

At the end of the chat she said her responses were being slow because she had never had so many people write in in response to a question before–all in defense of that poor gardener grieving her mother and those lost plants and connections.

Former copyeditor that I am, I noticed that pollenizer and pollinator were both used in their conversation.

I had to go check that out.

Pollinator is something that conveys pollen from flower to flower. Pollenizer is a plant that offers pollen, that feeds the bees and the hummingbirds. My Stella cherry is a pollenizer for itself but not for my tart English Morello. Got it.

I mentioned the letter to my husband. My easygoing, always-look-at-both-sides husband.

MOVE, he said with emotion, surprising me. There can be no communication with someone who willfully will not hear you like that.

Move to where he cannot easily reach you to trespass like that ever again?

YES.

That had been my first thought, too.

But then (in our case it was a bad boss, not a relative) 38 years ago, we did exactly that.

He didn’t recognize the song last night, but then, I’m not the voice on the radio singing it from way back when to give him context and I had no idea of the words beyond the chorus. It’s just one of those catchy little tunes that pops up in the brain every decade or two and wants to get you to dance.

So I went and looked it up.

The No No Song, by Ringo Starr. (Me: It IS? Ringo?!)

Pulling out the second stained glass puzzle tonight, I found myself softly singing today’s silly little ear worm.

He didn’t recognize that one, either. So, repeat pattern from *.

Back Off, Boogaloo. By–you guessed it. Ringo Starr.

Which one of his will my brain come up with tomorrow.

He wondered why Ringo was using that word and what it meant.

Okay, Merriam Webster says this, that it’s Latin-inspired 60’s music, Collins says it’s a fast dance of Afro-American origin, of couples not touching while they dance in quick jerky moves (that is definitely our generation!)  and neither one of them says a thing about the group banned by Facebook that Ringo had no way to know would steal and twist that word.

I bet they had no idea who it celebrated. The self-mockery!

But then bullies were meant to be laughed at.

The news from Texas has been heartrending. Historian Heather Cox Richardson says the National Weather Service did publish flash flood warnings, but the head of Kerr County said the warning systems that would have conveyed that locally were not in place because they had decided that cost too much.

Man.

My husband got his ham radio license after 24 hours of not being able to reach his aunt’s family very close to the epicenter of the big 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (they were okay but their house had stories to tell) and from there he did emergency communications volunteering with the city, the county, and the Red Cross.

I said in agony over the lost campers in Texas, Don’t they have reverse-911 there!

And then went, Wait. Do they?

Which got him reminiscing. He knew all the people who started that. It began with an idea: the city had topography maps and it had 24 fax machines. What if… So they kluged up a system where if there was a risk of flooding, the homes in the lowest elevations could get a warning phone call by having a switch that disconnected all incoming faxes, because that’s not the priority in an emergency, and took over the faxes’ phone lines to call out to those homes with a pre-recorded message.

Twenty-four numbers at a time. That’s all.

But then you have the computer call 24 more, and 24 more…

That concept got tested pretty quickly thereafter: we had our 100 year flood in 1998. There were kids boogie-boarding down our street. There was the friend who saw his koi from his back yard swim past his feet in the front yard to go live happily ever after in the Bay (good luck). The elementary school principal hauled a canoe out and got himself in the paper paddling across the playground just for fun but there really wasn’t much water there. Might have drowned a few gophers, though.

There was one notable fire department rescue operation where someone thought his big pickup could easily do that puddle and tried to drive through the steep railroad underpass. Oops.

So anyway. Instantly it became: how do we make it so we can reach everybody? In time? Can we do it all at once?

Well let’s see: the Feds had passed a law requiring the phone companies to provide the phone number to every address for 911 calls so that the first responders could know where to go no matter how much information the caller was able to give them. Early cell phones weren’t covered. The Feds made them cover them, too.

That database existed. How about if you invert it?

You could draw a circle on the map and say, everything in this boundary, or you could say everybody in the city.

And thus they created the reverse-911 system that lets you know there’s an emergency.

The surrounding cities thought this was great and copied us.

The county thought this was great and copied us.

And it took off from there.

I thought by now everybody had it. I cannot for the life of me imagine why on earth any municipality wouldn’t.

Everything about making your own chocolate is messy. Towards the end there he looked at the front of my shirt in some amazement.

That’s why I put on an old one, hon!

And it is so worth it.

It’s a good thing it makes so much: once you’ve stirred that thick liquid nonstop while holding the bowl for 15-30 minutes in cool water and then again in warm to lower and re-raise the temp to get the right crystalline structure to try to get that perfect shiny tempered snap while not letting any water touch the inside whatsoeverdon’tyoudare, then an hour-plus of cleaning up the equipment including spraying a connected pair of granite rollers with hot water while holding them above the sink for way too long… (But you only do that after you’ve paper toweled all the chocolate off that you possibly can for the sake of the plumbing.)

You love that you got it done. But you really don’t feel like starting the next batch that very day, even if the machine claims you can get right to making your husband’s preference of 80% dark to mine of ~76%.

She who does the math rules the superfine sugar box. More or less.

(Parchment paper under the molds. Always. To create samples not spills.)

Last year a drop of water got into the melanger while it was just getting going: I had done the usual step of first running the cacao nibs through the Cuisinart, not realizing that its lid wasn’t entirely dry from the dishwasher. It was the second batch of pure cacao crumbs that touched it.

The chocolate in the machine instantly seized into a hard rock and jammed the motor. I leaped to turn it off fast.

I gouged and scraped the stuff out of there and set it aside. I didn’t know if the machine was toast. I didn’t want to know. It’s an entry level machine for hobbyists that was actually originally for dry lentils, upgraded a bit when the manufacturer found out what it was being used for and trying to match that market–not a more seriously-priced and -engineered one. But at the time we found it, it was all there was out there that we knew of. Plus we could buy it on Amazon points.

After what Congress did to the American people and the rule of law yesterday, after Monday’s little surgery that was so much fun, on the Fourth of July with no fireworks because lives were lost when the vendor’s warehouse blew up this week… I needed to do something, anything, to give myself a break from moping.

I thought I would start in the morning. It was 2:00 when I finally turned on the oven. (No professional cacao bean roaster nor winnower here.) But I got it turned on.

Half a 5 lb bag of cacao nibs got baked and Cuisinarted. (A side note: raw cacao that some swear is a health food? It’s a source of salmonella poisoning. It is typically fermented on trays in the sun, wildlife can walk on it and poop on it, just don’t. Plus the heat greatly brings out the flavor anyway.)

Superfine sugar got calculated.

The melanger turned on. It turned on. It worked.

We added the crumbled nibs slowly, slowly, slowly, taking turns, making sure not to overtax the thing with too many big particles at once. Let it work its way up.

It worked.

It’s working. It’s working! And noisy and there’s a fine spray of crumbs across the counter that no water is going near till this batch is done and poured and safe and man, it smells so good.

Tomorrow we pour it into the molds. The tempering will likely be half- (insert pejorative of your choice here.)

I had been waiting so long to find out that we could still do this, knowing how good all this could be again. And we can.

Congratulations, one person told us back then, You picked the hottest day on record in Washington, DC.

Which was topped thirty years later at 99 to our 98. It took that long. But at the time, we were like, Oh. It’s hot? I mean, yeah, I guess it is but, um, we kind of hadn’t really noticed.

Jokes about how maybe I should stand on the low stone wall along the garden pathway near the temple’s doors so that I could get up into the same picture as him and his family.

The skunk raiding the marshmallow off his campfire stick right over the fire on our honeymoon in the Shenandoahs with its tail brushing his arm as it sat back and savored the thing–with his face pleading, Just don’t laugh. PLEASE don’t laugh.

His consolation prize being that the skunk sided with him over me: a long slow roast over my burn it fast and crunchy and blackened and then reach for more while he’s still working on three marshmallows ago.

The hair stylist in Indiana who couldn’t cut my hair because she was husking.

What the heck is husking?

How do you not know what husking is?! She’s helping bring the corn harvest in.

Oh.

George Winston’s December album playing softly while we turned off the lights and with our babies in our laps, watched the snow fall (and fall and fall) in New Hampshire to the music as each perfect silvery flake danced and sparkled in the moonlight.

Our oldest remembered, and took that album off to college.

The monochromatic boredom of white snow, grayed parking lot snow, more snow. And how pretty and quiet and peaceful it was. Along with the how do you shovel snow so you can pick up your husband from work and leave your kids alone inside but how do you shovel snow with them outside in weather that cold? You can’t take a baby out in zeroF for an hour+ while trying to watch the toddler while trying to get this done.

Somehow I got it done, or enough, anyway. I don’t remember how. Naptime? I just remember I had to, so I did.

The househunting trip in Spring in California, going straight from 72″ in 17 days to green, glorious green and flowers everywhere.

The kid who left me speechless by saying, Mom, I don’t think I could ever call anything on the East Coast a forest.

Say what now?? Why??

Because no redwoods.

We have got to get these kids an education… We flew us all home and played tourist in DC.

Taking my sister’s boys to where the sun sets as the ocean waves goodbye, laughing that yes that feels like you put your dawn on backwards in the morning.

The day we drove past the high school, knowing there would never be another Back To School night for us.

The knit night at Purlescence where I took my cell phone out of the shop for a minute, needing it to be on speaker and wanting to hear my son and where he could have a little more privacy. Then walking back in the shop, holding my phone out to my friends, and saying, This is my son. He’s calling to say he’s engaged!

The whole shop burst into applause and cheers. As well they should. Such a profound gift to our family Kim has been.

The arrival of grandkids.

The feeling, within five minutes of meeting my daughter’s boyfriend, of, I don’t know who you are. But I HOPE you marry my daughter.

He did.

The arrival of their two.

The missing them. The treasuring every moment with them when we are there with them. So much love.

Our younger two, hoping for those blessings too but entirely blessings themselves as they are. So proud of them. All of them.

The gratitude beyond words at this dear, dear man in my life who made all of this come to be with me and that he gets to still be with me and I still get to be with him, well beyond the time we once thought I might have left.

I got up this morning, picked English Morello sour cherries from the tree that he’d driven me over the mountains to Santa Cruz for and had helped me pick out in happy anticipation of moments to come just like these, let them soak in their sugary filling mixture for awhile and then put the pie in the oven to bake while I headed to Andy’s Orchard. Richard got off work, checked the pie, and had it cooling and waiting when I got home with the first peaches of the season and the newest Candycot apricot developed by the guy who gave the world the Anya: the Yelena.

Just an ordinary day. But one that gives a meaning I love to the new-to-us number of 45.

We’ve been doing a random assortment of wooden puzzles of fewer than 100 pieces after dinner of late (with thanks to Holly for introducing us to Nautilus.)

Somehow after a lifetime of not doing puzzles he’s got me hooked on those little ones with him. If he weren’t there I would never bother but 75 pieces away from a picture of a coral reef together? When it’s so gratifying to see him having such a good time? Sure.

We’ve done those five or six little ones enough times now that we did three tonight zip zip zip. He admitted to boredom.

I called his bluff and pulled out a 500 piecer of shore and ocean. That one last edge piece is still defying us somewhere but the center has a bit of progress showing. My resistance to the idea of having to wait for the entire finished edge before filling in the center might actually be rubbing off on him.

I just finally got up and looked and exclaimed, 10:32?!

Maybe I’ll order a new little one after all.

Part two.

We got to see Janna and her husband. We walked into the presence of such an immense sense of love.

She was joyful, she was exhausted, and I hope at just under an hour we didn’t stay too long. I have more experience than most at how wonderful and tiring it is to see people even when you love them so much when you’re so ill and we were all trying to be mindful of that, though I’m not quite sure we were mindful enough. But man, it was good to see her and to meet her prince of a husband. (Her first one died years ago.) He is so good to her.

I had four more hats ready (Richard says five), including one begun in the airport, and two balls of yarn to ask if she’d like those colors next. She said sure. She had one on that I’d mailed earlier.

But she gently let me know that all of these were really more than she could wear.

Not knowing that I had thought of her beloved as I packed this thick warm greens-etc Mecha one and that earlier one and was thinking of her granddaughter and her two older sons and the son I’d knit the Christmas stocking for years ago: her mom had knit one with the name knitted in for each of her grandchildren–but he hadn’t been born yet when she died.

When Janna told me that of course I made him one.

I had never knitted such a thing before and I couldn’t find a pattern for one with the kind of cabling I wanted, so I just winged it. I can do socks, right?

Um. Sometimes letting the object be its own size swatch has its idiosyncrasies, not to mention Malabrigo Rios is not sock yarn.

So I asked her if he wishes he had one that weren’t so big and she exclaimed, He LOVES his big stocking! You can fit anything in it!

We all laughed.

He’s in his mid-20s now. We sat there a moment with the unspoken thought between us that his future children likely won’t know their grandmother, either.

An experimental med in ’03 snatched me back at the edge of life. If only. You never know.

I will have my work cut out for me. I’ll let him and his future love decide what size to aim for.

But meantime, any of her family who want to wear a Malabrigo hat in solidarity with her in this beautiful month of June, maybe when the hot sun dips below the mountains? I think with these last two coming along, if she wants, we’ve pretty much got them covered.

And I can always knit more.

Part One.

All my siblings came. Mom got feted, Dad’s stuff got divided between us, and as my older brother said afterwards, “I am amazed and grateful for how well everything went.” Everybody was mindful of everybody else and trying not to be too eager about any one thing: we didn’t own it before and if we didn’t own it after, what’s the difference, right? So. Your turn.

There was a painting I loved. The others noticed the two gouges in the paint before I did, two white canvas spots showing, about the size of the inside circle when you hold thumb to forefinger.

Bryan, who along with Anne has entered juried arts shows and done well, instantly offered, “I can fix that for you.”

Two days later my sister was holding it out for me to see.

Now, I’d been expecting to have to pay to ship it to Atlanta and then to our house and to wait for however long everything took.

But, but–where were the spots? You can’t even tell! Where were they? as I bent close to see.

Bryan happened to come in the room in the middle of that, so I said again, “You can’t even tell!”

He laughed. “That’s the point!”

I just couldn’t get over how very very perfect and untouched it looked.

He was staying at a cousin’s; we were at a hotel a half hour from there.

So it was with great delight this morning that I looked up at the TSA station where you retrieve your stuff and exclaimed across the conveyor belt, “BRYAN!”

He looked over, laughed, and we got one last big hug across that metal space before he raced off to his flight while they finished patting me down. (Holding my arms above my head while circular glass walls move rapidly the way they do, close to my face, makes me fall down. So, yeah.)

So, so glad we got to go.

She said maybe brown.

It’s going to be over 90F. I’ve got some dark brown ready to go after this but for the moment I’m thinking let’s try a lighter version and see how it flies. I can always keep going.

One of the camera crew did a hatch-to-fledge four and a half minute compilation of the 2025 season so far, here.

Meantime, the three newly fledged females were immediately spotted yesterday; one was rescued from behind a glass balcony so she wouldn’t hurt herself trying to get out and was put in a box and taken to the roof of City Hall above the nest. Got her feathers sprayed so she wouldn’t panic-fly to get away from the humans as they set her down but rather wait a moment drying off while they disappeared. She’s fine.

The male, though, nobody knew where he was.

So one of the BOGs (boots on the ground during fledge watch) was looking today when she saw a homeless guy looking up. He told her there was a hawk that had a bunch of crows harassing it, so he’d been keeping watch to make sure it was okay–and there was our Chico!

When she explained that it was a peregrine falcon just learning to fly and that multitudes of people were going to be grateful to him for finding him and looking out for the little guy, you can imagine how that felt to someone who doesn’t usually find himself being looked up to.

They chatted a little and she found that the birds mattered to him, all of them, and he felt for the one being harassed and stood by him.

And so he became a hero to the falcon community.

Our little Chico got retrieved, went through being boxed and hauled upstairs like his sister the day before, and is now living happily ever after.

Meantime, chemo cap #6 got finished, #7 is started, and I have been invited to a sisters and female cousins lunch where I can get to give it to Janna in person. I can’t wait to see her.

He said see if you can find any appointments or does it have to be walk-in.

Appointments. On a holiday weekend. Five o’clock today was the only time available to do two people. I clicked yes.

Only then did I look at the clock and realize it was 4:48–forget dinner, we had to dash out the door now! and hope we hit every traffic light green. Which never happens.

But it did.  We are officially covid-proofed for now. It was also an excuse for ice cream because dessert is the most important thing you can eat after a vaccination: they do their medicine, we do ours.

A fried light switch out of a set of three outside the kitchen. A package delivery. Time to play electrician. He had as a teen done the wiring for the addition on his parents’ house, the work duly signed off on by the inspectors, so a simple light switch shouldn’t take very long.

Mutterings commenced.

That plate had a really terrible edge on the inside where nobody was supposed to ever see it: sharp and wavy. The wrong lights flashed on and off when he was sure he hadn’t even touched that wire. The insulated screwdriver hit the floor.

He looked at me and in a self-mocking tone pronounced, Tarnation.

Now there’s a Southern cuss word for you, I told him. Thinking further, I wondered if I’d ever heard a northerner Yankee type say such a thing (we lived in New Hampshire for four years.) I was pretty sure I had not.

He thought maybe yes they had.

The short, great linguistics debate of the evening (feel free to chime in–that way one of us will find out we were right.)

And now I have my kitchen lights back and everything works the way it’s supposed to and nobody can see the inside of that plate.

Meantime, my new zucchini stem had twins this morning. I have never heard of such a thing before.