Hmmm. *checking* Nope. Still sick. Still being boring. But catching up on some of the reading I’ve wanted to do. For the record? “The Birds and the Beasts Were There” is laugh-out-loud funny at times but I was looking up a lot of bird photos and descriptions to know for sure what she was talking about.

My parents would be pleased with that, and rightly so.

Do not forget my camera card do not forget my camera card do not forget my… As it sits in my computer for this post.

Peachy-pink Shepherd’s Choice, a skein I bought pre-Rios to try out; the folks at Purlescence told me it was their softest wool worsted.  Our niece and nephew are about to move to Boston from southern California, and I wanted to keep their newborn twin girls warm.

The grandson baby blanket is done. The sweater is done. The first hat is done. The unassembled bootie in the photo is now done. All the ends on everything are run in at long long last, the items are all wrapped, the cards are written and signed.

There. The camera card is in the camera is in the carry-on. And tomorrow I get to go deliver everything in person.

And darned if I can decide which knitting project in the queue to start on the flight. I know–it’s nice to have that level of problem.

Thank you, everybody. I talked to Dharma Trading Co, purveyor of all things dyeing, and they cautioned that the chemicals that would reliably get the dye out would wreck the feel of the cashmere and, they said, miss the point of such a sweater. Their advice was wash, wash, wash, gently, and hope.

O—– said they were passing the word along and would get back to me shortly. Okay. Now that I’ve had a day to chill, reading all your notes, thank you, you really helped, even just by speaking up.

The best antidote, of course, was to finally run in the four yarn ends on a project I’d blocked–yup, dry now, it’s ready–go off to Target, buy envelopes and mailing tape, and then a little later, after checking my email for details, get out to the post office. One book (yeah, that book) sold (directly, thanks) and in the mail, and one…

And (whistle) typing that sentence is when it hits me that, oh. Right.  I forgot to photograph it. *Bad* knitblogger!

And there, in my own mailbox, was a gift of beautiful, beautiful shots of the coastline, taken by my childhood friend Scott, one of the B’s I drove to Pacific Grove to see. If I couldn’t stand in the sun admiring the surf and the fog and the steep hills rising from the water, he could and he did and he gave that tideline to me. Gorgeous. Well done, Scott, and such an antidote for petty disappointments. Such good timing!

And in the glow of that, I went off to Purlescence tonight and they had a new line in from Cascade: royal baby alpaca, which is the finest grade you can possibly buy and hard to find, mixed with cashmere and silk. Swoon.

I told Richard that when I got home.

“So how many skeins did you buy?”

I didn’t.

“You DIDN’T?!” He was genuinely stunned.

I couldn’t make up my mind. The deep blue or the wine-red: both colors were exactly my shades. I’ll have to come back.

Yeah, I think they’ll see me again. Happens.

It’s interesting watching the birds really flock at the feeders just a little before it starts to rain. They know it’s coming and they want nourishment against the cold and the water in a safe, dry place.

Thank you all, meantime, for the support, and I knitted a few rows today. Decided it wasn’t worth pushing it too soon, but at the same time I was delighted that I could. Another day or two and it’ll all be back to normal.

Except…

Me: “I don’t WANT to do a liquid diet! I’m hungry and I want some real food!”

Hubby, looking at me steadily: “Nasal gastric tube.”

He had me and he knew it.  Four days that felt ever increasingly like having surgery without anesthesia. Never again.

Well, at least you can pack a lot of nourishment into soup.  So now the blockage, too, which had been ignoring my protests of I so did not earn it, is starting to improve. And Don is right: Stones into Schools, written by Mortenson himself, is the better book, but Three Cups of Tea, the one that made the man’s name and cause known, is vastly important in its own write.

Remember my dying tomato plant of a month ago? Its main branches are just straws now, bent in half from birds landing on it and going Whoa! as the stems collapsed under them–I saw them.

I discovered a new tomato on a small, still-green branch yesterday. It cheered me greatly, and all the more today.

Auditioned for the next Incredibles movie: st r e  t ch.

So I was going to show you the it-was-going-to-be-finished baby sweater. Yeah well.

Typing gingerly and glad for a hubby who raced for the icepacks: turn the treadmill off first, don’t grab at the handle to keep from falling while it pulls your feet away. Or, how to learn things you already knew and thought you’d planned out against in advance.

Life’s way of saying, forget the chores; go prop up your feet, wrap an afghan around you (thank you all for those!) and go read a good book in the October evening cool.

Why thank you, Three Cups of Tea arrived in the mail, I think I will.

I spent a fair bit of time poking around the various books at hand and Patterncentral.com and Google, searching for… I wasn’t sure what but page after page, those weren’t it.

Till I stumbled across the picture of the pink one here. Hey. Color Transplants R Us. That’s IT! That’s what my subconscious was trying to push out of the memory banks. I’ve seen that before but I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been.

During the few years of my life I wasn’t knitting much, I was making smocked gowns and dresses for my own babies, and that round patterning around the neck, called a bishop style, was something I made over and over.  A knitted sweater that echoes that, a generation later? Perfect.

I hadn’t ever realized till I took the photo just now that the reverse holds true too: I designed a smocked dress back then for Michelle with a sheep front and center.

Meantime, today was my monthly trek to Los Gatos to buy birdseed. There in front of my car as I parked was a signboard for a shop at the far end of the plaza–where I had never been nor really looked. A chocolatier? There is?  Okay, that’s worth checking out.

You walk in and there’s an intricate haunted house at the front with figures and jackolanterns and all kinds of detail. And it’s chocolate. All chocolate. All made in-house by hand. We are talking someone who plays with chocolate like I play with baby alpaca and silk.

I decided to try just one piece to test the place out, just one framboise.

Oh. My. Goodness. Change the metaphor to qiviut and silk.  Richard exclaimed later, You didn’t get ME one? But I had no idea till she rang it up what it was going to cost vs the amount of cash I had on hand for an impulsive try-out.

To give you an idea, I later got in and out of Trader Joe’s without buying a single chocolate thing. Not even a plain good dark Valrhona bar.  It would only have been a comedown.

The one thing I regret? I didn’t eat it till after I’d left and the woman didn’t get to see my whole face light up. She certainly earned that. I’ll have to go back, and Richard needs to come too.

Okay, right about here a good essay would pull the knitting and smocking together with the chocolate shop. Does that sentence count?

I’m going to be a lazy blogger tonight and post here, with a touch of editing for clarity, what I put on Twinset Jan and Ellen’s blog.  Jan had made some baby socks and hat in a soft, soft angora yarn in a muted sunflower-yellow shade; scroll to the bottom of the post to see them.

I don’t usually comment at such length in someone else’s space, but her picture so grabbed me.

——

Oh. My. Goodness. That angora. That shade (you photographed it better than I did.) BOY, does that bring back memories!

My mom bought some pure angora that exact color on a trip to France before I was born, to knit for her little girls in anticipation of their being upstaged by the new one coming (me).

My oldest sister got a green sweater and she was highly allergic to it. The yellow…sat in a box for something like 45 years.

Until Mom and Dad packed up and moved out of the house they’d raised us in. I had coveted that angora all through my teens and beyond, the only one of the four girls to latch onto knitting like Mom, and Mom had always said, No, that’s not yours. I promised that to your big sister.

She out of the blue, just before the moving van came, mailed it to me after all, all these years later.

You see my blog header? That bit of yellow and those scarves?

That yarn was totally not protected, totally chewed up. I pieced it back together as best as humanly possible and then knitted it up: a scarf for my not-allergic older sister, one for my younger sister, and one each for my brothers’ wives. I dyed them partly on the grounds that no moth stages could survive the boiling water, partly on the grounds of felting together any slipping pieces beyond the splicing efforts.

And that is the story of how my blog top came to look like that. (Note that the ball of yarn has multiple ends.) After wanting that yarn for all those decades, I finally got to have it come to me–and after all that time, Mom was right: it wasn’t for me after all. It was for everybody else.

—–

(Wow. I’d totally forgotten I got seven scarves out of that box!)

Don’t stomp in the puddles! You’ll get your feet wet!

Well, yes; that’s what puddles are for, aren’t they?

One of the treasures of my childhood was all the times when, on returning from following the trails and climbing over the rocks and splashing around in nearby Cabin John Creek, my mother would look us over appraisingly with a big grin and pronounce, “You must have had FUN getting THAT dirty!”

If you remember, the peregrine falcons who fudged their fledge the first time got rescued by Glenn Stewart, the UCSC biologist in charge of the peregrine recovery project. He would scoop them off the ground, (like this time) put them in a box, and take them up the elevator back to the nest area–and before releasing them would give them a good soaking so they couldn’t try to get away from him in a panic till they’d dried off enough and recovered, by which time he’d be long out of sight.

So. Today, after their usual six months’ vacation, the clouds came back and started back to work. Rain! I remember rain… (My children do not believe in this myth of warm summer rains back East. Rain is never in summer. And it is always ocean-cold. Or so they say.)

With the new camera up on City Hall this year and its new views, there was one of our peregrine parents, EC, this afternoon. On the 18th floor louver. Spreading his wings open to the rain, then splashing across the louver to the other end, turning again, his wings wide to the sky still.  Puddles incoming! Catch me if you can! And he flew off into his game of tag with the raindrops.

And Clara flew from her tree to join him.

News flash: our nephew and his wife, he being the son of Richard’s late sister, had twin baby girls yesterday, everyone healthy and well. Yay! I can just picture Cheryl giving her granddaughters one last hug before their trip down here.

The baby afghan fabric the Malabrigo Rios is turning into for our grandson, meantime, is solid, substantial and warm, exactly what I wanted. But my wrists can only do so many M1 twists at a time, so it tends to go slow.

Every now and then I stop and look at how much is actually nevertheless getting done with my one pattern repeat minimum per day and it surprises me–cool, look at that!  Getting there!

The blog has been photophobic lately but I’m hoping this old shot goes through. (It’s not a great one, but it’s better than what I’ve been able to get since.)

I brought the blanket with me Thursday to Purlescence to show it off there for the first time, and they all made my day with exclamations of Oh, that’s *pretty*!

I told Sandi, the pattern should be intuitive–but it’s not, and I pulled out a simple scarf to work on.

“Some knitting isn’t social knitting.”

True.  But oh, but that yarn and that pattern so much want to be. Just wait till they’re done.  Stitch by ongoing stitch, it’s gradually, beautifully, in spite of my impatience, all coming together.

I’m sure my daughter-in-law knows that feeling right now way more than I do.

This is not the most reverent post. Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends!

When my boys were young, they–well let’s see. Dates. 1990 for the first Super Soaker? Sounds right. They kept making them bigger and squirtier from there on out, coinciding with my boys’ growing appreciation for just what a fine piece of machinery these could be. (With the occasional summer exclamation heard of You boys keep those things AWAY from my hearing aids!) The girls played with them too, but with not quite the same passion for power.

There was a birthdays-and-Christmas arms race going on for several years running. If one of the boys got one (and they did, it was at the top of their wish list), their dad had to have a bigger one.

I thought the things had all long since gone to that great recycling squirt gun in the sky, but no: when I said something last week, my husband grinned and said he’d kept his biggest baddest one all this time. Never know when you might need it. (Grandson? January?  Did you say grandson? Dude!)

Remember that book my daughter-in-law sent me that says squirrels don’t learn by fear because then they just couldn’t be squirrels?

The gray ones have, with the onset of Fall, gotten bossier and meaner to my cute little black ones I watched grow up and have been vigorously chasing them away at teethpoint from the area under the birdfeeders.

This will not do.

The first time I hefted that thing, wondering, (for the record, it weighs more than I do) I had a gray bushytail looking at me like, what is that? Is that fruit? Those bright colors says it’s fruit and it’s sweet and I want some. Just hand it over, lady, winter’s coming and I gotta stock up.

I opened the door.

It couldn’t take its eyes off–but no wait Feederfiller is coming OUT! RUN!

That water can run faster than I can. Okay, wait, I have to prime the thing, open the door, raise, aim, oh wait hang on, step further away from the feeder so I don’t get the seed damp, okay, now try!

Those gray squirrels, over the last few days, have stopped doing a flat-out run and have started doing the anti-hawk zig zag dance trying to get away from it better. They can plot the spray’s trajectory better than I can theirs. I’ve barely gotten a drop of water on any of them and only from a goodly distance.

But still.  Turns out they like being squirted about as much as cats do. And they don’t come slinking right on back, either, like they would if I’d only scared them–not if I’m anywhere in view they don’t.

The black squirrels have already caught on pretty much that I’m totally cool with them.

And now they get the place to themselves, unbossed and unbitten. The supersoaker is resting pointing at the porch. They’ve all learned.

(Psst–that thing’s obsolete by ten years. Did you see that Wikipedia link? How to powerboost your soaker? Go for it, kids!)

It’s amazing how much good a little wool on one’s head can do.

A year and a half ago a big and much appreciated get-well basket was left on our doorstep, full of scrumptious yarns and handknits like the cashmere fingerless gloves from Jasmin–who, when Purlescence was having a sale on that cashmere awhile earlier, had let me have the black that she’d already picked out for herself when I oohed and aahed over it. Just because she’s nice like that.

That black cashmere became my first surgeon’s shawl.

She kept the light aqua blue for herself, and then gave that to me too, in that basket, all knitted up. I was blown away.

But there was one thing in there that came with no name, no tag, no way of knowing who it was from for me to say thank you.

Stephanie was blogging today about it being cold and her daughter putting on a hat and Stephanie’s sudden need to start knitting one.

It’s cold here too this evening. I was reading that and thought, that’s what I need! A hat! And I reached over for that gray and purple one and felt warmed all over again by the thoughtfulness of someone out there. Thank you…

It has been a very useful hat. Last winter, did I steal all the blankets at night? No, I reached over my head into the headboard and fumbled that thing on in my half-sleep.

Although, you can tell I’m married to a computer nerd. He has been working on a long stubborn software problem, working on the laptop right up till bedtime the last few evenings.

Tuesday morning I was startled abruptly awake at a cold something and looked over–my snoozing husband was running his wireless mouse on my arm in his sleep, I guess because to his subconscious I can solve all his problems because I love him.

If you give a mouse a cookie…

The mouse (which, to be fair, he didn’t know was there) has been banished. Even though, theoretically, I could put Jasmin’s long gloves on to ward off its chill.

Uh no. Let’s keep it at hat.

(Hubs wants it mentioned that I still steal the blankets.)

It’s a cold, tool world.

——-

Ed. to add: okay, just picture it–he’s solved the problem, the patent attorneys have gotten involved, and now they’ve billed a better mouse traipse.

Here’s where I’ve been: about eight years ago, during the worst of the brainstem lupus stuff, I set myself a goal to walk all the way around my block once. Without shortness of breath, without chest pains, without weakness. That was my goal for the year. And the next.  I did not make it.

And for awhile there, it was also to feel well enough again to be able to drive a car without worrying about my blood pressure getting too low. I did not make it. I chose, and will always choose, to err on the side of caution on that one, this driver‘s choices being a good reason why.

Now, back when my kids were little, I used to racewalk four to five miles every morning before my husband left for work–my much-needed time to myself in the great outdoors, time to work out, time to just be out and SEE to recharge the batteries before starting in on the day with three children four and under.

Then the fourth child arrived, the lupus hit, the no-sun issue surfaced, and all together it added up to years of wishing keenly for all sorts of things.

And one of those was to just get in the car and go see the ocean again. Not our close-by Bay but the actual ocean. It wasn’t like it was very far. (Oh yeah, sun, right.)

My younger brother Bryan was here about eight or ten years ago and we did exactly that: we got in the car, him at the wheel, and the two of us drove down to Monterey, reveling in the rare time together.

Pebble Beach. The 17-Mile Drive. Got out from time to time (took the risk, how often do I get to with him) and looked at the seascapes below. The funky Monterey cypresses, the redwoods on Highway 17, the weirdness of the sign claiming copyright on all images anyone ever might make of that one lone tree on that outcropping as belonging to… You can’t copyright a picture you didn’t take! Silly people! Hanging out. Having a day to just go be siblings again.

I so wanted to go back there. I so wanted to cruise down Highway 1 and just be free of all health-related cares and just go. I tried to ignore how confining lupus can feel.

The B’s did not know that when they booked a cottage where they did for their vacation. It was simply a good spot for the things they wanted to do.

Bryan and I had driven right down that road. You go past the sign to 17-Mile Drive and there you are.

The best part of my trip yesterday, by far, was getting to see and spend time with the B’s. With serious chronic illness for two of us and a 3000 mile distance, this is a rare and wonderful thing. I think we two were both surprised at how well the other was looking. Acknowledging, yes, but acknowledging too how things are holding together in spite of all that as we created new memories to rejoice over with the old.

On a side note: going such a distance, and down a highway that occasionally turns into a country lane, a kick back and relax in the scenery type of road with slow produce trucks hauling artichokes from the coast and ambling at their own pace, one never knows what to expect. So I’d left early with the idea of Monarch Knitting as my time buffer: I’d wanted to meet LYSO Joan there anyway, very much so, for over three years now.

There was a big knitting retreat going on back then at Asilomar (wait–not SOAR, it was June–trying to remember its name) and my friend Nina was attending. She asked for, and got from me before she left, my author’s proof pages that I’d had spiral bound.

The first day of the retreat happened to be the day that Wrapped in Comfort was released, and the conference also happened to have a show-and-tell scheduled then.

Nina, bless her, held up that book, wearing the shawl in that book (she had wanted to own the very one, not a copy, even if it meant waiting for months to get it back from the publisher, so I did that for her), pointed to the page, and she announced, “I am Nina. This is the shawl in this book. You want this book. Go buy this book!”

And thus she led a posse of 50 knitters over to Monarch, where, she and Joan both told me later, Joan was just opening a box shipped from Martingale that had six copies in it.

And everybody wanted them.

Joan took a deep breath, made a decision, and pleaded with them: please, if I do this, promise me you’ll come back tomorrow?

They did. So she did: she called Martingale, on a Friday afternoon close to quitting time, and asked them to Federal Express Weekend Overnight her those 50 copies. And they did it! They got them out in time! The next day, they all sold except the copy Joan wanted to keep for herself.

She told me the shipping fees had eaten any profit from the sales but oh what a good time they’d all had!

I thanked her for giving me a book story to brag on for life. And I do.

So, yesterday I was making good time, on my way, passing several bicyclists who were off the road talking to each other, when suddenly a cop passed me, lights and sirens. A few minutes later, another. Oookay. There was a long curve there near Moss Landing, too far away to see why traffic had by then come to a stop.

And there we sat.

It was one of those times I was glad I was in a Prius: I turned off the fan to save electricity and thereby gas. We sat. Pretty scenery… But I really hoped things would get going; I did want to stop by Monarch.

After a half hour it all started to clear up again. No tow trucks, no fire engines, no sign of anything having been out of the ordinary. Curious.

To either side of the power towers at the Landing, there were swamps and birds that I wished I could see closer up.

I did get to go to Monarch. I walked in and the first person I saw, having cheated and looked at her website, I asked in delight, “Are you Joan?”

“I am!”

“I’m Alison Hyde.”

She knew exactly who I was! Totally, totally made my little ego’s day.

I looked around with the occasional exclaiming of delight as one room unfolded to another and ooh look there’s another back here! I bought a little baby alpaca. “Souvenir yarn.” I explained about the time buffer, thanking her for her offer to wind it but gotta run.

I had no idea when I got back in that car I was going to be retracing some of my brother’s steps from there. Hey! I recognize that restaurant!

And that’s where we all had lunch together.

The B’s happened to mention having gone birding at Elkhorn Slough over by Moss Landing a bit earlier, where a large group of bicyclists had gathered and traffic had backed up for two miles behind them.

Oh my goodness! You were there! *I* was there, at the far end of that! Too funny.  I asked Scott, Did you get to see your Bewick’s wren? Knowing he’d so wanted to and never had. I have one that hops across my view every day, moving like a cartoon figure the way it bounces almost faster than the eye can keep up with.

“I did!”

Cool! I told the three of them that I was now into birds and it was all their fault. They grinned.

Joan over at Monarch had offered to take the hanks and ball the two up for me and let me pick them up on my way back later, and that was really nice of her.  But…

I thought as I came back through Pacific Grove just after her quitting time, I was right. Don’t wait up. I was having too good a time just being friends in person again to get wound up.

And I did it. I know now I can do it. I knew, but I hadn’t tested, hadn’t pushed myself, and now I have. Along with their friendship, the B’s gave me back the most incredible, the most exquisite sense of freedom reclaimed.

I ordered more Rios. I have to wait a week to find out if it matches well so the baby blanket can get bigger than 43×40″ (I will knit in alternating dyelots if they’re really close) or if not, the two new skeins will become a mostly-matching outfit while I go buy a contrasting color to put in ribbing all around the thing: I like my baby blankets generous. I’d bought all that Golden Fleece had in that lot, hoping 840 yards worsted would do it. It won’t.

My son told me tonight that my daughter-in-law had been secretly hoping I would knit something for the baby.  I just might.

So. Back to Lisa’s Blackbewwie.

I measured and was sure I had enough to do just one more pattern repeat. It’s always nice to see how far a yarn will go, right?  I know my electronic scale gets a little wonky the closer you get to zero, but it looked like I would have two grams left over, maybe three. That’s cutting it far closer than I like, but the results held steady.

I decided to give it a try.  I confess to knitting perhaps less loosely than usual–I had visions of having only a yard to spare.

It took me three hours to finally cast off, not because it took three hours to cast off, not because I couldn’t bear to see, if, if…  but simply because I could.  No worries.  Clearly, looking at that ball at the very end, I had enough. Alright! Six grams left over! That would be about 30 yards.

Then I threw the shawl in the bag. Done! At last! Two weeks to knit that. I never take that long, but it was 1090 yards of light fingering weight and 72 rows of 439 stitches on smaller needles than I often use and it simply took a lot of time. (Not to mention there was this other project…)

Go do something else!

Like that lasted. Out with you. I was curious.

In the crumpled tinfoil stage, I got 12.5″.  It is now drying in the other room at 26″: add a little water and it’s like Wile E. Coyote after the steamroller went through.

And here I am bouncing back up again and off to the next.

After much trial and error on the baby blanket that did the sturdy Malabrigo Rios not the slightest harm, I ripped to the beginning yet again today and went back to the pattern I’d started out with in the first place.  (After going up three needle sizes on this fifth attempt; I’ve been out of worsted-weight practice.)

This is what I’d wanted all along:  Barbara Walker’s “Dragonskins” pattern. Good and solid, and what it needed to be.  Because every little boy deserves to be dressed in dragons.

With thanks to Margo Lynn for the heads-up: I have to show you this. I’m just glad the birds’ cameras didn’t catch on anything, especially the goshawk’s while going through those trees Star Wars style. Wow.

I was in the Martin Luther King library in San Jose once when one of the peregrines from the nest across the street suddenly flew down the narrow treeline along the side of the building, so fast I had to blink a moment and question whether I’d even actually seen it–I knew I had, but it had gone by too fast to even begin to make out anything other than the sheared-off vision of speed.

(Oh, and, while we’re at it: a few Eagles. Congratulations to my sister’s sons!)