My husband and I drove across the Bay today to a funky import place that is emphatically a guy’s answer to my love of yarn stores to buy more tennis-racquet-style bug zappers.  Looked around; didn’t see any. (Managed not to say about all these clearly Highly Desirables, why on earth would anybody ever…? And did you know you can still buy those cap cages to run your beloved baseball cap through the dishwasher for cleaning when your wife’s not looking and exclaiming ewww? You could be, like, all domestic and stuff!  Are you ecstatic yet?)

I was thinking, you bought these how many years ago, dear? But while he kept looking, I did the not-a-guy-thing (Richard later said something about almost compromising his masculinity and trying that himself–we were having a good time teasing each other) and I found someone who looked official and asked.

Oh, sure, we have those! And the guy disappears in the back and comes back out loaded down with like two dozen of the things, his face almost disappeared behind them.

He tells us they’re ten bucks.  Richard, who’d found me by then, goes, Nah, I can get’em with AA batteries for that much.

Oh. $7.99, then.

To which I pipe up that he (pointing at hubby) had gotten’em for two bucks each here last time. I did not mention how many years ago that had been.

“Do these things really work?”

Yeah, they do! I have all this wool around and knit and yeah, those things, they are really useful!

The guy grins. “Two bucks!”

Our old ones had had arc attacks (do not hit the furniture when flailing around with one, and I’m not talking electric arcs) and they’d died one by one.  We bought seven. Bugs shall fear me again.

Michelle made a dessert with the neighbors’ plums and some star fruit for the occasion.

Meantime, we had one of those afternoons where looking for a tool that hadn’t been used in over a year led to closet cleaning and the non sequitor of this discovery from the early days of my spinning, just waiting to be uncrumpled and admired out of its bag.  Briefly.

I’d splurged on the 50/50 angora/merino fiber at the now-missed Straw Into Gold in Berkeley and had carefully spun up the most luxurious fiber I’d tried yet on my wheel, not knowing that Michelle would prove allergic to it and that I would later be getting angora out of my house.  This was for her big sister.

And it’s…pretty big.  Angora has no sproing to it.  It might fit one of my sons.   But I was looking at it, going, wow. I did spin that fine back then. And really evenly, too, even though I was a rank beginner. Not bad!

Then I took it back out of the breathing space and zipped it back up, a little wistfully.

Meantime, we have two juvenile falcons perched for the night at either end of the louver in view.  They don’t always now, but they did come back tonight.  Curious.  I was surprised by fireworks going off a few hours ago–maybe one of the towns was saving on overtime on traffic control?  Dunno, but I did get to see some of it from my street, crowd-free, once I looked to see what was going on.

Maybe the falcons were boomed out by the noise and headed for the familiarity of home.  It was good to see them.  Happy Fourth of July!

Every now and then Facebook helps bring about a moment where you think okay, this site has a lot of faults but this is why I put up with them.

Someone I knew from back in the day casually mentioned a first name of her friend and a moment of their shared history in the context of I don’t even remember what, because I was just sitting there stunned–wait–do you mean..?!  Where do I find…?!  I have wanted for SO long…!

And there she was.  I sent her a note.

Twenty-four years after our younger daughter’s birth I finally got a chance to tell this person my husband and I both so much admired growing up the news that we had named our child after her because we wanted our daughter to be as kind a person as she is.

About time.

There was a knock on our door again today.

Michelle looked in the bag and grinned. Her jam jars are ready to go.  We’ve got serious work ahead!

Someone new was in church today, and there was a Sunday School lesson on the Biblical story of Jonathan and David and comments made on the essence of friendship.

I told them of how one small decision to be of service, of my friend Lisa and me going together to visit a mutual friend’s child in the hospital in Oakland once a week, had grown our friendship and had led, a year later, to Lisa’s offer to watch my preschoolers while I did swim therapy for my newly-hit lupus to treat my sudden and severe arthritis, if I would watch her little boy in return.  We did that morning trade-off for three years four and then five days a week, an immense amount of her time that I could never, ever possibly have asked for. And what a difference it made in my life!

The new woman came up to introduce herself afterwards:  saying, she had heard the other side of that story.

Say what? What other side?

She told me she had just moved from Lisa’s ward and that Lisa had told the story of how she was profusely grateful for my help with her two-year-old back in the day.

I was going, wait, wait, there’s nothing I did that remotely compares to what she did!

Wow.  Huh.  It got me thinking how, with true acts of service, both do come away feeling like they were blessed the most of all.  But you know what, Lisa? You still did way more.

Meantime, thank you all for all the anniversary wishes!  Today is the actual day.  And after thirty years, I still think we have the best honeymoon story ever.

“Do you think you could help me scan in one of the photos?”

“TMI, TMI,” he winced.

Heh. Yeah, you should see those geeky clothes and those old glasses on our faces.

————————-

The waitress asked if we wanted the dessert menu.

“I don’t need it.”

“He’s being good; I’m celebrating.  Yes!”

Wait–I just checked out this post and suddenly remembered–and Phyl and Lee actually did knock on our door while we were gone tonight, but not with balloons.  As far as I know.  Still, he didn’t order dessert again, hmm, must be a trend. But since I currently weigh what I did in high school, he encouraged me to and I was quite happy to make him happy with that.

Turns out I wasn’t the only June bride in there.   On one of the longest days of the year, Flea Street was crowded with happy people, and the folks behind us were celebrating their 17th.

We beat’em by a baker’s dozen.

After my sorbet, Jesse sent out chocolate truffles again, and for that, yes, Richard was quite happy to eat a little dessert after all.  After all, we have some serious celebrating to do!

My husband had an early-morning meeting today and headed out–but forgot something and had to come right back in to get it, all the way into the bedroom, rattling around a moment.

I figured, well, I’m awake now, and after he left I went into the family room for just a moment before heading towards my morning shower.

A sudden surprised but very soft-spoken exclamation of Well hello there!

There was a little towhee, bigger than a house finch, smaller than a dove, with its droopy wings showing that it was relaxed, and it was hopping tentatively across the carpet immediately at the foot of where my knitting perch is.

This is where you build your nests with all that string, right?

We stood there a moment and considered each other in wonderment.

Why, it’s Feederfiller! I know you!

I immediately realized I was not going for a photo.  (Camera–stage right). I was not going to take my eyes off my new friend nor throw aside the awe of the moment.

Right. So.  The slider was close by, but I didn’t want to risk having one bird fly in while trying to herd the other out and the sunflower tower was a busy spot just then. Besides, stepping between the bird and where I wanted it to head towards was a no-go.

The towhee settled the matter by hopping/skipping/jumping ever so lightly, no concerns, towards the living room, as if it were eagerly inspecting the possibilities with its realtor in tow.

Heed me.

I opened the front door about halfway. I followed my new houseguest.

It never panicked, it never scrambled, it just carefully stayed the proper distance between us.

But no, honey, I don’t want you behind the organ bench, now.

Oh, okay. It fluttered up into the skylight as I stepped away.

I was concerned: I didn’t want it to get hurt hitting its wings there. I sent up a silent prayer to its Father and mine–and immediately the little thing came down just a bit and out of there, straightened up, flew, turned in front of the kitchen and went straight on out into the waiting bright sunlight through the doorway. I stood there agape for I think half a minute, trying to take in what I had just seen.

Hours later: “Did you leave the doorway open when you came back in?” Because I had found no bird poop–no sign whatsoever of the little thing being stressed, but also meaning it hadn’t been there long, either.

“I don’t know–I might–I don’t know.”

And then I told him why I wanted to know.  I didn’t even have to tell him it had been a surprisingly beautiful experience. He totally got it.

“Oh cool!”

I love that man.

And we are minding that front door a little more carefully now.

I’ve tried all day to think up the right words, and it comes simply to this:

I totally lucked out. I’ve got a great Dad. (And Mom, too!)

I totally lucked out. My kids have a great Dad.  And I a great husband.

If the whole world had that, think how much more peace there would be on earth.

My Dancing Queen amaryllis is blooming! You know, the bulb I was supposed to toss because it had a red virus it wasn’t supposed to recover from, much less ever bloom again. It’s only two flowers this year instead of four or five on each of multiple stalks.

I think I can live with that.

Meantime, on the peregrine scene, Kekoa left dinner with his sister and mother on a tower at San Jose State University early in order to claim his window ledge first. Maya ate awhile longer, and when she came in, flew to a louver several floors below him. Hmph!  *I* can have my *own* window, so there! With the camera looking straight down from above, the tip of her tail showed.

But then her beak, and then all the sudden her wings and tail were spread wide and she was flying out of there. She circled just out of view, clearly, because she almost immediately reappeared next to her brother.

She gave him a push from behind. Just, you know, to see. Window? Corner?

NO. MINE. I got here first.

Oh okay, be that way, and she settled down for the night next to him. But notice, no feather pulling, no beaking, no running a talon through his tail.

If only my kids had learned to behave that much that fast!

It’s official: now they’re 22, 24, 26, and 28.

He was due Memorial Day.  He came on D-Day instead, exactly 40 years later.  He missed my dad’s birthday by a day, but I got the obstetrician I wanted that way.

I called the OB’s office that June 6 and asked which doctor was on call.

The nurse on the line immediately shot back, and this is a direct quote, “Why, if it’s the wrong one are you going to go out of labor?”

Note that I hadn’t even told her I was *in* labor, but I shot right back, “Yes.”  I am an honest person.

I googled St. Joseph’s in Nashua, NH this morning and was pleased to see that it still exists and still by that name.   Hopefully they’ve got a new AC unit by now. That day, New Hampshire was having a record heat wave, 106, and somehow, at St. Joseph’s, a record baby wave to match: the nursery was used to having a half a dozen. There were 37 newborns, among them, my little guy, and the AC blew its cool.

He’s not so little now. A friend of mine once saw him walking up to us, and from his height of 6’6” or or, exclaimed, “Wow. I’m not used to looking UP at people!”

I used to be bigger than you.  You’re a good man. You picked the best bride on earth, and I am so proud of you both.  Now I’m the one who has to live up to whom you’ve chosen to be, and I look forward to seeing all that is to come.  To life!

Happy Birthday, Richard!

I was telling a friend her dog’s picture with it wearing deelyboppers was cute, and I got back a query of “Deelyboppers?”

That gave me one of those instant, oh, good, now I’m old! moments.  So I found this site.  I had guessed it was the 80’s, maybe early 80’s when they started being a big thing?

1982. I’m good. And scroll down a bit and check out that cordless phone. I knew someone who had one of those back when we were all dirt-poor grad students living in married student housing, making her purchase (her husband had just accepted a semi-mythical Real Job) all the more memorable: the sound quality was so much bad radio static, the price something Steve Jobs would have loved. (The electronics, though, not so much.)

Yes, children, when you were little we had to shovel the driveway both ways uphill in the snow with our telephones. Well, they were big enough to shovel with, anyway. If we’d had one of those. Which we didn’t.

But those deelyboppers?  Baby, we put those on you.

Just for fun, next time my kids ask me what kind of cake I might want, the answer is going to be this. Although, note that the last time I got fake-tortoiseshell cat’s-eye glasses I was in Mrs. Harvey’s third grade class at Seven Locks Elementary.

Speaking of which, best Mother’s Day article here; thank goodness for Christopher Gurr getting the whole ball rolling for the author. One teacher makes such a difference.  It sure got me thinking of some I wanted to thank, especially an English teacher at Churchill at her first job just out of college whose name I wish I could remember. I still go by her writing advice.

To one of the two best-ever teachers in my life, my mom and my dad–Happy Mother’s Day!

For Mother’s Day weekend. Best kind of present there could possibly be is, simply, presence.  Actually, he’s back out the door with his sister and their friends, but I’ll happily take every moment I can get and I’ll even share, too.

Meantime,  Jocelyn has a bird in her yard doing karaoke at all hours, defying her personal noise ordinance.  And boy does that bring back memories.

This is a corner of the back yard I grew up with in Maryland. One year, a woodpecker having too much fun with the wood siding discovered the second floor of the house to be high, safe, and warm, and pecked out a hole big enough to raise her family in. Insulation! Ooh, soft! Bonus points!

That nest was between the plasterboard and the outside wall and right at the head of my sister’s bed.  Till the babies fledged, there was not a thing anyone could do but wait for the day there weren’t little chirping hungry woodpeckers at the crack of dawn. (While hoping for no obnoxious cracks from teenage birds getting plaster’d.)

Mom and Dad eventually–they waited till they were really, really sure those birds were gone–got a tall ladder and plugged up that hole, hoping Momma Bird would get the message.  Woods, see? Tall trees, that way, go!

It had been two years since Nina and I had done a yarn crawl.  Last year’s medicalnoise simply, neverendingly got in the way.  We were long overdue for some time together, so today we threw our things in her car and headed north.

I introduced her to Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco and snagged the last hank of Malabrigo Sock Botticelli Red in that dyelot, just to make absolute sure I had enough for my project–you know, the one I ripped out four times in my perfectionism before I got it right.  Having a lot of yarn left over, just in case, so much beats the alternative, and  I want to be able to be more generous on that shawl’s length that I would be for me, personally, if that’s what feels right when I get to that point. (I will add, the yarn held up just fine to all that ripping. Makes me more willing to buy more.)

The owner grinned to see me right back and right back in that Malabrigo basket, and she welcomed us warmly.

And then we went to Imagiknit in San Francisco, a marvelous shop full of light, both in the people and in the shop itself.  As we drove closer to it, looking around and at our map, (hey, I know that park!) I mentioned to Nina that my cousin Dan lived in this general neighborhood.

She dropped me off and went hunting for that most endangered species, a parking spot in The City.

I had only seen Imagiknit in the wild, at Stitches.  The store itself has two big rooms: the animal fibers in here as you walk in, the plant fibers over there in that one.  I imagine that would make it easy for the vegans or for the allergic. (I appreciated that the angora rabbit yarn was on a table by itself in the center, thereby far less likely to accidentally intermingle fibers with the wools.)

I bought a little Malabrigo here, too, some laceweight in exactly THE shades of rosy reds, and the gorgeous many-shaded skein less than perfectly pictured here, a colorway not quite like anything else around; it had a tag that said “test” on it.

Test? I asked. Am I allowed to buy this?  Did you dye this? Did Malabrigo?

The lady laughed and said yes, Malabrigo dyed it, and then explained it was a line that wasn’t out on the general market yet.

It’s a two-ply superwash merino worsted, super-soft.  They’d put in just the right amount of twist–not too tight, that would add too much friction to the hand, not too loose, that would let the fiber ends pop out. They’d done this exactly perfectly right.  Bravo! (Okay, Malabrigo, so let me buy more, okay?  Could you like, maybe, shear your sheep a little faster or something down there in Uruguay?  While those little lambs are just, you know, milling around like that, waiting impatiently for my needles. Whatever it takes.)

I told them I hadn’t been much of a hat knitter, but there was a family that had lost a child whom I’d knitted hats for and their little boy still doesn’t want to take his off ever.  His attachment to that hat had sold me on knitting them, so this worsted skein would be the next one I make, for…whomever.

I now know what I want to make the next piano hat out of, too, once there is more than the one skein in my world.  Can you Imagiknit?

The kicker? As I waited for Nina to swing back afterwards to pick me up, the guy who stopped at the stop sign across the street from the shop as I opened the door:  I could not believe it.  “DAN!” I mean, c’mon, what are the chances?! But it was him.  He looked slightly around but not all the way to where I was standing, shrugged ever so slightly, must be just city background noise, and drove off and away.

Leading me to thinking, you know?  There are others I love that I also need to go spend more time with, now that I can.  I’m so glad Nina got me to stretch my boundaries and go farther than my usual path and to see that I could. I’d needed that.

While trying to get a birthday pulled together and trying to help a friend move and a family member go on a trip and trying to–well, I had a cool little post simmering away in my brain just waiting for when I actually had a moment to sit down and write it.

I can remember none of it.

But the others approved of the homemade angel food cake just the same.  Richard got to make use of one of his favorite earlier-year presents, one of those squirting thingummies that you pour your cream into with maybe a little sugar mixed in, (I assure you we paid nowhere remotely near that price, but on the other hand, ours, an older model, is not dishwasher safe) and poof! You’ve got that fancy-shaped canned whipped cream splurting out, only it tastes good!  Throw in some crushed Heath bars, and you have the only kind of cake he considers acceptable for birthdays, the cake of his childhood and our kids’.

I’m a rebel.  I like my cake different.  Anything, please, after all these years and all these birthdays, as long as it’s not angel food cake with whipped cream and crushed Heath bars, and does it even have to be cake?  A little variety is a good thing.

(That post is coming back to me…)

I saved, for a long time, a cartoon where the mom couldn’t find the birthday candles so she just stuck a lit flashlight in the center of an angel food cake. That is SO us.  Which is why Richard now has a hidden stash of birthday candles, and today he had to tell us where to find them.

He always buys three boxes just to make sure.

That was the last box.

Y’know, we really should know where the flashlights are.

Oh, and: when it was Michelle’s birthday, for once, I couldn’t remember the recipe off the top of my head and actually had to go look it up.  The bells didn’t clang when I did, either. Huh.

We all had the same reaction at the first bite–wait. Something’s different.

It took awhile to figure it out: I had long ago reversed the amounts of vanilla vs almond flavoring without realizing it, and had been doing it that way for lo these many years, very heavy on the almond.  That’s our cake.  We like it that way. So when it came out tasting of vanilla, even tinted slightly by it, with only barely enough almond essence to nag at one…

So yeah. We needed a do-over. Richard got his cake, it got done right this time, and having another angel food cake in one month was definitely the right thing to do. We celebrated him right.

And it even had candles.  The tens figure on this side, the ones figure on that side, we can stretch those 36 as far as they need to go, over the hill and on beyond, his smile lighting up the place.