When a kid’s first attempt at filing bounces…

…When you realize BYU lets out mid-April so she didn’t quite make it to five months in college for the year, so technically then she’s not a dependent anymore…

…When she doesn’t want to be one anyway because of grad school issues…

That’s when you stifle chuckles while the hubby goes But I just DID that! at the not-helpful tax software chasing itself in circles, just like it did to me for hours before he came home.

And then–we’ve never done this before.  A once-in-a-lifetime chase.  The great American cultural experience of finding an open post office on the night of April 15th.  There are a lot fewer of them than there used to be, and after I looked up the possibilities, I told Richard, It’s a date! We’re going exploring new places! Out into the hinterlands!

This is supposed to be fun?  He wasn’t convinced.  Was I sure there wasn’t one closer?  Uh, Pleasanton and Oakland are your next closest.

Oh. We weren’t sure we needed to get the amends in that fast anyway, since we’d all filed, but better safe.

Forty-five minutes of waiting in line to turn left onto the road it was on, with the usual cut-ins by the cheerful types who like to wave hi while showing you their sore finger for your sympathy.

Big wheeled mailbags at the curb, a tired postal worker who genuinely smiled when I told him “Thank you!” as he took my mail through the car window, lights on inside behind him and people clearly still working on their returns in there. Ouch.

And you know? Really?  Isn’t it wonderful that these are the kinds of problems we’re having this year?

But I gotta say–Sam, this is why your due date was April 11. I tried my best to make that work out, really, I did (hand me that pogo stick…) But the skies were holding a party and throwing sparkly-white confetti on the 15th, and you held out for that. You knew a good thing coming.

So did we, in our anticipation, whenever the day might be, and boy were we right.  Happy Birthday!

Pictures borrowed from Paul Higgins and Marlene Foard; I couldn’t get the black-headed grosbeak that showed up in my yard today to hold still long enough to shoot my own photos, much though I tried, Richard’s mega-camera in hand. Thanks to Sally for helping me identify the species.

Meantime: does Babelfish come in an OED version?

There’s an online listing for a silk/cashmere laceweight yarn, shipped from China, and where it should mention care instructions it has the rather marvelous sentence, and I quote exactly, “Abstersion explain:handwash in cold water and dry flat”.  I looked up abstersion at dictionary.com and it defines it as to wipe clean or to clean, from Sir Walter Scott.

So Walter Scott made up some random word forever ago, being, you know, novel, and some poor guy in China is trying to use it to communicate?

I told Michelle there was this weird word and she, always up for a vocabulary challenge, looked it up on Merriam-Webster’s site–where they said, well, that’s not in our regular online dictionary, but if you pay for our super-duper advanced version, then we can indeed tell you what it means.  But it is secret knowledge, with initiation writes involved, a real fee-for-all.  (Or words to that effect.  I’m translating.)

She was stunned, going, “I have *never* seen that before on their page! NEVER!” It was like the old Google game where you try to come up with a search that gets you only one result on the page–I won!

So how on earth did this guy in China get a hold of that word and think it was the right one?

And now we’ll just, I guess, absterge that useless word from our vocabularies? (I just made it real easy to, huh?) My computer’s spellcheck Does Not Approve.  That’ll teach it.

Random avoidances of tax forms, which really are done anyway, just print and sign and be done with it, fer cryin’ out loud:

Saw another large hawk, perched on the telephone wires watching the cars, including ours as we were going by during a break in today’s rain rain rain. We came back the other way awhile later, and there he was, still, calmly observing.  The rain was holding off the whole time for all of us during that errand.  Apres nous, le deluge.

Saw a squirrel trying to sneak at the feeder actually slip off the top of the wet awning and fall down to the patio, flipping his tail wildly as the ground jumped up at him. I think he was as surprised as I was. He seemed okay.

We found, next to a large bookcase, the leak in the roof going down the wall of an unused bedroom, the top of the wallboard starting to peel away. My dyepot found a new use.  The warranty on that roof expired in November.  This is Not Good.  At least no squirrels fell in.

Michelle was explaining to a friend from back East yesterday that it doesn’t rain in summer in California and that the rain here is always cold–the idea of a warm summer rain is just “A weirdo thing you guys do back there,” as she put it to me today as the skies did their normal-winter thing.

It never rains in summer, except that it always does just once, and always when it does, people exclaim, But it never rains in summer! This is so bizarre!

Nah, the bizarre part is that it doesn’t and that it’s so ocean-cold when it does.  There are supposed to be summer rains, and they are supposed to be warm, and they are supposed to be enjoyed back home, say, walking along the C&O Canal with old friends watching turtles swimming in the canal as the rain splashes from above and the wide Potomac ripples slowly nearby.

I’m trying to figure out an excuse to go confirm that hypothesis in person this year.

The song “California Dreamin’ ” was written after a 17-year-old from LA joined a band and it landed a gig singing in New York. Her father tried to explain the concept “cold” to her. She bought a wool dress, thinking that should totally do it.

Backless.

Manhattan, we have a problem.  They “stopped into a church” because it was the closest warm building and she was finding out that maybe her dad did know something after all.

My friend’s handknit wool socks on my feet, gratefully… Because it’s raining, y’know, and that means it’s cold in Northern California. (Cold.  Um.  I assure you my snow shovel remains idle. I am not complaining!)

Weighed my yarn, decided I could do one more pattern repeat before the edging–remember the edging? There was a shawl project, once upon a time–I decided I had been yarn-deprived for nearly a week and that that was way long enough. I knitted that pattern repeat.

I will stop treating my taxes like a manuscript or a house remodel: there is an end and we are there, fer cryin’ out loud.

The weather report is calling for rain Thursday. Maybe I’ll get to see another hawk!

And so, there was a message in my inbox from Sam this morning after his mom, Gigi, read my post: would I like a Sherpa?

Would I?!  I answered with a Yes Please! and immediately started baking chocolate.  Sam is a peach.

And so I got to traverse CNCH in style.  We ran into Gigi and his sister and a few friends at one point, and as we were talking, he started teasing his mom about her haircut, how it went just so at the back now.

I looked up at him and grinned, Well, if she used a hot curling iron for that, you know… Train up a curl in the way it should go, and when it is cold it will not de-part from it.

After I got home I glazed the pair of chocolate tortes I’d pulled out of the oven just before I’d left.  One for Sam. And one for…

That second torte went out the door almost immediately but then came right back in, and I got handed an object.  I had no idea what it could be.  I was told, “Turn it off!” I was absolutely mystified. Turn what off? What are you talking about?

I about died laughing and wanted to take pictures after explanations were made but was told that doing so might not be held in the highest appreciation at just that moment–it would be funny later, but but.

Remember that glaze recipe?

Chocolate-truffled cellphones.  Total Immersion method.  Yum.

(Yeah, we were afraid it was net-working, but it handed over the chocolate and nothing got hurt.)

Just for fun.  Wow.  Anyone handy with paper?  Six pages of instruction on that origami, but people are flocking to the site.

A childhood friend of my dad’s lives in the hills above here, and I was admiring her koi pond once.  She lamented that the cranes and the great blue herons loved their fast-food sushi snacks, standing by the side of the little pond, waiting for the captive fish to come out from under their covered area.  Sure. They could wait.

We do live between the Bay and the ocean, and one will occasionally see a brilliantly white great crane standing in the green grass above the freeway in the spring, nowhere particularly near the waterways, simply showing off the fact that they’re gorgeous. (Do the cars passing below look like fish in a stream at a distance?  Are they carwindow-shopping?)

So. If a sea-diving bird were to fly over and decide it wanted a little lemon juice to go with its fish, and it got caught in the thorns, would I pull my auks out of the Meyer?

Or de-murre?

(Waiting for the angel food cake in the oven to finish.  Oh–there it goes.)

Happy birthday, Michelle!

You know who’s on your side when the chips are down…

“You want *WHAT*?!”

“If you could make just one of your pumpkin muffins without any chocolate in it…”

She stared. I used to read her that “Are You My Mother?” book with the little bird in it when she was little.

“Heathen,” she declared, turning abruptly back into the kitchen.

(She was right. They’re better with.)

I got an email that made me very wistful; I had hoped to see him one more time.  I wrote about him here; Time Magazine interviewed him here.  Goodbye, Uncle Richard; we miss you.  My children remember your kindness.  Rest in peace, and say hello to your brother and the grandparents for me.

It was a day.

Remember this? Prove you’re married or we drop your wife from the health insurance, etc.

We finally got the kid’s transcript in hand; deadlines are wonderful things. So.

Off to his office to fax everything in. Reading the fine print after I got there that I should have paid attention to earlier, marriage and birth certificates in hand, I realized, wait–they want our tax return too?  And, just in case we got divorced since last year, they want a bank statement or utility bill with both our names on it that’s not older than two months?  But what if those don’t put both our names on them?

Back home, growling at the lost time and the utter stupidity of it all.  Growling at myself for forgetting to hit “save” on my *Turbo-taxes yesterday (the software later restored the files for me when I finally dared look at it)…  Trying not to let it all get to me.

The only reason I found what I needed is that, on a whim, yesterday I’d gone to City Hall to pay my utility bill in person as long as I was running an errand nearby.  Meaning I hadn’t torn off the top of the bill, the part you mail in–and the only part that had both our names, the bank being of no help.  Small favors that are everything in that moment; thank you, dear G_d.

Back to the office.  I was almost there, driving along–when suddenly I noticed it. Somehow I just simply hadn’t before.  It was instantly clear to me what it was.

The eruv.

I am not Jewish. But this is Passover week and Easter week, and those who’ve read my book know that our first day in our new house here, the day of the moving van, a day that was completely overwhelming with boxes erupting constantly from the truck while I tried to manage three kids ages four, two, and crawling, we were invited to come to a Seder as soon as that van left.  Just because we were friends of friends and Nina knew what moving was like.

We were the strangers at the gates.  She and her husband warmly welcomed us in.

That line overhead had never called attention to itself.  It was just the simplest reminder on Earth that G_d is here, too.  It brought me up short and completely turned my day around at a moment I greatly needed it.

A piece of string. It healed my world in that moment.  My thanks to those who put it there.

Twelve rows x 398 stitches so far this evening.

1. So…if you browse through some yarns at some of your favorite dyers on your PC for a few minutes, idling the needles to give your hands a needed break, is it then Windows shopping?

2. Michelle took a whiff at the lemons in the bowl to see if they’d gone off yet, and asked me about their ages?  I’d picked them Sunday? Well then!

Which is how we found ourselves eating the first lemon bars out of the oven before they’d even set yet, necessitating forks.  Setting the bar high, temperature-wise.

3. The towhees didn’t fly off in a fright like they used to when the brash bully of the yard swooped in: I guess they’d gotten jay-ded by now.  The bluejay ate a few sunflowers and then chased them just enough to show them who still thinks he’s boss, but clearly, they’re on to him: even if he presents a big bill at this fancy restaurant, he’s into fast food.  Eat and run.

4. Those towhees got downy to business right after being left alone again, courting by quivering their wings and bopping around with their tails held high, and then the one that had to have been the male emphasizing his studliness by, Look at me!  I’m a poofball!

She was all, eh.   Don’t bother me.

So he gathered some tiny twigs in his beak for helping with the nest building.

Hey! Now you’re talking!

Last I saw them, they were bouncing together across the yard towards the trees.

We were walking into church today and I saw, at a side angle as we approached…

Back up a moment here.  For years now I have had visual memory damage and a specific difficulty with recognizing faces of people I’ve only recently met or that I don’t often see.

…And yet, “MICKEY!?!” burst loudly out of me before she’d even turned around.

Sixteen years.  It had been sixteen years. She was the young grandma with neon-(wait, I forget–was it purple? Fuschia?  Blue?  I think it varied.  Punk-spiked and wild-colored, anyway) hair.  Her grandkids were just slightly younger than my kids. Who did not have a California Cool-version grandma quite like my Norwegian-born friend Mickey. I adored her.  Always will.  And somehow my soul refused to let my memory damage defeat me or even slow me down, not for one instant, the moment I saw her today.  I’m still trying to figure out how it could have been so (and her hair was normal now), but… !

Her daughter had moved to Washington State, and Mickey with her, in 1994. I did not get to see those children growing up with mine, and I have wished it could have been otherwise.

She turned at hearing her name and took me in for a full two seconds before it hit her and, “OH!” as she threw her arms around me.  She was too kind to say anything like, when did your hair go so gray? Where are all your little kids?  How did you get so old?  Where on earth did that cane come from?

GOOD to have you HOME, Mickey!!

After church, we sat and just talked, not enough, oh, never long enough, but till I was afraid I was wearing out her friend who was waiting to take her back with her where she was staying. (Thank you, Jean!)

Why had she come? I asked.

Simply because it was time to see old friends.  Just because.

Okay, now, that is a thought to live by. Grab your plane tickets, let’s go.

And in the meantime.  While Richard was sitting waiting patiently for me by the main doors, he was being charmed by a young mom’s two-year-old daughter waiting with her mommy for her daddy to be ready to go, too.  He described the scene later over dinner: if her mommy asked her a question, she had to jump up and down before she could start to answer with a giggle. Bouncy bouncy bounce. Every question. Every time.  She was *so* cute.

Michelle, intrigued, asked, And did she have blonde curls?

Richard: Oh, yes!

Michelle: Oh, that’s just too perfect.

Richard: Yes, it’s exactly how you used to bounce; you didn’t walk, you bounced, jumping up and down with each step.

Michelle: And singing Little Mermaid!

Me, laughing: Oh, boy did you sing Little Mermaid!

Michelle went on to tell us a vivid memory of hers, long forgotten by either of us: her daddy was crossing the street with her to the Double Rainbow ice cream store downtown, a very special treat, one-on-one Daddy time to celebrate her birthday, when suddenly she realized: she hadn’t sung her song! She hadn’t bounced! She was so excited that she’d forgotten and she’d actually *walked*!  THAT’S not how you do it!

And to Richard’s horror, she’d darted back across that often-busy street so she could do the job right.  Bouncy bounce, sing Little Mermaid.  There you go. Did it right that time (and, I’m sure, with her daddy’s hand holding tightly to hers just in case this time).

She remembers that sense of satisfaction in getting it right.  Uh uh uhhh, uh uh uh-uhhhhhhhh. Put joy in the world!

At any age. At any time.  In any color.  Curly, punk, blonde, blue.

I want to see Mickey’s daughter and grandchildren; I say, the reunions have only just begun.

And I hope to see my young-mom friend’s exuberant little daughter grow up here, so her mother and I can swap tales in some day to come over when we had cute little girls always jumping up and down for the sheer joy of being alive and well loved.

Maybe I should go spike my hair.

(And as I finish typing this, Michelle is singing Easter music in the background.)

Warning: calories ahead.

When my husband and I were young newlyweds, his mother’s mother sat me down one long, boring day with her recipe file, and with her great enthusiasm and my attempting to look enthused, she had me copy down (by hand, kids, this was in the Olden Days) all her decades-long favorites.  She wanted to pass down the wisdom of her kitchen.  I chaffed in silence; I wasn’t about to tell her how much all of this represented to me what I so much didn’t want to be.  I had no intention of being a stay-at-home mom. Roasted Potatoes was just not what I aspired to.

Yeah well.  Live and learn.  One of the hardest things I ever did was decide to stay home with my children after all.  For the first few months of motherhood, I was able to work where I could take my baby with me; she wasn’t mobile yet, she slept a lot, nobody minded.  But then two things happened: she started exploring the world on her hands and knees–and we moved 2000 miles and that job was over.  I found, though it would have surprised me just a couple of years earlier, that I utterly could not bear to leave her, even if it meant living on my husband’s grad-student fellowship.  He very much supported my decision either way, but confessed later he was relieved I’d chosen to make motherhood a do-it-yourself project. He didn’t think anyone else could do as good a job as me.

And over all these years now, one of the things I’ve learned is how much memories attach themselves, over time, to–you guessed it–various foods.  Write down those recipes, give’em to your college kids so they can re-create home.

And yet.  GrandmaM would totally get where I’d been coming from back in the day.  She was the first woman in her small (and I do mean small) town to have a college degree.  She was a teacher who married a dairy farmer who was also the town’s high school principal, and the moment she was married she was of course out of a job; the idea of a married teacher back then was unthinkable, and a teacher married to the principal! Well now!

My older daughter, who is finishing up her PhD, asked for these, and I thought, as long as I’m typing them up, might as well put them up here.

From our family to yours.

There was a recipe making the rounds years ago with a story disclaimed by Snopes, supposedly stolen from Mrs Fields by a disgruntled ex-employee; whatever, someone did a good job of reverse engineering.  These make five pounds of dough–and I once had a batch at the top of the freezer, reached down later for something in the bottom of the freezer, and… Clonk.

Not-Mrs. Field’s Cookies (Clonk Cookies, perhaps?)

Cream: 2 c butter, 2c sugar, 2c brown sugar.

Add 4 eggs, 2tsp vanilla.

Mix: 5c oats that have been measured and then ground into flour, 4c flour, 1 tsp salt, 2tsp each baking powder and baking soda.  (I have been known to skip the baking soda.)

Mix all together and then fold in 24 oz chocolate chips and 3 c chopped nuts.

350 degrees, 8-10 minutes for medium-sized cookies. Note that the ground oats in the dough, being a little coarser than actual oat flour, help make it easy to pry off a little frozen cookie dough with a fork and bake just one or two at a time so that you can limit your caloric exposure at any one time if you want.

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Recipe the second: this one originated from, of all things, a 1992 Mazola no-stick-spray ad. (Why, yes, I write notes with dates in my cookbooks; do you?)

Cranberry Bars

Cookie crust: set oven at 350. Grease 15×10 pan. Cut 1 c of cold butter–do not substitute, and needs to be cold–into 2 1/2 c flour.  Add 1/2 c sugar and 1/2 tsp salt, by hand, not by machine. It’s more work that way, but the difference in crunch in the crust is huge. Press firmly in pan, bake 20-23 minutes or till golden. Top with filling quickly and bake again.

Filling:  Beat 4 eggs, 1c corn syrup, 1 c sugar, and 3 tbl melted butter (do not substitute!) Stir in 2 c coarsely chopped fresh cranberries and 1 c coarsely chopped pecans.  Pour quickly over hot crust, spreading it out.

Bake 25-30 minutes or until set. Cool completely. Refrigerate it for it to cut cleanly, if you can wait that long.

Pecan Pie variation: for filling, use 4 eggs, 1 1/2 c corn syrup, 1 1/2 c sugar, 3 tbl butter, 1 1/2 tsp vanilla, and 2 1/2 c pecans.  I find it curious that it uses so much more sweetener when it doesn’t have the tartness of the cranberries in this version, but if you want a pecan pie as a cookie finger food, this is definitely the way to get it.

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I brought the cranberry bars to a get-together once and watched my friend Jim take his first bite, close his eyes in appreciation, and pronounce how if you want dessert done right you ask Alison to bring it.

I’ll share the recipe with GrandmaM when I get up there.  She will laugh.

Looking down, Monday.

Looking across, today.

Looking up, after that; what a difference a rinsing and blocking make. (It’s just a bit greener than this in real life.)

I like it. Hey Mikey. Weekend, here we come!

Meantime, in family news, Michelle arrived home this afternoon after a week gallivanting in England. I, unfortunately, did not fit in her suitcase on the way out, but that’s okay, I had this project to get done.  She came home going, Mom! Green and Black’s chocolate! They had it, like, everywhere, like Hershey’s here! (As in, how would it be?!)

(Ed. to add picture of newly-glazed torte. The shine dulls once they’ve been refrigerated.)

Happy birthday, John!!! Our youngest is now identical-twin terrible-twos, the big 22.

Around here, when it’s a family member’s birthday and they are not in town, we bake a cake in their honor anyway.

And it’s also a tradition that when I bake a chocolate torte, I always bake two.

Okay, so, one went to Sam yesterday, the second one,  someone else has dibs on, meaning a little bit of baking, a lot of chocolate smells, but then no torte for me–but there is more cream, so, hey, we can fix that.

On a side note, the specialty place where I’ve always bought the manufacturing cream stopped selling it in small quantities, rumor being that they got told that pouring it off into quarts and pints in-store was not kosher.  But who would want an entire half-gallon of the stuff? So they discontinued it entirely.

When you have been making your signature dessert for 20 years and an essential ingredient suddenly disappears from the market, you have to do something.  I sent off an email to the owner of the Milk Pail Market; I had to at least try to talk them into reconsidering.

I gather I’m not the only one who spoke up.  I imagine the fact that I actually gave the man one of my chocolate tortes once didn’t hurt, and nudging his attention to the extinction of that cake, likewise. (I know, breaking my arm patting myself on the back and all that.)

Because:  around Christmas there was a small handwritten sign on one of their refrigerator doors saying that due to popular demand, manufacturing cream was now back.  Woohooo!

And so.  I bought a half gallon (again) a few days ago.  Heavy whipping cream is 32% butterfat, manufacturing cream, depending on the cow and the season, 40-42%.

‘Scuse me, the oven’s beeping…  The third torte might go to the church dinner Tuesday night (renegade that I am–they said they wanted cupcakes) but that fourth one stays right here.  John, we will eat a torte in your honor.  Maybe not all at once.   Happy Birthday!!

For those who missed it the first time, here’s the recipe with a few extra notes thrown in.  If you have to use ordinary heavy cream, avoid the ones with any kind of preservatives, additives, or sugar in them.

If you have any cream left over after all this, melt more chocolate into it and, warm, it’s the best chocolate sauce, refrigerated, a ganache.

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Alison Hyde’s chocolate torte–makes two

(NOTE added 12/13/10: I have two wire whisk attachments for my Kitchenaid; if you only have one set of beaters, beat the egg whites first before the other mixture or the whites won’t fluff up.)

Snap out the bottoms of two 8″ springform pans (flat bottomed preferred). Cover bottoms with foil, snap them back in, butter the sides and the foil-covered bottoms.

CAKE:

Melt 1 lb. butter, beat with 3 c. sugar, 1/4 tsp salt and 2 tsp bourbon vanilla
Add in 1/2 c. manufacturing cream, 6 egg yolks, beat till fairly light.

Add in: 1 1/3 c. cocoa that has been mixed with 1 c. flour till any lumps are smoothed out. Dutch process cocoa will give you a different flavor from that of Hershey cocoa; my favorite is Bergenfield’s Colonial Rosewood cocoa. The non-dutched cocoas are healthier and I think taste better; dutching is usually done on lower-quality cacao beans.

Beat separately till stiff: 6 egg whites and 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar. Underbeating is better than overbeating.

Fold egg whites into chocolate mixture. Put in the two pans and bake at 350 for 42-45 minutes. Center will not be solid and cracking should appear. Run a knife carefully around outer edges; cake will fall, and the top will be more even if  it falls in one piece. (On the other hand, since it will become the bottom of the torte, this step is not exactly essential.)

Cool at least an hour. Loosen springform sides and remove. Put a plate on bottom of each cake and flip over. Peel off pan bottoms, then the foil. Glaze when cool.

GLAZE for two cakes:

Chop one Trader Joe’s Pound Plus Belgian bittersweet chocolate bar (500 g) and melt with 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 c. manufacturing cream. The tradeoff in the amount of cream is whether you want to sculpt it to hold deeper J-strokes (use lesser amount) or thinner, with a slightly lighter texture (use greater amount, and is as is shown in the picture.)  Use a double boiler or microwave. Try not to incorporate extra air in as you stir. Also, it is important that every edge of every piece of chocolate be fully dunked down in the cream before heating or that piece of chocolate could possibly seize into a hardened, unmeltable lump with the combination of liquid and heat. You heard it here first: chocolate is very wool-like–it can, in effect, felt from that same combination of factors as wool. Unless you dunk it first.

When glazing a cake, first, I pour it into the center of the two.  I quickly first scoot it towards the edges to make some of it fall down the sides in waves.  Then, I make a backwards J from the center, turn the cake slightly, repeat all the way around.

Enjoy!

(Ed. to add 10/26/10: for those who have one nearby, Smart and Final stores currently carry manufacturing cream too.)

(Ed. to add 1/22/11: I put a thermometer in my oven today, and with the thing set at 350, it was actually reading 325 both at the beginning and end of the 42 minutes.)

Okay, if I titled this “Driving the Belt-way” that might be too much of an insider joke from someone who grew up near DC and whose older daughter did an internship at NIH there.

We don’t own a TV. We do, clearly, have a computer.  I spent about three and a half hours today smiling wryly at the difference as every now and then the screen would go blank and I’d have to tap the keyboard or mouse, putting down my knitting a moment to keep the picture going.

It’s been a dozen years since some of my kids started tae kwon do lessons at the local Y, a gift to the community one night a week from a local fellow.  Sam was always the most serious about it.

Which is how, with the wonder of streaming, I came to watch my little girl break every single board on the first try with her foot or her fist, then bowing and being bowed to as they presented her with her own, for real, much-worked-towards black belt.

She did it!  Go Sam!

(Time to go wind that second hank of suri.)

Last January, Richard ran into our old friend C. at Stanford Hospital; she works there as a nurse. Her kids and ours grew up together, we’ve known each other for ages, and she greeted him joyfully.

And then she stopped suddenly and asked–Wait–does this mean Alison’s in here?

That shawl project I mentioned yesterday?

I bought the hand-dyed Cherry Tree Hill suri laceweight at the DBNY sale.  When it came, it was wiry in the hands and very thin and I knew it would never get knit by itself.

So I went looking for something to tame it and add weight to it.  I found two blue laceweights in my stash, one dyed by me, one dyed by Lisa Souza, that I knew would look stunning with it.

But I also had some 20/20/60 cashmere/silk/superfine merino in Verdoso from Colourmart that matched the fairly small bit of green in that suri. I’d already hanked, scoured, and balled it up, which you have to do with mill-oiled cones; it was in the color of life growing upwards in the spring anew.  It was so soft now and it was ready to go.

I liked the blue. I preferred the blue. I wanted to do the blue.

But the green said, simply, No. Me.

We argued with each other for a few days.

No, the green flat-out declared, I said me, and that, honey, is that.

Rargh.

And so I got started, and as I got the yoke worked on, I thought, you know, I think I’d still like that blue better–maybe I should just frog this so I could prove to that yarn that I do know better than it does, thankyouverymuch.

Green it was.  I tried to get as much done as possible before Stitches, and then, like I say, my hands had to rest for days after wheeling around there.

It was such a relief to be able to get back to work.  I put a fair amount of time into it yesterday and today, feeling like this needed to be ready–if for no other reason than that then I could dive into the fun new stuff.

And yet.  I’ve learned time and again that when something is that insistent, there’s always a good reason for it.

Maybe I shouldn’t blog the whole thing yet, just wait for the day I go to give it, while probably wearing a different one to offer to trade, because, you see, this insecure part of me always wants to whine, But what if she doesn’t *like* it?

And yet.

I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday and the nurse there exclaimed, Oooh, that’s *pretty*!

That helped more than she could know, and then, today, all the more.

The mail came this afternoon while I was knitting away.  A letter. It was from C.  She was throwing a party, bringing old friends together as she tries to do about once a year–and this time also hoping to raise money for breast cancer research.

For the sake of a young co-worker of hers. A single mom with breast cancer.

Who is a nurse at Stanford.

In a department I was in last January.

I had two nurses by that first name.  They saw me near death’s door. I am well now. For all their hard work and their caring, I am where I am now. I owe them all so much.

“Wear green!” said the invitation.

Oh, honey, and bring it, too.  I shall bring it, too. And I will tell that young mom that that green cashmere blend knew what it was doing.

And she will see me healthy.  I will take the colors of growth and new life with the first bluebell flowers of spring sprinkled here and there, and wrap them around her shoulders from all my heart.

So the hubby comes home tonight and opens his mail.

And now we know the details.

To all those who think employer-based healthcare plans are the pure and only true path to medicine? Given my medical history, insurance is a subject close to home here.  Are you sitting down?

My husband and I are celebrating our 30th anniversary this summer.  Thirty years ago, with both of us having grandfathers on the political scene in DC for decades, they knew everybody, they had us invite everybody to the reception, we sent out 500 invitations and 500 people actually showed up! We were standing in that receiving line for three and a half solid hours with no breaks in the flow of humanity, most of whom my new husband and I didn’t know, all these people taking the time out of their lives to come shake our hands and wish us well.

We solemnly promised our own children we would never do that to them.

I guess one could say now that we had a lot of witnesses, having no idea we might someday need them. (One thank-you note, on the other hand, was returned two months after the wedding as “recipient deceased.” That was fast. We might be in trouble here.)

My husband’s employer, a Fortune 500 company, now says we must produce our marriage certificate, and fast, or they are cutting off my medical insurance on the assumption of fraud.  They are doing this to everybody.  We claim John is our son? We’d better produce the birth certificate and prove it, and his school transcript, too.  We have to order the license or the birth certificate from the states they happened in? Oh, those states are furloughing workers and are weeks or even, in California’s case, months behind on all paperwork?  So sad too bad, you’re out.

It took California over ten weeks to process my auto registration payment, and that’s when they were in effect getting paid money by me to do so, and not just some nominal fee.  Okay, yes, we have the kid’s birth certificate, but not his transcript.  And what of all the people who don’t have a copy on hand for their kids?  Or of their marriage certificate?

I so much want to ask the CEO, whose own insurance, I am sure, is in no way imperiled: exactly what kind of corporate culture do they think they’re trying for here? Are they familiar with the term meta-message? Could you shake each employee’s hand, look them in the eye, and convince them you were wishing them and their families…well?