Remodeling goof number one: twenty-seven years ago, the latest fad from Thermidor was to put a pop-up vent behind the cooktop. Someone we knew had that and she liked it. What sold us was the contractor saying that it would be far quieter than your standard hood because the motor for it would be on the roof and far away, and with my hearing, a lack of background noise is something to be highly sought after.

What he didn’t know is that the sound would reverberate all down that shaft, making it a lot louder than a standard one would have been. And when the part down at stove level refused to retract and close anymore it became a source of very cold air in the winter.

Goof number two: the architect’s specs called for a 30″ stove, but Richard wanted five burners. Okay, so, 36″. It wasn’t till the contractor installed the cabinets that he realized that he hadn’t changed them to match.

Meaning, our cabinets have overhung the stove from both sides all these years, which is great for the finish. Not.

And you can’t put in an overhead vent now because it would have to hang from below the cabinets and that would not leave room for the pots, much less stirring or seeing into them.

Unless you can put in a 30″ vent for a 36″ stove and I imagine the county would not be real happy with that idea.

So then the choices are to find another cooktop that shallow or look in the back of the yarn closet to see if we still have the leftover Corian piece (I’m not sure we do) and try to find someone to seam it when it’s 27 years old and make it still look good so we could have that 30″er. Or just replace the entire countertop, vent, cooktop, and did I mention the fridge is that old too and has been fixed several times and is leaking and just needs to go?

Nobody seems to make cooktops that shallow because they don’t make those vents anymore. With good reason: by pushing the stove forward the way it does, I have caught my sweaters on fire twice. You know how they say wool extinguishes flames? Let me tell you, it does. Angora got shaved close so it’s your friend too and that sweater looked like it had had a major procedure done at the vet’s but in both cases the fire went out before it got up to my chin and it didn’t take hold in the sweater, just blackened and shriveled the fuzzies on the surface.

Yeah. Fun times.

Apparently you can get a better, longer lasting finish on the wood of the cabinetry now than we were allowed then. With ours, you can see where the sun came through the skylight directly.

Lots of end-of-year sales, and a hubby going, One more month at least. We have to have the vaccine first before we let people work in here.

We really don’t want to re-remodel the kitchen. We just want a working stove.

We’re going to have to replace our gas cooktop. Like, asap.

We remodeled our kitchen 27 years ago with high-end Thermidor appliances and they were a disaster: the low-cycling burners were designed so that they fused shut and never worked again if you were ever to turn them to high (as explained afterward by the repairman, who was sympathetic, with the warranty getting us nowhere with the dealer) and both ovens’ motherboards fried just outside of warranty, with a quote of $850 plus labor for each. Same quote as the stove. We replaced the double oven and kept the half-dead stove. The other half actually outlived the average stove by a dozen years.

Another repairman later noted that self-clean ovens tend to fry their motherboards and that one should not use that feature.

So. I’m suddenly trying to learn everything I can about 36″ cooktops.

A Thermidor will never come in our house again–he felt as strongly about that as I do.

My problem is, scrolling around, there was one and only one whose looks stopped me in my tracks–I LIKE that one. Bluestar? What’s a Bluestar?

So I went looking for the price, rolled my eyes, said well of course it is, but still: more expensive than Viking? Yow.

I would dearly love to hear anything anybody loves or hates about theirs, any size or brand. Consumer Reports in my experience has become less reliable than some of the appliances they describe, other than obliquely by letting people publish reviews on their site.

For reliability, I’d be going with Bosch, whose appliances I’ve actually been consistently happy with–except that they don’t make one. (EDIT: Lowe’s has one! And for $1200 less than the Bluestar!)

Anyone?

There were three people being helped and one ahead of me in line at the post office. Even this early, I’ve never seen so few there in December.

But the stuff I ordered for the grands to come here first so I could wrap it–those haven’t come yet. So much for bypassing Big South American River. Turns out Monday we go on total lockdown for three weeks, and I don’t think going out to ship presents to young children counts as an essential trip under the new guidelines.

2020 is almost over.

We’ll figure it out.

Legos came in plain squares and rectangles of mostly red and blue and the occasional green or yellow when I was a kid, one or two sizes each and plain and hard and uninviting and I remember my grandmother wanting me to go play with the ones in her basket and me feeling like, Are you kidding me? How old do you think I am? Toddlers build towers!

As they got far more sophisticated I didn’t see for the longest time why a kid should just assemble from a directions sheet whatever someone else had dreamed up. Why not use their own imagination?

As if I ever did with them, so never mind.

But yarn! I remember watching my mother’s hands assembling plain straight string into beautiful, warm, cabled sweaters. Her projects always got my attention and the firmest determination that someday I was going to be able to do that, too. I remember studying the puzzle of her motions, the steady, accumulative loop-over-loop.

My husband’s family has always loved puzzles.

Watching my seven and nine year old grandsons showing off their Lego creations over FaceTime, I finally really got it: they’re putting together not just a puzzle but a 3-D one that helps develop fine motor coordination and their ability to envision what comes next and to check and correct and not be satisfied till it’s right and when they’re done, it’s not just a bunch of plastic bricks that fall right back apart but an actual toy that they play with with pride.

It teaches them about taking care of things that have unseen fragility.

Of things falling apart, of resilience when they do if they get a bit too exuberant flying their planes and that if work must be done to repair it, it means something to you, then you sit down and you spend the time and you repair it.

A frog/reknit, if you will: the resources remain, all it requires is you.

If their baby brother plays bam smash crash at them you forgive him, because, he doesn’t know, and they’re old enough that they get that.

But soon enough he will and it will be his turn.

Their sister’s already there.

But for her sixth birthday, and to be as different from Christmas the next day as possible, I decided she’s ready for the tactility of making her own fabric, too.

The old-fashioned metal loom from my childhood, with that bit of a loop shape at the top of each little bar to help hold your work in place. Cotton loops: you can make an actually useful (if small) potholder, unlike acrylic which could melt in high heat. Harrisville did it right.

That present, at least, is being sent straight there.

Re all that Christmas shopping stuff, there was one thing I hadn’t actually done yet. It just seemed like I needed to know more about it first, if for no other reason than that the one on the wishlist was discontinued and Amazon was suggesting something that sounded like the latest version, but it wasn’t something I knew anything about. Best to check.

So Christmas present or no, I asked that child’s spouse last night whether this type of fishing reel was a good substitute for that one. Same weight and length and apparent strength, anyway.

Text in return: I don’t think this message was intended for me.

Me: It is, it’s from their wish list.

Stunned silence.

Return text in the morning: our toddler likes to bang on keyboard keys at any opportunity.

Concurrent return email from said spouse: I don’t know how that ended up on my list. I don’t know what it is! Thanks so much for checking.

And now there is something that person actually wants on its way to them from a list that’s been carefully gutted and cleaned.

I made me a list, checked it twice. And again. And again. If the shipping all goes smoothly the Christmas shopping looks just about finished, and I know how fortunate we are that we can do that this year.

One company doesn’t gift wrap and I wasn’t going to send four grandkids a jumble of unlabeled toys to let them duke it out over early, so I’m having the order sent here so I can wrap and reroute. That works if they ship promptly. They’re not Amazon and I’ve never dealt with them before, I don’t know. It’s too late now to say I should have paid individual shipping on each rather than accepting free shipping for the lot and a little work for me.

But then, wrapped up for Christmas for the kids is just so much better. So much more, this is from us, rather than, look what we paid for.

I wonder if the post office lines will be shorter this year?

The thought hits me: like how they said the voting lines were going to be?

He said he didn’t mind having turkey again, so I decided to try to be creative about it.

I had bought a single jar of cherry fig savory jam from Cherry Republic in Michigan to try out–kind of a token purchase for the year towards keeping the Michigan farmers in business, as one does in 2020 if one can. I opened it: it was lumpy but really not jam-sweet. Spices. Hmm.

I diced up a bunch of turkey, cut some seedless green grapes into quarters so they would cook faster, scooped out less than half that jar of jam into a separate bowl and whisked it with maybe a quarter cup of leftover plain cream, there you go.

I used one of Mel and Kris’s ceramic cake pans, which always take just a little longer to bake with but always seem to improve the texture of whatever I put in them over anything else. In with the turkey/grapes, mix in the lumpy attempt at a sauce, then I grated some fresh Gouda cheese from Milk Pail on top.

It looked pretty but it didn’t feel done.

So I took a heaping spoonful of their fresh grated parmesan and sprinkled that around on top of the whole shebang and called it good.

Now, it must be said that theirs is nothing like the room-temperature supermarket stuff in the tall green cans: fresh authentic parmesan totally rocks.

Oven, 350, shooting for 20 minutes since all I really needed to do was melt the cheese, checked it a few minutes late…

I’d had no idea. This was glorious. This is like, like, my MOM’s cooking, which is the highest compliment you could ask for. It was good, and it came out with a deep red rich sauce pooling at the bottom that you’d want to serve to company, and the turkey (thank you ceramic pan) had not come out overbaked nor tough from its second go-round of cooking.

Richard wanted a generous helping of seconds. So did I.

So I’m writing it down here, because it’s the one place I know I’ll be able to find it next year when I’m trying to figure out what on earth I did.

Suddenly realizing that–thinking of yesterday’s post–yes, yes, it would be good over pinto beans, too.

Now that we’re officially between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I don’t think I’ve told this story here before, and it’s worth telling again if I have. With thanks to Anne for sending me a video of someone playing an intense organ piece and prompting this; my son Richard minored in organ performance.

My grandmother was a concert pianist. I inherited her musical talent but my hands did not–they’re the one dyslexic part of me, wanting to reverse notes at random until I practice and practice to the point of forcing muscle memory on them.

My son Richard is all Gram. He’s good. Hum a tune, he’ll embellish it at the piano with all ten fingers going at once and improvise it into a whole new thing, any style you want.

In college he had to go to a practice room on campus in order to play. Those are reserved for music majors at all times–in four years on that campus I found an open piano room twice. He *needs* his keyboard time in a way that I didn’t quite.

Coming home at Christmas meant the piano was right there and all his. It’s an old one of Gram’s; she bought it for their DC apartment when her husband was elected to the Senate before I was born, a very good upright, but it just wouldn’t do and she had to have her grand. She gave the upright to my folks and it got passed down to me.

One holiday season when Richard was in college, the guy I’d hired to tune it ever since we’d moved here just didn’t have time to fit me in–right around Thanksgiving he gets booked up fast because everybody wants to be ready for get-togethers.

And then, bless him, Neil decided he would squeeze me in anyway. It would be a quick tune-and-run, though, no time to catch up on life.

That was fine, and thank you!

So he came. He tuned. I thanked him, we wished each other the best and he was off.

A few days later my son flew home, finals done, the house ready for Christmas, and sat down at that piano and let’er rip in loud, exuberantly happy music all over the keyboard.

About a minute into it (and having him in on this with me) I dialed the phone and when the call was answered, said, This is Alison–and held the phone towards the piano as Richard grinned and really let’er rip. That piano had never sounded so good.

Neil, listening, said with great emotion, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me!”

The music got just a little softer (because the kid knew his mom needed the help hearing on the phone), I wished Neil and his a Merry Christmas and he me and then we let each other go back to our families, the moment never to be forgotten. I was and am so grateful for his kindness.

We talked to my Mom, we FaceTimed with the kids and grandkids, grateful for technology and each other and warm homes and jobs and food and for the times to come when we’ll be able to celebrate in person. We made a mess. We took everything out of the racks for baking pans above the double oven trying to find the cord for the thermometer for the turkey and put it all back together more organized and only then did he remember that he’d put three cords to three such thermometers organized in a ziplock that last year he’d carefully put…

…Somewhere…

Never did find that, but he did find the one that came with the oven and that was better because it turned the oven off and screeched when the thing was done. You want your turkey loud like that.

I just walked back into the kitchen proud of how clean it all looks now at the end of the day.

And spotted that one last pan at the back, hand wash only, that somehow I had just completely missed.

Okay, well, that’s easily taken care of.

President Nelson, head of the Mormon Church, asked that we talk about what we’re grateful for, and trying to squish it all into words seems kind of overwhelming.

In no particular order: waking up every morning in this life.

The faith that requires that I be my best self towards all others in order to honor what I’ve been blessed with.

The doctors and nurses and blood donors and medical researchers and volunteer research guinea pigs all the way to the housecleaning staff at the hospital–everybody who helped save my life.

My family, in a million more ways than I could ever convey. So much love.

The fact that my three nephews who got covid survived it; a cousin’s working on it.

And this is going to sound weird, but…my lupus, and the Crohn’s that piled on nine years later. Because of all the ways that it constricted and confined my life: after reading Norman Cousin’s book, “Anatomy of an Illness,” I knew I needed a creative outlet and the smocked baby outfits I’d been embroidering were right out–my hands couldn’t hold that fine of a needle without intense pain.

I was at the library with my little kids one day and Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Knits about fell off the bookshelf into my hands. It was that two-page spread with the models in those fabulous coats in an amaryllis field in the Netherlands that got to me–you know I love amaryllises. I could never in the world make anything like those designs with dozens of colors but I checked that book out again and again till I finally gave up and bought a copy.

That was the turning point. Turns out, my hands could knit. Thank you, Kaffe.

I had basically given up knitting in college when I couldn’t afford the yarn nor the time. I made up for those missing dozen+ years, I would say.

I made his Carpet Coat (“These are large but they drape beautifully on everyone”) and when I got done my husband glommed onto it and told me, “It fits me better than you, go make yourself another one.” I did.

And then I met Kaffe Fassett. I’m pretty sure he ducked to come through the doorway, just like my husband does. Richard’s coat has 68 different yarns, I collected more skeins to make mine 86 because if he was going to nab my coat mine was going to outdo his. I went with the large split triangles pattern.

And then a teen some friends were raising in foster care loved them, asked about them–“Mohair. MO hair. What kind of animal is a MO?”–and I felt in my bones I had to make him one. A vest, so as to not worry about the fit or running out of my leftover yarn, but, a large part of me argued within that I can’t possibly knit for every single person who admires what I do! I’d never stop!

Tim’s happily married with children now and his wife still wears that vest all these years later. Fits her better now.

But that project was an inner barometer: when I felt generous it was what I wanted to work on, complicated or not, and when I was getting wrapped up in illness or just too down to cope with it I had no desire to. I began from that to learn just how much better I could make myself feel by applying happy anticipation to my stitches towards someone else’s happiness. It made the lupus less–devouring. I don’t know how else to put it.

All the things I’ve made, all the privileges of being able to share what I can do–none of that would have happened had my circumstances been what I’d planned on. I was going to get my last kid in school and then go back to work. But for so long I was just hanging onto life by my fingernails day to day with my illness.

But I could knit in happy anticipation of seeing the look on someone’s face, I could make love tangible, and I can’t tell you how many times that has helped make the difference.

I’m so very grateful for every member of my family, too, but that would be an encyclopedia rather than a blog post.

We were asked our Thanksgiving plans.

We intend to cook a huge turkey, have homemade everything from cranberry sauce to pie and more than the table can comfortably hold, have more loved ones than the table can comfortably seat, and have the time of our lives in one great big memorable celebration of all that blesses us and all those we love.

Next year. When we can also give thanks for all of us having been vaccinated.

So, yeah. The two of us and all the screen time with loved ones we can get. There is no responsible alternative. None.

I am totally going to steal my cousin Jim’s FB post because I know my mom can’t see anything there and it’s about her baby brother who died four years ago; he was the Senator whose seat Mike Lee unfortunately is now in. Plus it’s a hoot.

Note that Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Chris Dodd hashed out the beginnings of what would eventually become the ACA, part of why the Kochs and the Tea Party went after Bob so hard. He said at the time that Americans can’t compete on the world market as long as they know they’re one medical disaster away from losing everything.

Jim wrote:

I wrote in the spring last year about my niece who hadn’t gotten a flu shot, caught the flu, and ended up in the ICU for a very long time with sepsis, fighting for her life.

Emily was at one point the youngest-ever head of the piano teachers’ association in her state–she’s good.

After the amputations that helped save her life she had to learn how to be a piano teacher with no fingertips.

She made this video to teach other teachers what she’d learned from the experience about how to relate to her students. Who don’t know how they’ll ever be able to do what the teachers do like the teachers do, who see it from a very different viewpoint, who question themselves. How to see and meet them where they are.

With hands back to being the size of your typical five-year-old’s, as she put it, but that can’t quite land in that space back there between the black keys anymore, she tells her students it’s okay when they make mistakes because she does, too. But making music feels great.

And if you want to skip right over to 36:25 in the video, you can go see how she does.

Four years ago I was at a doctor’s for what was probably her last appointment of the day. She always took time to really listen and really ask questions, but that meant the number of minutes late piled up. I knew that. I expected that. It meant someone else was getting the care they needed and she loved that from my point of view, it also meant I got to knit: take your time.

It was going on past 5:00 on election day.

The nurse walking by was a tall African-American woman who looked absolutely stricken, putting one foot in front of the other and just trying to get through the day without bursting into tears. I learned from her face in that instant just what it must really feel like to know that Trump, whose daddy had been in the KKK, was actually close to becoming President. After Obama, no less.

So I held up my phone and assured her, It’s looking good. It’s close, but this and this and this toss-up state, it’s blue, she’s got this.

I didn’t know her at all but in that moment we were friends.

Later that evening, though, state after state blipped and flipped and turned unfathomably red after all. I felt almost as if I had betrayed her in my inability to personally keep it how it had been.

One of the great things about all those paper ballots this time is that they are counted on machines not connected to the internet. There is no wondering about hacking, the vote is what the voter said. You can run them through again. It’s all good.

I’ve been thinking of that nurse a lot these last few days.

Chris S was the first to tell me this morning that the race had been called; the Washington Post had not yet. I ran to go look, and thanks to her got to see Van Jones on CNN. Don’t miss it. That’s it, right there.

On a different note: our grandnephew Benjamin arrived last night at 33 weeks 1 day. He is in the NICU to give his lungs some time to play catch up. He is beautiful, we are thrilled, and all those crowds today across the country and even other countries calling out windows in cities banging pans dancing in the streets honking horns singing making music waving celebrating welcoming joining dancing some more–welcome to our world, little one. That was for your future. The terrible man who hated your beautiful brown skin has lost his power. I think you’ll like it here now. You couldn’t wait to see it for yourself.

So on a completely different note.

This is a hand wound ball of yarn–done kind of artsy, like I like to do it.

For my non-knitting friends, yarn is sometimes sold in ready-to-use skeins but often in hanks: picture winding it around and around the back of a chair a hundred times or two, putting a few ties on to keep the strands from tangling or falling apart, and then you twist that big loop you’ve made up and tuck one end in at the other so that it looks like a twisted cruller in a doughnut shop. You don’t want to knit straight from that.

So why sell it that way? It shows off the yarn better and pretty yarn sells. It can be hung on display. It keeps your product from unwinding all over the shop via careless customers or their fascinated little kids.

Many a yarn shop has a ball winder on hand if you have time to wait for that to be done for you and if they’re not waiting on too many other people just then; Imagiknit lets you use theirs to wind it up yourself. A lot of shops will offer to let you come back later after they’ve had time to get to it. (Cottage Yarns is wonderful that way but they’re too far out for me to make the trip twice for the same purchase, hence either I wait, or, it’s the pretty hand-wound balls for me.) You put the hank on a swift–like the outer edge of an open umbrella–and crank away at the winder, jack-in-the-box style, till the yarn end goes floating off into the air at the last.

Once it’s wound, it can’t be returned, which is incentive for them to hand it off all ready to knit up from like that. Plus it’s nice of them to do, because it does take their time and attention.

Ball winders don’t make nice round balls, though: as the strand zig zags up and down while the stretched-out hank is being twirled, it comes out flat across the top and bottom and so is referred to as a yarn cake. Because everybody likes cake and some marketing genius made the visual connection in the shapes thereof. You’ll often see that last little bit simply given a quick wrap around the cake like this one was. (That one strand across the top makes it look rounded across there, but it’s not.)

And then there’s this.

We need the pandemic to be over, because I need to go to my local shop and share…

Whoever thought of this has to have been a knitter… (Scroll down their link just a bit.)

…That’s a yarn skein cake pan.

And yes, it’s angled to curl under at the bottom like that, you don’t have to piece two together.

I bought the last full size one on Amazon, at least at the moment, but they still have mini cakes. In answer to one review, they do say to chill for a bit before unmolding to help whatever you make keep its shape. Edit: of course it’s back in stock.

The only question is, do I have Richard make me wait till Christmas or my birthday for it. He says it’s up to me.

Maybe he can squirrel away some panna cotta size ones while I try this one out.

The work-zoom pumpkin carving thing they all did for fun?

There was actually a contest to it with a $50 prize.

Which he didn’t mention to me until they told him that, over his objections because he thought someone else’s design was a lot harder, he’d won.

Way to be cool to your grandkids, for sure!