Point oh one of an inch was forecast for the rest of the day; the storm was supposed to be basically over, with a noncommittal shrug of a chance at slight drizzles tomorrow.

That .01″ has been .41″ so far, and every now and then another cloudburst hits for twenty, thirty seconds (and right on cue, here comes another one and I’m editing that number.) Go rain go. (And another one.)

The roots of the neighbor’s redwood have lifted the ground around our gate and so the latch misses connecting now by several inches, the gate held in place only by a small flowerpot–and so the first time, when I said, What was that? Richard looked out the window searching for where out there, going, Something just fell in the yard.

The trees all seemed to be accounted for. We realized that no, it was the gate slamming that mismatched fence. Let me in! Again. And again. And again.

We may not get a lot of weather here but we’re trying for this Dark and Stormy Night thing as best we can.

Here we go again.

Sitting on the floor, I unscrewed the screws. Here, could you get that one over there for me? Sure, says he.

He gently pulled the door and the cover apart to find the broken latch and the piece it connected to and we adjourned to our side-by-side computers to find the name of the part (which one of those three random numbers was the model number?) and what business might still exist in the area to buy it from. The local appliance parts place that my friend Diana and I once made an outing of? Long gone.

Fremont, the page said. (Oh okay that’s not too bad.) Open till 4:00 on Saturdays. I called them and they said they had two, Richard said something like Oh good! (you’re always on speakerphone at our house, one of the charms of hearing loss) and we looked at the clock, 2:30, and the weather and told them we were on our way. (Don’t close up early!)

Waze, an app that directs you away from traffic accidents, sent us clear around the bottom of the San Francisco Bay and back up. Wave after wave of blinding rain hit and it was just not a great time to be on the freeway or anywhere else out in that but by golly I wanted my dishwasher and he wanted to solve the problem.

They knew who we had to be the moment we walked in their door and opened our mouths. We chatted like old friends. They had an antique wringer-style washer on display; I told them my grandmother had had a live-in maid when my mom was growing up but that she’d told Mom later she’d have given her up in a second in exchange for a modern washer and dryer. We all allowed as how fortunate we were to have modern appliances, even when they’re being a pain.

Richard had actually used a wringer washer and he and one of the men talked about all the things you could get trapped in those: your hair. Your arm. Yup, those were the days.

There was a chance all along that it wasn’t just the latch but the expensive display panel going out again, and one wonders how long one should baby an old machine along before throwing in the towel. But then, just last month we had finally given up and replaced our vacuum cleaner. I do like the Dyson. But one hopes for a little time in between such things.

We got home, we did other things, we chilled a bit after that drive and we kinda didn’t want the hassle, either of us, till finally I said, What’ll it take us? Half an hour?  (Not saying, and that’s if it works.) And at that we both got off our duffs and went back in there and tackled the thing. I filled every last bit of space with more dirty dishes, and after three days of only doing a little in the sink at a time because my hands were bothering me, there were, shall we say, a few.

Connect the new piece, admire how shiny and new it looks, screw. all. those. screws. back in the door–

–and push the button in great hopes.

Nada.

Dannnng.

He wasn’t willing to give up that easy. Did you plug it back in?

Oh right.

Push the button.

Nada.

He tried pushing the cycle buttons, and just like before, they did briefly light up green, the one thing that had assured us all along that the panel wasn’t (entirely?) bad. Then he with his bigger stronger fingers pushed the On button and darn if that dishwasher didn’t cave. It knew who was boss.

The sound of that machine doing our dirty work at last was an immense relief. It finished the cycle, everything was sparkly clean and disinfected more than hand washing could ever do and I’ve emptied and refilled it most of the way again.

Try pushing not hard next time but long, says he. But I’m not touching that thing again till it’s all the way full. It may only have so many cycles left in it and I don’t want to waste a one.

We had the wettest December in history and then the driest January in history, as in, zero rain–my grass sprang up and grew just enough to look green and then froze in place as the top of the soil cracked apart as if it were summer. In this drought if you don’t feed us I don’t water you.

I woke up about 7:15 this morning to strong winds and leaves and limbs thrashing and an overcast but bright, deep yellow sky.

I’ve seen a sky like that–right before a tornado hit, ages and ages ago in a different place and it got me out of bed to go check the weather report, but no, as far as I can tell, it was simply the late dawn against the storm clouds and it faded to gray quickly.

There was an errand that had to be run today not tomorrow whether we wanted to hunker down or no, and so we were on the expressway at late rush hour clearly immediately after the tall eucalypus fell and blocked all southbound lanes. Shattered pieces were thrown across the divider and the northbound lanes where we were and beyond. A busy road–and yet there was no sign of any damaged car, just tree shrapnel. Everyone completely lucked out.

And I mean that, because coming from the other way there’s the crest of the hill and then there was that tree–with a 45 mph speed limit, there was no way to have seen it till drivers were right on it. Just past it, I was waiting at the light at the bottom of the hill while a rush of cars was coming back the wrong way in both lanes across the divider from me. People were doing crazy things, and meantime, the next group of cars was arriving facing them head-on at the light. One particularly panicked-looking woman reacted to my left-hand green arrow as if it were her right-turn green arrow–NO, honey, STOP.

I dropped Richard off a block away (if I had to be out and about he might as well work from work rather than home) and coming back there was already a cop with flashers on and the road coned off and the city’s tree workers were getting right to it. They had a big job there, and that one probably took immediate priority.

Tomorrow we get a ten-hour break in the middle of the day for the earth to inhale deeply of this rich essence of life-sustaining fluidity and then it starts coming at us again.

A good time to be thankful for a warm house to knit in.

I noticed a whole flock of finches not in the trees but in odd spots under what roofspaces we could offer them. Drier that way.

Needed to buy some birdseed, and since it was right off the freeway stopped on my way home by Yamagami’s Nursery to check out the fruit trees.

And boy did they have nice fruit trees. If you wanted cherries or peaches this very year it looks like you could have exactly that.

No Lorings in stock, though; they would have to order and find out if one is available. I texted messages with Richard and came home, for now.

But when the sun was low I picked that spade back up and dug that planting hole a little deeper and now, at last, that spot feels ready for whatever will go in. It will not stay bare for long.

A side note: I know vaccination is a hot topic right now and that there are strong emotions on both sides. Hear me out, if you would. Measles is *the* single most contagious virus known, and if you simply walk through a room hours after an infected person did you can catch it. I have an immunosuppressed friend from my knitting group who got quarantined from work this week because a co-worker had been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone who’d been exposed to someone at Disneyland, the disease leapfrogging up the state. That’s an awful lot of quarantining and lost wages and lost time.

Our daughter the microbiology PhD was telling an anti-vaxxer the other day, Sure, if you get German measles you’ll be sick and you’ll probably recover and you probably won’t be one of the unlucky ones who goes deaf or gets pneumonia or meningitis and all that. You’ll probably be okay.

But you don’t do it for YOU. You do it for every pregnant woman. Because it is horrendously dangerous to a fetus in utero at any stage of pregnancy and extremely likely to kill or brain damage them for life. You do it for them. Because you’re a good person.

As I knit some Abstract Fibers yarn, needing lots of bright colors against the winter fog and in celebration of the fact that Stitches West is less than a month away.

I could not talk the camera into focusing on the limb rather than the fence, but here goes. Variety: Tropic Snow, an apt name given the storms back East this week. (Throw a snowball for all us weather-deprived out here, will ya?)

There was no spark of green or new growth to be found yesterday at all–I looked for it. So I certainly wasn’t expecting to find green tips everywhere today but I did, just on this one tree,  always the earliest. Peaches! It’s leafing out!

We’ve had a forlorn and bare spot in the raised bed where the bird-killing heavenly bamboo was taken out last summer and I used that burst of happiness to finally go dig there in preparation for the next tree to go in. It’s ready. I came in and told him.

Last Valentine’s Day, he took me on an expedition to Wegman’s and got me the big, healthy Comice pear of my dreams. He was anticipating as happily as I was as we talked about what this year’s version should be.

A few more pictures. (Note that Madison’s clothes didn’t make it throughout the day. Actually, I don’t think any of the kids’ did. I remember those days…)

The boys were sick; did we still want to come?

We looked at each other: yes.

A follow-up call last night. Hudson was now at 102.3, so, just to make sure, did we still want to come?

We knew the risks and said a prayer and still felt like wild horses and viruses couldn’t keep us away and hopefully having already had the flu in September and having had the shot such as it was…

Of course we went. Our grandsons needed snuggle time all the more.

The baby and parents are still healthy and we did a lot of handwashing between kids.

It is amazing how much energy small sick children can have. Parker’s one meltdown was when we realized that we needed to go back to the airport now. We promised we would come again soon and he calmed down fairly quickly and made us promise again. We promised again. Alright then–and he helped take us there after all (giving Kim some one-on-one time with her one-month-old, something I know every new mom with older kids could use more of.) Hudson at long last fell asleep on the way there. I was sorry he would wake up to find us gone, but we’ll be keeping that promise. Soon.

And Madison is a perfect baby.

And we are home again. More pictures later. It was a wonderful, long day but we’ve got some sleep to catch up on ourselves.

I put off doing the seaming for at least a month. Deadlines are a wonderful thing.

I put off running the ends in on the red jumper for longer. Deadlines are a wonderful thing.

Malabrigo Arroyo for the English Rose pink and Malabrigo Rios in the Ravelry red–only the softest for my grandbabies, and only superwash for my daughter-in-law and son to have to deal with.

I was late for knit night because I was stitching up those four pink side seams at home where there was no question there was enough light. The last part I did was around the armholes, which I should have had curling the other way.

Next thing you know I might even make baby booties. That fit. But here, let me run the last of these ends in first.

It seems we will have room for yet more fruit trees, with a call in to Chris at Shady Tree for a bid on two more weed ones that are shading the solar panels (and my mandarin and mango. Richard stood by the Page with a UV meter and it read zero at 2 pm, thus the yellowing leaves and my willingness to let a little more bird habitat disappear for a few years till the new catches up.) Montmorency? Lorings at last? Let the plotting commence.

And then.

We were at Costco, looking at a monster package of cherries. Rainiers–I’d like to try them, but that was a month’s supply. Now it might have been different had they looked like they hadn’t just traveled a long way over a long time and then been left out unrefrigerated, but as he wondered how we could eat them all it yanked my thoughts to our Stella cherry, to all our fruit trees as they grow up. That box (which we did not buy) potentially represented only a few branches’ worth.

For a brief instant the sheer volume to come overwhelmed. Countered instantly by, but see the difference is that we’ll be eating and freezing however much we want and then giving just-picked totally ripe homegrown to all comers, and surely there will be no shortage of those. A sun-warmed, dripping-ripe full-flavor peach is hardly the proverbial and much-maligned foundling zucchinis abandoned on doorsteps in the dead of the night. ( A side note: make zucchini bread, using butter, brown sugar, baking powder not soda, and, the most important part, substituting ground pecans for a quarter to a third of the flour. That will justify any zucchini planting you might ever do.)

And the picking of that fruit means this necessarily sun-deprived lupus patient will have reason to be outside at dusk for many a day, getting some badly-coveted fresh air and the satisfaction of doing good in the process. It’s like you cast on and then the trees do all the knitting for you.

Cherry on, then.

We bought the plane tickets. Now we just both have to keep every germ far, far from both of us before we go cuddle that new baby.

And someone needs to go weave in every yarn end and sew every seam yet unsewn and maybe, like, y’know, knit a dozen more things to go with the rest of the superwash wool before we get there.

It is the most amazing thing to have a fussy newborn who just really needed to put that diaper to the use it was made for quiet down at the sounds of our voices and search for our faces coming from the screen. As the old Ma Bell commercials used to say, it’s the next best thing to being there.

Thank heavens for Skype.

Looking at airline tickets to go meet our granddaughter, we decided we needed to wait till I feel better than I do today. Talk about incentive, though. Blenderize those grapes in that orange juice and go get a good night’s rest.

Two weeks. So much older.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times wrote THE article about the events in Paris today that most needed to be written.

We are all Charlie.

We got a phone call tonight: having been frustrated by the problem for some time, our daughter was finally appealing to her tall dad to help her with some burned-out lights. They needed to be reached so she could see them and know what size to order and she felt too unsteady to risk trying. There were I think six in her kitchen ceiling and three by now had gone dark.

We went over there and helped her unscrew those bulbs. Then asked, why wait on shipping? There was a hardware store almost around the corner.

It seemed to me it wasn’t just the lights–it was that her injuries having been re-ignited last Friday, she needed to fix something to brighten her day that was within her power. Especially today. But she was not up to going to the shop, maybe multiple shops, to look for new ones, and she hadn’t been about to risk another fall by trying to even start the task alone.

Well, we could go, we offered, glad to help. And so we bought new bulbs, a grand total of $12 for three flood types, in LED no less–boy have prices come down–and came back over. With her big strong daddy again holding her steady standing on a chair, she screwed those new lights in herself.

I turned the switch on on the wall. We looked upwards in great satisfaction. Such a difference!

The darkness is a very small part of the world but it tries to claim great power. It deceives only itself. We are greater and we shine everywhere. Every good person in every religion or none who is trying to live by love. Love for those we know, love for those we don’t, love to all simply because we share our humanity and find it good.

We bring the light. We are Charlie.

A pronouncement of 20/30 so far at the eye doctor’s and then I dropped him off at work. Back to normal life.

Home was so quiet, but that was also a perfect chance to knit more than just in that doctor’s office and my queue is long. I turned on the stereo and picked out a CD from its list, because if there’s music going at home it compels my fingers to knit in time to it and me to sit and pay attention. To both.

Uh, dear, we forgot to wire the speakers back up to that thing when we moved everything back in this room after the carpetbaggers left.