Michelle told us she’s been baking ganache-filled cupcakes, and I can just picture the chocolate being folded into the flour mixture. Sing it with me: While my Guittard gently wheats…

George Harrison died not in London as I would have thought but in Los Angeles thirteen years ago, and it turns out a pine tree was planted in a park there in his name.

We’ve had drought across California, we’ve had heat, and in the end the city was sorry to have to notify Harrison’s widow as they took it down that it was gone, promising to plant a new tree to replace it.

It had been done in by the beetles.

Kaye at the shop put a bunch of hand-dyed Colinette yarns on the front table, marked way down.

Superwash merino? $2.25?! Seriously?

“I wanted to see what people would do with it.” It had been sitting in the back unnoticed for awhile but now everybody was going through it and stacks of skeins were going home.

Thus this hat, and as I finished up the simple pattern my brain had time to think of other hands around the world, busily creating…

All these years that I’ve bought those sweet little fingerpuppets knit in Peru by women able to put food on their tables for my purchases. All the small children and their tired parents here who have received one of those puppets, meltdowns diverted.

What if…

I was chatting with one of Sahar‘s American friends last night and asked her if she knew Truman Madsen, the late BYU professor who used to run tour groups in Israel in the summers. Turns out she had been in Israel just after he retired.

He was my mom’s cousin, I told her, and my folks went on the last tour he gave. He took Mom into a shop owned by Palestinian women selling their handicrafts (what town was that, Mom?) and Mom picked out a hand-embroidered apron (purple stitches, if I remember right) and then one for each of her daughters. I treasure mine.

Truman’s reaction was to exclaim that her mother had bought the same thing in the same shop!

I know there are talented women in the West Bank and Gaza and I wonder how much of a difference we could make by buying from them, whether we could help make their lives easier–I would certainly think so. (Typing that and going looking…) I found this and oh look! This!

It says their embroidery work is a connection to their mothers and their grandmothers.

As it is, now, to my own.

Five dollars for a small olivewood bowl made in Bethlehem from locally sourced wood, ten for a carved candlestick, beautiful. One to fourteen of those bowls is $30 shipping, the fifteenth kicks it up to $40.

I am suddenly wondering who around here would go in on an order with me.

And I wonder what it must be like to get a package to the postal service there. Any arriving order would surely have its own story to tell.

Six weeks and I’m ready to be done and go dive into something far smaller and faster.

But first. I need to add a few rows of ribbing–and then this blankie is *done*.

I had ten 100g skeins of Malabrigo Rios (close to the Bobby Blue here in real life) and I could have made it tall enough for my 6’9″ son to curl over his feet and up to his chin as a good afghan should do–and Hudson’s going to be tall–but when I asked him if he wanted it adult size or baby he said baby.

Baby blankets always need to be at least 45″ square in my experience. I’m somewhere around there-ish, preblocking.

So what I decided to shoot for was this, since it wouldn’t be too big: my birthday knitted right into the thing. A little genealogy mystery for the future.

Now, it helps that for me the number of months and the number of days are only off by one number: so you have this many full repeats of diamonds and this-many-minus-one full repeats of diamonds framed by a half repeat at each end, since the diamonds alternate by half motifs. Go look at the pattern framing this blog to see what I mean–it’s that one, with yarnovers instead of the more-solid make-ones.

I like how lots of little diamonds together add up to bigger diamonds, individual within and yet solid and big all at once. Like families.

I know, it’s not very diamondy looking yet. Just wait till it hits the water tomorrow.

Had a must-take-it-easy day so I did. A random mention: my friend RobinM said something about cherry clafouti and I didn’t remember quite what that was and went on a hunt for a recipe and can now attest that this one is really good. (Um, and I changed it to half cream. Because someone had to use it up. And I used a lot less lemon zest because it was after the mega-dyeing thing and I was tired.)

But meantime, we loaned our Aquarium guest passes to our friends Phyl and Lee and they came back tonight with almond croissants from that Parker Lusseau bakery we’d tried to go to down there but that had been closed for the Fourth of July. So we finally got to try their famous pastries–they were worth the wait.

They got the last three almond ones so they added a plain, knowing I’d hoped for a bunch of extras for the freezer.

But the best part was having them over and listening to them talking about and showing photos not only of the Aquarium and Tahoe before that (Oh, we always see a bear *shrug* Wait, you *what?* Oh we always seem to camp next to someone who doesn’t follow the rules even with the thousand-dollar fine) but also of the hyperbaric chamber that as divers they had also wanted to go see, given that there was a tour today. Also in Monterey.

It’s for divers with the bends and for those with carbon monoxide poisoning–so you bet we were interested in what that thing looked like. I would have been airlifted to the one at Johns Hopkins years ago but for the fact that the chamber would have killed the baby I was pregnant with.

Phyl’s eyes got big when I mentioned that that’s when we found out there was no ambulance service back then in the town we lived in in New Hampshire, just a volunteer with a Suburu and hope. Gotta keep those taxes down.  At the hospital, they tested our blood levels and then turned to Richard and exclaimed, You DROVE here?!

(Carbon monoxide alarms are a good idea, folks. And the law in California now.)

I said that chamber looked like a tube-shaped ambulance interior: a bed to each side, ready to go. They described how the thing actually works. They could put up to four in there.

Let’s not. Dive safely, guys.

They do.

Phyllis really liked the deep-sea Outer Banks exhibit and I wondered how often she’d seen a view quite like that from the inside.

And a good time was had by all.

While I finish up one project I’m trying to plan the next. My grandkids need matching sweaters come Christmas and just for fun I thought I’d put a link here to bookmark the Ugly Christmas Sweater (TM) that did itself in in its enthusiasm. With thanks to Richard Thompson, whose Cul-De-Sac strip is the best.

(While thinking, you know, I bet I could get a soundtrack doohickey to stick in a sweater pocket, and and and… oh wait–and wouldn’t the people at church have fun when one of my grandsons pokes the on button sitting hidden in his handknit sweater in the middle of services and wheredidyoufindthat! Okay, never mind then.)

Maybe just a plain t-shirt for everyday.

Him, a few days ago: So what do you want to do for the Fourth?

Me: It would be fun to drive down the coast, dip our toes in the ocean. Wait–beach traffic. Holiday traffic. Never mind.

One of the facts of life here is that there are a very few very tight windy roads over the mountains between the Bay Area and the coast.

So he proposed going back to the Aquarium. The southern route around wouldn’t be bumper-to-bumper. (Just a little, it turned out.)

Sure! I was quite surprised. How about… (Googling for the perfect almond pastry.) Maybe throw in a bakery exploring?

Sure!

Except the place I wanted to try was closed today so we didn’t get to find out if the almond utter nirvana described per Yelp was true or not. But we had to love a place whose first name was Parker.

Our year’s membership was ending July 30th and at $275 to renew with guest passes again, that would likely be it for awhile. Hang in there, little bakery, we’ll get there someday.

Two weeks ago I was focusing on seeing everything; this time I was taking a lot more photos so as to bring more of them home with me.

I took a picture of the California red-legged frog for all my fellow knitters: our mascot, local version.

The Sunfish photo came out surprisingly well, given how dark the tank is and that there’s no flash allowed. But it moves so very very slowly that the Iphone got it. That’s almost the whole fish–there’s a slightly scalloped edge just to the right there, feather-and-fin style and you’re done.

I asked the receptionist to verify that our passes were good through the 30th. She checked, grinned, and said, August 30th.

August?! Really?!

Yes!

She so loved being able to say that. Sometimes they offer a baker’s dozen of months when you sign up for a year and I guess since we’d come in twice in two weeks they were out to make us happy and she had great fun surprising us.

Well then. We just might have to come back to explore Parker Lusseau when it’s not a holiday. We’ll see. Oh and? The Aquarium employee who told us last time that the  place starts emptying out 4:ooish? Genius. We had the whole upper level of the sea otter exhibit to ourselves and that has NEVER happened. …Well, till the one in view woke up from its nap, whereupon a family came upstairs to see. Their kids were adorable.

Otter with its blankie pictures tomorrow.

Got up an hour early to make sure I wasn’t late taking Michelle to the doctor; her car is out of the running at the moment. Got her home, got Richard to work, got home, had two hours to myself, got Michelle and took her to work down in San Jose because they wanted her to come in today in person and thought as long as I have to wait two hours, I might as well discover Green Planet Yarn’s new digs rather than drive home only in time to drive right back.

The freeway down there, it turned out, was dealing with a major crash, so I thought I’d just do the surface streets from her office to that shop, no problem.

Big problem.

But it had to be… it wasn’t. I at long last pulled over and looked at my Iphone. Maps *click*. Twelve minutes thataway? I’d turned the wrong way.

Ten minutes into that, my phone buzzed and I pulled off again: Michelle said her meeting was cancelled, could I come back at 3:30 instead?

2:45. My phone hadn’t updated my location; I still wasn’t sure I would find that shop nor how long it would take me to get all the way back to her if I did. Traffic was picking up and I knew a lot of it would be diverted as rush hour was starting and after two hours into this trip, the enthusiasm just wasn’t quite what it was.

Forget it. And so, for the fourth and last time I drove through that bad end of town, briefly certain I must have lost a tire to that pothole, heading back to her office–if I could retrace my steps.

Which, it turns out, you can’t.

Just when it looked like my road was ending and was going to dump me into a ramp to the shut-down freeway waitwaitwhat?!, a side arm opened up going thataway and I saw the new sign to the road I’d most wanted to find and knew my way from there.

Six cities, six hours at the wheel by the time I’d picked Richard up from work–and two gallons of gas used in all of that. Go Prius go. (Fully aware I could have been more than halfway to the grandkids in San Diego by that point.)

Settling back in the parking lot at Michelle’s office at 3:03, meantime, I sent her a note saying I was here, I was going to knit, I was simply going to sit tight till she was ready. No hurry. Had lots to do.

She showed up at the door immediately–and confessed she’d only said 3:30 because she thought I was having a grand time at the yarn store and she hadn’t wanted to interrupt me.

I’d spent that *whole time* lost? she asked. Why hadn’t I used my GPS?

I looked at her in what I hoped was gentle–alright, utter in spite of myself–disbelief–and said simply, I can’t hear my GPS.

She looked steadily back at me and asked, With your bluetooth?

.

.

.

The bluetooth.

.

.

That connects to my new hearing aids.

.

And I’d actually remembered to bring the thing. I don’t like to wear it, it’s heavy on the neck but at least it was there in my purse this time, for, you know, phone calls, even though I don’t take calls when I’m driving e v e r .  But I’d actually remembered to bring it. This is a rare thing.

The bluetooth connects the hearing aids to the phone and the phone has GPS and I had it right there the whole time and I could have….

And then we both just howled, laughing. What else can you do. The thought of listening to a portable electronic device, much less while driving, I mean, it just never in a million years would have occurred…. Ohmygoodness, I was wiping tears and trying to catch my breath. Ohmygoodness. Just too funny.

Well, I’ll remember next time, that’s for sure.

One more thing about Rita yesterday.

I was sitting next to her at that table and I told her the story of my grandmother at 95 with a big glass bowl full of individually wrapped candies: she was offering my kids some. They were–here, let me try to remember–maybe 5, 7, 9, and 11 at the time? My mom was in town too visiting her mother while we were there.

Mom and I silently gave the kids the hairy eyeball–just one, kids.

Gram’s eyes twinkled: “Have some more!”

(Us: Just. One.)

They each in varying degrees of age and awareness took another piece in a combination of eagerness and hesitation and trying to figure out just what the power dynamic going on here was.

She egged them on yet again, and again, one piecetaking at a time: “Have some more!”

Till eventually they had filled their mouths, all their pockets, their socks by golly, everything they could think of, and at the last they totally emptied that bowl. And it was not a small bowl. If the number of pieces didn’t come out evenly between them, I don’t remember, but they had the good sense not to complain nor I think did we have to prompt them to say thank you.

Gram was having the time of her life.

I told Rita, “She knew she was making it so they would never forget her–and they didn’t.”

Lovely Rita looked at me with her good eye and this suddenly profound moment passed between us as she in her own great old age affirmed, “Yes. Exactly. “

Our one-year membership at the Monterey Bay Aquarium has five weeks left on it and we’d wanted to see their Tentacles exhibit while it was still on.

This morning: “Do you want to go?”

“Sure!”

“What time?”

“Let me get this load out of the washer and we need to fill the car.”

And then, wild and crazy young things that we are, we threw a few cans of fruit juice in the car and took off down the coast. Got some serious blankie knitting done while he drove.

The GPS on his phone was misbehaving so we used mine, knowing there had been road construction. But his is the one that has a charger in the car, so I was down to only getting a few pictures once we got there.

Nautilus can naut(tell)ilii.

Sardines are the silver jewelry of the sea.

We watched a cuttlefish that kept pulsing dark purple in waves down its body, S-curving around a lighter almost yellow at its edges and in time to the waves of the water, the darker area matching the (lava rocks?) at the bottom of the display. There was a white anemone nearby and hiding in it another cuttlefish had gone white to match. Put a color or pattern next to them and watch them change to try to vanish into it to prey and not to be prey.

Richard got some pictures I’ll have to share later of the horned and tufted puffins–I was delighted to be within inches of some of the birds that our daughter saw on a recent boat ride in Alaska.

But quite a few people in the crowd around us cracked up when I mentioned that the tufted puffins looked like Donald Trump’s hair, they really  do.

We drove through the artichoke fields of Castroville on the way home and found ourselves a farmstand and came away with the very freshest and a jar of their artichoke marinara sauce. It was clear the place had seen many a tourist, in that there was a large sign showing how to eat their crop–thistle show’em.

We came home too tired to cook. Tomorrow is soon enough.

“You spun? You haven’t spun in a long time.” Then he stopped short with, “Wait–spun? Or plied?”

Busted.

Maybe a dozen years ago I bought the cashmere, I bought it all: cones of 90% undyed brown cashmere 10% wool, single-ply, spun very fine for the garment industry.

But when it arrived from China the importer found a moth in the box. Or maybe several. She debated shipping it back but emailed me, an old customer, saying it would be all the same to her if she simply unloaded it on me at her cost.

Fifteen bucks a pound plus shipping.

!?! YES please!!!

Granted, brown cashmere is cheaper to begin with because you have a far wider range of dyeing options with white. Brown makes for earth tones. I could live with that.

It came from the Southeast with a slight whiff of mildew. A really hot scour of the finished yarns helped greatly and it was all the more incentive to boil it in a dyebath (but that and the lack of superwashing made me hesitate later to use it for the grandbabies.)

I plied pounds and pounds of that thin thread on my wheel into a soft knitting yarn and I knitted and spun and dyed some more until I actually, honestly kinda got (forgive me) bored with it. (I hear you and you and you and you saying hey let ME be bored now!)

I knew all these years later I still had a little somewhere, but two days ago I stumbled across not scraps’ worth but three two-pound cones.

I had this laceweight offwhite silk on a Colourmart cone that had just been sitting there…

I was a little afraid to touch that brown for fear of finding that for having been left alone in their ziplocs for so long they were finally bug-damaged, never actually having had any problems before despite their beginnings, but no, there was no sign. The yarn was fine.

The bigger bobbin was 227 yards and 120g when I got done and when I finish I’ll have more than that again.

It was a distraction from the project at hand, but I felt like when inspiration strikes after a dozen years’ wanting, grab it while it’s there.

Do I dye it or do I leave it?

And I… There were originally fifteen pounds… I think I have another of those cashmere cones in that other closet, too, most of one pound, at least. Might even be two like that. I’d have to open those big awkward boxes that are above my head and I haven’t quite yet looked to confirm.

Sometimes all it takes is starting that first step.

I bought a full bag of Malabrigo Rios skeins several months ago, a very soft superwash wool and what Parker’s blanket was made of, for a matching drag-around-everywhere blankie for Hudson. I made him that vivid blue silk one when he was born, and it was gorgeous and good for thermoregulating in heat or cold, but for doing head-first dives off the couch into the softness and poking holes in and having Gramma fix it? (I know, I know, so I keep convincing myself–wool really is the way to go.)

And a friend having been burned out of her apartment last year by a hot water heater gone bad, you never know; wool self-extinguishes when you remove the source of flame, whereas synthetics melt onto the skin. Wool is definitely safer around small children.

I finished the ribbing tonight and I’ve started in on the pattern part.  The yarn had thrown a tantrum clear from the next room and had demanded to be next. Nothing else would do. Me me me, it loudly bossed my needles.

At long last and such a relief–I’d wanted to want to work on it and now nothing else will do. (Sorry for the delay, kiddo.)

Dinner at Michelle’s, Facetime with Parker and his daddy, old friends showing up at church who’ve moved across the country and across the world and by sheer happenstance getting to see each other as well as us. The world shrank and got all the sweeter.

And I got nearly half a cowl done on just one speakerphone phone call.

Thing the first.

I was delayed getting out the door to knit night: I think this is one of the babies I saw earlier that were still a little iffy at this landing thing.

The little finch had just hit the window and oh goodness I almost stepped on her coming in from watering my tomatoes, not expecting a bird on the mat.  She didn’t move, even when my foot came within a tailfeather.

I didn’t want her to be eaten by squirrels looking for an easy snack so I decided to give her some time and if she was still immobile in ten or fifteen minutes, I would lift her up to the warm wooden bird feeder (not the metal one) for the night; I did that once before for a finch that did finally fly off in the morning. I took her picture, no flash, and the near eye that had been shut tight squinted open just a bit in response.  She’s still with us! Oh I’m so glad.

I waited, I gave her yet a little more time, but she held the same pose.  Well then. I walked around the house to scoop her up from behind as gently as humanly possible and with the least fright, but as I stepped onto the patio she saw me this time and with eyes wide open now stood up at attention. She fluttered just slightly, brushing against that window one last time but in a way that could not cause harm, then veered around the danger that I represented to her and flew off to the safety of the trees. For all that she’d gone through in the last half hour she’d come out okay.

Thing the second.

Someone was at Purlescence tonight whom I haven’t seen in a goodly while. I had no idea she was coming; we threw our arms around each other for joy.

She’s been fostering a toddler since his infancy about a year and a half ago.

His circumstances would hurt anybody’s heart but for the lucky break he got when he was placed in that home. One bio parent will never be in the picture again and the other has spent most of the baby’s lifetime in jail and has changed nothing from what landed them there.

She gave no details other than that there’s been delay after delay while Bio parent has not been conforming to the social workers’ requests and that their supervisors think that’s just peachy. My friend thinks it’s pretty clear that that sweet little boy, so innocent of how his life began, will be given back to that parent, ending his relationship with his big sister and the only parents he’s ever known, who love him and dearly want the best for him, and it is such a wrenching thing that however it turns out they’re giving up fostering after this.

I so hope they succeed at adopting him.

The eye towards the window had squinted but in good time the fledgling saw clearly what she needed to see and she made it to safety.

Somehow, and I can’t quite explain it other than that it’s what I’ve got to go on, that small persevering bird gives me a sense of hope for my friend’s adorable little boy.

But meantime, I’m praying hard.

Just for fun: my cousin Dan, a math teacher, got his puzzle published in the New York Times.

While I marvel at the political puzzle of the day, political junkie that I am. Eric Cantor, the man so close and so desperate to be Speaker of the US House, down in flames, defeated in Virginia’s primary today by an unknown with almost no funding.

One commenter on the Washington Post explained his vote between the two Tea Partiers: his neighbor recently stepped into a local shop and did a doubletake and exclaimed, It’s Eric Cantor! (Surely expecting a handshake, because that’s what politicians do on being recognized by their constituents, right?)

“That’s *Congressman* Cantor.”

Interesting times.

If you’ve got a primary still coming up or a runoff, vote! Eighty-six percent in Virginia did not, and by staying home today they made history. And elected a Brat, perhaps this time in name only. (Edited to add, or maybe they painted themselves a Rep. Brat who’ll become an old master at the fine art of politicking.)

It totally caught me by surprise. I had forgotten all about it.

I was cleaning and organizing and there, hidden away towards the day was the Christmas present. Now, it’s a family joke that I hide them so well that I find the smaller ones especially throughout the year after people were supposed to get them, but this one. Tears leaped into my eyes–I did not expect that. Stop that.

But it staggered me a moment. I had ordered it for Michelle, wondering if she would like it, if it would be too Mom, but it seemed such a useful little thing.

It was, basically, a lunch bag. In the form of a small canvas tote, insulated, offwhite with blue handles, a mini-me of my then-knitting bag (before The Purse that I got for Christmas). She’d had issues with the cafeteria at work via staff who didn’t get that allergic to dairy means butter, cheese, milk, every possible form and that yes just a little bit does matter. The safest thing was for her simply to bring her own, and so, very often she did. An insulated bag would make it easier and I’d thought this one was cute without being cutesy.

It came.

And I think it was the very next day…

I looked at that little tote and it hit me all over again how deeply grateful I am that my daughter is still alive and I once again said a prayer for all the others, the families, the other injured, the dead, the cops and the firemen who had had to see it all.

Last week she finally was able to begin to work again. Part time. From home. The commute would be bad enough, driving home after sitting for hours too much, but oh, at long last, as she’s so much wanted, she has started to begin again.

Hey kiddo it’s yours, you want this thing?