I glanced up at the clock and thought, I was going to stop knitting and go do a blog entry five minutes ago.

…I was going to stop knitting and go blog half an hour ago.

…I was going to–eh, it’s been almost 45 minutes, we have to get up early to pick Michelle up at the airport, I’m running out of time in the day and my hands need a break anyway.

And that’s what got me to finally come over here. (A side note: that timestamp up there is still on daylight savings time.)

Oh, and, Ellen’s right; baking that fleece would definitely be the way to go, clearly; the only thing standing in my way of just going and doing that yesterday was the simple silliness of I had never done such a thing before.

Helpful hints for your significant others: qiviut blend yarns starting at $9.95/25 g/200 yards of laceweight, very soft stuff, and this giveaway on cottagecraftangora’s blog. Way more fun than beating back the crowds at Crazed-Mart.

We got a note today from the friend who, a little to my (albeit grateful) surprise given my recent flu, had invited the two of us for Thanksgiving, even after finding out Richard had had a fever on Sunday: her email said carefully, tentatively that she’d found her daughter had invited a friend who had a newborn. How was Richard doing?

He’s fine, I told her, I’m the one that hasn’t entirely shaken my germs off. I told her not to feel guilty; keeping a newborn healthy was far more important–just like I like people who are sick to stay away from my immunocompromised self. It was the right thing to do.

So here it was Wednesday. He and I looked at each other and I decided I felt better than he did–I wasn’t the one who got up in the middle of the night to drive to the airport.

Trader Joe’s it was: cranberry-stuffed turkey breast, which will leave us with plenty of the obligatory leftovers. Pecan pie for me, am absolute must, pumpkin for him, the only real Thanksgiving pie as far as he was concerned. Frozen gratin greens, totally cheating boxed turkey gravy and scalloped potatoes–and a sugar pumpkin for the sake of the possibility of homemade. There you go: Thanksgiving dinner for the energy-impaired. Bake an hour-ish. Boil a bag of cranberries and a cup of sugar and a cup of water (or orange juice) for one minute if we want sauce.

And since pecan pie is not necessary for the real dinner as far as he was concerned, we didn’t have to wait to try it.

Michelle snagged a cheap flight to go spend Thanksgiving with the Texas relatives.

My sweet Richard offered–cheerfully!–to get up at 4 am tomorrow to take her to the airport and insisted I should sleep in.

And he and I saw a Cooper’s hawk perched on the telephone wires across the intersection while we were stopped at a light this afternoon, so we could both get a good look at it. Very cool.

Fly well, everybody. Have a very happy Thanksgiving.

A certain daughter of mine who took ballroom dancing in college (and who, unlike me, is quite good at that sort of thing) cracked up when I pointed out this comic. Heh.

Meantime. A follow-up re the peregrines: Haya fledged from the bridge between Oakland and Alameda a year and a half ago and was later found shot. She has had three surgeries and been through long, long training and rehab–and they are preparing to release her! She has healed and her flights have become strong now; they’d been afraid the day would never come, but it has. Very cool what good people can do.

And…

Years ago, I saw the hearse. It was parked across the street as I came home, not your usual suburban-neighborhood sight. Later that day, I saw the college-age son, who was so very grateful at having someone to talk to at his mom’s passing from cancer.

His dad remarried a couple years later and moved away–but he did not sell that house. A series of renters came and went, and after the moving vans would leave, the dad and son would be back and working around the place for a day or so. They kept it looking as beautiful as his mother had left it. Rose trees blooming in the front.

A new family’s little toddler grew into early school age there–but again, the moving van came just a few days ago.

And yet somehow it surprised me to see him across the street this afternoon, and it took me just a moment to be sure it really was him. He was as glad to see me as I was to see him–and I saw in his face what is always clearly there after each gap in time, an, Oh good, you’re still… The lupus and Crohn’s didn’t… Such joy in his face.

Life IS good.

The little eight-year-old boy who moved into that house all those years ago is now a 30-something good man with a fiancee and a life to begin. In the home where the ’89 Loma Prieta quake swept him clear out of the pool and splashed him onto the ground. A house with stories for him to tell their future children, of his mother’s roses, of her presence.

I look forward to pointing out the Cooper’s hawk for them. And maybe even an eight-octave zone-tailed. And hand in hand with their little ones someday, klutzy-footed and all, I shall dance.

Michelle, who has been studying Japanese, went out to dinner with her co-workers. Some of whom got into a conversation in that language.

“Did you understand any of it?” I asked her.

She got this rapidly-growing impish grin on her face. “Only one phrase: ‘I understand what you’re saying here.’ ”

A punchline is always the best way to start anyway.

My dad and his two brothers served in WWII, and my grandmother headed her county’s Red Cross knitting for the troops effort, knitting as much as twelve hours a day to try to bring her boys somehow safely home. She had rheumatoid arthritis. I don’t know how she did it.

One of them assured her the war would end after he got overseas. He could not tell her he was one of Oppenheimer’s men and would be the physicist on the Enola Gay. So many lives were lost–but so many more, in the end, were not.

My thanks to all who serve and who have served, and my gratitude for all those who’ve been able to come home.

And on the total silliness side, courtesy of Kevin at Purlescence, I offer a picture of taking it easy on oneself, sipping honey and fresh-squeezed lemonade for the flu. Here you go.

Clearly, they put a small person in a much larger person’s sweater with the head out the neck, their legs out one arm,  hands out the other and the hemline opening carefully skootched under. I think. Don’t go racing to knit that; just go find someone much much bigger than you.

(Glancing sideways at the 6’8″er who doesn’t know I’m typing this. Heh.)

I did finally pick up yarn and needles and dive in today. I can’t tell you what a relief it felt. At last!

My profuse apologies to my brother-in-law for the exposure I didn’t know about.

He took the train down last night from San Francisco, where he’s staying for a conference, to visit with us last night. We had a good laugh, all of us, at Michelle’s declaration of No politics! Given that it was election night and we were all dying to know how it was coming–but there was a conscious decision all around to focus on the short time we had together.

He and my sister live in upper Manhattan, some of the lucky ones whose power stayed on last week.

Richard drove him to the train station with me tagging along, wanting all the Boyd time I could get but finding myself suddenly tired and not wanting to be behind the wheel.

An hour later I was running a fever.

I stuck it out through Obama’s speech last night but shouldn’t have–I was desperate to collapse in bed.

It is quarter after three in the afternoon and I’m finally up again. I’ve been offered by the doctor to go to Urgent Care to have IV fluids but I think I can get more down on my own now.

Okay, let me go check those returns. Did the California Propositions pass? Did Obama at long last win Ohio? I’m about to go find out.

And I saw my Cooper’s hawk soaring as I glanced up through the skylight, always a message of, I’ll be fine.

My older daughter has the right roommate: she was driving and told Sam, How cute! Look, there’s a sheep!

And she too has the right roommate: What I see, answered Sam, is unsecured hay bales.

Her roommate slowed down in response, which is why when one of those bales was suddenly coming at them on the freeway they weren’t hurt–but the driver of the pickup took off. They did call in his license plate.

They had to pick hay out of the car but they were okay and it was too.

Thank goodness. *blink* Live by the sheep, drive-by by the sheep.

The NYC marathon continued on too today, unofficial or no,  and so, some athletes decided a vertical run was the way to go–who else could go up and down as many flights of stairs to tend to the stricken? Some of the runners carried backpacks full of supplies to Staten Island, one of the places hit hardest. They were warned that they would see things they had never seen before and that not all the dead had been found yet. The needs they would encounter were so great.

Well, they could do what they could do and so they did it. Flashlights. Blankets. Clothing. Ignoring the crank honking at them, yelling, Don’t you know the race was cancelled? Oh, but sir, if you only knew….

I would think the whole world wished they could be doing what those runners were doing. I say they totally placed first and first things first.

Update Monday: here’s an even better article about the runners.

Kaye at Purlescence messaged me: my spinning wheel was done! My Ashford Traditional, the one that has been broken so many times, so many ways, the one that was the better wheel I always used, even after it fell out of the back of my minivan and broke the flyer and maiden (always seatbelt them in), even after a kid tripped over it and broke the replacement flyer (and I had to buy the whole maiden assembly again for $120 from somewhere else, just before Purlescence came to be.)

It never did work well after that last time: it wobbled so hard that at times the thing simply fell apart, the maiden twisting with the vibrations and the bobbin simply falling to the floor.  I had to clean dirty sewing machine oil out of silk. Kinda put a damper on the spinning thing.

This is the third wheel she and Sandi have repaired for me. One, bought at an auction, had never worked at all; they got it going and I sent it happily off to a great home, gratified that after fifteen years it had finally been made to work and it had gone to exactly where it needed to be. That’s why I’d still had it: so they could get it. So worth it now.

The second wheel, an Ashford Traveller, the Purl Girls did a great job on, too.

And once I had that one back I pulled out some merino/silk in a beautiful blue that I’d bought half a dozen years ago from a place that was closing down. Finally I had a wheel that would do it justice again.

Only…

The bag was mismarked. Clearly. It was Romney wool or its equivalent: good for making a rug or perhaps felting into a birdhouse, maybe knit straight from the roving, quick and bulky and for baby birds to poop in, but by no means was it worth hours upon hours upon hours.

Did I never put my hand in the ziploc bag before and actually touch the stuff? Boggles the mind.

And it kinda took the wind out of my sails on spinning for the moment.

But then today there was that message. My favorite wheel was repaired, the flyer replaced, the wrong metal part finally gone so that the spindle can lift up, not out, and other than the cup of Welch’s grape juice a then-teenager of mine once tried to balance on the sidebar, graffiti-ing it permanently (hey, Kaye, no need to apologize for not being able to get it out, it’s a bit of family history anyway), the thing is as good as new. At last.

My folks gave me some super-super-fine 90s merino for Christmas one year. Lots of it. After two afghans, there’s still a little more if it around somewhere–and I have my Trad back. Let’s finally put the spin back into that spindyeknit. Been too long.

A little looking around… It IS the same Greg Prince! I thought so! He and his wife threw a big bash for my dad at their home in Maryland when Dad turned 75, and all of us kids came into town for it. Lovely people, just the best.

It wasn’t long after Richard and I had done some remodeling, and I remember his wife in their kitchen telling me why trash compactors are a bad idea: you cannot access them while the pusher is down, for obvious safety reasons, but that means you can never really clean them. She’d given up and had had hers removed and replaced with a simple pull-down drawer. She was right.

Dr. Prince invented a vaccine for a form of newborn pneumonia that is now given to a quarter million infants around the world, saving many lives.

And he is a Mormon. Who knows Romney and has mutual good friends with him.

So he found himself interviewed by Lawrence O’Donnell after writing a cri de couer for the Huffington Post after the 47% video surfaced: he had donated the maximum allowable amount to Romney’s first presidential campaign, he said, but that was Romney 1.0.  Romney 2.0 has utterly turned his back on the unfortunate. “That’s Republicanism, not Mormonism!” He was horrified at our church being equated with some of the things Romney has said and done in this campaign. “Mitt Romney is *not* the face of Mormonism.” Looking out for one another is what it’s all about.

Preach it, brother. And thank you.

In his latest ads, Romney’s been trying to prey on the fears of auto workers, telling them that their jobs are about to be shipped to China and to vote for him to save them.  And yet he opposed Obama’s bailout that did save them at the time that private sources of credit had vanished in the bust, and Bain itself is right now shipping 100% of its American Sensata employees’ jobs to, where else, China. Despite being profitable here.

The heads of GM and Chrysler felt compelled to step up and publicly pronounce Romney’s ads about their products and companies wrong. They are doing quite well right here at home, thankyouverymuch.

Yet Romney is still pushing down on those same ads that are trash and he won’t come clean. And he’s certainly not improving as the pressure of election day gets closer.

Shall I mention that Romney’s family and friends invested in the last few years in Hart Intercivic, which sells voting machines? And that three of its five board of director members donated at least $50,000 each to Romney’s campaign? As reported by Forbes. Voting machines. With the owners of the company voting for one candidate with their money.

I’m with Dr. Prince. If a good Mormon ever runs for that office, more power to him, but Romney isn’t one.  We do have a good President, though–and you don’t have to constantly guess which side of every issue he stands on. Please vote, and please vote for Obama. And a better Congress, too. Thank you.

My sister and nephew (on Richard’s side) in Manhattan are fine, my friend Afton’s been allowed to return home, my daughter in Baltimore ended up with two leaks in her roof that the landlord is getting right to, my sister-in-law in New Jersey says they’re not going anywhere till things get cleaned up a bit–but all of them are fine.

And as I ran an errand in the late afternoon I marveled at how ordinary and untouched everything around me was. Real weather is a spectator sport in California, pretty much. I marveled at how few lives were lost back East, as terrible as Sandy was of a storm, while sobered at the ones that were.

On a different note. Or somehow not entirely; nature continues. Ahote, one of the peregrine fledglings of a year and a half ago from the San Jose City Hall nest, has in the last few months grown his adult plumage, found a female, (unbanded, so, not from one of our observed nests, yay for genetic diversity), and found a territory they clearly call their own together in anticipation of spring, having been seen numerous times by one of the falconistas, who took their picture today near the Bay. He’s on the left, she’s on the right. Beautiful.

From the shark falling out of the California sky, which was funny (since nobody was hurt and it lived) to the one swimming past the front porch of a flooded home in New Jersey today. Yow.

I’ve been reading updates from my sister in Manhattan and my daughter in Baltimore, along with various others.  I’ve been hesitant to call for fear of draining needed cellphone batteries at their end.

To all in the path of Sandy, my prayers go with you. Stay safe.

My laptop is alive! Turns out it was the charger that was not and there was a spare in the house.

My sister offered a link to a James Taylor song that turned out to be a whole series of videos of him, of Joni  Mitchell, the Kinks, etc, concerts broken up into individual songs each. I got needed hours of knitting done while watching this afternoon, although it is safe to say that the chance to watch Louie Louie performed (second down) did not really charm my daughter, tired after a very long day at work. (Richard loved it, I did too.) She said something about my generation and I said, Hey. 1964? I was six. (Five, actually, till the end of the year.)

Watching kids rock out in black and white with the boys dressed up in suits and ties. Amazing. I’m curious; when was the last time you saw a guy in a ruffled tux?

On a definitely more serious note, my cousin Tina said her son was interning with a newspaper and had written an article she wanted to share. The writing was indeed very good, but the subject, superb.

I knew there were refugee camps in Jordan; I did not know that Jordan was actively seeking to take in those fleeing Syria’s civil war, and I most definitely did not know that there was a 60-something couple who had volunteered to serve a mission for the Mormon Church, wherever they might be sent, who, where they were asked to go was on a humanitarian mission–to Jordan. To help take care of the people in those refugee camps, where the needs are so great. Who knew.

Wait. Did I really just put 60’s concerts and Syrian refugees in the same post? We do have it so easy in this country.

Let’s see if the software is in a good mood today: I rebooted, now trying again on the same process, same pictures–hey, there you go!

Meantime, I have some knitting needing doing. It takes such a long time–but then I remind myself that part of the inherent beauty of it is that it takes a lot of my time. And my love. It’s all about the love.

Running off to get right to it, then.