Richard glanced out the window and remarked on how loud those birds were being.

Singing? Or just chirpy?

He considered that a moment, still looking at the feeder. Chirpy.

Went to two farewell parties today, brought a blueberry cake to each and coconut cream truffles as well to the second: the first was for someone who will be coming back next year, but the second was for a young family where the husband’s new job is near Denver.

If chocolate and blueberry cake can’t make that family stay, it can at least make them want to come back to visit. Even if I gave them the recipes.

I blocked the Findley shawl this morning and that fine yarn was dry in hours. It’s different. I like it.

I have two blueberry cakes in the oven and a timer on my Iphone loud enough to wake the deaf. Perfect.

There’s a Frazz comic written totally for me, even if the author didn’t know it. Cool!

Oh and, just because. The eagle doing the breast stroke at about the 1:20 mark. I have never seen a bird swim like this.

Another Parker picture.

Went to the main meeting at church, then bugged out and drove to Santa Cruz an hour away where Richard’s cousin was baptizing his son.

In the Mormon Church this is done at age eight. That is when children are beginning to really get the concepts of right and wrong for themselves and to understand cause and effect in their behavior, to be able to actively choose how they’ll react. Beginning to. We spend our whole lives from there on out working on that.

And so we call it the “age of accountability,” with baptism opening the way for repentance and a return to joy when we mess up, surrounded by people who know that we all make mistakes and that it’s okay to be human; just keep trying to be a better person. The habit begins of turning to Christ again and again to see us through by His patience, that we may learn to live His example of unshakable love.

We’re all in it together.

Okay, so that’s the background. What we did not know was that Jonathan’s brother and two sisters were coming, too, as well as Aunt Mary Lynn and Uncle Nate, and some of Jonathan’s in-laws with their little ones. People we love but seldom get to see.

We had a grand reunion. We got to meet babies we hadn’t seen, to exclaim like old people over how much the kids had grown. Alexander is ten? How did that happen!

They served an early dinner; there was at least one plane to catch. We were done there in time to get back up here and meet Marguerite’s future son-in-law. There was our second chocolate torte of the day, gee, how did that happen.

Her daughter’s fiance grew up in a ward in Boston where my cousin Grant was bishop, and so we had an instant connection there.

Friends showed up whom we hadn’t seen in ages and, again, hadn’t expected to.

I’m not sure how one day grabbed so much joy all in itself, but I’m selfishly asking for more like that.

(Oh, and the other part of that post in the link? I asked tonight, wanting it to be just right for her. Red, she answered, delighted. And so the next project shall happily be.)

And guess who was there tonight.

That same couple–and their baby, whom I hadn’t seen since she was an infant, 11 months old now and almost walking; she and I played for quite awhile. Peek a boo! *giggle giggle giggle*

And Penny and her husband, too.

She had been diagnosed with lymphoma shortly after I knitted her that shawl, and it was a comfort through all those months of treatment and solitude as her chemo-battered immune system could tolerate no risks for months and months.

That yarn had known exactly whose it was from the get-go.

I showed her the project I was working on–and admitted that although it had absolutely demanded to be made, and I’d thought I’d known who it was for, the further along I got into it the less sure I was that that was where it was meant to be.

And so I have already decided what I really will make for the person I’d been aiming towards, while this? I don’t know. I just know I have to knit it. Monday, when I rescued its UFOness from oblivion, I actually only had the first four rows on the needles; now it’s halfway done.

She reached to touch the Findley yarn and exclaimed, Ooooh! As she did so, I suddenly knew: this was exactly the pattern I had knit for her.

Everything came together in good will from both of us in that moment towards whomever it holds in its future.

Monday, it was going to be a different pattern in the body but my counting was off, and so…

I told Penny in mock indignation, My knitting bosses me around! She guffawed–she knew. Hers does too.

I’m curious to see what will come next with this. I do know that yarn time is in its own variable universe.

(Parker and Kim in the photo.)

The doorbell rang and I put my knitting aside.

My sister called from Atlanta last night: her husband was in California on business, and a meeting had been moved to–Wait! she told him. That’s where my sister lives!

Business trips usually leave no time for anything but work, but he had a break during this one. And so between that meeting and Ned’s 5:30 flight, he came on by and we caught up on each other and our kids, the first time we’d seen each other on my home turf in 13 years.  He’d seen three of my kids at college a couple years ago while visiting his and told me how great they were (and both winced and laughed at himself for doing a double take when that pretty tall blonde who’d joined his boys out at dinner called him Uncle Ned. Wait–*Michelle*?!

And as we caught up, he was happily facing my birdfeeders and occasionally laughing over squirrel antics as he told another tale or two. We had a great time.

He loves birdwatching, my sister told me afterwards. They’d had a birdfeeder, but it got put away when Ned had enclosed their porch.

I have no doubt it’s going right back up when he gets home. He was enjoying my flock just way too much not to.

I was going to send him home with some Meyer lemons but forgot. He’ll just have to come back.

You can’t divide 16 into 58 and 26 doesn’t play well with it either.

I did goofball math three months ago when I started this shawl, in trying to transcribe my scattered notes at the time.  I only caught it after working all day on it, all the while admiring the way the light catches and dances off the silk in the yarn.  It was seriously pretty and seriously soft.

It still is. No way was I going to rip it out.

It took some grumbling and a “what’s wrong?” from my sweetie and finally realizing there simply was no way and giving up. Redesign time!

And now the rest of it is going to be beautiful, too. Totally different from what I’d envisioned, but hey.

I promise not to say to the recipient, Oh, but it was really supposed to look like…

Time to finally sit down and knit while I wait for the almond cake to come out of the oven (with a glance at the clock) and waitwaitwait how on earth did it get that late?

Oh. Right. And my blog time stamp is finally correct again.

Parker, meantime, is ready to help make cookies; they’re a little easier to walk around with.

I once took a class on Robert Frost from an older professor who had herself taken a class from Robert Frost. Thus I particularly love this comic.

And then this day’s too.  Note that if I link them here, I can find and enjoy them all over again later–otherwise I would never remember where they were.

Does that make me a Frost-ed flake?

Meantime, our Sam got the news that I knew she was going to get: Harvard wants her in their Master’s of Public Health program.  (And yes, you have to have a PhD first for that.)

Go Sam!!!

My son John was due Feb. 29th. He chose to wait a week so his sister could have her surgery she needed. Happy due-iversary, John!

And today is the 15th anniversary of my parents’ engagement–although, yes, Dad did the asking. Happy engage-iversary, Mom and Dad!

And what I did on their date…

Squirrels don’t learn by fear or they could never sustain themselves. But they just didn’t like that flashy flying box under the feeder. It was just me and the birds since setting it up.

Unable to stand being left out any longer, this morning a black squirrel decided at last to head for the patio to graze underneath it. If it’s safe enough for a chickadee…

But. As soon as he took the first few happy bouncy steps off that tree, Alpha, the black one with reddish highlights who fought off that big gray fox squirrel a few months ago and claimed his dominion over my yard, appeared suddenly from the base of another tree and took after him at a flat-out screaming run, out for blood. They zigged this way. They zagged that way. FAST!

And out of sight and gone.

That’s when I knew the porch was still under their surveillance. Alpha came by a little later for sustenance after that marathon, and a few nuts were tossed his way; I figure, if the place is his (add a little more motivation), he’ll keep the numbers down.

What intrigued me is that two weeks ago he couldn’t follow a line of sight of a tidbit flying past his nose; now he can. Not only that, but he’s figured out that what my finger way over here inside is doing is being his personal food GPS, and he can turn to follow as it turns.

I tested him. He was  happy to be tested. A walnut this time! He wasn’t perfect, but he was far from the hopeless nut case he was before.

Object constancy happens for his species at maturity. Happy Spring.

A big gray came by in the afternoon and made it clear that, okay, he wasn’t going near that weird swingy thing up there but that’s fine, he’d picked up a taste for the expensive peanut-and-suet I like to set out for the wrens. And they’re ground birds. It was right there waiting for him near the door.

Not! I was surprised; the squirrels all used to turn up their noses at it.

He got good at gauging how long it took me to pump the squirter, open the door and then raise the thing and actually start to squirt, how long he could ignore me before he had to make a dash for it.

That’s too aggressive-urban-squirrel for my taste. This would not do.

I got it. I took an old keyboard and leaned it against the wooden box there. Ran the cord to inside. Shut the door. Waited.

Here he swaggered. Definitely some fox-type in him, even if his ears are a bit big for it. He gradually worked his way towards that suet as if I wouldn’t notice because, you know, he was being all subtle about it, and the strangeness of that new object hadn’t kept him away long at all. But carefully, before he got close enough that it could possibly hurt him–

–I yanked his chain.

And as that electric cord flipped up and the keyboard came crashing noisily down on the concrete, you never saw any animal run like that one ran.

He did not come back.

But then, there’s a difference between fear and a dead-certain knowledge of a monster lurking waiting to pounce.

Maybe.

My neighbor had hired someone to do a day job on her trees.

My husband is a ham radio operator, and though it hasn’t happened in a long time, he’s been known to leave a radio on that will suddenly cackle out a man’s voice randomly in the middle of the day and throw me for a minute.

Which is what I thought it must be. Had to be.  (Which began growing into, it did have to, didn’t it?..!) I was doing laundry at the back of the house and I ignored it.

Till I couldn’t.

There it was again. And louder. And too clear of radio static–what on earth?! I started walking down the hallway, wondering if somehow Richard had come home in the middle of the afternoon without calling first–this doesn’t happen–and it wasn’t his voice–and wondering if I should grab a phone on my way past the one near the door in his office. Seemed way too paranoid. Didn’t.

Which was really, really, really stupid.

HELLO?!?

That one was clear as a bell.  As I came around the corner to my kitchen, there he was. Standing in the middle of my locked house in the middle of the day with me inside with him. I had never seen the man before in my life.

“How did you get IN here?!” was the only thing that could come out of my stunned mouth. I looked at the door: it was indeed still locked. And the door was wide open.

“Your car alarm is going off.” And so it was. Then he told me he knocked and it just, kinda, you know, came open when he knocked harder.

“Let me go get my keys,” as he turned and walked away down the sidewalk. While I was hoping I actually still had some, panicking when I didn’t immediately find them. I had taken them out of my purse–my purse! My purse in the other room was somehow still there, I guess he didn’t see it!–for some reason a few minutes before all this started, but do you think I remembered that now? (And yes, I was abruptly as scattered as that paragraph sounds.)

My first reaction after he left was to turn to my husband: I called him at work to ask him to be more careful about shutting the door tightly on his way out in the morning; I knew *I* hadn’t gone through that door all day. I was surprised at how shaky my voice sounded. But then, I had no idea how many strange men might still be there inside my house and how much of it this guy might have just cased.

“Alison. CALL THE COPS.”

Oh. Right. Cops. Duh. But the car alarm really was going off… (And so nicely turned itself back off before I could even get outside with those keys. This was quite a relief.)

“Alison.”

Right.

I was on the phone with the dispatcher, watching out the window, when, a few minutes into the call, I confirmed to her, “That’s him” as the man walked down the street towards a patrol car with two officers, everything casual. Next thing I knew he seemed to be resisting and suddenly one cop had crouched straight into a ‘Freeze or I’ll shoot!’ mode and the other was putting handcuffs on the guy’s hands behind his back.

All they knew about him was that he had walked into a locked house in the middle of the day with someone home. Not exactly the social norm. They had to respond to his body language (and I have no idea what words might have been said). They had to be careful and they had to establish who was in charge.

But watching from inside, I thought I was about to see someone die because my car alarm had gone off, whatever the man’s intentions, and I turned away, unable to bear it.  At some point I looked again, and the handcuffs were off; they had talked the guy down to where things needed to be. They moved out of my line of sight towards that car.

The dispatcher had hung up and a third cop came to my door. After what seemed like forever, one of the others did too, and repeated what the first had asked me: did I want to press trespassing charges?

I asked, Was he someone on the lam with other charges pending, or was he really that much of an idiot?

The cop who’d been talking to the guy responded that he thought the guy was definitely a few screws loose, but he thought the guy did simply mean well. He did enter a stranger’s house and that is seriously not cool; the cop told the guy, You could have been blown away by someone defending their home!

I pointed out, And he did lie to you when he told you my door was unlocked.

I showed them that door. See: it is still locked. I haven’t touched it.

We decided to let him go as a well-meaning idiot. He went back to work on those trees. You know they’ve got his truck’s license carefully taken down (and that it must have come up clear.)

Richard came home early. I was so glad.

I love this one. The picture of the little white flower on the plant looks so much like something you’d see growing around here; they did say it’s a very adaptable species.

Somewhere still in my brain is the formula for figuring out how old something is by the half life of the amount of carbon still left in it.

Thirty thousand years in carbon-dated rock sediment ago, a squirrel dug down and tucked away seeds and fruit in its burrow in Siberia. I love that they described the little den as the size of a soccer ball; when I was a kid, I had one of those hamster balls and the pet to match bumping into the furniture while I kept it away from the stairs.

I can just picture my own squirrels strutting around proudly, tails high, to say they always knew their work was important. See, there’s a reason they steal every apple from my two trees! Just helping future researchers do their work.

But I rather wondered if the original article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences actually mentioned soccer balls and put its measurements in the colloquial like that. The Washington Post doesn’t say the scientists sprouted a seed; it says they produced the fertile plant from the fruit, in ways the reporter didn’t try to describe.

I can just picture the reporter thumbing through their copy trying to figure out the jargon and how on earth to talk about it.

I’ve done likewise. The scientific articles presented in that top-rated journal are well beyond my expertise. They offer the culmination of many years’ studying and learning and hard work. Not to mention the joy of having discovered something new.

Which I know, because they also published our Sam.

And on a happier note: Sam‘s platelet counts have come up at last and out of the danger zone. My thanks to all who have offered love and prayers her way; the support of others means everything when things are rough.

I put aside the project on my needles (this is rare for me) and dove into some of the softest yarn in my stash in happy celebration today. Suddenly nothing else would do.

Sam’s counts went up slightly. They’ll keep close tabs, but we definitely like the start of that trajectory.

Still, the bills got paid, the house got cleaner: I had to accomplish busy things. I had a hard time sitting myself down to just go calmly knit like I wanted to in anticipation of Stitches West. (Speaking of which, if you’re going, you might want to look at the Rav link here for the market-admission coupon via the folks at Webs, with thanks to them and to Janice Kang for the heads-up.)

Richard wasn’t feeling well today and didn’t go in to work, till about dinnertime, when he really had to run a quick errand to the office but didn’t feel up to driving.

Hey, he’s ferried me enough places when I needed it. So I grabbed a baby hat project that I hadn’t been able to make progress on, just in case it wasn’t quite as fast an in-and-out trip as he was anticipating.

Two hours of having my feet propped up in his office and my yarn on the floor, wondering what I would do should I finish while not having enough yarn to start something new, he made good progress too. It felt good. He made me a romantic mug of instant but not too sweet oatmeal in an official (Company X) logo’d mug with a plastic spoon: warm and soothing and somehow ridiculously perfect.

I didn’t run out of yarn nor project.  The hat just needs the decreasing at the top.

Dinner was ready when we walked back in the door.

Happy almost-Valentine’s, sweetie.

We told Sam we would check our (silenced) phones if she texted us during church; we wanted to know how her day was going.

And so while our friend Russ was on the stand making an impassioned plea for people to participate in a Red Cross blood drive the church was going to be sponsoring in Menlo Park, that message came in, driving home Russ’s point unbeknownst to him.

Seriously down on those platelets. More so. Trying one more thing before transfusing.  There are risks–but if she has to, a profound thank you for each person who makes it possible, and likewise to all who have added their prayers with ours.

It’s been a stressful time around here.

Our doorbell rang. It was a friend with a tiny miniature rose plant and a few homemade chocolate chip cookies, just because. Happy Valentine’s!

She had no idea. She had no idea how much it meant to me. I am determined to grow that three-inch Parade rose into something that blooms in my garden for decades in grateful remembrance of that act of unexpected kindness.

And as the sky started to dim in the late afternoon I suddenly had a feeling of being watched. Curious. I glanced up.

And just outside was the male Cooper’s hawk, perched on the chairback under the birdfeeder, people watching. My heart went out to him in thanks; somehow, when life gets really hard, one of them always seems to show up.

And there he was.  Beautiful red chest, bluegray/white racing stripes on his head, craning his neck to show a gray stripe at the bottom of it too.  He bobbed a bit, looking around just in case any dinner might happen to stumble on the scene, but mostly he was simply watching me.

We took each other in.

He opened his beak and again and said something I wished I could hear.

I thanked God for sending him to me; and with that, he raised his wings, turning, and flew in the one direction where I would be able to follow his path between the trees across our yard and on past the neighbor’s as he went–gone in a wingbeat, so fast!

I feel now like I can handle anything again.

Any mention of that group brings back the fierceness of great loss. They came, and I wrote here about how proud I was of the children in our community in their responses.

The last line in that post has proven to be true.

My sister Marian writes of what happened when they announced they were going to protest at a funeral in her town today.  The Powell boys.

I don’t know who that radio announcer is, but when I find out I’m going to thank him for his act of great compassion and humanity. And I thank the people who came to that church for theirs. Well done. So very well done. I’m so sorry for their losses. And so grateful for the great goodness in so many.