If I do this row it’ll be done (meaning the row). If I do this next row I’ll never have to do it again. If I do this one more row it’ll be done.

And so on.  The baby blanket is coming along.

Meantime, I’ve been playing with a recipe. It’s the brief time of year when our Costco sells big bags of frozen tart cherries.

Chocolate Cherry Lava Cakes for two:

Mix a spoonful or two of sugar and a half spoonful of corn starch (optional) and stir into about a cup of frozen tart cherries; cover and zap for several minutes, long enough for the corn starch to have had its needed one minute of boiling time. Let cool a bit, then blenderize or cuisinartify to make sauce. Set aside.

Melt 2 tbl of either butter or coconut oil with 1/2 c of bittersweet chocolate by zapping about 35 seconds. (The original recipe calls for it to be chocolate chips.)

Whip two eggs with a pinch of salt; add the chocolate mixture in slowly as you beat it with a wire whisk so that the heat of the chocolate doesn’t cook the eggs. Add 2 tsp flour and whip a bit more, then pour into two greased 8 oz ramekins. Or two cupcakes’ worth or hot cocoa mugs or whatever works for you.

375 for 12-13 minutes (note that my oven is slow).

Serve lava cakes with cherry sauce.

I’ll add pictures later. I’ve been too caught up in finishing up the knitting for now.

Got home at almost bedtime, so, quickly, here goes: my dairy-allergic daughter went to a vegan food fair at Santa Clara Convention Center and stopped by our house with fabulous chocolate she’d found there: the 70% dark chocolate from Earth Circle Organics and everything from Mama Ganache. Not to mention Equal Exchange, with their Panama bar already being a longtime favorite of mine for melting in my daily hot cocoa.

But oh, that Mama Ganache stuff. “Here, Mom–try this, too.”

I had time. I dropped everything and ran out the door and totally lucked out with a parking space eighteen steps from the door and met up with those vendors myself. (Mama Ganache needed a bigger sign–I passed him twice before I found the guy, I thought he was part of the booth next to him.)

Talked to the guy a moment and found out he’s from Maryland, and suddenly, wow, a mutual sense of, someone from home!

I grinned at his raspberry chocolates and told him my husband’s grandfather had had a quarter acre raspberry patch in DC and had turned down a huge sum at the time for it and by whom.

*IN* DC? the guy asked, knowing that area as well as I did.

Yup. Our wedding was an all the raspberries you can eat day.

And with that I bought some of those bars, along with his patties that remind me of some childhood ones like nothing else I have ever found before, and he threw in an extra of the raspberry ones in a hail-fellow-well-met. Really nice guy.

It is our friend Lee’s birthday today and we were going out to the movies, dinner, and then dessert at his and Phyllis’s house afterwards so I had to get going fast.

And a grand time was had by all there, too.

It is a true measure of our devotion to that couple, longtime friends that they are, that I did it: I actually did it.

I gave Lee one of those raspberry chocolate bars.

(And I actually sat through a loud Tom Cruise action movie for his sake, too. I tell you. True friendship. Totally.)

Okay, off to bed with me. Chocolate in the morning.  Happy Father’s Day!

Yesterday being Mother’s Day, I did what I always do, with only the item in hand being the thing that changes: I clipped an amaryllis stalk that had opened that very morning, right on cue, put it in a vase and headed over to Edie’s house.

I rang the doorbell, waited, knocked, no answer, and thought my timing was off this year and she must be at dinner with her kids.

Turns out her kids and grandkids were there, actually, and in the “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord” department, nobody heard me. I put the vase there on the step, knowing it would be expected and found and of course it was.

Which is why I got asked if I could come back over tonight. Before I headed out, I watered the tomatoes and saw that in today’s high heat we had half a dozen or so blueberries ripe now that weren’t before; I reached through the netting and they fell into my hands. Definitely ready. Wished there were more, but there will be in time to come as the yearling plants grow.

I put my small sun-warm offering into as small a jar as I could find.

They were cute and she loved them. Blueberries and apricots are her two most favorite fruits, she told me as she offered me roses and a couple-sized box of chocolate-dipped strawberries (all of which Richard and I ate within a half hour of my getting home–they were good.)

We pulled up chairs and caught up on each other’s lives. Praised good surgeons that cared and had saved our lives, hers, last year and recently. We rejoiced in each other’s presence.

And she said, And we have come together and become such good friends all because of Adrian.

Ohhhh, Edie… My heart broke. Again. And it was true. Her teenage son. Fourteen years ago.

She comforted me, then. She told me he is the first thing she thinks of when she wakes up every morning and the last thing she thinks of when she goes to sleep. The pain never goes away. You never get over losing a child. And yet, you find out how to cope, and life does go on, she said.

I having nearly lost a child this past December to that accident, and when people ask me how many children I have part of me still wants to say five: three girls and two boys–a miscarriage is nothing, nothing at all like what you’ve gone through, I told her. And yet–that other daughter is part of me. I struggled to say, losing her is part of what shaped me.

But Edie understood, better than I could ever ask for. There was no judgmentalism, there was no comparing in this, it simply was and we took it in together and we are enough in the face of these things. These are our lives.

And we have children that are growing and thriving and grandchildren to bounce on our knees and sing to and we know how lucky we are.

I exclaimed over the yellow roses and we came away blessed and loved and the world a better place.

(And now I want to plant an apricot tree.)

Just wishing every day could be like today.

Hudson has this Skype thing all figured out. He doesn’t try to climb through the screen to us anymore but rather took it as his cue to make funny noises up close with Grandma and giggle. Then he brought his favorite toys over to make sure we got a good view, and if the thing makes lots of power-tool-type sounds, all the better.

Silly Grandma, Parker’s pajamas you can’t see behind his knees are Thomas the Tank Engine, not Superman. We cheered on Thomas the Tank Engine.

Got to talk to everybody and a very happy Mother’s Day was enjoyed by all.

And typing this near 11:30 at night it just hit me that wait, my hubby forgot to give me the new chocolate torte pans that I *cough cough* don’t know about, for when I need to do a production run and the ones on hand weren’t enough (plus dishwasherable nonstick with a silicone seal, pretty cool, I simply wanted to try them.) We both just utterly forgot the just-stuff stuff.

There was also going to be some silk/lycra from Colourmart but it hasn’t come yet.

(break)  (return) I just ran and told him we forgot the material gifts of the day. There was a moment of say what? on his face, then the dawning and a guffaw. Yes. Yes we did.

Dropped Richard off at work took something to Michelle’s forgot something went home took a brief nap to catch my breath got up went back to Michelle’s went to the post office mailed off a copy of Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls for someone who donated to Stephanie’s bike marathon went to Costco bought fruit went home hulled and de-stemmed fruit made coconut chocolate ganache and then caramel sauce to dunk giant strawberries grapes blackberries in. Arranged artfully (more or less). Answered a bit of mail in between.

Then I picked up Richard, threw some dinner at us (more or less) and got back in the car with the fruit and the sauces.

And sat down in the chapel with him and took a deep breath and let the music, finally, begin.

Our friend Jim the organist grew up with Sue (Keith of yesterday’s video’s mom) and today was Sue’s birthday, so he rounded up half a dozen mutual friends who were musicians too and threw her a concert in celebration, at church, of course, where there just happened to be this pipe organ and grand piano near each other. So handy.

Katie came with her flute, and Katie hasn’t lived in this state since our kids were in high school together. She and Russ played some of Mary’s compositions. (Note that there are scores there. Note that they are freely available to the public for non-commercial use) and Mary herself came with her husband and got to hear her work performed.

The first Sunday we were here 27 years ago they announced in church that (insert name I did not know) was in a coma and would everyone please pray for her recovery.

I figured it was some old person, having no idea it was the wife of an old college classmate of mine, all of us then in our twenties. She had had a pregnancy turn molar with preeclampsia and had stroked.

Katie had been a gifted flute player and when she came back to us she no longer knew how to play. She has long since fully regained that ability and is fine. She knew me when all seemed lost when I was later in the hospital, too, and I too came back. So did Russ’s wife (I will be grateful forever that Karen and Amy told me I had to buy that cashmere.) We are survivors.

Sue’s husband was recording the concert and I might be able to link to it later; I hope so. Anyway, afterward, Katie asked after me and I explained the new hearing aids. She immediately thought of who could most be helped with that information and got very excited, saying, we have to tell Hank about those! His aren’t very good and he needs better ones. When I warned her on the price she said, But being able to hear the best you possibly can, it’s worth it!

Exactly.

It’s all worth it. Every experience we go through to get us to where we need to become and that teaches us to take nothing for granted, it’s worth every step of the way.

There was so much love tonight.

Happy Birthday, Sue!

She admitted that she was really hoping for an angel food cake.

“It’s in the oven, honey.”

“Oh good!”

My husband has taught all our kids that the One True Birthday Cake is always that 12-beaten-eggwhites type, and when I made myself a chocolate plain old ordinary one once since hey, it was my birthday and hey, I was the one making it and cake isn’t even my favorite dessert so I was going to make what I was going to make, he was quite surprised at the blasphemy, uttering the memorable “That’s not a birthday cake!”

It is to me. Chocolate it was.

But this is April, which around here means stocking up on a whole lot of eggs. Happy birthday, sweetie!

More apple and peach photos… And I saw the hawk! After the downpour was over, swooping by almost unseen for his speed, then in full view, then five more almost-missed-that swoops, again and again. Protecting his nest?

A friend who’s an avid birder dropped by, and we pulled up chairs side-by-side and watched the show at the feeder as we chatted. She mentioned that her hawk never shows her anything gory, just feathers gently wafting in the breeze.  Ours too. “Oh, there’s your wren,” she added. But she just missed meeting Coopernicus.

And. After writing last night’s post about appreciating those who make it so our food comes to us and not wasting their work, I went in the kitchen, where I had a bunch of bananas that were right at that perfect point–and where they would be just past it in the morning and I knew it. Time to practice a little more of what I’d just preached.

I squeezed a Meyer lemon, threw the bananas in the Cuisinart, decided it needed a second lemon and certainly didn’t need any sugar and I whirred the thing for several minutes.

It came out with a texture like angel food cake batter. Curious. Warm, though, of course, after applying all that friction to it, so I put it in the freezer, remembering that my mom would do that and then take it out and whip it again briefly in the frozen state to break down any large ice crystals and call it done.

And then of course I entirely forgot my new sorbet all day so we still have something to look forward to.

I looked all over that little cherry tree yesterday for any sign of future blooming and found nothing but leaves anywhere.

And yet today, after a little bit of rain…well there you go now.

Meantime, I pulled the big Costco clamshell of red seedless grapes out of the fridge to make pink orange juice with: rinse a big handful and throw them in the blender with the fresh-squeezed. Bananas and mango juice add-ins optional.

The grapes, imported from Chile, had faint waves of the very slightest dust across their curves, as if they had been rinsed in the field but not quite enough. There is never any question that I’ll wash them too and definitely say a prayer over my food, but, somehow the unexpected sight instantly connected me to people far, far away from me.

Walking down the rows in a vineyard. Cutting the clusters off, putting them in wooden crates perhaps, again and again, hard work in the sun, never getting to meet the people they would be feeding by their labors. Do they ever wonder about us?

I suddenly felt duty-bound to them not to waste a one. Here, have a smoothie with me, I’ve got another two pounds to use up this week and I don’t want to let a single grape go bad. Oh wait–I could freeze them like ice cubes–there you go.

And rather than just asking a quick half-thought blessing on my lunch, I found myself thanking Above for those individuals and asking Him to take good care of them, whoever and wherever they were out there. I don’t know them, but He does.

And I found myself profoundly grateful that they do what they do.

What I really hope to do is pick and deliver to her in thanks but we’ve got a few months to go on that.

I got a note two weeks ago from a friend asking if I were collecting produce clamshells for my fruit trees again this year?

Yes please?!

She collected them from her neighbors as well as saving her own over that time and gave them to me at the end of church today: not one or a few but twenty-eight identical ones, cleaned, dried, and stacked. Wow.

I went straight home and turned on the oven before I’d even found all the ingredients. I couldn’t use my own blueberries yet but I certainly had some in the freezer (right?) Yes I did.

And so a few hours later, hopefully after dinner was over, a phone call: “Will you be home the next few minutes?”

I got quite a kick out of her little girl jumping as high as she could to try to get the full view of that warm blueberry cake in her mom’s hands as she stood in the doorway of their apartment and her little boy who climbed up on a chair in hopes of being high enough up to see it, too. Cake! The baby recognized me and grinned and toddled a tad uncertainly towards us–he’s walking! Look at him go!

I told her, “I think they taste better the next day”–and added, “but it doesn’t have to wait that long.” She looked at her excited little kids and laughed, shaking her head, “Probably not.”

I got a glimpse of their happy household that reminded me so much of our own family back when I was a young mom like that.

Y’know? I should bake more often.

You know that moment of discovery that feels so obvious, so brilliant, and so stupid all at once that you didn’t think of it before? Like, to a beginner, that you can knit normal back-and-forth on circular needles, it doesn’t have to be in a circle?

And then a little later I realized that of course I’d thought of it before, I just hadn’t in awhile because I don’t do this often enough. So. Cocoa that has been opened in a humid environment becomes lumpy; my chocolate torte recipe calls for mixing flour and cocoa together before adding them in and I’ve been smushing the lumps out with a large spoon for forever.

Except when I’m not. A wire whisk (duh), the dry cocoa and flour. Smooth now as, well, newly opened cocoa.

Meantime, a little showing off of Parker’s sweater. There would be a video of Hudson walking, too, if I could get it to work here. Later.

They moved here just a couple of years ago. I know that along with missing old friends it can take awhile to feel truly rooted in a new town, both at work and within the community; having school-age kids does help, and a church community, definitely. I’m glad they’re part of ours.

Good friends of theirs where they’d come here from made the news in the last week or so when they didn’t show up where they were supposed to and concerned family called 911: one of the gas appliances had leaked carbon monoxide into the house and they had been overcome too quickly to get out.

Their old friends were abruptly gone from this earth. It was one of those things that just was and was just unfathomable all at the same time. It hit home for me because that was so nearly us too this past November.

Neither of us said anything about that to the husband as he stood in the doorway tonight quite surprised at the chocolate torte he had certainly not been expecting to find in his hands of a random evening. It simply was their turn to have a grownup version of a doorbell ditching. You should have seen the delighted anticipation in his face as he looked at all that beautiful chocolate he was about to share with his kids and his wife when she got home.

It was what we could quietly do.

The first Babcock peach blossom, opened today as expected, and the other two peach trees. All in a year’s growth.

I finished the aqua silk shawl, I finished the aqua silk shawl! With about two yards left on the cone while the last pattern repeat was over 5000 stitches. So close. I would have liked to have done at least an extra row knit plain at the bottom but I just didn’t dare chance it. Good thing I stopped.

And…I came into Purlescence late tonight.

I had made a blueberry cake (with a little fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon added) for Valentine’s breakfast tomorrow, and I’d been waiting for it to be done before I could go.

I pulled it out of the oven with one hand with a toothpick in the other to test it–and that’s when I found out the oven mitt I’d grabbed had a spot where the insulation had worn through, and in my sudden scramble to get Don and Cliff’s pan to the stove fast before I burned my hand any further, I tripped over my own foot.

Now, it’s a running joke here as to which of us is the klutzier, but I think I took the cake on this one. I called out to Richard to come and see, because it was funny if nothing else: a third had landed in a clean saute pan on the stove, safe! Some of course had landed on the stove, but most stayed more or less inside the pan, even if not quite arranged the same way.

Four cups was a lot of blueberries–it was supposed to be three. I goofed.

He came around the corner in a hurry, wanting to help–just as I, while trying to finally put that cake pan the rest of the way carefully down, managed to flip the handle on the saute pan, blueberry shrapnel suddenly firing right at him.

He said something about how he could only make it worse and backed out of there fast.

Tomorrow we shall beat a tasty re-treat on this thing.

I know the old name for these cakes was blueberry buckle but I don’t think that’s what they intended.

A Bacon avocado. The actual name of the variety, a BLT gone askew.

So I had to go look online after buying one, and of course Jim Bacon was the grower who developed it, it comes by the name honestly (pretty much).

But wait, it gets interesting: there’s a plain old Bacon avocado and a Jim Bacon avocado. The guy was on a roll here.

Couldn’t he have called them something like, maybe, Jim’s Best and Jim’s Almost As Good Hey I Tried or something? Looking at a bin of these is now going to be like trying to figure out whether you’re about to buy a merino yarn or a merino merino yarn.

But somehow the one avocado I bought, whichever of the two types it is, badly wants to live up to the power of its suggestiveness and at least be sprinkled with some bacon bits tomorrow. Milk Pail really should have a little mini-fridge set up next to the vegetable bins with a pound of sliced ready-to-fry to go with. Pork belly futures, there you go.

See how innocent it looks. Not a soupcon of suspicion. (Chicken noodle soup on the side for his foggybraining head cold.)

BPA-free package, the Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Soup box said. The flap was solid across, no indented dots, just, Squeeze in at the four corners to open. Odd.

My hands just plain weren’t big enough and clearly weren’t strong enough. I would just have gone and gotten the scissors and been done with it but curiosity got the better of me–was that really the right way to open such a thing? Thwarted, I didn’t see how it made sense.

My friend Lynda was talking about words that the English language needs to have.

He didn’t get up and come into the kitchen, he just helpfully took the package from my hands. He didn’t read the instructions, he just queried me and I helpfully parroted again what the thing said, so, okay: and my 6’8″ husband with his great big hands gave that little box a good short hard squish suddenly with the bottoms of both palms in the very instant that I knew too late to beg him to forget what I said and not, just, not.

English fails for when you’re suddenly helpless, crying, laughing, quite unable to stand upright, utterly dissolved–but at the same time also very sorry that you’re totally losing it in front of someone who’s paying for the source of that mirth and incurred it for your own sake and you know it though he would never say it and ohmygoodness.

Mentos and coke. Snowblowers hitting a row of jack o’lanterns. Think redhead with highlights, spaghetti sauce around toddlers, the shirt, the pants, the hair, the chair, the desk, the floor: nailed’em all.

Bless him, he thought it was funny, too, though honestly perhaps not quite so much. (Where do you want me to put these, dear? Washing machine, right? Yes please, I answered, trying to be meek and thanking him for helping me. There have been random snorts of laughter all evening since. Geysers! I’m sorry, honest I am. Butbutbutbut. !!)

I think that Amazon gift certificate from my brother might need to go to a new keyboard, maybe for insurance’s sake while we can still get the ergonomic ones cheap, but so far his still seems to be working after all.

After he got cleaned up he was even willing to eat some of that soup.  What fell back into the box was still left.

Dinner at Nina, Rod, and Gwynie’s. Good friends, good food, good times,  (looking at the clock) g’night, and can’t wait till the grandsons tomorrow (got one sleeve cast on, at least.) Merry Christmas!