HE’S HOME!!!!!! They were going to keep him till the middle of the grandsons’ visit, a whole ‘nother five days, and yesterday when he said, So I’m going home tomorrow, right? the nurses were sympathetic but the doctors gave that idea a yeah right look.

So I was not at all expecting the call at 12:15 this afternoon saying they were sending him home and he was getting ready. Then immediately came the message from Phyllis and Lee saying they wanted to go visit him.

–Well actually….

I had been wishing hard that I didn’t have to make that long walk in the sun at the highest-UV part of the day, solstice or no solstice, and there they immediately were on the phone with no idea I needed them, offering well then, let us help you out with that. And so they drove me to the curb and waited. Circled when they had to and came back and waited patiently some more.

It’s always a long wait. After awhile I went to the nurses’ station and asked with a grin if I could bum a wheelchair and wheel him out myself? (One is never allowed to walk out on one’s own, an employee must wheel you out.) They laughed and called down again and ten minutes later there you go. Took an hour and a half for me once, so ten minutes is practically the speed of light.

And then just to top it off, when we got home Phyl and Lee asked a few questions and then went into our garage (brave people) and wrestled the fake tree out of there and the wires to the darn thing and set it all up for us, upright and lights on and there you go.

I was expecting to have a grand total in the decorating department of a Christmas quilt on the floor with post office boxes on top. By myself. Whoopdedoo. And then head over to visit him at Stanford.

He looks great. A friend was throwing a get-together tonight and he wanted to go and so after a few hours’ lying down here to rest up for it he had a great time, and Nina and Rod were there and offered Christmas dinner if we would throw in the oven time since theirs wasn’t working. Hey! Twist our arms! It will be a great day well spent.

And, bless the poor old guy, now I don’t have to be in the same room for hours every day with a patient on the other side of the curtain with pneumonia and a 102.5 degree fever–in my autoimmunity, that was really really really not a good place to be, but since it was my husband on our side of the curtain there was no question but that I was to be there. I confess I would have been there more hours had it not been for that.

The new hospital whose foundations they are now working on will all be private rooms to stop germs from spreading between patients so easily.  They can’t build it fast enough.

My Richard is home. I wore a Christmas sweater a dear friend gave me years ago, and the good Jewish wife who’d been there day after day too with who knows how much more to go whose elderly husband lay in that other bed and whom I fervently wished could be taking him home too wished me a heartfelt Merry Christmas as we went out that door free.

Hudson practicing for Talk Like A Pirate Day.

I called my mom and wished her a happy birthday.

A little later, my doorbell rang. It was such a joy to see those happy, expectant faces: I was expecting two, I got four. Nicholas and his dad, who had worked together and made persimmon puree and persimmon chutney from their tree; Nicholas was selling them to make Christmas money (and to earn that Lego robotics toy he really really wanted) and I had asked if I could buy some.

And his little sisters: the twins whom I’d given yarn to to learn how to knit with. They asked if I’d gotten the fingerknitted-chained necklaces they’d made me? (I’d thanked them a week ago but being right there in person, the excitement needed to be shared all over again and the delivery of the gift made real.)  Yes!

And so I reached a few steps backwards and grabbed the things and wrapped them around my neck to their delight and I thanked them all over again.

Turns out they had a burning question about it, and one pointed at the brick red piece: “What is that?”

I got it– “Silk.”

Their eyes got big.

So were mine when I saw what they’d all brought me. I doublechecked to make sure I wasn’t depriving anybody else by buying the eight jars of puree–I love the stuff. Not only was it wonderful food from their tree and their hands and their stove but it was wrapped up beautifully, one even covered in a square of–wait for it–silk. A drapery sample (as labeled on the back) that added that perfect decorator’s touch that people like me can only wonder in awe at. How did they think of that?! Not in my skill set, that’s for sure.

And then later we got to Skype with Parker and wish him a happy third birthday. He proudly showed us a new toy, while Hudson found watching his big brother far more interesting than grownups waving on a screen.

Next week we get to see the boys and their parents in person and run and play and sing and hug. I cannot wait.

A friend’s son is suddenly on life support after an unexpected medical emergency and will not survive, I found out today. We will never again see that sweet redheaded Down’s adult winking in pride at his mom for a job well done after he’s helped out. I wanted to shout NO! No more of this, everybody just stop dying for a little while, okay? Enough!

And that my friend Jennifer is moving away.

Sometimes it’s all a bit too much.

There was an unexpected knock at our door tonight: Jennifer herself, sharing some homemade soup that she’d frozen extras of and would not have time here to finish off, offering up food, friendship, and what I think I needed most of all, an evening’s presence. We talked, she asked after Michelle, we laughed, we all swapped stories till late, we treasured every moment. She told us of one dear to her who had been in such an accident–but he had died. We examined the impacts of grief together in a safe place.

We laughed over the antics of babies–one at church today who’d toddled over to her, descriptions of her brother’s twins at the just-walking stage. New life. To life!

And I came away feeling somehow whole again in a way that had been missing these last few days.

My friend Phyllis and I went off to the Harvest Festival arts and crafts fair today, as close to Black Friday-ing as I ever care to get. We got to see Mel and Kris! Our potter friends!

I figured I could justify buying a few food items (and a Mel-and-Kris mug. Hey.)

Yesterday, the turkey was carved in Aunt Mary Lynn’s kitchen and the bones went straight into the fridge, to be sent home with us. No way was I staying up till 2 am to cook them down, so, I did it when I got home from the fair.

I tried a little in a spoonful this evening, curious.

Then a fair bit more in a quarter cup.

And another.

And a few more times, and had to stop and put both in the fridge so there’d be some for anybody else.

For the record: fresh turkey broth mixed with grenadine syrup from the owners of the pomegranite trees? Watch out, cranberries, this totally beats you. skylakeranch.com and the shipping is free this weekend only. The syrup does not have and does not need added sugar.  Wow. Recommended. Go have fun.

(Edited to add: the label on mine says pomegranite juice, water, lemon juice. The description online says pomegranite juice, water, sugar, lemon juice. Curious. If it’s an issue for you, ask them.)

We do the chocolate.

Homemade nutella recipe here, the best one I’ve found so far: http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2013/02/21/homemade-nutella-recipe/print/

Chocolate torte recipe, my own, as always, here: https://spindyeknit.com/2010/03/may-the-fourth-be-with-you/

Cranberry sauce recipe: one cup sugar one cup water one 12 oz cranberries (or a whole pound if your bag is that size–hey, who’s counting), bring all to a boil and then simmer for a minute. The more skins that pop, the smoother the sauce it’ll make. Thickens as it cools.

Annnd… I checked with Aunt Mary Lynn while the tortes were in the oven, just to, y’know, verify she wanted one this year like every year.

She has an eight-year-old granddaughter coming who’s allergic to dairy and eggs. Did I have a no-eggs version?

Can she eat coconut? I asked; I can look, and I could make a ganache with coconut cream for hers.

Yes! That sounds wonderful!

And so, chocolate Depression Cake, and I remember the name and history from my 1952 Betty Crocker cookbook, created when butter and eggs were hard to come by when my parents were kids. Vinegar and soda to make it rise. Recipe here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe-Tools/Print/Recipe.aspx?recipeID=18061&origin=detail&servings=8&metric=false  I skipped the chocolate chips for fear of milk contamination but I’ll make up for it with that glorious topping.

The tortes are cool, the cake close to it, the nutella’s in the fridge and the cranberry sauce on the stove just got turned off. Ganache batches next.

I think I’ll sit down a moment.

But I can just picture a little girl, old enough to really enjoy chocolate and to have already been excluded from participating in a whole lot of food-related events, with a glorious chocolate cake made just for her and just as good as anybody else’s. I’m really looking forward to that.

Wishing everybody a very happy Thanksgiving.

I’m debating typing this. I don’t want to sound like I’m patting myself on the back. But then, actually, it started with what seemed for a long time like a mistake on my part, and more of one as I held doggedly on to it.

I saw a jacket–on sale, a very good price, lined and good and warm. And it was a deep blue teal, just subdued enough, the short-shearling-type lining a slightly greener teal and lining the hood, too. Gorgeous. I seriously coveted it. It was too big for me, but my daughter needed a jacket and there you go, decorating a daughter is even better than decorating yourself and so I bought it.

She, however, was a teenager at the time and the kiss of death at that age is to have your mother go bonkers over an article of clothing she expects you to wear. (Hey, I did it to my mom, too, I get it.) She did humor me enough to try it on once and as far as I remember that was that.

Both girls are a lot taller than I am, and no matter how much I liked it, the sleeves especially were just ridiculous on me.

And yet over the years as various things have come and gone, that jacket has stayed right there in that closet, with me unwilling to let it go. I gave a coat to a shelter, knowing it was much needed. The jacket, though, for whatever unfathomable reason, stayed. Out of sheer stubbornness. Or something. Someone had to like it as much as I did, darnit.

For the last few weeks, I’ve thought, y’know, I really should take that to church (but kept simply forgetting it, good intentions or no good intentions)…

…Instead, finally, that part of church that I kept thinking about came here.

We got a phone call in the middle of all-the-everything that’s been the furnace stuff: making sure that we remembered that on the monthly calendar we had signed up to serve dinner to the Mormon sister missionaries tonight. We had utterly forgotten. Had it been just one more day, had we known when we signed up, we could have had the whole house nice and warm for them, but oh well.

One of them is from the States and one of them is from Fiji. I had some very good coconut-curry sauce (thank you Costco) unopened in the fridge and hey, cook some raw shrimp in that, a few minutes stirring on the stove, done. To make the beautiful young woman with the slightly English accent feel at home, and she was ecstatic. (That wasn’t the only dish, but it was the most successful one.)

Richard had pulled one of the space heaters into the dining area as we’d sat down to eat  and we’d explained about the no furnace. Between it and the cooking, though, we had it reasonably comfortable in there.

We visited awhile, and at the end, I asked her: I had this jacket. It’s been cold. She was from a warm climate. She was taller than I; would she be willing to try it on and see if she liked it?

Her face lit up in surprise and hope and I ran and got it.

It fit! She LOVED it. “It’s *warm*!” (And boy did I relate to that sense of endless cold right now with having had to open windows to air the carbon monoxide out and all that.) She loved everything about it as much as I had, and just kind of danced around a moment in it holding it tight to her for sheer joy, the other sister missionary as happy for her as anyone could ever have asked for.

Turns out my instincts had been right–our tropical friend had been shivering and I should have done this long since, way back at the start of the cold, but at least here we now finally were. She had been going to go take the hit on her funds at long last (and I can’t imagine what that would have been for her at American prices) and just go and buy a jacket tomorrow. Tomorrow.

And now she didn’t have to. This was everything she needed. It fit. And she loved it.

It had been waiting for her for a long time.

Trying to type with an icepack on one arm, shortly to be switched off to the other. Icing just as a precautionary measure at the first sign of complaining, it’s not bad and I want it to stay that way.

But there’s nothing quite like that little satisfying snap sound at the end of a project. (And being able to hear it!) Especially when with 960 stitches per pattern repeat, there was just just just enough supersoft Malabrigo Finito left that I got to break the yarn at the end.

Oh and by the way? That excellent blueberry cake recipe?  We found out tonight that it’s good with sour cherries, too.

The annual stroking of the ego. I confess it freely.

The Scouts were having a spaghetti dinner tonight with a dessert auction fundraiser. I made two chocolate tortes for it. Bergenfield cocoa, bourbon vanilla, manufacturing cream–only the best.

And people were just waiting for the moment (while bidding on other things and Dave ratatatating off encouragement and numbers. DOIHEAR30? 35! SOLD, for 35!

There were lots of desserts, lots of laughing, gradually a slowing down and more chatting but then suddenly attention and a whole lot of hands shooting up as he started off on the first torte. He told everybody, “Now, there are two,” but still–the first went for $62. $52 for the second.

And as I watched the winners across the room cut them up on the spot and gleefully hand pieces around their tables and to anyone who allowed themselves to look interested, it felt pretty darn good.

I had to make the first move. He wasn’t going to do it.

I offered to open the hoarded coveted box of Triple Ginger Snaps from Trader Joe’s.

Now, I’m not big on store-bought cookies. But these are good. The natural-ingredient list is short and to the point: just sweet enough. Crunch to the nth degree. Just enough zing to the ginger. Small and potato-chip addictive.

But what caught me by surprise and had me grabbing the box to read it, was, after nearly a year and a half of having lived with someone who’s allergic to dairy–

“Butterrrrr,” I swooned. “Taste that butterrr.” I had really, really missed it.

Because, after all, you don’t bake the really good stuff and then have your kid come home and only be able to smell the heaven from the oven wafting around the house, mocking her. It wasn’t till her teens that she started reacting to it; she knows what she’s missing, and it’s hard enough.

But she’s got her own place now. I have butter in my freezer and I know how to use it. For the moment, though, while I figure out which recipe in my mental stash comes first (there’s no particular hurry), please pass the box.

Hudson and his cousin Hayes…

Went to Purlescence’s yarn swap and got to see friends I haven’t seen in ages! I’m so glad I went. I sent good yarn off to new homes and brought none home.

Meantime, Richard has had a fever the last two days and someone had to get some groceries–not much, but some. Rhubarb to go with the strawberries in the cobbler I wanted to make (and did). There’s only one place I know I’ll definitely find that.

So I waited till 5:30 and headed off for the partially outdoors Milk Pail.

The place has maybe half a dozen shopping carts, cute little miniatures; there’s just no room for more. Baskets, they have lots of plastic baskets to carry around.

I always remember after I get there just how hard it is for me in there: visual overload, tight spaces, and the brain that had the visual and balance connections not entirely mended since my car accident. My sense of which way up is is tactile. And I am always, always bumped into in there.

There was one last cart to steady me–but a boy of about six or seven never saw me and ran ahead and grabbed it with glee and wheeled it to his mom, and I’m not about to do anything to tell a kid not to do right by his mother.

I turned back, but another woman saw. She had a cart, and in a–German?–accent she offered it to me.

It was a lifeline: I could make it through this place and I thanked her.

She didn’t seem to want to be thanked, just let her go about her business.

Oh okay.

We passed each other a minute or two later and I smiled and nodded and her face registered as yeah yeah whatever. I hoped she didn’t have a sore back or some such that might make her need that cart too; I hoped she had no regrets.

But it seemed like it just wasn’t a big deal to her. It was to me, of course.

Back to our anonymous shopping.

While I said a silent prayer upwards to the Love who treasures our best impulses that her day might go easier as mine had through her.

Holly got to see the Chihuly Garden! Sculptures of handblown glass. There’s a local Chihuly piece I have yet to go see, but I need to.

And then today she landed in San Francisco, took the train down, and spent the afternoon with me. Not often you get to see a friend who lives on a different continent.

Knowing she likes to knit hats and that she’d said something about not having a lot of yarn with her on her trip, not wanting to weigh down her luggage but wanting to offer something, I brought her a skein of Malabrigo Rios in Ravelry Red (thank you Kathryn at Cottage Yarns) and it exactly matched her shirt–and of course it had that legendary Malabrigo softness. She loved it.

Then she pulled out a red fabric bag. Ohmygoodness. The peach, the gold, the two of purple variegated–those are all silks! And six skeins of Zauberball sock wool from the factory outlet there in Germany.  Wow wow wow. Karbonz double points to knit socks with. Thank you doesn’t begin to say it.

We commandeered a table at the new restaurant Tava for over three hours, and they assured us we were fine. I was glad to see a good stream of customers coming in and out; nice people and good food and one of those rare days that you get to remember and treasure forever.

I wish Tava every success, and to that end, my family and I will be back.

Safe travels, Holly, and my best to you and your family.

My husband likes the occasional dish of yogurt in the evening. He had some tonight.

A short time later, after thinking about it a bit, I offered that I would have some spoiled yogurt myself.

He wrinkled his face in confusion: “Spoiled? Yogurt?”

“Yes. Green.”

(one… two…)

His face suddenly lit up. “I think I’ll have some green yogurt too!”

I grinned from the kitchen, reaching for a second small rice bowl of Mel and Kris’s–they make a big spoonful look like a generous portion, no small thing.

And scooped him out some pistachio gelato, too.

I made up a zucchini bread recipe twenty-five years ago after buying and freezing and using for the longest time a twenty pound bag of pecan meal from Sunnyland Farms, and then another. It’s been a long time since I made this, though; I have no idea now where I had it written down.

But how could I resist those big blue Bambi eyes? And so tonight I tried to replicate what her memories were making perfect. And this will definitely do–so I’m putting it where I know I won’t lose it again. Here.

The ground pecans substitute for some of the flour and half the oil of this fairly standard recipe.

____________________

Pecan Zucchini Bread a Michelle–two loaves

Measure a mildly heaping cup of toasted (350, 10 min–or don’t worry about the toasting if you don’t want to) pecans and cuisinart them till they start to be pecan butter–I’m liking smoother over grittier since I’m the one doing it. It came to just under 3/4 cup packed.

Mix in a half cup melted butter. (Oh but I wish. Earth Balance worked fine.) Whip in two cups gently-packed, grated zucchini, and three eggs. (Oh. I was supposed to add in a tbl of vanilla?  Oops, I guess.)

In a separate bowl, mix: 2 1/2 cups of flour with 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1 1/4 cups sugar (this is a cup less than what they said but plenty sweet for us), 1 tsp salt, and 1 tablespoon cinnamon.

Whip in the liquid mixture. Bake at 325 for about 55 minutes or till a toothpick in the center comes out clean.

Try not to eat it all before morning. That first loaf is going down fast.

(Edited to add in the morning: I might take 1/4 cup flour out for next time, but it’s good as is and makes great toast, somewhat biscotti-esque, to spread with cream cheese.)

One of Michelle’s friends gave her a book on chocolate today, and flipping through it at home, all three of us stopped at one page of pictures with the identical reaction: the old Scharffen Berger plant in Berkeley! It wasn’t labeled but we knew it instantly. We took the tour there years ago, back when the founders, not Hershey, owned what was then a start-up. They were determined, with input from the wonderful Alice Medrich, to make the best chocolate in America. (And then later when one of the men was dying they sold out and the little factory got shut down and now Tcho in San Francisco is setting out to take the spot of best chocolate-maker in the country–superb chocolate, highly recommended.)

The tour guide showed us the room where a woman was deftly and quickly wrapping individual chocolate bars. By hand.

And there she was in that photo and we could tell you that the photo was shot from the doorway we saw her through and that that was the actual woman we’d seen. I wondered if I was remembering right but Richard and Michelle both confirmed, and besides, there had only ever been the one person doing that job, from what we remember from the tour.

They had actually just bought an automatic bar wrapping machine at the time but then found it didn’t fit through the door in the old 1907 building, although we found out later they managed it not long after.

And what a building: the ceiling was in brick. Curves of bricks. Note that brick crumbles in earthquakes and that this place had been finished the year after San Francisco’s big burning 1906 quake. How a big double S set up stayed up there… It has been one of life’s mysteries for me ever since.

Hershey’s promised not to compromise the quality, but there are definitely those of us who feel they did.

We have thought for some time that if I could just get to the Tcho factory tour without having to walk through a lot of sunlight to get to it, we’d be right on it–and I just got my push to go find out.

I wonder where their employees will be in a dozen years. I’m curious to know if they bought the Scharffen Berger wrapper machine that had been right across the Bay Bridge from them. And I hope that woman is working for Tcho’s now in product development, taste-testing after all those years of being surrounded by the aroma of the world’s best cocoa beans. She’s earned it.

As the late rays came in at a slant that we’re not and don’t quite want to be used to, the perfect juicy peach that had waited on its tree collecting sweetness nearly all summer. A little cream, a sprinkling of brown sugar on top. Just a little.

There’s only one problem with it, he said.

What’s that?

It’s all gone!