How you chop 500g chocolate bars: you hold them up high and smash them down on the floor. Carefully, straight down, so the seam doesn’t rip in the paper wrapper (although that can be very entertaining to children for the pinata effect). Concrete-slab floors a la California ranch houses a plus.

Maybe repeat. Open bag. Pour.

My friend Nanci’s youngest is having a wedding reception soon–my stars, I remember when he was a newborn–and Nanci approached me, very tentatively, wondering if I might make a chocolate torte for it.

I always make two. I’d love to. I promised her a pair, if she wouldn’t mind freezing them till the day so I could get them done and out of the way.

She surprised me yesterday by saying she was going to Milk Pail, which is a half-outdoor market, to buy the manufacturing cream so I wouldn’t have to go out in the sun, and was there anything else I needed? Butter? Chocolate?

I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to have someone who doesn’t live with lupus remember what it’s like to have it.  No sun exposure! I told her I had plenty of chocolate and butter; she brought me some butter too anyway, because that was an ingredient that was easy to get just the right one of. I told her there was more than enough cream there for four tortes, and if she wanted, I would try to pull that off in my time constraints.

Her eyes voted immediately yes! If it’s not too much…

And so I started. I made the first pair of cakes yesterday, hurrying to get it done before Richard called for help.

They were a tad overdone; these new darker pans are still a learning curve. Well crumb. I put them aside.

Today I turned the oven down by 25 and the timer by 7, tried again and got it perfect. But when I went to glaze them…

…I’d accidentally picked up the Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bittersweet with almonds rather than plain. Nuts! So I went off in hopes they’d gotten the plain in stock by now–had they had them earlier, the color contrast on the wrappers would have tipped me off: they’re close but not the same.

The parking lot was a zoo and the employees there looked like they were putting a good face on things, but with the holiday (an aside: Happy Veteran’s Day. A solemn time and a necessary remembrance) it almost looked more like the Thanksgiving rush in there. Where were all these people coming from!

I walked in and a clerk I’ve often seen immediately asked me with concern how I was; she hadn’t seen me in awhile. Clearly that had worried her. I was surprised, and touched; I assured her I was fine and thanked her.

I explained to her and the manager the situation: baking for a wedding, I’d bought two almond ones and discovered it when I’d opened the first, too late for that one but I traded them the second, adding in a bunch more bars just to make sure I had plenty of the right ones on hand for next time too. Oh! Wait! I’m out of eggs–and I left the checkout. The woman I’d first talked to had by now taken over a line to let someone else go on break, and I waited the second time in hers.

I’ve still not recovered from our late nights of office packing. I was tired. She rang me up, handed me the bag–and I turned and promptly lost my balance. The eggs went smashing out the top (better them than me.) Chocolate down!

She was indignant: “Those bags are supposed to be good up to 20 pounds!”

It wasn’t the bag, I assured her, it was me, I lost my balance, here, that’s my fault, let me pay for them, as she called someone to get me another box.

No no that’s okay.

Let me clean it up? Please? This is my fault.

No, no, and by now I had several employees assuring me, that’s okay.

And so I went home to my already-chopped (see above) bag of almond bittersweet and those two slightly overbaked cakes, definitely good enough to eat but not quite fancy enough for a wedding.

Which is how my local Trader Joe’s employees got that already-smashed bar returned after all (or half of it, anyway.) I forgot to take into account that the volume of almonds displaced that much chocolate, so the texture of the ganache came out a tad thinner than my normal. Like they would know to compare?

The manager laughed in delight at my semi-sweetly ugly cake with the random almonds. For you all. Trading you for those eggs. Oh yes. Twist their arms.

And as I left, ducking out into the rain, every employee who’d seen it was just bursting with anticipation, fatigue disappeared.

(p.s. Hey Nanci. The first two for you are finished now, the next two are cooling and will be ready to glaze in an hour.)

My brother-in-law was in town on business being crazy busy, and with the weekend coming we knew at some random point we’d get our time… and so this morning he called to say he was on his way.

After a visit here awhile, we all headed up to their aunt’s house in the mountains, where we were joined by their cousin and his family coming up from Santa Cruz.

We caught up, hour after hour: one had only recently moved home to the States after four years doing the ex-pat life–in a part of the world where we’re glad to have him and his family back safe now. One who had a wife and small children who had somehow, all on their own, become four and seven years old already, hard to fathom. The aunt who quilts, her nephew whose wife does.

The four year old barked and was the doggy under the table during dessert. I meowed. He grinned.  I aarfed back. He loved it. I (after most of the others had retired to the living room and were far enough away) did my fair imitation of a horse whinny, to his exceeding delight–while Aunt Mary Lynn, startled, looked up from way over thataway, going, Who–was that you…?!

(I can just HEAR my little sister reading this and going, You didn’t. You still do that?)

We created an early mini Thanksgiving celebration, salmon, salad, and my chocolate torte sub’ing in for the turkey and cranberries and pie.

And a good time was had by all.

The walkway up to the front steps was being rebuilt, so at the end, we had to leave going a less familiar way down the steps in the semi-dark of the garage that, like the house, had been built into the hillside.

Where the stair turns, I missed one and tumbled towards Richard’s legs.

My brother-in-law allowed as how I had given him a scare. My aunt-in-law firmly declared I was to hold onto her arm from here on out. I tried to assure them it was no big deal (while inwardly exulting, Look! No breaks! Cool!)

My BIL would brush off any hints of our worrying while he was overseas. I will brush off any worrying over me. We’re fine.

Family solidarity, all around. Good stuff.

They don’t stay little…

My cousins John and Dan and Dan’s wife Leslie and their boys came from out of town to stop by for a few hours on their way further south. It is amazing how fast other people’s kids grow up, and it was wonderful to see them. “Richard (the younger) has a baby?!”

Leslie’s mom is an avid knitter?  Who knew? I told her my friend Gunilla Leavitt just bought  The Golden Fleece in Santa Cruz and I bet her mom knows her. I sent them off with a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” for her mom; family gets extra privileges and all that.

We listened to Conference, good put-up-your-feet-and-knit time. Almost finished that Sea Silk.  Smiled remembering that as a teenager I used to babysit the kids of one of the speakers on the occasional Friday evening back in Maryland; they were good kids. He’s a good and kind and loving man.

The wildlife: this morning when the other squirrels left, my little injured one came out of wherever she’d been, I saw her, she caught the nut deftly in her mouth and immediately did her funny sideways lope to her new hiding place, tucked that conspicuous tail remnant away and disappeared so completely that it surprised me all over again. The others came back; the others left; only then did she appear again, getting seconds and ducking  immediately away under the patio again and safely out of sight. She’s got it all figured out.

Costco, later: I quite enjoyed getting people to smile back.

Meantime: a sample table. People waiting their turn, when, this time it was an old Russian woman who saw that the little paper cups of food in the meat department were going to be all gone by the time it was her turn and she simply shoved her way through the crowd to get to the front.

Given what happened two weeks ago, when she shoved him–“Wait,” I asked Richard afterward, I having stepped away to go get the milk and having completely missed the scene, “some little old lady shoved YOU? You’re a pretty formidable target!”–she did, he said, she shoved him out of her way. By taking him by surprise from behind, I’m sure.

He immediately firmly told her (and the man is not soft spoken) that she was being rude, that all these other people were waiting their turn and she could go back to the back of the line like she was supposed to and wait her turn too.

She was astonished. Nobody had ever told her no like that before, apparently. She responded in a thick Russian accent but clearly she’d understood what he’d said.

“So did she go to the back of the line?” I asked.

She did not, but she did at least wait till he’d gotten his and turned aside.

It’s a start.

Maybe a dozen years ago, a couple of older neighbors were reminiscing over days past when there were a ton of kids in the neighborhood and how much everybody knew everybody back in the day. They missed that.

So let’s do something about it! And so the more gregarious of the two took on the task to walk house to house, getting names, phone numbers, email contacts. They launched our first neighborhood block party. A nearby cul-de-sac was closed off and the owners cleared their cars out of the way, a bounce house and a cotton candy machine were rented for the little ones, barbecue grills were rolled forward from backyards and volunteers manning them presented themselves as a happy captive audience for anyone who wanted to come chat over the chicken vs over there at the rent-a-tables.

And just about every year since then, Labor Day has meant block party day, officially 4-7 but that always stretches till dark, not to be missed.

Richard took my dessert over there, a pluot crisp that I found out later had had the neighbors playing guess-that-fruit. “That was GOOD!”

I waited till a sun-safer 6, then strolled over there too.

My sweetie talked with one fellow about the ham radio/disaster services volunteer work they both do. Meantime, I got cornered by an elderly man whom I am inwardly delighted each year to see he’s still with us: he moved in here when these houses were built in the mid-1950’s.

Only–last year the organizers had both had family conflicts with the date, it had been moved around and finally the party had landed on a day I couldn’t make it. I could have shown up for just the very last few minutes, but I let it go.

And he knew I had not come and he remembered my health was rocky. I have no memory of ever discussing it with him; maybe a chance comment from someone else when we didn’t show?  Whatever–it had meant something to him and he had carried that forward for the whole year.

I was amazed he noticed. Here I was, having to read his name tag yet again despite knowing who he was, and I was quite sorry to have caused him concern.

“It’s good to see you here,” I told him.

He knew exactly what I meant, nodding and looking me steadily in the eye, returning the sentiment.

I had not expected to come away feeling so important. I do believe he did too.

More neighbors. More chatting. Come to find out the sister of one of the burger flippers–call them grilly men, Ahnuld–had also volunteered on a peregrine nest cam. Cool! And he was a bird lover too. Finding out about my feeders, he exclaimed, “So that’s where all my finches and chickadees have gone! I love those chickadees!”

Sorryyyy… Honest, I’ll share…  He got in some good teases about that.

Another neighbor started telling me about her own birdfeeder, but–those squirrels! She admitted with a laugh and a very sheepish look that she kept a supersoaker by the back door to teach them what’s what. She felt much better when I laughed, “You too?!” We swapped a few squirrel-antics stories.

Barbara pulled me over to the bounce house so she could show off her grandsons hopping and bopping to the crocodile rock.

Because one of the neighbors was in an a cappela band, and they performed for us for the fun of it.

And one of the people in that band, not a neighbor, was surprised to see my Richard there, and he to see her: Valerie! Rich! They used to work together when we first moved to California. We had gone to hear her perform at her you’re-great-but-don’t-quit-your-day-job, oh, must be at least 15 years ago now.

Reunion time. He pulled up a chair and sat right at the front and clapped the loudest of all.

Saturday night, at about dusk when the UV wouldn’t be an issue, my husband and I wandered around downtown.

Meandered into the crowded Apple store. Inwardly chuckled at the (possibly Indian?) fellow who suddenly found himself at belly button level with my sweetie and jerked his head way up to see just how far to the ceiling this guy goes! Didn’t hear a friend trying to shout hi across to us as we were leaving, and he couldn’t run fast through all those people; he had to wait till today to tell us.

Applauded the apps and the Apple and walked away, for now, our wallets intact. I told our friend that and he laughed and said his, not so much.

Bought gelato from the cheerful (I have no idea what he was saying, but he was having a great time of it) older guy with “Croatia” embroidered on his polo shirt, with a fairly garish painted mural (was that supposed to be Venice?) on the wall behind him, a street musician at the front of his little shop asking for song suggestions from his foot-tapping audience.

Went into the still-breathing Borders bookstore. Everything must go. Including the Borders gift card my husband had long forgotten he had in that wallet he didn’t take out at Apple, well, will you look at that! Hey! Seeing the size and the weight of the bag he came out of there with, we decided it was a good thing we’d gone in there last.

But it wasn’t.  I nearly walked on by but Richard turned at the sound, beckoning/inviting me too, and it was like a baby boomer’s Narnia moment: we found ourselves coming down a beautiful new-ish walkway opening suddenly out to a courtyard where a band was totally rocking the most joyful rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing.”

And I came home thinking…

And then today. I’ve met her, but whether I’ve ever heard her name I’m not sure; I sure don’t see her often. I think she’s older than my parents. But I saw her today, and she motioned to me and pulled me aside and reached out her aged hand to hold mine: she just wanted to tell me she love love loved my hair! She said it again. She just loved it. She wanted me to know that.  I was very surprised. (I did not by any means have great hair before that moment, but I’m easily persuaded.)

And I came home knowing…

All those years of wishing to be able to get back to my old pre-lupus life and the way things were? Really? I’m there.

You know those crazy last two days before a kid leaves for university when you have to run every last errand, she’s got to wash her laundry, we need to pick up the drycleaning, and your friend Catherine recommended the Vanilla Queen (a gallon of bourbon vanilla, fair trade! Bring on the hot cocoa!) but that was just too far but that Indian grocery in Sunnyvale, let’s try that, and it had every spice you ever heard of (Michelle loves to cook Indian style: so many flavors, so dairy free), and then a dash to Trader Joe’s and Safeway too and Dad my hard drive failed! and pack pack pack and hey, one last chance to see one of her best friends?

And yes. That would indeed be when the plumbing sputters and today finally fails again. Just like last time. Right on cue.

So. (Picking up the baby alpaca.) Tell me why Indian names of things always seem to need an h after the d and an i after the a. And ghee, what was that bright (and I mean bright!) green yam-shaped plant part that had more spikes than an ’80’s punkrocker’s head?

“Are you all together?”

“Yes.”

Michelle noted that she was buying spices and I was buying shelf-stable ready-t0-heats.

They had pretty pictures on the boxes. I figured that potential earthquake supplies might as well be tasty, but what I said out loud was, “The difference between your choices and mine is that you know what yours are.”

The clerk cracked up.

A thank you to all who checked in as to how things are where you are; it’s good to hear you all did okay. Hurricanes are random acts of velocity.

Here, the baking binge continued, and as I chopped and sliced and got out the cheater store-bought no-dairy crust from the back of the freezer (uh oh, I’ve disillusioned Scott‘s whole family now) I thought of how my mother always thought of dessert as one last attempt to get good nutrition into her kids.

So enough with the chocolate for a moment. It’s all about the fruit. We were on our second helpings of rhubarb  strawberry pie when suddenly I looked up at my husband and said, “Oh. I was going to photograph this for the blog.”

The general consensus here is that I could always, definitely go make another one.

———

This took less than five minutes to get into the oven.

Recipe: Have a bottom crust ready.

Slice rhubarb (I had three+ cups’ worth) and strawberries to bring it to four cups. Mix 1/3 c flour with 1 1/3 c sugar and 1/2 tsp cinnamon; pour in the fruit, add to crust. (And yes, Scott, I forgot to prick it again. Must have been the strawberries. Some things never change.)

Halfway through you might want to open the oven quickly and dunk the top fruit down so that any flour mixture sitting exposed goes in the goo.

I baked it at 425 for 40 minutes, and then because it was a cheap shiny store-bought throwaway tin had to add another five at 350. Next time I might turn it down after the first ten min like another of my cookbooks says so the outer edges won’t burn; personally, I chuckled at being able to toss some of the empty-calories part of the pie, just enough to free it from guilt. And the rest of the crust had the most perfect crunch.

Baked four chocolate tortes and one lemon chiffon cake today. Got rescued by friends when I ran out of Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bars for the ganache. (Note to self: make sure you’re not buying the “with almonds” ones next time–duh), sent the friends home with tortes and thanks and went back to the oven. Made the lemon chiffon to have something dairy-free/Michelle-friendly as the third dishwasher load ran. Handwashed Don’s and Cliff’s pans again.

As if, knitting being too slow, I could somehow crank out enough chocolate goodness to comfort and feed all the people in the path of the storm back East. Y’all take care of yourselves out there for me.

The doorbell rang. Huh, too early for the mailman, I ran to open it to see–Cliff! Don’s son, with Don sitting on the passenger side of his car at the curb in front of the house waving a happy hello. Cliff, meantime, was pulling a really nice nonstick springform pan out of a bag, grinning as I about died with laughter, my jaw on the ground at the same time with a speechless, you didn’t…! And then he pulled out another.

I gave him a hug and a heartfelt thank you, then ran to Don and he got his hug too and I told him, “You’re wonderful, you’re terrible!,” laughing.

“Well, I have to have my cake!” he laughed back.

Much nicer pans than my old ones, and let’s see, we’re out of butter, fix that, okay, and I put them right to use and emailed Don that I hoped I wasn’t jinxing it again, but…

Right. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

But it worked, because of course new pans deserve that and so do Don and Cliff. Who now have two chocolate tortes by way of a thank you; the pans almost handwashed themselves, they were that easy, not that you have to but I’m going to. I want them to stay as perfect as the gift they are.

An aside to them: I didn’t put plastic wrap over the tortes because they were too new and the glaze hadn’t finished setting in the fridge yet (but it was getting late); the plastic can pull and mar the surface when you take it off if it’s put on too soon, before it completely sets.

Like anyone would mind. Thank you! Enjoy!

I’m sure going to!

I saw the dermatologist again: two new spots on my head. They looked to her like an autoimmune reaction to the surgery, but she made sure I did indeed have an appointment for four months post-op on the skin cancer. I do. Meantime, though, she was relieved and I was too.

She mentioned that a friend of hers had knit baby blankets for her two children when they were born and they loved them; she marveled that her five-year-old was still so latched onto his.

I loved hearing that some other knitter’s work was so prized by that good woman’s children.  What better could one ask for?

And so I came home wanting to celebrate all around. Hey. I’d found some manufacturing cream actually in stock yesterday and bought it; I owed Don a chocolate torte, I could drop one off at his house on my way to Knit Night if I hurried.

Um.

The original incarnation of my recipe is dated June 1991. My pair of 8″ springform pans has been well used for a long time.

And they’re showing it. The latch on one is a little loose, the other, more than a little and it’s leaked a bit a few times; I try to make sure the foil lining on the bottom comes up and covers that join.

Nuts, I forgot to do that this time, I thought a little later as I started to smell smoke; I really should spring for those new pans. Oh well, open the oven a crack for a moment to keep the cakes from tasting smokey and hope it burns off fast.

Okay, this is where I’m glad I had my hair pulled back.

Waiiiit… Try that again…

Slam it shut.

NOW what do I do?!! The one torte, if I had an oven free that I could… Are the neighbors home? Right, ‘scuse me, could I borrow a cup of 350 degrees for 25 minutes?

Take a deep breath. (No don’t.) Turn the oven off.  Be glad the smoke alarm system has a timer so you can turn it off for 25 minutes. Hope the mailman going by doesn’t call 911. Take the good cake out. Move the racks. Acknowledge to myself that yes, I really did do that: I put a springform pan in the oven without closing the latch.

And yet half that torte was still somehow in the pan. I poured the unset part of the batter into bowls and nuked its sorry remains. The other torte had to sit on the counter and cool its heels while I scraped and scraped the oven out with a metal spatula (no don’t reach for the nylon one!) and then reheated it, opening it again and again to let more smoke out, waited some more, okay, try again.

I sent up a silent ‘Thank you Larrick Hill’, our architect on the remodel 16 years ago, for the screened open-able skylight he put in this kitchen that even when it’s opened still keeps most of the direct sun away from me. Up, smoke, up. No, mailman…

It was a total guess how long to bake the behaved one.  Note that neither of us who can eat dairy have ventured to cut into it yet, much less waste a ganache glaze on it.

But that happy email to Don in between baking steps around the kitchen about dropping off a torte on my way to Knit Night? That was a half-baked idea. Maybe next round?

Yesterday I was not feeling well, dragging, just not up to a run to the store and neither were the others.

Last night I looked in my kitchen and wondered how… And every one of those avocados so far that I’d cut open was bad, which is highly unusual here. BLTs totally wouldn’t do, and and and. What to plan.

Today (feeling a lot better) I couldn’t wait to tell my husband thank you when he got home.

My friend Holly arrived on my doorstep in the early afternoon and we chatted and knitted and caught up and were so glad for some time together–very rare given that a) she lives in Germany and b) she just did a deployment to Afghanistan.

But she’s safely out of there now, she and her husband were in the area for a few days, and she carved out some time for me–and earlier for Ruth, too. She gifted me with German Zauberball long-repeat sock yarn, German orange milk chocolate, a travel kit, all very good stuff. But best of all, her time. (Thank you, Holly!)

A few days ago, my Richard and I were at Costco and he went looking for and found that they still had an artisanal cheese I’d had some of a few weeks earlier: exquisitely good stuff.

But I didn’t need to splurge on it, I told him. And it would be mostly me eating it, Michelle can’t and he shouldn’t and really, that’s just too much for one person.

Rather over my objections he put some in our cart anyway and firmly insisted that since I liked it so much, I should have it for protein in my lunches. It wasn’t for him; it was for me.

Twist my delighted arm. We did have some crackers it went well with…

Fast forward to  me telling Holly, who is vegetarian, that if she’d like, I had peaches and I had a goat cheese with blueberries and cinnamon to serve up with crackers–adding quickly that yes, that sounds weird but it’s really good. (Side note to Holly: I just looked it up and turns out it’s not quite so locally made after all, it’s from Canada. Not so much on the Napa Valley thing.  Oops.)

She had the same reaction to it we had had. Wow! I offered to take her to Costco and buy her some; she said customs would be the problem, getting it back to Germany, but oh, my.

I have this wonderful husband who likes to make me happy. It was a little thing…but it turned out to be so much bigger a thing and better than he imagined at the time he went looking for that cheese for me. He rescued my day, in sickness and then in health. I wanted to spoil my friend like he’d wanted to spoil me, and it was just the thing.

I was going to post a picture of the lilies, type, Just one more day, and leave the blog at that for the night and distract myself with Epiphany yarn. Row 72.

Michelle popped her head around the corner: “You were going to make almond cake, right?”

“Was I?” (Total head tilt.)

She’d just assumed, since I’d bought almond milk at Trader Joe’s on that trip yesterday and said it was for making cake with, well, so, tonight, right?

After we both got a good laugh out of that miscommunication–I’d simply wanted it on hand for the possibility–we both admitted that lemon cake actually sounded more fun, and since we already had five lemons picked we wouldn’t even have to brave the thorns in the dark out there.

1952 Betty Crocker’s Hot Milk Sponge Cake, substitute fresh picked lemon juice for half the milk–all of it is even better but again, it was a thorny issue–double the butter  (using Earth Balance to substitute) and soy or almond milk for the rest of the milk if needed (the dairy allergy thing) and there you go.

I got interrupted by the timer during the previous paragraph, and oh, does that kitchen smell heavenly. Michelle and Richard are looking forward to their early-morning breakfast before the dash for the train, everybody’s cheered up, and I’ve totally lost any leftover moping about the skin cancer surgery and any hair loss tomorrow.

Just because you can definitely means you should.

I bet you Sue knows what I’m going to write about tonight.

1. But before I get there, I knitted a little Camelspin on the side today in a sudden hurry to get that done yesterday.

2. Nope, no phone call today from the doctor, or at least not while I was home, and no messages were left while I was out foraging for chocolate.

3. My daughter had a co-worker who, last Friday, was having a horrible, rotten, no-good-I-think-I’ll-move-to-Australia kind of day. (That’s the refrain on most of the pages of a certain children’s book–just to make that clear since one person who’s going to be reading this has a loved one who *did* move to Australia and who clearly has turned out very nicely for it.)

4. So I offered to bake a chocolate torte for them. (Here’s the recipe.)

5. Tomorrow is that person’s birthday, it turns out.

6. Well then!

and, 7, since I always make two of them, and since today’s our anniversary, and since Michelle can’t eat dairy, I substituted hazelnut oil for the butter, coming about two tbl short out of two cups needed for two cakes–close enough. We’ll call it the low fat version. I can’t begin to tell you how heavenly it smells.

8. Richard and I are home now from going out to dinner so we might go cut into that second cake if I stop typing a moment.

9. We went to the restaurant where Sue works, hoping to see her; for those of you who’ve read “Wrapped in Comfort,” (still available at Purlescence) it’s the first story, and yes, that Sue. Nope, they said, wrong night, not here, sorry.

10. On our way out I explained to our waitress why I’d so hoped to see her: how, when we moved here we came here a lot while on a per diem the first month, and how 20 years later she still remembered what my then-small kids had liked to eat. She loved my kids and we all adored her.

11. At that point, a different waitress exclaimed, “She’s here now!” Sue and her husband had decided to beat the heat and go out for dinner too, coming to this really great place they happened to know really well.

12. Hugs, love, intro to her husband, and then Sue told him that our kids were the best ever. “Some kids in restaurants, you know, but yours were always perfectly behaved.”

13. They were just shy of 1, 3, and 5 at the time; I don’t remember them being perfectly behaved. But I do remember them as being perfectly loved around her. Every parent of a small child needs some other adult who feels their kids are adorable: it helps the children and it helps the parents, too, to all rise to the occasion.

Sue was there. Our occasion got even happier. She laughed to her husband about my four year old who liked lobster. (It was a moving-expense per diem, the corporation didn’t care in the least what she ordered as long as it was below $25. Come to think of it, four-year-olds ordering lobster several times a week because they miss New Hampshire would be memorable.)

14. Happy anniversary, Richard! With no skunks this time.

(If that one of the three budding amaryllises turns out to be white, I’ll know it was the one Sue dropped off at Purlescence for me back when I was sick. Thank you, Sue!)

Love you, Richard!

A friend who belongs to a CSA sent out word that her farmer had excess strawberries to sell and that if she could find takers for enough big cases, he would deliver them to her house.

Twenty dollars was a lot of just-picked ripe red sweet-smelling goodness.

Strawberry picking getting up very early on a June morning, before the 100/humidity+heat hits the top of the misery index in Maryland, was an essential part of my childhood–along with hours afterwards spent around the hot kitchen table, we six kids anchored in place by Dad working too at the head of it, hulling, Mom a few steps away at the stove. If Dad couldn’t get out of it either after all those hours bent over looking for fruit over and under those green leaves and was cheerfully working away at his mound of berries, then there was no hope of a kid weaseling out. None. Trust me.

So often, we would try to pun-up each other, starting off with a lame “I can’t believe I ate the hull thing”–but if you could make Dad roar with laughter it was definitely triple word score time.

Counting and anticipating: jar, jar, blinks and it’s all gone. (I know. Sorry. Reminding you of that movie is like singing “Feelings” in earshot. Woe woe woe your boat done with these–when we’re jamming, it gets bad.)

My friend Robin, a fellow knitter, flew in from my hometown and I got to spend part of today with her. We tried to figure out how long it had been; must have been three years now, way too long. We were catching up, we had no particular agenda–till she said she’d realized she’d packed no chocolate.

Hey!

I had her sample some of mine: Valrhona 71%, some Endangered Species dark with hazelnut toffee, and then we were off to the local Whole Foods, which has more choices than anywhere.

She passed on the Vosges chocolate/bacon bar. So far.

She went to her brother’s after that (I don’t get to keep her all the time) and I to KnitNight.

Where I got six carefully-knitted rows of lace done at Purlescence. Qiviut is like the finest cup of hot chocolate: you savor it slowly, a sipped stitch at a time.