I finished it!  And I can’t really show it off yet, which runs totally counter to the instincts of a blogger, but never mind.  Don’t miss the caption–it’s true!

Continuing the food theme, I saw these and had to try them once. The idea of green beans being potato-chipified was well into the nonpsychodegradeable category.  Um.  Hubby, day one: “Gaack!”  Hubby, day two: “There’s some left?  Sure, I’ll have some more.”

Make sure there’s plenty of water nearby to help you swallow–trust me.

Meantime.  I told this story last month on my blog, but a lot of people at Purlescence’s knit night on Thursday didn’t know anything about it.  Mary was there for the first time in awhile, so I decided to tell on her generosity a bit and say what she’d done.  And I did want to know if her shawl fit okay.  I told her, if she wanted more length, she had the rest of the dye lot: after the shop had gotten their shipment in from Handmaiden, she had shown up that Monday morning to buy a new skein to replace the one she’d given me. I, not knowing that, had shown up an hour or two after her to buy two skeins to knit her a bigger shawl to replace, you got it, the skein she’d given me.  They’d sold out of the periwinkle fast.  Heh.

She loved it, told me it had been a complete surprise, and that it did fit.  Good! That helps confirm my idea that for a larger size, starting at a wider neckline (row 2 in most of my patterns) and adding length works best.

But the group laughed when I admitted I had two more skeins of Casbah somewhere and I couldn’t find them for the life of me. I knew I had them. I knew where I would have put them.

“You’ll just have to buy more!”

“Twist my arm!”

Next shipment… Maybe I should knit a shawl in the Blackberry colorway, long as we’re talking food here.

(Edited Friday to add this picture of an Ostrich Plumes shawl I did in gray laceweight a year or two after theirs.  It too will fit through a wedding ring, hence the name.)

Today I got to see a doctor I seldom see and told him that there were only two people mentioned in my book whom I hadn’t given a copy to yet.  And that I needed to fix that.  I hadn’t referred to him and his wife by name in there, I said; last page, second paragraph.  I was a brand new laceknitter way back when and I’d made them a wedding ring shawl on size 3 needles in white laceweight Ostrich Plumes.

Dr. M was the ENT who, eighteen years ago when my lupus was diagnosed, finally put together what had eluded everybody else for all those years: that my progressive hearing loss was due to an allergy to aspirin.  I’d apparently triggered it with an overdose when I’d climbed into the medicine cabinet as a toddler and had eaten not quite enough baby aspirins to have to get my stomach pumped.  It was a new bottle and Mom counted pills and fed me baking soda instead on doctor’s orders to neutralize the acid.

With the lupus, I had a new diagnosis and meds to have to take, but I went completely deaf on the prescription-strength Aleve.  I have to tell you–you can close your eyes and try to see what it’s like to be blind, but you cannot close your ears.  It was like nothing I could have expected: when someone talked to me, I felt waves of pain in my ears.  But no sound.  Nada.  Except for the roaring white noise in my ears that didn’t respond to anything but itself.

Apparently Aleve (called Naprosyn then) was different enough from aspirin that I lucked out, but whatever, my hearing came back to what it had been when the dose wore off, and under Dr. M’s directions, I never took NSAIDs again.

And what he told me meant my kids wouldn’t go deaf in their teens too.  And they did not.

And what he told me meant I didn’t have to go any more deaf.  And I did not.

The man was right.

There is more to the story, related to when my Crohn’s was diagnosed ten years later, but this will do for here.  Suffice it to say, I owed him, bigtime; that wedding ring shawl felt absolutely imperative to do.  And it became one of those projects that I will forever rejoice that I knitted it: both for my own sake, and for the great joy of their reaction to it.

I signed and gave him a book today. And he signed my copy for me.

Beautiful pictures of a beautiful soul here.  I waited for permission to link.

A few minutes ago, my daughter, rushing to get ready, asked me to find and print out directions to the wedding she’s going to of a college friend of hers; it was being held 60 miles away through the worst of Bay Area traffic.  I glanced at the wedding invitation, and…

…”MICHELLE!!!!”

It said the parents of the groom were holding a second reception later at their home in Indiana.

The father of the groom was our Mormon bishop when we lived in West Lafayette 25+ years ago while my husband was in a PhD program at Purdue.  I taught a Sunday School class of ten-year-olds and they adored me and I them enough that one even sent me a wedding announcement a few years ago, but I’d gradually lost touch with them all.

And now I have the address of the parents of one of them to go and say hi, both to their daughter and to them.

Very, very cool.

I would not have joked about PCC lines yesterday had I known what was going to happen last night. An intense thank you to everybody who signed up or tried to sign up for the bone marrow donor registry.

I went to go blog this morning, but the words I’d been going to say just kind of trailed away from my fingers and left me; at the time, I didn’t know why. I thought, okay; it can wait till the right time.  Many a knitting project has shown me that.

But, though I know we will all see each other again in a place where there are no more tears, mine are flowing freely right now.

(Edited to add: http://www.bobgreenberger.com/ for those so inclined.  Thanks.)

Teri and I used to chat occasionally via the Knitlist, and I found out her dad was the partner (retired now) of our family’s ENT doctor.  Cool!  So she grew up here.  I snapped this photo of our backyard lemon tree to share a bit of California with her.  She lives in Hawaii these days, and one time, while visiting her folks, she showed up at our house with a box of chocolate-covered Hawaiian macadamias: one of those too-rare times where you get to actually meet a person you’ve known online.  She’s as warm and wonderful in person as she is across the electrons.

I wrote a few days ago about knitting for the staff at Stanford Hospital, and here’s a post from two years ago that is important to me as well.  You’ve got to go see what Teri just did!  Wow!

(Edited to add: Teri got the ball rolling re the plans for yarn and needles in the waiting areas; I hope they follow through.

I have another friend who was hospitalized with a serious illness and baby twins at home she wanted to be taking care of, and she was telling me afterwards about a nursing assistant at Stanford Hospital who was supremely understanding and kind and who took the time to be there for her and her husband: to listen and to make them laugh.  He was such a gifted healer at a time they needed it.  I asked her the guy’s name, sure I already knew…  Was it Noel C.?  Yes!)

Last fall, I was surprised at Stitches East by my friends Deb and her daughter Kate presenting me with this pair of lace socks that they had knit together, one doing the feet, the other the tops, so that the differing gauges wouldn’t matter.  They’re glorious socks in my favorite shade of maroon, and the three of us spent I don’t know how long together, laughing till we ached.  After years of exchanging emails with Deb, and then with Kate, it was such a treat to come together like that and to really hit it off like we’d been so sure we would. We did. And how.

Shortly thereafter they got hit with the first of the out-of-the-blue news.  The followup now is that Deb’s son and Kate’s brother Robbie is in need of a bone marrow donor for his leukemia, and he needs it like, now, and there is no good match in the registry yet.  Here is Robbie’s dad’s blog, a mix of work and their current situation.

I checked, and I’m not eligible to even try to sign up.  Given that I’m waiting for the trials at Stanford to progress so I can sign up of lupus patients’ receiving blood stem cell transplants from their adult siblings, this is hardly a surprise.

Here is a list of FAQs on the bone marrow donations.  It can be a lot more gentle a process than it used to be: it is often done now like a simple blood donation.  Speaking of which, and speaking as a parent with a child also in need at times of platelet transfusions–Robbie needs them far more often, though–the supply in the blood banks is real low right now; if you donate platelets, the process takes longer, but you can do it more often than whole blood because they return the non-platelet parts back to you.

Picture yourself, ten years from now, twenty years from now, knowing that you’d saved a life.  Maybe even getting to see a little of what that person did with that life to thank you for the one gift higher than any other that one human being can give to another.

How many hours of your days can you spend that well?

Laura, you got it.  The Julia.  It’s in the book all ready to go for you, and you can do your choice of yarn types/sizes in two gauges/sizes.  The whole thing is six stitches long, repeated forever. (I know–you said counting to four was your limit.  Heh. I don’t think you have to count with this one, though, so it’s all good.)  Purl straight across the back every time.  If you want to, when the boys are in bed, you can do the zig zaggy optional bottom edge.  Or not.  Me, I finally bought a Weight Watchers scale so I could measure grams so that I could figure out how much yarn I was using per row and thus when to start into the bottom edging and have enough if I knew I was running short.  (Note the lack of bottom edging on this one.  I like the seashell effect of leaving it plain, too.)

The larger-stitch-count Julia, by the way, is the pattern I used for the Knitpicks merino yarn you dyed and totally surprised me with at TKGA a year ago.  It’s a little thicker than most fingering weights I use, and this is how it looks knitted up on my size 9 (5.5mm) needles.  Funny that you should ask for plain and simple, and, hey, looky what I knitted last fall!

Somehow today we had six different sets of friends from way back when show up at church, people who’d moved away that we hadn’t expected to get to see again–and they all picked today to be back. Synchronicity is great fun.

The trio of little boys looked at me in semi-disbelief when I told them I’d known their daddy when he was a teenager. Their daddy? A teenager? Nonpsychodegradeable. Lady, are you SURE?

One old friend, after we threw our arms around each other, asked after the old neighborhood and specifically about her favorite old neighbor across the street. I told her I’d run into Jane at Stitches, that she was a knitter now and that we’d done a doubletake at running into each other at a knitting convention of all places. Jane had had no idea that I knit, much less anything about my writing a knitting book. She simply knew me from my taking walks around the neighborhood and our having children the same ages.

And then Jane’s old neighbor asked, in seriousness, about my health. I took a deep breath, and then: I basically told her how bad it had been. Not many details, just enough to be honest. Lupus with autonomic neuropathy is a bear–but the chemo has it mostly in remission, along with the Crohn’s.

I could only open up because it’s okay now, I really am doing so well now, and have been for some time; she was very gratified to hear that.

And then there was K there, visiting too. K… Several years ago, I surprised her with a knitted lace scarf, a nice one–and her reaction had stunned me. She’d held it, burst into tears, and rushed away from me and disappeared, while I was standing there going, What on earth…what just happened here? I don’t get this at all.

From what I was able to surmise, she took it as something bequeathed, while I wanted to quote Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!”

Today, she was totally cheerful and very glad to see me and no more was said. She lives in a cold climate now: and I happen to know she has a nice wide, warm scarf for it. I will go look her up in ten years and ask her if it needs any moth holes repaired. I am not admitting to any inner snarkiness at that thought.

Vera, who has children around my age, didn’t recognize me at all as I went up to her, exclaiming in delight. I reminded her of the time there’d been a ward Christmas party just before she and her husband had moved away, and someone had ratted me out and everybody had sung Happy Birthday. Vera had poked an elbow in my side, demanding, “And how old are you now? Thirty-nine and holding?!”

I’d looked at her with a wry smile and answered, “Yeah: for about six hours now.”

We shared a good laugh all over again at the memory. That had been ten years ago, and she allowed as how she had a few gray hairs now herself. Hey. Happens to the best of us, if we’re lucky. C’est la Vera-t’e.

Re the photo: the newest knitting, after two Casbah shawls in dark Periwinkle, needed to be not-blue. Knit long and prosper.

(And if you’re counting, no, that’s not all six sets of old friends, but this post is long enough.)

I wrote yesterday that I was going to go fix those dropped stitches, but I kept putting it off.  I worked out two different ways of tackling the problem but kept doing neither. Finally, knowing I wanted it to be a one-day problem only, I sat down and made myself go for Door #2, Bob.

I put a point protector on one end of my long circular: there was absolutely no reason to risk having stitches fall off that end while repairing at this one.  There was an unexpected sense of relief at that that made the whole job immediately feel much more do-able.

Then I took a second circular needle and slipped the stitches onto it, moving them over one-by-one across the row till I got to the problem area.  Since the stitches remaining on the original needle were not so scrunched up now, and since I wasn’t risking losing any more with that point protector in place, I spread the work open so I could get a good look at the pattern repeat next over and rework the dropped area to match it.  The whole thing took me maybe five minutes; I was surprised.  Piece of cake.

Then I slipped the stitches back onto the original needle on that side, took the spare–it didn’t matter what size it was, as long as it wasn’t bigger than the original needle, I was only using it for holding, not knitting–and went to the other side of the row and repeated the process.  But over there, I had a live stitch that did not end at a yarnover, so it turns out I’d totally lucked out; it could have run clear to the beginning, and it was a fairly slippery yarn. I’d put a snip of yarn to mark and hold it, hadn’t tied it, and it had fallen out and the stitch was running free.

Darwin missed that shawl.

And now it is repaired, re-cast-off, blocking, and done, just needing that final end woven in.  When it is dry I will run it in going halfway across the bottom where it will be a length of yarn in storage for any future repairs, right there where it’ll be easy to find.

Hey, Mary–you want to go to Purlescence today? I hear you beat me that Monday to the new Casbah shipment by a few hours, and I happen to know you like this color.

I ran a quick errand yesterday and then turned my car over to my daughter–and after she’d left, I realized I’d left my knitting bag in there.  I’d been going to block that project last night, she didn’t get home till late… ! But it’s just as well.  If the recipient saw it here, it would instantly tip her off. She knows that yarn, and she knows me.  Later.

I got a message this morning: the hubby was stopping by in, oh, about 45 minutes, with some friends from work.  Just so I knew.

It is amazing how fast the knitting can get ditched and the cleaning get done when need be.

And so I shall tell you of this dishcloth, (now that they’ve come and gone), well faded in its old age.  Just don’t look too closely at the back of it right now.

Back when my kids were in elementary school, I had a friend empty her closet of all her yarns and give them to me–seven bags’ worth, including large garbage-sized bags.  She told me good wool yarn was cheap in her native Germany, that she’d bought a lot over the years during various trips home, but she’d decided she was just never going to actually use it.  (The ironic thing now is that she recently got back into knitting, now that she has grandchildren to make cute things for.)

I in turn knew a young single mom of very little means who loved to knit, and asked the friend giving me the yarn if this would be okay with her; she was thrilled with the idea.  So.  Having once lived in grad-student-wife poverty, knowing what it was like to only be able to wish to make nice things, I in turn gave a lot of that yarn to this young mom: knowing I could replace what I liked and that here was a one-time opportunity to let her have some really nice materials to work with without feeling like a charity case from me.  Good yarns, with pride kept intact.  Perfect.

But I did keep a few nubbly-textured cotton skeins, and this was at a time I was doing a lot of Kaffe Fassett-style multicolor work.  So. I started into a cotton sweater.  I wanted to wear it to visibly show my friend I was grateful for her generosity.  Because I certainly was.

The further along I got, the more I dragged.  Too wide.  Didn’t want to frog it.  Not quite my colors.  Nubbly, I realized, was just not my style anyway.  Finally, I was reading the Knitlist one day, and someone there said something about knitting dishcloths. My first reaction was, why on earth would anyone put in the effort to knit something to get all grubby and gross in the kitchen?

My second was a sense of relief at the thought, that, I don’t have to knit that sweater anymore!  I can totally justify and make good use of the work I’ve already put into it!  Hey!

I intended to frog it down to the beginning of the armscye, but in a fit of why-should-I-be-patient-with-this-anymore, simply cast off right where it was.  And ever since then, I have had this, um, unique dishcloth. It really was a nice bit of intarsia work once.  You can’t really tell anymore.

Someone mentioned that bamboo yarns have anti-microbial properties, so I guess they would work well as dishcloths.  I can see that. I just haven’t been able to make myself try it yet.  Knitting one, so far, has been enough.  It works for me.

And you should see my kitchen right now.  The hubby’s co-workers did.

Amanda (scroll down to see) let me buy one of her very first colorways she dyed up for her then-new Etsy shop.   It’s brighter than this in real life, a very cheerful shade; the flash mutes it here.  The shawl pin holding it on the wheel for me is handblown glass, a gift from my old friend Sheila Ernst from when I saw her at Stitches.

And then that yarn sat there in my stash, patiently waiting its rightful turn, with a false start I finally frogged.  Till Amanda wrote a post about how her business was doing that sparked my pulling that gorgeous green out of the stash and casting on to see how far I could stretch my one little skein to go.  Normally, I would have used needles a size or so smaller, and I would have cast on more stitches, but I needed all the length I could get.

It was good to see it back where it belonged.  Her picture (note the beautiful brunette) is way more fun than mine.

Specifications: size 10 needles, the faster-version Julia from Wrapped in Comfort through the yoke and increase rows, then the Michelle shawl through the main body.

I hadn’t checked out her blog in a couple of months.  I wish I had.  Looking today, I find she had a fiberarts blogroll of only a dozen blogs–and one was mine.  That means a lot to me.

Her youngest was the same age as my third child.

Five years ago this week and last, I was in the hospital in critical condition, and Ruth Schooley, one of the listmoms of the Knitlist, was checking up on me. I had a Hiptop, the first of the cellphones to hit the market that did email (etc, etc). It was my link to the outside world, once I had the strength again to type into it.  Lying down at first, unable to handle its weight, then, as I got better, eventually I was able to sit up to type back to her and to a few others who weren’t afraid to hear about life at its far edges.  I could read my Knitlist messages and still feel a sense of belonging to my previous normal life outside Stanford Hospital, and Ruth forwarded a few from me to the list so that my phone’s addy wouldn’t be exposed to the whole world.  Much comfort came my way from that.

She was always the voice of calmness in any storm.  She was always one to come immediately help out.  At her most piqued, she would wave her dpns in the air and remind us that she had pointy sticks and she knew how to use them.  The laughter always helped.

Ruth posted on her blog on July 14.  Monday.

Tuesday she was suddenly gone.

I do not know the details. I do know she touched many, many knitters who take part in the online community, and she will be sorely missed.  To the Rocketman and to the children, I, along with many others, grieve with you; you are not alone.  Ruth saw to that.

I love knit night at Purlescence.  I was going through serious knitters deprivation while we were on vacation and then they were too for awhile there.

So here’s the scene: I asked if I could have the shawl back that they had in the window, the Julia pattern from “Wrapped in Comfort,” a little one made out of one skein of Handmaiden Casbah on big needles to stretch the yardage as far as it could go.  It’s softer than the blue Bare one I’d been working on, and softness was something the circumstances really needed.

Kay not only gave it back to me, it had been held on the model with a shawl pin made by a local artist, which she put in my hands and asked that I send it with the shawl to the woman whose husband Marc is so very ill.

Wow.

I regretted not having the Casbah to knit the shop another one; they have it on backorder, and it hadn’t come in.

At which point a woman across the room, Mary, who’d been quietly spinning away at her wheel, and who I hadn’t even known had heard any of that, reached into her knitting bag, stood up and walked over to me, and asked how many skeins it had taken to knit that shawl that was now in my hands.  One?  Good, then!  And she held out a skein, a beautiful blue, Casbah no less, and urged me to take it.

It took me a moment to sink in.  Wow.  I could knit it up and gift it in turn to the dear friends who own that shop.  And that’s what Mary was hoping I would do.  She was giving me her Casbah and blessing all of us in the face of the loss that this other woman that none of them had ever met was dealing with.  We were all in this life thing together.

I was fighting tears.  Wow.

Cast on.

Suddenly there’s so much to process in a hurricane all at once.

A new relative we just added into the extended family just found out he has a malignant brain tumor. Metastasized.  He has young children.

A young man my son met through their internships in DC turns out today to be Marc, the son of a friend whose husband was killed in an accident just after they moved away from here back when Marc was in I think kindergarten.  I lost touch with his widowed mom when she moved the second or third time and have wanted for years to get a chance to reach out again and talk to her.

My son called in great excitement to tell me, not waiting for me to get to my email for him to share the news.  Marc emailed just now that his mom was just as excited as I am at our all finding each other again.  Synchronicity is wonderful stuff.  And he mentioned something to me about his wife–while I’m struggling to picture the little boy as the grown man.  Wow.

The day his family moved away, a number of us at the young-child stage got together at their apartment on Stanford campus, where Bryant, his dad, had just finished his PhD, to box and scrub and watch kids and help out.  Anything to lessen the pain of their moving.  Bryant bought us all pizza at the end of the day, a rare luxury for us all, and we sat or stood under the scrawny pine trees just outside their door they were about to close for the last time, reveling in the friendship with the poignancy of loss that they were leaving.  How much Bryant was going to, just a few months later, we could never have known.

When Bryant died–he was a pedestrian, struck by a passing car–there was a tremendous need here to do something.  We their friends here got together with one person setting up a video camera, and shared our stories of their father’s kindnesses from people the boys would likely not even remember when they grew up.  So that they had something to remember Bryant by, so they would know the kind of man he was, so they would have his good image to live up to.

So their father would be real to them.  Compassionate and human.

Marc marveled that I remembered his brother’s broken leg. I marveled that he remembered any of us at all. But he did.  But then…  Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

Get out the video camera, take out the tape recorders.  Write up questions to ask.  Get the older folks talking about back in the day.  Their children and great great grandchildren will cherish every word.

Meantime, I’ve definitely got some knitting to do.

1. A bird’s-foot view:

Lene posted a photo she took of bird tracks that were probably made by pigeons, and it instantly hit me that if you turned them towards you and drew a circle around them, you had the Peace symbol. The Dove of Peace–I wondered, whoever drew the original, was that their inspiration? So I googled, found this, and have to think they did not make that connection. But it’s fascinating how well the two symbols converge.

2. Catapulted:

I was reading reviews of the Shake Awake, a silent alarm clock to put under one’s pillow, and had to laugh at one person’s descriptions of why it was such an improvement for her sound-sleeper hearing-impaired son: she said that before that, they’d had to throw the cat at him every morning to get him to finally stir.

3. Toucans help too:

I had a cardiology appointment this week, and if ever a doctor is likely to be suddenly interrupted and delayed, it’s a heart specialist. (It was just a follow-up to verify that yes, I’m fine there, my cardiac cough went away when that lupus flare did this past winter.) Definitely a bring-your-knitting appointment. As I waited, a very well-dressed elderly woman was wheeled into the waiting room by her attendant, who caught my eye, nodded at my stitches, and silently smiled at me.

The old one in her string of pearls and silk sat there in her wheelchair looking terribly bored and unhappy; it took me awhile to glance down from my knitting and notice that her lower legs were scabbed over in signs of old sores, many of them. Her shoes were perfect but her skin gave her away. She avoided eye contact. I noticed her attendant had pearl earrings on too, and I thought, you’re both generous souls, then; good for you.

I thought about it, then searched in my purse, looking for a particularly bright and cheerful one. And intricate. I wanted intricate. Something particularly nicely made. I found one, a toucan-looking bird, and just as the nurse opened the door and called my name, I reached across the small aisle between the seats and offered the old woman the finger puppet. A child’s toy? But an adult’s delight as well in the skill and pride that someone, somewhere in Peru had put into creating the piece.

The old woman’s face totally lit up in surprise and delight, and behind her, her attendant’s did too. So did the nurse’s. I didn’t want to delay the office by stopping to describe where I get those from, that no, I didn’t knit it, so as the door closed behind us going down the hallway, I mentioned to the nurse. I figured, if the patient wanted to talk to her about it, she could tell her herself. If they had time. The nurse’s call, not mine; the important part had already happened.

It’s hard to be old and lonely. Saying to somebody that they are noticed, even just in a small moment, can make a world of difference to them, and the rest of us too. It was so easy to do.

4. Now she sees it:

My daughter had an eye doctor appointment and I don’t even remember why I came with and waited for her, but I brought my knitting and did. A woman, I’m guessing Chinese, was walking past, saw the work in my hands, and stopped on the spot and came over and sat down next to me. It is amazing what you can convey with pantomime: she had never seen circular needles before. I demonstrated how you use them just like straights, and that no, the circular shawl I was knitting wasn’t a closed circle, it was back and forth; I pulled out my book and showed her how it would look finished. Oh! Then she wanted to know how to do lace. I taught her on the spot. Ssk, slants this way, k2tog, slants that, purl into a yarnover this way. By the time I left, she had it and she was thrilled. I couldn’t ask her how long she’d been knitting, I couldn’t ask her anything not communicated with waving hands and needles. But there is a universal joy in sharing knowledge and in learning how to do something new. I can just picture her running to me, wherever she is now, with her needles in hand to show me what she’s making now.

5. It’s all your fault:

And if you bought ME a Shake Awake, this being California, I’d probably need that cardiologist, thinking the San Andreas was going off bigtime.