My friend Lynn used to live in Ft Worth and knows my in-laws–and me, through knitting. Typing this into my phone, I’ll link later to the post of when we met in person last year the day after she got engaged, a very happy day then and since for her.

She picked me up tonight and took me to her old knitting group. I grinned that yes of course, knitting groups are always on Thursdays!

Earlier in the day, Richard and I had run an errand with his dad and I had googled for the Madeline Tosh retail shop; I knew it was around here somewhere, but I didn’t find it. Huh.

Guess where Lynn’s knitting group met? My stars, how perfect was that! You should have seen me grinning when we pulled up!

I got to meet Amy, the dyer behind it all; like my friend Lisa Souza, she has a degree in art and a love for yarn and put it all together.

I bought one skein, all I could do for now, and I am very much looking forward to it. But I love that this lovely woman who dyes this yarn got to see me swooning over her work as it so well deserves.

It was great to see Lynn, too.

She took me on a brief tour of the local sights. I got her into her first- ever Trader Joe’s store.

And a wonderful time was had by all.

Helpful hints for your significant others: qiviut blend yarns starting at $9.95/25 g/200 yards of laceweight, very soft stuff, and this giveaway on cottagecraftangora’s blog. Way more fun than beating back the crowds at Crazed-Mart.

We got a note today from the friend who, a little to my (albeit grateful) surprise given my recent flu, had invited the two of us for Thanksgiving, even after finding out Richard had had a fever on Sunday: her email said carefully, tentatively that she’d found her daughter had invited a friend who had a newborn. How was Richard doing?

He’s fine, I told her, I’m the one that hasn’t entirely shaken my germs off. I told her not to feel guilty; keeping a newborn healthy was far more important–just like I like people who are sick to stay away from my immunocompromised self. It was the right thing to do.

So here it was Wednesday. He and I looked at each other and I decided I felt better than he did–I wasn’t the one who got up in the middle of the night to drive to the airport.

Trader Joe’s it was: cranberry-stuffed turkey breast, which will leave us with plenty of the obligatory leftovers. Pecan pie for me, am absolute must, pumpkin for him, the only real Thanksgiving pie as far as he was concerned. Frozen gratin greens, totally cheating boxed turkey gravy and scalloped potatoes–and a sugar pumpkin for the sake of the possibility of homemade. There you go: Thanksgiving dinner for the energy-impaired. Bake an hour-ish. Boil a bag of cranberries and a cup of sugar and a cup of water (or orange juice) for one minute if we want sauce.

And since pecan pie is not necessary for the real dinner as far as he was concerned, we didn’t have to wait to try it.

A certain daughter of mine who took ballroom dancing in college (and who, unlike me, is quite good at that sort of thing) cracked up when I pointed out this comic. Heh.

Meantime. A follow-up re the peregrines: Haya fledged from the bridge between Oakland and Alameda a year and a half ago and was later found shot. She has had three surgeries and been through long, long training and rehab–and they are preparing to release her! She has healed and her flights have become strong now; they’d been afraid the day would never come, but it has. Very cool what good people can do.

And…

Years ago, I saw the hearse. It was parked across the street as I came home, not your usual suburban-neighborhood sight. Later that day, I saw the college-age son, who was so very grateful at having someone to talk to at his mom’s passing from cancer.

His dad remarried a couple years later and moved away–but he did not sell that house. A series of renters came and went, and after the moving vans would leave, the dad and son would be back and working around the place for a day or so. They kept it looking as beautiful as his mother had left it. Rose trees blooming in the front.

A new family’s little toddler grew into early school age there–but again, the moving van came just a few days ago.

And yet somehow it surprised me to see him across the street this afternoon, and it took me just a moment to be sure it really was him. He was as glad to see me as I was to see him–and I saw in his face what is always clearly there after each gap in time, an, Oh good, you’re still… The lupus and Crohn’s didn’t… Such joy in his face.

Life IS good.

The little eight-year-old boy who moved into that house all those years ago is now a 30-something good man with a fiancee and a life to begin. In the home where the ’89 Loma Prieta quake swept him clear out of the pool and splashed him onto the ground. A house with stories for him to tell their future children, of his mother’s roses, of her presence.

I look forward to pointing out the Cooper’s hawk for them. And maybe even an eight-octave zone-tailed. And hand in hand with their little ones someday, klutzy-footed and all, I shall dance.

Another crazybusylotsofdriving day, although with family along this time.

There was a little salad left.

And spaghetti. The boy scouts scooped lots of sauce and meat onto those noodles–good for them. Then, with their white shirts and fake mustaches (upside down on one kid), they waited the lines of folding tables covered in butcher paper, refilled the water pitchers, and offered crayons to the little ones so they could break all the rules of home by drawing on the table. They’d papered over the differences.

Then they were offering ice cream with a chocolate cookie in a cup to all as Dave warmed up. There is nobody who can talk as fast as Dave when he wants to.

It was Troop 66 fundraiser time again.

Dave: I have this beautiful cranberry-apple crisp–and it’s still warm from the oven! Who’ll bid me $20? 22, 25. 27? 30! Do I hear 31–33! (No, in an aside to his little kid, I’m not counting–oh, did Mom say so? Okay, 34!) 35!

Going once, going…37! Do I hear 40? Forty, forty, SOLD!!! for forty dollars!

It was a beautiful thing to behold. That man knows how to play auctioneer for the day after the day after the day after Halloween. Tablesfull of homemade desserts went home with happy people, and I know that tomorrow the question of the day at church will be, Did you get one? Cool, whatja get? …Oooh!

There was one that Phyllis (whose own dessert went for a good price) had had her eyes on, and when Dave started in on it she jumped out of her chair from across the long room, announced the price and announced it sold.

This had never happened before in all the years of doing these and it almost threw him a moment:  Wait, $20?

Yes, $20, it’s mine, sold! (The room laughed.)

He looked around, questioning his large audience. Twenty?

Heads nodded all around.

Twenty! Sold! To Phyllis!

There were a few other things–actually, a lot of other things–and a plate of homemade chocolate truffles came up–and there was Phyllis. Before he could even begin she was rushing forward, waving a fistful of bills and telling him he had to sell her just one.  (Knowing that if everyone followed her lead there would be a good price indeed for that plate.)

Never get in the way of a good laugh at everybody’s enjoyment; she got her truffle, big enough to share, and share she did. It was fabulous.

As she said to me afterwards, Dave is so good at this and he’s such a crackup. It’s all about the entertainment, never mind the spaghetti.

Not to mention a little sharing of good food and good deeds. And a good time was had by all.

Kaye at Purlescence messaged me: my spinning wheel was done! My Ashford Traditional, the one that has been broken so many times, so many ways, the one that was the better wheel I always used, even after it fell out of the back of my minivan and broke the flyer and maiden (always seatbelt them in), even after a kid tripped over it and broke the replacement flyer (and I had to buy the whole maiden assembly again for $120 from somewhere else, just before Purlescence came to be.)

It never did work well after that last time: it wobbled so hard that at times the thing simply fell apart, the maiden twisting with the vibrations and the bobbin simply falling to the floor.  I had to clean dirty sewing machine oil out of silk. Kinda put a damper on the spinning thing.

This is the third wheel she and Sandi have repaired for me. One, bought at an auction, had never worked at all; they got it going and I sent it happily off to a great home, gratified that after fifteen years it had finally been made to work and it had gone to exactly where it needed to be. That’s why I’d still had it: so they could get it. So worth it now.

The second wheel, an Ashford Traveller, the Purl Girls did a great job on, too.

And once I had that one back I pulled out some merino/silk in a beautiful blue that I’d bought half a dozen years ago from a place that was closing down. Finally I had a wheel that would do it justice again.

Only…

The bag was mismarked. Clearly. It was Romney wool or its equivalent: good for making a rug or perhaps felting into a birdhouse, maybe knit straight from the roving, quick and bulky and for baby birds to poop in, but by no means was it worth hours upon hours upon hours.

Did I never put my hand in the ziploc bag before and actually touch the stuff? Boggles the mind.

And it kinda took the wind out of my sails on spinning for the moment.

But then today there was that message. My favorite wheel was repaired, the flyer replaced, the wrong metal part finally gone so that the spindle can lift up, not out, and other than the cup of Welch’s grape juice a then-teenager of mine once tried to balance on the sidebar, graffiti-ing it permanently (hey, Kaye, no need to apologize for not being able to get it out, it’s a bit of family history anyway), the thing is as good as new. At last.

My folks gave me some super-super-fine 90s merino for Christmas one year. Lots of it. After two afghans, there’s still a little more if it around somewhere–and I have my Trad back. Let’s finally put the spin back into that spindyeknit. Been too long.

A little looking around… It IS the same Greg Prince! I thought so! He and his wife threw a big bash for my dad at their home in Maryland when Dad turned 75, and all of us kids came into town for it. Lovely people, just the best.

It wasn’t long after Richard and I had done some remodeling, and I remember his wife in their kitchen telling me why trash compactors are a bad idea: you cannot access them while the pusher is down, for obvious safety reasons, but that means you can never really clean them. She’d given up and had had hers removed and replaced with a simple pull-down drawer. She was right.

Dr. Prince invented a vaccine for a form of newborn pneumonia that is now given to a quarter million infants around the world, saving many lives.

And he is a Mormon. Who knows Romney and has mutual good friends with him.

So he found himself interviewed by Lawrence O’Donnell after writing a cri de couer for the Huffington Post after the 47% video surfaced: he had donated the maximum allowable amount to Romney’s first presidential campaign, he said, but that was Romney 1.0.  Romney 2.0 has utterly turned his back on the unfortunate. “That’s Republicanism, not Mormonism!” He was horrified at our church being equated with some of the things Romney has said and done in this campaign. “Mitt Romney is *not* the face of Mormonism.” Looking out for one another is what it’s all about.

Preach it, brother. And thank you.

In his latest ads, Romney’s been trying to prey on the fears of auto workers, telling them that their jobs are about to be shipped to China and to vote for him to save them.  And yet he opposed Obama’s bailout that did save them at the time that private sources of credit had vanished in the bust, and Bain itself is right now shipping 100% of its American Sensata employees’ jobs to, where else, China. Despite being profitable here.

The heads of GM and Chrysler felt compelled to step up and publicly pronounce Romney’s ads about their products and companies wrong. They are doing quite well right here at home, thankyouverymuch.

Yet Romney is still pushing down on those same ads that are trash and he won’t come clean. And he’s certainly not improving as the pressure of election day gets closer.

Shall I mention that Romney’s family and friends invested in the last few years in Hart Intercivic, which sells voting machines? And that three of its five board of director members donated at least $50,000 each to Romney’s campaign? As reported by Forbes. Voting machines. With the owners of the company voting for one candidate with their money.

I’m with Dr. Prince. If a good Mormon ever runs for that office, more power to him, but Romney isn’t one.  We do have a good President, though–and you don’t have to constantly guess which side of every issue he stands on. Please vote, and please vote for Obama. And a better Congress, too. Thank you.

Wait, I said as she turned to me as I walked into church, you look familiar…

She told me afterwards that in that moment, she was trying to remember, was Alison the name of the mom or the oldest daughter? But she remembered my name, whichever one of us it applied to, because it was her twin’s name and her own daughter’s.

She and her husband are friends from church who moved away 15 years ago, back for a visit. They wanted to show their kids the California sights, since they hadn’t really been old enough to remember (or weren’t born yet.) And they wanted to see old friends.

Meantime, there was a speaker from a neighboring ward, and he’d only recently moved into the area. He mentioned they’d come from New York. I went up to him after the meeting and said, okay, this is a long shot but by any chance do you know Boyd and Carolyn R…

His face totally lit up. YES! I worked with him on…

Carolyn’s my sister.

He loved it.

And California became, in that moment, just a bit more familiar and comfortable of a place.

(p.s. I once saw one of the weinermobiles driving the main drag three blocks away, but never anything like this in our neighborhood.)

I decided I wasn’t eggsplatly going to do any more baking today.

I was, though, doing my treadmill time.

Why is it that at about the eleven or twelve minute mark during every session of late my brain sneaks up on me and all the sudden I realize it’s playing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in my head? The version that was popular in the ’70’s. While I’m a captive audience to the earworm. A weemuhway. Oh joy.

And there it was again tonight, starting right on cue. I glanced at the time and could only laugh: 11:03, the little stinker. Okay, so what to replace it with: catchy, or, something, what’ve you got in there? (Walk..walk..walk….) Okay, James Taylor, and I hit the on button in my brain. A recording made when he was younger of You’ve Got a Friend.

It was the perfect pitch I was hoping for. It even got me to walk longer while it played.

p.s. With a shout out to Ellen, who does beautiful work. Thank you!

Left the house at 2:00 to take a friend to the airport: his grandmother had just died of Alzheimer’s and he was taking one day off from the intense world of medical training to fly out for the funeral.

When someone needs a ride for that, you take them.

But I asked him beforehand if we could leave just a few minutes earlier? Maybe ten? I had a doctor’s appointment to go to.

Sure, no problem!

As we went down the road, he talked about the strangeness of grief mixed with relief and the loss that had happened years before–and loss again, but with a…but…. Now at last she’s with his Grandpa again.

And then. I only got a brief glance because I was the one at the wheel–but at the place where I have seen one before, a peregrine falcon suddenly burst past the trees next to the road and zoomed across in front of us, both of us going, WOW!, low enough down that for a split second I worried maybe a semi might… But it was safe. In the blink, I would have guessed it a female for the shape of the body and likely an adult or near-adult. So close! Wow!

And I wondered silently, Ty, you have no idea, but a raptor always shows up when I need one, especially peregrines and my Cooper’s hawk. Maybe you needed one too.

There was some slowdown going on in San Jose but I got out of the backup and away to the gate about the time expected–but coming back around onto the freeway, traffic where I had just been was one solid mass of cars clear back to the next city. Had we left five minutes later, I would have been utterly hosed.

I was exactly on time for my doctor. We had a fair bit to discuss, and she’s a good one: she takes the time.

I raced home (it was 5:00 by now) and started peeling apples. Richard called; I dropped everything and went to get him since I had his car. Coming out of the neighborhood, a large red-tailed hawk soared right above. I have never seen one here before!

More backup. They’ve been digging up the road where pipeline 132, the infamous San Bruno Fire pipeline, goes down the neighborhood. Came home. Chopped apples. An old quick New Hampshire autumn dinner is that you cook sausage crumbles with diced preferably Granny Smith apples (getting out absolutely as much grease as you can) and then when it’s all done, pour just a little maple syrup on it in the serving dish, grade B for the more intense flavor if you can find it. Trader Joe’s here has it.

Thirty-seven minutes after we walked in the door together, the table was cleared and set, three different dishes were cooked from scratch, and our dinner guests arrived. We did it.

I could never have pulled half of that off in the bad old days. Wow life. Look at me now!

A timber company once copied those Ashford guys down the road, briefly; their foray into spinning wheels apparently didn’t last. (This got me to Google–who knew. They do still exist. Curtain rods and finials, okay.)

There was an auction nearby about 15 years ago of the estate of a woman who’d owned a shop that had sold spinning wheels–y’know, back before people knew what that Ebay startup was all about.

There was a wry comment from my friend Karen after I bought one of those at that auction, while I was hoping the box had all the disassembled pieces (it did): “I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for that brand.”

There was my father-in-law, maybe ten years ago, who, while visiting, decided to put the thing together for me.  Thanks, Dad! The directions said there was a second bobbin in there, an extra, because, y’know, you might want to spin a second color or something. (Plying, folks.) One of the sidebars was slightly shorter than the other, it turned out–well, that didn’t work.

Dad said, Hey, I got an idea.

So we went to the grocery store, bought Dove ice cream bars, ate the ice cream bars, and he used the stick of his to finish off that shorter sidebar.

The thing still never did really spin, though. If you pumped really hard you might get it to turn once. Maybe. Even if it was kind of fun to have instructions in aboriginal (near as we could tell) as well as English.

A few weeks ago I finally got that wheel in to Purlescence and the verdict was that it was such a close copy of what is the number one brand in the world, last I checked, that they could swap out the handmaiden (the top part) with an Ashford’s to get the thing going.

A friend at the shop tonight who didn’t know about all of that back-and-forth-ing two weeks ago about can you make this thing work mentioned that her partner (who is recovering well from a major health issue, and I’m big on having a good creative outlet when you’re dealing with a major health issue) has really wanted to learn to spin. If only they had a wheel.

Let me finish working on that, says Kaye, adding that she just happens to have a spare handmaiden to use on it. Now that she and I know who she’s fixing it for.

I’ve got two Ashford wheels, I don’t need the Woodcroft with the tulips engraved on it. Done. That was easy. With Sandi and Kaye’s help, it’s all finally coming together.

When Richard was working on his Master’s degree at BYU in Provo, Utah, his advisor and his wife invited us over for dinner once.

They had eleven kids, some grown, the youngest a bouncy little boy, not to mention that Dr. Ivie’s brother’s family was nearby and it was pretty brownian motion around there. I loved it. Dr. Ivie had made their dining table so as to accommodate the crowd: round, and from about a foot in from the edge it was all one giant lazy susan. It would start spinning at the beginning of the meal and when it stopped all the food was gone and the meal was over.

And if you were new there like I was someone had to fend for you, my new husband Richard laughed as he did so, helping me to a dish of I-don’t-remember-what as the center spun. (He’d been there before.)

We saw the reports today. Richard thinks Nicholas was the youngest, I think he was their grandson. But that Border Patrolman‘s face in that picture is one of theirs.

Went with Nina to my other knit night for the first time all year. It was wonderful to see old friends. Rush hour traffic at that distance is such that I just don’t go if I can’t do the carpool lanes–and it doesn’t help that it’s the same night as Purlescence.

But wow, on a totally side note, you should see the Handmaiden yarns at Green Planet.

When the shop was closed and we were heading home, Nina and I weren’t done catching up. She’s an old friend of the whole family, so she and Richard and Michelle and I ended up chatting till midnight.

Been too long.

It’s hard to be a teenager and have your dad decide to take a new job and uproot the family and did you ask to move away from all your friends? Did you?

Not that any of them said any such thing to me, just, I’ve been a teenager and I’ve had friends move in/move out even if my own folks were kind enough to stay put for 47 years in the house built for them when I was three. One of the quirks of growing up in the Maryland suburbs was having friends afraid their dad–it was always the dad, back then–might lose the election and then they would have to leave. Back in those days, Congressmen moved their families to DC–and if their political fortunes didn’t hold, then, often, back out.

So. A new family recently moved into the area and showed up at church, the kids ranging from teenage boys to a babe in arms.

The mom is always smiling. Always cheerful. I like her already.

We got sent a picture–and I want to show it, but I don’t know how to access it from this computer–of my son and his little Parker, toddler totally copying daddy, very cute. Richard printed it out at work on Friday and I folded one of the copies and put it in my purse.

So there was the mom today by the door when the meetings were over, waiting for her husband to find her, holding the baby, her two teenage boys standing in front of her. They really don’t know me from Adam yet, so I explained I had one grandson: and then I pulled out that picture.

The mom went, oooh, so cute. The teens leaned in for a closer look and had the same reaction. They had a baby brother. They totally got this babies-are-adorable thing.

And then they looked up from the picture and into my eyes, still smiling.

I think they made friends on the spot with me as much as I did with them.

I was knitting away at Purlescence tonight, chatting with friends, and about a half hour into it Ava was standing behind me and got my attention.

AVA!

She lives in Colorado. I’d totally forgotten she was going to be teaching a class here tomorrow; she’s shop-owner Sandi’s former mother-in-law and still Mom and friend forever. And she was to be teaching the class with–I mentioned as she and I talked that I would *so* love to meet–

–She’s in the back, Ava told me.

I exclaimed loudly, jumping: DONNA DRUCHUNAS was my TECH EDITOR for my BOOK!!! as I leaped to my feet to go back there along with one very happy Ava.

They’d been neighbors and knitting friends together where they live. (Donna just moved away last month, though.)

Donna greeted me with the hug I had so much for so long wanted to give her. We had long promised someday we would meet. We worked so much together via email on Wrapped; I told Ava, as we all chuckled, that at one point on the write-up of the how-to-knit-lace section at the front of the book, she’d emailed, puzzled, Do you really *do* that?

Me: Wait. Do you really do it that way?

Yes, we did. And her way and mine both work just fine. We had quite a laugh over that, six years ago and then tonight, all three of us.

Donna did a ton of work on that section. Those visuals? Hers. The charts that I cannot write nor work from due to a brain injury? She wrote them. There was a listserv for designers pre-Ravelry and she went on that list and proclaimed to the world of professionals in the knitting industry that she had never before tech-edited a book with zero errors in the instructions. Mine was the first. And then she told everybody they had to have that book.

I cannot begin to tell you how much I owe her. And I finally got to meet her. I am in awe of her, and I finally got to tell her thank you in person!

And to see Ava Coleman again, after her health struggles and mine since the last time we saw each other in person. She’s a generous, gentle woman I aspire to be more like.

Wow. What an incredible day. And it’s my mother-in-law’s birthday: celebrations all around!

Went with a friend to see a friend this evening to say hi.

To a new widow.

To an old friend. Twenty-five years ago, we were newly moved in and were struggling with the changes that had come with a California mortgage (I don’t even want to think what that would be like now). Where did we have any room to cut back?

We had three kids under five. She and her husband had raised their kids here with one still in school. She showed up completely unexpected one day, knocking on my door from halfway across town to share some fruit from her tree, a few veggies from her garden. She’d been thinking of me; would I like these? She was almost apologetic for the intrusion.

She had no idea that far beyond the fruit itself, the gesture, the thoughtfulness, the love for someone she didn’t even know well yet at the moment I felt so overwhelmed but had told nobody–I’ll remember it forever with great gratitude. It would all be okay now–the fear in the way and the tension it had caused was gone.

It’s been about a year since he passed; long enough that I’d been wondering if maybe she was feeling like everybody else had gone back to normal, everybody but her. When Catherine emailed and said, let’s go stop by, I was honored that she thought to take me too and glad of the excuse. Why did I need an excuse? Just go!

And so we did.

When our friend welcomed us in, I admired an old photo of her husband by the front door and marveled that their son (in his Facebook photos from across the country) looks now so much like his dad did back then. He was so young then. So was she.

We got to listen. We shared old stories together, some that were new to Catherine. We made our friendships all brand new all over again.

What had I been waiting for?! But maybe it was just the right time after all.

There will be more.