For those who wanted to know what I was listening to Thursday night, thanks to KDFC’s website, I found it; it’s Jonathan Biss (I read it as “Bliss” the first time, too funny) and his album is here.

I got a surprise package today from Cathy, who’s been ill herself, but here she was, thinking of me instead.

And from Anniebee. And Margaret. Julie. Stephanie. Kimberly. Ruth. Wishing me well on recovering from my last surgery, with cards, hot cocoa, dark chocolate (Cathy), handmade stitch markers (Ruth), the best use of a stray bit of dyed wool I’ve ever seen on Margaret’s card, and a handbeaded coin purse, sachets, a Canadian maplewood bookmarker, and a handknit pearled (spelled that right) flower pin from Anniebee.  My goodness. Thank you! To that I guess I owe a how-I’m-doing, which is very well overall. I did lift a 25 lb bag of birdseed Saturday and realized that I might want to wait just a little longer on that; I was testing my scars to see if I’m up to using my heavy dyepot yet.  It’s been a year since I made dye out of my fading amaryllis flowers, and I am antsy.  The answer would be, honestly, not quite yet. But close!

And in the random findings department.  Sometimes some things (this is their photo) just grab your attention. Like a hand (partly) -spun  handmade wool wedding dress and groom’s vest from the bride’s Lincoln Longwool sheep. Note that this is not a soft-haired breed; this is the sturdy stuff they make carpeting out of.  Honey, just don’t let him walk all over you.  I do love the effect of alternating solid locks with fluffy, whiter slightly-pulled-apart ones, and clearly it’s all been solidified and felted a bit by washing, but I gotta tell you–she got fleeced.

Little Bo Peep, did she lose any sleep over whether she’d be dragging her veil behind her?

But once you get pasture initial reaction, hey, clearly, they’re having a good time: already raising a little cane there, and everything’s rosey.

Add a little Biss-ful Beethoven, and there ewe go.

(Typed while wearing Jasmin’s handspun and -knitted socks.)

I met up with Gigi of the Knitmore Girls and some of the Minions of the Pointy Sticks at Le Boulanger down thataway today.

Four years, maybe five, you’d think I’d have taken a picture of it by now.  Sorry for another no show here.

Anyway, the story, and I think I’ve told some of it before, is: I was going to Stitches West one time, and it was the first time I was trying to manage my electric chair by myself which I need for long days out.

Open side door of minivan, pull out unattached ramp, unfold ramp, set it up in doorway, done.

Except the “This side up” sticker happened to have been glued on the wrong side. My husband had never noticed; he just intuitively got the mechanics of the thing, like I would have if it had been something reasonable, like, say, a knitting pattern.

Which is why when I started backing that 250 pound chair down the ramp the hinge was on the wrong side and the whole thing collapsed on my foot.

Annnnndddd, the newly-charged battery hadn’t held the charge.  It was nearly dead. Just enough juice to get it back up in there with the desperately-needed help of some random passersby.

It was not starting out well here.  I IM’d my husband and he offered immediately to leave work, rescue me, and get me in for x-rays.

“I have waited a year for Stitches and I am going to Stitches!”

I made it to my friend Karen’s booth, holding myself together right up till that point, but the moment Karen and Gigi looked at my face and asked, wonderingly, “Are you all right?” I lost it and bawled in pain and frustration and worry.

Gigi’s daughter Jasmin (and Gigi and Karen, for that matter) offered to drop everything and drive me to the doctor; when I said I just couldn’t go yet, not when I’d just gotten here, and besides, they needed to man their booth, Gigi’s then-teenage son Sam came to my rescue. He went out, found someone in charge somewhere there at the Santa Clara Convention Center, came back with a manual wheelchair which by now I really really needed, and proceeded to push me around for the next two hours.  He was very patient with my being interested in random people or yarns going by–oh, look at *that*!  Ooh, that’s pretty! Hey, Alicia!  BARBARA! How ya *doin’*!   Stitches West is a grand reunion as well as a knitter’s Disneyland.  Sam was the soul of gentleness and totally put up with the craziness that is me at those conferences, all while being very mindful of where my foot was going.

He got me to Lisa Souza‘s booth, where I bought some sock merino in her Seafoam colorway and showed it off to Gigi before calling it a day, and Gigi exclaimed over it, telling me she’d bought the same colorway from Lisa too.

Two weeks later, when I’d recovered enough to make the drive, I took Sam one of my chocolate tortes and thanked him for being my hero when I’d so much needed him. Such a nice kid!  I wanted him to know how much his cheerful readiness to help and his patience had meant to me.

Gigi is having heart surgery next week. What she never knew, was, I knitted up that Seafoam all that time ago and set it aside for the right moment: whether it was for her to wear to brag on her son or for Sam’s future bride someday way off in the future, I did not know. But it could not possibly go to any other family. That skein of yarn had too many important memories from those moments to mean as much to anyone else. It was for them.

I told Gigi all that today as I handed it to her for her to wear now.

Heal well, friend. As your family helped me to, too, on many an occasion by now.

Driving to Purlescence tonight, I caught something on the radio that surprised me and I thought I’d come home and blog about it: a Beethoven piece that I’d always heard as a very solemn piece, very introspective, even slightly mournful.

But here, instead of an orchestra, it was a single piano playing, and the pianist was–playing. He was having a good time. Matter of fact, that left hand started getting jumpy, progressing to a full-blown pogo-stick effect. Let’s dance!

It took me a moment to get past my “that’s not how you play that!” response and sit back and just listen to what the guy was doing.  And you know? It was really cool!  It was very creative. I found I liked that.

So that’s what I thought I’d be talking about, about being open to a new take on things.

Well.

At the shop.  Somehow the subject of blood donations came up; how, exactly, I didn’t hear. One woman said, Oh, I’ve been a platelet donor for some time. Then another chimed in, I do that too.

I had no idea you did that! I was exclaiming, Platelet donors saved my daughter’s life!

It was their turn to be surprised.  It all suddenly became very personal.

And then, to the one who didn’t know, I told her, And blood donors saved MY life last January, and I told her the story of the man in the hardware store. (Looking back over the January posts, I see that I didn’t mention at the time that I’d lost half my blood volume before the surgery, and they had to replace it then as well as what was used during the colectomy itself.)

Every now and then I get another chance to tell a donor thank you.  It was so cool.  SO cool.

So yeah, I had this blog post I was going to write. But life opened it up into a whole ‘nother direction. And it left me wanting to just dance for joy.

When they first put me on a chemo drug for my Crohn’s in ’03, I thought I would lose all my hair. And then I started to wonder about what hair I would have if I could buy anything I wanted–hey, this could be cool!

And thought of my friend Mona Jo, who moved away several years ago in retirement.

Mona Jo once told me, with great delight, the story of when her husband turned (was it 4o or 50? Been awhile.)  She decided it was time for him to have a midlife crisis.

So. She had short black hair; she went out and bought a blonde wig, long, too, if I remember right. Then she called her husband at work and invited to meet him for lunch.

She showed up early at the restaurant and sat down to wait for him to come in.  He came in, glanced around–no Mona Jo. The clock ticked.  Where WAS she? This was her idea, and he had to get back to work!

She watched him get antsier and antsier.  Finally she said his name softly and he jumped!  They got their table, sat down to lunch, and Mona Jo was all sweet and lovey-dovey as they ate, while, as she tells it, he was absolutely petrified. Mona JO! What are you *doing*! What if someone SEES us! They’ll think I’m stepping out on you!

Not that he was planning on it anyway, but, he never did.

In the end, I actually didn’t lose my hair on that chemo drug the six years I was on it, although I did lose a great deal of it after my flare earlier this year.  I look in the mirror and think, wow, it’ll take three years to get it back to where I want it.  Patience, patience; it’s growing.

But there’s a wig store near Purlescence, and every now and then the thought offers just a touch of temptation.

(I stole his photo. Yes, this is a cake. You really want to embiggen this one.)

Now, I’ve enjoyed the Cakewrecks site for some time, and Jen and John, who write it, are currently on a book tour. One of their stops is supposed to be in Bethesda, Maryland, my hometown. I so wish I could go!

That tour, if you’ve been following them, recently got upended. John thought he had the flu. He went in the bathroom to barf after four hours’ sleep and, as he later wrote in the comments, he now pictures his guardian angel, sword held high, bringing it down hard on the seat parts. Jen heard him cry out, ran to him, and found him half passed out on the floor with a growing egg already on his forehead.

What do you do in a strange town?  She called a cab and took him to a local walk-in clinic, where they got dismissed–eh, the flu–but one doctor didn’t like the looks of it and came out while they were waiting for a cab back to the hotel and threatened to call an ambulance.

The upshot is, because of that head injury, the ER took the guy seriously. And it turned out it wasn’t the head injury that was making him having a hard time staying conscious like that, and it wasn’t just the flu, and it wasn’t just the pneumonia he actually had, it was a blood infection that landed him in the ICU for days, lucky to be alive, lucky not to have lost any limbs.

And they paid serious attention to him in the ER and caught it in time only because they were worried about that head injury.

Thus his mental image of that guardian angel. As she went back and forth between the hospital, the tour appearance, the hotel, and the hospital again, Jen describes her tears at having a cab driver surprise her by knowing her situation and telling her that the drivers in town were all praying for her husband.

John is now out of the hospital and they are getting back into that tour. And that’s their story.

Meantime, and the reason I mention all this, is, I got a note from LauraN that quite surprised me. Now, Laura’s an old friend whose cousin married my sister, and she was roommates in college with Richard’s cousin, so we call each other cousins-in-law in great delight.  What I didn’t know, was…

Well. Cakewrecks posts funny pictures of professional cake goofs, but on Sundays they post what they feel is the best of the best out there, the most delightful, the most intricate, the most creative cakes.  If you go here, at the end of the post is a cake Jen describes as “my absolute favorite” that day.

Now go here and you’ll find it on the second page, but don’t miss the pear balancer on the first page, which is MY absolute favorite. And for which the baker won a well-deserved blue ribbon.

That baker is LauraN’s brother.

Small blogworld.  And very, very cool.  Well done, Bill!

(The lighter areas on the towhee are flash artifacts.)

LynnM says that that order of Superballs would be enough for all the employees at the Pentagon, but that they probably don’t play at work like that.

I told her, of course not; those would be weapons of mass distraction.

Meantime, I got a nice dose of October in the mail yesterday, a surprise from Margo Lynn: the best of the bright red autumn leaves around her in Connecticut, with just the slightest touch of dampness to them (perfect!) as I pulled them out of the package, thundery storms and blustery days and all the color the trees celebrate the season with all right there in my delighted hands.  Very thoughtful and very cool, thank you, Margo Lynn.

I wanted to see the reaction of the locals to this cultural event.  It took a moment. The patio didn’t look quite right, or maybe it was that Feederfiller/Godzilla hanging around with that camera.

The towhee checked things out first and decided to play leapfrog over the offerings to get at its dinner.  The black squirrel thought about it but hung back along the fence a moment, thinking things looked suspicious; a few minutes later, though, there he was, sniffing out each leaf one by one.  It went back to the long, narrow leaf, the first one it had gone to, and took a few thoughtful bites before deciding no, it didn’t want to eat its veggies after all.  Back to the sunflower seeds. It nosed around and under the bright maple leaves, while the mourning doves looked on and debated.

Watching them awhile, I didn’t get any knitting done…  Code Red!  Alert the Pentagon!

Slinkys and Lanafactrix’s comment reminded me of someone my husband worked with when we first moved here, back when our children were quite little.

Call the co-worker Tim.

Tim put a quarter in a gumball machine on a whim in some random grocery store–do any of them still have such things on the premises?–wanting to buy a superball just like the ones he’d gotten as a kid those times when his mom had given in. A nostalgic impulse.

Turn the knob.

No dice.

Turn again. Nope.  Dang. The thing had ripped off his quarter.

Well, hey, that’s no good.  While trying to figure out the thing and if there were still some way to make it work, he noticed the very fine print at the bottom of the machine: if you have any problems please call 1-800-xxx-xxxx.

So he did. Turns out it was the number for ordering more superballs for refills. Hey! Cool! What’s the minimum order?

A gross gross.  144 balls to a bag, 144 bags.

Coooooooool….

So next thing you know, some co-worker is typing away, engrossed (sorry) in their work, and Tim leaps into their office and yells, “Bouncy bounce!”  ripping open one of those bags, arms held high. Superballs!  Then in the next guy’s office.

Their then-employer was trying to be Silicon Valley-er than thou, with a pool table for break times and a yoga instructor coming in: Ohmmmmm… Playtime was taken very seriously.  It feeds one’s creative juices around other electronically-creative types, good for the employees, good for business.

There was a three-story indoor atrium in that building.  Look out below…!  Superball!  Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

As long as they were careful, management pretended not to know about that last part.

Bouncy bounce!

“Oh, Mom, I haven’t had caramel sauce in six years!”

Not since her serious dairy allergy had surfaced. About time, then!  Okay, so this is what I did: for normal caramel sauce you mix one cup sugar with a half cup water. Stir on stove till it starts to boil; immediately stop stirring or you risk granules in your sauce.  Some will probably form on the sides of your pan; ignore them.  Watch carefully on medium or lower for, oh, five, maybe ten minutes-ish, depending on your temp and pot thickness, till the syrup starts to change color from clear to beginning to be golden.  If your stove is like mine, it’ll turn slightly on one side first, in which case, pick the pot just slightly up and swish it gently around. (No spoons in there yet!)

It will turn darker fairly quickly, again depending on the temperature, and how dark you let it get determines how intense a flavor you’ll get.  Do *not* let yourself be distracted at all during the turning, or I will have to tell you of a notable burning-pot episode that–well, maybe I won’t.

So then you turn off the stove and–wait, read this whole paragraph first!–pour in 8 oz of heavy cream, and if you use nonfat milk instead I promise not to tell but I guarantee nothing; stir fast with a long wooden spoon while angling your hand away so it’s not right above the hot steam erupting in there. Trust me on that one.

Thickens when cooled. Unless you go all non-fat on us like that.

I did two batches. One with the last of the manufacturing cream. The second, I poured in a 6-and-something-oz container of coconut cream from Whole Foods to find out if both that ingredient and the size it came in would work.

We had our friends Nina of Ann Arbor Shawl fame and her family over for dinner Friday night.   I have to tell you: more of that caramel coconut got devoured on that ice cream than the regular sauce.  It was good stuff.

The best part of it was seeing something much enjoyed but long denied now given back to my daughter. At last.  And it was so easy to do.

(Note re the picture: the sauce isn’t separated, just eaten.)

A little bit of greed, a little bit of guilt, a lot of good done anyway. (Random ball of thick handspun dog fur to illustrate it now.)

It was years ago, but a chance conversation last night on my way out of Purlescence reminded me of it.

My audiologist‘s then-receptionist saw me knitting one time, waiting for my appointment, and struck up a conversation with me.  She was a weaver, she told me, although it had been awhile since she’d done anything. But she’d been really wanting to get back into it.

And what was inspiring her, what she really wished for, was some way of getting the fleeces from her four pet alpacas spun somehow so she could weave their fur into blankets.

Okay, you know she had me all ears at that point! I did tell her there were mills that would process the fleeces into roving for handspinning, and I could bring her my Spinoff magazine and show her their ads, but all the way into yarn? That service, I wasn’t sure where to find.

However…

So, with a little trepidation on probably both our parts, we struck a deal: she would give me the fleeces, I would spin them up on my wheel, and I would give her half the resulting yarn.  Seemed fair.

Let me tell you.  Four alpacas? That is a whole lot of fluff.

The result would be a bit rustic–I didn’t have the energy nor the strength to card that kind of volume with my little hand cards, not by a long shot. Fine.

I could only guess what she was envisioning it coming out looking like, so I spun up the first skein from the black and drove down to the office to show it to her to get her reaction–because if she didn’t like it, I was going to hand the whole lot back to her and tell her she needed to find another way to get this done.  Soft and lofty, not fine, is how my wheel was going to produce it.

“Oh,” (and she exclaimed the animal’s name, which I do not remember.) “Look at this!” She held it against her face, she petted it, she stroked it, she told me about her pet that black came from, she was just absolutely thrilled.  It really could be made into yarn! This really could happen!

To me, touching those fibers had left me thinking, this is closer to llama than alpaca; clearly, her animals weren’t babies anymore. I realized, as I left, that there was no way any yarn I could make from her beloved animals was going to mean anything to me like it would mean to her.  She certainly wasn’t going to care about the micron count!

But I did.  If I spun up half for her, agreement or no agreement, the rest would sit around my house, taking up space and accusing me of my own selfishness.  I had other fibers waiting their turn at the wheel that were softer and finer, and I knew I would never get around to using hers.

It took me a month. I allocated an hour of kids-at-school time a day to it, while keeping my knitting projects going for my own sense of gratification at doing what I enjoyed doing.

Pick up a wad of fiber. Pick out the really short random bits where the shearer had hit the hair twice. Fluff it out, don’t get annoyed at wadded-up half-felted parts, spin spin spin.

Spin spin spin.

Spin spin spin.

Absolutely endless.

And I confessed to John-the-audiologist afterwards, I actually did keep one little bit of golden fleece for me, about two ounces’ worth. The very best, the very softest, I was selfish and kept it for all my work.

I felt terrible about that later.  It would have meant so much more to her than me. (I don’t think she ever knew anyway, but still. I cheated myself out of that one last bit of thrill.)

When I at last hauled a large black trashbag full of yarn to John’s office, it turned out she wasn’t there that day. I explained the whole thing to him, and he promised to get it to her.

What I didn’t know was this:

She was in the middle of a terrible, messy divorce.

Oh, poor woman! I asked John, will she be able to keep her alpacas when they get done dividing the property?

He didn’t know. He didn’t think it was working out that way from what he knew.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I never saw nor heard from her again.  She had a terribly long commute, and I guess it got to be too much and her job changed along with the rest of her upended life.  But I was assured she did get her yarn.

And I was so very glad I had given her the whole of it. Almost.  It’s a little thing, but I will always regret that one little bit held back. Those two ounces taught me a lot.

(Added later: she might well not have had any address to send a thank you to, especially at the upended time of life that must have been.   I should have passed on saying I hadn’t heard from her.  To me, the point was, I learned I should put my all into doing something for somebody because you never know what they may be going through, and it feels better by far to give of oneself whole-heartedly anyway.

Richard and I had a wonderful time at Don‘s this afternoon; ice cream was consumed, chocolate was sauced, raspberries were sacrificed. Don’s little parrot Pepper stole the show, making it very clear that Don was emphatically hers, not ours, thank you very much.  Where Don went, Pepper puttered along right behind on tiny waddling feet and we were not to come between.

And a good time was had by all.

There’s a proud little corner of me that was glad we went in Richard’s car; mine is a wreck. It’s  a ten-year-old minivan the kids learned how to drive in, and boy does it show. The third time the sliding door got sideswiped against a pole, we refused to fix it again: it still shuts.  The alarm doesn’t sound.  Good enough.  If it’s ugly, I thought at my then-teenagers but didn’t say, you guys made it ugly and it’ll be all the more disincentive to do stupid kid driving tricks because there’s no way in heck that car is ever going to impress other teenagers.

Even if it has comfy heated leather front seats.

Nowadays it also has a crack in the windshield going nearly all the way across the bottom.  Nice touch.  The deductible would put it all out of pocket, and I refuse to put a dime more into that car that I don’t have to.  With about 17k by now in out-of-pocket medical expenses this past year, starting just after we contracted for that solar system having no idea what was about to hit us, that wreck is just plain mine for awhile longer. The transmission keeps threatening to die, but it’s been threatening for two years and I keep calling its bluff. So far so good.

We got home from Don’s.  I was a bit tired, so I tried to find a ride to Menlo Park.  The church there was showing a worldwide meeting being broadcast from Salt Lake City to the Relief Society, which I believe is, at 167 years, the oldest women’s organization in the world.  Several wards’ worth of women were coming to watch it there, with a potluck to be held afterwards. I would get a chance to meet many people I didn’t know and to see old friends I rarely see.

But no luck on the carpooling idea. I got in my van and simply went.

There was a talk given wherein they described some of the history of the Relief Society: how the early women’s efforts started some of the first hospitals in the western now-states, how the Mormon Church’s system of being able to reach into disaster areas with medical and food supplies grew from the efforts of those women way back when.

But, they said, the point is to keep remembering to be actively involved on a personal level, taking care of and looking out for one another right wherever you are.  I sat there thinking, oh yes.  The small moments mean so much more than it seems like they could ever, at the times we’re planning them.

There was the potluck, there was chatting; there was the woman who bumped into me so slightly that she probably didn’t even notice, who was stunned when my cane and I went sprawling; she grabbed me, along with Julia of Julia shawl fame, just before I totally went over. She apologized profusely, having no idea, poor thing.

I explained to her she had no need to whatsoever, that the only person who should apologize was the man who’d smashed my car nine years ago.  She looked at me…? Head injury, I affirmed. My balance is tactile and visual only now. Bump and the tactile goes poof, especially when the visual’s already on overload. No big deal, honest.

She felt better when she saw it didn’t bug me. My standard line is, hey. Burns extra calories.  Keeps me thin.

All of which, it turned out, delayed me just a bit more.

…I went out to my car, ready to go home…and stood there speechless.

A group of five women I didn’t know walked out together a moment later, and I tried to tell them and did such a bad job of it that one of them asked, “Are you okay?!”

There was just too much to put into any simple sentence by way of explanation. The surgeries. The extreme sun sensitivity. The cracked windshield that makes it so I can’t possibly put my car through a car wash. The abdomen that still makes me have to take it easy.  The hose I can’t yet manage to get around to the front of the house.  The sunlight I can’t begin to stand out in to hose the thing down anyway.

My car was spotless. Someone had snuck up on it and washed it while I was inside. My car was clean!  Months of tree dust and dirt and bird poop and quiet inner frustration on my part, not spoken of to anyone outside my family as far as I know. It had so bugged me.  I hadn’t been able to do a thing about it.  MY CAR WAS CLEAN!  I had to do a doublecheck to make sure someone hadn’t removed my car and put the same model and color in its parking spot.  Nope–there’s the crack in the window, there’s the box inside still waiting to get dropped off at Goodwill.  I was absolutely gobsmacked.

I don’t know how they got away with it.  I don’t know how I got singled out nor by whom.  But I will forever be grateful someone noticed, that someone thought of it, planned it, and carried out that suds attack. (And if someone is guffawing that it took me all day to notice, if you did it last night–but I don’t think so. My family doesn’t think so.  And Michelle says she knows nothing.)

I’m still shaking my head in delighted disbelief.  Yes, Universe–yet again, I owe you. THANK YOU!!!

Two things today. The first: I realized just as I hit the freeway that I’d forgotten my camera. I nearly took the next exit home to get it, but I didn’t have time and I didn’t know if it would be allowed anyway.

Glenn Stewart of SCPBRG gave a talk in the downtown San Jose library about the rescuing and recovering of the peregrine falcon population. I knew there’d only been two nesting pairs left in California in the 70’s; I had not realized they were extinct by then on the East Coast.

DDT accumulations had decimated the populations by thinning the shells, he said; that, I already knew. I didn’t know they were shot on sight in Europe during WWII so they wouldn’t intercept the carrier pigeons delivering wartime messages.

When he and his group started their efforts to rescue the peregrines, they were told it could not be done, it was a waste of time and resources–those birds were simply gone.

But how could they not try?  I got to watch a man showing the story of his life as well as theirs, the passion that had changed everything.  He showed slides of rappelling down cliffsides to retrieve falcon eggs to replace them with dummy ones in the nest. The living eggs were taken back to UC Santa Cruz, hatched where momma wouldn’t sit on them and break the shells, fed for a short while via injured/recuperating falcons on hand that were willing to adopt them, then the rappelling was done again, the babies put back in the nest, and the dummy eggs were taken away.

There are now about 250 breeding pairs in California, and the peregrines are making a comeback elsewhere as well.

Because a few people decided that if a difference could be made, if it were at all possible, it was imperative that they try to bring those birds back into life.

And they did it.

While he spoke, he had a marvelous distraction going on to his left: on a portable perch with a drop cloth of about four feet around it stood Sophie.

When there is a peregrine too ill or injured to be released into the wild, Glenn takes care of it: Sophie was certainly well enough to travel now. She would allow Glenn to hold her and take care of her, I was told, but no one else.

Well, yes.  I would definitely expect that.

But Sophie didn’t mind having about 15 strangers nearby as she preened, stretched, scratched herself with that enormous yellow foot, napped, stood on the other foot to show how relaxed she was, and generally kept us entertained very thoroughly.  Glenn reached into her space at the end, picked a downy underfeather off the drop cloth, and handed it to a thoroughly pleased listener.

What I hadn’t expected was what followed: he pulled out the most curious contraption and I was trying to figure out what it was. First he put it on his ear, and I thought, okay, to protect his ear, as he put on his leather gauntlet–but it was on the wrong side.  He got her set up on the gauntlet, then he reached for that–thing.  And then he put it over her head.

It looked like she was wearing a WWII ace fighter pilot leather helmet, except that it covered her eyes (which I’m sure was the point.) But: it had black rubber deely-boppers, two each to each side, going out far from her head.

I tried to wrap my brain around that one. I guess it’s for a visual announcement of her personal space so people won’t try to pet her as he walks by?

It was 1:00 pm, and with San Jose State University in the same city block and school in session, the library was jammed with people.  Walking behind Glenn and one  of the moderators of the peregrine group as they left, I got to watch heads turn and feet stop, over and over and over.

There was an inner set of doors, an atrium, and then the outer doors; in the atrium stood three young men suddenly stunned at a falcon with deelyboppers going right past them. They started asking each other, and of course none of them knew a thing, so I stopped and told them that Glenn Stewart of the peregrine rescue and recovery group had just given a lecture.

“Will he give another one!?”

Google his name and UCSC. Okay; they asked about the lecture, and when I talked about those slides of rappelling down the cliffs to save the species, their eyes got big and clearly, this was something that appealed to 20-something young men.

Maybe Glenn will find his next set of helpers soon.

Now, thing the second today.

I was at Purlescence Knit Night tonight when their phone rang (and if the woman wants to add anything here, I would love it, but till then I’m keeping her name private.)  A few minutes later Nathania came over to me and quietly told me who had called: one of my readers had gone over to deliver a shawl to a friend who had Stage 3 breast cancer. It was what she could do about it.

Nathania knew and I knew as she relayed this message that when a person has been made suddenly acutely aware of how finite the minutes of one’s life are, having someone bring them hours and hours of their time, a gift of life as well as any stitches or fiber involved…there are no words.  But the caller wanted us to know the depth of the joy she had found in that giving.

She had welcomed her friend back into life in that moment.  How could she not try.  For every minute there might be of it, for however long, she was wrapping her friend in love.

Glenn would understand, too.

It was going to be a long wait. Michelle was very apologetic about having scheduled an appointment over here during my appointment with the dentist over there;  I thought, are you kidding?  How long have you been the daughter of a knitter?  No, I don’t mind, not one bit–guilt-free knitting time? Peachy-fine.

So I grabbed the shawl project du jour and threw it in my knitting bag.

But.

No. I’m not going to!

But there was that bluegreen Purl Up and Dye project from Purlescence…

Now, Kaye gave me that skein she and Nathania had dyed out of the generosity of her heart only a week or so before I had this knitting epiphany hit me of wait, I knit socks?! And that yarn, ahead of its time, emphatically wanted to be socks.

No. That’s just not what my needles do, do you hear me, yarn? I cast on this scarf instead.

Every single time I picked it up to work on it, the silly thing whined at me, But I want to be *socks*! You NEED me as socks! Rip it, c’mon, you can do it, one good frog session and you’ll have just the right colors and just enough synthetic with your merino not to wear holes in the heels and you know you’ll feel like royalty and you’ll finally have some that would go with your teal skirts and it’ll be such a big deal and and and.

For the last time, I. Do. Not. Knit. Socks! This is going to be for somebody else anyway, and you know I’m too greedy (or afraid they won’t fit) to give away socks.  I knit to give, not to keep.  Be still.

So you know how that came out; after that surprise Sock Summit package arrived, I started knitting socks after all, and that bluegreen was sitting there torn between feeling jilted and exulting in, I told you so!  So now are you going to frog me, are you are you huh huh?

Hush child.

Now, I tend to do one project till it’s done these days, a discipline I learned in knitting for my shawls book, but this scarf timed out into being the homework project with a deadline a long way off that you don’t want to work on and you have plenty of time to work on and no you’re not going to pull a 2 am-er on it at the last second, the semester doesn’t end for months and the teacher will never know you crammed, she’ll think it’s your best work and not only that she’ll tell the whole class she wishes everybody else prepared like that in advance!

Wait–that was Richard’s high school oral book report on a book he didn’t know he was supposed to have read, never mind.

I explained to the dentist’s hygienist that I was simply going to have to wait awhile after my appointment to be picked up; sure, no problem.  She sent me out into the waiting room with toothbrush and fresh floss, armed to the teeth.

The wait began. I reached for my baby alpaca–and you know what came out of that bag instead.  Hmmph.  I was knit amused.

And then it became a race: can I get this finished before Michelle shows up? So I don’t ever have to listen to its socky attitude again?

And the answer, now, is, unblocked, 44″. Stretched out, mmm, ’bout 57. So close.

Nathania took a picture of it in progress the other day so she and Kaye could recreate that colorway.  And if that doesn’t placate it, one more half hour and it’ll be cast off and that’s the ends of that.

If only I knew who this was going to be for!  After all, the best way to get kids to stop whining about something they want is to get them looking forward to something else.

Someone is going to absolutely love this colorway and the generosity by which this yarn came to me.  I know I do.

So, picture this (happened a few years ago, but I’m still telling the tale.)  An older couple comes home one day to find, of all things, a mattress blocking their front door.  What on earth?  They hadn’t ordered any mattress!  Oh, wait–must be for that other house again.

It was.

Picture winding roads out a bit from the main suburbia and a street sign that delivery truck drivers sometimes read wrong, with a home to each direction from that intersection with the same house number.

Picture my dad growing up in Carson City, Nevada.

Picture his high school classmate (and there were how many in that class, Dad? Eight?) now living in the one house, on the inadvertent receiving end of that mattress, and in the other…  Our friends V and V.

Don’t you love it when the world shrinks like that?

And just to make it even smaller: when we moved here, the father of someone we knew at church owned a house that was good for entertaining in and would occasionally turn it over to his kids for parties, and we got to go there a few times.  But Mitch’s dad retired and moved away and that was that.

V and V called us a few years ago to invite us over, but mentioned they’d moved. Okay, cool; we got the new address, we’re driving there, and the closer we get, the more we’re saying, Do you think?!… Nah…  *I* think…! And then we pull in the driveway.

Oh. My. Goodness.

Richard knocks on the door, V opens it, and Richard asks if the house still has the such-and-such room down at the end to the left.  V, stunned, goes, How did YOU know?!

Dad’s classmate got a good laugh out of that one.  And we offered to help her with any mattress removals she might need ever after.

What are your small-world stories?

Wow, what a day! Okay, I’m going to let myself be distracted a moment first by saying, Lisa, Tina: if only you could have seen all that colorwork on display! Bright silk saris in cheerful fuschia and orange, fuschia and turquoise, fuschia and gold and coral and black, and did I mention fuschia?  Reds, reds, reds, orangy-reds mixed with purply deep blues and a flash of teal.  Over to the right, blue and purple.  Over to the left, resist-dyed bright red with tiny white stars that at first glance looked like Barbara Walker’s Rose Garden lace pattern, as if all our patterns overlap somewhere in space, as if to pronounce, we are universal in our creativity and our humanity.

Bright pink, lime, you name it; down near the stage, weft of sage green, warp of fuschia, shimmering in vertical changes as the wearer walked.  Such a glorious intensity everywhere that we so seldom see in our Western culture.  Color!

M outshone them all. By far.

We’d been invited to the dance recital of the baby down our street from our New Hampshire days, the adorable little girl whose parents came over and played an evening of Scrabble with us after her family moved out here too; a teen, I think, by the time we ran into them at the Aquarium in Monterey–the time I totally embarrassed her big brother by telling him I remembered him going down their steep (to a three-year-old) old driveway on his Big Wheels. Just what every teenage boy wants so much to be told in public.  Right.

We’d visited with the parents since then but the children had been away at college. Now they were graduated and there, and M, long a dancer, had taken to serious study of the religious dances of her parents’ native land.  She had studied under a master on two continents.

It was far more than a recital; it was a two hour concert with seven musicians in accompaniment.   The auditorium was packed.  As fluid as the river she was portraying here, as determined as the trunk of the elephant there, as graceful as–there simply are no words.  M had studied and practiced long towards perfection and it showed.  Michelle and I kept glancing at each other and going wow, not wanting to miss a second of it by turning away a moment too long.

At the end her master teacher pronounced that M, too, now, was a master and a guru.  She had succeeded.

Her father, taking the podium, wondered out loud at a life’s journey taking such faraway turns: New Hampshire–M totally made my day by looking straight at us, way in the back, immediately as he said that; she had not seen us before the program, but she recognized us–and in their life here in California and visits to way back home.  And here we all were together from all these places in celebration of her accomplishments and hard work.

To life!

(p.s. Yes, I finished her wool/silk scarf in time. It is not bright. The colors are quiet.  But I think it’ll be okay. And V and V, if it’s not, rat your daughter out for me, wouldja? My needles love to dance.)

I kept it short. I wanted enough yarn left to make a matching pair of socks of the merino Jasmin spun up for me: after I started with one pattern, I realized that at the size it was coming out to, I could switch and do it a la Water Turtles, a very open, stretchy lace, and not have to use up lots of yardage. I think my final stitch count was something like 241/row in the main body, only seven Water Turtle repeats long, and it’s plenty big enough for me. (Pardon me while I go run in those loose ends…)

This is the yarn Karin just surprised me with to replace the shawl I surprised her with to replace the yarn she surprised me with.

This is the baby squirrel near a towhee, to give a sense of scale.  It has already learned it is not to climb the awning support pole so temptingly close to the birdfeeder, not from me but from the other squirrels–and it was highly amusing to watch it and a gray squirrel this morning. They were staring at it longingly, twitching towards it and away and towards it and away in fierce repetitive tiny motions, not daring to but oh it’s fall!and you have to squirrel away food!!andandand!!!

All I did was unlatch the door and the two careened into each other while trying to run for the hills.   Guilty!

The baby squirrel tried to climb the fence yesterday and found itself sliiiiiiiiiiding back down the wood. Oops. Made it on the second try, though; it’s getting better at this quickly.  Yesterday the fence, tomorrow that pole, bwahaahaa. (If that big feederfiller isn’t looking…)

We’ve all had days like that–being new at something, trying again, and the sense of satisfaction at getting it right.

And one more thing.  My usual daily dose of hot cocoa?  Mom, this is for you: today I broke just a small piece off the end of a Valrhona 85% bar and grated it into the mug (and got tired of grating and just broke up the rest of it and threw it in).  Add the milk, nuke the milk (you don’t put solid chocolate into hot milk, they have to warm up together to keep the chocolate from seizing), and then I added the cocoa and sugar.  Skipped the usual dollop of cream.

Wow.  Things will never be the same.