Five members of the Supreme Court, including Catholics Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, turned down their invitations to witness Pope Francis’s address to Congress. I can only feel that they–and we–missed out. There is a power for good in the example of a person of great love, a clarity offered to one’s sense of purpose. Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Thomas S. Monson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and any others you might want to name from your own experiences or readings: they don’t just preach it, they live it.

If only….

Breyer was in San Francisco to give a talk and sign copies of his new book–my daughter is in the audience as I type.

After the Pope left yesterday, two reporters stumbled into the best, most human story on what would be Boehner’s surprise resignation come the morning: Boehner beckoned them to the spot he had stood in to try to feel what he had felt, to experience some part of what the day had been for him. The Washington Post, here, and a Q&A with Speaker Boehner today, here.

So apparently there’s a Twitter meme going on whereby former teenage nerds are offering Ahmed Mohamed a show of support by building clocks themselves and taking a picture of wires and all and posting theirs.

My sweetie happened to take his with him to Timothy Adams tonight to show our daughter; thus we have a chocolate shop going on in the background and empty truffle wrappers in front. (And they were very very good.) I wish we could share those with Ahmed, too; maybe Mark Zuckerberg could bring him in after his tour of Facebook headquarters.

By now you’ve probably heard of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old who built a clock and took it to show to his engineering teacher at his new high school in Irving, Texas.

Now, being married to a nerd, we have a lot of motherboards and various other parts kicking around here. Lots. He’s actually got my yarn stash beat. (Note which one of us is writing this.)

The Heathkit company of our youth quit making electronics kits ages ago. Even I built some of their kits–it was a requirement in a college electricity course. My clock finally died after 35 years but the alarm in case the standing freezer gets too warm is still at work in the garage.

So into that vacuum stepped the folks who started Raspberry Pi after looking at how expensive gadgets had gotten; few parents would want to let their kid take, say, an iPad apart and explore its innards, and they decided budding nerds needed to have access to electronic parts to tinker with and to be able to make things at a reasonable price–and I mean exceedingly reasonable.

And thus we have, for instance, the controller that turns the Christmas lights on my mango tree on and off depending on the temperature range I set for it. Had we bought such a gadget prefab it would have been prettier but also more expensive and this way my sweetie has made himself a part of that tree’s success. He built that.

This is the hubby who decided one Christmas years ago when the kids were little that the usual setup of chairs across the hallway with blankets draped over it to block their view of the goodies ahead wasn’t enough. The rule was that you wait for Mommy and Daddy and Mommy and Daddy are allowed to sleep till a semi-reasonable hour after trying to assemble that #*% rocking horse till 2 am (second page of instructions, line 17 halfway down: “Before you start, make sure you…” And so forever after it had a screw missing because there just was no way.)

No peeking.

A motion sensor, a tape recorder, and the very unexpected sound of Daddy’s voice: “Go. back. to. BED, Richard!”

And so it was with some amazement that I listened to my ever calm peacemaker of a husband take off on that principal and those cops. “They should be in JAIL!” He was just outraged. In his own youth, he told me, he had gotten permission from the school, made fireworks (me: You *made* fireworks? him: Yes, I made fireworks!) and had brought them in.

They called Ahmed’s clock a bomb and when he confirmed his last name and refused to say that it was a bomb, after having illegally questioned him without allowing him to notify his parents much less in their presence, they marched him across the school in handcuffs, hauled him to police headquarters and arrested him.

Let’s see: false imprisonment, false police report, false charges, under color of authority, lack of parental notification, libel, and even after they found out that it really was just a clock the school still said he was suspended for three days as if he were somehow guilty for embarrassing them–and then they sent home a letter to the other kids’ parents about how their children were being kept safe (from, basically, terrorists by the sound of it) and that there had been an incident but everything was fine now.

Now, if they’d thought it was really a bomb, would they have left it sitting in the school as they blasted this child? But they did.

Would they have evacuated the school? But they did not.

It all comes across as the English teacher and the principal with the cops piling on trying to show that smart brown kid with the Muslim name just exactly who had the power around here.

But then, thank heavens, the aftermath began. President Obama on Twitter: “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”

Mark Zuckerberg, NASA (he was wearing their t-shirt when it happened) and a growing number of places: You want to come tour our headquarters/lab/etc? We want smart people like you and we would love to show you around here.

Mohamed’s father, an immigrant from Somalia, thanked all those who stood up for his son: I love America. When we see something wrong we stand up.

The school is utterly unrepentant.

Some lawyer is totally going to clean their clock.

The bubble wrap has disappeared, whether upward or downward in those trees I do not know. Squirrelwork!

Silly stuff aside, I want to learn how she does this. I want to understand the chemistry of all of it. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a BBC article here about an Italian woman who is the last person keeping alive a tradition going back to, in her family’s tradition, the days of the Biblical King Herod’s great-granddaughter: she harvests byssus, the dried saliva of a clam, and adds a mix of spices that not only dye the clam silk but make it luminous.

The clam is a protected species but so is she–the Italian coastguard overseas her dives.

She is the Antonio Stradivari of fiber artistry. No one else can quite yet create what she does. She sells nothing and gives away everything according to the needs of those around her.

The reporter did not know enough to ask her how she changed the fibers into what she does, whether she works it still wet straight out of the sea or dried like her sample, whether she pulls it wide like a cocoon of terrestrial silk–is it all one long thread?–and spins it from there, or just how her yarn comes to be from its raw material. How is it done. I want to pull up a chair and learn (I’ll take my brother Bryan, he speaks Italian).

And I can only hope all the attention doesn’t cause poaching of her beloved clams.

France. High-speed rail, 554 passengers on the train.

I am in awe of the two American soldiers who had a bad feeling about that one guy, heard him loading an automatic in the bathroom and when he came out shooting, clearly planning to start at the back of the train and kill his way forward, jumped him along with another American and a Brit and despite being unarmed and despite being shot at and stabbed, they succeeded in wrestling him to the floor and getting his hands tied behind his back with t-shirts.

One account said the soldier who was stabbed in the neck had run ten meters towards the shooter’s gunfire.

Wow. Just, wow.

Prayers for all those injured and a huge thank you to those good men for being willing to put themselves on the line for everyone else.

81F (for a few minutes) and .23″ near San Diego today.

I remember trying to convince my then-school-age children that to me, there should be rain in summer, and that it should be a warm, heavy rain that makes you want to run in it and laugh for joy and splash in all the puddles with your bare feet and listen to the crickets after it’s over.

Warm? Rain? Summer? These were three words that did not go together at all as far as they were concerned. Rain equals cold straight off the ocean and it only happens in winter. You bundle up against it. You do not want to get your feet wet. Warm does not rightfully co-exist with rain. They refused.

Except it almost did exactly that today–we got the heat and the muggy air and the clouds threatening darkly but we just missed any actual water to go with. San Jose got some, though. San Diego got it. The I-10 bridge that collapsed into the flash flood hitting its supports definitely got it. In July! Never since records began in 1877 has LA gotten so much at such a date.

Hudson and Parker had to experiment with this idea of drinking summer skywater straight from the tap. Note that Hudson is all ready to splash in the puddles and Parker for the warmth.

Jon Stewart, and then Malala.

Those who forgave. So soon and so freely, even in their anger and their pain beyond comprehension: they are the ones with the power to change how we all talk to each other about that which wounds and divides us, they are changing the world by their loving, by their actually being what the rest of us could only hope we might. But that we never want to have to know if we could.

Alison Kraus‘s “I’ll Fly Away” with The New Yorker’s cover.

While over here, I want to rage at that stupid, stupid state law that keeps a wretched symbol endlessly at full height and to tell the South Carolina legislators, Take that Confederate battle flag down. NOW. Your shame is flapping in the wind for all the world to see in front of the statue of a man who represented the worst of what the Civil War was fought over. Stop with the willful blindness. Gov. Nikki Haley claims CEOs in her state don’t care but I do and I will boycott South Carolina and every business in it till it’s down. BMW, Denny’s, are you listening?

And then there are the families at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, not shaming but offering understanding so that we can all become better than this, so that our children’s future might have greater light. Reclaiming their church as a haven of safety offered to all who seek it.

I aspire to be like them when I grow up.

Trying to place the name, he asked me, Who’s Chris Hadfield?

I started singing Ground Control to Major Tom (I LOVE this video! It’s someone’s repost of the one that was seen 22 million times but only had a one-year license to stay up) and he instantly got it. If you haven’t read Stephanie’s post, please, do, her post is way more fun than mine!

Meantime, here, I turned the dishwasher on at 11:00 last night and we were off to bed. At nine a.m. I went to grab my hot cocoa mug out of it–and the door wasn’t quite hot enough to burn my hand but it was getting close and the thing smelled of burning plastic.

In disbelief I pulled it open and the white plastic at the bottom below the heating element was scorched.

This is a dishwasher that had previously been serviced under a recall for having burned houses down. I immediately unplugged it.

Maytag, bless them, when I called, duly noted that we had bought it according to their records in 2007 so of course it was long out of warranty. I expected an argument but instead they immediately offered to send someone out to repair it: the service call and the labor would be on them–they hoped I wouldn’t mind if we paid for the parts that might be needed?

Sounded quite fair to me. Although: I will have a tab open on the computer with their own price list/suggested retail for such showing when the guy comes. One can only hope he says it’s repairable.

So we came thisclose to burning our house down last night, and when I mentioned it on Facebook my friend India from our Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign (where we and others knit hundreds of hats to create a sense of community among members of Congress) said her neighbor actually did get burned out of their house a few nights ago by their dishwasher.

Mine is model MDBH945AWB (that last B for black). In case you want to go check yours. It might be a good idea.

The awful and ironic thing after yesterday’s post was finding a very still honeybee with a foot snagged in the mango tree cover today. It was quite cold but I don’t think it was the cold. (Cue McCoy: “He’s dead, Jim.”) I will keep that cover further away come the mornings henceforth from anything flowering.

I’ve been checking the new peach every day for any sign of breaking dormancy and at two weeks after planting, at last this evening there was a bit of green here and swelling pink buds there and there–my apologies that I cannot hold my hands steady enough for the camera to zero in well. One concern had been that the Indian Free produces so late that I was hoping the flowering would still overlap with at least the Babcock, since it’s the only one that needs a pollinator.

Well there you go. Looks like we’re going to do just fine. Whether I let it set fruit so young or not, I love that I didn’t have to wait another year or two to find out.

Meantime, I woke up this morning needing to knit something pretty. I didn’t know what and I didn’t care but I needed to knit and I needed lace and I needed something colorful and pretty and NOW.

The end result is that after looking briefly at some promising yarns, I sat down with the endless slog of dark steel blue in boring 2×2 and made major progress on my brother’s hat, neglected during this flu till now. And I actually got to where I could see the end of the thing coming at me. That feels huge. It is actually rewarding me with progress in exchange for time spent. It did not feel so for so long.

I can’t end without mentioning my sense of loss, like everybody else’s sense of loss, at Leonard Nimoy’s passing. My favorite tribute to him comes from President Obama himself:

“Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time. And of course, Leonard was Spock. Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

I loved Spock.”

As did we all.

If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss Mr. Nimoy’s explanation for the origins of the Vulcan greeting.

The dishwasher fix? It was good for one single load Saturday. After much research we unscrewed the door again tonight to check for corrosion, but, nope. At least we found that a new control board (if that works) is half the price at Sears–which helps, because at this point with all the repairs this thing has needed since immediately after the warranty we’ll have spent enough to have bought a Bosch in the first place. If we could find a schematic for the electronics we might be able to bypass the start switch but all links to one seem to be broken. Maytag MDBH945AWB.

A better part of the day was when I was quite surprised to find five new flower buds on the struggling baby mandarin tree. It is much happier where I moved it to.

I did not see the male Cooper’s hawk coming in till he landed on the giant elephant ear just outside the window ten feet away from me. I had twice today accidentally flushed a dove from right next to the door and such things do not go unnoticed.

But I had nothing to offer. Only love and silent gratitude at his presence. He stayed a little while.

I stumbled across a story in the St. Louis newspaper that I thought deserved wider notice: small farmers feeding their families on land their local airport was happy to have them work for 35 years. The airport didn’t have to pay to maintain it and an underserved community worked for its fresh vegetables, lugging in water by hand as needed.

A developer bought that land and the farmers expected that at last that would be the end of it all.

It wasn’t.

They’re getting an irrigation system, restrooms, and a farming-only deed in perpetuity. Across the street.

I was planning on writing about figs. Friends shared the bounty of their tree and my tall Richard helped pick a few higher-up ones for the others with his feet still on the ground. I always enjoy it when he does good simply by being tall–something he didn’t choose, it just is. Like the color of his skin.

I can no longer remain silent.

I haven’t mentioned the news of late because I felt nothing I could say could be enough and at the same time I simply wanted there to be one place on the Internet where people could rest from all that for a moment to read about, oh I dunno, mandarin trees and Costco shoppers playing falling piano to my roadrunner.  Or whatever.

And yet some things require they be addressed. I feel John Oliver has done the best summing-up so far of Ferguson, Missouri. Daily Kos, meantime, reports that Tibetan monks arrived there to represent for peacemaking, knowing that sometimes simply observing people often improves their behavior in ways that transcend the barriers of language.

The whole issue of the over-militarization of our police is being shown and borne on the shoulders of those who have the least but whose power is that they may yet change our nation for the better for what they are having to endure–the huge betrayal by those who swore to protect them, the betrayal too by those who give in to their anger late in the nights and allow the rogue forces to justify themselves.

There is the utterly innocent black man beaten by them before Michael Brown, who was charged with destruction of city property for bloodying the cops’ uniforms with four officers later lying during the deposition against their own signed statements. Enraged at finding they had jailed the wrong black man, they’d been determined to make him pay for it. There were video cameras everywhere there, as there must be in such places, and yet somehow no recording of it could be found.

One of those cops is now on the city council.

All those images, all that grieving for the human spirits on both sides of that huge divide and for how much better it could have been, should have been, needs to be, must become for all our sakes….

I wrote this on Facebook at Robin Williams’ death:

Every person matters. You matter. Whether I know you or not, you matter to me.

…….

And that, in the end, is all that matters among us. May we so live.

Get your name listed privately with the auctioneer, now you can buy your very own.

The guy inherited a fortune.

The guy liked tanks.

And so the guy collected…tanks.

And the guy built a house that had clearly been designed to mimic a very spacious one.

And he built a room (to use the word expansively) off that house with a huge pipe organ in it and seating for a crowd. He invited our friend Jim to play it–the former-world-traveling-concert-organist music professor who helped a Catholic priest brush up on his skills because he was going to go play for the Pope. That sort of thing. (Jim also taught our son Richard, who would go on to minor in organ performance in college.)

Jacques Littlefield invited the Boy Scouts to come tour his tanks and listen to Jim play.

I remember staring at Jim’s email and thinking, he wants to show us his…tanks? Like, real, TANKS? And he has them HERE?!

But so we did, and we got a tour with the enthusiastic owner himself. Each tank had a history to it that Littlefield knew well. They were still functional, too, all or most I don’t remember, although the town required him to have them disarmed before they could come.

There at the end of one driveway was the propeller from the Lusitania.

Turns out the man found out he had cancer not long after that day that we met him.

Reading about the breaking up of Littlefield’s collection after his passing, that building, we’ve been there. There were certain tanks that all those young boys were allowed to climb into to check them out as the guy grinned.

He told the tale that Hollywood had come calling, wanting to have such a perfect period-specific prop in their movies. They set a bond in case anything should happen–and then they blew the dang thing up and happily paid up, having planned to do just that all along.

It still stung and he never allowed it again. Let them find their own $@# tanks if they couldn’t respect his.

There will be a museum now in Massachusetts. And some will be sold.

Y’know? My collection of wool and silk and baby alpaca yarn and fiber? I mean, to each their own and that’s fine, but I think I get to feel supremely reasonable about it all.

And it would be a darn sight easier to give away.

Oh wait. Post-assembly, I already do. Knit on, then.

For all the studying and all the tests, they did not know for certain that they would survive the flight. It had never been done before. But the invasion of Japan was planned next and, for all the destruction this would wreak (and they did not yet know nor anticipate acute radiation syndrome), many more millions of people would surely die if the men in that plane did not take on this burden.

I mentioned once about my uncle’s role in WWII.

A fellow officer greeted my dad’s older brother in the mess hall that night with, “And what did you do today, soldier?”

“I think I just ended the war.”

A year ago we were in Baltimore for our daughter’s graduation from Johns Hopkins.

Karida Collins of Neighborhood Fiber Co names her colorways after parts of Baltimore and my hometown of Washington DC, and this is her Charles Village colorway, which I adore.

Trust a knitter to think of yarn when seeing what happened in Charles Village after all the rains this week. The train tracks are below. At 1:15 you suddenly wonder why anyone is brave enough to still be holding that camera there–so glad no one was hurt. But wow. That’s going to take some work.

More important than anything I could say tonight, I would ask that you go read this article in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King.