(Carefully) rolling the box he’d climbed into made him giggle.

So the computer did it to my picture. Sorry, Mac, you’re just not as cute.

The forgotten Blue Moon Fiber order from Tina Newton’s dyepots arrived the day before we left, a cheerfully vivid 50/50 merino silk. Not real practical for kids but a lot of fun and it would at least last a little while. Lily got a hat, and on hearing the next morning that Mathias had insisted on wearing it yarmulke style, I knit him one, too, fascinated at how differently the yarn played out in the two sizes.

The white: I had Shibui with me in I think baby alpaca/merino, when some cotton with a little silk is what I’d intended to grab. Again, at least Lily would get to wear it for a little while before it would have been outgrown anyway, right? I had time. I had needles. I had this yarn. Go.

I did know that everything goes through the laundry there; to knit with anything not machine washable was to know it would have a very short life. And that was okay.

I realized afterwards that I buy enough coned yarn that I deliberately preshrink that I hadn’t actually realized just how much laundering could affect yarn-store wool. It wasn’t going to just go down a single size or so.

They really did love them while they lasted and even though it was okay with me, the kids hurt that they’d felted them down to iphone-6 cozies.

Our last full day in Anchorage, then, Richard and I stopped by Far North Yarn and bought a skein of by-golly actual superwash merino. Their Rios shipment wasn’t in yet but I just needed a little something simple to start.

The replacement white lace hat, identical to the original but not quite as soft (hey Plymouth), was finished by the time the first plane touched down in Seattle on our way home Saturday.

Now I need to stop by the local shops to try to find a washable rainbow. Bright. It has to be bright.

It rained every single day we were there. There had been thousands of fires across the state and the air had been record bad, to the point that the doctors had been reluctant to send Lillian and Sam home into it and you could even smell the smoke from inside the hospital.

Rain, blessed rain.

We got to see the biggest rainbow ever, stretching across parkland from mountain to mountain and towering over the one in between.

Mathias and his baby sister need rainbow hats now that hold up to the elements.

We just walked in the door. The earthquake was in Alaska. My laptop was dead and I couldn’t access my email till we got home, but I can now. After 19 days I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do–and pictures to share.

Crashing for now. Type to you tomorrow.

Sunday: I startled her into a laugh, and it was a warm, welcoming laugh that left me wistful that I couldn’t stop right there and chat and become friends for life, because it instantly felt like we were now.

Up to that moment I had been a bit consternated, and the rain wasn’t helping any. Church was over, the building was emptying, and I was glad to have found someone still there I could ask as she finished clearing things from a children’s classroom.

“Excuse me–we went outside looking for our car and it wasn’t there; is there another parking lot on the other side of the building?”

I’m sure no one had ever asked her that before, and the chance to so easily make my day easier delighted her.

“Yes, there is,” she nodded as she laughed in surprise.

Richard, meanwhile, was already ahead, determined to find that car without having to be out in that rain any more than necessary. You have a problem, you apply logic, you solve it. Which is fine.

But I wouldn’t have missed that moment of mutual delight for anything.

A massage chair, not too hard a one. I looked up at their big screen and had this brief moment of, I didn’t know those could ripple.

5.1 or 5.2, depending on whom you ask. We like our earthquakes at entertainment-only level like that.

We were heading for a pizza picnic at the park where there was a playground designed for 2-5 year-olds, and before we left I grabbed my ready-for-anything jacket. After all, it was 5:00 and it gets cold fast at sundown, right?

Oh wait. Sundown takes several hours in September in Alaska. There is not that precipitous drop from 63F there would be at home.

Sam grinned and said to two-year-old Mathias in the back seat, Grammy’s a Californian.

Clearly this was meant to be an in-joke between them, even if he had no idea what it was about.

Grammy is uh Caff Phone uh!

Sam laughed and said it again.

So he did too. They were having a great time.

We got to the park, I looked at the kids playing in t-shirts and my sweater and left the down jacket in the car.

For the record: the lemon mousse topped blueberry compote tarts at Fire Island Bakery were worth several trips there. I’m going to have to figure out how to make those.

Just by way of apology for the radio quiet these last two weeks.

Not blocked, no daylight for the photo to help the moose show better, and I cast off too loosely in my hurry to finish it tonight and need to go back and tighten that up.

But yes, basically, it’s done and a small part of me cannot comprehend how that could be possible.

It’s either snowing or it’s coming down with chicken pox but I think it’ll do quite nicely.

Does anybody else do this?

I’m not one to cast on lots of projects at once. Yarn may be the boss of me but I don’t like it to nag; a hat in the purse and a kids-only-try-this-at-home project is all I want going.

And yet, when something the scope of that afghan is almost done, I scatter those last few days into winding and scouring coned yarn, admiring stuff in my stash for why I bought it in the first place, making no commitments but getting the most likely contenders that needed that bit of prep work in view and drying for the final winding, dreaming away at what they could be as I go and grateful for mill-end stores that help me afford my habit.

Pre-shrunk deep teal baby alpaca/wool and plum purple cashmere are drying as I type.

Thank you everybody for the wonderful words on my Anchorage afghan.

I at long last got to the overpass (mannn…) and with hardly anybody moving had time to look down and see what turned out to be an upside-down sewage truck on both sides of the freeway, looking impaled by the divider.

I was sure that one was fatal.

Found out later, nobody was hurt. Not even the guy it hit while trying to avoid the one at fault. Yay safety regulations and sheer great luck.

I made it to Cottage Yarns and showed off the Rios afghan and bought my first Dos Tierras skeins in the most gorgeous Solis bluegreens.

I took the other freeway home. Clearly, quite a few other people had diverted, too. But hey, I got to see Katherine for the first time since May, and that was my biggest reason for going: keeping tabs on how my friends are doing. I’m glad I went.

Figs are supposed to be sweetest in the morning. Yeah yeah yeah whatever, I wanted a homegrown fig and I wanted that bit of affirmation of good things created and nurtured and forget the sewer truck effects and I wanted my fig now and I went out and picked a couple and shared with my sweetheart who enjoys them but doesn’t adore them quite like I do.

Well who knew. Figs like super-hot days. They’re their native territory. Could not have asked for better.

I have a bit of very pretty new yarn calling to me.

I need to finish that cream afghan.

Edited to add, I forgot to write what I sat down to say in the first place: I got a surprise in the mail. From Afton. Who’d just been to Peru. It was fingerpuppets she’d bought there. The most perfect souvenir–thank you, Afton!

Hey, Mom, wanna go to Andy’s Orchard with my friend and me?

YES!

I sat in the back as they caught up in the front seat (her dear friend just moved here a week ago) and just about finished the back of the baby sweater a mile from home.

Kit Donnells are some of the best peaches out there–and one of Andy’s creations.

On a total non sequitur, I was mentioning to Holly a few minutes ago about a message Richard got in the early days of DARPAnet, the precursor to the internet.

So I had to go find it: the fractured fairy tale Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. Enjoy.

Today was a day spent knowing I’ll feel better tomorrow–I’m already starting to–and that it was worth it.

The antlers aren’t quite *that* big–the fabric needs smoothing out.

Added two rows’ uplift on the wings vs the swatch (cue the “uh, I meant to do that”) and decided to keep it.

Am debating adding an edging afterwards to make sure the thing can shrink all it wants and still be useful. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that if I do but it’ll be the first time (remembering a certain unforgettable ruffly edge that with all its extra stitches took forever to do–but the kid liked it) that I’ll have done it like I want it to come out.

One hopes.

Pick up three of every five up the sides this time. Right?

I had just picked him up from work.

I reminded him of that time at that reindeer farm in Alaska several years ago, where I asked the guy what they do with the downy undercoat of their animals in the spring and he kind of held out his hands to show it going away poof on the wind, explaining that they’d been told the fiber was too short to spin. He added wistfully that it *was* marvelously soft, though.

I was agog. I promised him that handspinners would card it with merino to anchor it and pay a small fortune for it–after all, look at the price of qiviut!

He was convinced it could not be.

I pled my case. I told him that come next spring if he sent me some I would very happily demonstrate.

I almost had him. So close. Enough that I knew that after I left he would at least make inquiries–I mean, why turn down a revenue source that could help support his farm?

Today, not looking for any such thing, I stumbled across this:

These merino skeins are softened and enhanced with 20 percent reindeer.
To our knowledge, Coyote Trail Farm and Fiber Mill, is the only mill in the country—probably the world—that processes reindeer. 

At $65 a skein I didn’t buy any, I quickly assured my husband in the passenger seat. With a grin: Yet.

He immediately exclaimed, with the eagerness of a small grandchild, But does it fly?!

That one little puffball in front of the moose is for the above-the-knees single dandelion flower outside the front door that so transfixed me on our first visit to Alaska.

So: this is how I draw. This is how my little sister draws.

You know that old insult, Stick to your knitting? Well yeah. Makes perfect sense to me, I think I will, thanks.