It took me a moment to grok the thing.

And then I started trying to rescue about twenty stitches: the wooden tip had come clean off the cable when my knitting needle self-destructed as I’d picked my project up.

Huh. I think the last time that happened was a good fifteen or so years ago. I looked at the tiny screw sticking out, thought, well that’s probably stripped, and simply jammed the pieces back together. And they held! For three rows so far.

Didn’t I just buy that longer size 9 needle to work on that afghan? I did. Where did I buy that. It’ll come to me. Always spring for the better-made needles (those weren’t.)

Meantime, the last Anya seedling is suddenly really getting the hang of this sunlight and green and roots thing. Even if it kind of looks from that angle like it’s being devoured by a tick.

It has the usual ribbing at the bottom but I tried it on like this and instantly loved it.

I’m debating whether to create a sunflower to tack onto the blue or whether just to go make another one and do it to that one.

(Yarn: Malabrigo Rios, left over from my ocean afghan.)

So, being curious after last night’s post, I googled Arlo Guthrie today.

Turns out the word “massacree” is actually a word, not just Arlo playing verbal Dr. Seuss.

From Vox: ‘A massacree is a series of absurd events, so the Alice’s Restaurant Movement is against absurdity and in favor of reason. It is against arresting someone for littering and in favor of ending wars.’

Meantime, I’d told my Zoom knitting group last week that I was working on a yellow and blue hat, and everybody thoroughly approved. Then I spent the week feeling like no matter how much I wanted to, I just couldn’t knit, between being glued to the news updates and the message from my sister-in-law that she was flying to California in three days to visit a childhood friend who was quite ill and could she come see us?

It wasn’t till the next Zoom meeting tonight that I got back to it. That’s right, I was up to the blue part already, oh good. Knitknitknitknitknit.

At the end, they asked if anyone wanted to show off their work.

It just needed the top decreases. I brought it out from below the camera’s view and onto my head needles and all.

The entire group gasped, it sounded like.

We have all felt like Ukrainians these past two weeks. We can make our support visible to those in our communities who are. I know there are a lot of them in this area.

I imagine there will be more hats like that made in the coming week.

I suddenly realized yesterday that I have a silicone cake pan that I’d wondered a year ago why I’d bought it (BakeDeco was the source.) I mean, it’s nice, but I hadn’t needed another pan, given how much I love my yarn-ball one from the same company.

Wait. It is.

It’s a mold in the shape of a sunflower.

I wanted it done in a day but that didn’t quite happen.

Meantime, Thursday, Richard was driving home from across the Bay when the Check Engine light came on. Nothing seemed wrong with the car otherwise as far as he could tell so he drove it home.

Which is how we found out our mechanic isn’t open on Fridays. We spent three days hoping hard that this would not be the time we would have to be trying to replace the ’07 Prius–not this year.

The cable to the battery was loose. They tightened it. They couldn’t find anything else and that did the job, and sent me off with, If it does it again bring it right back in here.

Somehow, the phrase ‘dodged a bullet’ came to mind and immediately got stomped on hard. No. No we didn’t. Come on.

Speaking of which, if you’d like to support Ukrainian knit designers without their having to ship you anything physically, this site lists several and I just bought several patterns. (I’d tried Ravelry’s ‘Advanced Search by country’ feature and had not found Ukraine listed, though it may well be now.) That gray hat that is the first thing that shows up in Blackbunny Fiber’s link stretches out on the head across its top into a sunflower per the Ravelry pictures. Perfect.

I’ve spent the last two days wishing I had some yellow yarn, but since I never wear yellow I don’t buy it either.

I was thinking about that again this evening as a purple beanie went slowly round and round in my hands during my Zoom knitting meeting as people were talking about the attack on Ukraine: where we could donate. Where we could hope to do the most good from so far away.

Wait.

Moments after it ended, I suddenly remembered back when I bought way more than I used and what a mistake and a waste I’d thought it was at the time (and I gave some of it away) but… I went running to look.

I did still. There you go. The octopus leftovers. That blue, a bit darker in a different dye lot, for the sky, a yellow with a slight peach to it for the sunflower national flower. Superwash merino. I can dive right in after all.

You know if I walk around with their flag on my head a lot of people are going to ask for one.

Let me just finish off the top of that other beanie to get it off my needles and out of the way.

Last night, Richard set the heat to go to 75 at 7:00 a.m. to try to last us the day.

7:30 a.m., I made a tall mug of hot cocoa. I made a second for him. I made a third for me and poured it into a thermos.

8:15, the lights went out.

He took the car into work because he sure couldn’t do it from here.

I put a long piece of scotch tape across the fridge and freezer side-by-side doors to keep me from having a stupid moment borne of 28 years’ habit of opening those particular doors. (On a side note, if I buy a new, prettier fridge with no broken shelf, how will I ever get one that will hold up as long as that one has?)

I started reading a book.

I drank my cocoa, but to no one’s surprise it was near room temperature three hours in.

I opened the thermos. That cocoa was still hot–careful. It was 1 pm. I sipped away as I finished the book. I thought, if that’s been too warm too long to be safe don’t tell me because I’m only being guilty at that for today.

I made progress on the barely-begun new afghan project.

I made progress on organizing a whole bunch of stuff.

I wished I had more hot cocoa.

I wished the city would hurry up and finish with their power upgrade/maintenance work. I thought about how we live a block or so from the infamous Pipeline 132 that blew up that neighborhood in San Bruno so thank you I’d rather utility work got done right rather than in a hurry. I can wait.

I didn’t want to wait.

I wished for takeout.

And then at 4:30, half an hour early, the lights suddenly clicked on oh thank you thank you.

When he finally got through the commute home, we finished off the lemongrass chicken in the fridge to make sure it wouldn’t go bad.

But the last of the milk in there was still cold.

The scotch tape saved the day.

Morning light somehow captures the color best so far.

For my own notes: two strands of dk Cashwool in Mulberry (sold out) from Colourmart, two 900 gram cones with 208 and 162g remaining but that includes 32 grams for the plastic cones they’re wound onto, size 8 needles, 239 stitches per row and could have been wider but with lots of sideways stretch it will definitely do.

Definitely.

The recycled cashmere sweater bought with LLBean Bucks came yesterday and I’ve been wearing it today.

So here goes.

The fit is quite generous, allowing for shrinkage I’m guessing; I would have bought a small rather than a medium had I tried them on in a store, except that the sleeves are inexplicably on the short side. Long enough to work out okay for me personally, though, since my arms are slightly short, too, but it made me not return it to exchange sizes.

I took a close look at the distribution of blue vs white in the heathered yarn: both front and back have slightly more white at upper left. Go figure. Not that anyone’s likely to notice it, though, it’s definitely not much of a difference. Overall, I would say the color distribution is surprisingly good considering the likely randomness the fibers took in getting to that point.

It’s garter stitch, and I’m trying to figure out if that’s why the fabric seems–I want to say more floppy than the usual. I’m not sure how strong the yarn would be if I were knitting it and I’m guessing less so than one straight from the goat.

But it will do. It will definitely do. I like it. I mean, it’s cashmere and the shade of blue turned out to be just what I wanted.

But if I were given a choice between recycled yarn and not (and they generally seem to be close in price on Colourmart) I’m definitely going with the not.

I’ve seen the description “recycled cashmere” in garments for sale, and now in a few yarns at Colourmart. And wondered what processes were meant by that. Is it just the leftover pounds of yarn from a production run, or is it something more? Tell me they don’t shred already processed yarns in the carding machines. Or I guessed maybe they must?

Colourmart decided (not on this particular listing, but here’s an example and it’s on sale) to add a link.

They actually cut up old sweaters? Surely in an automated process and that picture of people holding scissors is for show? There are actually stores that do trade-ins? Where? What about moth damage? They’d have to make sure every stage of such things is eradicated. What about the weak spots that would be left behind in the fibers? Stains? Is this why the recycled sweaters seem to tend to be thicker? To make sure everything’s covered?

And yet the yarns they create all seem nice and even to my eyes.

Well, huh.

LLBean ordered some of this latest trend but given this past year’s shipping issues, got theirs in (if they even did yet) after Christmas.

I have a credit card account in their name that periodically earns me Bean Bucks and I’ve been letting them slowly, slowly accumulate. I’d been thinking I might blow it at the end of the year on a cashmere sweater but they didn’t have any that grabbed me hard enough.

But now they do. Only they’re recycled, even if I think, so far, that I’d rather they were not. They’re not cheap (well, in my case, at an outlay of $12.95 yes they are, never mind) but I’m just curious enough. Plus I happen to like it.

Shipping, they say, commences approximately February 8. Hopefully.

Silicon Valley might call that vaporwear.

Stayed up late talking. Talk to you tomorrow!

Early on in this whole pandemic thing, when everything had been on lockdown and particularly so in our area, the county north of us decided that a customer could buy something online and the shopkeeper could hand it to them outside now. You could have that close a contact, briefly. Youcouldn’t browse, you couldn’t go in, you couldn’t touch their credit card machine, but you could do that.

This is when they were still trying to figure out the details of how covid-19 is spread.

I talked to one of my local shops, saying that what I wanted was two bags of a particular blue Malabrigo Rios that matched so that I would have enough for an afghan. I knew that officially it’s ten skeins per bag equals one dye lot; rumor, though, is that they’re matched up in groups of ten but that the mill produces more than that in each lot. But that’s a rumor.

So.

I wanted twenty skeins. I’ve found matching bags in the past, but I wasn’t going to be able to go in and eyeball anything.

Turns out the whole supply-chain mess meant the shop didn’t have and couldn’t get them in from Malabrigo for months.

But maybe her yarn rep had them on hand, she wondered.

Turns out she did.

Once those were delivered, I swung by the shop, they handed me the bags out on the sidewalk rather than frisbeeing them from, y’know, six social feet away through the car windows and all that and it was so good to see actual human faces again, not to mention old friends.

(Unspoken: Still here. Still here. And you too! Stay that way. Thank you for wearing those masks. Pray those vaccine researchers get their studies finished fast.)

I waited till I got home to see if my initial quick impression was correct. It was.

She’d been so relieved that the two bags matched like her rep had been sure of.

Now, here I interject a quick story about my folks visiting the dye works for a tapestry weaver in France at a time when they decided they needed just a bit more of this one color for their project, so the dyer was asked to create more.

He asked Mom if this and this matched.

She said no, not quite, and why. But no, sorry.

He hadn’t thought it was discernible but since clearly it was, he added just a touch more to the pot. There you go.

So blame it on the genetics. Here I was, staring at those blues, going, but they’re just not quite the same. This one’s more vibrant. This one’s darker. You can put them in all kinds of different lights and it doesn’t change the fact. It’s certainly not a huge difference, but…

So instead of becoming the next big project they’ve sat there for all this time because I can’t use them together unless I separate them by enough other colors and space that the difference might not matter, in which case I would no longer need twenty skeins of Matisse blue because half of the afghan would be something else altogether. Which has had me wondering if I should ask my friends who do diving and photography if they have a particular reef photo I could use, to riff on last year’s fish theme.

I’ve been musing about trying to match the one or the other, but I don’t know if inventories are back up yet.

Here, let me finish this other project first before I worry about it too much.

I just like to know what’s ahead.

I was in a knitting group meeting by Zoom today where they asked everybody, What is the yarn that you’ve been hoarding and not knitting that you most love?

I told them that Colourmart had some heavy laceweight 150g 98/2 extra fine merino/vicuna yarn that was really nice stuff, but that every now and then–twice that I know of–they’d popped up a few cones of some with 7% vicuna content. It’s cobweb weight but it sells out fast.

So, having knit two 7% cowls, one for me and one for a friend and swooning at every stitch–nice stuff!–I’d been stalking the site to see if any more showed up, y’know, like during an inventory check or something. For months. (This is after I’d plied it on my wheel and sworn I’d never do that part again–I should have paid the five bucks for them to do that on their machinery. Cobweb weight is super fiddly to get right when you can’t see what you’re doing because it’s black and my spinning was wonky, although in the finished cowls, who could tell. Or care. So soft!)

Suddenly one day there was this one single cone of not seven but 10%, and not only 10% but it was blended with extrafine cashmere. No sheep.

I ticked the ply box and picked a number: twelve strands, the maximum, for a thicker yarn to work with. $55 total for 5.29 mill-end ounces, when pure vicuna retails for $300/ounce.

As one of my friends described it later, I bought it so fast I showed speed streaks.

It’s black, of course, which my eyes would rather knit later rather than now, but the thing that’s actually holding me back is that there’s only the one cone. When it’s gone there may never be another. How would I risk letting anyone feel left out of receiving the one best thing, and how on earth would I choose who should get it?

I was kvetching at myself for not getting anything done on the afghan all week.

It somehow snuck up on me that, wait–actually, I finished a hat this week, knit another, started a third, and stumbled across a half-done beaded silk cowl and finished that, too, because it was Christmas week and you never know when you’re going to need extras. (Suddenly thinking, y’know, if I’d knit those hats in stainless steel yarn I could have added an inside pompom for a clapper and made my own carol bells. Cool! Watch out next year!)

A very Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and peace and good will and beautiful music to everyone.

With thanks to Margo Lynn for the heads-up, this is really cool.

A Shaun the Sheep ad for wool, just for fun and so I can find it again.

Remember when I named a lace pattern (after not finding it anywhere else) Rabbit Tracks? Search engines having had their limitations in 2003, I looked for pictures of actual tracks made by rabbits to see if it fit and found no definitive answer–drawings in children’s books didn’t count–so I just went with it.

Well, I got a little help today after looking a little closer at the lace pattern certain claws and teeth were making in the mud out there. Again, it wasn’t quite definitive but it looked like a decent approximation. Alright then.

My yard looks like it has chicken pox and I’ve never seen anything quite like it out there.

So I had this post hopping around in my head gathering momentum about how I guess the whole rabbit thing is okay because they’re eating the weeds that I’ve been trying to fight off ever since the first time they told us not to water our lawns for the previous drought. The grass died. The weeds held a rave.

Worse: a few years ago, my neighbors planted an invasive but decorative tall grass that grows in impenetrable clumps with a bajillion poofy seeds that fly off like dandelion puffs, and all the sudden last summer it was everywhere in my back yard. Everywhere. Despite zero watering. The roots go deep and I found out the hard way that the stalks rip your skin off if you don’t wear gloves and when they’re growing under the thorns of the low-branching pomegranate tree and threatening to outcompete its roots, I had me some doubt as to how far this was all going to go.

Apparently, non-native flora or not, those rabbits really go after the stuff.

And the grass, our grass, real grass, is actually starting to make a comeback because the critters don’t touch it.

I was thinking, hey, I can live with that, as movement caught my eye and I looked across the yard.

A third one.

All in view, point A, point B, point C.

Three. And spring is a long way off yet.

Yow.

Well, they’d better get back to work, then, those shoots aren’t going to get any younger nor more tender. (LEAVE MY FRUIT TREES ALONE.)

High-frequency hearing loss is by far the most common type. And what it means is that you lose pieces of words, because consonants are done tongue against teeth and at much higher pitches than vowels’ vibrations in the throat.

So you hear the song of someone’s voice but not the lyrics, and more so the more background sound you add. This is one reason why the hearing impaired are good at picking up other people’s moods rather than what is being said. A crowd is an orchestra warming up. (For Bartok’s Etudes at times.)

I remember sitting on my brother’s bed when we were teens while he played some of his music collection and worked through with me what Elton John was actually singing. And then a song from the next artist and the next but one can only do that for so long in a day.

Now the words are all out there for the reading, and I have to admit I’ve had some serious disappointments on some really beautiful music. Not to mention it’s a pain to have to go look up my earworms before humming them out loud because you never know what they might mean to someone else who can actually, y’know, hear. Being a deaf musician has drawbacks.

So.

There’s been a crew of five prepping and painting our house all week. The kid across the street 35 years ago who bought a paint sprayer to set himself up in business and got our former owner to hire him to douse the house really quick? Uh, no: these guys power wash, scrape, scrape some more, primer, paint, second coat of paint. By hand. And it looks fabulous where they’re finished.

One guy out there in particular is quick to laugh, quick to sing, and occasionally whistles. Now, I wouldn’t know what he was singing anyway and I don’t think it was in English and as I sat there knitting away, singing being a compelling thing, I had visions of adding in a tune or two myself.

In French. Because then the words would be as nonexistent for them as any in English or Spanish might be for me and we’d just meet at the purity of where the tune carries us. Right?

Except the only French song I can remember the lyrics to are–I apologize in advance–Frere Jacque.

Think Chopsticks on the piano.

How about I not.