(The colors are better than my phone claims.)

I finished another hat for the work crew; I’ll run the ends in when they’re here so they can feel like they got to see part of that one happening, too. Man, it feels good. And I did get to Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco and stocked up on guy colors and started in on the next.

The skein that’s still in the hank is the one that arrived as expected from Imagiknit, along with the usual business card.

But the other side of it is no longer blank.

Imagiknit got bought out this past summer by one of its former employees, and one can only wonder in astonishment at what some customer must have said to elicit this.

And then I laughed, hard, thinking who this got sent to, because, yeah.

Imagiknit let me know my Pocion Mecha yarn is on its way. I bought a single skein to leave the possibility open of getting to a LYS tomorrow and picking out more hat yarn in person but I wanted to know that that colorway would be here before the workers return, and tomorrow it should be.

On a random note of practicality: I read somewhere that the best way to freeze unused sourdough starter is to spread it out on parchment paper and then as soon as it’s frozen, crumble it into a small freezer container, giving it an easily-accessible form for later. So I just did that, wondering if it would pour out all over the place but it didn’t and finagling the parchment into the freezer space contained the starter, so, cool.

And randomness for its own sake: the Washington Post offers its subscribers a scanned-in shot of what the front page was the day (please fill in this form thank you) one was born.

Okay, I figured that was just trolling for data, but still, I was curious.

Below the fold, there was a story of a judge who’d had twenty young azalea bushes stolen from his yard while he was having a weekend at the beach, carefully spaded out of there.

It lists his home address, notes his tony neighborhood and the prices of the houses, and says the thieves even got the ones behind his ten foot fence.

Who on earth is allowed to have a ten foot fence?

His neighbors were hit that same weekend, and they, too, were at the beach. Their roses too were left untouched.

A truck was pulled over near that street with a hundred azaleas in back, and the authorities were requiring the driver to offer proof of having purchased them.

Okay, today, that would mean the newspaper doxxed a prominent judge–on the front page, no less.

The kicker is that the date on that newspaper? I was a crawling baby aspiring to walk. So per them, I was, in fact, born yesterday. And more than.

—

Edited to add: since I wrote that they have corrected the link.

A friend’s mention of a concert she sang in years ago sparks this memory.

When my kids were growing up, the middle school had a fantastic music teacher: Tim loved the kids and he loved the music and everybody wanted to be in his class. Rumor was, though, that the program pretty much dead-ended when you graduated.

Fortunately for us, my oldest started high school the year they hired Theron. Theron was a master teacher himself, and suddenly the band and orchestra room was the place to be–our kids were in great hands.

I think it was his third year there that Theron, tall and thin, was found to have a 15 lb. stomach tumor.

This was in the bad old days before the ACA: you had to keep going to work to keep your insurance to cover your treatments when you got sick no matter how sick you got.

I knitted him a handspun afghan in a Tree of Life design from wool my folks had bought me for Christmas that year after I’d found a one-time source for a merino lambswool that was finer than cashmere and fur-like in its softness. Memory wants to put it at 14 microns. It just felt like it was meant to be for him.

The other teachers in the district donated their sick leave to save their colleague’s not just insurance but his very life.

But someone still had to teach that jazz class. Someone still had to lead the high school marching band. Tim drove over from the other school to fill in. He knew the kids already knew him and that it would be a comfort to them as well as him in being a familiar face while doing what he could for his friend.

Theron recovered and for awhile it looked like they were right when they said they got it all.

He was there for Back To School night–but I knew. As I said to him later, I don’t think anyone noticed who’s only always been healthy. But to my eyes, he wasn’t just leaning on the music stand because it had been a long day, his face and his body gave him away.

He was on sick leave again almost immediately. He was 35.

At his funeral there were pictures of his life that were a surprise to me but not to some of the kids, even though Theron had never spoken about being gay. His family sat on the right at the front of the chapel, shooting angry glances to the left half in the direction of his partner and friends.

I found that unspeakably sad for all of them. I did not get a chance to introduce myself to them–it felt to me like they didn’t want to talk to anybody they didn’t know.

But I did afterward to the grieving man who did not deserve that extra hurt.

He realized that I was the one who had made that afghan.

In his grief he comforted me by making a point of telling me that Theron had requested that afghan be kept right there on the bed with him at all times his last week on this earth.

He had wanted me to know.

Tim stepped into the high school job altogether and working with the vocal teacher had the choir and orchestra learn Mozart’s Requiem for their joint December concert.

The final piece was If Thou Be Near.

The kids poured their love, their grief, and all that they had into those perfect notes and I found myself in tears. It was one of the most powerful musical experiences of my life.

I caught Tim afterwards and thanked him for teaching our kids, thanked him for choosing that music.

And, I said, he was. ‘If thou be near’–Theron was there. So proud of those kids, so grateful to you, so appreciating the music, so loving–he was there.

Tim’s eyes were full as he nodded, Yes. And then said it out loud: Yes.

I am not good at stopping a project to dive into a distractive one: I like to slog through till it’s good and done first.

That said.

I realized that this is the third week of what was originally going to be a two-week house repair and those guys have been working hard. While I knit stitch after stitch they’re doing hammer lift after hammer lift. There was so much to do, and as they ripped out damaged wood they found more.

I wasn’t sure if I should knit them each a hat–but I knew I wanted at least to be able to should the moment present itself.

The feeling grew until I found myself actually putting the afghan down yesterday, promising it it would only be a few days, and diving into a gray-blue skein of Polar Morn. Finished it noon today and started on the next. Jupiter. A skein with flecks of dark pink so it didn’t make it into the redwood trunk.

So now that’s 2/3 done and the pink stitches are pretty much drowned out by the browns around it and maybe it will do and maybe it won’t, but I like it.

Chris stopped by to check on things and looked at what they’d found. I signed another change order a few hours later.

We knew that with double-paned windows, you can’t replace them without repainting the whole house afterwards. What I did not know is you can’t just buy a new window. Someone who knows what they’re doing has to come out and assess how green a tint my supposedly clear glass has so that it will match the other windows, because that’s just how it is and mine are old.

Me: I’m an art dealer’s daughter and I did not know that?! Glass has green?!

I wonder if my sister’s twins remember cracking that one while rough housing. It’s been sitting there behind the curtain that way for way too long.

That roof plank has to go. And that one over there.

Seventeen grand again and it turns out I had more time after all to decide whether his workers were knit-worthy.

And the afghan says, Told you so.

Coming along…

I looked at the forecast and did a sudden oh, right, I have to get in the habit of doing that again, and ran out with a bright flashlight and got the mango tree double-covered for the night to protect the fruit. Winter might come after all.

Meantime, a Ravelry link: my hands don’t love knitting cellulose fibers but that would be worth it. There are no instructions, just a seat-of-the-pants this-is-sort-of-how-I-did-it.

I think I could kluge that.

It’s fabulous. A beaded lace dress with a solid bodice, using an oak lace doily pattern that Lacis in Berkeley published eons ago for the skirt, sleeves, and inset. Make it A-line and floor length and it would be a wedding dress for the ages.

Kaethe Kliot, the founder of Lacis in Berkeley, knit doilies as cotton tablecloths to sell to American soldiers to send home after WWII and saved just enough to emigrate. She established a shop and museum and essentially a bookstore for all things lace, run now by her daughter, last I knew. She collected very old doily patterns including the ones she’d used and published them in several books so they wouldn’t vanish from history.

That dress took one of those doilies back to tablecloth size and showed what it could do. Wow.

I started an afghan months ago that was three shades of earthy pink/claret/burgundy, from some 95/5 silk/lycra I’d bought at Colourmart seven years ago. My thought was, I’m finally going to use this up; I wanted something simple after finishing the incredibly finicky fish afghan; and it could go to anyone who might be allergic to animal fibers and they would be so thrilled. Because silk.

I knew from experience that the stuff shrinks by about a third so I’d started it on size 10.5s: big needles to use up my stash and create that yardage fast.

Silk likes to jump off needles, and three strands at once? It was not fun. Twelve plies per strand spun tightly together and yet each individual one just waiting to snag on your hands if you had any rough spots that day?

I wanted it done, I just didn’t want to do it.

So it sat there at about eight inches long and not useful for anything. For months. It didn’t help that I thought I only had one more threesome of those cones, which meant I would not be able to make it as long as I wanted.

In the middle of the summer I stumbled across more cones. I DID have more! That shawl I’d made hadn’t stopped me from having enough! I could actually do this. I got about five more inches done on it.

Malabrigo in the hands it is not. It sat forlornly in a second timeout.

The redwood blanket. Done. But what if Kat, if I were to ask directly, were to confess she loves the idea of it but not how it looks? What if she’s allergic to wool? Shouldn’t I be prepared to offer her options? This is about making her happy, not me. I started wondering towards that silk, was it really so bad? (Do they have a pet whose claws will shred the snot out of the stuff?)

And then the phone rang yesterday. It was an employee of the contractor who had originally planned to come in September along with the roofers to repair the termite damage, till life had thrown the boss a curveball; could he come by in an hour and go over the parts where the work needed to be done? It’s the fascia all around, right?

Blink.

And so he did that. Appraised the situation–yup, the woodpeckers went after the termites there, set up stuff for the morrow and left, telling me they’d be here between 8 and 9 a.m.

I dug out that silk afghan project. I’d stored those rediscovered extra cones with it. Phew!

I got up this morning and another employee was sitting in a truck out front waiting for it to be 8:00 so he could start.

And while that wooden fascia started coming off from all around the house, I knitted silk. I took breaks of course, but basically I tried to feel productive to live up to their example. I decided I was going to finish off that first set of 656-yard cones and at about ten p.m. I finally did.

Twenty-nine inches. Not bad. Not bad at all. And all this time it was just waiting for me to get a move-on, fer cryin’ out loud.

This is the first year we’ve gotten more than a single Page orange on that tree and yesterday’s storm blew nearly all the leaves off the thing.

I don’t think that works.

This is definitely one that needs a daylight photo. I’m wincing a bit at this one but it’s what I’ve got.

On the right, the redwood was growing into the fence and the roots had tunneled underneath towards our house maybe four feet away.

I had k3, *(yo ssk k1) doing the diagonal on the right with a knit 1 at the center and then (*k1 k2tog yo) doing a reverse of that diagonal on the left–which meant that when they met up at the center bottom where I did a double-decrease every other right side row three times, it was going to push the fabric upwards visually and physically a bit in that spot, pointing an arrow at the tree above. It was where the roots lifted our sidewalk. But that change of direction at the center also balanced the side edges climbing pointing upwards towards each other, and I wanted that.

With no boughs nor needles nor hawks nor squirrels nor fog the stump is just a bit bare so far. But man does it feel good to be making serious progress.

Early last year, I picked out a mug online from Mel and Kris Kunihiro and rather than having them bother with shipping it to me from Oregon I told them I’d pick it up at Stitches West, since we were going to see each other there shortly anyway.

That was the Stitches that I ended up missing because I had, as my doctor told me later, a clear-cut case of covid. (No tests at the time for blue states, as Californians well remember.) I could have turned that big knitters’ convention into a super spreader event all by myself had it been held a few days earlier, before I knew I was coming down so sick.

So. Anne admired and even owned some of Mel and Kris’s pottery and she volunteered to pick it up from them there and drop it off at my house. It meant a great deal to me that she was going so far out of her way to make life a lot easier for everybody.

And that’s what started it all. We’ve known each other for years as passing friends at the yarn store, but she set the stage for a far deeper connection than that.

All these many months where, like most of us, I saw only a very few people in real life at great intervals, it seemed like whenever I most needed it to save my sanity one of them, standing outside, masked and at a distance, was Anne, totally putting up with my deafness that the masks make worse. Popping by to say hi after fair warning to make sure I’d be there. (Like we were going anywhere. Like anyone was.)

Two? Three? years ago? Before we had any idea what was about to hit us all, she gave me a box of yarns that she wasn’t ever going to knit, no matter how pretty they were–and told me not to knit her a cowl or hat.

Totally on to me. Busted.

And yet…things change.

I’m both excited for her and more than a bit devastated for me that she and her husband are moving to Portland in, unfathomably, two weeks. I’ve been covering that up to myself by looking at houses, sending her links, going, Isn’t this one so cool! Or, Can you even/what were they thinking/can you believe nine bedrooms/2 baths seven fridges taking up what was left of what used to be a living room, extension cords everywhere, with a trapdoor in the closet to a gun safe/wine stash in the otherwise nonexistent basement. A frat house maybe?

When she commented on this cowl picture I posted a month ago I suddenly knew why I’d bought that color combination that was a bit too yellow for me. At the last Stitches I’d gone to, from the Yarn Truck parked inside at the edge of the convention center floor.

If only she’d let me.

So I asked.

And she admitted that she had been hoping that, before she leaves, I would knit her something.

She stopped by today. I pulled out a bag of finished projects: purple wool, blue baby alpaca, ecru cashmere, the finished wool cowl she’d admired, and one in a similar colorway but with more blues and almost no yellows.

She went straight for this one. Still her favorite. “I like the yellows,” holding it up under her chin for me so I could see for myself that she was right, that was the one. She asked me the yarn and I didn’t remember, so it’s a good thing I wrote it down while I still had the label at hand. Yarnloveyarn.com’s Magic Forest.

It had been for her from its beginning and had been waiting for the two of us to figure it out.

The Washington Post did a story on diminishing fire risks for those of us who live with such.

Who knew there were air vents that swelled shut in heat to keep embers out of attics and garages?

They talked about roof types, but not the one I already have a signed contract committing us to. I have questions. (On second thought, Professor Google says that foam roofs are highly fire resistant. Okay, that feels much better.)

Reading the comments, someone in the paint industry talked about fire-resistant paints, saying, “A few and I mean very few of high quality water based products are actually non-toxic and can pass stringent NFPA tests for smoke production, optical density of smoke and toxic output” and said they were the best for residential use. And that if you buy the cheap ones you have to do two coats and haven’t saved any money.

Since I’m getting my house painted after all the termite repair and roof work is done and I’d never heard of such a thing, I’m really glad I read that. Sometimes you have to know what to ask before you can ask.

Someone took a huge, exquisite piece of live-edge wood (oak?) and turned it into the countertop for their kitchen island. It’s gorgeous–but does that kind of finish survive all the kinds of substances that could land on it? I have no idea and would love it if someone who knew anything about it could fill me in. Pictures #6-9.

Meantime, I finally worked out the math (for the third time), went through my stash, decided after a package arrived that I seemed to finally have what I needed for the thing and in relief that I no longer have to wait to see how the new shades work out with the previously-bought: I picked up the long-neglected start of the redwood afghan. The living tree was stumped and then so had I been. And now I could run with it.

It felt great to finally arrive at where the only thing that slowed me down was needing to give my hands a break.

*Chez: French for “at the house of,” pronounced “shay.” Also, above, a pun on smiling for the camera.

So we did, we went to Mutari, and I got their Costa Esmeraldas bar because that’s long been my favorite (Dandelion buys beans from that farm too) and those two put in chocolate and sugar and nothing else, whereas the Manoa we tried has some cocoa butter. They’re all great.

As we headed out I picked up a long-stalled hat project and saw why it had been on timeout so long–hadn’t I ever counted those stitches? How did that happen? I ripped it out, cast on again with the single-ply wool arguing with the bumpy road, and with great satisfaction finished the ribbing for the new hat at about Scotts Valley. I considered what kind of patterning–but, nah. I wanted to keep looking at the redwoods we were driving through. Mindless stockinette it was.

Meantime, remember how I love stone houses?

Someone made their kids a stone tree house. With stained glass (-ish) windows no less. Photos 28-30.

The perfect place to retreat with a good book or yarn while keeping an eye on the kids. (Hey Mom that’s MY tree house!)

The perfect little cool-grandparents retirement cottage, both of them.

Me: Man, what a lousy night. Couldn’t get warm, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find the wool blanket (the extra layer on my side.)

Him: That’s because you tripped and spilled hot cocoa all over it.

Me, slowly: Oh. Right.

So I am here to report that dabs of unscented laundry detergent on day-old cocoa on white wool, left to soak in for an hour or two and then rubbed a bit, did indeed get the whole thing to come completely clean. Gentle cycle or no, running it through the washing machine didn’t help its pilling whatsoever, and it did shrink slightly as one would expect, but the merino came out all the softer for it.

And we’re talking 1:1 ratio cocoa/sugar in the milk, not some half-fake commercial mix. But it came out.

Spending the day that tired, I sat down, propped my feet up, and knit. After 75 minutes, my hands demanded a break from the needles, which at 6.5mm were a lot bigger than I usually use but that the scoured and floofed-out chainette Piuma from Colourmart really needed. (The light beige.)

The closer I got to the end of the ball the more the stubborn side of me had to see it through. Intermittently as needed. I let the amount of yarn dictate to me when I was done, and after dinner, it was.

I gave it a bit of water for the lace to settle into place and it is now hanging to dry. Right next to that sweet soft Irish-made blanket.

The teacher in Relief Society asked, How has some small act of kindness made a difference to you?

Heather raised her hand and said, When we were changing the ward boundaries, it was a two year process and there was a lot of feedback and pushback from people who didn’t want any changes, because who does. But it had to happen.

I nodded, remembering that time a few years ago: one ward using the building had had a lot of people move out and was sparsely populated. The other one, situated where the housing was cheaper (that would be ours) had way more people than could fit in there comfortably and they just plain needed to be balanced out, along with the others in the stake. I didn’t know that she had been one of the ones having to deal with it. All I knew about her was that I’d once asked her after a biannual stake meeting where she’d been one of the speakers if by wild chance with that unusual last name she was related to one of my husband’s old college professors.

She was stunned. She was thrilled. She sought him out, badly needing to talk to him: her dad had been diagnosed with cancer two years after we’d moved away and had died of it fairly quickly, and since she’d moved to California and that had been something like thirty years now, she needed to know someone here who had known him, someone she could talk to about her father. She missed him so much. It was a great comfort to her, and I can’t tell you how glad I was that I’d asked.

Richard had had no idea his memorable old professor was gone.

So here we are a few years later and she blew me away by saying, And I was one of the people who had to do that change to a new-to-me ward. And I wasn’t sure how (basically, how she would be received.)

And then here comes Alison on my very first day here and she’s giving me a hand knit cowl to welcome me. (Me, thinking: I did? Yeah, sounds like me.) Heather described the multiple colors and how much they were her favorites, and at that point I remembered thinking that this matches what she’s wearing–it’s definitely for her.

Heather: And she knit a scarf for every woman in the ward!

I was suddenly doing a little bit of a cringe there, because well yes I did but it took me almost two years and then so many new people moved in at the end of one summer–it’s a college town, after all–that, being in the middle of a baby blanket project and then another, I felt like I could never catch up and gave it up. Plus by that point I was so, so bored of making cowls.

My wanting to is starting to come back to me now, though, and I think it was seeing the one in my hands and needles before the meeting started that sparked her memory of that winter-friendly warmth on this hot day.

She showed me a picture of the baby hat she’s knitting for one of her colleagues who’s expecting and a sweater she’s looking forward to finishing before the weather turns.

She’s one of ours. But then I found that out the day I gave her her cowl.