So. Here was the plan this morning: I ride the scooter out to the car, take it apart, put it in, go to Stitches.

Here’s what happened: rode the scooter out to the car, took it apart, got the seat and the battery pack, which is the heaviest part, into the car. Carefully sized up how to get the base in: bend the knees, correct angle, etc, reached for it–

–and as I lifted it something felt like it snapped in my back. I managed to get the base safely down to the ground without dropping it, so it couldn’t have been too bad–but then it did drop me and I sat there on the sidewalk in intense pain, going, NOW what am I going to do?!

And I had to lift that battery pack back out again in order to get the thing back into the house. I did; I thought that was it, my day was over, I’m done.

Becca to the rescue. “I’m a nurse, I lift patients heavier than that all the time.”

“Are you sure?! I mean, it’s heavy!”

And not only did she do that, she drove me the ten miles to Stitches and she did it all over again to pick me up in the evening and she took me home.

Wow.  Someone definitely needs a chocolate torte.

But here I go again: Richard remembered this evening that he has a commitment tomorrow starting early in the morning till late afternoon. He can get the scooter in my car but not out again at Stitches; he can pick me up in the evening and deal with it going home if I can get there without him.

Um…

But in the meantime, as I waited for Becca at closing time, my old friend Warren happened to come out the same door. We had been looking for each other all day. I had knit him a hat, while second-guessing myself and wondering how much a knitter needed a hat.

He surprised me by saying wow–he’d been needing a hat! He said you’d think he would have one, but he was always giving his knitting away and he didn’t have one and he just never knit for himself.

And there you go. Perfect.

(As for the scooter, we’ve got it worked out to where I just have to lift the pieces out of the car at the event. Okay; down is the easy part.)

I practiced taking the scooter apart. The battery pack is the heaviest piece at 40 lbs–bad, but I can do it. I tested the battery over the last several weeks; it seems to be holding its charge. I zipped around the house again and again and didn’t clip any wall edges.

It made me remember my late friend Lynda Lowe, who once was fumbling for her keys with a grocery bag in her lap, and having forgotten to turn her heavy chair off, suddenly hit the switch she couldn’t see and lurched straight through the frame of her front door, leaving it in splinters.  Oops.

But my scooter is a little thing.

I once knitted her a cream-colored Aran cardigan, with sleeves of slightly different lengths the way she needed, in the same yarn and the same combination of cable stitches as the sweater I’d made my husband. He is 6’8″, a large man. She was, if memory serves, 4’8″, and a hundred pounds was a weight she aspired to. I always wanted a picture of the two of them side-by-side in their matching sweaters so I could say, And THIS is why we do gauge swatches!

Stitches West is this weekend. The kind of event where you want to have finished everything you ever imagined knitting and the once-a-year chance to be with knitting friends you only get to see then. It is wonderful, it is intense, it is exhausting, it utterly fries my sense of balance in the visual overload and I can only do it sitting down.

My chocolate is packed. I’m ready to go.

And on a happier note: Sam‘s platelet counts have come up at last and out of the danger zone. My thanks to all who have offered love and prayers her way; the support of others means everything when things are rough.

I put aside the project on my needles (this is rare for me) and dove into some of the softest yarn in my stash in happy celebration today. Suddenly nothing else would do.

Sam’s counts went up slightly. They’ll keep close tabs, but we definitely like the start of that trajectory.

Still, the bills got paid, the house got cleaner: I had to accomplish busy things. I had a hard time sitting myself down to just go calmly knit like I wanted to in anticipation of Stitches West. (Speaking of which, if you’re going, you might want to look at the Rav link here for the market-admission coupon via the folks at Webs, with thanks to them and to Janice Kang for the heads-up.)

Richard wasn’t feeling well today and didn’t go in to work, till about dinnertime, when he really had to run a quick errand to the office but didn’t feel up to driving.

Hey, he’s ferried me enough places when I needed it. So I grabbed a baby hat project that I hadn’t been able to make progress on, just in case it wasn’t quite as fast an in-and-out trip as he was anticipating.

Two hours of having my feet propped up in his office and my yarn on the floor, wondering what I would do should I finish while not having enough yarn to start something new, he made good progress too. It felt good. He made me a romantic mug of instant but not too sweet oatmeal in an official (Company X) logo’d mug with a plastic spoon: warm and soothing and somehow ridiculously perfect.

I didn’t run out of yarn nor project.  The hat just needs the decreasing at the top.

Dinner was ready when we walked back in the door.

Happy almost-Valentine’s, sweetie.

IdiditIdiditIdidit, it’s soft, it’s pretty, it’s blocking, it’s done, I really like how it turned out and now I’m free to go knit something else for someone else. Yay!

If I can’t fix everything, it’s nice to have just this one thing, this knitting thing, that always turns out the way I want if I spend enough time on it. I can make it behave to help let the rest that is life be what it will.

Thank you all for all your messages of love and support.  Each note, each quiet prayer within or Thinking Good Thoughts, each one of you has been greatly appreciated. Wishing you all blessings in return.

The knitting always goes so much faster when you’ve already figured out what the next row should be. Right now mine is on the commuter train that has to stop at every station and pick up more stitches while the conductor tries to hurry everything along.

Started with a doodle, didn’t really care how it turned out till all the sudden I really cared how it turned out, about when I noticed it had suddenly gone off on some unknown side rails all its own–and hey, look, this is really cool!

Okay, for this next part, if I…

And no. I wish I could show it off but I can’t yet.

The Three Billy Goats Gruff have a bridge they’d like to sell me, telling me it’s done. All but the castoff. That would be nice, given that I just spent most of the last nine hours working on that shawl.

But it just might need another two times trip trap trip trapping across those rows. (As I head for the icepacks.)

You have to post that story, Holly told me.

I was sure I already had. But using every search phrase I could think of on the blog, I’m not finding it. So here goes.

They were about to move away, and I know how the impending sense of loss at such times brings friends closer together and the emotions high.

I was talking a moment to Curtis, the husband, at church on I think their last Sunday before they left California, and in that conversation, he started to say something about an afghan his grandma had knit him.

Only, with such a sudden halting sense to his voice that I immediately picked up on it and went, “Does it need to be repaired? I’d be glad to,” before he said another word, hoping I wasn’t getting myself into too much.

The relief and joy and sudden hope in his face!

When he’d been in high school, his grandma had offered to knit him an afghan. Anything he liked; his choice. Years later telling me this, he said, And I asked for black. I had no idea what I was asking of her.

I smiled and nodded that yes, black stitches are hard to see to work with and really hard as you get older. I sympathized with Grandma with him.

But she had knit it because she loved him and he had been thrilled. He held it all the more closely when she died, love meeting loss and finding warmth in the dark places.

And then his cat had gotten to it. It was torn in four spots. He was heartbroken and had no idea what to do with it except to put it in the closet and hope that at some point in the future something somehow could be done.

I would be honored to give it my best, I told him.

And so later he swung by the house with it, knocking on my door to hand it over. One look and I told him, Oh, good. This won’t take very long at all, if you don’t mind waiting.

His wife was in the car with their two little kids, who were sick, and they hadn’t wanted to expose me so they’d stayed in there and he didn’t want to leave them waiting alone and not knowing how long I’d be.

Well then. I picked up my yarn needle and, afghan in hand, walked out to the sidewalk next to their car and plunked myself down. Let the kids wave hi and watch if they want, and besides, I wanted to see them and his wife every moment I could.

The afghan had been fairly loosely knit out of a nice, soft wool. That looseness made it vulnerable to a good cat-claw snag and there were long pulls in it–all I had to do was work the yarn back into the sides to where it belonged, here, here, here, and a little bit over down here. Not a single break.

I told him he had done the right thing: he hadn’t lopped off the loops and that had saved it.

The whole thing took maybe five minutes. There was such an intense joy the whole time. Curtis, Jenna, the kids, getting a little extra time with them before they left–but it was also as if his grandma herself were standing chuckling over my shoulder, glad to see her work restored to go hug the great-grands with.

I love Stitches West.

I love the deadline that is Stitches West. I got a cashmere shawl finished last year out of yarn I’d been hoarding rather than knitting only because that date wasn’t moving anywhere further away and my ego wanted to show off–well, and I wanted to show off for someone else’s ego, too, since Dianne had dyed the laceweight I ran the Cashmere Superior with.

So this year. There’s some yarn that I started knitting back in September: I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it and I had a reason why only that yarn would do for that mostly-worked-out pattern.

I ripped it totally out the first time around. Took notes, made adjustments, tried again.

I got it going, and it still wasn’t… it didn’t…I dunno… Huh. At that point, I was frustrated.

So into the ziploc bag and out of my sight, and time and again I nearly ripped those two new days’ worth of work out to make myself start from scratch.

Well but let’s not, though. There are two balls; how about I just start from the other ball once I get going again with this, just to make sure.

If only.

So four months later, here I was this morning, suddenly thinking how nice it would be to show that off in three weeks.

And in those four months since the first attempt I’ve knitted all kinds of other things that have let other ideas gradually seep through without my quite realizing it until all at once, as I was pulling the thing out of that bag and looking at it, suddenly all the things that previously were wrong about it were what I wanted about it now. It would do, most definitely, it would do. I finally had it! It had just needed that time and experience. Best part is, the first two days’ worth of work were already finished.

It’s humming along quite nicely. I think it’ll be a little different from anything I’ve done so far; it’s going to stretch me a bit, and I may do the last part more than once. But that sense of long-sought achievement is so close and so compelling that I had to make myself put it down and come here to give my hands a break.

I wanted to make major progress today, and found myself reaching for a green sweater this morning before I even made the connection.

It is always easier to get to work on knitting that doesn’t clash with your clothes, and better yet, when the work in your hands will look fabulous with what you’ve got on (even when it’s for somebody else), it’s hard to put it down. A dozen more grams and it’s done.

Oh, and the squirrels and that bag? They quit even sniffing at it. They ignored the nuts in it. Even after I put peanut butter in it. Too scary.

Wow, how do I get them to react to my birdfeeders that way?

I finally took the bag out of the tall flowerpot this morning and put it down across the yard, the mouth open towards where I could see from inside.

It took awhile–and then the bag was suddenly doing a vigorous funky chicken.  A gray was trying the flower pot tactic: if I push this around there must be nuts I can get at underneath. He nudged it. He charged it nose first. He tried to wrestle it out of the way. No dice. He left in disgust.

Hours more and the alpha squirrel approached the mouth of it. (He’s black with a touch of white below his eye, he’s easy to spot.) He stopped halfway across the yard and did an anxious paw up, nose straining forward, tail straining backwards then protectively over him, then he shifted to the other foot and did a little dance.

It didn’t bite him.

A little closer. A little more trepidation. Finally he stepped into the wet cold bag and then freaked as the paper gave way under him and the top of it came down at his head. (The gray had left the thing angled upwards.)

But having gone in once nothing was going to stop him now. None of the others ever did dare come in. Alpha ate at his leisure, then came back for more later when he got hungry again, dashing out to safety the moment the almond was claimed, not staying in there one squirrel breath longer than necessary each time.

Moms rule. I got a squirrel to take just one at a time.

A Costco-sized package did this to me. They looked so good and they were so cheap but there were so many!

And I can never follow a recipe, so here’s my version. I rinsed the blackberries and then rolled them gently from paper towel-covered plate to paper towel-covered plate, patting them on top too to dry them off as much as possible.

Oven ready at 350.

Melt a stick of butter and pour in a 13×9 pan and swish around. (I greased the sides with a little extra butter.) Cover the bottom with 18 oz blackberries, ie one Costco package’s worth, trying to spread them across as they hit rather than pushing them around a lot afterwards so that the butter stays distributed as evenly as possible.

Meantime, have 2 c sugar, 2 c flour, 1 tbl baking powder, 1 tsp salt mixed together; pour in 2 c milk and beat. (Okay, so I substituted about 1/4 c super-heavy manufacturing cream in there for that much of the milk.) Pour over the berries and get it quickly into the oven.

Bake one hour. Makes something between a popover and a pancake with its own fresh jam. Note that the measured volume of berries, at about 5 c, nearly equals that of all the other ingredients together.

But be careful: the original recipe said to melt the butter in the pan in the oven, take it out, then pour the milk mixture over and add the berries. That, my friends, is a good way to have exploding glass all over your kitchen unless you’re using a metal pan. Cold liquid should never come in contact with hot glass.

Oh, and the knitting? Got past my roadblock and knitted up most of an ounce of fingering weight today. Love love love how it’s coming out, with credit for the exquisitely soft, beautiful yarn going to Lisa Souza. The cobbler was to celebrate and to get my hands to take a break.

Amazing how much stuff needing doing around the house gets done when the creative side of the brain needs to work something out on its own. How to get the yarn to look like…

The hard part was making myself sit down finally this evening with pen and paper to try to work out the details of what I was beginning to visualize, to actually start to do the hard work. And if you ever want an answer to a teenager whining about what their algebra is supposed to do with their future real life, send them over here to give me a refresher course to tutor us both–I could really use it right now.

As soon as I get off this blog I’m going to cast on and hope I got the first word problem right. Yes, it’s bedtime–but “Begin; the rest is easy” holds ever true. Even if it’s just one row. Start.

In the meantime, our neighbors have a compost box, *with earthworms and kitchen and garden scraps turning out good soil for their garden to grow more food with, with the remains becoming kitchen and garden scraps and good soil to grow more food with, repeat from *, just on the other side of the fence.

And today after the rain stopped, there was a black squirrel totally splayed out on the fenceline. Ahhhh…heat!

Immediately below him there was steam rising from where I knew that box was.  (I bet they get all the robins.) And that happy squirrel looked for all the world like a cat that has claimed the top of the radiator on a cold winter’s day.

I was curious to see how the lace pattern from Tara’s shawl would look in a hat. One skein of worsted baby alpaca, 3.5mm needles, there you go. (I’m told Martingale now sells a pdf of the book; Purlescence has physical copies and ships, and I’d be glad to sign one if you don’t mind waiting till I get to Knit Night on Thursdays.)

And on the wildlife front.

Young squirrels don’t have object constancy before maturity. I have thrown a nut into a large flower pot as they’ve watched and they were unable to figure out it was in there. Come Spring and a year old, though, they will.

A clearly new-around-here young gray spent a fair amount of time today trying to figure out how to reach a treat I’d made quite inaccessible; then, having spotted what he thought was a good idea, he explored how to get to the top of the barbecue grill. Which was not close.

It seemed to throw him that it didn’t feel like a tree. He wrapped a paw around the leg. Didn’t like it. Finally, after many tentative steps and much scouting around that took quite some time (can you climb up inside a closed plastic pipe? No you cannot), he managed that little bit of rocket science leap by leap to the shelf and then, standing at last on the cold metal at the top, king of the mountain, he turned his head this way and that, taking a good look around.

That huge sugarpine cone full of suet and seeds was still dangling above the porch. Getting higher up, though it might fulfill an inner squirrel imperative, hadn’t gotten him one inch closer after all. Dang. But… But…! He’d worked so hard for it!

But then…wait…how do you get out of here? He seemed to have forgotten how he got up in the first place. Down was not an option from that height. He studied how far away the olive tree was, the fiberglass ladder (he’d clearly already figured out you don’t want to leap onto that.)  It was leaning against a lopped-off trunk we’d left for the woodpeckers. And there, over there there was nothing but grass.

He was stumped.

And then I happened to open the sliding door. He panicked and took a massive leap to the tree trunk near that ladder–eight, quite possibly ten feet away. I was stunned. He was at the downward part of the arc by the time he landed and scrambled up, but he made it. Olympic Gold! The crowd goes wild!

The Washington Post declared it squirrel week, asking for photos; included in there is a black one with the outer rings of its ears and the bottom half of its face bright white, so odd that I had to look closer to make sure it was actually a squirrel. There are many reminders there of why these little animals are so funny to watch.

Took a nap today, puttered around the kitchen, walked into the family room at last to see, perched at most 15 feet away, a Cooper’s hawk–I think the female–looking at me in as much astonishment as I was looking at it: I didn’t expect *you* here! It considered my presence a moment and then in no particular hurry spread those beautiful 31″ wings wide, flared her long striped tail in the now-familiar circle, and she was off.

One of the first things Michelle asked when the kids got home last night was whether a certain package had arrived; it had. I picked it up to show her and said to Richard, “Looks familiar, doesn’t it?”

To which my daughter reminded me of a certain earlier Christmas where I’d told her of a favorite yarn, and a familiar-looking package had arrived: I opened it, I pulled out this lovely yarn, I knitted up half a ball’s worth of it and then suddenly realized, wait–I didn’t order this color, did I? (Checking name on box.) Oh my goodness.

And so I’d stuffed it needles and all back in the box, wrapped the box, and threw it under the tree tagged from Michelle to me. There. I wrapped it for you.

Needle deprivation. That’ll teach me.

Part One.

I had no idea what the place was going to be like or even quite where it was going to be. Which was okay, I was going to be the passenger.

My friend Nina was taking part in a small–very small, as it turned out–holiday craft fair in Sky Londa today, immediately down the hill from Alice’s Restaurant.

Phyl was sure it was going to be held indoors and safe for my lupus, and it’s always good to see Nina, so up twisty Highway 84 we went.

Well, there were doors, that much turned out to be true: a stand-alone room of a building with the doors wide open and most of the crafty goings-on out in the fresh air, with Christmas trees over to the side being picked out and bundled onto cars, attracting people driving by to or from the coast. Come.  You see all these trees all around? Bring one home with you, pine-sized. Buy a handknit woolly scarf while you choose in the chill.

The sky was a dense fog, the ear-popping elevation not limited to the tops of the redwoods. I had on two layers of sweaters, wool knee socks, and a good wool hat. Nina was cold in a down jacket and thick hat and I realized that my heating-impaired house had gotten me more used to colder weather than I’d realized. (One site says it was 46F there today, one, a bit more.)

Checking the blog, it was Wednesday that that skein of Malabrigo Rios jumped onto my needles for no reason I knew of and just absolutely demanded that I knit it into a hat, and fast. NOW. And there seemed to be only one stitch pattern for it. That was that.

It wasn’t for my Christmas knitting queue, either. Don’t ask me how I knew that, but it just felt obvious all of its own. Well, huh.

So it got made. I knit it into the pattern that surrounds this blog, except done with yarnovers to make fern lace. I ran the ends in to finish it this morning right before Phyllis came to pick me up; whoever it was going to be for wouldn’t mind if I wore it just this one day, would they?

Ferns grow freely among the redwoods, the fronds echoing the green needles above; the Azules colorway echoed the California coastal sky, bright blue and foggy mixed together. With a touch of green. The ferns.

There was a seat just behind the window next to the door. After admiring Nina’s knitting for sale and visiting with a few friends, (side note for them: my brother Bryan’s Jeppson Guitars is here) I sat down there, figuring the glass would give me a little bit of UV protection on one side at least, pulled some yarn out from my purse, and started another hat while listening to a singer with his guitar who was seated in that room too and whose sound had drawn me in there in the first place.

I tell you, he was good. I looked around for signs of CDs I could write a check for but saw none.

Another man had told me there would be four musicians together later, and I’m quite sorry to have missed that but I can only be outside so much. But while I could be there, the one playing then, I could have listened to forever.

Yarn winding in time around wood as he played helped keep me warm.

I (in my sun worries) thought we were there about an hour and a half; Phyllis later guessed about 45 minutes. Judging by rows finished, she’s probably right. She came to me to say she was done just as I was finishing up a needle; okay, cool–and just as the musician finished his song and said what he was going to be playing next.

He had a blue canister with the word TIPS painted prominently in bright yellow.

I was standing up to go but turned to him instead, glad that I could say something without interrupting–the timing had come out perfect. I said very briefly I had no cash with me (much though I wished) and major home repairs waiting. But this I could do: Malabrigo. Some of the finest wool in the world. I had just knitted this (and I took off my hat). I had made it up as I’d gone along, and it is a woman’s, but I was sure he could find someone to give it to; “I want to throw my hat in the ring” to thank him for his music, and with that I put it in his tip jar.

The new warmth in his smile was like no one else’s.

Part two.

We were pulling out when I went, “The honey!”

“Oh, right,” answered Phyl, offering to let silly me pay her back later (I did) and she pulled off to the left to where someone was selling local honey across the side street.

He had blackberry! My favorite! I told the man I couldn’t go to the Kings Mountain Art Fair anymore where I used to buy it; too much sun time.

He asked if I were sensitive to the sun?

Turns out he and his doctor have discussed whether he had lupus on his arm. He seemed grateful to be able to say that to someone who knew what the word meant.

I explained there were two types, skin only and systemic. If he has it there, don’t let the word scare you.

He told me as we left, “You take care of yourself.”

“You too.” And I assured him that systemic notwithstanding, I’d had it twenty+ years; I’m doing fine.  He was visibly comforted.

Part three.

Costco run. I grabbed my piano hat on our way out the door. If I was able to stay warm enough on that mountain I didn’t need more than a hat thrown on down here too, right?

There was a woman in the store’s motorized wheelchair wearing a set-up that I recognized from when my son had knee surgery: her leg looked tinker-toyed. She was offered a sample of smoked salmon and wanted to buy some, but it turned out to be set on a shelf high above her head and the person giving the stuff out was too swamped with customers to notice.

But I did. “Do you want me to reach that for you?”

“Oh, yes, please! If you would.”

Now, I have spent my time needing that chair before. I know that people in wheelchairs like to browse too: like not just having help getting something down, but also like not being forced to buy it or stash it in the wrong place after looking it over simply because there is no physical way to get it back up high again, the helpful person by then long gone.

So I hung around the salmon a moment, just in case, thinking, browse away, hon.

She asked me if I were a pianist?

(I didn’t say, not like my concert-pianist grandmother nor my organ-performance-minor son, but) “Yes.”

She was too! She LOVED my hat! Wait–I’d *made* it?!

Hey (bring on the brag). I’d designed it.

I showed her the inside: how I’d wrapped the yarn across the backs of every single stitch so it wouldn’t have long lengths to snag on things. But that had made it so the black shows through the white keys a bit across the front, and for later hats, I’d gone with the long lengths. (The floats, to a knitter.)

I did offer to put the salmon back up if by chance she needed that. She loved that someone understood how it was to be seated.

However long later, Richard turned back to get one last thing for me and then we headed to the checkout. With him at the cart, he picked a line.

Which turned out to be next to that woman. Her young sons had joined her by then, one quite small, one maybe six or seven. I knew it couldn’t be easy to have Mom having a hard time getting around for awhile, especially if that’s a change.

I said a quick inner prayer, wondering. In response I felt this: could I re-create the hat? Sure, in a day, two, tops. Could I re-create this moment? Not on your life. And so while she was turned the other way I whipped my hat off my head, stepped over and tucked it into her cart just as she turned back.

She was stunned. “NO!” in disbelief. A delighted butbutbut.

May I?

She shook her head in how can I let you and joy and are you sure. Yes I’m sure.

She exclaimed some more and her older boy admired it and put it on his head. She told me he played violin.

“I don’t know how to knit a violin yet,” I laughed. (Thinking, but just wait…)

Her husband joined them right about then and the next thing I saw, all of them were laughing and happy, and then the older couple behind them in line were happy for them and admiring their hat and loving being at Costco right there right then.

I had been exposed to enough UV earlier to burn my cheeks and wonder what my T- (ed. to add, and B-) cells would do next. But as I once told my friend Scott, “Sometimes you just have to LIVE!”  I was hoping the Decembery conditions would be enough in my favor, but it was a risk and I knew it and I weighed it and I took it. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll be fine. Some things are worth what you pay for them. It was a day well spent.

But that very awareness pushed me to choose not to be selfish but to grab the moment given me to make that family happy.

As that musician had made me happy by the depth of that smile that had lit up his whole countenance. He, too, had played his part to help make it happen for them.

We all arrived of our own choices where we were supposed to be.