Kaye at the shop put a bunch of hand-dyed Colinette yarns on the front table, marked way down.

Superwash merino? $2.25?! Seriously?

“I wanted to see what people would do with it.” It had been sitting in the back unnoticed for awhile but now everybody was going through it and stacks of skeins were going home.

Thus this hat, and as I finished up the simple pattern my brain had time to think of other hands around the world, busily creating…

All these years that I’ve bought those sweet little fingerpuppets knit in Peru by women able to put food on their tables for my purchases. All the small children and their tired parents here who have received one of those puppets, meltdowns diverted.

What if…

I was chatting with one of Sahar‘s American friends last night and asked her if she knew Truman Madsen, the late BYU professor who used to run tour groups in Israel in the summers. Turns out she had been in Israel just after he retired.

He was my mom’s cousin, I told her, and my folks went on the last tour he gave. He took Mom into a shop owned by Palestinian women selling their handicrafts (what town was that, Mom?) and Mom picked out a hand-embroidered apron (purple stitches, if I remember right) and then one for each of her daughters. I treasure mine.

Truman’s reaction was to exclaim that her mother had bought the same thing in the same shop!

I know there are talented women in the West Bank and Gaza and I wonder how much of a difference we could make by buying from them, whether we could help make their lives easier–I would certainly think so. (Typing that and going looking…) I found this and oh look! This!

It says their embroidery work is a connection to their mothers and their grandmothers.

As it is, now, to my own.

Five dollars for a small olivewood bowl made in Bethlehem from locally sourced wood, ten for a carved candlestick, beautiful. One to fourteen of those bowls is $30 shipping, the fifteenth kicks it up to $40.

I am suddenly wondering who around here would go in on an order with me.

And I wonder what it must be like to get a package to the postal service there. Any arriving order would surely have its own story to tell.

If I do this row it’ll be done (meaning the row). If I do this next row I’ll never have to do it again. If I do this one more row it’ll be done.

And so on.  The baby blanket is coming along.

Meantime, I’ve been playing with a recipe. It’s the brief time of year when our Costco sells big bags of frozen tart cherries.

Chocolate Cherry Lava Cakes for two:

Mix a spoonful or two of sugar and a half spoonful of corn starch (optional) and stir into about a cup of frozen tart cherries; cover and zap for several minutes, long enough for the corn starch to have had its needed one minute of boiling time. Let cool a bit, then blenderize or cuisinartify to make sauce. Set aside.

Melt 2 tbl of either butter or coconut oil with 1/2 c of bittersweet chocolate by zapping about 35 seconds. (The original recipe calls for it to be chocolate chips.)

Whip two eggs with a pinch of salt; add the chocolate mixture in slowly as you beat it with a wire whisk so that the heat of the chocolate doesn’t cook the eggs. Add 2 tsp flour and whip a bit more, then pour into two greased 8 oz ramekins. Or two cupcakes’ worth or hot cocoa mugs or whatever works for you.

375 for 12-13 minutes (note that my oven is slow).

Serve lava cakes with cherry sauce.

I’ll add pictures later. I’ve been too caught up in finishing up the knitting for now.

A member of the Mountain View City Council finally found out an hour before the meeting last night that no, he did legally have to recuse himself no matter how much he wanted to approve the project. He lived too close to it. That may well be why our agenda item scheduled for 6:30 was finally taken up at 9:00 pm.

Right there is a reason for people who don’t yet know how to knit to learn: portable, useful, gratifying, calming, and you don’t miss a thing while listening to people drone on when they’re in power and you can only hope that they hear what the community has to say.

Stitch. Stay.

They then spent three and a half hours on the Merlone Geier project that threatened Milk Pail. Geier was hoping to get final approval at long last and hoping that that guy would be the swing vote. Didn’t happen.

I wasn’t sure my 66g of Malabrigo Rios would last and it actually wouldn’t have but that my hands gave out by midnight.

When I arrived at City Hall, there was a small rally going on in front. If this passed they had a week to gather signatures to demand it be put on the ballot to try to stop it.

I said to the man addressing the group, when he said he was new at this, that I lived in the next town over and we did exactly that and we did defeat a poorly thought out development. Not only did people gather signatures but they put a copy of the petition online so that you could print it out, sign and mail it, and we won.

One of the women had made a whole bunch of signs and when she asked me if I wanted one that said I (heart) Milk Pail, I exclaimed eagerly, Yes please!

It turns out that opposition to the project had grown to include those dismayed at adding a million square feet of work space with no housing to balance it, further skewing the jobs vs housing ratio that has driven even the most modest studio apartments to $2500 rents here.  They wanted one of the proposed offices to be homes instead to at least ease some of that pressure.

And so we went in and waited.  The chambers were beyond standing room only–there was just no place left to put any more bodies in that room without the fire marshal hustling people out. The mayor asked people to be careful not to let their signs block their neighbors’ view. We were good.

The Council went over their slides and their stats endlessly. A few drawings had changed, the ten-then-eight stories were now to be six, etc.

Finally they announced that Merlone Geier’s representative would speak, followed by Steve Rasmussen, owner of Milk Pail.

The young guy with the slicked-back hair, shiny shoes and expensive suit, his face familiar by now, got up to give Geier’s spiel, trying as always to impress. Up pops a slide: a long list of all the meetings they’ve attended with the city over this.

(Well yeah dude that’s part of your job and part of their jobs. You wouldn’t still be doing this after two and a half years if you didn’t expect to make millions off it.)

But then–at the end he turned and gestured expansively towards Steve and darn if the guy didn’t smile, I mean, really smiled Steve’s way. I realized suddenly I’d never seen him looking anything but majorly stressed before.

Steve got up. He said that Merlone Geier had been helpful (while I thought, Steve, you are the salt of the earth and the nicest guy ever but that’s not a description I thought I would ever hear, not even from a saint like you) and he went on to announce that he and they had come to an agreement on the parking.

Yes it would cover the required number of spaces for his business.

Yes it would be for a long time to come. (Having his daughters inherit his business and being able to continue there for another generation had been a huge issue to the community.)

The Council sat there as stunned as the rest of us. We all clapped. The mayor reminded us we were not allowed to clap during a hearing. Okay, let’s see how loud our faces can smile, then–but the councilmen were grinning bigtime, too.

But Steve offered no details and he sat down and they had to go on debating the project while not knowing just what changes the developer was thinking of doing to make it so what Steve had just said would be feasible. Were they talking about relocating the proposed parking structure? Just rededicating some of the spots still a good hike away? Nobody seemed to ask, or if they did I sure missed it.

The planning commission days earlier had unanimously voted the project down, a complete turnaround on their part, pending the completion of the Concise Plan for the overall area. Etc.  I’m thinking surely all the public pressure in support of Milk Pail played into that.

Two hours later…

One Councilman finally asked the crowd, which at midnight was down by half and everybody could actually sit down in the seats now, how many people wanted this continued rather than put to an immediate vote. Nearly every hand went up.  And he asked Steve what everyone had been dying to know: what were the specifics of this new agreement?

Steve clearly didn’t want to endanger this shaky new truce but he tried his best. It was contingent on this Phase II being approved.

In the end, the vote: item delayed till this date.

So maybe Steve has an agreement and maybe he doesn’t now.

We poured out of the chambers at long last.

In the second picture is Jac Siegel, the one Councilman who after all this I’d vote for if I lived there. Really knows his city and a decent human being.

The senior Merlone Geier representative shook Steve’s hand, and then as he continued on by I said to the guy, with a warm smile in gratitude at their change of heart (however it happened, I’ll take it), “Take good care of him,” (motioning at Steve, now talking to another supporter.) “He means a lot to us.”

The guy went from approaching me, looking at me, to abruptly turning away and avoiding all eye contact as if I suddenly didn’t exist.

It hit me that maybe he was wondering if anyone in *his* business world would say words of support like that about him in such personal terms–maybe that’s not fair of me, but his sudden stricken change of demeanor was memorable. My heart went out to him, not that he would know that.

Steve loved my sign. I told him I really couldn’t take credit for it. The woman who had given it to me had gone home, though, so when I knew he wanted it, absolutely, I’d be honored.

He sent me a short note today thanking me for coming and saying that sign was in his kitchen now.

I took great comfort in that.

Seven. If I put the blog down and race back to the needles (having iced my hands for the third time today, the eyes being enthralled but the wrists and fingers not so much) I can get an eighth row done today and that will be a record with this project.

It ain’t heavy, it’s my bother. Re the joints. But worth it.

(Edited to add the picture and to say, nine! I wanted to see if I could get one more full row out of that cone before I splice in the next one at the side, and I did! Icepack again and call it a night.)

I mentioned last month my cousin admitting to secretly fervently wishing for a purple hat and scarf from me and I’ve been keeping an eye out ever since for just the right yarn.

And not finding it. Nope, not in my stash. Not that variegated. Purlescence had one that was tempting but was split into two dye lots, no–but I had these other projects that had to get done first anyway and that silk still has easily another week on it, so, no hurry.

But having finished a hat for someone else I no longer had a carry-around project. Just the silk. I was driving friends to San Francisco Airport this afternoon, and just before we got there I finally mused out loud to them that Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco was a whole lot closer right now than it would ever be from home and they carry the Malabrigo that would likely include exactly what I wanted that purple to be: the shade, the superwash, the softness; the wow factor, basically.

(Making that link it just finally dawned on me after all these years that the background is pale orange because they’re on Orange Avenue. My, I’m quick.)

Would the owner recognize you? Lee wondered out loud. (I guess because of the distance from home.)

Phyllis and I guffawed at her husband and I told him, Even Kathryn’s husband knows me!

And so. The Borraja. When I said no, that Rios Purpuras was just a little too gray, Kathryn pulled out exactly the right purple in the Arroyo–and thank you, Malabrigo, too, it’s perfect.

At the wheel again, I tossed various pattern thoughts around as to what I would do next with my time.

One stooped, elderly man stood alone with his memories at the foot of the Army-built Golden Gate Cemetery, a world away from the seven lanes of cars streaming past on the other side of the fence. The light turned and he didn’t see me stopped alongside him, wishing suddenly I could get out of my car so that he wouldn’t have to stay alone. I turned onto a quieter street and up the hill running alongside the place as I continued towards the freeway.  A small American flag had been planted at each grave marker, with large flags flapping vigorously in the Bay breeze around the small steep hill overlooking them all. Families were getting out of their cars near the entryway for the the Memorial Day weekend, and I silently wished the old man way down the hill company and camaraderie, too.

And I wanted to ask them, too, to tell me their stories. To see their loved ones come back to life in their eyes.

But I did not interrupt what was so intensely personal but continued on to my own place, knowing I would never forget the sight.

I picked up my project wrong somehow at knit night last night and dropped about twenty stitches of fine slithery silk off the end and didn’t know it and didn’t see it till I’d made it worse.

I suddenly rued not having filled my new glasses prescription yet. I tried. I stopped things from running any further (it was a fairly complicated lace pattern) and then stuffed the mess back in its ziploc in my knitting bag and hoped that the friend who was showing off her new scarf over there wouldn’t see the angst in my face. Hat project, good thing I’d brought that too, okay, it’s definitely going to be a long slouch hat now (glancing at the clock). Just. Knit. (Deep breath.)

She came over and showed me the pattern she was working from and we laughed together in surprised recognition that the stitch pattern I was making that hat in was the same as for the main part of her shawl. Harmonic convergence. (She helped me right back in that moment and she had no idea.)

It took me till this afternoon to face it. There was no way I was going to tink for two or three hours and the liveliness of the silk was just unfroggable.

I hashed it out. Smoothed out all those snagged separated strands complicating finding where the yarn was supposed to go, worked out what went where, picked up, reknit, nope, re-dropped, tried again… And looked up, done, surprised to see that it had only taken me about twenty minutes. See? All those previous times, they came in handy.

This was a project I had worked so hard to have perfect for publication. Anything less than, I would have had to start all over.

Knitting the next row never felt so good as the pattern continued to settle nicely into place. I knew it was back to being just right but there’s nothing quite like proving it so to myself.

Phew.

(Let’s see if I can sneak another row in before bedtime.)

Suddenly realizing I don’t have a picture of it. Which is fine, I certainly have the pattern.

She admired that scarf the couple of times I wore it to knit night–a lot. Really liked it. As in, told me to finish that book, willya, because she wanted to make that one, and ooh, that colorway!

I knew her dad was sick and with a mental nod in her direction, I put on a dark-coral sweater tonight because she passionately loves orange and that was the closest I had to it to wear in solidarity. (Stephanie, I thought of your post, too, and thought how much the two of you could swap orange stories if you ever met.)

That scarf went okay with it so on impulse I put that on too just before I walked out the door.

She admired it again, a welcome diversion to the news that her dad had just been found to have not only cancer but he’s Stage Four. All the family had been asked to come and she will be flying overseas in the morning to be by his side.

And as she was telling me the news, she turned her head to catch something someone behind her said, giving me a moment when she wasn’t looking.

Wait, what?! She was stunned to feel that scarf going around her.

Honey. Even if I didn’t know it at the time, what else on earth did I make it for?

Happy Mother’s Day to all!

An old friend. A message today out of the blue with a request for a copy of my book  for a friend of hers. A new address–wait. Katie! You’ve moved back to the area?!

Turns out an old friend of hers who lives across the country had inherited a house here and Katie is house-sitting for her while managing the fixing up of the place.

She showed me the sweater her friend had once made her and was pleased I wanted to show it off to you all: she knew I would understand why that friend needed to have my book in thanks.

Katie’s husband died some time ago and I planned to quietly tear up her widow’s mite of a check, but darn it, she insisted on paying me and she insisted on handing me cash and she allowed me to give her no discounts.  I tried.

The quick visit turned into several hours as she offered us homemade ginger molasses cookies and her little dog decided we were harmless and took a nap in front of the hearth. It was so good to see her.

And we got to see that magnificent old house. Eighty years ago, it was a spacious barn for drying a farmer’s apricots in: an open loft towered in view above most of the lower level, hemmed in at the edge only by sheets of added-on lucite maybe 18″ high. Not a place for a child and certainly not up to code. Yet. Add a barrier to falling there and at the stairs and call it good. Maybe divide that massive first-floor wall of a window across at waist level like we had to do years ago, but the contractor will let her know. We talked about how to do what needed doing without disrupting its sense of history.

The hanging lights were ornately crafted, from a very different era. Ironwork?

There were ancient willow trees out the windows, streams of small leaves dancing gracefully in the breeze. The furnishings, including a grand piano, spoke to Katie’s descriptions of the now-gone owners’ love of a good party dressed in one’s finery. In a valley full of the tear-down and the so-modern and the crowded, this was space and slow pace, a glorious home.

And it brought our Katie back near us for now.

Bought a house as young parents, watched our kids grow up and our friends’ kids grow up. One family moved away eleven years ago but their boys stayed best friends with Keith of just-over-thataway; we visited them a few years ago in their not so new anymore place up in the Rocky Mountains–the one where we saw the herd of elk doing the fishy dance as we came back down from there.

They left California about the time I was in the hospital the first time and their youngest daughter took the time out of packing to make me a paper crane. I have it right over there.

The mom can make costumes like I can knit–and she thinks it’s simple and easy to do, too, to which I guffaw, and then think oh. right. in the direction of people who think that what I do is hard. So. One notable Halloween party when our kids were young, she and her family showed up with all of them done up as  Star Wars characters: the oldest girl had the dark hair and braids to totally pull off the Princess Leia look, the dad was Obi-Wan Kanobe, etc, and everybody else just kind of stopped right there and gaped when they saw them–WOW! So much detail, so much work (so much not a chance that you could talk her into letting you pay her to make anything like that for you or your family, too–requests that will sound familiar to knitters everywhere.)

And now three of their kids are in a video, and their sons’ best friend Keith–oh, wait, didn’t I ever blog about Keith? About going to church in Ft Worth when we were visiting my in-laws, and when the meeting ended we stood up at one end of the chapel and Keith stood up at the other end of the chapel and he and I both stood there frozen in disbelief, jaws hanging quite open: what are YOU doing here!

Small world!

So now he lives near where they do, and Keith has the Obi-Wan role. Etc. This video went past my Facebook feed again and again yesterday and I finally clicked today after my daughter said something.

Ohmygosh. It IS them! The maker of my crane is the female star. Her sister does a cameo. Their mom’s costumes rise again.

One of the great things about getting older is watching the world shrink before your very eyes.

Or close to it, as the stitch count added and added.

I had a moment of truth this evening: I was going to have to rip it all out yet again, I said out loud. (Why I haven’t been blogging about knitting the last little bit–you’d have had to cover your ears and hide the yarns.There were moments where planting innocent baby tomatoes and squishing water into resisting dirt saved us all.)

He knew that was his cue but he totally caught me off guard:  “But didn’t you use Frog Free yarn? You gotta use Frog Free yarn, y’know!”

I laughed, and it helped as I frogged a day’s worth of work for the third time. In silk (which I had held onto tight so it wouldn’t all go flying off the needles.) On size US 4s (3.5 mm.) All that carpal tunneling for the feels-overrated-right-now Learning Experience of it.

It was just that one missing stitch in the sequence, but it was at the beginning of the sequence and it changed everything and I refused to fudge it. You will see this pattern later, but not before it’s proven itself perfect over and over. Um, that means I have to be, too, and, um. (I’ve already knitted this shawl before. It’s already gorgeous and the pattern just needs confirming. Come ON, Alison!)

And darnit, I began with the right number of stitches the first time, on Saturday, if only I’d seen it.

Meantime, I got more tomato seedlings planted.

I started over. I counted right. I got the sequence right. I got it past failure mode, and we are back in business here. Man, does it feel good.

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.

One project at a time. Happy anticipation.

He looked at me, sure he’d heard that one wrong, repeating the word back to me so I could correct it. “Cobweb?”  One could just picture a spider-phobic kid reacting to a project with that thought attached to it.

“Yes, cobweb,” like, everybody knows, I mean, right? The thinnest weight of the superfine laceweights, the barely-theres: “It’s a technical term,” I grinned.

I was telling him about the little package of 70/30 cashmere/silk that had come today from Colourmart2.com, the site where the Colourmart folks sell the very last of their mill ends. There were just under 300 yards of that blue softness, just enough to pair up with a strand of something else for a cowl project to add a pop of blue and a strokeable depth to the hand (technical term alert) of a good merino. Including postage from England, the mini cone had cost me all of $5.

And it’s gorgeous. (And lighter and brighter than that nighttime photo shows.)

And it got me to sit down and make myself get 6000+ stitches closer to finishing up the current project, not a technically difficult one but still a slog because it involves paying attention to every single stitch on the needle and on the paper as I fine-tune a pattern that was not quite as perfectly written the first time as I’d thought it was. Which means I’ll have to knit it again after this before publication and probably again after that to be very sure there are no. more. errors. –but I’m that much closer to it now.

Worth the five bucks right there.

There you go, that’s a better picture of the color of the hat: the morning sun bouncing off the San Francisco fog with the trees below.

Meantime, the cinnamon sticks disappeared. No crumbles, no shards, gone. Huh. The cinnamon branch against the peach tree was left untouched but above it one of those sticks had been jammed between clamshells where the squirrels couldn’t reach it even if they’d suddenly stopped avoiding the stuff. No sign.

I finally got it: birds’ nests.

I wonder if they had any way to intuit that the non-native cinnamon would keep mites and ants away from their babies? Squirrels will line their nests with bay leaves to keep fleas away if they’re lucky enough to find any.

Or maybe they just were attracted to the size and shape and color and smoothness and light weight.  I don’t know.

Meantime, after very rarely ever seeing a single one, (like, twice, I think) –but I don’t think it was the cinnamon that called them–today I had a flock of fourteen elegant birds crowding the patio. They dwarfed the mourning doves, who kept well clear. According to Sibley, band-tailed pigeons are 13 oz to our Cooper’s hawk’s 16 oz–they are big. Beaks with a bit of a curve downward with dark coloring at the tip rather like a hawk’s. Cool.

They were skittish and didn’t stay long (Don’t move! You moved!) and I got no pictures, but, wow, my birdfeeder has never seen the like. (And no you can’t land on it–one tried.)

The third thing. I got the call from the UCSF researcher and we finished up our annual lupus survey but just before she could go I told her what I had done.

She was stunned. She was thrilled, and she loved that the color matched where she worked. She was so excited for her mom to be getting that soft chemo cap made just for her and she completely made my day by how grateful she was–she has no way to know how many more people will get knitting done for them rather than just thought about after she so thoroughly fed my soul in those moments.

After I hung up that did it: I sat down and undid the last ten rows and redid them to take out that one single non-decrease row right there that was making the back poof out funny. Yes it did. Out it goes. Should have made them all decrease rows as of one step sooner. Now it’s nice and rounded off at the top the way it needed to be and now it’s good enough for her mom and now it’s reblocked and tomorrow, now that it’s perfect, tomorrow it goes out in the mail.

It’s amazing the difference one single step can make.

The memorial concert was beautiful. Friends, family playing and even Uncle David taking part–my cousin found a recording of his dad playing in an ensemble from 1977.

And I got to listen with both ears. It occurred  to me that I’d had the battery cases hanging slightly open during the flight because that’s how you turn those aids off. That made the right one more vulnerable to the unwitting kid with the backpack.

So maybe I could nudge the case a little? I tried it and it worked. It cut in and out at times but basically I had both ears for the day. Such a relief I can’t even begin to say as I saw cousins I hadn’t seen in years. In a noisy environment.

I am so grateful.

Had  two boys about ten and eleven sit next to me on the plane. Nice kids. The one next to me went oh cool!  when I pointed out Lake Tahoe below us, and then the Great Salt Lake.

He swung his backpack on when we landed and never knew it smacked my face.

I couldn’t hear Mom very well when she greeted me–huh. I just changed that battery yesterday. We got in the car, my son John at the wheel, and I took it out. Weird–it looked scratched. I put a new one in. Dead. It now looked scratched. Repeat one last time.

Its broken. I’ve never had such a thing happen before.

It’s under warranty, but meantime I now know why I kept feeling I should take my old hearing aids on the trip. That made NO sense and I left them home.

But at least I have one ear.