Our friend the patient and her husband got their pie.

Our mutual friends came over and picked cherries to make their own, bringing a much-appreciated gift of chocolate.

And I awoke this morning with the startle of an intense realization that the reason I couldn’t make myself finish the row on that afghan yesterday and just. get. going. was because I’d started the sunflower where a tree was supposed to start soon and that would not do. You don’t pile up motifs in a corner like that. My fingers were waiting for my brain to catch on before I created any more work for them to have to undo.

And now the sunflower has been transplanted to where it belonged all along.

Got to the next color change on my project, went looking for what should go there, found it–and…I hadn’t scoured that yarn that day I did all those others. I hanked it, but cleaning the mill oils off was supposed to be the next step. It is now dutifully sitting in hot soapy water. Any dye that’s going to crock, do it now.

Just when it was starting to feel like hey, this is beginning to come out right after all, I have to sit and wait.

So let me distract us with my first-ever homegrown sunflower. Variety: Creme Brûlée.

Oh and? If I ever again decide to do a big intarsia project with doubled yarns, take me aside and just y’know quietly scream AREYOUOUTOFYOURMIND in my ear? And yet, and yet. Not all of them are doubled, and it is so going to be worth it.

Sudden thunderbolt as I type: this thing needs a sunflower! That’s why I bought that orange! Of course it does!

Swifts are great, but a well-handwound ball of yarn is its own art form.

It was $12.32 for my 100g/650m and curiosity got to me.

Here, feel this, as I held it out to him after it arrived this afternoon. So soft. And look how shiny it is.

He smiled a Yes Dear and dutifully ran a hand over it for me.

I gave it the fragility test: see how easily a piece breaks off.

It didn’t, and I had to quit trying.

Not that any of that justified buying it, and I’m going to be considering awhile before actually diving into it. Maybe. It and I are still negotiating.

A viscose yarn that sold out before mine made it here from France: it is 100% dandelion. I knew I’d regret it if I never tried it.

This is where my game of yarn chicken was just before the 271 stitch cast-off row yesterday. Won it.

The men came and worked on the awning today–which included replacing and painting some of the thin corrugated-looking wooden strips that the panels rest on and are held in place by. A few of my guaranteed panels made by the Palram greenhouse people were, oops, cracked and going straight back to the store.

They will be back tomorrow to finish.

It is innately silly and very very human to want to accomplish more when someone’s watching. Even if in fact I was doing this in the next room, but hey, motivation is motivation, I’ll take it.

That’s over two pounds of yarn. Plus four swatches! It’s a good start.  

Note to self: twelve now, with 159 and 166 grams including the 36g paper cones left on the two at the end of the repeat plus a purl row.

The mockingbirds were flying into the Stella tree for the first time yesterday, the heads-up that the cherries were starting to turn red. My mom reminded me of the grape-and-only-grape unsweetened Koolaid spray to keep birds away from fruit, and I armed a bottle tonight.

And then didn’t do it yet. The raccoons seem to think it’s fruit punch bowl time when that stuff shows up and I don’t have an Erva bunny cage around the cherry trunk yet. Eh. Tomorrow morning. (Do I type, in an old nightgown so I don’t care if the wind blows purple stains on it? And before I wash my hair.)

p.s. I thought this one was looking like it would start to come up today. By comparison, the other sprouted last Wednesday. Grow little apricots grow! 

I’m at 17 cones now wound off since Saturday. Enough for several afghans that will be knitted with my hands getting to enjoy those soft yarns at their best rather than their straight-from-the-cone quickest–and by that pre-wash, not having to worry whether they’ll shrink at different rates within the project the first time they hit water and soap. It was worth it.

The tenth: done.

We have the first tomato flowers of the year. (Photo taken through netting, thus the blur.)

Re the peregrines: while the sub-adult was in courtship with the adult, a male adult flew in and took over mating duties for a single day while the teenager sat over yonder and cried audibly in camera range at being ousted. But there was no fight, because the adult male didn’t think he was old enough to be competition yet–and then was never seen again. Avian flu, we don’t know.

So the female went back to accepting the sub-adult because that’s all she had.

And so I wonder…

Of the three eggs she laid, only one hatched and it’s late enough by now that there is no expectation the other two will.

Maybe he wasn’t fertile yet after all. We’ll never know.

(Today’s video here.)

Ninth, done. Part of me has been picturing one of those old-time flip-photo books with these where you can almost see the stitches moving.

Took a break to help him clean up a corner of his and a very small package labeled

After Thoughts Magnetic Earrings

came to hand. It had slipped behind the furniture long ago.

He looked at it and gave a wry grin. Remember these?

I hadn’t even looked at it, really, so, no.

He named the guy’s name.

Ohmygosh.

It involved a trip with the kids, where the older two were about 11 and 13 and conspired with their dad to pull as dire a practical joke as one has ever seen from any of us. You put these on in pairs: they’re magnetic so you need both sides to hold them on. Voila! Nose piercings! Multiple ear piercings, all with sparkly little fake jewels at the centers of little stars marching way up your earlobes. But the sparkly nose piercings on both son and daughter just totally sealed the deal.

And so temporary–all you have to do is pull on the outside one and the pair falls off into your hands at the end of Halloween…or punking a particular someone who might or might not have been to the right of Attila the Hun but what are friends for.

The two of them knocked on the door, grinning, the rest of us a few steps behind to let them have their spotlight moment.

The husband, knowing we’d driven some hours to get there, opened the door

took one look

and slowly closed the door in their faces, shaking his head, saying, I’m sorry, I’m…sorry, I just can’t let you in like that, as the door shut to. He was dead serious.

This was more of an effect than any of us had expected and the kids protested loudly through the door that they were fake, they were fake, here, watch us, they’re just magnets!

He opened the door and let us in with some reluctance still (I guess we were going to subvert his children?) but he required they take them off on the porch first and expected an apology and well, frankly, so did they though they didn’t say so and well that was interesting.

We found out later he was cheating on his wife. Who had cancer. She divorced him and lived the happiest I’d ever seen her for the years she had left.

Do I remember those magnets. A rhetorical question if there ever was one.

It is just so weird sometimes what some people think is immoral.

I planted a handful of Anya apricot seeds after we got back from Seattle a month ago and today the first one finally sprouted. Those baby leaves just delight me to no end.

The sideways-design idea? Yeah, lace stretches every which way and all that, but laid flat like that it’s 72″ wide and 27″ long. Or 33″. Or more if you hold it up and its weight pulls it down, but either way, I’m thinking I’m doing this much again and calling it done.

Or (looking the dimensions up) I could do a bit past that and call it a twin size. Should I really want to?

Another same but not quite the same picture: seven. One half pattern repeat like that is 3252 stitches per day.

English needs a word for when there isn’t peer pressure but you treat yourself as if there were for your own advantage in order to accomplish something. Keep it up, it’s working! Thanks!

Meantime, our enormous tropical-looking I forget the name but we’ve always called it the man-eating plant with its scaly trunk undulating on and above the ground like a Chinese dragon has sent up a flower bud wrapped up inside that thick corn cob-y thing. Past experience says that it will open up for less than a day and only partly exposed to view, facing the sun.

And now I know where we put the blue outdoor five gallon emergency water container. It was tucked under that thing so as to be out of the way and out of sight. Worked, too!

Sixth, as you follow it diagonally: done.

I’ve had problems with my corneas tearing from my eyes being too dry. My eye doctor told me to use not just drops, but a particular one because it didn’t have preservatives that would accumulate over time and the single-vial version would negate the risk of contaminating the bottle.

So I use GenTeal.

There’s been a growing recall of contaminated eye drops that have caused eyeball loss and sepsis and deaths and that multiple antibiotics are not able to cure.

GenTeal’s single-use vials say made in France. Okay so far. Their ointment, however, is made by one of the two companies under recall. FDA link here. Symptoms list here. If you use any made in China or India, including those sold by Costco, it’s probably from those two companies that this has been traced back to. One source I read said the India plant has been a repeat offender on contamination, but I don’t have the data to back that up.

Regulations, folks. They’re life savers.

Merriam-Webster, “fernery: a place where ferns grow.”

Playing The Little Red Engine That Could here: the fifth set of diamonds/ferns is finished, about ten to go. I think I can I think I can I think I can I think I can…

For those who have not yet heard: XRX, which used to publish knitting books and a magazine while running Stitches events, then pulled back to just running Stitches events with all those classes for fiber artists and vendors on the floor and thousands of participants, was done in by the effects of the pandemic and as of today is formally out of business.

It is unfathomable that after 30 years of going to Stitches West and, once, Stitches East, there will not be another one. Not just the yarns and booths but all the friends I only get to see there, now how will we ever? Such a loss. And all that knowledge begging to be shared.

I thought their moving Stitches West from the Bay Area to Sacramento was a mistake–it was their biggest event–but this was absolutely not an opinion I wanted to be vindicated on.

Surely someone out there will take the sudden business opening and run with it.

I finally went back to the 64/36 cashmere/cotton afghan I’d started before our trip. I’d put it aside, debating on a blue for the recipient, but this finally won out and I started into the main pattern two days ago. Notes: size US8, two strands dk, 271 stitches, 15 repeats, and it’s coming out 60″ across which is a bit more than I’d planned for so it’ll have to be quite long to match. Because knits shrink lengthwise much more than widthwise.

I like the look of a seed stitch edging but that part of the fabric has a tendency to look stretched out compared to the rest.

So I compromised with myself: I’m seed stitching but only on the wrong side rows.  Right side rows, knit straight across there. There’s surely a name for that but I’m too lazy to look it up. This may well be my new go-to.

I typed the above and then Richard, having answered the phone, walked into the room to tell me: his Uncle Duane passed away last night.

The rush of memories! When I miscarried my first baby with 20 hours’ labor at 12 weeks (they finally did a D&C) the day before a big family get-together, it was Duane who’d followed me a moment after I’d fled down to the basement and away from all those cheerful greetings: Doesn’t anyone know?! I cried at him.

Yes, they do, he told me: but my sister told us not to mention it, thinking it would be easier on you.

He heard me out, and then he told me of their baby who’d been stillborn at seven months. He cried. It had been twenty years, but the tears still came so easily to the surface.

He totally saved me.

At a niece’s wedding, the first time we’d seen each other in probably thirty years, I asked him, Do you remember that day?

OH yes. OH yes. And I knew it had meant as much to him as it had to me. All these years later, I can see that his ability to comfort me had comforted him by giving meaning to what he and his beloved Joan had had to go through: it is so we can know how to be there for the next person.

Duane was an amputee who took the experience of losing his leg and turned it into helping Haitians who’d lost limbs in their big earthquake get prostheses. He took great care of his wife throughout her Alzheimer’s. He was just a very, very good man.

The three of us started reminiscing: at one nephew’s wedding, I had heard of Aunt Joan’s diagnosis and went up to reintroduce myself to her and she smiled, Oh, I know who YOU are! as she reached for a hug.

At the next wedding two years later, she told me with just as much enthusiasm, I don’t know who you are but I know that I love you!

My sister-in-law said Duane had been afraid of having to be institutionalized if his brain were ever to go like his late wife’s had. He never was. There was a “sudden event,” was the description, and he was gone. It was a blessing to him, hard for all of us who love him, all the mixed emotions. We’re glad for him that it was fast and over with and that he’d gotten to live on his own terms to the end.

A DKO, Michelle said, after we’d told each other how we loved that man so much and he us.

We looked at her.

Y’know, a DKO.

??

Dude Keeled Over. (Looks at us as we burst out laughing.) What?

(Richard grabs his phone and starts Googling the abbreviation.) “Divine KnockOut.” He kept looking. She offered another possibility off the top of her head.

And with that we gave Uncle Duane up there a story to laugh with his wife over. As they would.