Our ladder walked off on its own at some point in the past we know not of. I put out a plea and I do mean plea to our ward chat list; Glenn responded near-instantly. We ran very gratefully off with his ladder and Richard climbed up on our roof, relieved to finally be able to get at that furnace.

It’s working now.

My knitting, not so much. The poor guy spent several hours this evening (and that was only half of it) listening to me muttering under my breath from across the room, “But this makes no *sense*!” I counted, I recounted, I “dear could you SIXTY EIGHT SIXTY NINE SEVENTY oh sorry, dear” knitted, I frogged, I wondered who on earth ever thought I knew how to do this. A designer? Are you kidding me?

I could have fudged that one stitch there. I refuse to fudge. Ripped! I can now tell you that the new Findley yarn from Juniper Moon Farm is not only super soft and deliciously shiny, but it holds up to being frogged and reknitted five times–and it will be again if I have to to get this to come out as perfect as it deserves. I know exactly how I want this pattern to look. A bunch of silly string is not going to defeat me!

I guess we got our heat back…

(Hastening back to the computer to add, he was a total sweetheart about it and I was trying to be. All it needed was for me to stop fussing over it and go do my treadmill time to clear my head. That seems to have done it. Tomorrow I should be able to just sit down, relax totally, and knit.)

I finished this hat.

I thought of about a hundred more people who would be thrilled to be given a handknit hat. I aim to please.

When there are too many possibilities and too many ideas and my brain can’t settle down and pick one, I start winding balls: something to keep my hands busy and getting something actually done while my mind meanders in the context of handling soft yarn and colors. That usually settles it.

That or dyeing hanks to something new, but it was too chilly to change out of my layers of wool that might get splashed on. Even if stacking balls of yarn like this is as close as we get to building snowmen around here, it was 49F last night and at that rate even my husband might start wearing a hat to bed.

Hopefully when he gets some daylight time and climbs up on that roof tomorrow he’ll be able to figure out why the furnace up there isn’t working. The thing melted its, and I quote, silicon control rectifier (not to mention part of our outside circuit breaker) a few years ago. Crossing our fingers and keeping the darn thing turned off for the moment, glad it’s supposed to warm up for the next few days.

Listened to Conference today again; it’s a two-day multi-session thing. (The Sea Silk project got finished.)

Quentin Cook, one of the last speakers, started to tell a story.

Okay, back up: he first made the point that bad things happen to good and bad people alike and those who would judge the ones that bad things happen to, just don’t get it.

But it is amazing how all the personal tributaries that flow into the Mississipi River of the lives of all of us eddy and tumble together. As soon as he started into his tale, I knew exactly who he was talking about: I’d read the biography by the man’s son about his father. Then he named the name. Yup.

There were six young Mormon missionaries nearly 100 years ago whose missions to Great Britain were ending at the same time and they were going to return to the US together. With much hype going on about the world’s greatest ship, the fellow named Alma booked passage for them all on that one.

And then one missionary simply could not make it that day and was going to have to ship out a day later alone. The chance at a trip of a lifetime, gone.

Alma said no way no how are we leaving you doing that long trip by yourself; you’re going with us. We’re just going to have to re-book our tickets and that’s that.

But, but!

No buts, we’re going together.

Which is why they weren’t on the Titanic.

Which is why, nearly 100 years later… I have the best daughter-in-law anybody could ever ask for and an adorable little grandson who has totally stolen our hearts.

Alma, Kim’s great-grandfather, was generous to the one who was disappointed.

Small choices matter.

They don’t stay little…

My cousins John and Dan and Dan’s wife Leslie and their boys came from out of town to stop by for a few hours on their way further south. It is amazing how fast other people’s kids grow up, and it was wonderful to see them. “Richard (the younger) has a baby?!”

Leslie’s mom is an avid knitter?  Who knew? I told her my friend Gunilla Leavitt just bought  The Golden Fleece in Santa Cruz and I bet her mom knows her. I sent them off with a copy of “Wrapped in Comfort” for her mom; family gets extra privileges and all that.

We listened to Conference, good put-up-your-feet-and-knit time. Almost finished that Sea Silk.  Smiled remembering that as a teenager I used to babysit the kids of one of the speakers on the occasional Friday evening back in Maryland; they were good kids. He’s a good and kind and loving man.

The wildlife: this morning when the other squirrels left, my little injured one came out of wherever she’d been, I saw her, she caught the nut deftly in her mouth and immediately did her funny sideways lope to her new hiding place, tucked that conspicuous tail remnant away and disappeared so completely that it surprised me all over again. The others came back; the others left; only then did she appear again, getting seconds and ducking  immediately away under the patio again and safely out of sight. She’s got it all figured out.

Costco, later: I quite enjoyed getting people to smile back.

Meantime: a sample table. People waiting their turn, when, this time it was an old Russian woman who saw that the little paper cups of food in the meat department were going to be all gone by the time it was her turn and she simply shoved her way through the crowd to get to the front.

Given what happened two weeks ago, when she shoved him–“Wait,” I asked Richard afterward, I having stepped away to go get the milk and having completely missed the scene, “some little old lady shoved YOU? You’re a pretty formidable target!”–she did, he said, she shoved him out of her way. By taking him by surprise from behind, I’m sure.

He immediately firmly told her (and the man is not soft spoken) that she was being rude, that all these other people were waiting their turn and she could go back to the back of the line like she was supposed to and wait her turn too.

She was astonished. Nobody had ever told her no like that before, apparently. She responded in a thick Russian accent but clearly she’d understood what he’d said.

“So did she go to the back of the line?” I asked.

She did not, but she did at least wait till he’d gotten his and turned aside.

It’s a start.

If you can’t be a good tree squirrel, be a good ground squirrel. That seemed to be today’s thinking.

We had a weed tree spring up that had pretty branches and we let it be although it was right next to the patio. Canopy is a good thing, right? While I was in and out of the hospital two years ago, it was the last thing anyone was paying attention to.

One day in this Spring’s early growth, though, I happened to walk outside and do a doubletake: when had the edge of the patio gotten lifted up like this! What would it do to the house, and soon, if this kept up. It was a non-native species that offered no support to the wildlife anyway, the birds didn’t even deign to land in it nor did the squirrels touch more than the trunk, much less did any of them gain any sustenance from it; it had to go.

My little black squirrel showed up in the late morning today, daring to come out even earlier this time. A walnut for you, m’dear. She was a little more skittish, a good sign of increasing health. Even her tail was groomed now.

And again, as she munched the second walnut quietly on her forearms, a large gray squirrel approached to challenge her for it.

She ducked under that patio square. I did not know she could. But she’s a tiny thing and she had it all figured out and completely disappeared in a space I thought impossible.

The challenger, after she left awhile later, came over and sniffed around there but would not could not climb in there himself. Nuts. He’d missed out again.

Meantime, one shawlette in one skein of Sea Silk, half done, practically knitting itself. It’s amazing to my fingers how thick it feels after baby alpaca laceweight!

(Ed. to add: the tree is gone, thanks!)

For the first time ever, this evening I stepped outside just in time to see both my Cooper’s hawks at once: soaring in a wide circle, surveying the neighborhood from above, their wings held wide to ride on the wind, the one announcing their territory with the other one backing her up (while some crows across the street dared not challenge their airspace but moved down among the treetops, trying to stay out of their sight). Breathtaking.

And more down to earth: she came back today.

She has clearly learned how to manage with how things are now; she didn’t fight it but simply rested on her forearms to eat the nut I rolled to her, but first took it over to the yard and off the hard concrete. Oh!

She had much more energy, though still clearly injured; she had kind of a sideways twist to her leap, a squirrel equivalent of trying to walk in super-high heels with her hips swaying, but leap she could now. A bit slow still, but yesterday I think I could have walked outside and scooped her up; had the wildlife rescue center still been open that till very recently was two blocks away  (their funding got cut), I would seriously have considered trying to get her there.

A much larger gray saw her with her second nut and interrupted his siesta to swagger down from the tree and try to steal it from her. She turned away from him; he came after her again. He saw me suddenly standing up, eyeing him: you leave her alone. This one’s under my care now.

He hesitated, then walked around in a circle as if somehow I wouldn’t follow his movements–and then he leaped on her in an attack, teeth ready to tear into her. (Quite a few of the bigger ones have torn ears; ears seem to be a target in dominance fights.)

But he leaped quickly away again as I started to open the door, and when he was far enough from her that I could aim it specifically, he got squirtgunned for it while she hid in the bushes and trees, up or down I do not know.

But she was clearly so much better than yesterday.  She felt better, she was better nourished, and she had learned quickly how to get by with how things are now rather than inflame the damage by trying to stand upright.

Watching her these last few days has been like watching a part of myself.

I finally sent off a note to my Dr. R yesterday, detailing symptoms we knew too well. It had been nearly a week of it.

He emailed me right back with a clear plan of how to start tackling this, starting with the simple declaration, “I’m sorry to hear this.”

I found a surprising degree of power in that simple declaration. Someone who knew every disease detail but also the potential emotional impact, someone who had hoped with us that the potentially-untreatable might be gone forever, someone who cared deeply and who KNEW…from hospital to hope, every single little thing…

It mattered to him. I knew of course it would. But those words were the most perfectly stated and the most caring rendition of that whole unspeakable everything, and with them, he made all the difference.

And now I could handle it.

I woke up today feeling like that little skunk-striped black squirrel that soon showed up out there: still limping but coping and more food down me and so much more energy than there was before.  I think I’ll be all right.

(Oh, and by the way, when I projected that stitch count to finish that shawl? I forgot to factor in the ruffle. 12,462 stitches in two days. I was determined to bring accomplishment out of the enforced downtime and I did it.)

I had an errand to run. It didn’t even walk, much less run (sorry, Cheryl, hopefully tomorrow). I was glad instead for large swaths that can no longer be inflamed.  It was a good day for putting up my feet and knitting, 5985 stitches’ worth.

I have a shawl that I made a few years ago that was different from anything else I’d done, in a way that I wasn’t sure at first I liked; it simply was different, that’s all. I threw it in a ziploc, I threw it in a corner, I didn’t remember what I hadn’t written down and my notes were a total mishmash that I guess made sense at the time. Sort of. I guess it was one of those I’ll get back to it that, till now, I didn’t.

I started it again last Wednesday night. I got the first 20″ worth figured out, written down, tested, knit, and the last of that part done today. It all came out exactly right and written down exactly so now. I am very pleased.

But what was in my notes after that point had no connection to reality–clearly, I’d tried it, chucked it, and riffed. I puzzled over the original while thinking, this shouldn’t be so hard; can we defuzz the brain a bit here? At least I hadn’t let myself give the thing away, knowing somewhere down deep that it was the only representative I had of what, now, I think is a really cool idea.

I took a break, I answered some email, and that’s when it hit me–I knew suddenly how I’d done what I’d done. I grabbed the older shawl again, grateful for its wooly presence, and after swatching, checking, writing, knitting, checking, correcting, knitting knitting knitting–

–I’ve got it. I wanted to enough finally that finally I’ve got it. I am terribly pleased with myself and with it. I can’t wait till the day I get to show Lisa Souza what her sapphire baby alpaca laceweight is now.

Another 5985 stitches and I’ll be casting off.

You only get to turn 80 once and yesterday was a milestone day for my mother-in-law.  So I’m going to say it out loud here, too: Happy Birthday, MomH!

The Cooper’s hawk caught my attention this morning with a successful hunt. This time he (she?) took its kill up to a tree and disappeared just below the center of that first picture there (no, that’s a leaf, he’s behind there), the occasional small bit of fluff floating down in the breeze.

He swooped through again about three hours later, highly unusual in the middle of the day and it was a hot one at that. He perched in the olive tree (second picture), fanning out his feathers and turning to catch a breeze between them just so. That’s his tail below the limb. I did not see a second hawk at the time, although it sure looks like it from the camera–if it is, it’s standing behind the chopped end of that big limb and leaning left and up towards its mate.

And a few hours after that, one zoomed in a half circle around the first birdfeeder, straightened, immediately did a right-angle turn and swooped its 31″ wingspan within the 10′ foot-wide foot-of-the-L part of the covered patio and around Kim’s feeder just perfectly so and back out to a tree. And then, before even two minutes were up, he did it again! With a pause somehow at the end of that last circle, as if he were trying to scare a squirrel out from hiding. (And there is one that darts under the barbecue smoker over there. Clearly, it’s not fooling anybody.) But wow, what an air show!

My first thought was, now come on, you know no prey flew in there in between; are you really that impatient and hungry?

But the next time Coopernicus dropped all pretense of stealth: he flew to the most exposed branch jutting out into the yard from up high, the sun radiating off his chestnut front, as if to proclaim to all the world–

–and that’s when I finally got it.

Glenn Stewart of UC Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has mentioned that at fall equinox, birds display some of the same behaviors they do at spring equinox, and that the peregrine falcons, specifically, make a particular show of guarding and announcing their established territory.

My yard was being announced as off limits to all comers.

And they’d been challenged on it yesterday. Yesterday, I had a small crowd of crows fly overhead for the first time in a long time and the Cooper’s pounced on prey in front of me not long after. Those crows will attack hawk young in the nest in the spring–so today I guess they’re not taking any chances: not of the crows and definitely not of any other hawks. From that king-of-the-mountain limb, something overhead bothered him and he flew off after it and over my head, not at hunting speed; that flight definitely felt different. Just don’t get in his way.

Dinnertime, a little later–and there, a Cooper’s, yet again, and away to the left. And again and to the right! Swoop! Swoop!

I had a shawl I’d knitted out of random baby alpaca laceweight a few years ago that I’d lost some of my notes for and some of what I did find was fairly scrambled, definitely not the copy meant for keeps. I’d been wanting to reknit it, definitely writing the pattern down and writing it right this time. It was going to be a lot of work. I’ve avoided it all this time.

Today I sat down with my birdwatching and my Lisa Souza baby alpaca laceweight in Sapphire, gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous, in the color of the deepening sky well before the dark, and worked that pattern out.  I have written it. I am knitting it to test it. I’ve got it.

Or clearly, buyer beware.

Meantime, the fourth hat for Vermont flood relief, with apologies for the flashbleaching. In real life it’s a triple-braid allover cable.

I bought some $8.99+ship mink/cashmere laceweight via Ebay awhile ago to see if it really was what it said it was–having once ordered $.99 silk/cashmere from someone else in That Big Country that a bleach test declared to be mostly-bamboo at best. You don’t get what you don’t pay for.

The American proprietor of Great Northern Yarns, looking to establish a world market in mink yarn awhile back, flew to China to verify the source of the fiber and the humane care they take of their animals to his satisfaction, and I’ve tried his. It has a distinct hand and is very soft, so I already knew I quite liked the stuff. His, too, has some cashmere blended in.

The new stuff seems to my hands to be a good enough match. I should note that if you want dk weight, though, ya gotta buy it from GNY.

So as I was finishing up the last of that fourth Vermont hat, with worsted and dk running together on size 5 US needles and cabled, tight tight tight and warm warm warm but hard hard hard on the hands, I escaped for a few minutes by admiring that mink stuff online again. I’d been wishing they had more pale-person-friendly colors; couldn’t hurt to go see.

And there it was. A picture of a display of every color the stuff seems to come in, from a new vendor, buy any lot size and name your colorway. A caution: one of their listings says “This is not mink this is not cashmere” but the rest of their English is so fractured that who knows what they meant to say.

100 skeins 5000 g mink yarn iceberg ferrets

Condition: new

Well, we certainly wouldn’t want old ferrets. Okay, it took me awhile but I found a listing with the 90% wool of ferrets 10% cashmere part. Got it. Weasel? Ferret? Mink?

But iceberg? Anybody?

(Ed. to add.  I looked again. I’ll take them at their “This is not” word and stick with what I’ve got from whom I know, product-wise. The “partner” yarns sound to me as I think about it like they’re being marketed as strands to run with the ones that actually are the blend I’m looking for. I wonder what they’re made of!

Oh. There’s a sheepish picture on the ball band. Never mind.)

Two hats finished for Vermont flood relief. An attempt at diving into a third: playing with colors, four strands of fingering and lace weight on 3.75mm needles, creating a Monet effect and a very dense fabric like I wanted–till the hands screamed Stop!

Oh. Well. Be that way.

Frustrated, I went looking for something easier to do.

Which is how, four or five months after the fact, an abandoned shawl that had needed a ton of tinking and that I dared not frog, not in that yarn and pattern, finally got rid of its botched edging. And yes, the woman who taught in her lace book how to do lifelines did not run a lifeline and yes, without one I was hosed and I knew it.

But fixing it was a chance to feel like I was still making progress and going forward on something, anything, while involving mostly the hand that wasn’t bothering me, so, that I could do. And now, a tedious hour+ later, it is finished. What a relief.

It was one of those projects where nobody was going to see the goof but me, but that was enough. I knew.

I still need a small, mindless, portable–but comfortable!–project to take to wait for a doctor appointment tomorrow, and that doctor runs notoriously late.  Pardon me, I’ve got to run go cast on.

Knitting two strands of soft merino/silk dk on 3.75 mm needles in tight cablework was like knitting at sock density and took me longer to finish than I thought it would. But it will be warm.

Ellen of Half Pint Farms in Vermont named this colorway Evening Shadows. We were in the Green Mountain State three years ago, just before the leaves turned, and I fell in love with how the fog and shadows from the mountains painted the world in purpley blues across the pined forests–add in the Judy Sumner connection to this particular hank and nothing else would do for knitting for Vermont relief.

As I finished it up today, I was distracted a moment by a California towhee outside my window, a Claude Monet study in browns: when you get a chance to see them up close in direct sunlight, there’s actually a surprising amount of other shades mixed in there, even a bit of brick red. They are designed to fade into the landscape, and yet they are a fair bit more complex than one expects at first glance.

They are not skittish birds. They never fly into the window, even when a hawk threatens, they just head straight for home. They never try to crowd onto the feeders, whose perches are too tight for them anyway: they know what they want and they know where they want to go to find it. (I should be so lucky when I’m stashdiving, said the woman with scars on her arm from going through a window as a kid.)

And I promised to show Karin‘s yarn: here’s her Atlantic color sock weight she gifted me with; it’s deeper and more intense in real life. Pretty stuff.

On to the next project!

A few years ago, I wrote a little bit of a book. (Purlescence still has new copies at the cover price, signed for you if you’d like if you wait for me to show up for Knit Night.) And it sold well.

My friend Judy Sumner, whom I had known via the Knitlist and KnitTalk yahoo groups for lo these many years, had had a sock book idea in her head for a long time. She had already been successful in getting a number of her designs published; her name was already out there in the world of designers and via the thousands on those lists; she wondered if she could do it too. Passing along the gift of Gracie Larsen‘s having believed in me and the great good it had done me, I thought a collection of Judy’s sock patterns would be a wonderful thing to have out in the world and I encouraged her to go for it, one voice among many others.

Twist her arm. She sent me regular updates on how things were coming along. I thought that was very cool. She loved her editor. I loved that.

Judy’s website is here, her book, which came out as beautiful as I knew it would, has been selling out the last copies fast of late here.

Then Judy not only surprised me with a pair of handknit socks, just because she’s a knitter like that, but she also gifted me with a hank of yarn.

And not just any hank of yarn. She had no way to know: I had seen Ellen of Half Pint Farm‘s offerings at Stitches West many times, (Judy I believe went to Stitches East), I had oohed and aahed especially over the huge hanks of merino/silk Ellen dyes and hangs in her booth. But I would look at the price, fair though it was for 13.5 oz, and leave them behind. Those were a lot of sportweight.

So now here coming out of that box that I had no reason to expect was a gorgeous hank of that very yarn. In one of the very colorways that I’d liked so much. Judy had no way to know that; she had just wanted to do that and could only hope I might like it. If only she could have seen my exclamations of gobsmacked WOW!!! in person!

(One of my tall daughters loves her socks and they fit her beautifully. And they helped me be subversive: if you want more that feel like that on your feet, you knooooow, I could help you learn howwww…)

But I didn’t know what to do with that hank. I wanted to repay the gift in the best possible way, but I was stumped on where to start. I have taken it out and petted it and admired it and pondered it many times over the last couple of years.

The time is right. It took me, with distractions, over two hours to wind it all up yesterday, but at least and at last I finally knew: when I asked here a few days ago if anyone wanted to knit for the people who had lost homes, jobs, everything they owned in the floods in Vermont? Who could no longer reach for a favorite hat or blanket when the cold sets in?

That yarn was handdyed in Vermont.  I’m using two strands of it right now, knitting it tight and warm and dense in a cabled honeycomb pattern to make pockets to hold the warmth on someone’s head out there. It’s a start.

Judy has moved into her daughter’s house and is under hospice care now with pancreatic cancer. Her mail is being forwarded; her daughter watches over her email as well as her. If you want to thank Judy for answering knitting questions or just plain for being a friend to everybody she ever heard of, now would be the time. Don’t hope for an answer; let your peace bless them and let it be enough.

It’s very much the least of their worries, and yet, I still hope she gets to see this post to know that someone out there facing so much loss is going to be hugely comforted that someone needed to repay, and took the time–because someone else gave the gift–because someone else had the artistry to dye the yarn–and it will all have come full circle and returned to its home state.

Thirty-one plus twenty-eight do not make sixty, no matter how many rows ago you added them together.

In other words, kids, try this at home. I was diving into a new project while keeping one eye on the door for the nurse to call me back to the exam room; when you’re waiting for an appointment, it all becomes bistro mathematics.

A few minutes later, needles mid-row and set aside, the doctor’s phone buzzed while we were talking; she instantly hesitated and then quickly apologetically explained to me that her sister was between two fires in Texas, not evacuated yet…

Answer! Please!

She grabbed it and checked.

Nope. Not her, at least not yet.

I cannot sing the praises of that good doctor enough to begin to tell it. Given how wonderfully passionately she has taken care of me for twenty years, that was the least I could do to take care of her and her own back.

Y’all take care of yourselves out there, y’hear?

Triggered by Stephanie’s very kind post, this is how my baby alpaca fixation got started. (With a half-a-pie photo for Don that I took this morning.)

Years ago, a shop owner showed me some very soft yarn new to her stock that she was quite excited about.

“Baby alpaca” as one of the fiber components was something I had never heard of, but I definitely liked it: all the scratchiness and guard hairs I associated with the word alpaca, gone.

It was about time someone did this. I’d always wondered why there were alpaca rugs that were just the softest fur you could hope to snuggle your toes into, but somehow alpaca yarns and sweaters, alpaca for wearing, were always a weird combination of soft and ick, keep that away from me!

I later read an article by a man who helped change the market. He had flown to Peru to try to convince the local mill owners  that paying alpaca farmers by the pound was resulting in the worst quality fiber going to market, because coarser hairs weighed more, while (he didn’t quite put it this way) the softer-haired animals were being Darwin-ed out by being turned into rugs.

First World knitters would pay a premium to be able to have those softer fibers to work with.

Many didn’t believe him. One mill finally took the leap and gave the idea a chance and did so well that others followed their lead, and in the end, one man and the people who listened to him changed the fiber world.

I must have found some of the very earliest out there. I looked for more over the next year or two and didn’t find it. The one had been a baby alpaca/angora/merino blend; was it possible to find pure baby alpaca? And if I did, how would the fabric I made with it behave?

The younger knitters may not remember when we had a list of web searchers to choose from and had to guess which one would be best at answering a particular type of question. Ask Jeeves?

Google was still new, but we had switched over to it entirely. It didn’t have a lot of pages out there online to search from yet, but my techie husband was sure this one was going to beat the others out totally, he said they’d done their homework with their algorithm.

“Baby alpaca yarn”. Two results. Hard to imagine now. One was not helpful, but the other: a link to a wholesaler who had imported a lot of cones of the stuff in fingering weight and I guess since nobody had heard of it, nobody bought it, and they were selling it on sale, eventually down to at or near cost and closing down their shop altogether.

I bought, I was quite surprised to count up later, over month after month while they sold it at $20, then $15, and even $8 I think on one of the colors PER POUND, three dozen pounds. It was cheaper than any good wool I could find.

As I bought it while I knew I could get it I was also knitting as fast as my needles could fly. I had found the yarn of my dreams. My four tall (or eventually tall) children all got soft afghans knit triple-stranded, long enough to pull up to their chins and curl around their reclining toes and down to the floor, the way my mother says an afghan should be. I made dozens of shawls.

And the light blue baby alpaca, of which there was much and it was cheap, I overdyed into a number of other colors. There’s a picture in my book of a stack of balls of yarn, the original light blue those others all came from at front and center to encourage others to look at the yarns in the closeout bins in a new way: if it’s soft, if it’s animal or silk fiber, if you love the feel but the color, not so much, you can go play with watercolors and do something about it. You will make it all the more uniquely your own in the process.

I was quite surprised to find, while stash diving last week, that I still had a little of that light blue left after all this time. It grabbed my eyes and my memories. I cast on. I’m 2/3 of the way through a lace stole.

I had long forgotten I had gifted Stephanie with some.

Don wrote about having to wait from 3:00 to 4:20 for a doctor to show up for his appointment, which I imagine is a long wait when you don’t knit.

The one time I got stuck waiting for an hour and a half, years ago, I knew going in that I was going to be one of the last patients of the day; I imagined all those extra moments adding up throughout the shift as that good doctor would have been taking his time not so much by the clock but as each patient needed him. I knew from experience that he would do so for me, so I certainly didn’t mind if he did it for others. I came prepared.

And so I sat in the exam room in my paper gown, yarn in hand, and waited.  And waited and waited. And waited some more. You know, it was getting to be a bit much, though, especially since I hadn’t heard any voices going past in a goodly while.

Finally, I peeked out into the hall and all the lights were turned off! Except the emergency nighttime ones! (It was winter.)

I knew it had been awhile, but– ! I called out loudly into the dark, empty hallway, feeling foolish. No response. Finally, I ducked back in the room and pushed the emergency call-nurse button, figuring if anybody answered, great, if not, well, they’re sure not charging me for this appointment!

A nurse came rushing in about 15 seconds later, very apologetic. The doctor had been held up at the hospital, hadn’t they told me? No, but I could imagine a cardiologist could end up spending a lot more time with a patient there than he had planned on.

The doctor himself finally came in about two minutes after that, embarrassed as all get-out. I was just relieved that I hadn’t been entirely stupid sitting there alone unknowing as the building had emptied for the day, quietly knitting away, glad to have an excuse to get some progress made on the thing instead of anything else needing doing just then. I showed him the work in my hands, tiny needles and fine laceweight, and nodded to the pound cone of soft merino (a gift from Karin, thank you!) that I was working from: see? Thousands of yards left on that. I had a long, long way to go before I ran out of things to do.

You know that if I ever bring a cone to his office again he’s going to burst out laughing and start teasing me that I hadn’t had to wait *that* long this time!