I woke up this morning with the thought, Maybe I can get a row in before church.

Oh wait.

(Still needs a natural-light photo to do the colors justice. Might need to tighten up that cast-off line. Photo will embiggen if clicked.)

Casting off in purl stitch from a wrong-side row to end a seed stitch border gives it such a polished finish. Love it.

Meantime.

A fun bit of amateur theater at church this evening. For me, a four year old stole the show: all dressed up as a mouse, she had a tail. A long tail. A tail she could twirl. A tail she could wrap around her waist in a hug. And again. A tail she could flip up and down, lasso or yo-yo, all the things, but she did, she had a magical tail and it would soon be all over and she was not going to miss one moment of it.

She was adorable.

We needed a grocery stop on the way home. Richard said he’d sit in the car and read his book while I ran into Trader Joe’s; I invited him to join me, but something felt cheerfully like he had the right idea.

When I came back to the car, the first words out of his mouth were, Well that was weird.

What was weird.

A guy knocked on the window. He had a little kid, and said the younger one had fallen asleep in the car and he didn’t want to wake him up and if he gave Richard his phone number so he could call immediately if there was any problem whatsoever, could he leave Richard keeping an eye on his little one while he ran in real quick?

And you let him?! (I said as my brain jerked back decades before to a local baby who had been snatched when a parent ran in a store ‘for just a moment.’)

He, on the other hand, had had the immediate reaction that I had to think my way past my knee-jerkiness to: he remembered what it was like and how hard it was at that stage of parenthood. He had a clear line of sight to the kiddo. It was a compliment to be taken for the kind grandpa that he is and that the guy had instinctively trusted him to be. He lived up to that trust by not taking his eyes off the kid till the dad got back. Three, four minutes at most, he told me, he was fast.

I said, That WAS fast–they’re in the middle of rearranging the store right now like they occasionally do and everything’s moved out of place. It took me forever to find anything that wasn’t in the dairy case. But I bet his wife wouldn’t be thrilled if she knew, though.

Maybe.

Did he thank you when he came back out? (He was already gone by the time I did.)

Oh yes. Richard added that he’d seen it as a chance to make the world a little better place for one overwhelmed dad in this one place at this one time, to be a neighbor. And who wouldn’t want that?

Bay Area Yarn Crawl shenanigans, round two.

So we have now been to eight yarn stores. Most of them had sock yarns and chunky yarns but the first four had no or nearly no worsted weight yarn, much less a superwash merino like Rios. It was so strange. Today’s gallivanting found more, but only Imagiknit San Francisco had it in more than a half-handful of colors. Most of what I did find was non-superwash, which is fine, but if you’re going to do the kind of massive intarsia afghan project like I like to do you want to know it will survive what non-knitters will do to it in the laundry.

Granted, there have been a lot of knitters missing their Stitches West fix swooping down on these guys. But I mean, you plan for that, right?

We’ll see what the sister store Imagiknit East will be like on Saturday because we’re both curious, but meantime I bought more at the original one than I’d intended just because by store #6 I wanted to make a statement on behalf of my favorite wool that I use so much of. Plus it was–this is the point of getting your customers into your store–so soft and so perfect in the colors I was hoping for that I wanted it in my yarn library. I threw in the one skein of Mecha at the top for Zoom hat knitting.

Plus that shimmery skein of Ecola Worsted merino/silk at Firebird Yarns, and yeah, that will have to get knitted up for someone who’s willing to hand wash it but it’ll just be one small thing, not three months of my time on the line.

Cottage Yarns really has had me spoiled because if it’s Malabrigo, they have it. (They are not on the BAYarn Crawl list.)

How does a yarn store not have worsted weight superwash wool?

(I have no idea why it’s cropping this, click to see the whole thing. It’ll go sideways, though. Go figure.)

I wound up the last hank of Matisse Blue of that dye lot and then I’m out and we’re done. The seed stitch border will take a chunk of it.

I started a fish over here, some seaweed over there, and (where’s the purple. Found the purple) that should also start about there, and then those will probably be the last of the fish, unless (let’s see how much blue there is left at that point) I start one over there….

Three rows in, suddenly I felt like, nope. Put it all away. Picked up a hat and added a few more inches to it, wanting something where I didn’t have to plan and I didn’t have to envision and I didn’t have to make any decisions, just sit there and knit and think how someone was really going to like a gray hat after this was done and it will be fun to find out who and wouldn’t it be great to actually *finish* something.

I did not finish it.

And I baked snacks. Because tomorrow Nina and I are off doing the Bay Area Yarn Crawl thing again.

Another day, another ocean creature. (Let me go tighten that woven-in end a bit there.)

If I spend too long looking at the colors at hand to decide which would go best for the next ones to fit in with the others, does that mean I’m fishing for complements?

Yesterday’s yarn purchases. I don’t usually buy chunky, but when you have a granddaughter whose favorite outfit is, to quote her mother, “rainbow leopard sparkle” and you find some Urth yarn like the one on the left, well there you go.

Just got back from celebrating the anniversary of old friends of ours. Their kids flew into town, we got to catch up with them all–I went to college with one of them–and I took the youngest aside and told him,

You changed everything.

I what?

I told him, I argued with that feeling that I should knit for you, going, I can’t knit for everybody who ever compliments my stuff, there’s only one of me and there would be no end of it, I mean, c’mon!

The feeling was so insistent (and he knew the end of that story. It was a vest. A Kaffe Fassett vest, with him at 15 picking out all the colors for it in disbelief as I egged him on to choose more because I knew he wanted to) and his reaction had been so intensely grateful that I’d wanted to be a part of that again. I wanted to knit for other people again. You did that, I said. I’d kept a running list for awhile of the people I had knit for after that and at 182 went, That’s not what it’s about–ditch this. And that had been about 20 years ago.

I thanked him again for changing my life.

His foster/adoptive parents were celebrating their 70th anniversary. Good folks.

This is Before on that leg. (Wait, maybe I did miss a stitch.)

After hasn’t happened yet, I guess because I generally avoid doing fixes while the project is still on the needles. Could use a diagonal add-on(s?) above the eye, too. And that’s really one row too many at the bottom of the shell, but now I’m just being picky, and part of that is a bit of camera distortion from the angle.

The basic turtle, back markings aside, was the most variegated yarn in any of the critters. I’d probably go with more strands and more control over the individual colors next time, but I think I lucked out in how it came out and I like it.

That background is Malabrigo’s Whales Road colorway. The turtle is set against Matisse Blue.

The Bay Area Yarn Crawl starts this Friday. If we can’t have Stitches West anymore, we can make our own, said whoever pulled this idea together and got it started last year. Can’t wait.

Meantime, I took this picture this afternoon, with the needles curling over and hiding the third jellyfish and the first half of a turtle.

Then I kept at it till I’d finished the rest of its eighteen rows (head, shell top, back legs, upper front leg) because I wanted to see it!

Oh. It looks like I missed a stitch yesterday connecting the lower front leg to the body; I didn’t, but it looks like I did. I think I’ll embroider maybe just half a stitch there, maybe a whole, let me think about it overnight, we’ll see.

But the next row is definitely going to start a new fish to the left of that orange trio.

I did not plan on placing them all in diagonal lines; they just swam to where they wanted to go and waited over a month for me to notice.

Did two rows on the coral reef afghan this morning and then spent a whole lot of time hemming and hawing over the turtle that was going to come next. Went looking for sea turtle pictures just to be sure, and the green sea turtle had the markings I liked best. Modified the shape I’d made on my graph a little bit. Went through my yarns. I swatched one I really liked but thought that yes, it did, it had a little too much that was too light–it wasn’t variegated a lot but it was a lot for it.

I said I might have to go to the LYS.

Richard said, basically, If you do, you do.

I appreciated the support greatly–but I didn’t go.

And there it sat for eight hours. No progress.

I finally decided this is ridiculous, just pick it up and get started.

I picked it up.

I stared at it some more.

And finally the truth that had been trying to find room to squeeze into my brain all day got through and got my attention: I couldn’t start the turtle because that’s not where it’s supposed to go, and just because I want to do that next doesn’t mean it does.

Finally! I got back to work, and the yellow tail on that fish I just started was just the thing.

The turtle needs to be headed towards the uppermost jellyfish (hello lunch!), which doesn’t exist yet. Well then.

A Wallace the Brave strip just for us. And then this one. (Someone may have been laughing her way through the archives. )

Our phones came today and I spent way too long trying to learn my way around a sometimes very different system before I go out into the wild with it. Still needs a protective cover.

But look at all those options for the hearing impaired!

Little by little….

You can’t get a great deal of detail into little fish compared to the ones in my first Ocean afghan what with the limitations of drawing in wide V shapes. But that just means it’s a new way of exploring what my needles can do.

More Anya apricot seeds went out in the mail, with a few left.

It is going to be cold and (finally!) rainy the next five days here, which feels fitting: the skies themselves mourning those lives lost in the air crash in DC.

James Fallows, pilot and reporter, says helicopters are forbidden above 200′ in that airspace. The New York Times says they were at 300′ and a half mile off the course directed by the controller–and that the helicopter pilot had flown that route before and knew those restrictions before they hit that plane.

It took me straight back to my mom’s close friend’s agony waiting to hear whether the father of her children during his commute home had been on the 14th Street bridge that another plane from National (now Reagan Airport) hit 40 years ago after not de-icing. He was not heard from for hours–but he was safe.

All those rescuers on those cold waters, hoping to be able to deliver that same news to other families but seeing only wreckage and worse.

Knitting. I tell you. Six rows again today. Needed to. Bright colors, fishy fish, creation-ing.

That second octopus’s last arm is just going to be too short if I don’t add another strand and put up with weaving its ends in, too. (Appraising look.) Nope. I’ll never be satisfied with it if I don’t. First thing tomorrow.

Remind me to break off a longer piece next time.

Slowly, slowly getting there.

Judging, wrote Carolyn Hax recently, is carbs for the ego: so satisfying at first but so easy to overdo.

And yet.

It is unfathomable that the day we remember and celebrate all that was good and noble and idealistic about Martin Luther King and his appeal to the best in our natures was the day we let the felon-in-chief back into the White House.

I do not want to see that face again. I do not ever want to hear that voice again. And yet, he’s managed to guarantee himself endless hourly media attention–again.

Any time he says something outlandish, the latest being wanting to steal the Panama Canal or invading Greenland–pay attention to what he doesn’t want you to see that he’s actually doing. It’s a tell, and it always was.

So to avoid all that I put in hours on the afghan. Six rows is the most I’ve done in a day, given that it’s such slow going. But in between I had to rest my hands, and would find email notifications; some, I just had to go look.

The richest oligarchs across the front row and the average joe left outside in the cold weather, no surprise there. Elon Musk, South African son of apartheid who came here illegally on a student visa because he never showed up at Stanford but stayed anyway, raising a Nazi salute–twice–not only in public but on camera in celebration of our newly sworn in racist-in-chief: that is staggering to the daughter of a man who put his life on the line to save the world from Hitler.

And it is so deeply sad to see those two in particular who have forsaken not just all those wives but the sense that we must all matter to each other in their zeal for power and money. If they had been in that Pacific Palisades fire like my sister, would they have cared what color the firemen who rescued them were? What *their* immigration status was?

In the end, which will come for them, too, everything they’re grasping at will become utterly nothing, and what on earth will they have then?

(Picture taken most of a shark ago.)

Phyl, an experienced diver, looked at this and started naming the striped orange fish.

I looked at her and declared, G_d makes His creations, I make mine.

Well alright then! as we both laughed.