Northern California as seen through a Marylander’s eyes:

It didn’t come with a massive temper tantrum that rips whole houses off their foundations. No lightning strikes, no massive blasts of thunder, no counting the seconds between to see how many miles away the eye of the storm was and how safe one might hope to be from falling poplar limbs a hundred feet above the house.

Just the sky weeping ever so very gently.

I got one, count’em, one, raindrop on me while going to fetch the paper.

Well, now. Can I stand the excitement.

(p.s. Yes, dessert before dinner. The Crown Mountain batt that Jasmin spun up for me just couldn’t wait any longer.)

1.What’s wrong with this picture?

2. Yes: swatches do lie.  I tried to try on what I had so far.  Not going to fit. Nope.

3. Tink.  Carefully, row after row, needle by needle, back to the end of the heel. To as shown.

4. See #1.

5. Rearranging stitches on the dpns to get the heel exactly aligned with the original first stitch of the sock (tell me why I thought that was important?), ie, ignoring and wrecking the 2×2 ribbing, wasn’t going to matter because it was going to be stockinette from there on down so who cares where it hit in the ribbing?

6. See #2. Ribbing needed.

7. Photo Wrecksock.

8. Spend a lot of time finally finishing designing a new lace shawl idea that had been patiently waiting its time like a good little pattern. Ooh, look, pretty!

9. Frog heel. Forget gentle tinkativity.  Take needles out. Hand sock to daughter.  Walk far away, holding ball. (Ignore gleeful “The sock is going *down!*”  Stupid sock.)

10. Try to come up with an at least somewhat inspiring post, knowing most readers will be reading it on Sunday.  Go for honest one–(note avoidance of sock while writing).

11. Pause.  Go back to beautifully finished 6” cuff, patiently waiting. Hey.  Wait.  Nice yarn.  Look at that!

(12. Ignore #8 and baby alpaca laceweight jumping up and down going Me, me! Little kids always know just how to push your buttons, and remember, little camelids do too.  The sock pair Will Be Done First.  No dessert ahead of dinner.)

About an hour ago, I only saw a blur with my glasses off, reading; Michelle saw the falcon swooping by in front of the window in its peregrinations.  She stood there, going, Wow!

I was wishing, More? Please?!

Note that the squirrels have again gone into deep hiding.

Meantime, last night at Purlescence, I said to Jasmin that some of you out there allowed as how you actually *liked* to kitchener.  (She was totally being set up and she knew it.) She said with immediate perkiness and the biggest grin, “*I* like to kitchener!”

And thus my socks took the easy way out, with both of us promising that, next time, I was to do it myself.  But she worked that grafting as easily as casting on a new project. ‘T’ain’t hard.

There will be next times: I started another pair today I’d been planning in Casbah, and DebbieR surprised me by having told the LYSOs from afar to gift me with their Jitterbug (it was a b.o.g.o. on their sale table) to keep me going with this whole sock thing.  Yeah, I know the racket: someone expresses interest knitting-wise, you bombard them with really good yarn, and you know they’re hooked on the spot. It’s insidious, I tell you.

The mail: Michelle’s first reaction to LauraN’s package was, a spider? No–an octopus, ready to get to work on socks: Mrs. Weasley’s airneedles have competition now.

And now!  The talon-toed team of Perry Grin Productions brings you:

“Ben Hur: the remake,” starring

Birk N. Stawk

Spike Lead

and the villain,

Ima Heel

See the thrilling chariot scene!

(Richard says it should end with Godzilla in his Doc Martens stomping out the set. I say keep the Poppa-razzi out of it.)

Second Sock Syndrome: a good excuse for avoiding sitting down and re-teaching myself (for the umpteenth time) how to do kitchener stitch. (To the non-knitters, that’s the method of grafting the toe stitches together on a well-made pair of socks.)  Rather, dive right on into that second sock, quick!, before you lose your momentum.

You know, I reverse-engineered the flower for my Zinnia Scarf so that the coming and going sides would look pretty much the same, even though they would look exactly the same if one were to knit the thing in two pieces and kitchener the middle.

Which is how I originally wrote and made it.

But I didn’t want people to have unfinished scarf halves sitting in their closets…

It’s been six years since I finished a pair of socks, not to mention eight since I started that last pair.  My fingers know how to do that final step: it’s just when my brain butts in and starts asking questions that they throw up their hands and stop.

But didn’t I tell them?  Lace shawls, sure.  But socks?  I don’t knit socks. I have quite a few pairs of handknit socks, thanks to Jasmin, Deb and Kate, Niki, Bonnie, Michelle, Chris, and my daughter Sam has a pair from Judy Sumner that turned out to be just her size.  My longtime readers know that I wore mine every day at Stanford this year as a way of declaring, I am loved.

But me?  I do not knit them here or there, I do not knit them anywhere.  Not in a house, not with a mouse, not on a train, not in a tree, my hands don’t like them, Nancy, see?

That package that arrived last week from some Sock Summiteers, had, as I mentioned, a hank of Blue Moon SockGate sock yarn in the colors of the logo of the Summit that was going on while I was holed up in the hospital. A yarn with a good firm twist for holding up well under heel and toe–cushy for a foot, not so much so for, say, a shawl. It was adamant about what it wanted to be when it grew up.

I looked at it and thought, it could make a cool hat for some guy sometime…

Wait. Would I knit a hat on the size needles that stuff would require? For anybody? No matter how much I loved them? When I could make one in a third the time with something else?

No.

I noticed that there not only was no return address on the envelope, the thing had been auto-stamped in such a way that it didn’t even say what town it had been shipped from, fer cryin’ out loud–if I wanted to surprise Nancy back, much less the others, with something finished from that yarn? Dude. Totally out of luck.

She/they wanted me to make myself a pair of Sock Summit socks to match the t-shirt and did a good job of reinforcing the point.

But I don’t knit socks. I can, I have, I don’t, the needles are too small, I drop too many stitches, blahblahblah.

I am wearing the shirt.

And looky here. How did that happen?! I do too knit socks!

I still won’t take them here or there, I’ll still drop stitches everywhere. But I do, I DO like knitting socks!

And quite honestly, I would never have sat down with a porcupine scaffolding of size 1s if it hadn’t been for the happy peer pressure of that package:  I have some designated blue-and-purple yarn of at least two or three years’ standing in my stash to prove it.

I am having the time of my life watching this first one coming to be and I’m really hoping to show off the pair at Purlescence on Thursday.  You guys go give each other a big hug from me, y’hear? You have SO earned it! I can’t wait!

Twenty-five rows today–sing it with me: 9685 loops of pink on the wall, 9685 loops of pink, take one down, wind it around, 9684 loops of pink on the…

Yeah. I know.

One lesson learned, given that I’m someone who winds my hanks into old-fashioned balls and these hanks were made into cakes on the ballwinder at Purlescence: given the slightly wiry character of baby alpaca when it is spun into a yarn as fine as this laceweight, one should knit the cakes working from the outside. Not centerpulled.  I did the first centerpulled and it wanted to kink on itself constantly and it would not run smoothly through my hands; I was constantly stopping and rolling the ball on its side to try to work some of the excess twist out.

The second one, working from the outside in–rarely a kink. Piece of cake.

This is probably not news to those who use ballwinders and laceweight all the time.  But I have to quickly add how grateful I am to the folks at the LYS for winding them up for me: as I explained to Kathy when I bought these Saturday, knitting-wise, I’m at the equivalent of standing in the frozen foods section looking for the prefab meals.  I’m not lifting dyepots. I’m not winding cones’ worth by hand, nor even hanks.

Today is two weeks post-op. I might be able to stand and wind a hank now. Just let me finish up this big bubbly lump of pink first.

Tomorrow.

Thinking back to the first pre-op appointment: there was a parade of people, from a medical researcher hoping to sign up a new subject to a physician’s assistant to a younger woman who came in after the doctor with forms in hand, asking my permission to let her be a part of the surgical team as part of her training.

I liked her on the spot and told her yes.

When she greeted me just before the operation last Wednesday, I looked her in the eye, smiled, and told her in a tone that I think affirmed that I believed she would, “Do a good job.”

She stopped by often afterwards to check on me, and Sunday, from my hospital bed, I reminded her that I had said that. And then I told her: “When I was brought into the recovery room, I saw your face.  I knew that you knew you had.  And you were proud.”

I got to see her beaming proudly all over again.

I’ve been thinking for a few days, and it seems only one yarn will do.  There’s enough for a good scarf yet.  If you’ve read the story of the Bluejay shawl, shown above (with most of its fulness at the back of the chair), you understand why the leftover yarn I have from that project would be the perfect yarn for a young colorectal surgeon.  A beautiful outcome from a situation rather less so, and… Yeah. That one.  My way of saying thank you.

And, like every patient–and doctor or nurse for that matter–that skein of indigo baby alpaca, so unusually custom-dyed, is a one of a kind. As far as my dyepot adventures are concerned, having no desire to, say, scatter suet or peanuts or birdseed on my wet hanks and wait for the moment, there will never again be anything quite like it.

(Scarf adapted from the Wanda’s Flowers shawl. Chloe Sparkle, this is the leftover dyed-by-me baby alpaca from your shawl.)

Pride. I could have been knitting. But the pride got me.

I am not the handbag-for-every-outfit type. Buy one good practical plain leather purse, preferably one that won’t snag lacewear every which way, and wear it out.

Which I did. I mean, it’s really worn out and I should have replaced it about a year ago. It’s big, it’s comfy, anything you want you’ve got it right there with you and you could stuff almost a whole afghan project in the darn thing–t’ain’t dainty.

I do have a nice, small purse, and when I say small, it’s iffy whether the cellphone can squeeze in.   Maybe not so practical.

So guess which one went downtown with me this afternoon?

We haven’t gotten a utility bill since May.  I’ve called and been told, Oh, you’re all paid up.  But wait, tell me, how does that work exactly?…

So given what tomorrow is and wanting things squared away and done, I simply went down to City Hall to see the printout of the bill that never came and to get it taken care of once and for all.

There was no bill. Our solar installation coincided with their changing how they processed households with solar systems, and I ended up in an upstairs office while they tried to figure out how to get their computer to generate one. Ever.  Four people were trying to figure out for about an hour how to let me give them my money; it was pretty amusing.

Finally, they cried uncle.  Good thing I came near the end of the workday, I guess.  I gave them an estimated amount that was pure guesswork against the coming amount (electric, water, sewer, refuse, gas–the city owns them all, and we only opted out of the first) and they gave me a much-desired receipt.

I’d had a feeling to take my knitting; but…  I was simply going to walk up to the counter and hand them a payment and that was going to be that.  It didn’t occur to me to put my knitting bag in the car just in case, I mean, why would I?

I could have brought my jaded, faded, coming unsewn old purse and that scarf project would have been finished.

Although, then I would have been sitting there wishing ruefully I had thought to bring more knitting.

Okay, now, back to work.

(Elann.com Baby Silk, two skeins to finish, 5mm needles, Michelle shawl lace pattern, four repeats plus edging, not yet finished/not blocked. Another nurse scarf-to-be.)

Saturday, it did not look good, I admitted during my appointment today, giving the dermatologist details.

That concerned him.

But then, as he got a look at the site of the staph infection, it turned out it had gotten much better under there in the interim and I exclaimed my relief as he peeled back part of the bag. He looked in my eyes, knowing what I needed to know, and told me, his voice sharing his own relief, “I see nothing now that would give a surgeon pause before going ahead.”

Thank goodness.

A very small part of my brain that I’ve been squelching hard wants to pipe up with, No? Are you sure?  Could you, like, maybe, look harder?

A quick knitting note: I worked out a pattern and started a shawl a few days ago in a 65/35 cashmere/superfine merino blend…and then had the same hesitation I’ve always had in the half dozen years I’ve owned that yarn.

It is lovely, lovely, soft stuff. But…  I finally handed Michelle two strands of it and asked her to pull them apart.  Zero effort–foof, done.

I asked her advice, and her reaction was she would never wear something where she would be afraid a wedding ring would catch on it the first time she wore it and then that would be the end of all that work.

I took the needles out, sealed it back in its bag, and put it back in its corner. Maybe someday I’ll ply it with something stronger.  To be sure, then, I tug-tested my Fino baby alpaca/silk I’d bought at Purlescence.  No breaking. Guess which one I’m knitting?

A bit of medical stuff:

After all the grief in January, I must give them credit.

Caremark sent me a letter recently, as I’ve mentioned, and then a second to reiterate the point, denying me not only my anti-nausea med because I didn’t have one of two specific types of cancer, but denying my doctor the right to prescribe an IV dose of it above a certain level.

This is stupid. This is a med that can help keep me out of the hospital, given my low blood pressure’s inability to tolerate barfing.

They told me I could appeal.

It took me awhile to do. A friend showed me a sample letter for a formal, matter-of-fact medical appeal to follow.

I couldn’t write it. I tried. I just couldn’t.

I finally sat down about a week ago and wrote the letter *I* needed to write, spelling out exactly what they had done in January and why their stance was again medically unreasonable.  That I might have been able to keep my colon had they responded in a timely manner earlier.  Telling them in no uncertain terms what I expected them to do and to do it right.  NOW. I snailmailed it to them and a copy to Blue Cross. A lawyer was mentioned as a possibility.

I got a call today from a nurse working for Blue Cross. She made no direct mention of that letter.  But she was appalled when she heard the details from back then and told me exactly what she was going to do to follow up on that. Meantime, she gave me her name, her phone number, her fax number, her colleague’s name as a backup, and told me if I had any problem authorizing anything, contact her immediately, and if I had a problem at an after-hours time, call this other number.  She told me Caremark had no business whatsoever with in-hospital dosages, not even at Urgent Care, they only had any possible say in home health care after the hospitalization.  Any problem, call her. And fax this form from their site so that Richard could call on my behalf if need be.

I was gobsmacked. They actually did the right thing. Someone at my insurance is actually on my side now.  Wow. Cool.

This isn’t blocked yet, and the jellyfish will look more like themselves once it is. It is quite a bit longer than it seems here, with the seaweed section providing a more-solid and thereby warmer area for wrapping around the neck in the brisk Monterey Bay breezes.  This is the Monterey shawl lace patterns morphed into a scarf, knitted out of a skein of Camelspin, one of my favorite yarns; it’s softer than quite a few cashmeres and a good one for wearing against the neck.

And just for fun, a good demonstration of why my husband insists that if I indeed get a woodpecker feeder, I’m to keep it as far as I can from the house.  Someone was having problems with their telephone service.  One of the hubby’s co-workers showed him this:

Re last night’s post, I almost deleted the whole thing; everybody has billing bugs from time to time, and how boring is that?

But that second paragraph demanded to go up, somehow. I don’t know if it’s because I have a dear friend who was a battered wife for too many years (not anymore, thank goodness), but whoever it was for out there wherever you are, it was for you.  But then I felt I had to give enough context to explain where that one was coming from.

An oddball twist came with today’s mail, and for once I am totally on Blue Cross’s side: someone put in a claim (surely someone simply keyed the wrong code) of there having been cardiovascular surgery done on me two weeks ago. On a day I was quietly sitting at home going nowhere in particular.  And the charge for said supposed surgery?

Nineteen dollars.

Blue Cross demanded and got a $19 discount on that one and assured me there was no co-pay.  Um, yeah.  Ya think?

Meantime, the Monterey Sea Silk shawl, as soon as I rinsed it and laid it out and the lace patterns were settled into their proper places, had me going, And THAT’S why I knitted this! It felt like just one of the most gorgeous things I’d ever made, the way a finished project is supposed to feel like, and I wanted to dance on the spot.  It was late, I only rinsed it rather than a serious blocking, but still.

I’m following it up with a scarf out of topaz Camelspin using the same lace stitches  in a straight line rather than a circle, just to hedge my bets on which article of clothing the recipient might prefer. Either way, I’m quite happy with it.

So many people to knit for in such a hurry. Go go go!

There’s the first Manos Silk scarf done, I did the second yesterday from the first of Kathy’s yarn (thank you Kathy!) and it’s now waiting to be blocked and the ends run in on both, and today, trying to choose which yarn to scarf down next… I instead tackled the longterm UFO that’s been off alone in a corner.  It simply declared it was its time now. I argued with it for about an hour and then caved.

I love Sea Silk. I love the Monterey pattern with its jellyfish and seaweed and the crash of the surf at the neckline, I really do.  And the idea of putting the two together, and in the Ocean colorway, was just so poetically perfect: actual seaweed turned into aquatic patterns in deep-sea blue, looking shimmery and gorgeous.  How can you get better than that?

So I went down a needle size to match the yarn and off I went.  But Sea Silk is very slippery and the Monterey is a complicated bear if you drop a stitch.  There’s a reason I rated it expert.  That wasn’t stopping me so much as wondering if the woman whom I don’t know that it’s going to will, you know, actually…like it…

I had rubber baby buggy bumpers on the needle tips every time I put it down when I started.  But that was a goodly while ago, months, and I don’t know quite where they are now.  I was afraid those stitches were threatening to be bungee jumpers every time I picked the project up.

So I avoided picking it up.

I found myself needing to finish up old tasks today.  It was time.  I got one and a half full pattern repeats done so far, and at that rate I’ll finish tomorrow afternoon, unless it declares it wants to be longer than I’m planning.

It’s already shown that it’s the one calling the shots.

I noticed this morning that the birdfeeder, which had been a bit low last night, was down to the bottom portholes; time to refill.  Got my measuring cup for scooping, filled it and put it down on the picnic bench, moved a chair under the feeder, and got up to untwist the feeder top.  Picked up the cup, poured the seed/minced peanut mixture in…

…And before I could finish twisting the thing back together, there was a tiny finch perched on the twig right next to my face: canIcanIhuhhuhisbreakfastreadyyet?

Chirp thing, friend.

Later, I went back to Purlescence with the smallest scrap of Manos, pulling it out of my pocket saying, “You know that yarn Kevin wound up for me yesterday? It’s” (sniffing ever so woefully) “all *gonnnne*…”

They cracked up. Okay, show us!  I did. I’d decided the scarf was long enough as it was.

But Kathy of yesterday’s comment had come too and she still insisted on handing me the three beautiful Manos balls she was coming to my rescue with.  I promised her I would put them to good use–I have some serious lace-scarf knitting to do.