It’s my yarn swap necklace, I grinned at him when it arrived.

Your what?

There’s someone who’d knitted a cashmere sweater for someone else, loved the pattern and wanted to make one for herself now, bought more of the yarn–and didn’t start it because she became sure she didn’t have enough. Since it was a mill end from Colourmart there was no more to be had.

Except I found out about it. I had an exact match and there was no point in having it sit in my stash when someone else actually needed it, and I mailed it off to her. This was about a year ago.

Now, I get it about queues and about knitting for yourself last except those times when you really need to recharge the inner batteries and how complicated the timing of any one project can get. So when I found out I had yet another cone that had somehow been separated from the others, I asked her just in case if she’d had enough to knit her sweater–and when it turned out she hadn’t made it yet, told her I had just found this other cone if it would help her be sure she had enough.

It would very much, thanks.

(I flashed back to childhood memories of Mom making Dad a complicated Aran sweater over quite a few months and coming up short right at the end: that is the reason I always overbuy before starting a project. Always.)

It was around Christmas and I tried to tell her it was on me but she was having none of that and insisted on paying for it.

Okay. So I turned right around and spent it in Ukraine to help them pay for backup power after the bombings because they needed that help and they needed it now.

I got an artist’s project made for me (with progress pictures! Cool!), that woman gets to feel that her country’s anguish matters to the world, the other knitter gets to be the artist making the project she’d wanted to do, everybody wins.

(Runs and looks it up.) Camelspin: 328 yards to the 100g.

This has been my carry-around project for awhile. I love the yarn, 70/30 mulberry silk and baby camel, the shimmer, the softness, and it marinated in my stash for a number of years looking for just the right thing till one day in November I grabbed one of the two skeins and thought oh just go.

It’s slippery and a bit of a challenge to hands that have a tendency to drop things.

I cast on more stitches than I should have and silk stretches, so I really had to keep going to have the length/width proportions work out right. I’ll get another four-row repeat out of it and then probably another and I think it’ll be just right.

I really like it. It was worth the wait. And it comes with fond memories of kindness from the folks at Handmaiden: fourteen years ago I showed them a picture of my mother of the groom dress and they surprised me and specially dyed some Camelspin to match for my shawl for the wedding. Wonderful, wonderful people.

So far it’s for me, but we know how that goes. And I do have that shawl already. In Ultraviolet. Which given my lupus’s sun sensitivity is a colorway name that always made me laugh–like it somehow let me get the better of that particular limitation.

So the other thing about the Vegas airport.

Southwest uses more than one terminal there and it was a long haul across the both of them. I found myself exclaiming, How big is this airport? Is it trying to be Atlanta? (The biggest in the world.)

I got an older wheelchair guy, the manager of the service with white hair to match my own, taking it briskly and cheerfully and at one point he said encouragingly, We’re about a quarter of the way there.

Me: Wow.

We didn’t tell him that my husband had taken a hard spill the day before, but he was in pain and moving slowly.

As we came around a corner, the guy spotted a woman waiting for her flight who was by a clearly-needed wheelchair but not in it just then. It was a different type from the one I was in, and just what he’d been looking for, though we had no idea.

He stopped. Excuse me, ma’am? Is that your wheelchair? Mind if I swap you? (There was a second one nearby like mine, left behind at someone else’s boarding.)

She looked confused but raised no objection as he helpfully moved it over by her and took hers. Apparently it was easier to manage for what he had in mind.

There you go: have a seat, he told Richard to our surprise, and proceeded to push the both of us at a brisk pace across the rest of the way.

My 6’8″ husband is not small.

We were a wide load and people were being oblivious and I did not want the man to lose and have to regain the slightest bit of momentum nor did I want to plow anybody down, so I proceeded to call out Beep Beep! and an occasional loud EXCUSE ME! as needed to get people to dodge us.

We thought at first we were on the brink of missing our flight but he knew better; we’d changed time zones. (Duh.) Besides, he told us, they’re not leaving without my passengers. Still, he took it at a good speed because he could.

He at one point bemoaned young people who collect money not to work, they don’t want to work, he said, they get paid to sit around at home, and I thought quietly, okay I know what channel you watch. They’re looking for better paying jobs and going back to school to qualify for them, but what I was actually hearing from him was, I can’t find enough people to do all I need done for all the people who need it at the amount I’m allowed to offer them.

But he was quite cheerful about getting to help us, as if simply meeting us had made his day.

He got us to our gate, I tipped him a good one, but before he could leave I said, A question, sir: are you allergic to wool?

That was so unexpected that it entirely threw him. Am I what??

I was unzipping my jacket pocket. Do you like green?

None of this was making the least bit of sense to him and he suddenly had no idea what to make of me.

Above and beyond, I marveled at him, not for the first time. You are amazing. THANK you! as I put a Malabrigo Teal Feather hat in his hands. I knit that on the way here, I told him; it’s brand new.

He was speechless.

And then as if suddenly remembering his manners he asked if I needed to use the restroom? I did, actually, and he wheeled me over thataway. On the way, I explained, That’s what I do. I knit things and then go find out who they were meant to be for.

You take good care of her, he said with great warmth to my husband back at the gate while patting my right shoulder and at a loss for how else to say how he felt.

A hat. Knit by hand. For him. For pushing a wheelchair.

What he didn’t know he also got was my fervent prayers for his back to be okay after all that work.

Turns out sixteen wasn’t the magic number either.

But as that seventeenth repeat was coming along, I laid the afghan out on the floor to see.

At long last, yes. Proportionately width to height, that was it, just right. And it’s about as tall as I am, also just right.

And went to bed without those last four rows and the cast off because there are only so many hours in the day.

I like lavender. The mill oils that are about to be washed out gray this one for now but I know how it will look. The yarn will brighten and bloom and fill out and look more solid. I know the recipient’s going to love it, I know the last recipient I used that yarn for nearly burst into tears when she saw the finished work in her hands. The two of them are cousins and they can think of each other with their matching afghans (different patterns).

Today was a busy and happily preoccupied day and I could have kept going with all that but after dinner it hit me: You are not coming back in that front door again without that afghan being finished. Over with. Out of your hair and away from your procrastination. You are not. Sit your posterior down on that couch Right Now. Do it. NOW.

Sometimes a good talking-to is just the thing.

I just put the size 9s away, the afghan in the tote, finally got the camera to be honest about the mill oils, and zipped the bag up.

It will look so good after the hot wash to come.

Someone yell at me to run that final end in, though, will ya? Never mind, I’ll do it myself.

Yesterday during my knitting group Zoom I happily announced that I had just finished the 15th repeat on my afghan, which I’d been aiming for for a long time.

But you know what? Yes it’s not blocked, yes it will stretch out, but it still was just plain too short no matter how much I didn’t want it to be and I refuse to be disappointed by the darn thing after putting multiple months into it. So today I overdid it while trying (or I told myself I was trying) not to overdo it.

Which means the 16th is now done, minus the purl row afterwards. Pass the icepacks.

Well, but, huh. You know, one more repeat there would really polish that off nicely. The recipients are taller than me.

—

p.s. We got 2.3″ rain over the last 24+ hours with .91″ to go tonight and an evacuation warning in the south end of the county, but the forecast now is in quarters and halves rather than in whole inches–each of which would normally be a lot but right now feels like quite a break. While still adding to the reservoirs.

p.p.s. For whatever it’s worth: handbeaded gerdans on the delicate side in appearance that are $13.75 as I type. Which to me sounds like a cry to the world out there for help, because the last time I saw a seller in Ukraine cut prices that drastically it was as things were falling apart around her hard, and I will forever be grateful for the gorgeous beadwork she’d already done for me and the conversations we’d had. Her shop is gone now and I have no idea how to find out if she’s alright.

An inch so far today, with two more by tomorrow night. And the wind!

Friends a few cities over have lost power. We haven’t so far, but it did have me deciding dinner was going to be some of the more expensive food in the freezer: it should be enjoyed, not worried over.

And so the stuffed chicken breasts are in the oven and the thought occurred to me that if the lights go out now, what would we do.

That little creme brûlée torch that was his favorite Christmas gift a few years ago. Can you cook chicken parts with it? Here, let’s just pry open that center there with a fork and melt that cheese… That would work. Right?

(Update 9:00 pm: It sounds like a large branch of a tree is being dragged across the roof by the wind, resting a second, gusting and dragging almost right away again. It is loud out there. And I am not used to hearing much of anything as being loud.)

Monday, the wheelchair pusher absolutely deserved a handknit hat and it didn’t even occur to me till a moment too late. They were in the rollaboard anyway–oh wait.

The crowd was closing in behind me.

Climbing up into the bus to return to the car rental (every bag present and accounted for this time), there was a snowstorm on its way in and it was even colder than the week before.

The driver’s head was bare. Not even a ‘fro for warmth, just that last close-cropped bit left behind his ears. He was 55-ish.

I stopped at the top of the steps and looked in his eyes and asked him with the intensity of a grandma, Are you cold?

He was surprised.

I whipped the deep green Mecha beanie right off my head, my hair going all electric socket: “I have another hat in my purse.”

The warmest smile entirely took over his deep brown face. The words were a simple, “I’m okay, thanks,” but spoken in what felt like a magical moment of deep appreciation both ways:

You are seen. You matter to me. Take good care of yourself. Go have a wonderful, wonderful life and maybe we’ll even meet again.

Little cloudbursts today, somehow never while I was actually driving.

Which I was doing for three and a half rush hour hours, just like yesterday. How on earth do people who have to do this every day do this every day?

It’s been a very unusual week where he had to be in the office and I had waited months for those appointments. So we made it work. There was a cashere/merino/silk skein‘s worth of bridge tolls. (Rainbow came today. I’m going to steal their photo to show it off because my phone’s pretty dead after running Waze to dodge the worst of the traffic.) 

And yet.

It was like the good old days, when his commute was three miles and he got to decompress by having me come get him, with the two of us together on his way home with no other responsibilities in those few moments but to be focused on each other. We’d missed that.

He got lots and lots of decompression time.

(Links so I can find them later: California major reservoir levels  and 24 hour rainfall totals)

Somehow all that time at the wheel helped make me feel a need to knit and to finish an old project, so a plain black hat that had been boring my needles to death is now done and my circs freed up for something a whole lot more fun that was waiting when we walked in the door tonight. And I didn’t even expect it to arrive yet!

My mail got hacked last week and yonder computer nerd worked on it briefly and all seemed well–except that I’ve found that at random times it will both say that I responded to a message and that it got sent while telling me it did not, in fact, send it. I can only guess. So if you’ve sent me anything and I haven’t answered, please know that I did but I can’t tell if it got anywhere and trying twice made no difference–and yet at other times everything’s perfectly normal. We’ll get this fixed, and sorry, meantime.

Back to the trip.

Sunday, Spencer wanted to play with yarn, too, so while Maddy was putting every bit of her concentration into her stitches, he kept batting her ball around.

Maybe we should tell him this is not, in fact, how you make socks.

I looked at him with blue yarn all over the floor and pronounced to his sister with a grin, Spencer is a cat.

She enjoyed that very much: it is always fun to pretend to be a cat. But she was too busy to join in just then.

I remembered then that while getting ready for the trip I had come across a very small ball of turquoise Rios in the bottom of my purse that must have fallen out from the carry-around project previous to the one that I didn’t know would be important on our flight in a few hours. So. It was too small to worry about and just enough yards to tangle with to his heart’s delight. It was the same color and yarn as the baby blanket I had made four years earlier for–you guessed it–Spencer.

And so he could have his own, truly his own, to play with to his heart’s content. (While keeping a close eye on him just to be sure.)

I cast on five stitches of Malabrigo Mecha for Maddy, a soft thick wool, and did the first row to get it started.

Random draping back loops and added and missing stitches later, she had herself a little rectangle (mostly) and asked me, But what do we DO with it? Knitting clearly made practical things as well as beautiful and she wanted to be part of that, too.

I asked her to let me add a little to it, and I doubled its length with some nice steady stockinette stitch and then showed it to her doubled over.

She instantly figured out we had a finger puppet there, and she was right! So I got out a yarn needle and sewed up the sides for her.

She is very proud of her finger puppet and how it lets her show off her knitting.

I debated dubbing it the Cookie Monster but quietly decided that was up to her; a seven year old might not want to be associated with toddler motifs.

Actually, it kind of looks like Her–now His–Majesty’s guards with the bear hats thing going on, only in blue.

The new post office guy on the case sent me a picture of the address it was sent to: where my street name and address should have been, in transcribing from whatever Etsy or PayPal had told her in an alphabet much less language different from her own, she’d put my phone number.

And so it was now on its way back to her.

I asked him, You had my (obviously-local) phone number right there on the package; why didn’t anybody call to ask my address? Someone took a picture so someone knew I was looking for it. Someone had it.

He wrote back that if I had phoned before it got to this point they could have intercepted it.

(Head smack) I went in in person as soon as I knew there was a problem and filed a report. How could I call to stop you from sending it to Carson and now Ukraine back when I didn’t know anything yet except that it was supposed to arrive?

*crickets*

The ironic thing is that it got through the postal system in Kiev in two days, which is lightning fast–four to six weeks is more the norm during this war.

Oh well. At least the artist and I both know now where it’s actually going and I asked her to let me pay for the next go-round on the postage.

Meantime, re the afghan, the trees are on their third sets of branches. I can at least make something make progress!

We moved here while there was late snow on the ground in New Hampshire, landing at the start of what was then considered a drought. (We hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.) Our then-youngest turned one and started walking.

Six months later there were sounds outside that our baby had no idea what to make of.

There was water. Falling out of the sky. Water doesn’t do that. She was staring out the window. She asked to go outside and toddled over to the edge of the patio.

It was cold! And wet! She ran back towards me and away from it but stopped–because this mystery hadn’t been solved yet.

She looked for it: yup, the sprinkler was over there. It was off, she checked it out, it really was.

So then what WAS this?! Water doesn’t just fall out of the sky, you know!

Years later and we’ve learned a bit more about drought, for sure.

It rained last night for the first time since what–January? But it was over by the time we got up, which is pretty normal for around here. There were occasional sprinkles during the day.

But then during my knitting group Zoom this evening the skies abruptly opened up and the rain pounded down. I amused my friends by going, Can you *hear* that?! RAIN!!! I jumped up to go get a closer look, to remember what it even is, what it’s even like (except I didn’t need to go out in it to prove the cold and the wetness.)

They chuckled, and I said, I feel like a little kid, I want to jump up and down in excitement.

And the conversation flowed away as such things do, soaking in over here, running off over there. And I went back to knitting my stick figures of trees.

Maybe because the first few leaves–maybe half a dozen scattered across the taller cherry tree and on one peach– have already turned yellow, as if telling Fall to hurry up: making something warm appealed, and besides, I needed a small carry-around project for a doctor appointment tomorrow. I did not want a cone. I did not want to wind yarn.

And so I found myself doing a stash dive this morning and coming up with this baby alpaca/merino/yak blend, one of those online buys that when it comes you think, oh. That’s not what I expected. Oh well. And then it sits there.

Two skeins, ready to go. I surprised myself when I thought decisively, That one. (Really? Curious.)

Since Richard was feeling contagious, we did church by Zoom and I got this started because it’s way more fun to have something to actually show off tomorrow if you’re going to be knitting in public, right?

The color is actually bluer than this, and that is a good thing. Taupey grays, which this has in the mix, are not my thing.

I have no idea who it’s for but I expect I’ll find out soon enough, and that’s the fun part.

Just for fun, a Ukrainian beaded necklace in granny squares. In late ’60’s colors to keep in character.

Made some progress on the afghan.

Meantime, I had some plums from Andy’s that needed to be put to good use, most quite small and a few of another variety a fair bit bigger. I whipped a warm stick of butter with 2/3 c sugar, then with 2 eggs, then added in a mixture of 1/2 c flour, 1/2 cup almond flour, 1 tsp baking powder and a pinch salt. Put it in a 9″ nonstick springform pan with a parchment bottom (my 9″ circles came with pull-up handles) and arranged halves of the small plums in a circle, skin side up, and half one of the big ones in the center.

I should have taken a picture of my pretty sunflower cake before baking it. It really did look like one with those golden plums and darker plum in the center.

When I pulled it out of the oven 45 minutes later (the recipe I was riffing off of with that almond flour said an hour and I knew that was wrong, 45 was pushing it but okay) I looked at that thing and there was only one description for it.

A bellybutton cake.

And it is very very good.

I guess you can make rayon out of just about any cellulose-based fiber, and I’ve seen a few oddball yarns from time to time. Sugarcane viscose? As Richard put it, well that one makes sense, it would be like bamboo, they’re both tall woody stalks.

Stinging nettle? I’ve heard its praises sung but I remember stinging nettle at my grandparents’ mountain cabin in Utah when I was a kid–I learned the hard way to stay on the path but that it didn’t have the manners not to lean over it. You had to be careful. It hurts like mosquitos itch.

Crustacean shell yarn, touted for health effects: that one didn’t seem to last on the market very long. Imagine if your recipient had a shellfish allergy you didn’t know about. It was the only yarn I’ve ever heard of with a warning label.

Rose yarn. Okay, put away the pruning shears and that’s another stiff long-limbed woody plant, okay.

Today Etsy sent me one of those “New Items!” notifications re a vendor I’d bought from pre-pandemic. Yeah, I clicked.

It really was. 100% dandelion yarn. Shiny, white, described as soft.

Dandelion?

Laceweight, too, so you’d be putting a lot of time into figuring out whether it was worth putting any time into and whether it would hold up, or else you’d have to hold a bunch of strands together; well, hey, the vendor wouldn’t mind if you bought extra cones. Oh and look they have peppermint yarn, too. Does it give your hands fresh breath?

I’m picturing a Monty Python Killer Rabbits sketch with bunnies leaping for your shawl for snacks and then polishing it off with a mint.