It had such a pull on me and I tried to figure out why. Yes it had the curved shape I prefer: for twenty years now I’ve used a shepherd’s crook-style cane and twirled it like a cheerleader with a baton to shift it onto my arm when I need my hands free; it’s just an extension of my body by now. Plain, practical–and the wood was starting to crack at the curve right where the weight of my hand goes.

So I ordered a pretty one. I love it. But you can’t twirl it, you have to hold it, and I find it easy to accidentally drop. (Not a friendly-looking move.) Reluctantly I find I save it for church. As I said to Richard today, Sometimes you find what you need by buying the wrong thing first. (Although I do not regret that one, even if it’s unwieldy when you’re not actually walking.)

So yeah, this one was cool and it reminded me of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and it had a long enough of a curve–hopefully–not to fall off my arm doing cool cheerleader moves.

But since its artist was in Ukraine there was no way to try it out without paying for it.

There was a video on one of the listings of the guy whittling away at the wood to create his designs: the (sold out for now) Great Blue whale at the crest of a wave. There’s a shark with teeth, a more simply carved killer whale.

Or a gentle blue dolphin.

I didn’t *need* this. Although, for the price, I could get another cheap rustic crooked crook probably from China just like the old. Meh.

I debated for a week before finally caving.

It wasn’t till ten days later after checking the tracking many a time that I realized why it had been so compelling.

That was three days after I had finally started working on the abandoned afghan again. The indecipherable red blob whose chart and plans were long gone had by then morphed into a fish I really liked, the whole thing finally taking on life and becoming delightful to my hands and eyes. I had needed that for so long.

It was the cane that did it. And I hadn’t even laid eyes on it in person yet. Maestro Syvatoslav Lashkiv’s art had at long last offered the spark to revive my own. Since I began it several years ago I’ve thought this afghan would need a dolphin near the top of the water, like the previously knit ocean, because, well, I like dolphins.

I kind of held my breath hoping the cane would live up to my hopes, too.

It came today. The blues swirl down its back like light on the movement of the waves. Like the ocean itself laid out before the eyes of all those grieving homeowners in LA: the Pacific is still there for them. The tides, the sounds, the water, stillness and motion all in one.

It always will be.

Unasked for but included was an unobtrusive arm band to attach if I wanted to, or not, so that this cane will never have to be dropped. But the choice is left up to me.

Octopuses: how the oceans doodle fireworks displays.

Two rows a day, I promised myself. About 45 minutes each. That’s all you have to do. And I have. A right-side row then a wrong-side row so that you’re ready to see it clearly on the right side again the next day and to plan any new colors or motifs from there.

It surprises me how much shows up below my needles when I just keep doing my one small part for the day. I have finished two fish.

I also know that the further along it gets, the more I see how it’s coming out, the more I’ll be able to see how I want the rest of it to come out and the more I’ll be working on it. So it’s okay to be slow in the initial discovery process.

(Photo: about a third of them.)

There’s a big zipped storage bag that’s been moved around again and again these last four years. It had the leftover yarn from the original ocean afghan. It had the added deep royal skeins for the background of the coral reef one. It had the leftovers of any Malabrigo Rios seen coming or going since those were started.

Some of it had become a tangled mess.

Today was suddenly somehow the day to just go deal with it.

Every ball that needed it is now rewound. Every tangle is banished. Every yarn is ziplocked away squished in with its nearest peers and only then put back into that big bag. I know now what I have, I know for sure what I don’t have, I know none of them have room to run around and cause problems again inside those, and I know how to find exactly the color I want amongst the dozens of others. Greens here, blues here, purples…

And it all started with wanting a close but different shade for the next section of coral. All the times I’d gone through that bag, I stared in amazement, I had not seen that one; how could it be so.

Then a sense of determination: so what else was hiding in there?

And now they’re not.

Cottage Yarns (they have more Malabrigo than anyone I know) is a few miles down the freeway from San Francisco Airport. I dropped Michelle off and then went to go make up for the fact that I ran out of Mecha yarn for Zoom mindless hat knitting at Thanksgiving and had not been up to making the drive in all that time. I could now.

Three future hats came home with me. I resisted so much temptation. But that Mecha is part of my usual Sunday evening Zoom knitting group: I can read the captions and be part of the discussion and knit at the same time.

I glanced at my email after I got home and there was the tail-end of a discussion that had started New Year’s Eve’s Eve, fellow knitters promising not to buy any more yarn for the rest of the year because they had enough in their stash. Then today, someone so proud that she hadn’t bought any yarn this entire year so far! (Keep the joke running!)

I laughed–and then suddenly went, wait a minute. I did!

And then was surprised that that surprised me.

And yet. It wasn’t online nor impersonal clicks. Face time with friends you know and love and want to support doesn’t count towards one’s skein count. Right?

There will be more knitting time after her plane leaves tomorrow, but that doesn’t make it any easier to see her go.

She was describing the weather she’s returning to and I grinned, Yeah, when we were heading back to Logan Airport from our house hunting trip out here and the pilot announced what the temp was in Boston, I muttered under my breath, Turn that plane around!

She laughed. Brrr. She was totally with me on that one.

Happy New Year!

Begin as you mean to go on, I told myself.

For so long I really didn’t want to do this but I really wanted it done. Now I was actually starting to want to work on it. That made the turn of the year a great reason to dive in.

I untangled all the balls and finally actually didn’t just stare at the thing but did that first row on the resumption of the coral reef afghan for New Year’s Eve, and then again today. Forty-five minutes a row. Five rows to the inch.

If only I hadn’t lost all my sketches and early chart-outs. If only I could see the end from here it would never have been left waiting like that.

But–I’m beginning to. Just a little bit, but the surprising thing about doing that one first row was that the two areas where I had no idea what I’d been doing several years ago or how those blobs were supposed to make sense, suddenly I did. Glad I hadn’t ripped it back. All I had to do was go at it and wherever it was in my brain knew. It just knew.

Pick a skein, any skein. Rios? Great. Start the ribbing.

Get bored. Doodle.

Try to figure out where the doodle wants to go from there because it’s kinda floating around untethered up there.

Look at the thing awhile, consider that today is the rare matchup of both Christmas Eve and the eve of the first night of Hanukkah, and realize you could do this many rows straight up from this point and then put a couple of knit stitches upwards at the tops. It would turn them into what some people would instantly recognize as dreidels and others would have no idea. Thank you to my childhood friend Wendy, now fighting pancreatic cancer, for teaching me as a kid how to play dreidel.

(Examine front side and back, reversing vs not reversing it.)

Almost do it.

Consider that you don’t want the hat to only be worn eight days a year. Skip the tops. It’ll be our secret–but I could, now, next time.

Continue on.

Wishing a very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, blessed season of the solstice and every joy and celebration to all. May there be peacemaking on earth.

And then the yarn laughed.

I’d forgotten how much mulberry silk lace weight likes to jump off the needles, and ended up removing 30 stitches from the cast-on; don’t need that extra repeat across, nope nope nope. I know that as soon as I get enough rows done the weight will help stabilize the work. To a point. It’s never going to weigh much at all.

This looks to be both easy and elegant–and something I’ve never knitted before, and I want to. Magic Waves, with an extra stitch each side for stability.

It’s a gorgeous yarn. It’s a lace weight with so much softness but significant strength, so one could trust it not to fall apart after all the work that would have to go into it. It was a splurge a couple years ago, but then, 500g of laceweight will go a very long way.

It’s what I want to knit next. It’s been a long time since I’ve knit a wedding-ring shawl (ie one that can be pulled through one.)

I thought I had just the pattern, but it feels like no that’s not quite it. Nothing with this can be ordinary.

It’s 90% mulberry silk, perfectly spun, with 10% vicuna, a shimmery light-blonde of a yarn. Cashmere has nothing on this.

From what I’ve read, Peru decided the way to recover that never-domesticated endangered species was to return to the traditional ways: to place ownership of the wild herds in the hands of the local villagers. Which would also give them jobs. The chacu returned, the rounding up into corrals with shearing and releasing along with the incentive to protect theirs from poachers while being allowed to sell a fiber that my LYS once sold under lock and key at $300/ounce once it got off the CITES list and could be legally sold–if sourced from Peru….

And I somehow snagged this Italian leftover mill-end designer cone of the stuff. Yes they stretched it out with the much less expensive silk. For me, that only makes it better.

My fingers don’t like knitting on size twos anymore. That’s okay. They can take their time. A lot of time.

Maybe I’ll incorporate that Dayflowers lace sequence into it after all; it was always a favorite. But it won’t just be that.

Open to suggestions here.

Past midnight. Made it home. Even though the Uber driver as he pulled out of the airport explained that the reason I couldn’t find my seatbelt was that there wasn’t one.

Holy cow.

It had not occurred to me that this was a thing you could buy (thank you random Etsy prompts): cane socks. Or, how to be a walking yarnbombing project.

Meantime, I stumbled across Gene Weingarten’s essay on Katherine Graham, who was the owner of the Washington Post for years; her children sold it to Bezos long after her death, after he promised them he would not interfere with the paper.

The second half of the piece is about Bezos’s refusal to let the editorial department publish their endorsement of Harris, old and regretted news at this point.

But the first half. I had not known–or possibly had long forgotten–that when faced with the lawyers saying which of the staff would go to jail if the Post published the Pentagon Papers, Graham said then send them to my house. Make me personally responsible for exposing what they’re doing, not you.

I read that and thought, integrity and courage. The one word repeats the other.

It was going to bug me till I did it, so I did it. I went to the cast-on row, picked up the first stitch, then the second, slipped the first over the second, pick up cast on cast off across, and so reinforced the beginning of the baby afghan.

Little hands do hard pulls. It needed to be ready.

Had I stuck with the game of yarn chicken I would have come up short halfway through the last row with nothing for the cast off, unless I used that slightly mismatched third of a ball.

So instead I used the new skein for that very short bit, wondered how that last of the original ones had turned into Super Skein! Able to leap large gauges with a single bound! (almost)! and had a good laugh at myself.

And yeah the shading wanders around a bit; I figure that’s a plus when you’re trying to put an older baby to bed and they’re not falling immediately asleep. Gives them something interesting to look at quietly.

I’m really really happy with it.

I know you’re going through the same grief I am, and if you don’t want to read below, I understand, and may I distract you a moment with a video courtesy of Meg Swansen of SchoolHouse Press.

————-

The price of eggs. The price of gas. (There was a bird flu that killed the chickens and there was a pandemic where nobody was going anywhere so the latter went down for awhile because nobody was buying much of it, and then it went back up when they did. Econ 101.)

A million people died in 45’s gross mishandling of the pandemic. Children were put in cages on hard floors and lost to their parents–even the Nazis did paperwork to document who went where, but not these guys.

The stealing of national security secrets.

The promise to use the military against Americans who protest against him.

The agony Ukraine is feeling.

The malignant narcissist with dementia.

The selling off of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Pebble Mine that will destroy the salmon fisheries forever for a short-term payoff, both of which the Biden administration was able to put the brakes on.

The promised mass deportation. The “enemy within.” The destruction of the rule of law, and it won’t just happen to people who don’t look like those voters.

The demonstrators in Texas today holding up signs claiming they now owned women. And slaves. (Those photos will stalk their lives forever. As well they should.)

The price of a box of eggs.

I have had an intense visual image of the eleven remaining disciples of Jesus staring in disbelief as those thirty pieces of silver were counted out one by one into the grasping hand of the betrayer.