1. His co-worker was what? I blinked. She’s going skiing?! Did she check first? Road closures? They’re hand-shoveling out the buried chairs on the ski lifts.

2. Everybody’s trying to figure out how four goats came to be running around in traffic in San Francisco. The people who rent herds out for munching fire-prone hillsides have said nope, not theirs.

3. The silk tape cowl is finding out what size it wants to be when it dries. This is nearly the whole 150 grams’ worth: it’s big and it will likely stretch some from all the weight. Note to future self: I started with 70 stitches on size 9s and increased to 84. It was a quick knit, but also not because the yarn was a bit of a hassle.

Although, compared to some silks it was thankfully a lot less snaggy on the fingers and it offered a chance at easy retrieval at a dropped stitch if you were careful.

But what I like best about it is that it’s done. I’d been needing more of that.

A large window blew out 43 stories up on a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. Yay for those reverse-911 calls pleading for people to stay home during the storm; thankfully nobody was hurt. Today I ran to the grocery store and was amazed at all the tree debris shoved to the side of the road. The next town over is still out of power and so their schools are closed, because the schools are required to feed the children.

Which means yesterday they called out for pizza for the entire district’s student body one hour before lunchtime. Can you just imagine being the owner who got that call? I wonder if it took every pizza parlor in town. Probably did.

Our old contractor Chris’s man Joel came by this afternoon. He measured, he observed, he poked and lifted: we had four panels broken. He would get back to me with a quote on lifting the one back up and then tacking the cracked and broken back into place, risking the wood beneath by exposure over time, vs replacing all the of them so they’d match.

Is this a trick question.

But he was trying to make sure he’d be doing what we wanted.

I pointed out the one in the corner. He lifted it–it’s not supposed to be able to–and saw where the cream colored paint ended about 18″ down the dark brown beam, whereas it was supposed to have been entirely painted. I do have a contemporaneous small can of that paint that I bought so as to have it for emergencies.

And so we go forward from here.

The next atmospheric river is supposed to start Saturday/Sunday night and go to at least Wednesday.

In the immortal words of the late Richard Thompson, author of the Cul de Sac comic and Richard’s Poor Almanac,

“March comes in on clumsy feet

Kicks the trashcans down the street

Spills some garbage on the lawn

Blows the rest to Hellandgone

Knocks the branches off the trees

Gives the power lines a squeeze

Then March leaves. And as it goes

the sun comes out. Then it snows.”

(Yeah, we had a fun day today. Noisy, though. 77 mph winds at SFO, 97 in the hills.)

The phone rang at dinnertime.

It was a reverse-911 call from the county warning of the incoming storm and pleading for residents to stay home and stay put if you’re not in an evacuation zone. And don’t drive through water in the roadway!

We are staying home and staying put. It’s supposed to start pouring any minute, strong winds, the works, and then another atmospheric river is expected next week. You know the “Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry” line? The levy wishes. They are dropping boulders from helicopters at this point to be able to reach it.

And yet all was quiet here so far. So I took a moment to photograph the biggest Anya seedling: I love its formation, it’s such an elegant little bundle of hope, and its leaves have really grown. It just makes me so happy.

There was enough air movement to twirl its skirts a little.

The flowering pear is at that glorious moment of full bloom mixed with the incoming leaves; it had waited all winter for this.

The start of the storm keeps being pushed back–11:00 pm, they think now. Edit, nope, 1:00 am.

That pear tree was a staked newly planted whip when we moved here. Hey, little apricot? You’ve got this.

Those stripes on the chest are protective of the young: they signal to adult peregrines that this is just a kid hanging around, no reason to hassle them, they’re not trying to steal your mate nor your territory.

But since no other male had chased him off at the abandoned nest and he got there first and then she showed up, well, it took a number of days to convince her but there you go.

The falconistas say this pair should mostly likely succeed this year after all.

Flight feathers are usually molted as a symmetrical pair wing to wing and he’s missing just one, so that makes him easy to spot till the new one grows out.

Just to add re the California flooding: the road nearest the Bay is under water and the city put out a warning and we’re definitely not traveling anywhere, but we’re doing fine.

Oh, and, thank you all for the advice re the microplane. My daughter reminds me that she thought they were a good idea too so she bought me one a year ago.

That was the Christmas we had almost no lemons because the unusual, intense summer heat had so stressed the tree that it had dropped the fruit before it had had any chance to ripen. And so the microplane had been forgotten.

And now I know where it is!

You know how the beep beep beep makes you go spend way too much time looking for which smoke alarm it is that’s going off?

That sound was driving us nuts one day last week, but we could not find it and at the end of the day we had to give up and go to bed: I took off my ears. He wished he could.

And somehow in the morning all was silent. Huh.

Then this morning it was back; the only difference is there were more people here now for it to annoy.

Michelle started staking out smoke alarms, waiting for the sound to coincide with the flashing light that would nail the culprit. Won’t work, we told her; we did all that.

It somehow sounded to me like it was coming from the printer, which made no sense. I touched all kinds of plugged-in things to see if they felt too warm. Everything was fine.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

It might not end this time. It had to end.

It was somewhere in this room–we all decided that much.

Much deep cleaning behind stuff and much squelched frustration later, they found it. At least they hadn’t had to move the piano to get to it.

I did not believe that that could in any possible way be what it was, much less be the source. It was. I could not believe that thing was still in this house. It was.

In 2015 our 20-year-old carbon monoxide detector finally started screeching the alarm it was made for–five minutes after Joe Lerma turned off our furnace up on the roof and knocked on our door, white as a sheet, exclaiming, Are you guys okay?!

That furnace had been damaged by its installers and with the air intake filter now burned away, was pumping carbon monoxide down our air vents. No we were not okay, all we’d known was that it wasn’t working well so we’d called him to come inspect it. But we’d barely turned it on because it had just felt wrong somehow, so our exposure had been thankfully low.

That’s when we learned you’re supposed to replace those alarms every six years whether they seem to need it or not–they do. It’s not worth risking your life over. Given that we were hospitalized with CO poisoning at our old house in 1985, we’re a little antsy on the subject. How many people get hit with this twice?!

It is safe to say I am not fond of the alarms that failed us. I had no idea the one had been put down and fallen behind the speaker and had never left the house.

It has not been plugged in for eight years. Eight. Years.

And yet it went off from dawn till sometime in the middle of the night last week and it did it again today.

I disabled it, he assured me a few minutes ago.

That wasn’t good enough.

The electronics recycling is being picked up in the morning, I assured him.

And it is out there sitting in that bin and it is not coming back.

We’ve replaced the smoke and CO alarms we replaced after that one and its peers were supposedly thrown out the first time. 2028 (for when I go to check out the date later) we’ll need to do it again.

I don’t know that scrubbing the back of the fridge and getting out the stuff that had not aged well or had frozen at the bottom and all the details one would probably be better off not mentioning (Really? You do eat year-old kimchi? Who knew. Well then that’s why it’s still in there, honey. Do I have to keep it? –Nah, toss it– ) would count as a blog post.

But it sure felt like it at the time.

—

Editing to add a link to a short video of the yearling male and the female falcon. Rarely, a yearling can succeed at starting a family but it’s more likely an adult will take over.

Somehow it reminds me of a high school dance.

Scene: church. Time: after Sacrament meeting. Characters: the young men, who’d taken the lace tablecloth that had been placed over the sacrament table outside to shake off any possible lingering bread crumbs.

One came running back in and grabbed his dad. People came out the doors to see.

At first disbelieving glance it was a hard snowstorm, but wait, snow doesn’t bounce–it was hail, and it was hailing so hard that the diagonal streaks of white were accumulating as we watched. Not big, dangerous stones like the ones that dented my brother’s car in Colorado one August, just little ones, but the air was white with them.

That dad pulled out his phone and took pictures of the teenage boys with ice balls in their hair, individually and arms around each other, laughing. It was windy and beastly cold, forget the 53F forecast, we weren’t dressed for this. I ran inside and grabbed a few more people to come see and they were in disbelief too as they took it in. Quite a crowd now.

And then suddenly for anyone who hadn’t already come outside, it was too late: it was a hard rain and all proof that it had ever been frozen vanished away and they were just going to have to take our word for it.

Eli’s mom wanted to know who’d had that camera because she’d missed seeing her boy laughing with nature’s glitter sparkling in his hair. Gordon. Oh good.

Back inside for the second meeting as the sky lost its impromptu audience.

When it was time to go, Richard, who had not come outside and had missed all of that, overheard Kimber’s excited little boy: MOM! I threw a snowball!

Close enough, little guy, close enough.

We laid out all the pros and cons again this morning, trying to balance out how badly I wanted to go see old friends after four long years away vs what the most right thing to do was and finally threw it up to G_d in prayer because we couldn’t decide. We figured He knew better than we did.

Richard wasn’t going to say it till I did: I felt an immediate, loving answer that driving to Stitches was not what was most needed of us today nor would it be where we’d be most glad we’d been. And somehow it now felt okay that that was so.

It was Michelle’s moving day.

225,000 tech workers were laid off last month and she was one of them. The kicker is that most of those companies are actually doing quite well. She was told there were 400 applications coming in for every job posted.

Her yearly lease was coming right up and it made the most sense for her to cut the biggest expense for now.

Which is hard for her and we know it but already it is so good to have her back.

Her day had its moments (like, the key is *where*?!) and it turned out we were glad we were around and not just coming home after she and her friends had done all the work. A notable one of those unforeseeable moments happened later after her friends had left, and I was glad we were there for her and not off somewhere else.

Next year. Sacramento drive or no.

Scene: yesterday. Him: migraine, with lab work due. So me: driver.

Stuck in traffic. Even the helicopter overhead wasn’t going anywhere.

I pointed out all the people on the pedestrian bridge over the freeway and said, The paparazzi. He remarked on the big camera on a tripod and I said, I bet that’s a news photographer.

It was a relief to find out afterwards that the entire freeway had been shut down for hours not because of an accident but because PG&E said they just had no other way to safely access the power lines that a tree had fallen through in the storm, taking out most of that city in the process.

Nature happens. Nature, we can deal with.

Alright, then, very good, carry on. (Is that our car behind that truck way back there no I don’t think so I think those trucks were both behind us come on why am I looking at this.)

(In real life, those lilacs at the top are as bright as a spring morning.)

I have mentioned the woman who sold me two beautiful gerdans in November–whose shop then disappeared from Etsy and there was no way to send her a message to make sure she was okay. Of all the people in Ukraine that I’d interacted with and had tried to do my part to help support, she was the one I was most worried about.

I had bought the second one because I loved it, but also to keep the conversation going. And suddenly all I was getting was Etsy’s notification that this shop was no longer listed.

I googled the name of it in case it might appear on some other platform. No luck. I only had her first name. It hit hard, to a degree that surprised me–and yet didn’t at all.

I have grieved that lost connection. I have wanted to know that she was as alright as possible.

Two days ago, the thought struck me: yes Etsy wouldn’t let me send a message to her shop–but what about responding to months-old previous messages? Were they still there? And if so, why hadn’t I thought of this before?

I felt a combination of, I have to at least try, and a sudden and unreasonable hope.

They were still there! She got it! She answered!

It meant the world to her that it meant so much to me to finally find her again, that it matters how she and her family are doing. The world. It cares. About them.

She told me the way to find and follow her now. Oh my goodness, there was a year old picture of her showing off her latest design and saying how proud she was of it, that she thought it was her prettiest ever–and it was sitting in a box across the room from me as I read that because I had also thought it was the prettiest ever, I had not found anything quite like it from anyone else and it’s what got me to ever pay attention to anything about her in the first place.

But also on her page was a video of a large apartment building collapsed by missiles with fire raging across the bottom, with her cri de couer: “There are people under there!”

And here I suddenly showed up telling her how hard I’d tried to find her and that I’d been praying fervently for her safety and so grateful to find her again. Unspoken was the word, alive.

That is when I realized why I not only have been buying but wearing these hand-beaded pictorial necklaces from Ukraine: each one connects me to the person who made it.

But also, I feel as if in some small and thoroughly irrational way I am somehow helping to protect that person from the terrors and the harm by keeping them right there close to my heart throughout my quiet, peaceful day.

Maps says three hours each way. Stitches West moved to Sacramento, I haven’t been in four years thanks to the pandemic (and to having had Covid during the 2020 one–Early Adopter status, it’s a Silicon Valley thing) and I badly want to see old friends I never get to see anywhere else. Even Mel and Kris are going to be there, and they’d thought they were done with making that drive from Oregon, but no, they’re coming.

So we talked about it. I told him, you know how utterly crashed I was coming home when it was twenty minutes away, I don’t know how I’d do three hours at the wheel afterwards much less driving that twice in a day. That’s also the weekend Michelle’s supposed to move.

But: I want to see my friends. (Thinking, I could even go and almost not buy any yarn because the first day is always such an intense overload and there wouldn’t be a second day.)

He totally grokked how important that was to me. But also to our daughter.

“Let’s think about that.”

Even if there were public transportation, it would involve some time spent out in the sun and I absolutely cannot take that risk at all.

Wind advisory, gusts up to 50 mph, the weather site said. 80, said another, though to me that sounds too much to claim.

I did have an argument with the air a moment there over whether or not I was going to close my front door, though.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to stop the gate from crashing relentlessly; it needs to be rehung and won’t latch tight anymore. I put something to block it and that went flying. Oops.

There was a piece of roof on the ground, I told him.

He scrunched his face, trying to picture how a sprayed-on foam roof could do any such thing.

That’s the headline part, I quickly clarified, the story part is that it was a chunk of the roof over the shed that the redwood needles broke that we were going to get rid of anyway. But you still don’t expect it to lift upward and past our yard. I retrieved it.

The roof over the awning is basically the same clear corrugated plastic material, 30 years newer.

And all I can do is mentally apologize to the neighbors for all the racket it’s making as the wind tries to tear it free, too. It’s sealed down tight enough that it’s been rainproof. I did not know the edges could lift apart like that. I don’t think they’re supposed to.

This is like my east coast childhood when we hunkered down as a hurricane passed through, including a memorable sleepover at Wendy’s where lightning and a tree knocked a house off its foundation around the corner. We even had the power failures–just not here yet. (Suddenly taking note of where the nearest flashlight is. Or–wait–was.) Hey, Look, Ma, Real Weather! (TM)

But what it all means is that there’s a storm coming and it’s going to rain again and this is hugely good and maybe we’ll get Trinity reservoir, still stuck at 32%, to move up a bit after all. And hey, thanks for the free partial demolition up there re the shed.

The kicker is that tomorrow morning early is the semi-annual city pickup day for local residents to get rid of Stuff. Which they will sort, donate, recycle, and at the last, trash.

Except you really wouldn’t want to put it out there right now.

There was supposed to be a bag full of Goodwillable clothing going out but you know the guy across the street isn’t going to want to peel it off his antenna.

(Walks off humming “letting my freak flag fly“…)

I wasn’t walking anywhere today if I didn’t have to. That foot needs to be looked at.

So. I have the assignment at church again of keeping the mother’s nursing lounge stocked with chocolate. One new mom, on finding out I was the one doing that, requested that the chocolate almonds continue, so now there are always some of those and if nuts are the thing then toffee pistachios go in there, too.

We arrived this morning with me thinking how much I wished Jen would just somehow appear and take the bag from me and take care of it. She’s the one who asked me post pandemic to start doing that again–there would be no having to explain to her what this was about. (We do not want little kids overhearing and figuring out how to raid the stuff.)

The door to the chapel opened, and out stepped–Jen herself. Sometimes miracles come in the most improbable packages. All taken care of.

After church, I spotted a young mom nearby and asked her if she could go retrieve the bag and chocolates for me so I wouldn’t have to walk across that long room and back.

Sure!

And then I waited. And waited. I figured she ran into a friend in there and they were having a conversation and that was fine by me, no hurry.

And maybe she was.

But she looked a little abashed at swallowing that last little bit as she walked back towards me. My grin got the better of me and then I was laughing. Have some more! It’s what it’s for, to be enjoyed! Plus, a quick snarf of good chocolate in a quiet room when your little kids have no idea, can’t pester you for any and won’t ruin their lunches–that sounds pretty perfect to me. I was very glad she got to enjoy some. Call it a commission.

She handed me the cotton bag and still had an ‘I can’t believe I did that’ look on her face so I tried again to make sure she knew that it was all totally fine by me. Any time. And thank you so much for the help with my foot!

That bag is clearly going to be our future private in-joke forevermore.

It was a surprise gift from a vyshyvanka seller in Ukraine.

With all the microclimates around here, no matter what the weather sites say, after a really cold night you wait for the frost on the awning roof to start dripping down before you uncover the mango tree in the morning. That, and, somehow I just didn’t want to go out there this morning. But it had to be done. Be careful.

The top frost layer still had a bit of crispy crunchy glittery to it and I could feel the last ice crystals breaking as I pulled it off the lower layer.

Which was dry and felt cool rather than cold. Those old incandescent Christmas lights underneath are still doing their job.

But the top layer was heavy with liquid in whatever form, and I was putting my whole body into dragging it away from the mango to where it could dry out.

Which is why (and I know better, I’ve done this before) I was at the wrong angle with arms and legs opposite the direction I was leaning in when my foot caught a dip in the ground.

As I told Richard, my instant thought was Don’tfalldon’tfalldon’tfall as I tried to right myself in time.

And then you fell, he said, reasonably.

My back bounced off that vertical piece of the raised bed. But it wasn’t my head!

Ice. Immediately.

He was right, and I did, and I was a lot better off for it.

Mostly.

After dinner I said, I don’t see how I could have broken it.

Is the pain more localized now? he asked.

I wiggled my foot a bit. Actually, no, more diffuse, which makes more sense anyway because it was a twist not a smack.

Broken bones localize.

Yeah. Um, yay.

I found my old ankle brace but it’s still tough getting around. Elevate. Which means the UFO 1×1-stitch-switching intarsia hat that is a joy to give but a pain to make is now almost done. Yay!

Looks like four more nights of frost warnings coming up and then hopefully we’ll be done with that till, I dunno, maybe Thanksgiving?