Rain blessed rain, we were doing it Camelot style again: mostly in the middle of the night. It stopped, the sun broke through here and there as we got up and started the day, and then it started in again.

At one point the thunder and lightning were nearly simultaneous as we heard that huge BOOM. Richard was working from home rather than out driving in that and we held our breaths a moment.

The power held.

It came to .54″ here at the eye of the storm.

I was finding and getting rid of kinks from a pattern and feeling productive.

Finally, the sun was out but going down fast–and the Christmas lights weren’t coming on. Huh. It’s getting cold, they sure should be by now. I checked everything, and then with Richard searching for ideas I did again. Breakers were all good. Everything’s plugged in and set. Had a squirrel chewed through the cord under the tomato bush?

Did you check the box?

Of oh course! And so it was, his Rube Goldberg of a thermostat was somehow dead, why, we have no idea. So I bypassed it and simply plugged the lights directly into the orange cord and ta daah!

And… The Acurite was blinking. We changed the batteries and I cleaned off the mud outside and the surprising little bit that had somehow gotten inside, but the temperature sensor part, which I use to read the temp under the mango cover without having to go outside, was still dead.

Two sets of electronics knocked out by the rain. The sensor is designed to be outdoors but the instructions say not to leave it where it will get wet. Um. It’s never been a problem before.

It wasn’t going to do me any good inside, though, certainly, so since the station part wasn’t blinking anymore I might as well try. I stuck it back under the mango cover.

It came back to life! Within an hour, but not in the first five minutes, I know that. Maybe it had just needed to dry out? It’s clearly working fine now.

Maybe I should explain that the rain reader is a third gizmo around here… Who knew we would turn into such weather nerds?

(Oh and? Last week’s falls didn’t improve my balance and I fell out there again. Twice. Always did like splashing in mud puddles as a kid but somehow I missed those, just the cushy bushes.)

Tom’s mom (he was a college classmate of mine, small world) told a tale in church today that had us laughing.

She grew up in a small town on the Canadian prairie and attended I think she said it was a one-room schoolhouse–but whatever, it was small and very old-fashioned and if you were late for school you got your hands smacked with a ruler: you *will* be on time.

So one day on her way to school she and her friends got distracted and explored the new cellar being dug for a new building along the way.

Her friend’s dog landed down in there too.

Should they leave it there? Or risk being late for school? Should they tell? Should they try to get it out?

Finally, they just couldn’t bear the idea of abandoning the poor thing and they had to do something, so they tried to get it up the ladder.

All the pushing from behind in the world was not getting that dog up that ladder. The harder they pushed the more it was nuh uh, not gonna, you can’t make me.

What to do.

One of them had a precious roll of lifesaver candies. They considered. They pulled out the yucky pineapple ones that the dog was certainly welcome to and placed them on steps above its nose to entice it upwards. And it worked! The dog went up a few steps, snatched the lifesavers, and hustled back down to the bottom of the pit to crunch away happily.

After doing everything they could think of they gave up and climbed the ladder themselves and tried to make up for lost time getting on their way, when running up behind them came that dog. It had been capable all along of getting out of its predicament, it had just felt all along that being with them was the important thing. Mud walls, dirt floors? Those were a problem?

I confess that as her story went on I had a stifled and hopefully not too goofy grin: she’d gotten me quietly remembering the time years ago when she’d so much wanted me in her theater production, so sure I would jump at the chance, so sure she could make it happen for me and her surprise when I, with all the gentleness I could say it with, told her in complete seriousness that I would rather have a root canal than be up on that stage. Any stage. Not my thing. Babysitting for those who were, that, I’d be happy to do, I offered. (And I did and it was her one-year-old grandson.)

I felt for that dog. And it got out of there with everybody happy just like I did.

It was the annual dessert auction fund raiser for the Scouts.

You know Dave is really good at this when I’m not the only laughing and going, wait, what did he say? as he rattles off in hyperspeak.

He noted that it was our first such night without Shirley and that she had always bid on every dessert, at least something, making everyone’s effort appreciated; and here we had (he presented it) someone had baked one of her favorite recipes in her memory and honor tonight.

Meantime, Donna was livestreaming the proceedings for another elderly member of our ward who in her 90’s had recently moved out of state to be with her children. She hadn’t wanted to miss out. Well, hey, they could do something about that, even if we couldn’t bring her dessert.

Richard and I had both been cornered by various people as we’d come in: You DID bring your chocolate torte, right?

Two! (Recipe here.)

They were waiting, Dave knew it, and he saved them to almost last.

T. had told me in no uncertain terms that one of those was going to be his, but his hand faltered and dropped at $150.

Meantime, others were making plans, and two families in cahoots nailed the second one. One of them proudly presented to me afterwards their toddler’s face completely smeared in ganache–she’d had a good time with her slice. (I didn’t think fast enough to go, Hey, Donna, Nettie would love this!)

$295 for the two of them. The mind boggles and it makes no sense to me, although, fundraiser, okay. And I should stop bragging. I know.  Still, a new record, that’s for sure.

Trying to rent a car for a wedding we’re going to in a few months.

Ya gotta love Enterprise. The first glitch on their site wiped out my supposedly completed reservation. Huh. What can you do but start over. Were they testing to see if anyone actually reads the Terms and Conditions they’re agreeing to? Because my mommy and daddy taught me you always read the fine print before you sign your name.

So I clicked.

Which got me an empty box declaring three words: Terms and Conditions.

Not a link. Not a way forward out of that page. Just a wide expanse of space. That was it.

I printed it out. You never know.

The breaker blew.

I’ve been wondering why it hasn’t made national screaming headlines: the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge is gone! No more R3! After two or four years there depending on whom you ask, it’s finally gone, do you hear me, GONE! Throw in an El Nino and boom, drought over, right?

Hey, where is everybody?

So I spent some time trying to find out why, since it’s such huge news, and the answer seems to be that nobody really knows why we had this bulletproof wall of air parked off the coast in the first place.

Which means they don’t know if it might come back at any moment, and that would tamp down the rejoicing, yes.

That really hard winter the East Coast had last year? R3 was bouncing all the tropical moisture that was supposed to come to us straight on up towards the Arctic, where it went on vacation and took in the sights and visited Denali National Park and combed the musk oxen at an Eskimo town and toured uppermost Canada and then came back down on the other side of the country and took off its new polar bear coat.

‘They got our water and Alaska’s cold and we got nuthin’.

Rain is predicted again in a few days. We’re off to a decent start.

I was covering the mango last night, lit by a misplaced flashlight and the Christmas string on the tree, tripped on the novelty of muddy ground, and fell twisting sideways into the tomato bush. No way to know if the pop tent that covered it is damaged; that plant grew right through it like a–okay, kids, ask your folks what a chia pet is. So yeah, a little cushioning there, definitely.

It’s a next-day thing, it always is, but it took me by surprise that when I lifted a more awkward than heavy thing this morning it quite did me in.

I still am having a hard time sitting up straight and I am walking like a ninety-year-old: stooped and slow and watching each step carefully. Must have fallen a lot harder than I thought.

And all day long I’ve been just amazed, going, I only fell and twisted with my own body weight–my daughter’s took it at freeway speed with the force of the weight and momentum of two cars. How does she DO this?! Me, pass the icepacks and I know I’ll be fine in a day or two. Or at worst three.

She amazes me. She’s a trooper.

I covered the mango a lot more carefully tonight. And then, since we hit 39 last night, I put a second cover on top. Just because.

1. Today is the 15th anniversary of a speeder totaling my car and my balance. And life has gone on just fine. Changed, though, so somehow I needed to acknowledge the anniversary.

2. Meantime, Maddy might not know what all those shiny wrappers mean yet but they crinkle and make lots of noise and are shiny and were desirable to her brothers so they made her happy.

3. My sweetie happened to glance past me towards my bird book this afternoon and did a double take. He knows each piece of electronics he’s ever ordered but that one totally threw him: what was it? Where had it come from? (How could he not remember this?!)

I laughed and reminded him that I’d ordered new glasses yesterday and had taken my identical backup pair with me to put new lenses into in case they didn’t have anything I liked as much. Which is what happened. And so this old case had come out of hiding and the dusty glasses inside washed off and turned in: I’ve alternated for eleven years now which pair has the current prescription. I want my face to look like what I want my face to look like, and so when I found just the thing I bought two.

Actually three, after one met a size 13 foot one night–I replaced it while I still could.

And he’s right, that doesn’t look like a glasses case. Put wheels on it and it could be a toy express train. Or wings and a tail, a plane.

Soon I won’t be flying quite so blind.

A four-year-old and her two-year-old brother: one single doorbell ring tonight. But oh so cute. Clearly coached to take just one, and they did, but then subversive me I told them to have some more and that little boy’s hand moved faster in response than his daddy could possibly say anything to. And then hey, you can’t penalize the older one for obeying the rules, so, to her, (remembering my late grandmother and her candy bowl), “Have some more.”

I’ve probably told this one before, but when our own were little, there was one Halloween where they all woke up with a stomach bug and that was that.

Our neighbor, then not yet a grandmother but hoping, had, it turned out, gone out and bought a gift for each of our kids: a delightful gingerbread-house-looking paper box with See’s chocolates and candies inside. We had the only small children on the block and she’d gone all out for them.

And then they didn’t come and it got later and they didn’t come and they still didn’t come. She’d so been looking forward to them ringing her doorbell and all of us being so surprised.

Finally, she walked over and rang *our* doorbell. And immediately on hearing the news cried, Oh, poor kids–to be sick on Halloween of all days! She was very sorry they couldn’t eat any of this yet, sorry they hadn’t gotten their chance to dress up silly.

But now after a bad day they had something to look forward to.

It hadn’t gone the way she’d planned, but the way it worked out, her generosity and empathy would never be forgotten.

(Found a second flamingo!)

I hadn’t made a chocolate hazelnut torte in awhile, and I forgot to add the layer of parchment paper to the bottom of the pan before greasing it. Then after the minimal allotted baking time, I kept doing the toothpick test to past the maximum minutes and finally just pulled it out–a little overdone. I should have trusted my nose when it proclaimed perfection.

And without that parchment paper, the cake stuck to the pan despite my best efforts to gradually ease it away from there. Lopsided, and I mean truly lopsided, but including dishwasher time it would have taken me five hours to make another one.

I confessed that I’d considered scraping the pan part off and mushing the thing back together and pretending it hadn’t fallen apart, but, um, that’s harder to do when you’ve been munching on the strays. (And leaving some for Richard. Sometimes with all that heavenly smell in the kitchen all you need is just a taste.)

So. Off to deliver it to a mom with a new baby because we could all use such a thing at such a time. Delivered in an Andy’s Orchard box with a paper bag over the top to camouflage it out of her toddler’s sight, deflecting the little one with persimmons bought yesterday at said orchard.

Yay! Persimmons!

She was amazingly well behaved: I went through my purse and found a pink flamingo finger puppet that matched her dress and offered it to her. I mentioned that there’d been a green snake, too, but nah, I didn’t think so.

She was curious and wanted to see the snake.

It had gone to some far corner and I pulled finger puppet after finger puppet to the top of my bag looking for it, and finally, there it was.

She peeked in and admired them all as I held the bag open so she could–but never once did she ask for any of them or try to reach for them. Looking was all she wanted and she had already fallen in love with her flamingo and it was enough, and I thought, that is one well-parented, well-loved little girl.

I told her mom I have to do this again so she can see what that (don’t say the word torte out loud now that the kid is awake from her nap) was really supposed to have been like.

Found a Department of Agriculture page on Africanized honeybees, a ‘contact us’ link, and fired off a note about what I saw the other day.

And here’s what came back to me:

Good Afternoon Alison,

Thank you for your concern and for sharing your experience. African honey bees are present in California, and from what I have read, have continued to move north from Southern California. Behaviorally, African honey bees differ from European honey bees in that they are more defensive of their hive, and will exhibit this defensive behavior further away from the location of their hive than European honey bees would.

During the Autumn months, there tends to be less for honey bees to forage, which can lead to a phenomenon that we call “robbing.” This is essentially the invasion of one hive by one or several other hives, but their intent is just to consume the food stores of the invaded hive. If an African honey bee colony is being robbed, defenders of that colony may pursue robbers from other colonies for extended distances, and this pursuit could end in the defending bee stinging the robber. 

I’m not saying that this is what happened or that African honey bees are involved in this situation; I am just offering an explanation about what you have seen. Regarding the abduction of one honey bee by another, I have no explanation. Perhaps what you saw picking up the assailed honey bee was not a honey bee, but an insect of similar appearance. Nature is variable and often times things occur in nature that are inexplicable.

Lastly, if you are concerned about the dead honey bees at your back door, you should make sure not to leave anything outside that could attract honey bees, for instance cans and bottles of any kind, jars, any receptacle that could have a sugary residue. These things will attract honey bees, especially if there is no natural forage to be found. There is also the possibility that there is a honey bee somewhere around your home. If you see signs of this, please do not look around for it. It would be best to contact a professional to inspect around your home if you suspect that you have some unknown neighbors.

Best,

(And then he signed his name)

————

On a different note, my sweetie tripped over the cord to the charger to my laptop last week and pulled it out of the socket. I plugged it back in, made sure he was okay, didn’t think much of it.

Today I picked up that laptop and noticed for the first time that right where it snaps into the Air it was bent tightly–and not only bent but the plastic coating was actually pulled open so that the wires inside were exposed.

And they were sparking. Tiny little–ongoing–sparks. Smallest fireworks show I ever did see.

The laptop still works, the charger is out of here, and the house didn’t burn down starting in our bedroom. We are really, really, really, say it again, really, lucky.

As an antidote for a moment to all the bad cop stories that have been out there: this one. Two groups of teens fighting, and the Washington, DC officer offers a dance-off. If she wins, they have to disperse, if they win, they get to stay.

She’s dancing with 40 pounds of equipment on her but look at her go.

Everybody has a good time, everybody laughs, and both women declare themselves the winner with a hug.

Trying to write a blog post after getting home late from Convocation at Stanford and then chocolate afterwards with friends…

While here’s my husband sitting down at the computer next to me and exclaiming over a new batch of grandkid pictures that came in while we were out. Sorry, this post is hosed, I gotta go look over his shoulder with him.

But I gotta say, four year olds playing soccer? Swarmball. Totally swarmball. And totally adorable.

I have Googled, I have read a ton, I have learned that Africanized honeybees were found in Lafayette, the other side of the San Francisco Bay from here, for the first time just last month. Oh joy.

But I still didn’t find anything explaining this, and the beekeeper friend who happened to drop by tonight hadn’t ever heard of such a thing either. So here goes.

The last few days I’ve found dead honeybees outside my door to the patio, eight or ten or so. When most of them disappeared I figured the Bewick’s wrens had hit the jackpot–I’ve seen them eat spiders.

This afternoon I saw a single honeybee fly in to where the others had died and, curious, I stopped what I was doing and walked over to my side of the glass to watch.

It looked like it was attacking another honeybee! I missed the first part so I don’t know when the other got there but the aggressive one was not letting it up, it clearly seemed to be trying to subdue it till finally the other one seemed to lie still, but the aggressive one was still at it. Finally–and this is what is really weird–it *picked it up and flew off with it*! I saw its feet holding onto the other’s dangling abdomen, and if he left any parts behind I missed it.

Now, a ready queen will fly up in the air once to a waiting congregation of drones prepared to mate with her for her to collect a lifetime supply of sperm, but this was on the ground and a one-on-one fight.

Reading, it seems the flight patterns of Africanized bees are more like yellow jackets than European honeybees, jerky and faster, not the slow, gentle whistling-a-tune stroll of our familiar honeybee. Yup. But this was no yellow jacket.

I may be wrong (and please tell me if I am!), but I think I just saw my first Africanized one. Right at my back door.

He was gobsmacked.

A week ago, as a middle-aged widower himself, he grieved with me at the sudden passing of my friend Robin the day before. He had never met her, but deep and personal loss, that he knew even better than I.

Today I told him I had had this machine-washable wool and I’d wondered…and then, as I’ve said here, it had just felt like she’d settled my question re a plain watch cap vs something cabled, how to know what he might prefer: that instant feeling of her laughing and the words, “You have the skills, what do you think they’re for?!” How I’d laughed, too.

How it had come to be like this, then. And I thought, Robin’s still blessing people.

I thanked him again for helping us out Friday a week ago and explained that it was a honeycomb pattern for the bees that make all of life better–for, well, everything and everyone. Truly, nothing else would do.

The man is a master gardener. He looked at the hat and at me and held it close to him and exclaimed, “I will treasure it for the rest of my life!”

I ran in the ends after I took the picture: the hat (after frogging and redoing the decreasing at the top), it is done. Tomorrow I get to give it to the friend who so much earned it and who has no idea it’s coming and I can’t wait.

Yarn: Cascade Longwood, a soft, superwash merino. If it matters to you, note that the Peruvian-milled and more recent Chinese-milled stock have different gauges, with the Chinese being thinner last I bought any. Their 220 yarn, too.

Meantime, I’m trying to figure out how to safely snap clamshells over the figs. When they go from being held straight up to stem up and fruit downward it’s a good thing, and mine are starting to get there.

And if you’re curious, NPR has a story here of how cultivated blueberries came to be. It took one determined woman a hundred years ago with just enough information, a little land, luck, help, and a whole lot of determination.

And neighbors willing to take walks through the woods.