Just one long row at a time, I told myself.  Then rest the hands for the rest of each hour–I didn’t want to push them into a more lasting inflammation than the little bit going on. There is not a single painkiller I can safely take.

Other than icepacks. Done.

On the hour I picked those needles back up again. Then I put them back down.

Yeah that all worked just fine till about 8:00 p.m. when I just kept pushing on through till ten with one nagging break to go read a newspaper article, because I was so close to being finished and I so wanted my inner vision to become real and accomplished and right there in front of me at long last. This one had been a long time coming.

I started this shawl during my cousins reunion trip over the Fourth of July–where I forgot my instructions so I just had to make it up as I went along.

Ad-libbing may be freeing but it’s also a whole lot slower: you constantly have to stop, take stock of where you’ve been and where you’re going and how much yarn you have left and make sure it’ll be what you want it to come out looking like and that you’ve got the yardage to do it. Will it pinch in below the shoulders? Stop weigh count consider.

It made for slow progress. But it was becoming something new entirely and the closer it got the faster it was finally going and by the time I went to bed last night I knew exactly what every single remaining row was going to be and I was totally falling in love with it like never before.

It’s the lace weight that Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns surprised me with and it exactly matches a favorite shirt.

Tomorrow: cast off. Block.

Wear, with an inner thank you Melinda’s way every time.

Still not free of fever at night, still sick, but today I could do stuff. (Yeah, I watered the trees Tuesday because I had no choice. It was a near thing, though.)

Today I saw a green pop-up ad selling olives and I wasn’t buying–I went out there this evening, clippers in hand.

When the tree guys stump-grindered the last of that dying olive tree, there was this wide, deep pile of sawdust afterwards. Not long after I planted my sour cherry in the middle of it and hoped.

It’s still this tiny little thing.

In the last month somehow clusters of quickly-hardening stalks have risen from the dust in a half-circle at the outer perimeter there. The first time surprised me; after that I kept an eye out and got to them earlier. I put large rocks where they’d been but wait a week and up they come again, sometimes in a new spot.

It’s not much of a contest, though, especially the ones trying to work their way out from those rocks. But it does make me wonder how much the English Morello has had to fight for root space–and it came with a broken-off major root. You don’t get first pick on bare-roots in March. But I did get my tree.

And so, wearing a flouncy silk skirt that I put on this morning to make myself feel better even if my body didn’t just then and knowing I was clothed ridiculously for working in the dirt (but eh, it handwashes), I got the tips of those clippers down below the soil line and just cut cut cut.

Because if I stopped and rested and changed I knew I might not get it done.

And then here’s the amazing thing: in March it was all yellow layered flat flakes of sawdust there. What was coming up in my hands was a well-crumbled rich, rich black soil any gardener would leap to have.

I think that sour cherry is going to end up just fine.

Two friends wanted to come by a couple days ago and I had to tell them that between the deep cough and the fever, they really didn’t want to be here.

Then Richard, on the edge of the bug and not wanting to infect anyone just in case, didn’t show up at church Sunday either.

This afternoon I went to go get the mail and there at our doorstep, wrapped together in twine in a bow, were these two bars of chocolate and a get-well card containing an offer to run any errand I might need done while I’m down. Note that the Chocolove so far has been opened, sampled, and exclaimed over–definitely buying that one myself first thing. We will taste-test the second one tomorrow and stretch out the anticipation a bit: life is good.

A huge shout-out to Courtney and Alice and how could I not feel better after that?

It was a three steps back kind of day. A little discouraging, and the fever had begun to come in cabin flavor too.

And yet, when I had to crash and go lie down again, look who fluttered in. Same as yesterday: a dove in the camphor tree outside the clerestory window, keeping watch over her little flock by day. I watched her consider a few spots, then walk over to where there’s this little horizontal leg in the limb where it was just right. She turned around and around there, checking out all angles, just making sure of her safety, then back to facing me.

It was a good spot. She stood there a moment, then quietly settled down on her feet. She let her wings relax to brush the limb and then she simply shared the day with me for a good long time, however long I might need her, it felt like: she had all the time in the world.

When my first attempt at a picture was a complete whiteout she even let me walk closer for a better one, although she did lift her wings a bit.

Then she let it be.

It was strange and normal and lovely all at once, and I am grateful.

I knew that some birds collect spiderwebs for the cushioning and great tensile strength those give their nestbuilding.

I knew that many songbirds with a failing nest, i.e. where none of their young in the spring survive, will mate again and raise a second set of young in the summer. And so starting last week I started noticing the occasional finch here and there acting as if it hadn’t quite nailed this landing thing yet–and I’ve been watching one yesterday and today doing feed-me begging that females do when choosing a mate and new fledglings till their parents start turning away from them. I’m assuming, given the date, it was a fledgling bugging her dad.

What I hadn’t quite put together was that the number of spiderwebs on my floor-to-ceiling glass on one and a half sides of this room just explodes in tandem with when those birds need that resource: in the early spring, the sides of the windows are always suddenly quite covered and everyone from Bewick’s wrens to chickadees to finches want a piece of it. Then when nesting seemed to have settled in in earnest this year (instead of two flirting Bewick’s wrens there was only ever one seen at a time, the other clearly minding the eggs) I cleaned the windows. Just like I do every year, only for the first time I was paying attention to the timing of all this.

They stayed clean.

And then suddenly all at once about a month ago the view out was looking like it was dressed for Halloween again. I resisted the strong temptation to clear it out immediately.

There are not as many young as in the spring, but they’re there. The scrub jay knows it, too–he’s suddenly testing to see if I’m still on his case, trying again to scare them into a collision for an easy meal and has to be reminded he’s no longer welcome here now that he’s learned to mimic the hawk’s hunting.

A bird in the squeezing talons of the Cooper’s hawk simply stops breathing. With a crow-beaked scrub jay? Brutal, inept, stumbling stabbing for as long as it takes as the smaller bird struggles and suffers. The hawk has no other menu. The jay certainly does.

But it speaks the language of territory and this territory is mine and it sees me. OUT. I open the door and it doesn’t even try for the fence line, it’s over it and away. This week, though, with me spending a lot of time sick in bed, I’ve simply let the feeder go empty several times and let the flocks disperse. Easiest way to manage it.

I filled the feeder today and was up to watching the birds awhile.

It’s about time to start cleaning those leftover cobwebs. They’ve served their purpose. Give me a few more days.

France. High-speed rail, 554 passengers on the train.

I am in awe of the two American soldiers who had a bad feeling about that one guy, heard him loading an automatic in the bathroom and when he came out shooting, clearly planning to start at the back of the train and kill his way forward, jumped him along with another American and a Brit and despite being unarmed and despite being shot at and stabbed, they succeeded in wrestling him to the floor and getting his hands tied behind his back with t-shirts.

One account said the soldier who was stabbed in the neck had run ten meters towards the shooter’s gunfire.

Wow. Just, wow.

Prayers for all those injured and a huge thank you to those good men for being willing to put themselves on the line for everyone else.

Richard remembered the Zofran (an anti-nausea med) prescribed the last time we went through this and I managed to get it down and avoid the whole IV fluids thing. The fever has settled down too. Yay.

DebbieR’s comment about her finger puppets at work was the perfect comic relief, and thank you. Richard found himself remembering back to the time years ago when he was in a meeting at work and someone was having quite the meltdown over something of no consequence: and so without even thinking, parental instincts and all that, he reached into his pocket for one of the baby’s pacifiers and flipped it over to the guy.

Um. Oops. Sorry…

(I just asked him, who was that guy? He told me. Ooooh, yeah, okay…)

We were all the way to the Aquarium Saturday before I realized I didn’t have a face mask in my purse. I usually do. I like to just go live a normal life as much as the next person so I didn’t think much of it.

I don’t do crowds very well, do I. Pass the grapes (zinc content in a healthy delivery package) and orange juice.

I had crossed off the word grandmother where it listed family history on the check-in form and the technician asked me about that.

“It was my great-grandmother. My sister corrects me that it wasn’t breast cancer, it was colon cancer.” (As much as anyone can tell from 107-year-old accounts and the fact that our grandmother was eight when her mother died.)

I asked her to be careful–“I don’t want *you* to get squished.”

“Oh, it’s happened.” A rueful chuckle.

And then, “Your doctor will let you know the results in a day or two.”

A mammogram before age 40 with no history of breast cancer in her family either saved my sister-in-law’s life a few years ago. Don’t put it off.

The Aquarium, dinner in Santa Cruz–a long, fun day.

The tufted puffins with their golden (Republican candidate’s name) locks swept back over their heads.

The special jellies exhibit we’d wanted to see was still up. Blue jellyfish? Brown? Since when?

There is always an artists’ exhibit in there somewhere, and those jellyfish chandeliers–if anyone starts marketing them I’d be trying to figure out where to put one. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch one of those in an earthquake? (Mild, mild, keep’em mild and entertaining only, that’s all I ask.)

Off to Chocolate, that fabulous restaurant in Santa Cruz, only this time we looked up: if your ceiling has to include industrial pipes, then….!

Home, tired, done. Can’t afford to do all that very often but today was a day that worked out to go so we jumped in the car and went.

And on our way back, taking in the scenery and happy to play passenger so I could, I saw what was either a whale breach out in the Bay or a really big splash of a sea lion in the distance. And I finally figured out what the rows of old towering eucalyptuses silhouetted across the hilltops looked like. They’re a terrible tree for California: they were brought here from Australia in the 1800s to grow quickly for lumber but they make terrible lumber so they were just left to spread. They are magnets for lightning and their oil explodes in fires.

And yet–that variety so prevalent in that area has this airy poof at the top and going down the sides, tethered just enough to the ground below.

Sky jellyfish. And they are beautiful.

Andy’s Orchard. We’d been out of peaches for days and this would not do. Given the development pressure on prime farming land so close to San Jose and the financial hit that the drought has surely inflicted, we want to support Andy Mariani all we can.

The Golden Nectar plums, which I’d never heard of before, were worth the trip alone.

Enormous, a blue-gray back, white then gray stripes at the end of a rounded tail–and it wasn’t afraid of him like the mourning doves it dwarfed: the young squirrel froze in high alert, then fled in terror.

Doofus, that’s a juvenile band-tailed pigeon, not a Cooper’s hawk.

The band-tailed is closest genetically to the extinct passenger pigeon and so they are using its eggs in experiments to try to bring the other back.

Which leads me to a question: wildlife instinctively knows what other species to be afraid of or not. If an extinct species were to be brought back genetically, would other ones need to relearn how to react to them? Or would that still be hard-wired in even after so many decades’ absence from this planet?

Meantime, back here in the day to day, the washing machine was diagnosed with a failed pump. $180, done. The repairman checked out everything else on the machine and said approvingly that it has “low mileage” and that it’s in great shape now.

No Speed Queen splurge quite yet.

“Never heard of them,” says he.

“They’re the ones you see in laundromats. Our grandmothers had them.”

So the interesting thing I learned today is that Speed Queen still makes a washing machine with no electronic controls. That plain old dial really is just a plain old dial behind there. Even better, the machinery is all metal, not plastic, and it is made in America. On the Consumer Reports website, they didn’t rate it highly but when I clicked through machine after machine on all the others, the user reviews were relentlessly negative, what there were of them.

And yet not two or three but 156 people so far had to speak up about this one, very nearly all of them demanding to be heard over CR’s dismal ranking: this is a great machine! Built to last! No it doesn’t save water but yes it does if it does it right the first time and you don’t have to spend another hour waiting for the slow high-efficiency models to have a do-over.

Meaning I finally have my washing machine picked out if I do have to buy one–the repairman comes tomorrow, we’ll see. But I thought you all would love to know there’s actually one out there that they really do make them like they used to. With a longer warranty by far than anyone else’s. They test it to a number of cycles that is 25 years’ worth for your average family–that is the company’s expected minimum of its life expectancy.

Someone who takes pride in their product. Hal-le-freaking-lu-jah.

The one thing I want to know, and I shot them off an email, is this: does it have a no-spray spin cycle? We fiber artists need those. You can spin anything, even the finest merino, without felting it–if the water doesn’t spray on it as it twirls. We’ll find out. (I can always turn off the water valves but I don’t want to have to.)

Edited to add Thursday morning–I just heard back from them and yes there is a spin setting you can do that on. Perfect!

Meantime, I ran a load at Michelle’s.

The city tore up the sidewalk in front of my next-door neighbors’ house yesterday and completely blocked their whole stretch off by barriers with blinking lights jutting into the street.

I came home to find a small Google driverless car stopped there nose to barrier.

This does not compute?

It didn’t move.

I waited. There wasn’t anyone in–oh wait, yes there was, as the guy leaned forward.

I motioned: you’re blocking my driveway. (There were No Parking On The Street This Week signs all up and down the block, so that was not an option.)

Oh oops sorry! (had he been tweaking the program on the go?) and it pulled out of my way and away.

So if you see a driverless car that can figure its way around those things? They learned it here first.

One of the toilets started running nonstop over the weekend, necessitating our cutting off its water but thus giving the plumber something to do after he’d ascertained that the washer had flooded because of the washer, not the line. I described how it had been having a harder and harder time getting any cold water into it–at that setting it filled v e r y slowly.

The washer, he affirmed again. Those pipes? (pointing at the wall.) They’re copper. They’re good.

So I have been learning about High Efficiency, Front Loader, and Top Agitator types for hours. And looking up repair places.

But what I’d love to know is if anyone anywhere still makes one that doesn’t have electronics behind the controls–in our experiences with dishwashers and ovens, those always, always fail quickly.

So. Washing machines. One Consumer Reports high-rated High Efficiency-type model had reviews from multiple people saying it won’t open after you start unless you start the whole cycle over, and yet they have to to stop it at times to rearrange heavy wet clothes away from the center so the cycle can continue. That makes me want to go with the less efficient traditional agitator model. California requires all those manufactured as of March and sold in this state to be more efficient and I don’t know if that means I should buy what will clean well fast while I still can?

What do you have that you like or don’t and why?

I had to laugh over someone’s Facebook meme about how little girls ought to still stomp in puddles like they did in the good old days. Seriously. Do you know any little kids at all that are going to pass up on a chance to do exactly that if they can? (Or did they mean back when it used to rain?)

So guess what I did today. Only, I didn’t stomp so much–I was being a grownup. And it was inside.

Tomorrow, the plumber.