This guy.  Trapped and praying as the semi bore down on him.

“Divine sources did not immediately respond to this reporter’s repeated requests for comment,” says the Washington Post, in not quite a tongue-in-cheek tone but rather sheer wonderment at the wholly improbable but indescribable relief of an outcome.

May he personally tell the tale of his great good fortune to his great-grandkids many decades hence.

It seems we will have room for yet more fruit trees, with a call in to Chris at Shady Tree for a bid on two more weed ones that are shading the solar panels (and my mandarin and mango. Richard stood by the Page with a UV meter and it read zero at 2 pm, thus the yellowing leaves and my willingness to let a little more bird habitat disappear for a few years till the new catches up.) Montmorency? Lorings at last? Let the plotting commence.

And then.

We were at Costco, looking at a monster package of cherries. Rainiers–I’d like to try them, but that was a month’s supply. Now it might have been different had they looked like they hadn’t just traveled a long way over a long time and then been left out unrefrigerated, but as he wondered how we could eat them all it yanked my thoughts to our Stella cherry, to all our fruit trees as they grow up. That box (which we did not buy) potentially represented only a few branches’ worth.

For a brief instant the sheer volume to come overwhelmed. Countered instantly by, but see the difference is that we’ll be eating and freezing however much we want and then giving just-picked totally ripe homegrown to all comers, and surely there will be no shortage of those. A sun-warmed, dripping-ripe full-flavor peach is hardly the proverbial and much-maligned foundling zucchinis abandoned on doorsteps in the dead of the night. ( A side note: make zucchini bread, using butter, brown sugar, baking powder not soda, and, the most important part, substituting ground pecans for a quarter to a third of the flour. That will justify any zucchini planting you might ever do.)

And the picking of that fruit means this necessarily sun-deprived lupus patient will have reason to be outside at dusk for many a day, getting some badly-coveted fresh air and the satisfaction of doing good in the process. It’s like you cast on and then the trees do all the knitting for you.

Cherry on, then.

Managed to haul my old and new computers into the Apple store to transfer old data; I hadn’t realized that meant they’d be keeping both for a day or two. Thank goodness for old laptops. (Look, Ma, no autocorrect!)

Richard’s still not carrying heavy objects yet and with a cane I’m one-armed, so it was a bit of a feat but we unloaded at the curb there and got it done, with the help of some great Apple employees. They both sympathized and rejoiced for me that that old beast was a Windows XP and my new one was a good Mac to make up for it. SO much better.

We walked around the corner to the Timothy Adams chocolate shop afterwards and had a truffle for now and some hot chocolate for tomorrow morning, warming our hands with it as we walked to the car.

Part of me is thinking I really should go shock some quickly-knit-up wool in cold/hot/cold/hot water with lots of agitation so I could have the perfect title for this post: Dell and the rows of felt.

She was a knitter. She would have loved that.

Looking at airline tickets to go meet our granddaughter, we decided we needed to wait till I feel better than I do today. Talk about incentive, though. Blenderize those grapes in that orange juice and go get a good night’s rest.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times wrote THE article about the events in Paris today that most needed to be written.

We are all Charlie.

We got a phone call tonight: having been frustrated by the problem for some time, our daughter was finally appealing to her tall dad to help her with some burned-out lights. They needed to be reached so she could see them and know what size to order and she felt too unsteady to risk trying. There were I think six in her kitchen ceiling and three by now had gone dark.

We went over there and helped her unscrew those bulbs. Then asked, why wait on shipping? There was a hardware store almost around the corner.

It seemed to me it wasn’t just the lights–it was that her injuries having been re-ignited last Friday, she needed to fix something to brighten her day that was within her power. Especially today. But she was not up to going to the shop, maybe multiple shops, to look for new ones, and she hadn’t been about to risk another fall by trying to even start the task alone.

Well, we could go, we offered, glad to help. And so we bought new bulbs, a grand total of $12 for three flood types, in LED no less–boy have prices come down–and came back over. With her big strong daddy again holding her steady standing on a chair, she screwed those new lights in herself.

I turned the switch on on the wall. We looked upwards in great satisfaction. Such a difference!

The darkness is a very small part of the world but it tries to claim great power. It deceives only itself. We are greater and we shine everywhere. Every good person in every religion or none who is trying to live by love. Love for those we know, love for those we don’t, love to all simply because we share our humanity and find it good.

We bring the light. We are Charlie.

A pronouncement of 20/30 so far at the eye doctor’s and then I dropped him off at work. Back to normal life.

Home was so quiet, but that was also a perfect chance to knit more than just in that doctor’s office and my queue is long. I turned on the stereo and picked out a CD from its list, because if there’s music going at home it compels my fingers to knit in time to it and me to sit and pay attention. To both.

Uh, dear, we forgot to wire the speakers back up to that thing when we moved everything back in this room after the carpetbaggers left.

Unlike the eye-doc-in-the-box we once saw in New Hampshire 30 years ago, the local surgicenter thankfully does not have closed-circuit TV to the waiting room whereby the patient’s family can watch their loved one’s cataract surgery. I mean gee, I always wanted to… (Or not so much. Gack.)

We tried to schedule it before the kids coming home and the wedding and the birth of the baby and everything else, but today was the day and he needed to see.

An hour and a half after we got there, we were on our way home with me at the wheel and him exclaiming that dark cover-up glasses and all, he could already see so much better. SO much better! He was looking at everything with a delight that reminded me of when I got my first pair of glasses in third grade. Comparing his eyes. Taking it all in.

When Holly and George were here, she told me that it’s better to wait to have it done (like we did) till it really has to be done: it makes it easier to put up with the adjustments that come with it. You know what you’re not having to go through anymore and why you appreciate the skills of that eye surgeon.

He does, oh, he does.

(p.s. My new Mac gave up on trying to change the word yarnovers in an email I was typing to the word earners; now it’s auto-corrected it four times to carnivores instead. And having typed that word, it’s done it six times more. Trying again. Yarnovers yarnovers carnivores carnivores carnivores –okay, that’s funny. It left the first two and last one as I corrected them to and grabbed the ones in the middle that I had previously gotten to hold still and I am just going to leave them on display for now. As presented by Apple. And now it’s grabbed the last one and I don’t even know when.)

Yarnovers yarnovers yarnovers I WILL win this one.

Seated a ways behind her, I snapped pictures of the bride’s grandmother in a wheelchair, hands high and clapping enthusiastically. Snapsnapsnapsnapsnapsnapsnap and then looklooklook oh yes I did manage to capture the action after all–with three or four shots in between that looked like she was holding still.

It was only fair to go introduce myself and show her her photo. She has email? Cool, could I send her this really good one?

Not that I could hear that address over the music–I handed my phone to her granddaughter, who typed it in, I added a subject line since it was going to be coming from a completely unknown-t0-her address, and together we hit send and the three of us grinned at our success.

The bride and groom were lovely and that love was utterly contagious. A wonderful time was had by all.

And then a number of our relatives adjourned to Michelle’s house with us to keep the conversation going over even more good food. Much laughing, with nobody wanting it to end. We got well into the yawn zone.

I looked around the room, wondering when I would even get to see some of them again. Our children are getting older with more responsibilities and more dispersed.

But Richard’s other sister has a son who just announced his engagement, so, hopefully, not too long.

We got up early and dropped John off at the airport. And it is very, very quiet around here.

If I say it was a crabfest it’ll sound totally wrong–people were totally good to each other.  It’s a Bay Area tradition to serve newly-caught Dungeness off the docks to celebrate the new year. The (non-sun-avoidant members of the) groom’s family tried providing some of those themselves, the Texas contingent adventuring for local flavor while they’re here, but Grampa told me the sea lions got most of the bait. The fishermen didn’t mind helping out, I’m sure.

There’s a whole lot more than a calendar becoming new. Two families together, the young and the old and the in-betweens. A rehearsal dinner and almost done.

The father of the bride smiled warmly as he told me, See you tomorrow!

The master bath suddenly sprang a fast faucet leak last night, which you don’t do when you have a drought but you can’t do much about late on a Sunday night, so Richard and John started off their day playing plumber and handyman with several trips back and forth to the plumbing supply shop and the hardware store. They picked out the faucet that I would have had I been there. Well done.

The old one that our contractor had chosen had had exposed sharp under-edges just out of sight that I more than once had cut my fingers on. The new single-center-handled one is flush with the countertop and could never do such a thing.

Saturday the wires that are twisted up into a steely yarn running from the bottom through the top of my bird feeder suddenly simply broke when I went to go fill the thing.

The menfolk didn’t tell me they were going to work on that too but all the sudden there they were out there next, figuring out how to thread the new wiring up through the plastic center part. Yes of course they’d picked out the screws and wires while they were out there to replace the old–done. I didn’t even know they’d checked it to see what they would need, much less paid any attention to it.

Next thing I knew they were on the roof. Nope, can’t set this up on that metal flashing, you need a piece that…

They finally sat down when we met up with family at a restaurant for dinner.

And after all that, the new carpet is still clean. Even by the door near the bird feeder.

Children, cousins, aunts, uncles, greats, Grampa my FIL–a happy get-together of fifteen of us tonight to start off the week of the wedding. Not all who are coming are in town yet but the ones who were got a chance to catch up on each other and we got to show off pictures of Dad’s newest great-grandchild.

Time to crash. Calling it a night.

A glitch. Richard to the rescue. My mail is working on the new computer now.

Things are settling in where they belong.

To every person who took part in knitting and piecing together my get-well afghans (and the Congratulations on finishing your book! one from my Campbell knitting group is in the other room, it should be in the photo, too) I just wanted to thank you all over again. You wished me back from the edges of life and I think of you all every time I see what you created for me. Every time. All that time, all that love, all that good yarn, offered in hope, taken from string in a skein to one-of-a-kind works of art. It is something to try to live up to and to be worthy of. (Hey RobinFre–“Same as it ever was.” Nails it.)

We got to see a video of our granddaughter sneezing. I tell you: there is nothing like the sights and sounds of a newborn, even across a screen, and we are utterly besotted.

No clutter. (In here, anyway. Definitely incentive to keep going on that.)

No dust. (Repeat row 1 from here to finish.)

No more 20-year-0ld blue carpet. It looked nice–once. But this matches the furniture and the tile in the entryway and it just makes me so happy to look at and to squish my toes in and the fact that the installers were wonderful started off its presence here with happy associations. Richard having thrown his back out between the quote and the installation, we needed more help moving stuff than we’d expected. They tried not to let us pay extra for that. I finally got a better number out of the guy on the extra labor–and then I about doubled it. They’d earned it, and I wanted them to be happy to come back to do the living room later.

No more 12-year-old Windows XP computer, either. When Microsoft said they would no longer support a system that was on about a quarter of the world’s desktops and on machines sold as recently as two years prior, my reaction was, Go ahead. Mac my day.

We’d been saving our pennies for months to replace both ours and now we have.

More baby pictures: Parker admiring the baby, then, Parker holding the baby, looking rather dubious about this. Or studious and trying to do it right.

I can’t wait to see Madison crawling and later walking on this. It’s finally here and ready for our grandchildren.

And they are home.

While, over here…

Michelle set her alarm for quite early so she could start orange rolls for breakfast for Sam. John and Richard got up quite early so they could pick her up from the airport. Sam beats everybody on earliness because the only flights from Alaska in December within reach had a six-hour layover in the middle of the night in an airport and then a red-eye here.

Food and festivities and we had an absolutely wonderful day, laughing much. We all got to see Madison across the screens in all her sweetest, sleeping cuteness. (She took his mommy away for a day. Hudson is wary. Give him a day.)

Richard opened Holly and George’s gift of their hammer dulcimer and his eyes got huge. He repeated quietly, all day, I am blown away. I am blown away. I am blown away.

I was chuckling just now, typing that, and he said, reasonably enough, Well, I *am* blown away. I am!

I am, too, but I knew what was all wrapped up over there, and the stand to go with. We hope to do the gift justice, and he gave it a good start by practicing for a good hour quietly as we all chatted.

Sam fell into bed at 7 pm. John helped some more and then did likewise at eight after being on his feet working on the food with Michelle for hours and she was ready to do likewise when we left her place. We got home, Richard sat down a moment, and fell instantly asleep himself.

Well, *somebody* has to get this room ready for the carpet installers coming at 9:00 am. And I had the easiest day, certainly.

After two hours of that, I’m ready to fall into bed myself. It wasn’t just this room–I had to move everything out of the way for them to pull the piano and heavy couch into the other room.

I sat down a moment to take a break and go tell the blog our new granddaughter’s name while hoping everybody else had such a wonderful, perfect day like we did.

And that’s when it hit me. I still have to get all those tubs of yarn stash out of the closet–they’re doing that part too. Okay, a little more to go and then I call it a night.

Twenty and a quarter inches, 8 lbs 4 oz, 1:00 this afternoon and all went well.

Parker was given a big-brother package by the hospital and, finding a stuffed animal in it, he took it out and gave it to his new sister.