I did redo the cast-off on yesterday’s. I blocked it. Now it is what it was meant to be: ready.

Susan at Abstract Fibers once gave me some Burnside Bridge colorway wool to play with, and I did; I liked it so much I bought some in Picasso, their baby alpaca, via Purlescence.

And that’s what I plowed halfway through today.

And in the middle of it I got the emails–I need to finish it and get it out of the way fast.

It happens to so many people. It’s so personal. My cousin Bruce’s wife Paige found the lump the mammogram reading had missed and had a double mastectomy yesterday. Three tumors, at least two lymph nodes look involved–and yet, I know someone else who came out of surgery with that kind of news where the pathology report a week later said one tumor only was malignant. And that friend is past the five-year mark now.

Eight to twelve months of treatment ahead.

And I am blinking, trying to figure out what the very softest yarn I own might be and what color it should be. And no, the above projects, nice as they are, aren’t it. Hmm.

Being sick is boring, so I’m going to mention other stuff.

Congress is trying to sell off parts of Yosemite for logging and mineral rights, along with a fair number of other public lands. Firefighting the Rim fire, that was expensive, you know. You can’t go in there, because they’re not funding the parks, but if the bill passes, the corporations can (and you never will again where they will be).

The studies and facts for anyone worried about whether or not to vaccinate their kid or how to answer someone who won’t.

Okay, and for something far more fun, this article says a Carnegie Hall orchestra was plunked on a random street corner in New York City with a sign: “Conduct us.” The first person to step up on the conductor’s podium (with encouragement from her mommy) was a little girl who had to have stood way high on her tippy tippy toes to reach the music stand, where she opened her coloring book to just the right page and started waving that baton for her daddy and his friends to start the music.

No line was formed, there were no rules anywhere, and yet everybody noticed who had been waiting longer than themselves and waited their turn, strangers looking out for strangers and laughing together while appreciating the magic of the moment. Move the baton slow or fast, point at this player or that and the musicians watched and honored their efforts and played along for the sheer joy of it.

Can we send them all to the halls of Congress?

Clearly Washington needs more musicians. They would bring out the best in the people who need it the most.

Thank you, everybody. Today let me up for air a bit; still sick but no chest pains. Much less nausea. I was actually able to get up in the morning rather than doing half hour intervals upright at 11 and 2 and then crumbling like the last four days.  And: I knitted! I wanted to all week but holding my arms up and me up long enough to even think about it was just out of the question. But today I got to! Wanting something that would pay off quickly, I grabbed the closest yarn that didn’t need to be wound and got about 2/3 of the way through a cowl. I actually got something done.

Richard’s stronger too. Thank you all for the good wishes and prayers sent our way: much appreciated. It helped.

And yesterday evening we got sent a video of Hudson in a baby jumper, laughing and giggling and bouncing and responding to encouragement and just being an overwhelmingly cute little bundle of six-month-old happiness.

How could one not feel better after that?

The lupus and Crohn’s duo have been trying to get in on this, since immune=autoimmune too, and I again spent most of the day trying to get fluids down and staying down, knowing that if I barfed once I wouldn’t stop and we would be straight out the door to Urgent Care for IV fluids. But things held, and by late afternoon I was able to get a little food in there too.

Richard still hasn’t shaken his cold/flu/comes with a fever, whichever you want to call it/ entirely either, although his started a week earlier.

His aunt and Dad called: they were down in the valley, could they be here in a half hour?

Oh honey you so don’t want this bug. We so want to see you, but.

It felt terrible not to get to say sure, come!, but you do what you have to to take care of your loved ones.

Michelle brought over chicken soup. And I got some solid food down for the first time all day.

Oh, and. The knitted house. A play fort for knitters and their little ones, don’tcha think?

An apple tree, courtesy of LynnM: two hundred fifty types grafted onto one tree.

A knitted botanical garden.

And after eating some soup, looking at the pretty pictures, and wishing I had the oomph to be knitting, I think I’ll go back to sleep.

Didn’t get the flu shot. I was dragging yesterday and thought, well, a good night’s sleep will take care of that and then I’ll feel up to driving.

Not so much. Woke up with the bug Richard’s had the past week: sore throat, bit of a fever, cold-ish.

The phone rang a few minutes ago. Richard’s widowed dad is coming to stay at his sister’s/the aunt’s up in the nearby Santa Cruz mountains for a goodly visit with the northern California contingent of the family. We knew there was a plan in the works; tomorrow?

It will be so good to see him. I just want badly for Dad to stay healthy, is all.

Let’s get that good night’s sleep.

Headed off for bed last night, to find–the plumbing, oh no…

We own a small plumber’s snake and thankfully it was enough for the job. It was past 1:15 am when I went to go turn on the last load of towels for the night. I turned the dial back around when I woke up–high heat again. Bleach. (And my kids know I never, ever leave a load in the washer overnight. But there are worse things.)

Which is why I did not get my flu shot at the medical center’s walk-in shot clinic this morning before a contractor came over to give us an estimate in the afternoon. It just was not the first thing on my mind.

The last time I didn’t get a flu shot I ended up with four months of double pneumonia and permanent lung damage, so, not just for me: go get yourself vaccinated if you haven’t yet.

Costco sells them for $15. Time flexible. I’ll be there.

(Edited later to add, after making myself sit down to knit after writing about the plumbing.) I finished it! Happy dance, happy dance! Took more frogging and leap after leap into the unknown, but I finished the friend’s daughter’s scarf and it is beautiful and flattering and unique and I knew the color was perfect but now I know the pattern is perfect–I was making it up as I went along (or unmaking it)–and oh, this came out just right. That makes up for twenty-two hours ago, definitely! Oh, I can’t wait till she gets it!

I found this photo in my phone after writing this post and had to laugh–alright, Hudson, you’re right, I owe you a sweater.

The season is turning, the shadows are more slanted in the afternoon, and the leaves are beginning to change back East. And, remembering hikes taken together along the C&O Canal, I have been missing old friends and places and sights.

I was knitting some nice yarn on some old favorite needles this evening, rosewood Holz and Steins made from the leftover wood from making musical instruments. You don’t see those anymore except in a fortunate knitter’s hands.

I found myself wondering. If there are a thousand yards of yarn in a shawl and I have knit how many, how many afghans, how many sweaters, how many hats, scarves, cowls, socks….

Would the length of that yarn be enough to connect me all the way across the continent to back home?

And back again to my friends and family and life here.

It’s all good.

Hudson and his cousin Hayes…

Went to Purlescence’s yarn swap and got to see friends I haven’t seen in ages! I’m so glad I went. I sent good yarn off to new homes and brought none home.

Meantime, Richard has had a fever the last two days and someone had to get some groceries–not much, but some. Rhubarb to go with the strawberries in the cobbler I wanted to make (and did). There’s only one place I know I’ll definitely find that.

So I waited till 5:30 and headed off for the partially outdoors Milk Pail.

The place has maybe half a dozen shopping carts, cute little miniatures; there’s just no room for more. Baskets, they have lots of plastic baskets to carry around.

I always remember after I get there just how hard it is for me in there: visual overload, tight spaces, and the brain that had the visual and balance connections not entirely mended since my car accident. My sense of which way up is is tactile. And I am always, always bumped into in there.

There was one last cart to steady me–but a boy of about six or seven never saw me and ran ahead and grabbed it with glee and wheeled it to his mom, and I’m not about to do anything to tell a kid not to do right by his mother.

I turned back, but another woman saw. She had a cart, and in a–German?–accent she offered it to me.

It was a lifeline: I could make it through this place and I thanked her.

She didn’t seem to want to be thanked, just let her go about her business.

Oh okay.

We passed each other a minute or two later and I smiled and nodded and her face registered as yeah yeah whatever. I hoped she didn’t have a sore back or some such that might make her need that cart too; I hoped she had no regrets.

But it seemed like it just wasn’t a big deal to her. It was to me, of course.

Back to our anonymous shopping.

While I said a silent prayer upwards to the Love who treasures our best impulses that her day might go easier as mine had through her.

(Hudson and his Grampa, who was running on four hours’ sleep at the time, were both taking naps when I pulled out the camera for these.)

I just helped Michelle load her car up.

Grad school was the only time she had to take on student loans. We know how lucky that is. Thank you BYU for undergrad tuition that was about $3500 a year. I am not missing a zero. Running and checking–it’s $4850/year now, $9700 if you’re not Mormon. Basically, if you get in you’re on partial scholarship.

A Master’s at the University of Michigan as an out of state-er was a whole different story.

Living at home for the first year of work helped her pay most of that off.

It feels like sending a kid off to college all over again: she’s moving out, she’s moving to a new stage of life, it won’t ever be the same, we can’t really go back. Well actually, now we know we can if she or a sibling needs it.

But we really really enjoyed having her here this past year. She’s only a town away and I’m trying not to go through withdrawal too hard for the first night.

Her parting words, reminding me of an Indian dish she had planned: “Oh I’ll be back tomorrow night to cook that for you.”

It’s all good.

I know, I know, it’s name dropping, but this is just too fun not to share–for me it brings back so many happy memories with that good family, and I knew if I put it here I could find it again. My parents weren’t big picture takers and I had no idea this existed.

My brother Bryan says our Mom sent him this photo some time ago and before everyone else had heard of the guy, of his best friend from across the street just before the best friend moved away to South Carolina.

Stephen Colbert was four.

Meantime, I finished the Malabrigo Silkpaca shawl and have gone back to the Epiphany project after a week’s break to figure out how to redesign the part I didn’t like. Ripped relentlessly, thinking of how Stephanie says she’s never regretted frogging something that’s not working.

And now that I’ve seen how it could look because of how it did look but that came up short, (see? It wasn’t wasted time) I finally knew what to do to make it come out perfect. It feels so much better now. Full speed ahead!

Thought I’d show you all a photo of baby Hayes with his folks.  Two months already!

———-

Downtown: where even the ranting crazy homeless guy is dressed better than us.

Went tonight for a scoop of ice cream and to go see if someone was playing in the plaza; there always is on a Friday night.

There were two groups this time, the first an older white guy and an older black guy doing the blues. Just enough amplification, no need to shout down the passersby–they were good and they knew it. People stopped in their tracks to listen. We did too, and I would have loved to have bought a CD from them had I seen any. Swung my feet in time from a high bench. Richard’s feet reached the ground.

Waiting their turn was a younger trio, 40’s-ish. We took a walk while they were setting up and when we got back, the older guys were putting things away and the younger guys were just getting going with some Springsteen.

We found us a pair of open chairs. My sweet husband has been married to me long enough that he didn’t bat an eye when I pulled out some of Dianne‘s cashmere and started knitting lace leaves in the semi-dark–the mindless carry-around project, forever in the purse, always getting just a little bit closer to done. (And I would have cast off and sewn up the ends on the spot as a cowl had a likely victim shown up. Nope. No such luck. Still got to keep working on that thing.)

A young girl, maybe seven, was fascinated and they took a break for a moment to show her their guitars, their amps, whatever she wanted to ask them about, they answered. She ran back to her mom and they fired it back up. Rock on!

Soon after, some random person whose clothes, like I say, were quite well put together but his face and his thoughts, not so much, walked over in front of the band too, kinda danced to the beat a bit but then he started yellin’ at’em.  Waving, gesturing to the sky behind, making no sense except that it was clear he wanted the attention on him, not them. He would retreat awhile, then come back and start in on them again.

Finally the tall blond guy shook his head slightly: a gentle no, no. We’re going to keep playing.

And they not only did, they sounded just a bit better.  Like they were working a little harder to justify their claim on that spot? I dunno but they were kind to the young and respectful to the crazy who couldn’t help being crazy and playing for the joy of it and it was a gratifying thing to behold.

The odd man out of it sat down in a far corner and let them go to it.

Brian Holloway, whose name will probably be familiar to people who follow football, had a locker just a ways down from mine in high school and was close friends with my friend Brad (the friend who posted notice of Steve’s passing.)  Between them and their little brothers a grade younger, they set the tone for the jocks in the school: be good to other people. Be proud of their accomplishments (missed the state football championship by one game) but not too full of themselves. The stupid drunk partying thing? Not cool around the captain of the team and his buddy.

Every high school should have jocks like that (said the emphatically-not-a-jock). I don’t remember a lot of details about Brian but I do remember that our class was fortunate he was in it; he was just a really nice guy who made the world better around him.

To whom this just happened.  (Updated link here.)

Over twenty thousand dollars in damage to his house, stupid teens tweeting their own little reality show while Brian read their posts from far away, incredulous. The rampaging mob, hundreds of them, stole, drugged, drank, peed, broke, shattered, vandalized, graffittied, all the while publicly glorying to each other in their destruction.

And his response?

To hope to rescue those kids from the tragedy of the trajectories they’d just sent themselves on.  To hold them accountable for the sakes of their own souls while telling them here was his website and here was their chance: own up. Come clean. Don’t stay in that horrible hole forever where it will only get worse if they let bad decisions compound bad decisions and flood out their futures. And don’t think you can duck out if you don’t do it–we know.  He offered them something priceless: take responsibility and by so doing begin to reclaim yourselves. Come help me get the place ready for a picnic for military personnel.

Other teens who had had nothing to do with that night showed up too after they heard: to help clean up the terrible mess in shame for what their peers had done and to offer solidarity to a family who had done nothing to deserve this.

And that is a gift they gave themselves as well as the Holloways, forever.

Dark o’clock alarm for the earliest flight out. Dark again after the last flight back. Blessings on Michelle for driving us despite working till 2 am the last few nights. (So did Richard.)

Hudson being a charmer despite teething.

More tomorrow after a little sleep. But I just have to say: if you ever, ever want to knit for someone who will swoon, who can’t believe you did that, who loves all the people who loved them and shared or wanted to share their yarn to contribute to the afghan for their little (is he really already two months old? Yeah, she said, I know!) baby–my daughter-in-law’s whole family is just the best.

And Hayes’s mom also said that after he was chilled that first week that yes, he likes very much now to be warm. The afghan was perfect.