An elderly person dear to me got hacked yesterday.

And today, another elderly friend, chatting like she does and asking after my family, told me happily about the quarter million dollar check that had arrived by FedEx from Publisher’s Clearing House and how nice it was that they look out for the elderly and disabled like that and had I signed up for that, too?

I advised caution.

No, no, she’d taken it to her bank and they’d accepted it.

I reminded her of a mutual widowed friend who, at about 90, was swindled out of the house she’d owned free and clear for decades and had found herself thrown out on the street in utter bewilderment.

There was no unconvincing her.

I linked to Publisher Clearing House’s own website where they warned against frauds being committed in their name and say that even banks have been fooled into thinking the checks are real–until they find out they are not.

I asked if she’d called PCH to make sure it was real. She hesitated, then said she had, and I thought, if you did, did you look it up online or did you call the scammer’s number? Because there is nothing legitimate about this.

So since she was a friend from church I got off Facebook and mentioned it to those in a better position to step in and help; she sure wasn’t listening to me.

To which one of them said, could that have been a fake? Basically, (she didn’t quite say outright) was the person they were trying to scam–you?

It was indeed a duplicate of her profile. Reported now.

I guess I learned a little humility myself on the gullibility index today.

They can’t say it out loud, but Fox and the like have got to be really really hoping the unvaxxed Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, thrown out by one court and reinstated by another, fails.

The trial was delayed by her Covid diagnosis. Of course.

With thanks to Lee Ann Dalton for the link, I can only wish that others who’ve been persuaded by such might read all the love in these words.

Today was a stake conference meeting, ie a semi-annual gathering of the six wards (congregations) in our stake. I’m guessing about fifty people sat carefully socially distanced, from what I could see, and hundreds of us tuned in from home.

There was a song announced that was going to be sung by four members who were from Tonga and a friend of theirs whom they assured us was big, BIG! there: “He’s our Stevie Wonder,” one said as the others chuckled in fond agreement.

He was blind. He played the piano. And man oh man did he have a voice. He wasn’t a Mormon but he wanted to add his voice to theirs along with our silent ones in this place where his people would be heard.

The song, they explained, was about an island in the dark as the light comes to it.

They sang it in Tongan, and watching by Zoom I had to chuckle at the auto-transcription trying to create English phrases out of the phonemes going past it. No, silly captions, they are emphatically not singing about millionaires.

But oh, they were good. And after having asked us all to pray for those in their homeland, they were singing their hearts out such that I found myself in tears.

I had no idea what the words were, and I can’t begin to know what the one man’s name was, but there was no mistaking that love being offered up to G_d and how deeply it was felt.

It was an honor to be invited to be part of that.

Someone tripped into her, a mug in hand got spewed, and the stains didn’t come out of a favorite shirt. She told me what she’d done to try and I nodded yes, that’s what I would have done, too.

How long had it been?

A month.

(Me, thinking, length of time equals greater set to the stains) Let me see what I can do.

Oh thank you! in relief. Because Moms can still do everything.

She’d already soaked it in Seventh Generation unscented no-dyes laundry liquid, which is my standard. I added more. Rubbed it a good one. Still there.

So I left it to soak in some more, highly cognizant that she’d been doing that since last night.

And then I went back in there every so often to rub the spots until I was tired enough to need a break (it was that kind of day as it was.) And then came back and did it again, and again. That was a great fabric–100% cotton but densely spun and knitted and it wasn’t looking frayed or worn for all that I was working on it; it held up.

I realized later I didn’t get all of one small spot because I was going after the many big ones that got most of the attention, but, it’s looking pretty good. You’d have to know they’d been there and where to look in bright light to see anything, and I can always give it another try. But given how it was and how it looks now–I was pretty pleased with myself, and the wonder on her face as I handed it to her didn’t hurt any.

I said to her later, Your timing is impeccable!

Because a short while later, I’d gone to clean something from a long-unused closet and had stumbled across a carefully put away stack of baby and little girl dresses in a bin. Handsewn. Handsmocked. I’d forgotten I’d made so many–I mean, I knew I had, but I’d given as many as I’d kept back when my kids were that age and it was a surprise.

Twenty-seven years ago we remodeled this house and while we were doing that the roof leaked badly.

Which means the box that had all those dresses, only a few years outgrown at that point, took a direct hit and nothing, nothing I could do at the time could get out those stains of what we promptly labeled roof juice. I tried.

The one with the blue teddy bears! I remembered buying the pattern booklet in a needlework shop in Burlingame whose name will probably hit me at about 2 a.m. It’s long gone. Maybe Ruby something? Opening that booklet there was a page with a picture of five hand-smocked teddy bears, and below, the words, What’s wrong with those?

Followed by, Surprised you, didn’t I? Didn’t you think, Nothing’s wrong, they’re adorable!

And they are. But this one–and the artist pointed out little flaws or inconsistencies in each one and then agrees with her unseen readers that why on earth would you worry about that when they’re so cute.

She said, So if you’re only seeing the mistakes in the ones you’re making, put it down and walk away for a day or two and come back to it and see how much you love them and keep on going because seriously, it’s hard to mess with the cuteness of a teddy bear.

There was roof juice. All over the dress, the pleating, the embroidery.

But my teddy bears were too cute to let it stay that way. I grabbed the detergent and started the first soak. Rubbing it in was dicier than a thick cotton tee, for sure; some of those hand stitches on the back of the facing…

But if I could fix hers I could fix mine and I have a granddaughter now who would fit this dress that I’d completely forgotten I’d made for her aunt.

There’s just the barest hint of a spot at the center top now but I think I got the rest of it. And there’s that whole pile of clothes to go. The baby ones can wait till who knows when but the toddler ones are in a hurry because two doesn’t stay two very long.

I’m on it.

Eh, I thought this morning, looking at my wet hair, why bother with this. Who’s going to see me anyway.

And instantly thought back at myself, well that’s one way to guarantee the day’s not going to go how you expect. So I pulled it back after all to tame that one weird curlicue that just needs to get long enough to get heavy enough so as not to play half-deelybobber.

About three o’clock the doorbell rang. (Told me so.)

I opened the door, was surprised, and teased, Hey! I remember you!

It was one of Chris’s guys. They had had a free moment so he was coming over to clean off that plaster-looking stuff below one skylight and to paint over the wrong color paint over the nails on another one that I’d mentioned to his boss a couple weeks ago.

I had a baking project at mis en place, measured and laid out but not yet creamed nor mixed or poured, and half-apologized that had I known he was coming I’d have started sooner so he could have gotten some. He reminisced over the cranberry bars I’d shared that he’d liked so much he’d asked for the recipe. Good times. (But I wasn’t going to stand in his way in the kitchen with plaster bits or whatever it was falling down from above, thanks.)

And now I don’t have to have that one nagging thought looking up of, I wish they’d finished this. They did. It’s done. They were little things, but it’s so much better now.

I’ve seen the description “recycled cashmere” in garments for sale, and now in a few yarns at Colourmart. And wondered what processes were meant by that. Is it just the leftover pounds of yarn from a production run, or is it something more? Tell me they don’t shred already processed yarns in the carding machines. Or I guessed maybe they must?

Colourmart decided (not on this particular listing, but here’s an example and it’s on sale) to add a link.

They actually cut up old sweaters? Surely in an automated process and that picture of people holding scissors is for show? There are actually stores that do trade-ins? Where? What about moth damage? They’d have to make sure every stage of such things is eradicated. What about the weak spots that would be left behind in the fibers? Stains? Is this why the recycled sweaters seem to tend to be thicker? To make sure everything’s covered?

And yet the yarns they create all seem nice and even to my eyes.

Well, huh.

LLBean ordered some of this latest trend but given this past year’s shipping issues, got theirs in (if they even did yet) after Christmas.

I have a credit card account in their name that periodically earns me Bean Bucks and I’ve been letting them slowly, slowly accumulate. I’d been thinking I might blow it at the end of the year on a cashmere sweater but they didn’t have any that grabbed me hard enough.

But now they do. Only they’re recycled, even if I think, so far, that I’d rather they were not. They’re not cheap (well, in my case, at an outlay of $12.95 yes they are, never mind) but I’m just curious enough. Plus I happen to like it.

Shipping, they say, commences approximately February 8. Hopefully.

Silicon Valley might call that vaporwear.

Here’s a video, via satellite, of the volcano that exploded near Tonga, and it’s actually pretty cool.

There’s a sign near where some of my family lives: “Tsunami Evacuation Route” with an arrow straight up a hill. (Here’s video taken from someone’s front door in Pacifica. Here’s Santa Cruz.)

We figured they’d be okay, and they were, but I kept an eye on the news.

Which ended up meaning praying hard all day for the people in Texas who were simply going to synagogue for a normal Sabbath’s services and ended up being taken hostage by a gunman with bombs. For the people trying to help them. For their families, their community, for them to know we are all their community as this was happening.

Those prayers were answered in the safe rescue of the hostages.

Are we willing to answer the prayers of those who ask that we help this to stop happening?

To start, can we make Red Flag laws universal?

A local small farm was supplying a restaurant, and you know how that goes these days. And so they got three other farms together and put a notice on Nextdoor.com, as one does when one has no advertising budget, about their new CSA.

I was surprised there were any farms left at all two towns over, but apparently there are, so you can’t get much more local than that. Straight up the road. I signed up. Plus I’m pretty sure one of the names is someone I know.

Yesterday was supposed to be the first delivery day. They said 7-9 pm was the goal but it might take a little longer as they found their way around on these new routes.

I figured they were being optimistic but I also didn’t want my veggies sitting outside attracting critters, so last night I was opening the front door every half hour or less to make sure my box hadn’t been put in that one spot you just can’t quite see from inside.

Ten-thirty. No go. Maybe they should just wait till the morning.

There was a mass email offering apologies for how long it was taking.

Eleven p.m., ready to crash, and there it was! They did it! I opened the door–

–and got the full impact of what delivering it that late had meant for the driver. I don’t know if they took the direct hit or not. I’m really hoping not, and given the intensity I’d say either the skunk was still recharging its batteries from the last time it told the neighbor’s dog to get lost or it was in the dog’s back yard again and took it up on that barking dare. But whatever, it was close enough to give a good dose to open those lungs right up, breathe deep now, best asthma treatment on the planet, there you go.

Right, right, I’m sure the driver was sooo happy for the treatment.

I sent the farm a note today hoping they were okay and that it wouldn’t dissuade them from keeping me on their list and that if helped any, skunks are wanderers. They only stay put when they’re raising young.

Which, of course, they will be doing soon, but hey, I’ve got the rabbits over here, that’s my fair share. (Don’t. Tempt. Karma, Alison.)

One pandemic side effect is that I ordered glasses online, something I thought I’d never do. Two pairs. One as much like my old glasses as I could find, the other the same frameless idea that I’ve been wearing forever but with deeper, rounder lenses.

I wore the former until they got caught on a mask I was taking off and the nose pad went flying off somewhere. Was there no glue to it? Okay, you’re done. The other pair looked great on, so, backup pair to the rescue.

Then I got a new prescription.

I still really wanted to keep unnecessary exposure to a minimum, so I went back to that website and ordered a single pair: that bigger rounder type. Same company same glasses same size.

They fell off my face if I looked down. What?

I kept wearing the old ones a couple of months.

I decided this was getting ridiculous and put the new ones on this morning, determined to get used to the new prescription and get that adjustment over with.

Oh. Right. The falling thing.

I took them off and put them end to end with their earlier twin for the first time.

They angle off to nearly 4″ wider by the ends of the temples. They were mediums, not extra larges.

So I tried to very gently bend them towards sanity, and succeeded enough to keep them from being an overt hazard, but after a few hours one of the nose pads hurt.

They need adjustment. Badly. They need someone who knows what they’re doing.

My dilemma is, that’s part of what you pay for when you buy them in a store and I didn’t and nobody owes me anything, except the online place, and who knows how long they’d sit in transit going back and forth or how they’d fare–after all, they came in a case but there was no padding inside that case in the first place and maybe that’s how we got here.

So a shout-out to the local opticians and a thank you for what they do and I won’t do online again.

Just pretty please bring frameless types back for those of us looking for them?

If your grandmother was like my maternal grandmother, she had small, mostly round, decoratively molded soaps in her guest bathroom in soft pastel colors, heavily perfumed and slippery as heck in your hands, bouncing off and around the sink when you were trying to actually use them.

She would know if you had indeed washed your hands for dinner as she’d asked you to or if you’d tried to get away with skipping out on that step (not that I ever did.) While the scent interfered with your tasting your food.

And that is why I think of Gram every time I take one of my new heart med pills. It smells strongly, and tastes strongly, of good old-fashioned lavender soap. Why, for the life of me, I do not know. And you try to swallow it fast so it doesn’t leave that lingering soapy taste on your tongue.

Chocolate is the antidote.

My longtime arborist stopped by today because I wanted a quote on some pruning that was higher up than I’m willing to go. He was surprised when I asked him at the end if he liked dark chocolate–why, yes, he does, very much–and then opened the front door and grabbed him one of those plisse’ things and told him what it was. That was fun.

The somewhat less fun but worthwhile thing was going in for a mammogram yesterday.

It created one of those weird moments where the pandemic makes invisible people real, and necessary, where you never knew they even ever were: there was a little window on the arm into the innards of the machine, just a few inches across and with a light inside so you could see how the thing flexed as they moved it in place next to the squish table thingamagummy.

And it was dusty. Quite. Inside an enclosed space with no opening as far as I could see, with that little light at the back showing just how the tiny, uneven, fuzzy bits cascaded down the little diagonal whatever in there. Dust bunny-foot, mid-hop.

I marveled out loud, the tech being an amiable sort, and she knew exactly what I was talking about.

“Oh we’re not allowed to touch those.”

Turns out the manufacturer has people whose job it is to clean those inside parts, which the patients are never exposed to, so, given covid restrictions and workers out sick (or maybe they’d quit) and the fact that it would physically affect nobody to just leave it like that for the moment, there had been no one on hand to do that particular job that I would never even have known existed.

I’m still left with the question hanging of, why? Why did they make it that way?

So that this whole x-ray vision thing can be a two-way street between patients and our non-robot overlords?

Two years from now I’ll be looking to see if it still looks like that. Which is the weirdest way to get a patient to book the next routine appointment ever.

People were vaccinated. People got tested.

And then we prayed hard, took a deep breath, made the decision, and drove. No airports. Cars only. Except for an elderly aunt in southern California who I don’t think drives anymore, the one we were being the most careful for. Masks on all.

Richard’s cousin was having her eight-year-old son baptized this morning and that is a fine reason for people to get together to celebrate.

Her brother and his family did the twelve hours from Arizona.

We did two hours from up north.

Her in-laws came from I have no idea where.

Etc.

I had missed several of these family gatherings due to having had pneumonia or bronchitis at the wrong times and I hadn’t even met her youngest–and he’s in kindergarten now.

(Who’s that guy with the long gray hair?) From across the room, he happened to turn around. (MICHAEL?? Long!? Gray?!?) I made a point of telling him I loved it, because it was gorgeous, and he chuckled and said his sisters had offered rather eagerly to cut it. But he’d been finding he liked it this way.

And so we had a grand old time, with lunch at his sister’s afterwards.

She and her husband had bought a fixer-upper and after a year of work had pulled off a gorgeous job of it, and I’m sure they enjoyed how much it got exclaimed over.

But the best part of course was the visiting, and the seeing the kids in such different sizes than they were, and how interesting they were to talk to.

That view. I instantly saw why they’d fallen in love with the place. (Avocados 4/$1, said a sign near their street.)

Um, that flying saucer thing? That’s someone’s plate and toasted cheese sandwich photobombing against the double-paned glass. Oops. For when Johnny’s sharing pictures of his day at some point in the future.

The lovely old aunt got talking about now vs back in her day, and turns out she’s a Golden Girls fan.

One of the younger cousins exclaimed, Oh! That was my favorite show when I was a kid!

We had a TV when our kids were young enough to be distracted by Sesame Street while I was trying to throw dinner together. When that died, a friend’s grandma looking to unload her old one fobbed it off on us: picture a huge 1960’s set made to look like built-in wood furniture with a silvery sparkly panel where the speaker was. My parents had one newer than that when I was a teenager. We watched one presidential debate where we debated which candidate was which as they stood there in their wavy-edged shades of green.

When at last we got offered a trip to the dump for it, off it went.

Several years later, our daughter’s friends, finding it unbelievable that we didn’t have a single TV in the house, all chipped in and surprised her at her 13th birthday party with a new one of her own.

The next morning, without texting even being a thing yet, they collectively went, Oh wait–maybe you don’t have one because your parents don’t want one? Do we have to take it back?

We told her, no, it’s fine. But there will be rules. Homework comes first. Etc.

And so our other kids started hanging out in her room with her to watch shows their friends had been talking about.

Later that year, she caught I think it was strep throat–and we had an old VCR still and she wanted to watch a Star Wars movie, so, sure, we dragged it out of the closet and set it up for her.

Look at the colors!!! she exclaimed as the opening started up.

Five minutes in, her low-rung-manufacturer TV suddenly went black. It never came back on. It hadn’t even made it to her next birthday.

We never did get around to replacing it–but our computers eventually pretty much did.

So with that intro: today I found out just how much we all missed out on all those years. Reading about The Golden Girls in random news articles so that at least I knew what it was while it was on the air in no way compares with (and probably everybody but me has already seen this, but) watching The Herring Wars, where Betty White went off script and ad-libbed with a straight face and had her co-stars convulsing with laughter.

Those five minutes were from one of the greats. And she was a lovely, lovely person. She will be so missed.

I’ve never bought a season of a TV series before but it’s time for that to change.

Note to self: next time, finish the row you’re knitting before you go do that flying leap thing.

The top of the freezer is dedicated to ice packs and most of the time I think that’s way overkill but every now and then, just every now and then I think, that’s actually a good thing.

And it really did help. Just hoping my gauge wasn’t too funky while my fingers were frozen. (Yes I did. I’m stubborn like that.)

Meantime, way more fun, a new song for the season: Masked Christmas. Jimmy Fallon playing chess with his golden retriever. Because of course he did.

After all that drought.

When the ground is hardpack-dry, water just rolls right off it rather than soaking in.

But when it’s been raining on and off for a week, never too much at once and yet relentless, it apparently starts doing what you’d expect and want: I saw this big pond this morning, ran across the house and grabbed my camera, came back and outside and snapped its picture.

Huh. And considered a moment–and walked back inside and across the house to Richard to show him how much water there was out there (but thankfully not against the house anymore!) and told him the picture was showing the ponding as being shallower than it really was.

Then I walked back outside. I wanted to see if I could get it to photograph better–to show how I’d seen it.

And now it was that much less.

The ground had absorbed it that thirstily and that fast.

On the other side of the house, I have a plastic trash can under the eaves that had a little garden debris in it and its lid had been left off. The roof is dripping on it, but still: it’s full. Of water. It’s full!