Jimmy Fallon was laughing about it, because what else can you do, so I had to check it out and it’s true.

One person in my family loves Yankee Candles so I went to a crowded mall some years ago, something I rarely do this time of year (or any other, to be fair), and bought her one in a jar for Christmas. Or was it two. Vanilla scented, and even just sitting there unlit it was like having baked cookies in the room.

But it’s true. This year the company got slammed with a fair number of bad reviews: people complaining they’d been sent candles with no or almost no smell at all, wanting to know what had gone wrong with their manufacturing this year? It was just not up to snuff.

Remodeling goof number one: twenty-seven years ago, the latest fad from Thermidor was to put a pop-up vent behind the cooktop. Someone we knew had that and she liked it. What sold us was the contractor saying that it would be far quieter than your standard hood because the motor for it would be on the roof and far away, and with my hearing, a lack of background noise is something to be highly sought after.

What he didn’t know is that the sound would reverberate all down that shaft, making it a lot louder than a standard one would have been. And when the part down at stove level refused to retract and close anymore it became a source of very cold air in the winter.

Goof number two: the architect’s specs called for a 30″ stove, but Richard wanted five burners. Okay, so, 36″. It wasn’t till the contractor installed the cabinets that he realized that he hadn’t changed them to match.

Meaning, our cabinets have overhung the stove from both sides all these years, which is great for the finish. Not.

And you can’t put in an overhead vent now because it would have to hang from below the cabinets and that would not leave room for the pots, much less stirring or seeing into them.

Unless you can put in a 30″ vent for a 36″ stove and I imagine the county would not be real happy with that idea.

So then the choices are to find another cooktop that shallow or look in the back of the yarn closet to see if we still have the leftover Corian piece (I’m not sure we do) and try to find someone to seam it when it’s 27 years old and make it still look good so we could have that 30″er. Or just replace the entire countertop, vent, cooktop, and did I mention the fridge is that old too and has been fixed several times and is leaking and just needs to go?

Nobody seems to make cooktops that shallow because they don’t make those vents anymore. With good reason: by pushing the stove forward the way it does, I have caught my sweaters on fire twice. You know how they say wool extinguishes flames? Let me tell you, it does. Angora got shaved close so it’s your friend too and that sweater looked like it had had a major procedure done at the vet’s but in both cases the fire went out before it got up to my chin and it didn’t take hold in the sweater, just blackened and shriveled the fuzzies on the surface.

Yeah. Fun times.

Apparently you can get a better, longer lasting finish on the wood of the cabinetry now than we were allowed then. With ours, you can see where the sun came through the skylight directly.

Lots of end-of-year sales, and a hubby going, One more month at least. We have to have the vaccine first before we let people work in here.

We really don’t want to re-remodel the kitchen. We just want a working stove.

We’re going to have to replace our gas cooktop. Like, asap.

We remodeled our kitchen 27 years ago with high-end Thermidor appliances and they were a disaster: the low-cycling burners were designed so that they fused shut and never worked again if you were ever to turn them to high (as explained afterward by the repairman, who was sympathetic, with the warranty getting us nowhere with the dealer) and both ovens’ motherboards fried just outside of warranty, with a quote of $850 plus labor for each. Same quote as the stove. We replaced the double oven and kept the half-dead stove. The other half actually outlived the average stove by a dozen years.

Another repairman later noted that self-clean ovens tend to fry their motherboards and that one should not use that feature.

So. I’m suddenly trying to learn everything I can about 36″ cooktops.

A Thermidor will never come in our house again–he felt as strongly about that as I do.

My problem is, scrolling around, there was one and only one whose looks stopped me in my tracks–I LIKE that one. Bluestar? What’s a Bluestar?

So I went looking for the price, rolled my eyes, said well of course it is, but still: more expensive than Viking? Yow.

I would dearly love to hear anything anybody loves or hates about theirs, any size or brand. Consumer Reports in my experience has become less reliable than some of the appliances they describe, other than obliquely by letting people publish reviews on their site.

For reliability, I’d be going with Bosch, whose appliances I’ve actually been consistently happy with–except that they don’t make one. (EDIT: Lowe’s has one! And for $1200 less than the Bluestar!)

Anyone?

Hoping the paywall doesn’t get in the way, please go read this: an essay by a Jewish doctor tending to a man with severe covid who was covered in tattoos that conveyed that his new ER patient would be happy to see that doctor and the black and Asian nurses tending to him dead.

In that moment, though, the only thing he wanted was to survive and he begged breathlessly for help.

I am grateful for the doctor’s honesty in saying that, internally, it took him a moment to deal with it.

I kept wanting to tell him, it’s okay to be human.

It is clear that the experience left a good man even more determined to be more compassionate towards all. He didn’t get to hear what happened to the guy after that; ER doctors pretty much never do. All he could do was silently wish him well wherever he was now, and hope.

I want to throw in a little of my Mormon faith here: in the life to come, when we come into the presence of the immensity of the Love there, if we have always tried to follow it, whatever we may call it, however we may think of it, every time even someone who doesn’t believe in God at all Thinks Good Thoughts towards the well-being of someone who needs it, we have served that Love.

We will recognize it and belong to it and it will claim us for its own.

Because we always did, by our own choices. No matter what we called ourselves or it here.

Thank heavens for the good examples along the way that help us see how we want to be like when we grow up, all our lives long, like this man.

I wonder if his patient had ever experienced selfless love like that before. I sure hope it changed him for the better.

There were three people being helped and one ahead of me in line at the post office. Even this early, I’ve never seen so few there in December.

But the stuff I ordered for the grands to come here first so I could wrap it–those haven’t come yet. So much for bypassing Big South American River. Turns out Monday we go on total lockdown for three weeks, and I don’t think going out to ship presents to young children counts as an essential trip under the new guidelines.

2020 is almost over.

We’ll figure it out.

Legos came in plain squares and rectangles of mostly red and blue and the occasional green or yellow when I was a kid, one or two sizes each and plain and hard and uninviting and I remember my grandmother wanting me to go play with the ones in her basket and me feeling like, Are you kidding me? How old do you think I am? Toddlers build towers!

As they got far more sophisticated I didn’t see for the longest time why a kid should just assemble from a directions sheet whatever someone else had dreamed up. Why not use their own imagination?

As if I ever did with them, so never mind.

But yarn! I remember watching my mother’s hands assembling plain straight string into beautiful, warm, cabled sweaters. Her projects always got my attention and the firmest determination that someday I was going to be able to do that, too. I remember studying the puzzle of her motions, the steady, accumulative loop-over-loop.

My husband’s family has always loved puzzles.

Watching my seven and nine year old grandsons showing off their Lego creations over FaceTime, I finally really got it: they’re putting together not just a puzzle but a 3-D one that helps develop fine motor coordination and their ability to envision what comes next and to check and correct and not be satisfied till it’s right and when they’re done, it’s not just a bunch of plastic bricks that fall right back apart but an actual toy that they play with with pride.

It teaches them about taking care of things that have unseen fragility.

Of things falling apart, of resilience when they do if they get a bit too exuberant flying their planes and that if work must be done to repair it, it means something to you, then you sit down and you spend the time and you repair it.

A frog/reknit, if you will: the resources remain, all it requires is you.

If their baby brother plays bam smash crash at them you forgive him, because, he doesn’t know, and they’re old enough that they get that.

But soon enough he will and it will be his turn.

Their sister’s already there.

But for her sixth birthday, and to be as different from Christmas the next day as possible, I decided she’s ready for the tactility of making her own fabric, too.

The old-fashioned metal loom from my childhood, with that bit of a loop shape at the top of each little bar to help hold your work in place. Cotton loops: you can make an actually useful (if small) potholder, unlike acrylic which could melt in high heat. Harrisville did it right.

That present, at least, is being sent straight there.

I made me a list, checked it twice. And again. And again. If the shipping all goes smoothly the Christmas shopping looks just about finished, and I know how fortunate we are that we can do that this year.

One company doesn’t gift wrap and I wasn’t going to send four grandkids a jumble of unlabeled toys to let them duke it out over early, so I’m having the order sent here so I can wrap and reroute. That works if they ship promptly. They’re not Amazon and I’ve never dealt with them before, I don’t know. It’s too late now to say I should have paid individual shipping on each rather than accepting free shipping for the lot and a little work for me.

But then, wrapped up for Christmas for the kids is just so much better. So much more, this is from us, rather than, look what we paid for.

I wonder if the post office lines will be shorter this year?

The thought hits me: like how they said the voting lines were going to be?

Now that we’re officially between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I don’t think I’ve told this story here before, and it’s worth telling again if I have. With thanks to Anne for sending me a video of someone playing an intense organ piece and prompting this; my son Richard minored in organ performance.

My grandmother was a concert pianist. I inherited her musical talent but my hands did not–they’re the one dyslexic part of me, wanting to reverse notes at random until I practice and practice to the point of forcing muscle memory on them.

My son Richard is all Gram. He’s good. Hum a tune, he’ll embellish it at the piano with all ten fingers going at once and improvise it into a whole new thing, any style you want.

In college he had to go to a practice room on campus in order to play. Those are reserved for music majors at all times–in four years on that campus I found an open piano room twice. He *needs* his keyboard time in a way that I didn’t quite.

Coming home at Christmas meant the piano was right there and all his. It’s an old one of Gram’s; she bought it for their DC apartment when her husband was elected to the Senate before I was born, a very good upright, but it just wouldn’t do and she had to have her grand. She gave the upright to my folks and it got passed down to me.

One holiday season when Richard was in college, the guy I’d hired to tune it ever since we’d moved here just didn’t have time to fit me in–right around Thanksgiving he gets booked up fast because everybody wants to be ready for get-togethers.

And then, bless him, Neil decided he would squeeze me in anyway. It would be a quick tune-and-run, though, no time to catch up on life.

That was fine, and thank you!

So he came. He tuned. I thanked him, we wished each other the best and he was off.

A few days later my son flew home, finals done, the house ready for Christmas, and sat down at that piano and let’er rip in loud, exuberantly happy music all over the keyboard.

About a minute into it (and having him in on this with me) I dialed the phone and when the call was answered, said, This is Alison–and held the phone towards the piano as Richard grinned and really let’er rip. That piano had never sounded so good.

Neil, listening, said with great emotion, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me!”

The music got just a little softer (because the kid knew his mom needed the help hearing on the phone), I wished Neil and his a Merry Christmas and he me and then we let each other go back to our families, the moment never to be forgotten. I was and am so grateful for his kindness.

Not sure everyone can get past the paywall, so I’m sharing his story here.

My cousin who’s a reporter in Salt Lake City pointed out her co-worker’s story: his mom had found his childhood bank over the weekend. Spongebob Squarepants no less. Did he want it? Enticement: (to get it out of her house I’m sure) there were seventy bucks in there, plus random small things that interest small boys. Childhood memories and all that.

Meantime, he had a can he threw random change into, and sure, he was curious to know how much all that would add up to.

It wasn’t money he’d needed or planned on and there were plenty of people out there who could definitely use it right now so he decided to invite his readers via Twitter to let him know if they knew or were someone in need. No need to be outed publicly, send a direct message if you’d rather.

You could have seen this coming, but he didn’t: one of the first responses was someone wanting to add $150 to his $165. And then someone else wanted to. And someone else. He kept answering with !!!!!!!!! because he felt speechless.

Over $49k in 24 hours. All these people wanting to help other people but not knowing where best to do so but figuring he, working for the newspaper, either would or he certainly could find out. All this desire to help.

And there will be food on tables and warmth in homes for it.

So Monopoly was actually invented by a woman in the late 1800s who was trying to teach Americans why having a very rich 1% owning and running everything was a bad idea.

There were lots of knock-offs, including the classic version we’re all familiar with that a man invented a story for and sold to Parker Bros.

Lizzie Magie got them to pay her $500 for the patent on her “Landlord’s Game” the same year. He got very rich and famous. She did not, but at least she got something.

In case you’re looking for ideas this time of year, you can buy a National Parks version from the National Park Service to help them fund their operations, sorely needed these past four years.

Although I would guess that things are probably starting to look up for them right now.

President Nelson, head of the Mormon Church, asked that we talk about what we’re grateful for, and trying to squish it all into words seems kind of overwhelming.

In no particular order: waking up every morning in this life.

The faith that requires that I be my best self towards all others in order to honor what I’ve been blessed with.

The doctors and nurses and blood donors and medical researchers and volunteer research guinea pigs all the way to the housecleaning staff at the hospital–everybody who helped save my life.

My family, in a million more ways than I could ever convey. So much love.

The fact that my three nephews who got covid survived it; a cousin’s working on it.

And this is going to sound weird, but…my lupus, and the Crohn’s that piled on nine years later. Because of all the ways that it constricted and confined my life: after reading Norman Cousin’s book, “Anatomy of an Illness,” I knew I needed a creative outlet and the smocked baby outfits I’d been embroidering were right out–my hands couldn’t hold that fine of a needle without intense pain.

I was at the library with my little kids one day and Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Knits about fell off the bookshelf into my hands. It was that two-page spread with the models in those fabulous coats in an amaryllis field in the Netherlands that got to me–you know I love amaryllises. I could never in the world make anything like those designs with dozens of colors but I checked that book out again and again till I finally gave up and bought a copy.

That was the turning point. Turns out, my hands could knit. Thank you, Kaffe.

I had basically given up knitting in college when I couldn’t afford the yarn nor the time. I made up for those missing dozen+ years, I would say.

I made his Carpet Coat (“These are large but they drape beautifully on everyone”) and when I got done my husband glommed onto it and told me, “It fits me better than you, go make yourself another one.” I did.

And then I met Kaffe Fassett. I’m pretty sure he ducked to come through the doorway, just like my husband does. Richard’s coat has 68 different yarns, I collected more skeins to make mine 86 because if he was going to nab my coat mine was going to outdo his. I went with the large split triangles pattern.

And then a teen some friends were raising in foster care loved them, asked about them–“Mohair. MO hair. What kind of animal is a MO?”–and I felt in my bones I had to make him one. A vest, so as to not worry about the fit or running out of my leftover yarn, but, a large part of me argued within that I can’t possibly knit for every single person who admires what I do! I’d never stop!

Tim’s happily married with children now and his wife still wears that vest all these years later. Fits her better now.

But that project was an inner barometer: when I felt generous it was what I wanted to work on, complicated or not, and when I was getting wrapped up in illness or just too down to cope with it I had no desire to. I began from that to learn just how much better I could make myself feel by applying happy anticipation to my stitches towards someone else’s happiness. It made the lupus less–devouring. I don’t know how else to put it.

All the things I’ve made, all the privileges of being able to share what I can do–none of that would have happened had my circumstances been what I’d planned on. I was going to get my last kid in school and then go back to work. But for so long I was just hanging onto life by my fingernails day to day with my illness.

But I could knit in happy anticipation of seeing the look on someone’s face, I could make love tangible, and I can’t tell you how many times that has helped make the difference.

I’m so very grateful for every member of my family, too, but that would be an encyclopedia rather than a blog post.

Someone was passing around a video of a stoat kit playing on a trampoline yesterday. Cute baby animals and all that.

And I woke up this morning with the thought of, that’s it! That’s the description I’ve been looking for for so long!

It was twenty years ago this month when someone grossly speeding and oblivious destroyed his car, mine, did significant damage to the car in front of me, and wrecked my sense of balance. Visual and muscle feedback is all I have to go on. Old news, long since adjusted to. But it has its weird moments and I’ve wanted a quick way to try to convey how it is and why when needed.

We have an old guy at church (the dad of one of my college classmates, actually) who likes to greet his friends by coming up behind them and clapping them on the back with one hand and then shaking theirs with his other as they turn in response. He’s sent me flying several times because, not seeing him, I didn’t anticipate the movement to brace against it and where up is got rearranged for a heartbeat. It was…a bit noticed. This is not how you’re supposed to do crowd surfing. It did happen twice. Bless him, he’s learned. (Sudden thought: we’ll see if he still remembers when we get to meet in person again.)

So. The now-obvious description: it’s like being on a trampoline! The surface you’re walking on all looks the same and flat but something moves and you find yourself tilting this way or that or staggering. You could be in the center where it’s the bounciest or at the edge near the springs and that affects how much where others move affects how much you move but even so anything can happen.

A good bounce from behind when you thought no one was there and whoa!

We were asked our Thanksgiving plans.

We intend to cook a huge turkey, have homemade everything from cranberry sauce to pie and more than the table can comfortably hold, have more loved ones than the table can comfortably seat, and have the time of our lives in one great big memorable celebration of all that blesses us and all those we love.

Next year. When we can also give thanks for all of us having been vaccinated.

So, yeah. The two of us and all the screen time with loved ones we can get. There is no responsible alternative. None.

I wanted to go to Andy’s Orchard to pick up a few things, like their dried slab Blenheim apricots: “slab” because they were so perfectly ripe when picked that they could not be sliced in pretty halves like the others, they kinda went smush. Those are the ones you want. So good.

And their holiday season dried figs stuffed with a walnut inside peaches pureed with honey and topped with almond bits: worth the trip right there, and they affirmed that yes they had them in stock now.

And so Friday, I went.

There were the last fresh-picked plums of the year and one last two-pound box of random-variety ripe figs; how, after two freezing nights this past week I don’t know but they were wonderful and we finished them off today.

But before I took off for Morgan Hill, I went looking and found the deep red superwash wool hat I’d made. In the Cerise colorway, French for Cherry, and what could be more appropriate for someone at a stone-fruits farm? It had been so long since I’d been able to just gift someone with some knitting in person. Their season was almost ended and who knew if the clerk who’s run the shop for Andy these past many months will be back next year.

She was wearing a sweater that went really well with that hat.

It hit me afterwards that I hoped she didn’t worry about touching it and being exposed to covid–I’d have offered to open the bag and shake it out for her without touching it myself if I’d been thinking. I knitted it about a month ago, so it’s done its quarantine time.

I guess I’m still, after all this time, figuring out this pandemic thing.

Reno. It was a small town when my dad’s folks moved there when he was a teen.

Wonder if their paths ever crossed. They’d be having a great laugh up there over this one.

I wrote in the spring last year about my niece who hadn’t gotten a flu shot, caught the flu, and ended up in the ICU for a very long time with sepsis, fighting for her life.

Emily was at one point the youngest-ever head of the piano teachers’ association in her state–she’s good.

After the amputations that helped save her life she had to learn how to be a piano teacher with no fingertips.

She made this video to teach other teachers what she’d learned from the experience about how to relate to her students. Who don’t know how they’ll ever be able to do what the teachers do like the teachers do, who see it from a very different viewpoint, who question themselves. How to see and meet them where they are.

With hands back to being the size of your typical five-year-old’s, as she put it, but that can’t quite land in that space back there between the black keys anymore, she tells her students it’s okay when they make mistakes because she does, too. But making music feels great.

And if you want to skip right over to 36:25 in the video, you can go see how she does.