I apparently have been ignoring people I didn’t know I was; my apologies. My husband set up a Twitter account a year ago to post my progress from the hospital to his family–and he used my spindyeknit moniker to set it up.  So if you wanted to follow me on Twitter but never got a response, well, hey, you’re reading this; you found me!

(p.s. And thank you, everybody, for looking out for Natalie with us.)

Michelle picked Natalie up from the hospital today. She’s out.  Yay!

Meantime, replacement to fix this broken dishwasher doorhandle: $23 plus shipping (they sent us the full assembly beyond this part; we were pleased).

Time to take the door apart, remove the broken piece,  replace it and put it all back together: under fifteen minutes. The new handle is better designed.

Time for the $133 electronic panel to arrive next: I’ll know after I place the order. So much for that. But it’ll be even faster to swap out, he says, and it’s quite satisfying to be doing it ourselves.  (We’ll reserve true elation for when the darn thing works.)

Meantime, it’s funny how having something you can’t fix right now makes it feel imperative to work on something you can make do absolutely whatsoever you say–or you will frog its little loops into oblivion, so there.  I am master of the yarniverse. I doodled with some silk/cashmere in a whole new tangent and really really like what it’s turning into, even if it doesn’t look like much yet.

Now, pardon me, our local parts place closed down. PartSelect here I come again. (And if you need a new silverware tray? You want Mending Shed for that.

I now have a safe, non-working dishwasher, but at least it won’t set my house on fire. And no, Maytag did not pass along the other information to the fellow who came out–who was hesitant to work on the thing once I told him, and wanted to know, was I sure?

He was already here, so, hey. My other choice would have been to get a discount to buy a third one in a row of these, and that was so unacceptable to me and not likely an option anymore anyway the moment he stepped in the door. I do not want to add to the landfills.

I want the thing to work. Is that so hard to ask?

Turns out the last recall for a fire hazard– our previous Maytag–happened in 2007.  So that machine sitting there dead was three years old.

I really really needed me some Sea Silk time. Even if I only have half a skein of Glacier left.

Meantime, if you have a front-loading GE washing machine, those could be downright entertaining: flames shooting out the front? Every little boy’s dream!  Break out the coathangers and bring on the marshmallows!

(Ed. to add) I think the moral to the story is, when millions of people are suddenly trying to buy the same brand at once because of a recall and an offered discount and it’s on backorder while they try to make them all at once, give the local guy the fix-it job rather than risk the lag in quality controls.)

Dear Maytag:

I want you to look at this picture. No, look closer: look at that factory-installed black rubber strip. You know how it goes up and around the latch area? Supposedly?

The thing has been intermittently difficult to start ever since we got it. Do you suppose you might think of a reason why?

The last time you had a recall, you offered me a discount on a new Maytag dishwasher or a repair call, my choice. I had something wrong with mine besides what was being recalled, so I winced at having to replace one that should still have been going strong but I went ahead and did so because it seemed the cheaper option. And because you make by far the best-cleaning dishwasher out of the five brands I have owned and I wanted that. And it was quiet.  You do that part exceedingly well.

But I’m back in that boat again. A recall for house fires? Okay. The repairman is coming tomorrow to replace that heating element for you. But in the meantime, I want my dead dishwasher to start working again–and I think it should be your problem it doesn’t think it’s latching shut anymore and won’t start.  Thank you for answering my email; no, I’m sorry, unplugging it so that the electronics might be able to reset did nothing.

You can see right there where the rubber meets the rued.

Here are Glenn Nevill’s photographs, the whole scene starting at picture two taking place in one second’s time, of lunch delivery of the San Francisco falcons. Eat and run!

Meantime, one of my fellow falcon enthusiasts came over today.  I was hoping the Cooper’s hawk would make an appearance for her, but no such luck, although she did enjoy the show the birdfeeder put on.

Hilary’s the one I was looking for Edgar for.  I never did find him, but I did find some good roving to share.  She’s into needlefelting–and her work is so exquisite I wanted to run show it to my parents, especially my dad the art dealer, and exclaim, Isn’t this just so cool!

Because she came with a surprise.

She had had to trim the body down a bit, she told me, because the feet weren’t supporting it.  (It looks perfect to me!)  She’d had the proportions just so the first time.

I’ve done a very little bit of felting, but I’ve never tried anything remotely like this. You’d have to be able to visualize what you want and then know just how to make it come out like that, not to mention doing all that actual work.  It takes the eye of an artist.  My pictures didn’t quite capture it, but she got it just so right down to the toenails.

I am reminded of Sandra Boynton’s lesson on how to mold chocolate bunnies: “Take one block of chocolate, 4x4x7 feet.  Chip away all pieces that do not contribute to an overall impression of rabbitittity.” Uh, yeah.

I am just totally in awe, and totally in love with my very own little falcon perched by my left hand as I type this.  Wow. Cool. Thank you. I had it perched on my knitting books while she was here, but I think I’m going to keep it on the arm of the couch, watching me knit at my own perch.

She told me it’s a tiercel, ie, a male, tiercel meaning “third” and males being a third smaller than females.  That tummy tuck and all that.

So.  He had a hard time standing up on his feet, had to have abdominal surgery, and is thinner now but can stay up just fine now and is ready to take on my world.  My stars, could this little tiercel be any more perfect?!

His name hasn’t come to me yet.  But it will.

I typed that, looked at it, and thought, Malcolm?  Hmm. Maybe.

Hilary, you’re wonderful! And it is absolutely beautiful.

If this goes through, it means our ISP finally got its act in gear. Cloud computing isn’t supposed to rain supreme quite like that.

Thank you, everybody, for the input. After looking at that scarf all blocked and done this morning, (5.5+ x 62″ out of those 24g!) it just felt like it is wonderful the way it is–and that I should knit and offer the person the alternative of a plain cream-colored cashmere blend, her choice; it’s pretty hard to go wrong that way. (So, back to the needles, I’m not finished there yet.)

Meantime, I have a friend whose emails my Thunderbird program, for reasons unknown, has been bouncing into the spam filter lately, about every other message.  We tried to pin it down: is it when it comes from her phone? From her computer? There seemed no particular correlation and it went on for days, with me dragging her messages up to my inbox as if I could show my computer, See?  *That’s* where it goes.  See?

All seemed mysteriously well this morning after all that, and I was thinking, Oh good!  Until I did a tentative check later just to make sure the new pattern was holding.

Nope. I fired her off a note:

“And we had fun fun fun till the T-bird took the addy away.”

I think it is safe to say I am not a computer person.  (Hey you Hydes, hush!) I have stuck to my nice safe Firefox PC.

But I have been pushed around lately by the fact that a) I’ve got the falcon cam on the big monitor attached to the husband’s Mac, because b) that site crashes my Firefox Ubuntu absolutely every time. Completely. Gone to lunch, ‘bye. (Which is why this year I haven’t posted the link. Don’t worry, that’s the link to the link.)

So tonight Richard was teaching me basic stuff on his machine, like how to open a new window and why it wasn’t working when I tried to. How to change the size of the window (so help me, that was designed by someone with sharper eyes than mine.)

It’s like knitting lace: it used to be, I didn’t know how, I didn’t (I told myself) particularly want to know how, but it bugged me that it was something I couldn’t do–but it was knitting!  I eventually tried to teach myself, but at the time there was just really nothing out there and certainly nothing that told exactly how one was supposed to, say, purl, much less knit, into a yarnover of the previous row and which way one was to wrap the yarn, much less that it changed depending on what came before and what after.

Now, of course, it’s all as automatic to me as breathing, you just sit down with the needles and go:  the Barbara Walker books from the last big knitting craze of the 70’s were finally reprinted, and I made myself slog through row after row with one eye on her first Treasury of Knitting Patterns directions and the other on the work in my hands.

A swatch. Then an afghan in a simple pattern, trying to drill it into my brain while learning to read my stitches, trying to learn not to panic and what to do if I dropped a stitch, how to put it all back together when it’s not simple knit and purl but with direction and–well, you know. One dropped stitch can unravel two or three below it and then that many more again each from there, and, yeah.

And then a second afghan.  Trying to practice at it enough for long enough to make it worth the time spent learning how.

And how!, now.

So eventually I put my own book out there that prefaced with the laceknitting directions, verbal but also pictorial, that were exactly what I’d gone looking for and could not find all those years ago.

I think it’s a pretty good book. (They’re almost gone.)

But I don’t think that means I’ll ever, ever write one on my new-found expertise on using a Mac.  Trust me on this one. Truly.

Pictures borrowed from Paul Higgins and Marlene Foard; I couldn’t get the black-headed grosbeak that showed up in my yard today to hold still long enough to shoot my own photos, much though I tried, Richard’s mega-camera in hand. Thanks to Sally for helping me identify the species.

Meantime: does Babelfish come in an OED version?

There’s an online listing for a silk/cashmere laceweight yarn, shipped from China, and where it should mention care instructions it has the rather marvelous sentence, and I quote exactly, “Abstersion explain:handwash in cold water and dry flat”.  I looked up abstersion at dictionary.com and it defines it as to wipe clean or to clean, from Sir Walter Scott.

So Walter Scott made up some random word forever ago, being, you know, novel, and some poor guy in China is trying to use it to communicate?

I told Michelle there was this weird word and she, always up for a vocabulary challenge, looked it up on Merriam-Webster’s site–where they said, well, that’s not in our regular online dictionary, but if you pay for our super-duper advanced version, then we can indeed tell you what it means.  But it is secret knowledge, with initiation writes involved, a real fee-for-all.  (Or words to that effect.  I’m translating.)

She was stunned, going, “I have *never* seen that before on their page! NEVER!” It was like the old Google game where you try to come up with a search that gets you only one result on the page–I won!

So how on earth did this guy in China get a hold of that word and think it was the right one?

And now we’ll just, I guess, absterge that useless word from our vocabularies? (I just made it real easy to, huh?) My computer’s spellcheck Does Not Approve.  That’ll teach it.

We’ve got a ways to go before we hit forty days and forty nights, but the animals are starting to gather two by two. So here to distract while we await the flood of reports on the Massachusetts election results are:

1. Knitting needles a squirrel could approve of. Here, you, too, can go knit your own futon with those yarns you don’t know why on earth you ever bought.

2. The Ig Nobel Prizes:  recognition from the scientific community for experiments that should not be repeated.  Creating diamonds from Tequila? Wait.  Are Mormons allowed to wear those?

Going to Rachel‘s in San Jose: “Did you get the GPS?”

“Nah, I’ll just use my phone.”

Showoff. Oh, wait, mine does that too?!

We finally gave in to the inevitable on our dying Sidekicks and bought new phones.  When you’re buying five cells, it’s like buying a car–you can’t just walk in and be done with it.  Even though we mostly knew what we wanted, Wednesday evening it took us three hours. The saleswoman laughed a bit ruefully when I gave out, gave up, plunked down and pulled out my knitting.

Richard had great fun later swiping his new phone at the barcode on a Safeway receipt and having it tell him where all the most-local sources were for that pumpkin can and what their prices were, telling me that his friend had written that Droid app.  Cool!

I got an LG env Touch, plenty for me. And I can now plug my hearing aids into my phone! I have always had to turn on the speakerphone and hold it (and hold it and HOLD it) right up at my ear.  I will actually be able to have a private conversation now?  And have much better sound quality from the phone itself, apart from the hearing aids?  This is going to be quite nice.

I told Richard I really didn’t need him to buy me any more birthday presents, we’d shot our wad.  Dirt. I need dirt. Dad sent me more amaryllis bulbs, Richard bought me a few too  (yay! Thank you!) and I just need some potting soil and a few pots.  I’m simple to please. (Wait–don’t look at that Touch when I say that…)

I’ll see Sunday if he agreed with me.

Crazy-busy trying to do everything that needs to be done before our own guests might or might not arrive, but first, for Carol, who would really appreciate this, I present: Fingernails on Friday!  Heh.

Yesterday, after part of our kids’ old bunk bed got picked up as a nice wooden bedframe for someone else, the last piece to go out the door, I was reminiscing to my daughter about the bunk beds we had in our family when I was a kid.

There were two, identical, one in the boys’ room and one in the younger girls’ room (meaning mine.)  There was the bedframe, and then there were wooden slats (not that those guitar necks reminded me of them or anything), connected by a fabric connector piece to either side, like sets of thick Venetian blinds running the length under the mattresses.

Our older brother, when he got mad, would run down the stairs to their room, lie on his lower bunk, and kick upwards at those slats.

Which is why one night Bryan rolled over in his sleep and innocently fell down on his big brother who was out cold below him.  Justice was served.

…That’s the thing about sisters, they tell tales on you all your life, you can never get away from it. Heh.

SO.  (Ahem.)

Bryan was at a show last week, selling his handmade guitars, and I just wanted to show him off a bit. Said the justifiably very proud older sister. He does *nice* work.

Nobody told the British Mormon missionary, carving his first pumpkin, that you’re supposed to cut the top off going at an angle so it won’t fall in on itself when you’re done–so his jack o’lantern ended up with a hat on its bald head, a pumpkin with a costume.  (And he did an impressive job making an expressive face, but I don’t have a picture–you’ll just have to take it on faith.)

The hubby bought candy. So did I. Oops. Total number of small children: about 10. Medium-sized children: 1.  “Take some more” can only be repeated so many times and be gotten away with when the child’s mom or dad is standing right there knowing full well what you’re up to: better your fight with yourselves than ours with our kids, was the unspoken smiling conversation.

Where are the towering greedy teenagers in goofy outfits when you need them?

I put Michelle’s jack o’lantern on the back patio afterwards to see, today, if the wild things might take interest. The wild things’ reaction was they weren’t going anywhere near that scarecrow head–we had  a squirrel-free zone and even ground-bird-free zone all the way till this afternoon, till finally one towhee braved that patio. Did I get to see gray squirrels doing the bobbing-apple dive for the seeds or the peanut butter I put inside that pumpkin?  Did I get to videotape baby black squirrels climbing through eyeballs?  No I did not.  Two finally showed up and only one so much as deigned to sniff in poor Jack’s direction. Rejection is brutal.

It didn’t hit me till later that for all but that one older kid, we could have skipped the candy thing entirely and helped Peruvian women feed their children actual and decent food: the handknitted fingerpuppets!   The little ones would have been thrilled! Their fingers could have been costumed year-round!

I AM slow sometimes! Oh well. Now you know what I’m doing next year, and the cash outlay will actually be less.

Except for a small bag of Reese’s. For that one eight-year-old. And maybe (not that I’m admitting it) me.

When someone lists a gallon of milk for sale on Amazon–wait, it gets worse, the price is $69.99–it begs for reviews like this one. Or the person who says get the Kindle version, it’s only ten bucks.  And then, looking under “new and used” there is of course the overpriced collector’s edition going for $2,500.00 plus $4.49 shipping.

Quoting the $1500 version: “Comments: Always fresh. Will never expire. We bring the cow right to your door.”  (But does one tip the cow?)  The $2499 version: “Comments: will hand deliver, then come in and make you a Tiramisu with product in your kitchen.”

Gee, cow can we resist?  After all, feeding our families well is a heifer responsibility.  I wonder if they’ll bring a DVD too so we can watch a moovie while they whip up that tiramisu. And how about a salad on the side with a little ranch dressing.  You hoof to hand it to them, that’s a pretty strong incentive: real food, real local.  It’s a grass-roots moovement!

(LynnM? LauraN?  Or…?  Your turn on the cheesy puns!)

(With thanks to Terry Border at Bent Objects for the heads-up.)