This picture just doesn’t quite capture it.

The best homemade jam ever is ripe white peaches done half and half with mangoes, preferably the Champagne variety, which is to mangoes what Scharffenberger is to chocolate. Champagnes have a very short season and are long gone now, and so when I went looking for mangoes, I came home with these instead.

I haven’t made jam in several years.  These might make me.  There were six in the box.  I ate the first mango, a little early, but quite good–took the whole day, and still, I had to call for reinforcements at dinnertime, and still, there were leftovers for awhile yet after that.  It was the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival of mangoes at 2 2/3 pounds. That’s a proudly-large apple doing the cheerleader tower with it, not some shy little thing.

The kicker is that you know all five mangoes still in that box are going to go dead ripe all at once.  Not a peach in sight. I think they’re going to be on their own, because, with the kids gone, so are we.

Barbara-Kay says she’s only ever met two truly ugly yarns. I’m curious to know what they looked like.  But now I’ve got to tell you about one someone once gave me: I’ve been looking for it, but I have some vague memory of passing it on to someone who saw it and really liked it.

Back at the height of the furry-feathery yarns craze, I got a visit from a friend from another state who happened to be coming to California anyway and wanted to stop by.  She was someone who knitted up samples for yarn companies and she had a leftover skein she wanted to share with me, partly because she thought the thing was just too funny.

We’re talking a very thin nylon strand connecting lots of soft puffs of white and brown, chenille-y and very touchable.  Scattered here and there was a small accent of bright red.  In just the right shade.

Which is why she giggled as she handed me the yarn, confessing she called it Roadkill.

On that note…  Lawdog kindly put together all the links to his serialized Ratel (an animal also called the Honey Badger) story, saving me the effort of hunting them down, talking about some of his experiences growing up in Nigeria as the son of an American oil-industry worker.  And then there’s the furious furry tennis ball attacking the python.  I love his dad’s calm words: “Boys? Try to stay away from anything with an appetite, mmm?” Maybe they needed some Roadkill to distract it.  Here you go.

Or at least I wish; we’re trying to figure out why the cold-water valve–the house’s, not the machine’s– suddenly started leaking.  I did do a few loads anyway before turning off the cold water, and after not having a washing machine for a week, what’s the first load you would throw in there?  Yeah, me too.

A quick glance inside beforehand hadn’t done the job.  An empty cycle-through just in case hadn’t done the job.  An extra rinse didn’t do the job.  Rachel: did you take Mr. Washie on vacation with you?  Or did he sneak off to Santa Cruz with his buds?  Did he enjoy the beach?  Next time, tell your machine he needs to rinse off his little feet in the Whirlpool or he Maytag you too with some of that sand when he gets back.  Kenmore and more of it come off if I keep running it through?

I think I’ll go rewash that underwear.  I tell you: Mr. Washie’s in hot water now.

And now, for some comic relief, you have to go read this.  Would that all the bad guys could be caught by guile and gorilla like this.  And ain’t no way I could ever write something this funny.  Wow.

I’ll have to drive an old clunker awhile longer.   The papers are signed: solar wins.  And… (pardon the cellphone photos)…

I asked John Miles, my longtime audiologist, if Sonic Innovations had ever yet come out with a more powerful hearing aid.  (Okay, yes, I know, if you click on SI’s link it looks like the guy is gargling his, but never mind.)  I had had a pair of theirs for awhile that were musically by far the most perfect hearing aids I have ever tried–but they just weren’t loud enough for someone at my level of deafness, they fed back too often, and eventually I had to replace them.  But the best of the rest of what was out there was just plain not pitch-perfect.  They drove me nuts.  You can’t tell me Alison Krauss is singing those top notes flat in real life, you know and I know it’s lazy software.  Grrr.

So.  I was in to John’s recently getting some work done, and happened to ask him if SI had ever yet come up with the hearing aids of my dreams.  Louder?  Got feedback suppression now?  He went and checked.  Yes!

There was some twiddle-your-fingers time in his office this morning with my ears hitched up to his computer as he was programming the new aids and walking through the new SI system, and out came the knitting.

And I bet I’m the first patient of his to snarl my silk in his telephone-cord-type testing setup.

I went home and, first thing I did was to listen to a favorite song on a musician friend’s CD.  And then: Alison Krauss, “Now That I’ve Found You.”  The way she really sounds.  Heavenly.

At last.  Oh, at last!

I didn’t join up with Ravelympics in part because–well, we don’t even own a TV.

But last night we were visiting friends, and the friends’ kids wanted to watch Michael Phelps win his eighth gold: the TV got turned on.  NBC was of course not saying when the swim meet was going to be shown–they weren’t about to let people TIVO it.  We saw the Romanian woman break from the pack and get far, far ahead of the crowd of marathoners, and I was glad to see in the paper this morning that she did indeed win.

So I’m sure you all know all this already, and that you saw it while I only got to read about it: but.  Phelps won his eighth, and when the reporter asked him how he felt about it, he answered, “I just want to see my mom.” And then he threw his arms around his cheering mom and sisters.

And in the interviews, he praised and thanked his teammates, saying he didn’t know them before they all arrived but they were a part of him forever now.  He spoke like Randy Pausch, saying you could dream your dreams and make them happen, encouraging everybody else with his words in whatever dreams they might have. From everything I have read, he was gracious.  He was grateful.

And he honored his mother first, in front of billions of people. He reached for his family’s loving arms for and in affirmation before the camera’s.

(And he’s from my home state of Maryland.)

The man is a bona fide hero.

First, thank you to all who have written about Ruth. My hope is that her husband aka The Roketman will follow the link back here and read your words and mine and find comfort in them.  I am told there was a spinners’ guild meeting yesterday with him present, with tears and funny stories told on his wife.

What I wanted to mention for this morning.  Yesterday, my husband and I went off to Costco a little before they closed, and ended up in a slow line well away from the busy central aisle.

Very shortly a young couple with two little girls pulled their cart up behind us: three and a half year old twins, identical as far as I could tell, and absolutely adorable.

The mom looked really frazzled, the dad less so, but clearly it had been a long day; it showed in all of them.  As the wife went off to grab one last thing somewhere, my husband looked at the dad, smiled, and said, “I remember the days.”

When your children are little, there’s nothing in the world so comforting as a middle-aged stranger who thinks they’re adorable rather than a pain for being fussy.  And when you’re a parent, that is one of the perks of getting to that age. One twin grabbed her sister’s head and pulled it into her lap and rocked  back and forth a moment.  The other enjoyed the closeness at first, laughing, then decided to assert her individuality and pushed away hard. Normal sibling stuff.  She got her daddy to let her out of the cart, and then promptly laid down on the floor, swishing her arms and legs full circle.

“Wrong climate for snow angels,” I laughed, and the dad’s face lit up and he laughed.  He mentioned a trip to Tahoe they were looking forward to.  The other twin experimented for a few moments with the fact that she now got to take over the leg holes in the upper cart for both sides–it was designed to seat two–and then, when it wasn’t fun to take over her sister’s territory if her sister didn’t notice nor care, asked to be let out too.  Whereupon she flopped down on the floor a moment herself, looking the very picture of exhaustion, then leaped up and ran around her twin like a sheepdog herding her.  Never letting herself get too far away from her sister.  Stay close where it feels safe from the big world.

“I wish I had that much energy when I’m tired.”  Again, the dad laughed in response.

Next time Costco exhausts me, I will picture myself on the floor making snow angels.  Maybe one of their 25-lb bags of powdered sugar would help.

A side note: I like to answer every comment, but there was a problem with my email that hopefully is fixed now after I noticed that some of the ones on the last post never appeared in my inbox.  If you didn’t hear from me, I apologize.

Okay, another one just for fun.  That one top and center–boy does that bring back memories of exclaiming to a friend way back when when we were all in our early 20’s, “You bought a PINTO?  Your first new car, and you bought a PINTO?!” having many growing-up memories of my neighbor upset at his because the darn thing ran only when it felt like it on alternate fifth Saturdays of the month.

Well, the salesman had talked him into it, and it was cheap…

(I need to go car shopping. I really, really don’t want to.)

Jetblue does that flight once a day. Yesterday’s was cancelled. We’d heard there were delays due to smoke, and yesterday’s had been delayed so far into the night that Jetblue bagged it.

I was really afraid, with my asthma, of coming home to what we would find with all those new fires. So just picture my excitement, after all that worry, as we drove down the freeway: look! You can see the lights on the hills! Look! You can see the Oracle tower clearly! LOOK! It’s CLEAR!!!

Richard, pleased, said the seabreeze was blowing a good one tonight. And all was right with my world.

As we got further south, the sky started to muck up again, but that’s okay; I can handle it now. I saw that air further north. Maybe tomorrow I go hang out at Creative Hands yarn store (are they open Mondays?) in Belmont. How often will I ever get to claim this about a LYS: it’s for my health.

Jessie’s wedding was wonderful. The skies back home in northern California, at 1100 fires now, not so much. There’s a huge temptation not to get on the return flight in a few hours.

And then yesterday, driving across the foothills of Salt Lake City, one could see the smoke plume and the fire from clear across the valley: exploding propane tanks inside a burning building way out in the industrial area. Alright, alright, I’ll get on the plane–can’t run away from it, can I?

1. A bird’s-foot view:

Lene posted a photo she took of bird tracks that were probably made by pigeons, and it instantly hit me that if you turned them towards you and drew a circle around them, you had the Peace symbol. The Dove of Peace–I wondered, whoever drew the original, was that their inspiration? So I googled, found this, and have to think they did not make that connection. But it’s fascinating how well the two symbols converge.

2. Catapulted:

I was reading reviews of the Shake Awake, a silent alarm clock to put under one’s pillow, and had to laugh at one person’s descriptions of why it was such an improvement for her sound-sleeper hearing-impaired son: she said that before that, they’d had to throw the cat at him every morning to get him to finally stir.

3. Toucans help too:

I had a cardiology appointment this week, and if ever a doctor is likely to be suddenly interrupted and delayed, it’s a heart specialist. (It was just a follow-up to verify that yes, I’m fine there, my cardiac cough went away when that lupus flare did this past winter.) Definitely a bring-your-knitting appointment. As I waited, a very well-dressed elderly woman was wheeled into the waiting room by her attendant, who caught my eye, nodded at my stitches, and silently smiled at me.

The old one in her string of pearls and silk sat there in her wheelchair looking terribly bored and unhappy; it took me awhile to glance down from my knitting and notice that her lower legs were scabbed over in signs of old sores, many of them. Her shoes were perfect but her skin gave her away. She avoided eye contact. I noticed her attendant had pearl earrings on too, and I thought, you’re both generous souls, then; good for you.

I thought about it, then searched in my purse, looking for a particularly bright and cheerful one. And intricate. I wanted intricate. Something particularly nicely made. I found one, a toucan-looking bird, and just as the nurse opened the door and called my name, I reached across the small aisle between the seats and offered the old woman the finger puppet. A child’s toy? But an adult’s delight as well in the skill and pride that someone, somewhere in Peru had put into creating the piece.

The old woman’s face totally lit up in surprise and delight, and behind her, her attendant’s did too. So did the nurse’s. I didn’t want to delay the office by stopping to describe where I get those from, that no, I didn’t knit it, so as the door closed behind us going down the hallway, I mentioned to the nurse. I figured, if the patient wanted to talk to her about it, she could tell her herself. If they had time. The nurse’s call, not mine; the important part had already happened.

It’s hard to be old and lonely. Saying to somebody that they are noticed, even just in a small moment, can make a world of difference to them, and the rest of us too. It was so easy to do.

4. Now she sees it:

My daughter had an eye doctor appointment and I don’t even remember why I came with and waited for her, but I brought my knitting and did. A woman, I’m guessing Chinese, was walking past, saw the work in my hands, and stopped on the spot and came over and sat down next to me. It is amazing what you can convey with pantomime: she had never seen circular needles before. I demonstrated how you use them just like straights, and that no, the circular shawl I was knitting wasn’t a closed circle, it was back and forth; I pulled out my book and showed her how it would look finished. Oh! Then she wanted to know how to do lace. I taught her on the spot. Ssk, slants this way, k2tog, slants that, purl into a yarnover this way. By the time I left, she had it and she was thrilled. I couldn’t ask her how long she’d been knitting, I couldn’t ask her anything not communicated with waving hands and needles. But there is a universal joy in sharing knowledge and in learning how to do something new. I can just picture her running to me, wherever she is now, with her needles in hand to show me what she’s making now.

5. It’s all your fault:

And if you bought ME a Shake Awake, this being California, I’d probably need that cardiologist, thinking the San Andreas was going off bigtime.

First–happy birthday, Dad!

I love this town. My folks lived here the first year they were married, before they moved to Maryland in the early 50’s, and when they found out we were considering a job offer here, worried quietly–but didn’t tell us till we’d accepted the offer–that if we moved here, we’d never leave and we’d always be far away.

They were right. It’s been a good place to be.

My husband and daughter and I on impulse ditched the all-week leftovers last night and went to a place new to us, Thaiphoon, for dinner. You have to love a restaurant that introduces itself to you with a pun while referencing Real Weather (and the food was good). We do miss having a greater variety in the sky and air; it brings you, as one friend noted, closer to nature when the weather’s bad. The interesting nature award will probably have to go instead to the mountain lion that was sitting on our orthodontist’s fence a few years ago. Or the golden eagle eyeballing me as I got out of my car at home. I’ll take the eagle, thanks.

As we ate, there was a small toddler at the next table who looked very much like my sister’s twins did at that age, with very strong opinions and a gregarious charmer when he was happy. He’d fit right in. I thought, let his mom have a good night out with her friends; one Peruvian fingerpuppet coming right up. Happiness won out.

There is a local artist, Greg Brown, whose late mother-in-law used to play the organ at our church, her territory for decades–till a young teenage upstart of a show-off started horning in on her turf a few times a month. If he goofed, she let our son know with a grin: “Great improvisation there, Richard!”

Greg is famous for his murals on some of the downtown buildings. Check out this one, my favorite. Or this one, up in San Francisco. Or this.

This is also a town where once upon a time two new Stanford MBAs looked at the pet rock craze, where someone had just made a fortune peddling plain old pebbles with fun packaging, and they were sure they had a one-hit wonder in them, too. So they wrote, “Juggling for the Complete Klutz,” making good on their goofing off, expecting that that would be that. Thus Klutz Press was somewhat inadvertently born: the authors, like us, stayed. Klutz is a local institution whose one vividly-painted retail store is named “Klutz Intergalactic Headquarters.” Where they sell, should you need it, extra rubber chickens.

We walked from Thaiphoon last night towards Couppa Cafe for some hot cocoa as the evening foggy chill set in. We saw a jewelry store a few doors down. With a rubber chicken standing guard just inside the window: don’t steal the rings, or you’ll be henpecked.

I so love this town.

Meantime, just for fun, given all Richard and Kim’s wedding festivities of late, I had to share this picture I shamelessly stole from cuteoverload.com:

It was just making sure there’d be lots of leftovers for it, too.

Just an FYI for anybody who might enjoy knowing something I never would have thought of, had it not been for my friend Phyllis: what we did for Saturday’s flowers is we ordered them straight from the grower, freshroses.com. They’ll send you a sampler of colors to choose from in person before ordering for the big day, if you want. Five of us arranged them that morning into a few large arrangements and a small one for each table. Remember that the eye likes things in odd numbers: flowers high, medium and low in an arc, (there were five red roses here, not four.) Tuck some limonium (I know, it sounds like flooring material, and this arrangement lost some on the left in the car on the way home) and tree ferns around and behind, tie a matching ribbon at the neck of the vase, and there you go.  It’s much easier to pull off than I would have thought.

My camera’s on the fritz, so this is from my phone.

Nordstrom’s: zero. Zip. Nadda. Ain’t got’em. Doesn’t even carry Birkis anymore. (What!?) The guy was a prince, but he got desperate and tried fancy flipflops–you know, it being a Californian wedding and all, right? Mellow? Casual? Uh, sir… Didn’t matter. Couldn’t get my feet squeezed through and Cinderella’s wicked stepsister was out of luck. There simply was not. one. pair. Not even that he could put a rush order on, not at any price.

I’m debating putting in an aside here: pointy toes? They’re bringing back pointy toes? My stars, do you know how dainty pointy toes look on a double-EE foot, how far forward you’d have to extend the toe box for visual balance? Dudes. Errol Flynn could swashbuckle his way down the castle steps with those as backup swords. For him, though, they could be well heeled to the hilt. Heh.

So I went home and googled my size. Looked for the flats. Zappo’s had one pair left in this shoe and three left in that. I actually got to choose. Done.

(Toute being French for “all.”)

Michelle and I needed to go shoe shopping. Not my kind of thing to do: trying to buy shoes for me in most stores is like trying to buy qiviut in Walmart. They ain’t got’em. EE width in a formal shoe? Uh, no.  Try Nordstrom’s, lady. 

So Michelle shopped and didn’t quite find what she wanted right away either; I, since I look at shoe stores as something to escape from, thought that meant we were going to be out of there in no time. Right. I should have pulled my knitting out about fifteen minutes earlier than I did, but hey. A lovely African-American woman about my mom’s age was being dragged around shopping with a woman about my age, and as I knitted away, I grinned at the older one, “When the yarn’s gone, we’re done.” Totally cracked her up.

And then from a number of aisles over, Michelle’s voice, suddenly: “I heard that!” The woman about doubled over, laughing.

I had to shoot a picture of these with my phone when I saw them: did the person who designed them think of Tutenkhamen too, with those bright gold and lapis stripes?  Put these on, and you, too, can walk like an Egyptian.