Grabbed what was closest and softest to hand from my stash and knitted up a third of the first skein of Woolfolk Far while watching the Iowa town hall meeting tonight. After shivering in DC last week I was stuffing that cabled yarn onto size 4mm needles for a thickly-knit cowl.

Which happens to be in black, because that’s what there was. The sooner I finish it the happier my eyes will be but the longer my hands get to caress it the happier they’ll be.

The Democratic National Committee had threatened the candidates that they would be banned from future official debates if they set up their own, so instead they took that stage and the questions from the audience one candidate at a time, competing in the immediate sense only with themselves, connecting better with those who’d come to see who they were. I liked it.

Meantime, in solidarity with the good folks back home trying to dig out of their record-breaking blizzard, one of my peach trees broke out in a bit of spring for them. The name of the variety? Tropic Snow.

Oh, so that’s what happened.

I was reading someone’s complaint that the Democratic candidates’  debate that was supposed to start at 5 pm Eastern didn’t at all because the pundits spent the first half hour guessing what was going to be said, making everybody wait on them. And yeah, I might have been annoyed had I set aside the time to watch it–which I would have, had we been home.

But that delay is why we got to see the last half hour of it after we got back from a friend’s Christmas party.

When it was over, I tried to see if anyone had the full video available yet. Nope–only Clinton’s, and only Clinton’s, opening statement. Curious. Eh, wait a day or two. And now there are highlights posted. I don’t want highlights and pundits: I want to see all of what the candidates said, how they said it, and how they responded to each other so that nobody’s making my decision but me.

I wrote a long post. I deleted it. I’ll just let this guy say most of it.

Note that the contract the Democratic National Committee had had Sanders’ campaign sign when they rented out the voter data to them put no requirements on what they could or could not do with what they found there–it was a badly written contract, but it meant that even the staffer Sanders immediately fired for downloading Clinton’s information had done nothing wrong per what they had agreed to.

But the DNC sure did. They ignored the Sanders campaign’s repeated pleas to close their security breach. They had stated in their contract that ten days’ notice would be given before cutting off data to a campaign and they did no such thing. Bernie Sanders landed major endorsements and got his two millionth donation and had a very very good day and suddenly they cut him off from his own data and donors. Whatever you may think of any of the candidates, that’s wrong and blatantly anti-democratic.

Here’s one petition that got over a quarter million signatures in one day. Go git’em.

I know, I know, you need a break from all this. But two of the perpetrators of today’s massacre–well, of one of today’s two massacres, the bigger one that got more publicity–were found hiding in the city where we will be attending a wedding next month. We are all within six degrees of connection. Every time.

Here is Neil DeGrasse Tyson presenting the numbers we know but we don’t want to know. One. million. four. hundred. thousand. since Mr. Kitto’s fifth grade class at Seven Locks.

Here, at Slate, is an essay asking us what kind of a country do we want to live in. We do have a choice. Second Amendment and all, daily mass slaughter is just not how it was when I was growing up: our Congressmen have made decision after decision, persisting in spite of increasing consequences, that have brought us to where we are now.

Is this what we want more of?

(Edited to add this link.)

We have to wait a year before we can express ourselves with our ballots but we can sure speak up now and be heard just the same.

By my calculations, assuming there’s no increase in the rate–which there relentlessly has been every single year since 2001–that means 32,640 more Americans will be dead of gunshot wounds from household-owned firearms by Election Day next year, plus however many more while the lame-duck moldy-leftover politicians continue to offer prayers for the victims while actively doing everything they can to prevent God from helping us get ourselves out of our man-made mess.

Write and call your Congressperson (find them here) as if your very life depended on it. For 32,640 people whom you may know, it does.

In the choreography of G_d department that let a grieving mother know she is not alone.

A few friends of mine shared, via Facebook, an account written by a woman who was out having a meal last week with her friends. They happened to be the mother and sister of Sandra Bland, the young African-American woman on her way to her new job at a university in Texas who was pulled over for not signaling and who inexplicably, inexcusably died in a jail cell for it days later. Some say the background of her mug shot was the jail floor, that she was already dead by the time it was taken.

But this, rather, is what the woman writes about.

A man walked into that restaurant and sat down at another table, alone.

After some moments the writer, marveling, got up the courage to go ask him if he were indeed he. He was, and, invited, yes, he wanted to meet them very much.

“He took no record, he made no statement. He did not try to turn it into a publicity stunt. He simply made space for a sacred moment, and then let it pass without trying to gain anything from it.”

They, not he, asked for pictures to capture the moment.

He said Sandra’s name at Tuesday night’s debate to comfort her mother and sister, that she might not be forgotten.

Because that’s who Bernie Sanders is.

Open Enrollment time of year, with required medical screening. Because why should April and tax time have all the fun?

And every year our insurance company starts bouncing claims come August or so, claiming I have other insurance. Every year I call them. This time I actually went to their website to see what gives, and that other insurance they list? It’s them. Same account. Same everything but with the previous year’s date. But that’s double coverage and reason enough to stiff everybody for months on end, right? Every. Year.

I think the state insurance commissioner and I need to have a little chat.

I will be so glad when we take the age discrimination out of Medicare and come into the civilized age.

Five members of the Supreme Court, including Catholics Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, turned down their invitations to witness Pope Francis’s address to Congress. I can only feel that they–and we–missed out. There is a power for good in the example of a person of great love, a clarity offered to one’s sense of purpose. Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Thomas S. Monson of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and any others you might want to name from your own experiences or readings: they don’t just preach it, they live it.

If only….

Breyer was in San Francisco to give a talk and sign copies of his new book–my daughter is in the audience as I type.

After the Pope left yesterday, two reporters stumbled into the best, most human story on what would be Boehner’s surprise resignation come the morning: Boehner beckoned them to the spot he had stood in to try to feel what he had felt, to experience some part of what the day had been for him. The Washington Post, here, and a Q&A with Speaker Boehner today, here.

By now you’ve probably heard of Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old who built a clock and took it to show to his engineering teacher at his new high school in Irving, Texas.

Now, being married to a nerd, we have a lot of motherboards and various other parts kicking around here. Lots. He’s actually got my yarn stash beat. (Note which one of us is writing this.)

The Heathkit company of our youth quit making electronics kits ages ago. Even I built some of their kits–it was a requirement in a college electricity course. My clock finally died after 35 years but the alarm in case the standing freezer gets too warm is still at work in the garage.

So into that vacuum stepped the folks who started Raspberry Pi after looking at how expensive gadgets had gotten; few parents would want to let their kid take, say, an iPad apart and explore its innards, and they decided budding nerds needed to have access to electronic parts to tinker with and to be able to make things at a reasonable price–and I mean exceedingly reasonable.

And thus we have, for instance, the controller that turns the Christmas lights on my mango tree on and off depending on the temperature range I set for it. Had we bought such a gadget prefab it would have been prettier but also more expensive and this way my sweetie has made himself a part of that tree’s success. He built that.

This is the hubby who decided one Christmas years ago when the kids were little that the usual setup of chairs across the hallway with blankets draped over it to block their view of the goodies ahead wasn’t enough. The rule was that you wait for Mommy and Daddy and Mommy and Daddy are allowed to sleep till a semi-reasonable hour after trying to assemble that #*% rocking horse till 2 am (second page of instructions, line 17 halfway down: “Before you start, make sure you…” And so forever after it had a screw missing because there just was no way.)

No peeking.

A motion sensor, a tape recorder, and the very unexpected sound of Daddy’s voice: “Go. back. to. BED, Richard!”

And so it was with some amazement that I listened to my ever calm peacemaker of a husband take off on that principal and those cops. “They should be in JAIL!” He was just outraged. In his own youth, he told me, he had gotten permission from the school, made fireworks (me: You *made* fireworks? him: Yes, I made fireworks!) and had brought them in.

They called Ahmed’s clock a bomb and when he confirmed his last name and refused to say that it was a bomb, after having illegally questioned him without allowing him to notify his parents much less in their presence, they marched him across the school in handcuffs, hauled him to police headquarters and arrested him.

Let’s see: false imprisonment, false police report, false charges, under color of authority, lack of parental notification, libel, and even after they found out that it really was just a clock the school still said he was suspended for three days as if he were somehow guilty for embarrassing them–and then they sent home a letter to the other kids’ parents about how their children were being kept safe (from, basically, terrorists by the sound of it) and that there had been an incident but everything was fine now.

Now, if they’d thought it was really a bomb, would they have left it sitting in the school as they blasted this child? But they did.

Would they have evacuated the school? But they did not.

It all comes across as the English teacher and the principal with the cops piling on trying to show that smart brown kid with the Muslim name just exactly who had the power around here.

But then, thank heavens, the aftermath began. President Obama on Twitter: “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”

Mark Zuckerberg, NASA (he was wearing their t-shirt when it happened) and a growing number of places: You want to come tour our headquarters/lab/etc? We want smart people like you and we would love to show you around here.

Mohamed’s father, an immigrant from Somalia, thanked all those who stood up for his son: I love America. When we see something wrong we stand up.

The school is utterly unrepentant.

Some lawyer is totally going to clean their clock.

On air. As the reporters interviewed.

I am not by any means someone who feels there is no place for gun ownership. My husband and sons were taught at a rifle range at scout camp when they were younger. Grizzlies will happily eat you in Alaska. Etc.

But the blunderbuss and frontier of colonial days is not what we have now and our laws need to reflect current reality–and technology. If that requires a Constitutional amendment I’m all for it, although I will point out that before the current makeup of the Supreme Court the original version did the job quite well.

Parents cannot legally leave small children unattended but in Virginia a toddler by law can shoot a gun as soon as he is able to hold one up long enough to do so. Any size magazine. Cheers.

The thing about politicians is that by being voted into office they have a little more power than the rest of us do and we willingly give them that power.

And then some of them claim they have none because, y’know, peers. Or they sell it, or at the very least sell us out.

When someone invented a gun that could only be operated by its owner he got blasted by the NRA and sent death threats. Here was a champion of the Second Amendment who was threatening the income stream of the other gun manufacturers–because you wouldn’t want to have to, y’know, pay for any kind of licensing agreement on his invention.

Death threats. For trying to make guns safer.

There is now on average a multiple-victim shooting every day in America.

Every single politician who has voted for there to be zero restrictions whatsoever on guns is choosing to be complicit in those murders. Full stop.

Drying: a warm hat in half bamboo half pearl flecks. (My airport project a few weeks ago, finally blocked.)

Yet more zucchini to ditch somewhere on someone. Maybe I’ll take some to knit night tomorrow.

With Ellen. Twinset Ellen of Minnesota, who propelled the whole Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign, where she got about a hundred knitters together online, with India T of New Hampshire as our third organizer/cheerleader. The idea was to create a hand knit hat for every member of Congress to send them tangible testimony from their constituents that we wanted them to stop fighting and to sit down and do their jobs working together, and one House member actually referenced our campaign in a speech on the floor! He wanted us to succeed and that did us a ton of good. We felt heard.

We didn’t quite make it before the weather got too warm to consider wearing hats and people kind of gave out. But we got one for every Senator and at least half of the House and mostly coming from the members’ own districts.

It’s all her fault. I threw out a stray what if/if only and she went YES if, let’s *do* it!

A huge thank you to every one of you out there who knitted those.

She’ll be here. I get to finally meet her in person, and we’re going to Purlescence together. To say I. Can’t WAIT! does not begin to tell it.

So, Donald Trump’s campaign released an ad via Twitter: the Donald, the flag, and faded into its background stacks of hundred dollar bills, the White House, and a small group of soldier trudging across a field.

Except, as Mother Jones pointed out (and the Washington Post ran the story too and then apparently took it down, so take this whole thing with a grain of salt if need be), if you do a search for images of World War II soldiers, then (allegedly) that same photo pops right up.

And it’s Waffen SS soldiers. You had to know the uniform or at least look it up, and whoever it was at the Donald’s offices didn’t think to do so, says Mother Jones. He blamed it on an intern (does he pay his interns? Just curious) and it quickly got taken down.

So (if true, and even if it’s not) it proves the old axiom: those who don’t know history are doomed to retweet it.

——-

And I was going to leave it right there at that punch line, but a box arrived in the mail this evening, completely unexpected. It was from Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns. I knew she’d been playing with color gradients but I had no idea and absolutely no expectation of anything whatsoever, much less that she would surprise me with some of what she’d been doing, and look at all that…. Wow! Gorgeous, gorgeous, soft stuff. Just, wow! She did it simply to make my day. I am totally blown away. Thank you, Melinda!

I was waiting at the pharmacy at the clinic, knitting away, and found myself looking at the project in my hands and up at the harried clerk who has known me by name for a couple of years now. No not this one–not her color. But I do have a skein of that one she has on…

And with that it felt like I was reclaiming a part of myself that had been too quiet of late. Anticipating making someone happy with my needles–man that felt good already. Thank you Karin for jumpstarting my needles!

And at the other end of the day, I probably should have picked that round zucchini: it was big enough and I was watering it, which would make it a more likely target even if the squirrels hadn’t chewed on it yet. But dinner was already cooking and I knew that there was no way I was serving zucchini in any way shape or form for tomorrow’s dinner. No matter how homegrown. Nuh uh.

It was the hottest June 27 on record in Washington DC, as many people let us know that day. The year ended in zero. The President was someone whose grandson would later talk a reluctant waiter into making the number 47 famous. (Political families and political junkies, both of us.)

Jon Stewart, and then Malala.

Those who forgave. So soon and so freely, even in their anger and their pain beyond comprehension: they are the ones with the power to change how we all talk to each other about that which wounds and divides us, they are changing the world by their loving, by their actually being what the rest of us could only hope we might. But that we never want to have to know if we could.

Alison Kraus‘s “I’ll Fly Away” with The New Yorker’s cover.

While over here, I want to rage at that stupid, stupid state law that keeps a wretched symbol endlessly at full height and to tell the South Carolina legislators, Take that Confederate battle flag down. NOW. Your shame is flapping in the wind for all the world to see in front of the statue of a man who represented the worst of what the Civil War was fought over. Stop with the willful blindness. Gov. Nikki Haley claims CEOs in her state don’t care but I do and I will boycott South Carolina and every business in it till it’s down. BMW, Denny’s, are you listening?

And then there are the families at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, not shaming but offering understanding so that we can all become better than this, so that our children’s future might have greater light. Reclaiming their church as a haven of safety offered to all who seek it.

I aspire to be like them when I grow up.

It was a drought year the year we moved into this house and that one lasted seven years. Then we remodeled. (After the ’89 quake our kitchen cabinet doors kept falling on our heads–they had to go.)

The contractor did damage to the aging roof and we ended up with seventeen buckets catching the incessant water leaking inside. It rained so much that winter that a beam he’d had waiting in the yard for a few days warped enough to soon crack the new window set against it–so that had to be replaced. We named the inside downpour roof juice and joked that if the legislature should ever again need to end a drought, all they had to do was re-remodel this place for us.

I’m waiting….

And then it turned dry again. So we’ve been pretty good at not wasting water for a very long time now. The San Francisco Bay Area, for whatever reason, has been better at water conservation than the whole rest of the state and is under slightly less drastic cutbacks. My one fault was frequent laundry loads, because having gone through that one good-sized earthquake I just really don’t want anyone to be out of underwear when the next one hits.

Relandscaping this past year, though, with the extra water that new trees need and with sixteen fruit trees–when they said cutbacks were going to be mandatory, I thought we were totally hosed. So I bought us more underwear. More favorite-color-blue oxford shirts for him. Bigger laundry loads done less frequently, well okay, and I have thrown some loads together that my momma taught me not to mix, but, drought, so, yeah.

Not because we wanted to, but, we bought a much more water-efficient dishwasher. We replaced that outside faucet at last, and although that wouldn’t show up in the bill yet, that will make a difference, too. And tonight, with Richard’s back giving him grief, I unloaded four monster bags of mulch from the car.

I just went to pay the utility bill and just kind of stared at it a moment. There’s a line where you can compare how much you’re using to how much you used in the same time period last year. It doesn’t show you two years ago, and that’s the number the state is comparing against, but it still definitely gives us an idea.

Our city is under a mandatory 24% water reduction starting June 1. I was sure any laundry savings was being offset by my trees.

I had to do the math to make sure we hadn’t already hit that target. We are so very very close that replacing that tap was all we needed and laying down that mulch will top it off.

Gee, maybe I could have planted that pomegranate I wanted after all.

Next year.

Hey, Jerry Brown, maybe just painting the outside and redoing the driveway would be enough this time?

Thank you, everybody. Today was definitely better.

And… The outside faucet now refuses to turn all the way off. Yow. This is so much not the time to be wasting water— $135 for an hour of a plumber’s time tomorrow will be money well spent, for my sense of guilt as much as avoiding being fined.

Meantime, five fire hoses full time, 100 gallons a minute each for eight weeks, the most pristine Yosemite-area water in the state when free recycled water was available right nearby but, y’know, then you’d have to pay the truckers… That link gives a whole new meaning to Candle in the Wind.

I can’t fix them (ah, okay, here’s the followup article) but I can fix mine.