While the Chicago teachers’ strike was going on, whatever one may think of that (and I actually thought their mayor made some good points against some of their arguments), Romney went on record as saying that teachers’ unions should not be allowed to make political contributions.

Think about that a moment. Out of all the possible groupings of individuals or corporate interests in the entire country, and under a Republican-celebrated Citizens United Supreme Court decision, teachers’, and only teachers’, unions should not be allowed to do what all the others throughout the United States can.

Says the man who wants to run the place. Shades of 47%. (The video Romney didn’t know was being taken behind closed doors with his donors in Florida.)

I can understand changing the laws to limit political contributions to being by individual human beings only, but I cannot understand how Romney could think it fine to disempower one and only that one group. Who would be next?

If only that were all there is to complain about. I read an article today at freepress.org. If what their investigators say is true, then like that video, word has to get out.

They say they have found that there is a group that is Mitt Romney’s 11th biggest donor, HIG Capital. Of the 49 people in charge at HIG, 11 used to work for Bain. And what do they sell?

Voting machines.

Voting machines that counted 10,000 non-existent votes in Ft. Worth. And there is more posted there, if you want to read it.

Holy. Cow.

With the Republican efforts to purge the voter rolls going on in contested states, the place to start is here, canivote.org, to make sure that your right to do so has not been messed with while there’s time to fix it if it has. Clicking through, it takes me to my county’s voter registration, which asks for my zip code, house number, and date of birth: yes I am still registered. Yes my husband still is, despite there being another man of the same name in the same town–no problem. Yes Michelle is too, but no, our youngest, who has not lived in this state for three years, is not–in other words, the records were indeed updated as they should have been.

I want this question asked loudly and by many. Why is it okay for a company that sells voting machines to make large political donations to the candidate they want? On the presidential level, no less. Given the right wing’s worship of the unfettered free market, I want a straight answer on just what that voting machine company thinks it’s buying with their large investment.

The New York Times had a graph last week showing the possibility of one individual vote’s possibly changing an entire state’s outcome, and in one swing state the probability was 8%. One. Single. Vote. Your choice to stand a moment in your precinct’s booth could determine not just the Presidency but Supreme Court decisions for a generation to come.

Vote!

Heard elsewhere:

Sarah Palin called Senator Joe Lieberman’s office.

“I’m sorry, he’s not here, it’s Rosh Hoshanah.”

“Hey, Rosh, could you take a message for me?”

———-

Edited hours later to add the real post. You know how some days are all about winding yarn while your brain sifts through what project and idea to pursue next? Only, I’ve been doing that with fruit trees, winding my way through websites, learning everything I can while trying to decide what makes the most sense for our small lot. Avocado trees are poisonous to birds? Forget that. Wait–we get 880 chill hours? We do? (The number of hours of cold a tree needs in the winter in order to produce a good crop come spring.) That’s a lot more than I thought and gives me a lot more options.

Note that if you plant close to a light-colored house it will reflect warmth onto the tree and up the hours needed.

Wait–Lorings? 750 hours–Yamagami nursery in Cupertino has Lorings?! (Down the right side there.) Lorings are the peach trees of my childhood!

There was a commercial orchard just barely into West Virginia that grew them.

The farm hands would come through and pick everything ripe or that might ripen, leaving only the tiniest and greenest that could never sell like that. The trees would then put their all into those very few, and over a few weeks they would become huge–a pound, a pound and a half, drip-through-your-fingers juicy and with a flavor like no other. But getting to them was so much work that to the farmer it wasn’t worth hiring help again for.

Mom and Dad would call, and when the peaches were ready for gleaning we would go. It was a long haul from the DC suburbs but also one of the adventures of our childhoods.  Putting ladders here and here and here with Mom and Dad, we six kids got to climb up in the trees after those scattered few, so perfect peaches left behind, while getting an incredibly good per-pound price for our prizes; for the farmer, it was found money.

And also found friends. He loved that we so much loved what he did–and that we got to see his peaches not the way they ship best but fully how they’re supposed to be.

Meeting new neighbors down the street once with some of those incredible peaches the day we’d picked them answered their wondering as to whether anyone would notice or care that they’d moved in. Wow, *where* did you get these?!

It took us, what, Marian, an hour and a half? Hour three quarters each way to get there? But it was always worth it.

I can grow Lorings here in California! Who knew!

The lace hat I was already working on yesterday when Representative Cleaver was speaking is finished. The cabled hat that I dropped two stitches at the needle switch awhile ago is now finally ripped way back and restarted: he’s getting a cabled hat and it’s back to halfway done so far.

Had quite a few laughs at the typos in the closed captions during tonight’s convention. John Kerry, it claimed, said: “We do batter where we must, peace where we can.”

That was even better than the spoken “a man and a woman” scrolling across the screen as “a minimum bomb.”  Let’s all go have that proverbial Army-fundraiser bake sale! (As the cold-war saying goes, it’ll be a great day when the schools get all the funding they need and the Army has to hold a bake sale.) Batter up! Bring on their just desserts! Robert Fulghum once wrote about how great it would be if we could stop wars by dropping from the planes colored paper and crayons, a bit of childhood delight revisited to make friends with the enemy below. I guess he’s saying we could let people have the means to draw down the fighting.

Add in some carrot pecan cake and some chocolate chip cookies, too, and surely you can’t go wrong with that.

(p.s. And maybe you’ve already seen this, but how many handknit lace fences are there out there? With thanks to Betsy Bowman for the heads-up.)

Did you hear that!? Knitters?! I sent messages to Ellen and India.

Emanual Cleaver, Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a House Rep from Missouri, got up before the Democratic National Convention today and proclaimed, “We need warm hearts. Not. Hot. Heads!”

I was stunned. Thrilled.  He cribbed our line! Cool! They DID notice in Congress!

I immediately wondered, who knit his? Surely he got one (and that if he didn’t we needed to fix that fast.) So many of us knitters made those hats for members of Congress in our campaign last year to get them to cooperate with each other in mutual respect and kindness, to say to them that no matter who we each were in our own politics, we wanted to make a statement that the too-dominant lack of mutual respect did not represent us well and, as I liked to think of it, we wanted them to put a lid on it.

Some thought it a waste of time. Some just didn’t have the time just then. Some did one, maybe two, with each one making a difference: how many people ever see, much less get offered, a handknit hat, and created just for them? Some threw themselves into the cause. The more hats that arrived, the greater the sense in the thank-you notes that came that, at least in some offices, our voices and our stitches were being received warmly.

Gratitude makes the hearts grow fonder.

I found Ellen’s spreadsheet. We got all the members of the Senate but not of the House and somehow Representative Cleaver didn’t seem to get one.  Wouldn’t it be great to help him reiterate his point that was our own all along? Wouldn’t it be great to send him a box of handknit hats to pass around, or maybe to send to the people that were missed last time around, but at least, we’ve got to have one for him. I think I might have some wool around here somewhere….

My cousin Grant Bennett spoke at the Republican Convention tonight about his neighbor and did a fine job of it: straight from the heart.

Then he introduced a few people, and I ended up emailing a friend from our ward here: was that your mom?!

It was. The mother of this child, if you want more of the woman’s story.

I still have no intention of voting for Romney, but I read a comment on the Washington Post today by a fellow Obama supporter who said that clearly the man loves his wife and she loves him: you can’t fake that look he saw between them.

Much though I dislike that Paul Ryan last night repeated outright lies that have been exposed again and again and he didn’t care–like that Janesville plant that closed not under Obama but while Bush was in office, that that debt commission report didn’t get acted on because he voted not to let it out of committee, and on and on–but his little boys stole the show by hamming it up every time the camera landed on them last night and tonight. I laughed as it got snatched away again and again, trying to find that right moment while the youngest especially was simply being a cheerful little boy cooped up too long in cooped-up clothes. Bring on the balloons!

I think it was his sister that caught one almost as big as her at the end and was wobbling with it, exit, stage right.

A quote in the Washington Post today about the GOP: “ “The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” ”

Generating. Angry. Okay…  CNN itself did not report what happened at the convention today until other outlets started asking them why, since they certainly should have had photographic evidence; finally, Wolf Blitzer made a statement re his camerawoman: a couple of abusive, racist people had gone, literally, nuts. “This is how we feed the animals!” as they threw peanuts at her.

Do I need to mention she was black and female? Did they realize how much shame the whole country would feel that they would think of such a thing, much less do it before the watching world?

Well, there you go, Graham. But at least those two got thrown out. Who they were or whether they were banned completely or snuck back in later, nobody seems to know. And if they’re actual elected representatives (or future ones), their constituents need to know.

A little calm fact-checking and setting in order after the speeches.

Richard, horrified at what that woman had been put through, hoped hard that Blitzer had told her that she didn’t have to stay there, that she didn’t have to take that, telling me he once counseled a fellow employee to just get up and walk out on a harasser and not ever worry about her job for it. He would stand up for her: her job was the one that was safe.

Boy did that bring back memories.  In the year after my college graduation, I had a boss who harangued and demeaned everybody. The car she was in was stuck? It happened to need the one and only thing I knew how to fix, I totally won as it started right up, and right there as the others on our shift were cheering me on she dissed me for it: only stupid people were mechanics.

And so much more. I needed that job but I hit the point of no return and all I could do was quit. Unbeknownst to me, every single one of my fell0w co-workers under her (there were about eight of us) did the same thing the same week; I was just the first. Then, at last, she was sent packing.

Thank heavens for good bosses who stand by their employees. We moved across the country for a good boss. A good boss is worth everything.

And you know we’re the bosses in this election. Be good ones. Vote!

I got tired of the squirrel scrums. So I changed the birdseed to safflower a few weeks ago and the suet cakes to ones with chili peppers as the second ingredient.

This means the juncos and towhees only stop by when a little suet hits the ground, but it’s so much more peaceful out there. With the coming of fall and the need to fatten up, the bushytails have finally started coming by, but never more than one at a time, they don’t eat much when they do come, and they’re certainly not about to make any effort to get at the stuff. It’s like offering a kid boiled brussels sprouts.

This also means my supersoaker got shelved. I wonder if that’s why the Cooper’s hawk has come back.

I looked up this evening in time to see–wait, was he trying to land on the birdfeeder?!  Or did he just brush it while trying to flush out a potential finch on the other side that he couldn’t see through the seed (only, there wasn’t one).

Huh.

Then he flew to the barbecue grill and watched us for awhile and Richard got to see him too.  A bit late of a hunt; it was definitely dusk. Beautiful, beautiful bird. We communed, with his permission. And then he was off.

Meantime, in the political world, a cousin here said a cousin there was going to be speaking at the Republican convention–and so I sat with a project that had needed justthismuchmore for so long and finally finished it off while I listened. Okay, lady from Oklahoma, you forgot your ninth grade history, but whatever. The woman who yelled about too many regulations–she paused for applause and had to wait for it. Oh. Right. Clap. Not everybody did, and I wondered how many spills and polluting incidents had come to the audience’s minds: 14,000 people would not have gone to the hospital this month had the Chevron refinery that blew up in the East Bay here been better regulated. Fourteen. Thousand. It looks like it will be now.

About an hour into it, I went back and doublechecked the messages: oh. Today’s not the day. And then I looked at the list of speakers for the right day and did a doubletake–wait! That name from–! I *knitted* for her once!

If you see a red scarf…

Re Debbi’s comment Tuesday: she was right. See here.

Now, total change of subject.

Picture your hand with your fingers splayed out as far apart as they go–okay, maybe mine, then, I’ve got small hands. That’s about what I saw diving up and over the other side of the fence Wednesday, clearly in pursuit of a smaller bird even if I only caught the tail end of the scene.

I wondered if that might have been…

Then last night Richard called out to me in great excitement and I didn’t come fast enough: he had seen a hawk! But not our Cooper’s, it was really small, and it had a brown back, and it was yay big, and it was a hawk! And not the Cooper’s!

It was great fun to see him so excited. He said it was bigger than a mourning dove but not by much. I flipped through Sibley’s with him, but he wasn’t sure.

So while at the bird center today I mentioned it.

Sounds like a Kestrel, Linda thought.

Exactly! That was my guess. I googled Kestrel images and, scrolling through them with him just now, he said that definitely could have been it. They are a falcon species.

I have never seen a Kestrel in the wild in my life, or at least not in full yet. I have a whole new raptor to look forward to. Cool!

I’ve been trying really really hard not to blog about politics of late. But I just cannot stay silent any longer. Did Todd Akins skip every history class, every current-events reading (hello conquests of South America by Europeans, hello Serbia/Slovenia)? His screamingly screwball ideas on biology: women can’t get pregnant when they get raped, and if they did it’s because they secretly wanted to because otherwise their magic powers would “shut the whole thing down”?

This is one of the men who writes our national laws?

Dang.

And he and Paul Ryan are likethis on this personhood thing.

Their bill would convict me of manslaughter for having had a miscarriage at nearly four months. There’s no getting around that, no explaining it away. Every baby conceived via in-vitro? The new illegals. Raped? Too bad.

If you haven’t read my old neighbor’s story, please, please do. She faced the consequences of exactly what they’re trying to do.

Laws are not intentions: laws are laws and you can’t wave away the part you don’t like–if it’s wrong, or some part of it is not quite what you meant, regardless of political expediency you don’t write much less pass that law. Period.

Can you picture a rapist suing for custody? I guarantee you that scenario will happen under that bill, and note that the very first thing announced out of Tampa as the Republicans get ready for their convention is that their plank includes a personhood declaration: all life, beginning with a single cell, has the full rights of a walking breathing human being. A potential person trumps a real one. No exceptions, not to save the life of the mother. Have an ectopic pregnancy? Catholic hospitals statistically already treat them surgically rather than medically so as not to directly harm the never-viable fetus, despite the fact that doing so can render the woman unable to ever carry another child and is often medical malpractice.

But our hopes and our families, they don’t matter there.

They cannot cry religious freedom when they are accepting money from the government of all the people, for all the people.

The Republicans put that plank in their platform despite all the states where the voters rejected that very thing. Including Todd Akin’s own Missouri.

Mitt Romney is not a Catholic and the Mormon Church knows that life is messy and that there may be circumstances we may be forced to factor in while grieving our loss. So why does Romney go along with this?

Why does the Republican party want government to stay away from regulating their guns, their Wall Street, their polluting corporations and their rich but demand that that same government be right there between every woman’s uturus and her doctor? I understand not liking abortion, I fervently don’t like abortion either. I also understand that we live in a multicultural, diverse nation that prides itself on its tolerance.

And on its justice.

Tonight was the night.

Barron Park Plumbing Supply’s landlord had signed an agreement with the developer that if Geier’s plan got approved, the building would be sold to him.

And you know it would be bulldozed.

There’s a small halal grocer in that little group of businesses; the owner complained that Geier had fenced off the end of her one-way parking strip’s egress. Three days it stood, and three days her customers did not come. It seems clear that he hoped to push her into bankruptcy so he could have that lot, too.

Note the German translation of his name: vulture.

So, now that it was out of the planning commission,  Mountain View City Council was considering the issue of whether the monstrous proposed redevelopment should be built.

I love that one councilwoman said, There’s supposed to be a public benefit and the only benefit I see here is to the developer.

Others piled on and the project, at least in its current form, was shelved. Round two to Milk Pail, and kudos to all the council members who stood up for those small businesses and owners on that corner and for the residents as well.

(p.s. A non-sequitur because I want to record the date: this afternoon, while I was stopped at a light, a peregrine falcon flew overhead and then swooped down close, giving me a good view, and away. Wow!)

A few years ago I bought several skeins of Cascade’s Eco Alpaca at Purlescence, a very soft undyed baby alpaca for a project that was never to be.

Heading out the door tonight for the Mountain View meeting to defend the continued existence of Milk Pail–for the record, it was the Environmental Planning committee meeting in the council chambers, not the city council itself–I decided I needed a mindless project for it and I didn’t have one. Needed two circs in a size I didn’t have available–well, then, 8s it would have to be, what goes with 8s?

And so I grabbed two leftover half-skeins of that baby alpaca and decided to knit them doubled, hoping I would have enough. I weighed them: 50 and 52 g. Sounds okay.

I cast on as the meeting began at 7:00 sharp. Hmm, too short, rip. Started again, guessing at the eventual size and give of the ribbing; it wasn’t a gauge I normally knit hats in. Sixty stitches. Okay, hope, go.

The seats in the chamber were filled. There were people along the walls and a few sitting on the floor, the place was packed–and you know which side they were on.

The meeting started out sounding really bad, though: the developers went on and on and didn’t seem to get challenged much. Gradually, though, I started to breathe as person after person got up to speak from the audience when it was our turn. (I didn’t; not being a resident of that city, I didn’t think they would allow me.)

The thought came to me, you know, this yarn is about the color of Steve’s hair, I bet he’d like it…

One elderly fellow had to be told he couldn’t speak again, he had to let everybody else have their four minutes. He waited patiently till all were done and then he came down to the podium a third time, and this time a gentle chuckle went around the room. The subject at hand was only the commissioners’ first of the night and we were well over two hours in, but they heard him out.

Dang–in my town they’d have cut the mike. They never did.

I had no scissors, I had no sewing needle, and even individually, those two strands refused to break for the amount of effort I was willing to put into it.

Well then. I wound in the first end with my knitting needles and somehow managed to get a tie-off, and then a second tie-off on the top of the hat. Turned it right side out, done, with the two almost-gone balls of yarn inside still attached.

Afterwards, Steve let me catch him for a moment. I apologized for the lack of scissors and told him he’d have to snip the yarn but it was ready to go, done. There’d been a lot of cold wind blowing his way of late, and… I hope it fits.

We won! The worst round, and there will be more rounds to come, but, we won!

If I’d counted right when I started my project, I wouldn’t have learned how to make the first lace pattern flow so beautifully into the unexpected new one nor would I be planning what comes after these two.

I should stumble more often. I am really really really pleased with how this is coming out–it was hard to put down.

As the afternoon wore on, to give my hands a break I was reading and then grumping over some news: Arizona’s House approved a bill that went below and beyond to actually allowing employers to demote or fire any employee who uses birth control even if it was paid for out of their own pocket. This sentence was removed from the old law: “A religious employer shall not discriminate against an employee who independently chooses to obtain insurance coverage or prescriptions for contraceptives from another source.”

Their Senate looks ready to pass it.

Wow.  Anyone who’s ever had a bad boss (I certainly have), raise your hand… I wonder how fast the Supreme Court would take that one on.

And so I turned on the stereo, looking for relief from all that.

Alison Kraus began singing a cappella.

A young dove flew in and settled in on the patio. Watching me. Learning a new song. Tilting her head up to pay particular attention when I sang too. She relaxed into her spot on the concrete and stayed there as long as the album played, the very model of being still within the world.

Acknowledging the gift, I turned back to that beautiful, radiant yarn and knit in increasingly happy anticipation of its arrival home.

I was paying too much attention to the vicious speech and its aftermath, the twisting non-apology that came only after advertisers started to bail, to the much-ignored fact that one of Ms. Fluke’s points was that birth control pills are used in treating ovarian cysts and ovarian cancer, which is what her friend had needed them for.

I was one of many who wrote to the folks funding his show, but finally, enough–I needed an antidote to all that.

Her timing was perfect: my friend Jade called and came by in the afternoon. We’d run into each other at Stitches for the first time in probably three years and were interrupted, and it was such a joy to just sit down and spend some time together, this time with a cheerful, “Hi, Jade!” from Richard. And I do like to show him off. He’s a good one.

And then as soon as the sun was down enough, he and I went to Milk Pail to get manufacturing cream–and it was in stock this time! Yes! We got the last one. Totally lucked out.

And so (bwaahaahaa) at around ten, after checking with her beforehand to make sure she would be up and it would be okay, we delivered a late-night snack, a still-warm chocolate torte to Becca’s door.

It felt so good to see her so delighted. It did me much good. Chocolate torte: comes in self-serving sizes.

A certain subject in the news seems to me to show that certain people need a wider perspective. Rep. Joe Walsh says, “This is about religious freedom.” But there is also freedom from someone else’s religion that pertains, especially re an employer that accepts government money.

And so I share this memory:

Thirty years ago, we were living in a married grad student apartment complex, a set of four buildings facing each other with playground equipment for small children in the middle. There were several of these.

And quite a few of the women in our courtyard started getting hang up phone calls that summer. So many that it began to become a subject mentioned and oh yeah me too and talked about around our little playground.

What we did not know is that he apparently wanted to know who was home when: the one single mom who lived there (just one; doesn’t that sound quaint?) was being stalked. Till the day he broke into her ground-floor apartment through her window and threatened to kill her young daughter sleeping in the other bedroom if she didn’t cooperate. She was raped by a man she had never seen before.

She called the police after he was gone and was transported to the local hospital, where they examined her–

–and then refused to do anything to make sure she hadn’t gotten pregnant in the last half hour or so. The ambulance had taken her to the local Catholic hospital.

She had to find her own transport from there in the middle of the night to the other one in town to clean off that man’s filth.

That could have been any one of us at any time and we women knew it.

There was no way she wanted a child of hers to have to accept how it had been conceived. Or to be from that man’s gene pool, and on into the generations to come. No way she wanted to have to tell her small daughter why she was going to be a big sister now–can you imagine trying to explain that one to a four-year-old?! And no way she was going to let a violent rapist dictate the rest of her life and her child’s and possible future children’s.

“A bad man hurt my mommy” –I have never forgotten that phrase–and in their own home is a heavy enough burden for a young girl to grow up with.

Now. I am not a Catholic, granted, and my own church calls abortion not murder but rather “like unto it,” to be avoided if at all possible. There are times when that is not possible–you cannot grow and produce a living baby from a mother who has died of the pregnancy.  But in a situation like this one, when there isn’t even a single cell dividing into two yet, to me there is no question she did what she had to do.

But whatever choice a woman may make or may have to make, that woman is to be loved and supported unconditionally, as are we all.

I understand where people like Rick Santorum are coming from, believing that all life is sacred. I feel that yes; yes, it is. But it is also messy, and I feel that must be taken into account.

I guess I am still incensed that a half hour later, when conception probably hadn’t even taken place yet… (And yes, the ambulance driver totally blew that one.) She had to find her own way across town alone in the middle of the night while knowing that man was out there somewhere to get to the other hospital. Thank goodness there was one.

I want to tell all those men who testified in Congress on the subject of contraception–this wasn’t even about abortion but contraception!–allowing no woman to give any opposing viewpoint, that I will do everything I can to vote them out of power and out of office.

The other part of my neighbor’s story? Her bike was stolen, too. Another neighbor reassured her that some men are good and kind by giving her his, a good one, even though we were all grad students living on nearly nothing and that was his main transportation. It was what he could do.

Earlier, someone had given us their window air conditioning unit when they’d moved away; our baby had had heat rash, it being 108 humid degrees in our upstairs apartment, and they wanted to make our lives easier, since theirs were immediately about to be so with their graduation and new job to go to. Here. Take this.

About a week after that event that devastated us all, and just before we ourselves moved away, we gave that AC unit to that single mom. Not only were she and her daughter going to be far more physically comfortable with it: nobody was going to be able to break through that window again without first making enough noise for her to be able to call for help.

It was what we could do.

First there were the tapes. Family voices from long ago that Richard digitally transcribed for his mom for Christmas. She was absolutely thrilled that she could now share them with her brothers and sister and children rather than having them sit in a drawer. Most. Successful. Present. Ever.

That having worked out so well, a box from his dad showed up two days ago despite our saying we had no such player. Reel-to-reel tapes. Now there’s a reely current technology.

Could we would we?

Uh…

A check of Ebay revealed non-working machines and one listed in the hundreds; Richard remarked that there’s a rubber part that wears out, and at the ages of these…

But the box was here.

Oh and. His dad mentioned that Uncle R had had a machine and had donated it to a tech museum and it was in our town! Maybe we could ask to borrow it back?

Uh…

So I put a note on our ward chat list, feeling like that was our last chance. Someone from church responded almost immediately, saying her husband was determined to hold onto one of every technology that might have family recordings on it, and so, yes, they had a reel-to-reel; would we like to borrow it?

Blessings on Sue and Ken, the problem is solved and now we just have to get started.

(Anyone get that Rose Mary Woods reference in the title?)

p.s. Watched my first Republican debate tonight, transfixed by the political theater. Gingrich wants a lunar colony with hopes for it to be the 51st state by his second term. Really. Maybe they could just aim that $99 billion railroad at the sky.