There were reports of two pips spotted among the three peregrine falcon eggs on San Jose City Hall. These are the tiny holes where a baby beak begins to do its first job. White fluff was spotted on the first, video was taken, and I am told that you can hear the tiny sounds of the eyases (chicks) as they are slowly showing themselves out.

I don’t think I can–there might be something at the very edge of my hearing with everything turned full blast, possibly–but maybe you can hear it.

Try to say ‘Pretty pre-pomegranate’ six times fast.

Next to it, the English Morello started blooming a month ago at the bottom and has been slowly working its way towards the sun: the top had stayed so bare that a friend had asked me if it were dead, but a few days ago it burst into blossom.

While the early sour cherries below are already well on their way. Spacing out not just the picking but the pie-making. Nice.

Every time a squirrel goes near the sweet cherry tree, which is much more to its taste, one of a pair of mockingbirds dive-bombs it and it high-tails it, literally, down the fence line. Mrs. M over there might get mad at it for eating her roses but she doesn’t move at the speed of wings.

I’m not sure, but I think the mockers’ nest is tucked somewhere down in the dense tangle of the mango tree. I’m trying not to disturb it.

Did you know that spiders produce different types of silk and it depends on what they’re using it for? That wrap-the-prey silk is different from wrap-the-precious-eggs silk is different from spin-the-web silk? That there can be seven different kinds?

Did you know spider silk is used in bulletproof vests?

I didn’t either.

Seems to me that on the latter all you really need to do is train the spiders to leap out at the bad guys. The jumping Wolf ones might be good for that. The perps will stop right there throwing their hands through their hair over and over screeching, NO NO GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME!

I’m just trying not to look at the pictures too close to bedtime.

Tonka truck for scale, sort of.

If I hold it up, the weight drags it to being slightly taller than me, but the recipient has about 5″ on me. It should cover her feet and go up to her chin which means the person’s height plus a bit extra for wiggle room.

Factor in that it’s 50/50 cashmere/cotton and I’m going to deliberately preshrink that cotton a bit when I scour the mill oils out before handing it off.

So I figure I’ll simply keep going till I finish that big cone and call it good. I’ve got about 175 yards to go. Today’s her birthday and she got a note and an IOU for now.

Oh, and just because: I’ve got to show you the renter near Tahoe who couldn’t figure out where the purring sounds were coming from till he finally called in a volunteer group to check just to make sure it wasn’t…

There were five bears hibernating underneath the house.

Who knew black bears snore like kittens?

Falcon swear words: We have three eggs to guard and they think they can swipe our nest? Well let me tell them!

Also re the nesting instinct (or not): go to the house with the luxurious couch for people who refuse to talk to each other, scroll down to the master bedroom, look at that loft and that railing and tell me if that doesn’t just insist “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” isn’t begging on its knees to be disobeyed. One fell off and bumped his head and wasn’t that fun? The round-and-round staircase totally makes it. Race you! Whee!

The upskirt floor so you can keep an eye on the kids up there.

All that over-the-top everything–and then you see the kitchen.

You know how a kitchen can totally sell a house?

I, I… I can only think they intend for it never to be sullied with food–that would just be too messy. Let the caterer deal with it.

And random item the third, it was 38F this morning and there is rain in the forecast and I’m not sure what season this thinks it is but we’ll definitely take it.

Cold weather is definitely better incentive for having a pile of afghan in progress all over you than last week’s record 94F.

When we came home last week there was a smell, not strong, of something in the side shed that was inviting scavengers: crows, skunks, whatever could get into that space, to have at it. I did not go looking to see what it was. Within a day or two it was gone.

I’ll never know for sure–but it was along the path the male cottontail took to come into our yard, and he has not been seen since the day we left. Just the female, with her distinctive lighter curves over her haunches contrasting with her darker fur.

Her belly is noticeably smaller now, and yeah, it’s been about a month since they declared which of them was which.

For the first time, there was no sign of her today either. Yeah I know rabbits are terrible for one’s garden, but I was really enjoying watching them as they kept our weeds at bay, their ears twitching from time to time, their watching me when I open the door, waiting a moment to see if (insert teen whine) Aw, Mom, do I *have* to hop away? I was just getting to the dessert part of this leaf! Okay, FINE. (Slaps back feet against the ground. Goes to their room under the bush.)

While below we have the rare Dog-Faced Spring Titmouse.

Meaning, a paper lunchbag’s worth of my friend Kathy’s dog’s fur was put out there for the birds before we left and nearly all of it is gone now.

I can’t wait to see the fledglings. I am slightly less enthusiastic about a yardful of baby bunnies. But we’ll see.

So the new tiercel’s been making a huge display of territory and the falcon’s been receptive but about ready to be done with the planning stage of the season and lay those eggs, when suddenly today one can only guess the previous peregrine decided he really was serious about getting his nest and his mate back.

Unless it was a third male altogether.

It’s been over a century since there were enough of them alive to bother to fight over a good territory–and there’s nobody alive but all of us to be able to tell what it’s like when they do.

This video shows both camera views at once: same spot, different angles. The one on the right, a UCSC student is trying to figure out where they went, and the fixed-position one on the left, way up in the sky, shows part of the comeback attempt with Grace looking on and yelling Go Team Go!

But at this point nobody’s quite sure who won.

My friend Sue, recently home after two years abroad, put out a note that today was going to be Pi Day and she’d left her pastry blender behind in South Africa; could she borrow one?

Sure!

And so she was the other person who stopped by yesterday, briefly, but it got me thinking I wanted to celebrate the day, too. I had prefab pie crusts in the freezer and could cut to the chase instead of the butter.

Last year when we had so many tart cherries on our tree, I pitted and bagged them by the quart so that they’d be the right size to pop right into a crust. I grabbed a ziploc out of the freezer this morning.

But it was the season’s remainders and the amount a bit random, about half, which explained why it seemed so small.

Well huh. I’d forgotten about that.

I rolled the crust out very thin and lined four large ceramic bowls with it: two for cherry, two, peach slices, and, just for fun, folded the edges down galette style. They took about 45-50 min at 350.

Each of the four Mel and Kris cereal bowls served two.

Meantime, on the peregrine front, Grace the falcon is trying to get that gravel just so for the eggs that are about to arrive at City Hall. She’s had several tiercels (males) fighting for the territory and her and one was the victor long enough to get a name and possibly future progeny–only to be ousted the next day by a new new tiercel.

Who so far is TT, for, The Tiercel. Much bonding has taken place and he’s definitely the victor of the year.

They’re really going to have to give him his own name before they start naming the eyases (babies) to come.

Since there’s really not a lot I can do about them anyway.

The weeds that took over our yard these drought years ago have not been blooming this winter while normally by now they would be.

Flowers are tasty when you’re a rabbit.

“You’re going to have a lot of those, you know,” warned my daughter, looking at the usual two of them out there nibbling away.

We have a lot of weeds. Go get’em.

It helps that they’re adorable. Not to mention, they’ve figured out that we’re the ones in a cage, so if you thoughtfully look away when they look up to see if you’re doing the predator stare thing, they’ll go, okay, we’re good, and go back to landscaping the yard. So far, in the way I want them to, too! (We’ll see how long that lasts.)

I think I’ll order those anti-rabbit metal guard rings for the fruit trees after all.

It’s February. It hit 80F.  This is not normal. The air conditioning kicked on. I realized I had done repeats of 13, not 14 on the hat project and it was totally not working and after wishing for about two seconds for it to be something other than what it was, I started the ripping back, unwinding the tangling intarsia work slowly, slowly. I knew better and yet I’d done it wrong anyway. All I’d needed was to be a little less sure of myself and doublecheck. Well, okay, now I have.

But then seeing the first three peach flowers of the year opening up by evening and all the buds ready to pop where there had been nothing but gray dormancy a few days ago was just so joyful that it made up for everything, and I can’t wait to see how that tree looks tomorrow.

And the next tree. And the next one.

I chased away a squirrel that wanted to snack on the little pinknesses. Some things never change.

I think the scrub jay chased the rabbit across the yard just because it could boss it around like that so it was fun. It’s a corvid thing.

Re less fun things: sometimes it’s just easier to hire someone else to do it. And so two men showed up today to spray my peach trees against leaf curl disease and another crew from the same company will be pruning everything shortly.

I noted one of them stopping first in apparent surprise and not moving from the spot, so I opened the door and called over to him, Yes–that’s a mango tree.

He told me, marveling, that the other guy had instantly recognized that it was. He looked like he was trying to memorize it–the long leaves, the tropically curving branches.

I answered the question he hadn’t quite asked yet by saying it had been under a plastic greenhouse when it was younger. What I didn’t say was, we’ve had the warmest winter since it was planted and I haven’t so much as had to cover it at night with frost covers but half a dozen times this whole season.

Including, as it would later turn out, tonight, just to be on the safe side.

After they left one of the rabbits tried to dig under the bird netting around the base protecting the mango from their teeth–they’ve always avoided it before–and the jay would have been proud of my wing flapping as I ran out there to chase the little fuzzbutt back across the yard.

A Shaun the Sheep ad for wool, just for fun and so I can find it again.

Remember when I named a lace pattern (after not finding it anywhere else) Rabbit Tracks? Search engines having had their limitations in 2003, I looked for pictures of actual tracks made by rabbits to see if it fit and found no definitive answer–drawings in children’s books didn’t count–so I just went with it.

Well, I got a little help today after looking a little closer at the lace pattern certain claws and teeth were making in the mud out there. Again, it wasn’t quite definitive but it looked like a decent approximation. Alright then.

My yard looks like it has chicken pox and I’ve never seen anything quite like it out there.

So I had this post hopping around in my head gathering momentum about how I guess the whole rabbit thing is okay because they’re eating the weeds that I’ve been trying to fight off ever since the first time they told us not to water our lawns for the previous drought. The grass died. The weeds held a rave.

Worse: a few years ago, my neighbors planted an invasive but decorative tall grass that grows in impenetrable clumps with a bajillion poofy seeds that fly off like dandelion puffs, and all the sudden last summer it was everywhere in my back yard. Everywhere. Despite zero watering. The roots go deep and I found out the hard way that the stalks rip your skin off if you don’t wear gloves and when they’re growing under the thorns of the low-branching pomegranate tree and threatening to outcompete its roots, I had me some doubt as to how far this was all going to go.

Apparently, non-native flora or not, those rabbits really go after the stuff.

And the grass, our grass, real grass, is actually starting to make a comeback because the critters don’t touch it.

I was thinking, hey, I can live with that, as movement caught my eye and I looked across the yard.

A third one.

All in view, point A, point B, point C.

Three. And spring is a long way off yet.

Yow.

Well, they’d better get back to work, then, those shoots aren’t going to get any younger nor more tender. (LEAVE MY FRUIT TREES ALONE.)

All the noise and random people walking around didn’t happen today and it apparently seemed safe to venture forth. Look who’s grown some winter fluff.

You know it’s a quiet day when the best you can do is take a picture of a rabbit.

I did get a hat doorstop-ditched to celebrate a friend’s retirement; his wife has bronchitis so I didn’t ring the bell. Instead, I went around the corner afterwards and texted Richard so he could tell the recipient (since they were already on the phone together) to go find his surprise.

Not the party we would all have wanted to throw together, but hey. Love finds the expressions it needs.

Chris got back to me right away this morning, then again this afternoon after the manufacturer answered his questions.

That product didn’t have amyl nitrite exactly–but it had (and he named various substances) and it appears I’d had a cross-reaction. No problem, there was an alternative. The original takes 24 hours to off-gas, this would be faster anyway.

Remembering the amyl nitrite in the new carpeting at church that lingered hellishly, affecting two of us for months despite many efforts to air it out, 24 hours sounded like the best possible news except for the even better part.

I went outside to see the day’s work about 4:30 again and was quite relieved to be okay. I had ditched the errands I’d planned on for the day because I wanted to be quite sure I’d be safe to drive after walking out my own door.

And look at that–they’d told me multiple times just to make sure I had no objections that they were using 8″ board, not 6″ like the original. To my surprise, I liked it much better. And not just because it’s pretty and new.

Just before I stepped back in the door there was the faintest brief whiff, right there, same spot, yup, and I hurried past it. By tomorrow it’ll be gone entirely.

The funny part of all this was yesterday when Chris stopped by the site and the workers came off the roof to talk to him–as a van pulled up, searching for where on earth to park. The next-door neighbor has a contractor working at their place, too.

And so the dishwasher repairman with his bag of tools in hand found himself walking a bit of a gauntlet there down my walkway while Chris and his guys were wondering silently, Wait, who is this??

Because yes, Sunday morning we found an error 24 code on the machine and it was stopped up like a washing machine in a household with disappearing baby socks. The disposal was clear. I finally found someone who does Bosches.

Five minutes and $238 later, rounding out to a half hour for his standing there punching buttons making the thing go through its paces to make sure it stayed working, and I figured, well, if you want a repairman to be where he has to pay Silicon Valley rent, then that’s what you do. And you smile and you thank him for coming while he was clearly waiting for an argument that was not coming and you thank him for making it so you didn’t have to wait three, four months for a replacement machine like how it is these days and then you send him off with a pomegranate you tell him you’d picked that morning and you get to see the surprise and growing wonder in his face and the delight as he admired this piece of beautiful, deeply-hued fresh fruit in his hands that he was so not expecting.

I’d found a third of the shell of one on the ground a few hours earlier, the rest completely cleaned out, and had picked a few that were still in reach of those wild rabbits. My line of bird netting tents wasn’t going to block their way forever (clearly).

They may be pretty animals.

But they don’t smile back and walk a little lighter for it on their way back to their van way over yonder.

I have a working dishwasher again!

We got our Moderna boosters yesterday (yay!) and figured today was going to be a day for taking it real easy.

I haven’t much minded the desert cottontail in the garden–as long as there was only one. Which had been the case. Yeah it seems to like pomegranates, though I’ve never quite caught it actually eating one, just, the lower ones have mostly disappeared and I’ve seen it by that tree; as long as it didn’t figure out how to get to my netting-protected mangoes we’re good.

Maybe.

But this morning….

And then I went into the kitchen. The dishwasher was flashing an error code. Not working.

He’ll get to it tomorrow. Today was just not the day. Yay for there still being Zoom church, that, we could manage, and then we crashed.