If things are a bit quiet on the porch, if there are no other doves around, occasionally a mourning dove will start people-watching. I’ll look up and there one will be, quietly observing me at my work: sometimes from the patio–they seem to prefer keeping close to the ground when possible–and occasionally, not very often but occasionally, from the back of the chair.

Where I saw that Cooper’s hawk perched, once. The gray concrete and the gray bird, yes, I can see why it would want to keep a lower profile.

It is, as far as I can guess, the younger ones that tend to do this, but I’ve found that when I return their gaze, when it’s just the one bird and me, no other birdly distractions, (the finches don’t count), I can slowly blink at them.

And they will start blinking back.

Bliiink.

Blink blink blink blink.

They have found a way to get my attention. Sometimes it gets them rewarded with extra sunflower seeds, scattered at ground level.  Hulled, too!  But the time spent sharing a small moment in time, just the blink of an eye, seems to be its own reward to them, and they are quite consistent about copying me.  I find it utterly charming.  Somehow, I matter to a small wild thing that has no reason it knows of to need me.

And life is good.

Kurt at Imagiknit asked Saturday what a peregrine is, after I exclaimed that that soft handspun Peruvian Tweed alpaca in shades of gray would make a great peregrine. (Are peregrines soft? But then, how could feathers not be?)

I so much wanted to show him Evet’s gorgeous Earth Day photos in response. I think they could answer his question better than I ever could.  And man, ya gotta love those last two: someone had slammed a door loudly behind Evet, and Mama Clara announced, Okay, that’s it, you’re done. Bye.

And that was what I’d planned to blog about today.  And then I got an email.

That shawl that I mailed off that had so bugged me that it had taken me three weeks, what with taxes and all, to finish and get done: it arrived today where it was going.  On the most right day, and the delays that had seemed such a problem to me suddenly made sense.  The person I sent it to took the time to thank me right away, which amazes me after all the things she had to deal with and do today–including attending a service for a fourth-grader from her school who had passed on Saturday.

I am so glad I didn’t ignore the impulse to go knit that.  I am so grateful that my hug arrived around her shoulders the first day possible after the loss of that little girl she knew. This is what knitting is all about: sending love forward.

I forgot to tell her one thing, though, which is that if it should ever snag or tear, there is a spare length of yarn worked a good ways across the bottom row.  Anywhere else, surely it would get lost or tossed, but there it is.  Invisible but right there at hand, ready to reloop a broken loop, ready to hold it back together for her, at the ready, any time.

Which is as close as I could do to doing that in person for her from several thousand miles away.

One other thing about yesterday’s trip: driving up 280, just north of the Flintstone house, I saw the wings overhead of a raptor riding the thermals with that familiar angle of, apparently, a peregrine falcon.  I exclaimed over it and told Nina.  And then on our way home, in close to the same spot, I saw one again! Kicking the breeze, sightseeing from above.

Meantime, Veer, last year’s male peregrine fledgling, has been spotted safe and sound a few miles northeast of where he grew up on San Jose City Hall’s 18th floor nest. His beak and talons are starting to turn yellow; next, his chest will turn more fully white, and by next spring he will be a full-fledged (well, yeah) adult.  The band on his leg verified it was him as  Eric the photographer snapped photos of Veer here.

Did my heart good, I tell you. Meantime, this year’s three surviving eyasses are growing by the day.  And to think there were only two surviving nesting pairs in all of California and zero left on the East Coast in the 1970’s.

We can create much good out of imperfect circumstances–if we pay attention, if we care enough, and if we believe and pray to get it right and then go and actually do.

Happy Earth Day!

The Slinky got totally upstaged today. Even after Michelle suddenly noticed it this afternoon and stopped speechless mid-sentence, her jaw slowly hitting the floor as it entered in what that was out there and what it must be for.

So how do I one-up that moment?

Looking in the fridge for a glass of milk, I see: the whip-cream whipper, not yet empty.   Hey.  It has fat. It has protein. It has what I’ve read that momma squirrels need this time of year (and after the hijinks going on out there, I guarantee you there are momma squirrels this year and which individuals they are likely to be.  Look for the one with the white spot in the center of its back where it got nipped in the action.)

So I took a paper cup. I cut it way down to about two inches tall. I squirted some fresh whipped cream in (don’t forget there’s that little bit of sugar mixed in there, too, just a touch), and of course the gadget sprayed way more than I intended, they always do–quite the sundae there.  Add a little sunflower garnish on top.  Voila.  Then I put it out on the patio.

The black squirrel came to it pretty quickly; she danced around it, a hilarious combination of severe lust and fear of the unknown.  Come close, dash, close, sniff, dash.  This strange set-up sure wasn’t going to take a day of acclimatizing.  Forward and away, forward and away.

A dove took a quick peck at it.  Well, then.  Not going to let some dumb bird show her up.

The next thing I knew, that squirrel was sampling, oh, just the seeds, not that weird white stuff.  Don’t you pay attention to me. (As the camera comes out…) Then holding the cup still with her paws while eating away at the top of the white swizzle. Then suddenly throwing caution to the wind, grabbing the whole thing and running for the grass, where she wrestled it to give up every last drop of cream.  I started to step outside at one point, worried that somehow I’d done damage because it was on her head and she was falling over to the side–but she grabbed it back up from the ground and stuck it back on her head and did it again and again, pulling it down over her ears, trying to reach every smidgen in the bottom seam of that cup. I glanced upwards for the Cooper’s hawk, just in case, but the coast was clear. She fell sideways in ecstasy again.

I tell you, that little animal with its white-fringed whiskers twitching in delight was the funniest thing ever. Then she stashed the magical cup near a tree, hoping it might sprout more later.  Maybe start a whole forest of whipped cream.

Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.

(Edited to add: about three hours later, she came back on that patio, plunked herself down facing me through the window, and just stared, willing me to turn around and look. I had this feeling of being watched and glanced out the window.

May I have more nirvana? Pretty please with whipped cream on top?  I laughed and turned away. She picked herself up, moved a foot or two closer, laid back down again facing me–no time for shyness, this was serious business here–and resumed staring.  BRING. ME. MORE.

When that didn’t work, she stomped off.)

I googled, and one of the sites that came up was Walgreens. Following that, I found that the one closest to me apparently had it in stock.

And so I found myself walking down the half-aisle of cheap breakable little kids’ toys, looking totally out of place, because, honey, ain’t nobody gonna think I’m a young mom, and grandmas are supposed to buy the expensive things the young parents can’t afford, right?

Twice up and down, and then I went and looked for someone to ask.

There was a young guy at work in the next aisle, certainly willing to peel off from the older woman I took to be his supervisor and to come help me find it but looking like the day was one of those where work just drags on and on.

And then I told him *why* I was looking for a Slinky. To hang from the awning, an old Easter basket hung from it, and put nuts in it for the squirrels to have at it.

He looked at me like he was going to die laughing any moment, but first he had to make sure I was serious.  His eyes and mine met.  Both twinkling now: I was serious.

I came away with the impression I’d just given him his funniest-customer-ever story.  I’m dying to know if he bought the next Slinky himself.

It stretches a bit much and a bit far for that basket, so right now we’re making do with a clear plastic cup so they can see what they’re missing.  So far, the set-up has been the most effective squirrel repellent you could imagine. Okay, well, I’ll take that, too.  But hey, I’m a good sport, and I moved it away from the birdfeeder so they could at least graze underneath the finches while they acclimate.

Give them a day. Just one day.  And then maybe I can shorten the thing and add that basket after all that they won’t be able to see into from below.

Just putting a spring in their step, is all.

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

Meantime: does Babelfish come in an OED version?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tax software: one tab keystroke off on the very first page. It took me two days to track it down. When it claimed suddenly that we had a California refund coming that was more than the value of our old New Hampshire house, uh, no.

I finally found it.  I’m done!

The classic annual elementary-school chant of kids waiting for the schoolbuses to take them home for the summer, morphed into adulthood: No more taxes! No more doing the books! No more giving the paperwork dirty looks!

I got to see a hawk afterwards this afternoon, and it wasn’t even Thursday yet.  I simply sat down and watched, and then pulled out the camera to go notice the rest of Spring.  Pardon me, now, (don’t miss the captions), I’ve got an edging I finally get to go knit.

Random avoidances of tax forms, which really are done anyway, just print and sign and be done with it, fer cryin’ out loud:

Saw another large hawk, perched on the telephone wires watching the cars, including ours as we were going by during a break in today’s rain rain rain. We came back the other way awhile later, and there he was, still, calmly observing.  The rain was holding off the whole time for all of us during that errand.  Apres nous, le deluge.

Saw a squirrel trying to sneak at the feeder actually slip off the top of the wet awning and fall down to the patio, flipping his tail wildly as the ground jumped up at him. I think he was as surprised as I was. He seemed okay.

We found, next to a large bookcase, the leak in the roof going down the wall of an unused bedroom, the top of the wallboard starting to peel away. My dyepot found a new use.  The warranty on that roof expired in November.  This is Not Good.  At least no squirrels fell in.

Michelle was explaining to a friend from back East yesterday that it doesn’t rain in summer in California and that the rain here is always cold–the idea of a warm summer rain is just “A weirdo thing you guys do back there,” as she put it to me today as the skies did their normal-winter thing.

It never rains in summer, except that it always does just once, and always when it does, people exclaim, But it never rains in summer! This is so bizarre!

Nah, the bizarre part is that it doesn’t and that it’s so ocean-cold when it does.  There are supposed to be summer rains, and they are supposed to be warm, and they are supposed to be enjoyed back home, say, walking along the C&O Canal with old friends watching turtles swimming in the canal as the rain splashes from above and the wide Potomac ripples slowly nearby.

I’m trying to figure out an excuse to go confirm that hypothesis in person this year.

The song “California Dreamin’ ” was written after a 17-year-old from LA joined a band and it landed a gig singing in New York. Her father tried to explain the concept “cold” to her. She bought a wool dress, thinking that should totally do it.

Backless.

Manhattan, we have a problem.  They “stopped into a church” because it was the closest warm building and she was finding out that maybe her dad did know something after all.

My friend’s handknit wool socks on my feet, gratefully… Because it’s raining, y’know, and that means it’s cold in Northern California. (Cold.  Um.  I assure you my snow shovel remains idle. I am not complaining!)

Weighed my yarn, decided I could do one more pattern repeat before the edging–remember the edging? There was a shawl project, once upon a time–I decided I had been yarn-deprived for nearly a week and that that was way long enough. I knitted that pattern repeat.

I will stop treating my taxes like a manuscript or a house remodel: there is an end and we are there, fer cryin’ out loud.

The weather report is calling for rain Thursday. Maybe I’ll get to see another hawk!

And today we have three new babies.  Happy Spring!  If you go here, at 1:56 you see a tiny white snowball with black eyes and tiny beak, dot dot dot like a child’s drawing, looking wide-eyed and up and seeing its daddy perhaps for the first time in its new life.  Blink.  EC, aka Esteban Colbert, takes off on a grocery store run for pigeon-flavored formula.  The mom, Clara, is still at the nestbox as another chick breaks out the top, and a few seconds later Clara has her head lowered talking to a third, looking satisfied as its egg splits at last and a tiny head suddenly dots its eyes too.

One more egg to go.

When I was growing up, most big birds were nearly gone from the entire planet, their eggs thinned by DDT and breaking at incubation.  I remember my parents’ great joy at seeing, as we drove through the Sierras when I was ten, a bald eagle in a tall pine, free and alive in the wild! The chances of a sighting were so slim then, and their thrilled reaction and teaching us about them made it so that I would never forget their awe.  Nor the eagle.

Now my children and future grandchildren get to see them and other raptors after all, due to the great dedication of the few who were convinced they could make a difference.

Glenn Stewart describes being denied funding on the grounds that the peregrines were already lost.  He and a few peers at UCSC watched eyries with binoculars anyway for hours and days, waiting for hard incubation to commence, the point at which the peregrine parents decide, okay, all the eggs are laid, it’s time now to start seriously sitting.

Then he would rappel down the cliff, replace the eggs with wooden dummies, hatch them in a lab while trying to simulate a parent’s presence, rappel again, and return them to their nest.

Which is why this magnificent bird went from two nesting pairs in all of California and total extinction on the East Coast to an estimated 20-25,000 nesting pairs in California. They are back. I can only imagine the intensity of the satisfaction he and his peers must find in that.

Peregrines mate for life and are so focused on having a territory and a mate of their own that if the male in a breeding pair should die while there are chicks in a nest, another male will move in and adopt them and care for them, defending them from intruders, feeding them and teaching them to fly and hunt as if they were his own, and he will stay with their mother for the rest of his days.

God is a poet, teaching us by all that life offers around us. I’m so glad these are still written in His notebook.

I wanted to go to CNCH today, but it seems I’m going to have to do the conference on my feet, which means I can’t stay very long and I will be totally wiped when I get home.  So.

It seemed the right thing to do to get the taxes finished at last before letting myself get that tired.  Maybe I could wrap it up quickly and scoot right out the door.  (As if!) I do have a neighbor hoping I’ll somehow help her get her Nilus Leclerc loom sold; I’m not a weaver, though, and have no expertise in such things.  (But I’m mentioning.)  Still, a convention center close by filled with yarn and a fair number of friends–even if it’s not knitter-focused, I definitely want to go.

I could add paragraphs of IRS-ings as to what today became instead, but surely you don’t want to hear it any more than I wanted to do it.  I’ll go tomorrow.  But I will say this:

Karen, out of the blue, sent this photo today and told me she’d spent the best five dollars ever:  look what they’d turned into!

I glanced up from “Did we save the ambulance bill” at movement in my peripheral vision, to see what was at best guess a Cooper’s hawk suddenly perching right outside my window on the back of the old windsor chair out there–begging squirrels, take note.  It was *right there.* I gaped, trying to memorize it: gray over the eyes, not quite the fitted-helmet look of a peregrine, although a white chest like one and a speckled pattern below, with a grayish back and then, when I tried to reach slooowly for my camera while calling out softly to Michelle, not wanting her to miss it, it flew off with wide bands of gray and white showing across the bottom of its tail. Wow. Straight towards the bluejays’ nest.

Took awhile for the rest of the backyard crew to wingtip-toe cautiously back.

Richard was up quite early and puttering around and told me later what he’d seen. Unlike me, the squirrels didn’t recognize him as an enforcer and they weren’t afraid of him catching them at it at all:  he said there was the funniest cascade of catapulting furries throwing themselves at the birdfeeder, each one so sure they could show that dimwit who just got off how it’s really done–gimme that thing!

When I appeared awhile later, they were all either not to be found or on their very best aren’t-I-well-behaved demeanor.  My favorite did a reenactment of yesterday’s prim begging.

Cashew?

Bless you!

Meantime, I’m glad I went for the 48-stitch edging swatch on the side rather than diving straight into it on all 400ish stitches on the project: it worked okay on paper. In real life? I wanted to be impressed. I was not.

I briefly considered how it might be more entertaining to frog a project by tying a walnut to the end of it and throwing it outside, with a good foot stomp or handclap added for effect… (It must be admitted here: some yarns and some projects thoroughly deserve being squirreled away like that.)

Let’s see, (taking notes) I need this and this and I can’t do a thing about them right now–nope, the taxes aren’t going to be finished today after all.

Too many hours of all that and I was off to Trader Joe’s and bought chocolate hazelnut gelato immediately before closing (adding in berry sorbet in case of guilt).  Escape!

Meantime, Don, having no idea that that’s what I was immersing myself in and that I was being seriously knitting- and reading-deprived, sent his son Cliff over with a CD they’d burned, of what I think of as knitting music: the perfect thing to turn on and let the ears pay attention to while the fingers glide along, knowing their part of the duet by heart.  A relief for a day like today, something to look forward to; thank you, Don and Cliff!

It was fun to watch, though, that the squirrels had figured out, every single one of them before I even woke up this morning, that the game was up.  The birds seemed to know it, too;  they were flocking to the feeder all day in great numbers.  Here, *we* get all the sunflowers now, but you down there, *ptooie*, you can have the leftover millet.  Neener.

The runt of last year’s black squirrel litter who’d acted nearly tame for awhile was suddenly on his best behavior again.  Scrambling up the back of a chair, not too close since he wasn’t allowed to, keeping away from the amaryllises, standing and begging and staring long and longingly at me through the window.   When I laughed, it knew it had won and scrambled down to where it knew I would throw to, just like old times.  Nuts to the squirrels!

Nope, don’t see a line for claiming them all as an aggregate dependent…

Thing the first: I walked into the Bird Center in Los Gatos for more seed, having been going through it very fast lately–just as someone was washing a caged Brome Squirrel Buster feeder identical to mine.

We talked.  She explained; I asked; she showed. This this and this, all three, have to be just so.  Make sure this covers this wire and that and that are lined up.  Lifetime warranty says it works, period.  My feeder shouldn’t be only closing down for the bigger gray squirrels, and it shouldn’t be staying closed till I get to it to open it up again, nor should the small squirrels be able to hang down and frantically swish half the contents out onto the ground with their paws.  This part should be like this, and we have spare parts if it isn’t.  Go check.

A few seconds with seed spilling over me and it was all solved.   Boy, that was easy! Once I knew.  Sproingy sproing!  I must have misaligned the top tab from the groove when I cleaned it.  Now, I don’t at all mind the squirrels getting a bite; I find them inquisitive and curious and highly entertaining. But it’s got to be on my terms.

Thing the second:  (squirrels, you might want to cover your ears for this one.) I had a second errand to run.  I found myself stopped at a long red light in the late afternoon a block from where, last summer, I’d seen a peregrine falcon overhead as I’d come out of my pre-op appointment.  The sight of it had changed everything for me that day.

My wish was its command: looking up, I suddenly saw a very wide and familiar set of wings doing a gentle swoop across the road overhead, low enough down that at first I thought, surely, it couldn’t be…  It flew from near the large billboard trumpeting the Stanford University basketball season on the right, then, after a casual flap, landed on the topmost part of the highest tree to the left, swaying slightly at first, surveying our cross-town rival high school’s campus.

Then it lazily stretched its wings out just so like a teenage athlete surveying his pecs:  see me? See those angles on those wings?  Are they not just the most raptor-ous things you ever saw?

It spoke in pigeoned English but straight to my heart. Wow. I so much love that we have peregrine falcons nesting in our town.

Just for fun, if you go here, check out the two maps showing the difference in migration routes between them and Swainson’s hawks: it makes clear how the word “peregrination” came to be: they just mosey on everywhere and anywhere they feel like, no distance too short nor too long.

Including from one side of El Camino Real to the other at the right moment to brighten a random Monday afternoon.  Glorious.

Just for fun.  Wow.  Anyone handy with paper?  Six pages of instruction on that origami, but people are flocking to the site.

A childhood friend of my dad’s lives in the hills above here, and I was admiring her koi pond once.  She lamented that the cranes and the great blue herons loved their fast-food sushi snacks, standing by the side of the little pond, waiting for the captive fish to come out from under their covered area.  Sure. They could wait.

We do live between the Bay and the ocean, and one will occasionally see a brilliantly white great crane standing in the green grass above the freeway in the spring, nowhere particularly near the waterways, simply showing off the fact that they’re gorgeous. (Do the cars passing below look like fish in a stream at a distance?  Are they carwindow-shopping?)

So. If a sea-diving bird were to fly over and decide it wanted a little lemon juice to go with its fish, and it got caught in the thorns, would I pull my auks out of the Meyer?

Or de-murre?

(Waiting for the angel food cake in the oven to finish.  Oh–there it goes.)

Happy birthday, Michelle!

Twelve rows x 398 stitches so far this evening.

1. So…if you browse through some yarns at some of your favorite dyers on your PC for a few minutes, idling the needles to give your hands a needed break, is it then Windows shopping?

2. Michelle took a whiff at the lemons in the bowl to see if they’d gone off yet, and asked me about their ages?  I’d picked them Sunday? Well then!

Which is how we found ourselves eating the first lemon bars out of the oven before they’d even set yet, necessitating forks.  Setting the bar high, temperature-wise.

3. The towhees didn’t fly off in a fright like they used to when the brash bully of the yard swooped in: I guess they’d gotten jay-ded by now.  The bluejay ate a few sunflowers and then chased them just enough to show them who still thinks he’s boss, but clearly, they’re on to him: even if he presents a big bill at this fancy restaurant, he’s into fast food.  Eat and run.

4. Those towhees got downy to business right after being left alone again, courting by quivering their wings and bopping around with their tails held high, and then the one that had to have been the male emphasizing his studliness by, Look at me!  I’m a poofball!

She was all, eh.   Don’t bother me.

So he gathered some tiny twigs in his beak for helping with the nest building.

Hey! Now you’re talking!

Last I saw them, they were bouncing together across the yard towards the trees.