First thing I saw this morning from here was a bluejay hopping around on the ground around E.’s hydrangea: planted and a solid part of the landscape now.  You could just see its wheels turning: too light and way too low to perch on. What’s the point of this? Who’s messing with my yard?

And then, after flying past the porch a few times to get its bearings, it divebombed. Richard had put the birdfeeder together and had hung it last night.  (It may have helped that I offered to do it and he visualized me with my balance and his drill in hand while trying to use it on something way above my head.  He could reach the awning easily and without falling over. The deed got done.)

Nuts. Missed.  Annnnd… missed again!  The jay thought about it a moment and tried a gentler approach: fly a little slower and try to land on the green perch this time.

The feeder twirled, the jay’s wings flapped wildly, it just couldn’t get its feet where it wanted, and it gave up.

It has not been near it since.

The folks at the Wild Bird Center said the feeder’s for songbirds and is squirrelproof but I didn’t expect it to be jayproof!

Talk about watching things grow… Saturday after I mentioned the falcon cam, I saw a white ball of fluff with just the slightest smudge of gray in its tail watch its mother take off into the air and then flap its wings like crazy to try to copy her, tip right over and go splat on its beak, and then actually achieve liftoff of about two inches’ height, flying forward about a baby bird’s length! It collapsed in a tight huddle on the City Hall ledge as if to exclaim, I can’t believe I just DID that!

I felt so proud. Like my baby had just taken its first steps.

Today they were already about half smooth gray to half fluffy white in a striped effect. They still tend to tip forward but only just a bit when they stretch their wings out and flap; two in succession lifted from the ledge up into their nesting box by wingpower without hesitation, and they are clearly starting to get this balance thing down.  They’re starting to not just accept food from their mother’s beak, but to grab a bit away and hold it down with their talons like she does and pull at it themselves.

Silhouetted against the city lights right now, Clara is keeping watch over her flock by night.

Kids. They’ll grow up and leave you with an empty nest before you know it.

(Picture is from the San Jose city website.)

A few years ago, a rare peregrine falcon was spotted staking out the heights of San Jose City Hall as a potential nesting site; UC Santa Cruz biologists attached a nesting box against the wall. Since then, there’s been a falcon cam here as the birds have made happy use of the box. (Biologists rappel down to tag the babies.) The same female, Clara, has returned every year, bringing a different mate each time.  This year’s male was named Esteban Colbert for Stephen Colbert, and it was determined a few days ago that there are three females and one male baby bird in the nest this time.

I love that the fluffy youngsters look big-haired next to their parents at the moment.  60’s hairstyles making a comeback in the bird world! “And the sign said, longhaired freaky people need not apply…” Go peregrines!

Meantime, the City claims to be put out that Stephen Colbert has not lauded them for naming their falcon after him. Nor even mocking them.  Stevie, honey, they’re waiting!

It’s a surprise. I don’t know a thing about it. I’ll distract you with an amaryllis photo (Lene, that’s yours in the white container, far left).  The thing is all wrapped up in bird-themed wrapping paper over there, right next to the 25 lb bag of birdseed. I wonder what it could be.

Michelle was wondering out loud yesterday what the family should get me for Mother’s Day.  My friend Robin then sent me a link to one of her favorite stores when I mentioned to her that a birdfeeder would be really cool. Our next-door neighbors have one, with the result that I’ve seen a red-tailed hawk right outside our window here, and there was the never-to-be-forgotten moment when I pulled into my driveway, got out of my car, and there, perched at the edge of the neighbor’s roof at the closest point of it to where I was, quite close, stood a golden eagle. It looked at me. I looked at it. It looked at me.  Hmm. A little big for prey.  Came in a crunchy container, and it might get back in and you know how hard it is to undo that overpackaging with one’s talons.

So I wanted something that would help pull the outdoors up closer to my window, a little friendly competition with the feeder next door.

Robin’s link was to the local Wild Bird Center.  Michelle and I hopped in the car today and headed down to Los Gatos.  We were helped by an enthusiastic ornithologist who wanted to know what kinds of birds we wanted to attract?

“Pretty ones.”

She laughed.  Ooookay…  Obviously a fussy customer here.

I asked about the feeder I’d seen online that flips the squirrels off. No, literally. She told me the price of those (yowsers!) and that they have a $30 part that has to be replaced about once a year, and added, the squirrels learn quick to avoid them so then where’s the entertainment?  She doesn’t sell them.

Ah. Well, it was just a curiosity.  Besides, then I’d have to keep the feeder close to the ground and I’d be watching the little beasties anxiously like a mom whose 16-year-old just took off on their first solo trip behind the wheel.

She sold Michelle one that closes up the restaurant at the weight of a squirrel and is perfect for songbirds.

And I don’t know a thing about it till Sunday.  (Michelle wanted me to come with her to make sure the one she got would be one I’d be pleased with.)

I’m all a-twitter.  Heh.

Tina over on her Blue Moon blog wrote about how essential it is to have time alone in order to let the creative juices have their space.  Time to oneself to contemplate in.

Time with friends is essential to the soul as well.

I don’t get a whole lot of Karen time or time with my other friends back home–and I missed two of them this round–but I’ve usually managed to get back East once a year, and it does wonders for me; California is home now, but can never be so on quite the same level.

My quiet Potomac and the Canal are part of who I am.  This is where I contemplate best.  These are some of the loveliest spots on earth to me.  Here is someone who took far better pictures (and at a better time of day and year) than I did; enjoy!

The designers’ version of the swatch, swatch, gauge, gauge mantra is, don’t swatch a new lace pattern mid-shawl; if you want to run off with a new idea on a tangent from what you’ve figured out and written out beforehand, do it across a few stitches somewhere else first.  (insert whiny voice)  P l e a s e ?  Four hundred stitches across just doesn’t quite qualify as a swatch.  Ah well, live and learn.  (The former is more likely.)  There’s nothing terribly wrong with it as it was, I just didn’t happen to like it, and I’m the one I most have to make happy with it or it would never get finished.  Now that it’s back on the needles, it’s ready to hum along happily and is feeling all the better for having been held to a standard of perfection.  Not to mention, better four rows ripped than forty.

The good part is, taking those needles out, I went and found a UFO and checked the size of their circs, just to see; I thought I’d been doing that project on 10s.  Nines! Holz and Steins!  Not my sentimental pair, but hey!  I switched them out, as long as the slick ones were unencumbered for the moment.  Yay!

I got an errand run in the afternoon, noting how few miles I’ve put on my car in the last month; it felt good to get out.  I pulled off to the side of the road and tried to capture the snowy egrets in that center shrubbery, knowing my camera could only do so much, but hey. I share what I can.  I’ll get a better camera someday soon, since this one is held together by scotch tape; something to look forward to.

A bicyclist came down the bike path between me and the brownery there, saw me perching against my car door with my Pentax in my hands, and shot me a big grin on his way past, clearly glad to see someone else appreciating the day out there.

I can’t wait to see how this shawl is going to turn out!

(It wasn’t till I posted this that I realized how much the clump of stitches looks like an inverted version of the egrets’ perch.  Cool!)

I’ve been trying for days, and this is as close as I’ve gotten so far.  This jay was particularly bright and blue in the morning sun, and it let me open the sliding glass door, slowly, slowly.  One unsteady click of the camera, though, and it was ducking into the shelter of the larger trees and away.

It’s beautiful out there.

(Edited to add: Knitpicks just put “Wrapped in Comfort” at 40% off! Just in case, you know, anybody besides me might be jumping up and down over that.)

I did not know a bird would be willing to do that.  It hopped over to about a foot away from me through the glass as if to say thank you, munching away happily.

I’d swept out some cobwebs, and being on rather unfriendly terms with spiders, had put the long-handled duster outside to shake it off (okay–picture it more like, I ran with it and dumped it fast after I’d cleaned some of the outside webs and slammed the door), and I’d left it out there; maybe the buggies would scurry away from it for me.  Well, turns out, one did, a good-sized one.

I’ve been googling, trying to find the right combination of words to conjure up a picture and a name for the very small brown bird with the surprisingly long, sharp needle of a beak that this one had. No such luck.  The fuzziness of this shot doesn’t convey it well at all.  It did not have the short wide beak of, say, a chickadee, although the bird was about that small.  It saw that spider and whisked in to our back porch to snatch it up.

The spider was having none of it, and did the spidery thing of running into the dark, underneath a wooden box we have up on top of a few 2x4s.  And the bird followed it!  Spearing away at it and dragging it back to the light.  One leg crunched, and the spider scuttled off with the other seven.  Nuh, uh, dude, and the bird was right under there after it again and dragged it back out.  Totally harpooned the thing, and then ate one potato chip leg at a time, savoring dessert first, and then the main course of the body of the thing.

I watched, fascinated; the beak was about as wide as the spider’s legs to begin with, how was it going to get that big thorax down?  But it did.  Then it looked at me like, Got seconds?  No?  And flew around the patio, looking for more.

I needed motivation to clean off that duster and sweep the rest of the cobwebs. I think I just got it.

He was a beanpole: young-looking, long, thin-boned, with a tail like a two-sided mohawk.  The most unusual thing was the few speckles of gray fur mixed in with its white underbelly–freckles!  The squirrel eyed me from my kitchen window, scrambled up the Chinese elm and came back down on another limb to get a closer look at me.  It played peek-a-boo there for the longest time, and I couldn’t make a break for it to get the camera or the game would have ended on the spot.  It really did need a pirate-motif sweater, you know?  It debated leaping onto the recycling container where I could reach it to take its measurements, but thought better of it.

Meantime, I got asked at church today if I were still knitting.  Uh, yes. I do tend to do that.

There’s a reason redwoods are so tall: they live along the ridgeline of the California coast, between a near-desert climate and the ocean and where heavy fogs roll in at night.  They are designed to pierce the fog with their height, causing water droplets to condense and run down their trunks and water them–which is also why they have very shallow roots. They typically reproduce by having new ones shoot up from the roots, with the new ones joining in to help form a wide underground lattice of roots that supports the whole community of redwoods together.

Which is also why my treedling might actually make it.  There was no depth to the bit of earth it was clinging to when I pulled it out, probably no broken roots.

All that said, I gotta say, “bonsai redwood” to describe it is one of the funniest ideas I have heard in awhile.  Totally nonpsychodegradeable.  Thank you, Carol!

(Oh. Right. The shawl.  Tailor of Gloucestor alert!  Heh.)

Specs: One skein Casbah from Mary’s stash, size 11 (7mm) needles, Faster-version Julia shawl through the yoke, then I switched to the Michelle pattern for the body, it being a 6+1 lace pattern as well, both of them in “Wrapped in Comfort.”  This did not make a very big shawl, the Casbah being a thinner yarn than the original mohair, but it’s good for a small person.  Lying flat, it’s 19″ long.  It’ll stretch out a bit held up when it’s dry.

(Say that fast. Sorry, couldn’t resist the chance for a bad pun.)

Slipping back towards the bad old days: I made it through about a half hour at Purlescence last night. Someone brought in their dinner and I had to move quickly away before my stomach did violence to the surroundings from the smell of the food. My daughter, who’d dropped me off and gone to the nearby library, was hovering from a few blocks away and texted me that I probably wanted to go home now?

So I came home and collapsed. But not till I’d had a conversation with a fellow knitting Crohn’s patient about a new drug approved last month. There is? Really? Yay!

Hopefully, though, give this a few days and it’ll settle down on its own.

Meantime, Michelle had gone and looked up bluejays: they stay in pairs even when it’s not nesting season (I often see two) and they’re loud–until you get near their nest. Then they get quiet so as not to attract undue attention.

Oh goodness. And I’d had that thing squawk at me across the yard and finally get quiet near the apple tree after I flicked the hose towards it. I don’t think the water even reached it, but suddenly I wanted to go apologize to the baby birds. I will be the one who’s more respectful now (and curious as to where the nest is–I didn’t see it.)

To change the subject: when my husband and I got married, my parents were so happy and so glowing, you’d think they were the ones getting married! I saw the love mixed with the difference between being young and in love and middle-aged and in love, and told Richard I looked forward to the day when we too would have the time, experience, and maturity behind us like they had. I wanted to be them when I grew up.

And here, a generation later, I think we’ve done okay, and here we are looking at two of our own kids and their spouses with love and gratitude ourselves.

I didn’t take Jessie’s shawl to Purlescence. I figured it was too complicated to be an on-the-go project, especially when I was still at the stage of starting the main pattern and trying to keep track of the stitch count. After I got home, I picked it up and wondered if my fried brain could make sense of those jellyfish, Barbara Walker’s Showers pattern turned upside down.

And you know what? To my surprise, my laceknitting had become middle-aged. No angst, no worries, just do it. Why had I thought this was hard? Knowing which way to wrap the yarnover when the next stitch is a knit or purl is as natural now as breathing. Knowing what to do coming up to a double yarnover is like remembering that the green light means go. The purl through back loops of three stitches at once is a meandering knit along a beautiful country road.

I’ve always loved this pattern, and now we’re old friends, too.

A skulk of foxes

A cacophony of crows

A screech of gulls

A charm of hummingbirds

A prickle of hedgehogs

An inflation of alpacas (possibly from the equivalent of tulipmania that happened in the US in the late 80’s, when their exportation out of South America was so tightly controlled? I’m totally guessing here)

A bored of directors (the ones that forgot to bring their knitting)

A surety of surgeons (yes, in fact, I did make that one up, even if it’s a malapropracticism. Okay, that was to make Sid Schwab laugh.)

An am-barrassment of amaryllises

And we will not speak of the yardages of yarns, nowaynohow.