A friend stopped by for a visit today; she and her family will be moving soon, and I will very much miss them. Her husband’s defending his doctoral thesis next month and I told them I would bake a chocolate torte in celebration.

With coconut cream. He’s allergic to dairy. We know all about that, I said, no worries, coconut cream substitutes one for one with heavy cream on the ganache.

The bonus is that it comes in small containers that don’t have to be refrigerated till I open them and use them all up. No churning butter in the washing machine.

If he passes (he will!), if he gets the job he’s interviewing for, if they don’t get outbid first on the one they’re hoping for, they will then buy their first house. They will anyway, just, they’re hoping for that one.

And if they want it, an Anya apricot seedling will go with them. They’ll be leaving the state just before Andy’s crop comes on, and they know how good those are–they’re fans. And I’m fans of them. Not to mention they volunteered and kept things watered for us while we were out of town last summer and definitely earned their baby tree.

I couldn’t let them and their two boys miss out on what those are growing up to be.

One and a half milk chocolate tortes were still in that fridge. After our big Easter dinner, even with all those people here, we’d only eaten the other half.

I put a note on the ward chat explaining what they were, why they were there, the fact that they freeze easily whole or by the slice, but that they were milk and not my usual dark chocolate and that I had no freezer space for them.

Please rescue us from these calorie bombs, I wrote.

It took no more than the time it took him to type it for the first response to come in, where the guy said he was so glad he’d been on the computer just then. He’d love to share one with his neighbors. He knew what my tortes were like.

He got the whole one.

I write notes in my cookbooks, which is how I know that the first time I baked the original version before it morphed over time into richer and darker was in June 1990, and the person who answered next had been enjoying them that long; she got the half.

Her husband stopped by to pick it up on his way home from work and by the quizzical look on his face I’m not sure she had told him not to expect a whole torte. But he was certainly willing to let me give him that one.

The third person wished so hard and was a dear enough friend that I measured the cream I had left, found a half–I never have a half, but there was a half, and only a half–of a Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bar for the glaze and there was enough cream for just one plus for whipped cream on a certain somebody’s birthday cake tomorrow but there was not enough cream to glaze two tortes. So that settled that.

A few hours later I sent her a note.

Wait what?! You did not!

Did too.

So she stopped by a little later to pick up the one I baked this afternoon, a proper bittersweet chocolate this time, and she surprised me back with her favorite balsamic vinegar plus a jar of honey from her bees.

Because if I can do it to her she can do it to me. So there.

And then she told me her family was going to share it with a mutual friend whose husband has been in the hospital for some time. I’d had no idea. So glad that torte got baked and ended up where it needed to be. (And it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the second set of recipients shared theirs with that woman, too.)

We got a little extra grandkid time!

They had their brunch with the great grandma and then they’d hoped to take the kids to see the redwoods. Richard-the-younger mentioned that their town near San Diego is beautiful and certainly has lots of trees, but he hadn’t realized just how much greener it is here. He’d wanted to show their kids the best of it.

But looking at the time, in the end, the distance vs the route vs potential traffic and the potential of missing their flight with four kids in tow, they came here to retrieve his camera bag instead.

So I pulled Kat’s polished redwood slab out of the other room and told them about our neighbor’s generosity as Maddy and Hudson promptly sat down to count the rings. I told the kids how the fog condenses on the needles and runs down the trunks and that’s how they get their water.

That got their daddy reminiscing over the immense cross-section of an oldest-growth redwood cut down in the 1800s, preserved at the visitor’s center at Big Basin, how it has these little tags that mark off this is when this happened, this is when the Magna Carta was signed, this… It’s a map of human history, he said, just the most amazing thing.

I hadn’t realized how much of an impression it had made on him when he was young but I definitely understood why he wanted his kids to have that experience, too. But…

…It’s gone, I said.

He went right on saying a little more about it.

It’s gone, I said again. It burned in the fire. The beautiful visitor’s center built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s that it was in front of–it’s all gone.

I saw in his face that sudden moment of staggering loss that we had gone through at the news. It was even worse than that, though I didn’t say so; the CZU Complex fire had burned through 97% of that old-growth park, though some of the oldest trees did survive after all when the biologists hadn’t been at all sure they would. (Park FAQs here.)

And then we moved on from there, a lot gladder now that they hadn’t made that long trip for nothing. It will take some planning and checking next time to see what’s ready for visitors again, but a lot of effort is going into reopening things safely. Alright then.

That space where you know you have to leave soon and you hate to really get into making a Lego robot like the one your grandmother so admired yesterday before the little Hulk! Smash! got to it and you might not have time to finish it anyway? The two middle kids suddenly needed something to do.

So I asked them if they wanted to learn to knit (suddenly very very glad I had two balls of already-wound-up soft, thick Mecha yarn right there.)

Yes!!

And so I pulled out a pair of needles for Hudson and one for Maddy and cast on a few stitches each.

Hudson was sort of getting it, with a couple of long loopinesses where he’d dropped a stitch or two. But he’d done it. He’d knitted all by himself. Maddy wrapped the yarn for me and I popped the other needle over it and showed her what that did.

But what does it make? she wanted to know.

Well, I told her, our neighbor used to have a very fluffy cat and we combed its fur, I spun about 18″ of yarn out of it, and I knitted it into a little square just like this and then glued this thing on the back that made it into a pin for her.

I cast off both their pieces and showed them how pulling the yarn through the last stitch meant it wouldn’t unravel now. Maddy wore hers as a necklace. Hudson was deciding as they left, but they were both quite proud of their first knitting, especially after I made sure they knew how much I was. Suddenly his funky strands were okay after all.

Spencer (whose shoes had been found in the car, and that’s where they were again) danced barefoot down the walkway towards the rental car as they headed for the airport and away and home.

Easter Sunday at church, lunch, dinner: today was our day with the grands, and a grand time it was, starting with their discovery of the kids’ corner by the fireplace. Legos, Play Dough, Hot Wheels, something for everybody. (Let’s take the Play Dough outside, said the wise mom, looking at the carpeting.)

While every now and then the three year old simply took off at a run across the back yard because we had the space and the fencing and he could. He and I played Chase Me and Peek a Boo that involved blowing kisses when you showed your face.

So. Much. Joy.

I told Hudson the chocolate torte was for his birthday this month. He thought it would definitely do.

I texted my neighbor afterwards, telling her, I don’t expect so but just in case: over at the half-high fence section, if you should by chance happen to find a pair of toddler shoes, the three-year-old was throwing things near there and there was no sign of his sneakers when they had to go.

She laughed and said she’d look–and mentioned that her son’s baseball had gone over the fence there a day or two ago.

So that’s where that came from! I told her the grands had been playing with it and I’d had no idea where they’d found it.

I walked it back over to her on the spot and we looked in the dark for the shoes and topped off my day with a great time visiting with each other.

As I told her, when I was three I floated my shoes bye bye down the creek in back of my parents’ first house. It’s genetic.

There was a breakfast at the church with an Easter egg hunt for the kids. Today was Great Grandma M day for our kids but it was before her family’s festivities began, so they came. Minus Hudson, who woke up feverish, and our daughter-in-law, who stayed at the hotel with him. Poor kid. Poor mom–man do I remember the days. Taking a train from Boston to DC with two toddlers and pregnant to come to my cousin’s wedding, and then spending her wedding at some random pediatrician’s office for a kid with an ear infection and missing all of it. I think every parent has a story like that.

But meantime, it was fun watching the number of people who did a double take at realizing who our son holding his three year old was. He was surprised at how many people there still were there who knew him; this being a college town (not to mention having an insane cost of living), people come and go all the time.

Someone had brought their very large orange pet rabbit. They had set it in a corner of the gym on some blankets that were clearly home territory to it and it was staying put. The adults kept an eye on the kids going over to pet it; not all of them knew how. Stroke in this direction. Don’t grab fur. Gently, yes. Like that! Well done!

Being surrounded by strange small bouncy people intruding on its space didn’t faze it a bit.

Maddy (I made sure it was okay) fed it a grape. It reached out its nose to take it right from her hand, accepting her offering, and that sweet rabbit just totally made her day.

This is how they’re supposed to look.

The glaze for the tortes didn’t get made till today because they requested milk chocolate in the ganache.

Preference for dark chocolate vs milk is statistically a northern California/southern California difference, which I find curious. I remember reading an article years ago about how when Trader Joe’s started opening stores up here, few people were buying what everybody bought down there and they had to come up to speed fast.

Having none of the latter in the house because we just don’t, I had to wait till the local store was open again for the day. They do carry it in such a percentage, just not a lot by comparison.

Take one Pound Plus (ie 500g) bar in its wrapper and throw on the floor repeatedly. Inside a ziplock bag if you want to be sure none gets loose. Easiest way to chop chocolate ever, and it generally divides itself along the lines of the little squares in there.

Got that done, reached for the half gallon of extra heavy cream from Costco…

The fridge. The floor. Me. I remembered to grab the carton off the floor as it was chugging away down there, and what was still in there hadn’t made any contact with anything yet and there was still enough for that glaze. (Barely.)

But man.

This was going to take awhile. And this is in a kitchen where, to take its drawers out, you have to pull the entire fridge forward to get it clear of the oven doors it’s at a 90 degree angle with. I did not get them out.

There was still a bit in the tread of my shoes but I tried.

I gave up and used bath towels on the lake on the floor.

And then I tried to wash the bath towels.

All it needed was a few drops of red food coloring in the stuff and we would have had The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. It could leave one surface for another but you could not make it go away, as I learned when I opened the washing machine and wondered at that white band just below the rim when the load was supposedly done. Oh man. I wasn’t trying to make butter!

I paper toweled that out of there the best I could and ran the thing again on hot. Still some, but a lot less.

Crossing my fingers and mindful of the extreme drought (but it’s supposed to rain tonight!), I threw the load in the dryer.

It came out with a lovely smell of fresh cream. For now.

I bet the cashmere sweater I hand-washed does, too.

But the tortes got their glaze. It did not look like normal; it was runnier than I expected and refused to hold the deep indentations I usually put into the tops (picture above pilfered from my recipe) –and then I realized that of course. It’s got milk and sugar substituting for more of the actual chocolate and they don’t have the same properties.

Leading to the quite irreverent thought that, there it is: milk chocolate is the Hollywood plastic surgery of the cacao bean. So smooth. Wrinkle free.

Chocolate tortes about to come out of the oven, lemon almond blueberry muffins that SOMEbody snitched one of, thoroughly approved what he’d just tasted and came back for a second, Costco lasagna in the freezer–sprinkle a little Penzey’s Pizza Seasoning and a bit of parmesan and a spoonful of the best olive oil on the top to make it not taste like it’s from Costco, and if you can wrangle it into your own pan from frozen before baking it you can actually pull it off–and milk and apple juice in the fridge. Raspberries and ripe mangoes, the simplest salad in the world but very good, okay, got those, and I know how much they love raspberries.

It’s the great-grandmother on the other side’s birthday this week and since she’s a local (and turning I think 99?) they’re coming to see her while they can, grateful for the break in the pandemic.

Which means we get spillover grandchild time this weekend.

Our older son was 6’2″ and 126 pounds when he was 12, and grew nearly eight more inches after that. Parker is 11, and just set a record for a baseball hit farther over the fence than any 11 year old in his town ever has; the kid’s a natural athlete.

He wasn’t towering over me last August, but you know that one by one they’re all sneaking up on me fast.

I can’t wait!

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.

I offered to help get stuff out of her car before it got turned over to the repair folks who will tell the insurance company whether the frame is bent or not.

Afterwards, we sat and talked about it all. Turns out Richard had looked at our car’s clock, which has not been reset, which is why he’d insisted he’d been home around 2 a.m. I’d thought, well, okay, if it makes you feel better, but no it was not.

No, she said, *I* got home a little after 3:00. So yeah, closer to 3:30 for him.

Yup.

You know, the important details like that. Sometimes it’s just easier to sweat the small stuff.

But she’ll be alright.

She showed me the imprint on the back of her car from the bike rack that had been on the front of the county bus. We marveled at how much worse it could have been given all that kinetic energy. She felt so bad for the driver and hoped he wouldn’t lose his job, and he had been so worried about her, not himself. By law, the sheriff had had to come, the supervisor, the cops, and the bus had had to stay in rush hour exactly where it had hit her as they processed everything.

With idiots in expensive cars going around them to the right over the curb in front of all that law enforcement! Some people are determined not to learn the lesson of the moment.

She told me she’d asked me to come help out in part because, mindful of my health, last night they’d insisted I go to bed (even if I didn’t sleep) when it was clear the ER was going to drag on forever–and that she knew I’d needed to see her.

I did, very much. And that is one very perceptive young woman.

Okay, for those of you who live in hurricane country, which I have not for a very long time now: do you ever feel the wind go right through the house?

Because there were no air vents to the right of me and nobody was walking around, but in today’s strong wind storm, there was this one big gust where I not only heard it, I felt it coming through. Not hard, but cold like outside and very startling because that has never happened here.

Edited to add, okay, today’s post isn’t about the weather after all. We just got a series of messages from one of our kids. (type type type. Delete.)

I’ll let them process their own story before I barge in, on second thought.

ERs are mostly about waiting. Which is good, when you get to have to.

Yesterday there were two massive fires in the Bay Area: one that utterly destroyed a Home Depot in San Jose that thankfully everybody in the store escaped from; there were two other small fires near it whose connection is unknown yet, and a few hours before that, a fire at the Port of Benicia in the North Bay that destroyed a pier, an important deepwater dock that imported cars are loaded onto, and damaged an oil refinery.

You know how California gas prices are super high because we require a cleaner version that’s only made and only sold here? Just on a side note.

Today I heard from another one of my old Purlescence friends.

She’s a recent cancer survivor, so when she went to Costco, the size of the crowd (Palm Sunday? People preparing for Easter?) was just too much; she turned right around and headed home.

She found herself at a particularly long red light with time to look around–and she saw him. She called 911 and said I don’t know if he’s setting a fire or trying to put one out, but here’s where he is.

The light turned, she pulled away.

The police called back to ask her to come make a statement, and she did, and they were done and she was almost to her car again when the cop got a message. He asked her to come with him in his cruiser.

Was this him?

Yes that is him.

I’ll be curious to learn how many of yesterday’s events they end up connecting him with. But they know he’s responsible for the one he didn’t quite succeed at.

I thanked her for doing the right thing and she was like, how could one not.

But no really, it was for us.

Kathy came! I wrote about the nest-makers taking the last of her dog’s fur I’d had tucked away and she told me, That’s a renewable resource!

And an excuse to see an old friend from our Purlescence days. So much to catch up on. She’d made it to Stitches, I had not. Both of us stayed carefully masked (while succumbing to the temptation for a hug at the door.)

We talked pandemicnesses like wanting a haircut, noting each other’s longer locks these days. Her stylist was careful; mine…there was only once. And that was between the vaccines and Delta.

I learned more about what it’s like to be a schoolteacher through all this, the hybrid classes, the kids whose needs to be in a classroom with peers was so great vs the ones who just couldn’t for health reasons. Those weren’t statistics to her, they were kids she loves. They are lucky to have her.

She had a goodly distance for the drive home.

We parted with a mutual, Let’s not make this three or four years next time, okay?

My thanks to that sweet goofy-eyes German Shepherd (the pictures were so funny!) for giving us an excuse to do what we’d long wanted to do.

And for taking good care of the chickadees and titmice, too.

Every now and then, the comments are as good as the story; not every one, but certainly most. The story being about parents who meet their new babies and ditch the name they were going to give it and why they do.

We did that on one of ours. We spent most of the pregnancy trying to pick one of two names and neither one of us was able to decide which. I would just have gone with both, but my mother-in-law, I am told, hated her middle name, hated dealing with having a middle name and then four as an adult and forms only letting you put down two and a middle initial and what do you need that extraneous one for anyway, and my sweet husband grew up thinking he wasn’t going to do that to his daughters, no sir.

Whereas I grew up without a middle name and was the only kid in the grade as far as I knew who didn’t, and I wasn’t going to do that to my girls, no way.

So.

Frances (hi Mom!) or Carole (which would have deprived my niece born later of what turned out to have belonged to her all along.) For nine months.

I’d been in labor for hours when we looked at each other and had a mutual moment of truth: not those names. Something else. But what?!

We started throwing ideas at each other, no, no, do you remember–not that one, you’re right–till I said how about? and he went, That’s it! We decided to wait for sure till after we’d seen her but hey, not long now.

But it already felt like we’d finally found the right one.

Our family doctor stopped by the hospital after dinner. I had just been wheeled to my room. The baby had spent some time in what that hospital had as far as an NICU–nobody had told us till she arrived that the closest one was a two-hour ambulance ride away–and I was a little hazy on where she was at that point other than the nursery. I wanted to hold my baby. I hadn’t gotten to do that yet, they’d been in too much of a hurry when she’d arrived.

He stopped by my room to reassure me, telling me he had examined Michelle and she was looking great.

Me, having had a very very long, strenuous day, bone tired: “Who?”

He looked startled.

Oh right, right, that’s her name now, right. Sorry.

After seeing my mom, our younger son, my older sisters and their husbands, my older brother and his two girls at home and Richard’s sister last week, today felt antsy: I wanted more.

I checked our flight miles, and it turns out that after accumulating them for two years we have enough to fly a round trip free.

As my oldest niece said after her first flight when she was two, Mommy! Get air pane! Less go!

As we wait to see how this BA.2 variant progresses. I’m glad we went when we went, but for now, we’re back to not yet. Not quite yet.

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.