Done did got my hair did, after putting off the trim for too long. When it pins you in place when you try to look over your shoulder to change lanes and you have to lean forward first to let yourself free, it’s time. At least for me.

Gwyn does amazing work… Besides, it’s fun to see what I look like with straight hair with a little flip at the end, or at least while it lasts. I like it. So different, without having to cut off all my hair to enjoy the effects of the novelty.

Tomorrow morning the fog will roll in, the humidity will rise, and my hair will curl.

Well, so then we got a message from our older son that he was in town for the day on business and could we meet up for dinner? Cool!

I wondered if maybe still… And so we headed over to the restaurant where Sue worked and who had so adored our kids when they were little. The woman in the intro in my book. She’s a good one.

Sue herself welcomed us on back–she was still there!

Our 6’9″ Richard-the-younger arrived not long after.

I loved her laugh as she said, “Oh, he’s not little anymore!”

Meantime, Sam pinged a baby picture or two our way as if on cue, not knowing we were right there with her favorite waitress from her childhood, showing Mathias getting better and better at this smiling thing.

Sue thanked me again for the scarf I knit her, and I had been going to thank her again for the amaryllis she dropped off at Purlescence for me once, so let me do so here.

It still blooms every year. It’s perfect. Thank you!

After we got home, I texted Gwyn what Sue had said at the beginning, taking me in a moment: “You look fabulous!”

Only with help, honey, only with a lot of very talented help, and Gwyn deserved to hear every word of that.

And then I cast on a baby blanket for a friend. As one does.

I was on what I’d decided was going to be the last repeat when the so-obvious smacked me upside the head: I know who wears turquoise. (Which this is in real life.) A lot. Like, does she ever wear anything that’s not? Her dad just passed away–you know she could use a good hug. And she’s a knitter!

I used 40 grams of the merino/silk and I have 90 g left. We’ll see how the length and fit of the thing looks once that lace is dried, and if I need to make a second on a larger scale to match her better, I certainly have plenty to do it with.

I’ve wanted to knit for her for a long time and at last I have a plan. And maybe even the cowl.

Meantime, this is how the back of the pattern that my Water Turtles shawl is done in looks like, and I just think it’s really cool.

Thoughts during a summer full moon’s brightly lit and long, sleepless night:

Y’know? I have a lot of people I want to be knitting for right now for a lot of very good reasons.

If I put another day’s work into that afghan project I’ll have a really nice soft black scarf that the recipient will love just as much as any bigger object and would probably actually use it more. How much the yarn shrinks or blooms wouldn’t matter then: I could seam the ends for a doubled-over infinity scarf or leave them open, and I don’t even have to decide yet. I can knit it to the point where I’d cast off if I were doing that, leave it waiting, and if I find I want to and have the time I can keep going from there as I’d originally planned.

But right now is just not that time, no matter how much I might want it to be. I might even be able to pull off doing both from those cones–making the scarf a swatch. A really big swatch.

The moon finally went behind the camphor tree’s leaves, and at some time well after 2:00 am I fell asleep at last.

I cast on a turquoise cowl in the morning.

Yardage times desired length divided by time…

And so I supplemented the 900 grams of heavy dk weight with 760 grams of a matching thinner 4-ply, even if it meant waiting for the second cone to arrive. It just came.

I swatched on the 10s–that would go fast for sure.

In your dreams, honey. I scoured it in hot water, hoping it would shrink enough. A little, maybe, but, c’mon.

I swatched on the 9s. Give it up, honey.

8s are as low as I’m going. It *will* shrink, but it will also bloom out when I wash the finished afghan. But I am not pre-scouring two pounds on that niddy-noddy at once. Okay, then, we’re on.

It’s a race to see which runs out first, the yarn or me. Me. There’s probably ~2500 yards on the dk and twice that on the 4-ply, and starting a black afghan in two strands of loosely-plied yarns was probably not my smartest move–it was the fifty bucks for two pounds of cashmere (the best bargains went fast) that did me in and here we are.

I’m figuring I need to do five inches a day to totally be on the safe side, time-wise. So far, I’ve done a whopping three. Which is actually not shabby at all.

(Edited to add: got it to 4,” we’ll say five if you stretch it. Meantime, someone’s setting off illegal fireworks outside and made a skunk mad, which is good for my asthma but probably not what they intended.)

Bedtime. That satisfying snap as the last of the ball is broken away at last. Lights, action, camera!

I’m just really glad right now that I made two more skeins of this yarn, because it exactly matches a sweater I love. I’ll have plenty of time to knit another before it gets cold.

Dropped my glasses off the top of my head when I stood up to answer the phone and then I stepped on them.

It was bad. There was just no putting those back on. All I could do was wait for Richard to get home from work to drive me over to For Eyes.

A dozen feet away was close enough not to be too fuzzy when a Cooper’s hawk skidded to a stop on the concrete just on the other side of the glass door. It considered me a split second as a finch on its back flailed away wildly trying to right itself (its hard thwack on that window had snatched my attention) and he grabbed it and was off.

The younger employee went, “Wow, you really stepped on them,” and given their age (I’d reused the same lightweight metal frames through several prescription changes–I bought an extra pair eight years ago so I could) she was afraid she would break them; the more experienced middle-aged guy, the one I took a tumble in front of last week, was sure he could do it and she was sure he could if anybody could and handed them over.

At this point I’ve been in there enough times that they were not surprised to see me pull out the knitting project I started today (after I did indeed add a repeat to yesterday’s.)

He was glad to see me back and looking none the worse for that fall and made a point of getting those exactly right. He totally rescued me, and was very pleased to be able to make such a difference. I can see again. I can do things again. I have my life back.

They both adored the picture of Mathias in shades and even asked to see more pictures of the baby, and I thought, I really like you guys…!

(Yarn: two strands of a dusty purple-plum cashmere laceweight, a gift from Sherry in Idaho, and two strands of a brick red merino with a touch of sparkle to it, plied together on my spinning wheel.)

Hank to ball to I’ll decide in the morning if it’s finished or if I want to add another repeat. Malabrigo Mechita in Whales Road colorway, and I’ve only used 32 of the 100g so far. That’s one very cost-effective hank of soft, washable merino yarn.

A confession: I was working on what I wanted to work on rather than the colors I think the next person in my mental queue would prefer, and that made me want to push on and try to get it all done by the end of the day. I didn’t, quite, but tomorrow I can get to hers instead of having this still in the way. (Much.)

Sometimes you just have to recharge your batteries by knitting what pleases you, and that’s okay.

Bring on the icepacks.

The last rays at sundown were coming through the window right on that drying merino/silk cowl (Scrumptious 4-ply yarn by Fyberspates), showing the radiant deep purple hiding in that dark navy. I ran for the camera, but in the steps it took me to go down the hall and back the light was gone.

You can almost see it.

The mango tree has sprouted like crazy just since two weeks ago.That top branch grew from ending at that last big green leaf to seven new branches popping out–and that’s just the one cluster. From this morning to this evening, it went from looking like a solid poof from inside the house to discernibly separate branches: they are stretching up and out at two to three inches a day.

All the flower stalks that had the tiniest suggestion of buds when we left town to help when Mathias was born–it got too cold for them while nobody was home to cover the tree at night and they gradually turned black, so I think there will be no crop this year. The rest of the tree is doing fine. And who knows, it might surprise me yet.

(Cute hat and matching socks–hey, they match the mango!– from longtime online knitting friend Susan Schutz.)

Blowing up mannequins on the Mall in DC as the traffic continues on by without a blink. Someone at the Consumer Products Safety Commission has a job that gets to be fun once a year: showing how not to be stupid with fireworks.

That bird (I’m guessing a pigeon) streaking past that blue canopy a split second early enough must have thought it had broken the sound barrier. Take *that*, raptors!

The full version beyond the gifs, here, from 2016. Watching the 2015 and 2017 versions (same demos), it’s amusing to watch the demo kitchen setup go from curtains on the window and potholders to potholders to, this year, oh forget it. Just the paper window.

Budget cuts.

Happy and safe Fourth-ing, everybody!

We are foster fish parents for a month, trusted with someone’s children’s beloved black beta in a square goldfish bowl sitting inside a plastic modern-architecture of a holder. (We have it on a shelving unit, thus the metal wires below.)

After 24 hours it’s still swimming and it’s still coming out to eat. So far so good.

Those wispy fins waving in slow curling motion against the water are so elegant.

(I confess I did feel better about my chances of doing a decent job after its owner said what happened when they tipped a little water out to be able to transport it over here. It was an easy promise to make that I won’t have to fish it out of my disposal.)

Driving over the San Francisco Bay, glad Richard was at the wheel so I could see: the black cormorants resting on the towers, the snowy egrets, one in flight, the others wading by the shore. The flock of white pelicans!

And the water was high, so high, so close–and green across the expanse to either side rather than blue. All that winter white in the mountains to the east melting melting melting flowing down to the Bay.

If I could get my phone to let me take another picture, I’d show you the half-done one I started this morning in navy 4-ply Scrumptious by Fyber Spates. Take this pattern, move the decreases to the centers of the diamonds, dark blue, there you go.

Yesterday’s silk came out such that when I tried this cowl on and looked at how it shimmered under the skylight, I instantly wanted to make more like that for more people and I do have more colors of that dk silk in my stash.

The Scrumptious was not one of them. But somehow this morning it wheedled its way onto my needles anyway and told me it wouldn’t take more than a day or two, promise! So I’m trying to hold it to that.

It made it up to me as I went along with it by reminding me how (name redacted)….wears navy a lot… And could use a hug right now.

And a superwash merino blend is likely to be a lot less stressful on a new mom than pure silk might be.

That time they drew the black line on the display glasses to order where the bifocal line should be and you said it was too high so they redrew the line but you wondered about it still but they’re the ones who know their job right and they went ahead and the glasses came in and you took them home and you put them on and the line was just barely below center in your vision when you’re walking and you couldn’t see the kitchen counter and it threw off your balance and you could only see if you tilted your head down a bit and that doesn’t work when your husband is 6’8″ and you’re 5’5″ and you took them back the next day and explained that you were in a car accident years ago and your ability to balance at all depends on visual feedback and you have to be able to see like you did with your old glasses and they said well these are crooked anyway here let me fix those for you and then they put the new glasses back on you and asked you to check them out and you stood and turned to see across the room to get the depth-perception thing going and to see where that line was now and next thing you knew you were falling over backwards and splat on the floor and the store was freaking out and the manager wondered if he needed to file an incident report and you said you were fine and thanks for the icepack and they called someone and spent half an hour filling out an incident report and had you sign it and you realized afterwards you couldn’t tell the difference between city and county and what were their names when you were filling it out and hesitated and wrote the wrong one and why does your writing look so bad but it came back to you pretty fast so that’s okay and you filled in the right one next to the wrong one and you told him you tell your kids you’re going to be a terror when you’re 90 and he cracked a smile for the first time and took a deep breath?

Yeah that time. Today. That was the time they decided they were going to redo those glasses for you and could you just leave the one pair with them so they could make sure they got it right and then bring the other pair back and they’ll duplicate it once they knew those were good?

Now that I know how to make the dk silks in my stash work up well into a cowl and how they look and behave when I do… (Mine is like these, somewhat darker and greener than the fawn.)

That’ll be a good stopping point. I’ll put it down when I get there.

Okay, fine, so, the end of the row after that, then.

(Finally…) enough. Stop. Put it down.

It will be done by tomorrow. But not, no matter what my hands and eyes still want at this hour, tonight.

The picture’s the bright-light version of the colors, which are generally more subdued.

There was a baby shower tonight for someone who was a one-year-old with our then-one-year-old daughter when we moved here, and the best anniversary present my husband gave me was to urge me to go ahead to the party and enjoy.

I got there right at starting time–and there was Vivian and a chance to talk to her in an aside without its being in front of lots of other people and at a time when she was not having to deal with movers nor small children.

The blue I finished a week ago. The brick silk was an abandoned project that I hadn’t been able to make myself frog but at that gauge it just hadn’t been working as a rectangular scarf: the weight of it was going to pull and sag the stitches long over time the way loosely-spun loosely-knit silk can do and it had sat there hogging that pair of needles for a year.

Knowing she liked orange had gotten me to pick it up this morning, consider it sideways–hey! It does fit over the head when I pinch the edges together! (Barely.) I went to town with it, widening the pattern so it would go around the neck in layers just so. I am totally glad I saved that! (I did have to put a seam up the back.) UFOs can be great to have in a pinch, and she really liked it. She loved them all.

She laughed when I quoted her, “All the colors. Mostly orange. Blue is good.”

And then I told her this: I had bought that variegated Joseph’s Coat yarn from my old friend Lisa Souza maybe ten years ago and it had drifted to the far regions of my stash.

But somehow, and it was either Friday or Saturday, I had gone through bags and bags and found it and for no reason whatsoever I had pulled it out and put it front and center in the family room, so that when I got home from church Sunday after that conversation with her there it had been. Right. There. I hadn’t even known yet that she was moving away, much less what colors she liked. I had knitted it the rest of that day and all the next.

I found it intriguing how the yarn had split itself into three sections: the yarn was the same yard after yard but how it came out was not. “Kind of like raising children,” I said, and she laughed again.

She loved them all, but that one. That one spoke to her.

Her outfit looked like she had picked it out to match that cowl and she proudly wore her Lisa Souza the rest of the evening.

And then.

It was a large turnout: older women who’d known Kimber all her growing up (or almost, in my case), young women she’d grown up with, quite the reunion, and that end table in front of her was stacked pretty high. Which is good, given how many clothes babies go through every day.

Her sister had crocheted her a soft baby blanket and everybody oohed and aahed in appreciation.

More baby clothes… Towels, binkies, lots of pink in happy anticipation of her finally getting a girl on the third try…

Almost the last one. Kimber went to pull the envelope off so she could read it and tugged hard enough that some of the wrapping paper came off along with it.

She gasped and looked at me: that had to be from me! Right?!! She knew how big that package was, too. !!! She opened the card, took a deep breath to see the rest of what was inside while filling her mom in next to her (it was really loud in that house)…

and pulled out the baby blanket.

The machine washable and dry-able baby blanket in colors she loved so much. Colors that I had struggled to push myself through. Colors that were perfect for her.

One of the older women pulled me aside afterwards. She used to be a Knitter with a capital K but it’s been awhile.

That yellow, she said. In that pattern. It’s reminding me of–I don’t remember, but it’s reminding me of…(she shook her head) something!

It was absolutely compelling to her, and driving her crazy that she couldn’t remember what it was that had been.

It’ll come to you, I promised her. It’ll come.

I just bet you it’s that she knit somebody something once….