Item 1. They replaced the carpeting at church last week. People were complaining about the smell. It was intense. (I did a mental grin upwards at the late Ski, who’d ordered the previous one ~25 years ago, thinking, at last they’d corrected his color choice. He was so proud of that mismatching green. Shhh.)

I spent much of the time holding very still with not one oxygen molecule to spare. Yow.

This week I was hoping the place would be aired out far better by now–but the answer was, um, some.

I got the doors propped open with a flower pot on one side and a chair on the other before the meeting, but during it found myself having to put my head between my knees. Hey I did better than this last week, what’s up with this. I made a break for it and went for that chair. Yes it was near noon on a summer day and in the sun, but you worry about paying for it re the lupus tomorrow after you make it through today–can’t get to the one without the other.

Jenni saw me and immediately followed me out and stayed by me and asked if I was okay. I searched through my purse I should have used last week but before that hadn’t had to use in years, even if I’ve periodically replaced it at expiration.

I found my inhaler. It helped. Not as much as I wanted, but it helped.

Item 2. I had to go back in to the one of the less aired-out parts to retrieve the Trader Joe’s chocolate goodies from the mother’s nursing lounge at the end.

A young mom was in there: Oh, are you the one that brings those? Thank you so much!

Me: Yes, it is the most fun job–and I take requests.

Her: You always bring my favorites!

I left with a big grin on my face.

Item 3. The upshot: the realization that there was no excuse not to ask. I needed to send out a message to both wards that use that building to make sure there are no serious peanut allergies in either one before I bring TJ’s chocolate peanut butter cups in there. Whether I ever know about it or not, I do not want to leave some poor kid fighting to breathe.

I’ve only brought them a few times but I never should have without making sure first. Checking with the leaders like I did was not enough.

So now I’ve asked.

Hey, Mom, wanna go to Andy’s Orchard with my friend and me?

YES!

I sat in the back as they caught up in the front seat (her dear friend just moved here a week ago) and just about finished the back of the baby sweater a mile from home.

Kit Donnells are some of the best peaches out there–and one of Andy’s creations.

On a total non sequitur, I was mentioning to Holly a few minutes ago about a message Richard got in the early days of DARPAnet, the precursor to the internet.

So I had to go find it: the fractured fairy tale Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. Enjoy.

Today was a day spent knowing I’ll feel better tomorrow–I’m already starting to–and that it was worth it.

Went to pick up a prescription and there was a banner above the pharmacy window: Vaccinations.

So I asked, not quite daring to actually hope: did this mean they finally had Shingrix in stock?

They did! As of today they had the latest flu shot, too!

This early?!

Yup!

Note that we have a baby in the family scheduled to be delivered weeks short of full term.

I did ask if I would need a booster later if I got the flu one now and was assured by the pharmacist that no, it would be effective for the whole year.

So I filled out the paperwork, waited while they did the insurance company thing, and knitted, glad for the small project in the purse given that I had expected none of this.

Just before the pharmacist gave me a shot in each shoulder she happened to mention that that was their last dose of Shingrix.

I had been trying to get one for over a year. I’ve heard so many friends tell horror stories of what their shingles was like: intense, unrelenting pain for six months, one whose husband went blind in one eye, another who was hit with it twice.

After all that time spent fervently hoping I not get it while waiting for the vaccine to finally be available, and then the extra of being able to go through airport crowds and not have to worry about bringing the grandchildren the flu, to which I am highly susceptible–I tell you, I walked out of there so very very happy that after I got home I even told every single spammer on the phone, warmly, to have a nice day, even though the ringing has been relentless of late. The ones that were actual human beings I decided needed a little humanity shown them, because how often do they get that.

Now we just have to find one of those doses for my husband. I don’t know if all the CVSs received stock or just the local one. Sorry I hogged it, dear.

The antlers aren’t quite *that* big–the fabric needs smoothing out.

Added two rows’ uplift on the wings vs the swatch (cue the “uh, I meant to do that”) and decided to keep it.

Am debating adding an edging afterwards to make sure the thing can shrink all it wants and still be useful. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done that if I do but it’ll be the first time (remembering a certain unforgettable ruffly edge that with all its extra stitches took forever to do–but the kid liked it) that I’ll have done it like I want it to come out.

One hopes.

Pick up three of every five up the sides this time. Right?

Our cherry season is over, so these weren’t local but when I saw them at Costco I fell for them.

Funny how you can tell yourself in the grocery store that it doesn’t really take that much time to make a fresh cherry pie when you really want one.

It does.

I overfilled the 10″ pan, wanting to use all three pounds and be done with them because (after tasting one) this was the best they could ever aspire to be. I pinched those edges shut, but the pie wasn’t having it. Five minutes before the buzzer went off (I’d set it at maximum time because of the size of the thing) the kitchen was suddenly smoking up big time, and I mean billowing.

I yanked the oven door open, fully expecting flames (nope, just a gray cloud and an escaped cherry and juices sizzling on the floor of it), turned on the fan, and opened windows skylight doors and got a nice quick chat with my neighbors out of the deal.

Richard came home from his errand a few minutes later and walked in going, Did you know something burned? You can smell it down the street.

Naaah. Never would have guessed!

It doesn’t taste smoked. It’s not an Andy’s cherries pie, but it is still definitely cherry pie. Yum.

I wasn’t about to take a white afghan project to the garage while they worked on the car, so the languishing washable-wool purple baby dress got picked up again and the second side has gone from a few indecipherable rows to wow, that’s looking great.

The new mechanic was delighted at hearing it was for a whole new person about to come into the world and it just made his day. Which totally made mine.

With that sense of accomplishment in hand, after I got home I tackled what I’d been avoiding: I dislike doing exploratory knitting that is not usable for anything afterwards except as ripped-out yarn. I know that sometimes for all the sketching I might try I just have to do it but I fight the impatient sense of wasted knitting every stitch of the way.

I did six iterations of what my soaring eagle should/could look like. I didn’t want the classic simple gull-wing V, I had enough detail in the trees and moose that the eagle deserved the same. Not to mention eagles are big. Scale, we needed scale here.

I went from, that’s what I’d thought I was going to do but I really don’t like that, to, rip, I don’t even want to see it, to, okay, keep that to compare against while I try… To, at long last, as my strip added ever more inches, Oh! Of course! That’s what it needed!

I would not have thought of the final version if I hadn’t seen all the in-betweens.

Which I’ll rip out. Tomorrow. I don’t enjoy that part and I don’t have to yet.

I knew about huanglongbing, ie, greening disease, first found in China about a hundred years ago and how it has been threatening to kill every citrus tree in the world–I have looked for signs of it in my lemons and mandarins. Supposedly, northern California is the last corner of the American citrus world that doesn’t have it.

What I did not know was how far anyone had gotten in fighting it nor by what means they were trying.

First, the horrifying article from May saying that the EPA had approved spraying 650,000 pounds of human antibiotics on commercial groves this year even though they don’t yet know if that will even work. You didn’t need your streptomycin to be effective on your infections or post-op, did you?

I wanted to know more.

I found a six-year-old article, also at the New York Times, that was far more hopeful.

A spinach gene. A grower who was as enraged at Monsanto’s business practices as the rest of us helped fund the research that discovered that a gene in spinach might make it so that orange juice still exists 20 years from now. 90% of the orange trees in Florida were already dead at the time.

His group even found a way to get that gene into living trees so that they could test it for safety sooner. The story needs an update whether their efforts got swept away in the anti-GMO fad and whether it worked as well as initial tests suggested. He understands that fad–but hoped he could make his case to the American public that he had chosen spinach and not pig genes for the same reasons they would have: to stick to a widely-used well-known plant source so as to cause the least potential disruption in the food chain. The gene had nothing to do with flavor or color.

Meantime, Trump’s administration is grossly contributing to antibiotic resistance.

Thanks, I’d rather say pass me the spinached.

The transition away from safflower is complete now, and what a difference it has made.

I’m used to seeing mostly house finches, and house finches squabble and fight each other off and vie for the top spot on the feeder–even when there’s nothing up there for them but self-regard as the winner.

I’d never seen this before: two goldfinches sharing a portal. For several minutes, not just as a one-off, long enough for me to fumble with the phone to try to get it on camera. A third one flew in; that was fine with them.

They were a team. They mostly worked in tandem, going for sunflower together, straightening up to eat, going for another. Occasionally one would dive in while the other waited but mostly it was the two of them together.

Who knew birds in the finch family could cooperate like that?

It gave me a sudden irrational sense of hope for the world, our political differences and all.

I had just picked him up from work.

I reminded him of that time at that reindeer farm in Alaska several years ago, where I asked the guy what they do with the downy undercoat of their animals in the spring and he kind of held out his hands to show it going away poof on the wind, explaining that they’d been told the fiber was too short to spin. He added wistfully that it *was* marvelously soft, though.

I was agog. I promised him that handspinners would card it with merino to anchor it and pay a small fortune for it–after all, look at the price of qiviut!

He was convinced it could not be.

I pled my case. I told him that come next spring if he sent me some I would very happily demonstrate.

I almost had him. So close. Enough that I knew that after I left he would at least make inquiries–I mean, why turn down a revenue source that could help support his farm?

Today, not looking for any such thing, I stumbled across this:

These merino skeins are softened and enhanced with 20 percent reindeer.
To our knowledge, Coyote Trail Farm and Fiber Mill, is the only mill in the country—probably the world—that processes reindeer. 

At $65 a skein I didn’t buy any, I quickly assured my husband in the passenger seat. With a grin: Yet.

He immediately exclaimed, with the eagerness of a small grandchild, But does it fly?!

That one little puffball in front of the moose is for the above-the-knees single dandelion flower outside the front door that so transfixed me on our first visit to Alaska.

So: this is how I draw. This is how my little sister draws.

You know that old insult, Stick to your knitting? Well yeah. Makes perfect sense to me, I think I will, thanks.

The story. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell it. The ending part, maybe.

Even when someone messes up and thinks you messed up when you know you didn’t and you know they (collectively) did and you know you have a brain like that but you know that other guy put it in that box but they’re so sure and eventually you shrug it off and walk away.

…When they call you two years later and they tell you they found what they’d accused you of losing and ask you to come get them and then call again and tell you they’ll return them to the manufacturer if you don’t show up in so many days to get them and they make no offer of refunding your rather large sum of money if they in fact do that (edit: it may be that that just didn’t occur to him) nor do they apologize. For anything. And when you show up the look on their face is anything but glad to see you. More, wary.

Being glad to see them anyway and laughing off our human foibles and trying on the long-lost new glasses (not mentioning that the prescription has since been replaced because that could be just so many more layers of awkward) was not what they were expecting but man, did it feel like a weight was lifted off both our shoulders.

I had once been glad to see him. He had once been glad to see me. We reclaimed that, and it was a huge relief. (What’s his name again?)

I will never again, however, order more than one pair and then send one back to be redone.

He didn’t put the paperwork quite in reach and in fact ditched it at the end rather than giving it to me where (edit: this is a guess and an assumption, to be fair) I might read the various notes on it.

I didn’t care. I’d long since ceased caring about the dumb stuff on this one. What I’d wanted to know was, the man had always seemed like actually quite a decent, caring human being, and this had been all kinds of bad for him I’m sure; there was zero point in making it worse. Why not approach it as a chance to come back to the best in ourselves, for both of us. Hail fellow well met.

The glasses I’d actually worn all this time? I’d tripped over them and had been wearing them crooked for months. Costco didn’t have the equipment to repair that style, I knew the original seller would, but I really hadn’t wanted to go back there.

And then he had had to call me to ask me to.

There’s usually a backup guy if not two in the place but at that particular moment everybody else was at lunch as the door opened again and again. Suddenly the place was hopping with customers.

And by golly he put me first even over my objections that I in no way wanted to cut in line, saying, they were still choosing, and then he fixed my regular glasses, too, after I asked if he was sure? I could come back at a better time.

It took him awhile to do. They needed what he could offer.

And he was honestly glad to get a chance to help.

After a few days’ interruption, the race is on again! The moose is hiding just beyond that stand of trees, finished, and we’re 25 or 30 rows before the eagle flies in.

Every line of pines going up the mountainside is slightly different from the ones before. Slightly shorter. As they are.

The first thing I did today was to check up on them.

My friends talked a little about the festival and marked themselves as Safe.

Would that it had been so for all, like it was supposed to be. Like it should be. Like it once was and could be again, if we so choose as a society.

Vote, my friends. Vote. We deserve so much better than this.

I called my folks and standing there phone in hand was looking out the window when there it was.

I hadn’t seen so much as a bud much less a stalk when I’d watered the amaryllises a few days ago nor did I ever spot it through the window. It was hiding behind quite a few leaves.

I brought it out to where we could all get a better look at it.

On a side note: going to Andy’s Orchard yesterday, my daughter and I were in a long heavy traffic jam and went oh right, it’s the Garlic Festival in Gilroy this weekend. Cool. I can say that yes, I have tasted garlic ice cream, thank you Gilroy! Those people were going to have a good time, but we were quite happy to cut out of that part of the freeway early.

The news tonight is absolutely beyond comprehension.