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.

The conching was to the point where you could stop any time now.

This has always been a two-person project. It’s one of the things we like about it.

He had a migraine and I was avoiding the chocolate: usually it’s one watching and stirring as it cools and eventually adding the cocoa butter at the right temp while the other cleans up the equipment, and then one pouring, one smoothing the bars over, but none of that is something you can do in the dark holding still holding your head.

Which is how the big cherry tree that’s needed pruning got pruned. Avoidance is a productive thing.

And then I came inside, washed up, dried my hands exactingly–no water near chocolate–and with a few check-ins with him to make sure I was remembering the right temps for each stage, I did it.

I didn’t get the cookie sheets under the molds shaken to help get air bubbles out, the amounts aren’t perfectly even from mold to mold, and the tempering? Yeah well. I did my best. But I did it, and now I know I can.

Run the ends in, tighten up that little open circle at the top, call it done.

Ed. to add so I’ll be able to reference it later when I can’t remember which variety is which: Guatamalan-Cahabon cacao nibs, roasted 12 minutes at 350, in the melanger now. It had been awhile and we’d been missing the homemade stuff so after writing the earlier part of this post I got a batch going.

Chocolate gets smoother in scent as well as texture the longer it conches. A few kind of smack you in the nose with CHOCOLATE!!! almost burning your nostrils at this stage. Not this one. It smells great but high acidity it is not.

We’ll see just how mellow it actually turns out to be tomorrow when it’s done.

The plan was to work on the afghan.

But that brown Malabrigo insisted I go get it, insisted I wind it, and then when I said okay did that and picked up the afghan, I found myself putting it back down and giving myself over to the urge to not just cast on a hat but actually make that hat.

It felt important.

I guess I’ll find out why soon enough.

The bottom half of a gansey moose (if I can get the picture into the post–the update really scrambled things.) To my eyes it looks more like one of those Star Wars mechanical Trojan horses but we’ll see how it turns out.

We played a bit of a game tonight: trying to guess the size and type of the critter just outside by the sounds it was making.

Big sounds.

I turned on the porch light. No sign, but a moment or two later, more sounds, light or no light–to use an old expression from back home, it didn’t pay it no never mind.

I opened the door so as to hear better and the tiny skittery sound off to the right was probably the target of the I don’t care that you know that I’m here sound off to the left.

“Close the door, you don’t want to get sprayed.”

Well that’s a better thought than a mountain lion. Did I hear that awning bounce a minute ago? Skunks don’t climb nor do they jump down.

I closed the door.

Trying to see if the blog is fixed.

Edit: It is! Yay for the resident computer scientist!

The doorbell rang. I saw the back of the head through the window as I approached, told my husband it wasn’t anybody we knew, and opened the door to–Holly!! HI!

Turns out she’d been in my town for something else and thought she’d drop by and oh by the way she’d embroidered these hand towels for me just for fun.

She used the facilities before she left and only afterwards did it smack me upside the head that I had just the perfect new towels to hang in there–if only I’d pushed her out of the way and run down the hallway ahead of her with them.