Dad put me on speakerphone into the party. His voice was strong, happy, laughing, sounding like Dad always has and at his happiest. My older sisters, brothers-in-law, a niece, and I didn’t quite catch the others and of course Mom were there celebrating his day.

“Tell a memory!”

I thought, Quick, think of something good!, and so I came up with this. While also marveling at how energizing love is. Go Dad!

I told of Mom and Dad coming here to visit and happily posing with my childhood stuffed tiger with the biggest smile on their faces. (That post is in the blog somewhere, I’ll find it…) The one Dad had brought home from the Steiff factory in Germany when I was three or four–I remember the moment when it became mine.

Do you still have it? Dad laughed, sure of the answer.

Me, with great enthusiasm, Yes! And when I was a teen, I wasn’t going to ask permission or for how to do it, I just grabbed some of the leftover yarn from Carolyn’s sweater and stitched him up where he’d split open a bit. The yarn didn’t match (not to mention, it was way too thick for the job) but it was what I had and I used it anyway. It’s still there. It’s part of its history and part of Carolyn’s sweater.

Which I’m sure was news to Carolyn in the background and I know all of this was new to her daughter there. Dad talked a little about touring that factory and was pleased that I remembered Anne’s koala. There were the big girls and the little girls and we two little girls got the stuffed animals.

I went on, Last Christmas, Maddy was turning four and that was just the right age so I went looking and I found the Steiff website and a tiger that was adorable and whose price wasn’t in the stratosphere. Maddy got a tiger from her grandparents, just like you gave me mine. Spencer got a Steiff baby rattle. I’d never known there was such a thing, but there is.

I forgot to tell him that Maddy latched onto that tiger like I’d latched onto mine and that when we visited between Christmas and New Year’s, the kids told us it was her favorite now.

I was afraid I was making Dad overdo but I didn’t want to break the spell and I didn’t want to deprive him of a single moment. Or, selfishly, me. He did tell me, though, when he needed to let me go so he could…

I knew. Breathe.

And if any doctor ever again asks me how I stay cheerful while going through the worst medical crises (actually, let’s hope I’m done with those), I’m going to say, You should see my dad. I totally get it from him.

Happy 93d, Dad. Love you forever and always and thank you.

This video. Because everybody needs to hear Mozart in birdsong.

She’s my mom’s age but has had more health challenges; she gave up driving some time ago. She needed a ride to the dentist. Yay for chat lists, which let you ask everybody so nobody gets put on the spot.

I sat on the Scandinavian-style couch in the waiting room with my small, portable Rios cowl project, listening fondly to the happy chatter, then the quiet, then the familiar sound of the drill.

The receptionist coming off her lunch break saw me, exclaimed over my work, and came over and asked if it were Malabrigo?

Yes! I asked if she was a knitter.

Oh, I’m a BIG knitter!

Instant kinship. We had a great time. (I tried not to take too much of hers.)

When Gail got done I got her and her walker in the car and then asked her, Anywhere else you’d like to go?

She looked like she was holding her breath, hardly daring to hope. She was trying to say it without giving away the intensity of emotion I saw in her face: Why, yes!

Trader Joe’s?

Her nose wrinkled a little. She really could use a trip to Safeway.

The little one one at midtown, where you don’t have to walk a mile to find everything, or the giant one on El Camino?

She grinned. The giant one. She hoped that one of their scooter-carts would be available.

Alright then!

They had two just inside the door to choose from, one in good condition and one with the seat torn. She chose the torn, and I silently wondered if her experiences with her weight influenced that choice and I hurt a little for her for it. I remembered the days when I would be driving my kids to school and she, her kids long grown, would be out there race walking for miles every day. And yet fate refused to let her be thin.

But never mind, we had a grand time, me with a cane and a cart following her around, her, electric-wheelchairing it. It’s a huge store, trying to compete with Costco. We walked it side to side and end to end. I reached things for her so she didn’t have to get up. I put a few things in my own cart as long as I was there. She wanted the Irish butter. I helpfully found Danish, and some other European country-style made in America, but nothing that said…

She spotted it and reached that Irish Gold before I could. It was at sitting-person height.

I was happy that among all the staples and common-sense items, she chose some stuff that was simply fun food. Every pantry should have something that’s a just because you feel like it.

Back at her house, I got her walker set up, put three of her bags on it at her request and carried the fourth and she let me in to put it up on the counter.

She explained about her table. And over there, that empty box.

A friend of hers had had many many pictures from years when their kids were little together, and there were faces there whom she no longer knew or knew how to get in touch with, if they were still with us. She had gone through them all, and these were the ones with Gail’s family and the rest were a chance for Gail to identify any of those others.

The Simon and Garfunkel Bookends song…

There had been so many. Gail was almost done going through them. She showed me a single stack, about six inches high: those were hers.

All the rest–and she said it with a quiet laugh, and in that moment I felt her appreciation for a good and long life and all that had blessed her and hers along the way.

All those other pictures. There really was nothing to do but put them in the trash.

She understood my oh goodness, she felt it, too, but sometimes you do what you can. And then you move on.

And as I write this I suddenly wonder if I’ve ever taken a picture of her myself. I want to. I need to. And soon.

(Afghan progress: halfway there.)

Yonder daughter came by and homemade strawberry pie she’d made was enjoyed by all.

Later, I was reading the paper and mentioned out loud the story in there of someone in Florida hearing something messing around downstairs in the middle of the night and they got all brave and stepped out the bedroom door to look over the railing to find out what on earth was going on.

The downstairs was being wrecked. By an 11-foot alligator that had broken in through a window.

I said, Y’know, when I was a kid those were almost extinct from hunting, and now they’ve really made a comeback.

Daughter gives a wry grin and says, You can tell your blog: it is much better to live where there are man-eating cats where you hike. Much better! Man-eating cats!

And she turns back to what she was doing, chuckling, joking/not joking.

Writing it down so I can find it later: I experimented to see if I could adapt my favorite blueberry cake recipe from chocolateandzucchini.com to use some of the freshly- made almond paste they sell at Milk Pail, with a higher almond and lower sugar content than any I know of.

For a few more weeks, anyway, till they shut down because Steve wants to retire. I need to find out where he sources it.

Okay, here it is:

Highly-Requested Blueberry Almond cake

Mix in one bowl:

1 2/3 c. flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

In Cuisinart: the almond paste is sold in small random packages; I used .35 oz the first time and about .5 oz the second. Both worked, they were just a little different. So, pulverize it in a Cuisinart; add in 1 stick butter, sliced and at room temperature. (Note that Wayfare brand dairy-free vegan butter worked great, too. Now I have to find someone besides Steve who stocks it.)Whirr. Add 1/2 tsp almond extract and 1 tsp vanilla, whirr, 1/2 c heavy cream (sour cream, plain yogurt, or going dairy-free, Kara brand coconut cream worked, too), then add 4 eggs and 1 c. sugar and whirr some more.

Add dry ingredients in. If you have a small food processor you might want to pour the wet ingredients into a mixing bowl first and add the dry in over there; one more thing to clean but easier to scrape into the pan, your choice.

Pour half into a greased 9×13″ pan. Cover with four cups (don’t be stingy) of fresh, rinsed, patted-dry blueberries, then add the rest of the batter on top. Sprinkle 1/4 c of brown sugar across the top and bake at 350 for 50 minutes or till a toothpick comes out clean.

I made this for Richard on Monday and it was so good that he and Michelle asked me to make it again, dairy free so she could have some, and the Wayfare dairy-free whipped butter (butter beans are an ingredient. Who knew) with the coconut cream worked both in texture and flavor. I also happened to overdo on the almond extract a little that time and it obliterated any mention of coconut flavor.

Blueberries, almond paste, Wayfare, Kara coconut cream, sour cream, butter, and the particularly good versions of almond and Bourbon vanilla extracts: I have no idea what I’m going to do when that place shuts down. They are small but they have all the best stuff.

A funny story on the side: twenty-five years ago there was one single herd of Wensleydale sheep left in the world. Handspinners pitched in to try to help save the breed; I’m not the only one who bought ten pounds of their wool, and I’ll have a hand spun coat just as soon as I finally finish that button band in time for the SpinOff Magazine Rare Breeds Contest. Of 1999. Well anyway. So, I was at the doctor’s waiting room working on it once and someone with a British accent came over to sit next to me and ask me about my knitting.

The yarn was a new thing to her, and so I told her it was Wensleydale I’d spun.

Wensleydale! She smacked her lips loudly. That’s good eating!

I was so not expecting that reaction. I was speechless. I knew they ate a lot of mutton over there… I had no way to respond to that.

It wasn’t till years later that I found out what she’d been talking about and had a good laugh at myself and wondered what she’d thought I’d been thinking.

All of which I was reminded of last night as I made toasted cheese sandwiches with Wensleydale with cranberries. From Milk Pail.

Thank you for all these ingredients all these years, Steve!

The real simple solution: I put a lid on the trashcan this evening. Stifle it, eat-eth. (With apologies to Carroll O’Connor.)

The yarn store in the beach town: I went to Fillory this afternoon to show my friends who go there on Fridays that “this is all your fault” as I showed them the afghan project with a grin.

It is safe to say they approved.

One of the staff there didn’t know how to cable six across seven stitches or how the fourth one stays the middle one going straight up as the others pass over, so now those two have helped someone else learn something new as well.

While I was there, I mentioned last Friday’s incident about the tangling yarn on the skein winder, and when I got to “she went to cut it” the three women nearest me gasped audibly.

I told them thank you. It wasn’t just me, then.

But I had done nothing about it after getting no answer from my Facebook private message asking if I could send a note to the owner, and I still wondered what the right thing to do was. Just leave it be? I mean, I could imagine a new mom running on no sleep doing something stupid in a moment without thinking straight.

Or it could be what it looked like–that a depressed clerk didn’t care and she wasn’t going to put up with any more of this. But I don’t know, and I don’t want to blame nor judge. I don’t want to be mean any more than I want her to be.

We discussed how best to bring it up.

What it came down to, as it had at the first, was, if I were the owner I’d want to know. And as they pointed out, People don’t want to go back after something like that.

Exactly.

Okay, so, I guess that means I will try after all.

But they loved how the afghan they’d helped mentor into existence was coming out, and that and their own projects were more fun to talk about.

Then I came home just in time to watch, from inside, a Cooper’s hawk do a figure eight around the awning poles fifteen feet away in pursuit of dinner and then a loop back around the first pole. Whoosh! And away!

The picture flat-out refuses to go right side up. It’s being squirrelly.

I have, for some time now, only put safflower seeds in my bird feeder; it doesn’t attract as many varieties of birds but the squirrels won’t fight to get at it. They’ll graze the kickout below if they’re hungry enough but that’s it.

Unlike sunflower, though, you can’t buy pre-hulled safflower. And those hulls get tracked indoors and into the runners on the sliding door and that has gotten very old. So I tried to figure out how to go back to sunflower but thwart the squirrels–who LOVE the stuff.

And then I noticed the old plastic trashcan that the trash service doesn’t use anymore and didn’t take away when they changed trucks.

I put it underneath the feeder and put a mixture of the two types of seeds in there; I have 20 pounds of the safflower to use up, and that seemed a good way to start transitioning. And containing. Maybe the squirrels wouldn’t want to jump in where they couldn’t see a predator coming. (Yeah, good luck with that. I’ve seen them pulling a paper cup down low over their heads, trying to lick out every last bit of due-date whipped cream, falling over frontwards and backwards in the process while holding on tight to what made it so they couldn’t see. Squirrels are so funny!)

The other hope was to starve the rat out so it doesn’t show up again.

Of course it only took a few days for the first squirrel to want that treat enough to jump in. Even I can hear the thump from inside when they land in there. They don’t have enough of a steady surface at the top of the thing to leap upwards onto the feeder (yet), so that’s good.

I debated leaning a piece of wood against the can to entice the rat on up so I could capture it, but no: it wouldn’t be stupid enough to simply fall all the way down in there, and I wouldn’t know what to do with it if it did.

There was no appearance of the unwanted little rodent. For days. Well that worked!

Until there it was again, grabbing whatever had fallen just outside the can. Definitely still the same one as ever.

Tuesday evening all was quiet as I went to go zip up the Sunbubble for the night. Opened that sliding glass door, and…

I’m quite sure it didn’t even touch the lip on its giant kangaroo leap from the bottom of that trash can, just one big arc up and over and out. I came inside and marveled to Richard, Just how many times its height did that thing just vault? Wow.

It wasn’t till later that it hit me.

I had just invented a popcorn popper for owls.

Costco-sized Tonka truck, rocking chair, and two-yard niddy noddy for scale in the 4:15 pm light.

I knew the bottom-edging seed stitch was going to ripple somewhat from the cabling drawing up the stitches, I just didn’t expect it to be that much. The seed section would have been longer, which would have tamped down the rippling somewhat, but it was just taking too much yarn at the time. On the other hand, I figure rippling for a girl is not the, um, tragedy, yeah that’s the word, that it would be for a boy.

One other thing about yesterday: when we got home after the yarn store/chocolate store/hardware store/electronics store jaunt (he got something out of that trip too, it was only fair), I was trying to figure out the math. Let’s see, I’ve knitted four, have six more, have seven of the new, do I do a fade of so many increasing/decreasing rows of new vs old and try for thirds of old/mixed/new, how many skeins, then, with that middle third going twice as far or using half as many of each but you don’t want it to look like quarters because the eye is pleased with odd numbers…

Richard’s take on it, was, I know how your brain works. You need to put the skeins out and see them. You need to look at them. He knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with it till I did.

He was right, and I dumped the whole shebang on the rug.

Six–there. Seven new–there. I could…

But there was only one way, clearly. Alternate pairs of rows the rest of the way through, ending with a solid last ball of the new in the seed stitch. Nothing else would look as good–even if I didn’t want the hassle of untangling strands from across the work and back for the rest of the project.

I like it. It’s looking good. Hassle? What hassle? What was I worried about? You need to do it to make it right you just do it.

Alarm went off, we got up, got ready, got out the door, got onto the main road…

And in a split second of wait, where is everybody, had a good guffaw at ourselves and turned back into the neighborhood. Oops. Yeah we had a nice vacation day Friday but today’s one, too, remember? Not to mention what it was a remembrance for. With real thanks to all those who’ve served and the differences they’ve made.

Not long after that he asked me what I wanted to do with the day, then, now that we had it.

Well, we’d already avoided holiday beach traffic for good reason, so I threw out an in-my-dreams: Imagiknit and Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco.

Was I serious?

Well, actually, yeah, I’d love, but only the purest of love would make him offer to take me to a yarn store, much less one that far away… I’d bought these three extra skeins at Fillory that were just plain too off to feel good trying to mix dye lots with and I’d been trying to reconcile myself to the thought of not only buying more but buying quite a few more. That project devours yardage. And I had to see it in person.

Imagiknit’s website said they had nine. If it didn’t work we could check Cottage on the way back to see if they’d gotten more in stock. So because my husband really is that much of a peach, off we went. And he knows that that’s one yarn store I particularly do not get in and out of quickly even when I’m trying to be good–they have all my favorites. And I so rarely get there.

I spread the afghan-so-far on their counter and the young woman manning the register pronounced, simply, Wow.

That right there made it worth the trip to San Francisco.

The other, gray-haired woman went looking for the last skein but it had apparently been bought while we were on our way there. She sent us to the second room with the stronger lighting to get a better look at the colors, apologized about that missing skein and said that if we call ahead next time they’re happy to reserve… I assured her it was okay.

I had the afghan spread out again and this time Richard took a good look at it.

I’d bought ten? That’s four skeins? That’s not enough! he said decisively (he was right), and urged me to buy all seven they had that matched.

This time, (with the shop’s permission), I took one of theirs outside into the direct sunlight to see if it matched there, too. I’d made that mistake a week ago and I wasn’t going to repeat it.

The one difference, which the older woman pointed out, was that the shop’s was more nearly solid of a color while mine had more little bits where it was lighter here and there.

I could alternate rows.

The purple was the right purple, and what were the chances I’d get that so perfect anywhere else. I bought them.

They had a ball winder and swift set-up but winding the skeins was a do-it-yourself over in their classroom space. Back to the brighter room.

I had memories of friends telling me their ball winder’s gears had been stripped by people who’d cranked it too hard and the wrong way. I was not about to ruin theirs, and I’d kept him long enough; I was ready to just go.

But it was a mechanical thing, and mechanical things are toys to entice and figure out and use and feel great about and my ever-loving sat down with that first skein, got the nod from the woman to make sure he was doing this right, and set to it.

Six skeins later his arm was getting tired and he asked if I’d mind doing the last one. Not at all.

He got to wind the soft wool for his baby granddaughter in happy anticipation of getting to meet her soon, and being able to be participate in that afghan meant a lot to him.

Four hours of knitting later, sun light, artificial light: if I didn’t know where the second dye lot comes in every second row, I wouldn’t know of it at all.

Finished the fourth 100g ball of yarn on the afghan last night, put it down, picked up the dusty purple cashmere cowl project I’d gotten from near-zero to half during Friday’s driving and thought, I’d really like that finished for tomorrow if it is in any way possible. 120 stitches a row…

And at 11:00, hands and time demanding an end, I finished the castoff and broke the yarn. Done. It was a good length after all. Gave it a quick rinse and spinning out and set it to dry overnight, wondering who it was for.

The person I thought would pick it went straight to the Rios Anniversario cowl instead.

I was walking out the door, church over, wondering how I’d just walked through all those people and not felt that spark of hey you.

Glanced to the right and walking out the door with me was Ella.

I knitted for her once before: she was four.

I had gone to her widowed great-grandpa’s funeral. She adored him. He was part of her everyday life. He’d driven himself to a game at Stanford to cheer on his team, gotten in his car to come home, had felt the heart attack coming on and had had just enough time and presence of mind to steer away from the car in front of him on that fast busy street and plow into the unoccupied parked ones along the side instead. And he was gone.

Ella held up remarkably quietly through the proceedings for someone who was so small.

Until the moment they started wheeling his casket towards and then out the chapel’s funeral door (so named because it opens extra wide precisely for that reason) at the front of the room.

She leaped onto the bench, reaching with her arms and her whole soul towards what she suddenly seemed to have realized was gone from her forever in this life, crying: NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I had this thick, cushy Robin and Russ yarn in my stash…

I overdyed it to her favorite color. It wasn’t as perfectly soft a wool as I would have liked; those were harder to find back then and outside my budget in that particular slice of time–but it was okay, and I knitted her an afghan. Her late great grandma had given me some wool yarn just before she’d passed; this was softer. Ella had had a knitter in her family and I could be her hands for her.

Ella has just finished her first year of college.

I tugged upwards at the dusty purple in my purse, and asked her, suddenly quite sure of the answer, Do you like this color?

I LOVE this color!

It was time she finally got something as soft as she deserved. I didn’t say that. I didn’t want in any way to put down the earlier gift. But man it felt good.

(I just posted this, got up to walk away from the computer, when it finally hit me: the afghan was purple, too. Just little-kid brighter, is all.)

(It reminded me of the Rose Window. Pictured with a $4 trinket of a pendant/key chain thing, bought after the Notre Dame fire because one of my daughters did a semester abroad living in view of that cathedral every day. It finally showed up in the mail yesterday, just in time to meet its match.)

The story. He had the day off for the holiday weekend. Yonder daughter took the day off. Me, I’m always a little off…

We knew the holiday traffic today would be horrendous so we chose Friday to do our day tripping fun stuff. Pack things to drink, she said, we’re going to be driving for like two and a half hours, easily. Andy’s for the best cherries (and into the insulated case they go) then across the mountains to the beach town/touristy stuff/best chocolate/lunch at some new-to-us restaurant. Oh, and (not that we needed it at that point) the ice cream/sorbet for the dairy allergic that’s made in-house at that place that uses fresh fruit from the local farms. Go.

And so we did all that. I managed to drop the handmade mug with the balls of yarn motif that I’d bought at Stitches and shatter it outside the ice cream shop, but at least it cowabunga-ed off my car door holder in Surf City. Somehow that fit.

Anything else you guys want to do here before we head for home? Gotta beat rush hour.

Me, looking at my phone for choices and directions: Yeah, let’s try out one of the local yarn stores!

Them: Like you NEED more yarn! (with a slight groan.)

But hey, there was one right over there, turns out, just one block over from the ice cream shop. Well that’s handy.

I walked in there and a skein facing the door, set low in the bin, leaped out at me. Gorgeous. I did a quick cursory look around the rest of the shop but knew nothing else would live up to this. Shame there wasn’t more. It didn’t have any kind of a ball band but it was in the dk wool section and it wasn’t like it was hard to guess what it was.

Wait. There were two more at the bottom, tucked way under. I pulled them out and considered the variants in the hand dyeing, the fact that all three were different enough that you would always know where the skeins had changed, and opted for just the middle one for a cowl, or potentially a grandbaby sweater with solid colors to border it. Black? The Rose Window?

Maybe the ball band for the first was stuck under there where those came out of? I reached, and there it was, a little smushed from someone else having crammed it back in after knocking it off the skein. I smoothed it out, put it back on for the next person, thinking, c’mon, people, it’s not hard to be a little more polite to the shop and the other customers than that, and took the one I wanted to the front.

Where I told the unsmiling clerk that my family had told me I had ten minutes. (And with that, I instantly announced we were tourists they would probably never see again, not potential regulars. I didn’t know that that might be going to matter.)

Michelle popped her head in the door and grinned, It’s been nine. Just saying!

I grinned back.

The clerk did not. Everything about her screamed major depression. I wanted to help somehow if I could in what few moments I would have with her.

She asked if I wanted it wound. I would, actually, very much, thanks.

She set up the swift and the winder, and I was a little sorry that the shop owner had gone for the expensive wooden type without springing for the powered version that frees the staff to pay all their attention to their customers while it winds, like Green Planet/Fillory has. I would think that that would pay for itself over time, but whatever, not my business.

The woman cut off more yarn than I would have liked when she cut the knot tying the two ends together, but whatever.

She didn’t maintain the tension and neither did her set-up. It kept tangling. She stopped and freed the strand three times.

On the fourth time, there were only five rounds left on the swift. She picked up the scissors. (!!!!!)

Saw that I was watching, a little stunned. Oh right.

She put the scissors back down.

I said something to the effect of offering to wind the rest of it by hand myself and she took it off the winder and did exactly that.

That picking up the scissors thing was so automatic on her part that on reflection I realized it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d done it. Get rid of the nuisance. Toss the end of it. The customer would never know.

Now I need to figure out how to let the owner know. I googled to find a picture of her to make sure this wasn’t her, and it wasn’t–wrong face, wrong generation.

I want the clerk set straight, certainly not fired–but even more: I want her to get therapy. Because she’s clearly just barely dragging herself through the day and her issue is a whole lot more than cutting off nuisance yarn and cheating customers.

And maybe, trying to be charitable, it was just a stupid brain-dead moment from the habit of cutting the knots at the beginnings. But it sure didn’t look that way to me.

This was a day when computer time just wasn’t happening. I’ll tell you about our day trip tomorrow. We had fun. Night night.

This seems to be the last one for the season: a Red Lion amaryllis, from a bulb Dad gave me several years ago that has now split into three that need to be repotted and given their own spaces. But first they had to celebrate their old one.

Thank you, Dad! Love you!

Yesterday was mostly a carry-around-project day, so today was a bit of catch-up on the afghan.

And I’d show you a pretty picture to brag about it, if the computer would just do what I tell it.

(Added in the morning: there you go.)