Every now and then, even the online mapmaker folks goof. Don’t know if you’ve encountered it but I have a couple of times. Like the time I was trying to meet up with an old college roommate and finally pulled over and called her.

The map said this road connected up with that. Turns out that the one stopped a block shy–you had to go around this other way.

So. I used to on rare occasion go to Green Planet Yarns when they were in downtown Campbell, but parking there was always horrible, and Purlescence was closer and easier all around, so, eh. I did like the owner, though, even if I didn’t know her very well, and she stocked some nice stuff.

And then Green Planet moved to San Jose.

The map…

I tried. A year ago I spent an hour wandering around on (turns out) the wrong side of the freeway, pulling over several times to check my phone to see what it was saying now, since I couldn’t hear it. Finally I gave up in frustration and headed home.

I joked with Kathryn’s husband at Cottage Yarns a few days ago when I went to show her the Mecha afghan that I’d be back in two weeks (again) with the next one in Rios, but after all that color intensity, when I actually sat down to knit my eyes said no. I actually finally wanted to knit up some vanilla dk weight cashmere/silk I’d bought from Colourmart a few months ago: I wanted plain ordinary white and I wanted to knit that warm, soft yarn, even if it would need small needles and even if superwash merino might be far, far more practical. I’d bought this because I wanted to make this, so, so there.

Grab the impulse while you’ve got it and go.

Hmm. Size 4 was making a great fabric but I learned in one little swatch that my hands needed a little more give, a little bigger loop for that needle tip–and that it still looked fine on 5s. (3.75mm)

My circular 5s were 24″ long. Wait–how, after all these years, could I not have…! Surely I do in some forgotten bag somewhere, but oh well. My 231 stitches were packed in so densely that it was a constant fight to push them along or out of the way. My hands never got to relax nor could my eyes see the pattern coming to be.

There was only one thing for it. I knew who would have the brand needle I wanted.

Yay for repaired maps: this time I found them.

There was not a soul I knew in sight. That felt strange.

But the clerk was friendly, and I bought a skein of supersoft thick wool in the most perfect purple, a semi-instant cowl-to-be. The color won.

She offered to wind it up for me. And not only did they have my needle–they were closing it out. They had one last rosewood 40″ size US 5, and it was on sale and it was perfect and I got exactly what I’d come for. And a 40″ US 4, too, because.

Re the yarn: Sure, thanks!

Which means I had a moment to just stand around, or….

There were two knitters at the table. They invited me to join them and then included me in on the conversation as if I were just as much old friends with them as they were. They told me when they’d be hanging out and that they’d love to see me around again.

I think my transition to Purlescencelessness just eased a bit.

Five days later… I can actually see the difference across the yard from day to day. That set of three branches growing from one in Sunday’s picture? This is just the one that was at the back.

The older new leaves are greening up fast.

The long branch at lower right: it’s got a whorl of leaves about 2/3 up (even if they somehow vanish to the camera), which makes it the perfect place to prune it early next year to trigger another flush of growth in time for fruit to happen. (Having learned…) Lots of leaves means lots of new branches from the spot. Ten is my record so far.

Had a male California quail (video) wandering around the patio for the first time this year. A squirrel was incurably curious but pointed its tail hard at the intruder while straining its body away just as hard, nose stretched nevertheless towards this strange big bird in spite of the fear it was signaling: what WAS this thing?!

While the quail likewise was afraid of it but eventually, following a seed trail, got too close in spite of itself–at which point the squirrel flipped over half-backwards while the quail jumped hard the other way.

That didn’t go so badly. The squirrel wanted one good sniff from closer up now: Will it bite? Does it peck? Is it a bird? Can I eat it?

At that the quail took its deely-bopper headbanger ornament (*why* did evolution do that to it?) and announced with its feet we were done now.

Having woken up to the news of an utterly innocent and well-loved man in Minnesota shot dead by the cops as he reached for his driver’s license, bookended by the snipers in Dallas tonight shooting eleven cops, killing four (update: five), who were there to make sure a protest rally stayed peaceful…

Both feel like the Kent State days of my childhood. We have GOT to stop doing this, thinking like this, acting on this. I want the Peace sign to make a huge comeback in our society: offer love to one another, not warring.

On a different note.

It was almost exactly a year ago, and I remember because it was right after the Fourth of July but while most of the traffic around my husband’s office was very low because people were on vacation, when I came around a blind curve in a steep hill and saw it.

There had been a pair of red-tailed hawks soaring above the nearby buildings for as long as anyone could remember, kiting on the thermals.

One of them had been hit by a car just at the end of that blind curve where neither could have seen the other coming. It was on the shoulder, an enormous wing angled upright, being blown softly by the wind.

A day or two later, I saw a bicyclist stop and pick up its body carefully, as if to honor this huge beautiful bird for having graced our lives, and he moved it to a small depression in the hillside where a tiny stream of water sometimes runs in winter, as if in burial. Away from the hard road and back to the nature it belonged to.

I mourned, too, for the hawk that had lost its mate. I saw it from time to time, alone now, as I waited to pick Richard up in the evenings.

Yesterday morning at 8:30 I had just turned up that hill a little farther down when I saw it: those wings, that size, the brilliant white against the new light of the day. A bit of gray in its tail and shoulders and its feet tucked in. It was rising, soaring on the wind.

Rushing home to my Sibley’s guide, it was a light morph of either a ferruginous hawk.

Or of a red-tailed. So there was a hawk nest up there this year after all.

Flying free, last year’s pain a distant memory of its elders.

May we learn from the hawks.

Before I forget. Actually, I wasn’t there because it was held outside in the sun, but Richard went and helped flip pancakes at the Fourth of July celebration at church Monday morning. I knew the old veterans that would be stepping forward in turn to say where and when they’d served, and I knew there would probably be younger ones that might surprise me to see them in uniform, too.

But hey, lupus, and so you get this report second hand.

He told me who one of the speakers was–a young dad who’s here for grad school and because his wife grew up here.

It took me a moment as it sank in. A Brit?! On the Fourth of July?

Richard was grinning as he recounted the tale. The guy had started off by taking a good, appraising look all around and then back to his audience with, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

And then he’d said some of the things he’d found that he liked about America.

People in the stores call him sir all the time. That would never happen back home!

You can have all the water you want at a restaurant.

He named a particular fast-food joint.

Drive-ins. Drive-ins!

(And actually, at one of those drive-ins, his little boys can come inside and watch the people slice the potatoes and then fry them up and hand them to them to eat. High entertainment for small children while still at the pace of the actual food.)

In progress, and done.

A close-up including of one of the dark spots at the center.

I think the variegated-purples skein at the end was a bit too much purple, although it was a good transition from the red (and I needed the extra length and I knew Kathryn didn’t have a second bag of Anniversario in that weight.) The mostly-red skein was definitely a sharp transition from the green-purple–maybe I should have alternated pairs of rows of those two for awhile.

But then not a single skein matched another one anyway so why change how I’m doing it now, I kept figuring.

I like the purl side better because of the way the purl bump colors play with their mates, definitely a different effect from the front (see the in-progress photo at the top).

All along my eyes have proclaimed this my Northern Lights project because what else could this be?

And if I were really good I’d knit the fern lace motif again for one more purple skein, unravel the afghan’s cast on, and kitchener the two pieces together to have the ends matching.

Ain’t happening.

Some notes on the yarn: I was trying to arrange the skeins in a symmetrical pattern going across as much as possible. I found the early skeins just slightly muted compared to the others, but for what I was trying to represent that’s fine.

Definitely a fun afghan to curl up with. And warm. Not sure I’d do it again exactly like this one but I’m glad I did it.

This was going to be the last skein. See all that purple? The afghan needed to end in mostly-purple.

Amazing how much of this didn’t come out looking that way at all, including a ladder alternating in black and bright lime. The colors all along have been like kids at recess, spreading out across the playground.

Eh, the blanket could stand to be a little longer anyway.

So tomorrow I wind up a mostly-dark but variegated purple, a +1 to the dye lot bag and originally intended towards a border anyway, and finish the thing.

Six days later… 

My mango tree had two branches when it arrived in December nineteen months ago, twelve by the end of last summer, and it looks like we’ll have forty-five by the end of this.

(Fruit next year, then, right? Right, tree?)

All tucked in: the afghan now covers the feet if you don’t pull it too high up in your lap.

I kept looking at it draped over my knees towards my hands and thinking, how did that happen already?

As far as I can tell unblocked and still on the needles I’m at about 60×40″ so far. Malabrigo Mecha in Anniversario colorway, one skein for each of the ten years that Malabrigo is celebrating with that name and that kaleidoscope; I started it last Friday (after ditching the purple that was going to be the border–I think it’ll make a great sideways-knit scarf.) Photo taken in today’s late afternoon light a skein of yarn ago.

Every hank in the dye lot is different. Every one somehow works within the context of the others: even when I don’t think it will, it does and then the one after that confirms it and I can’t wait to see the whole thing done.

“Goodbye, and Thanks For All The Fish.”

I read that email, scrolling past the dolphin photo, inwardly pleading, NO. Oh please no!

It was true.

I put my carry-around cowl project in my purse and headed over to Purlescence. Sandi and Kaye were both there and we exchanged grief and thanks and hugs and memories of the good that had been.

But it came down to this: over the last ten years they had taught many how to knit, to crochet, to spin and to weave, and they knew some of those would continue to teach others. But they themselves had had very little time to make anything–they both described crafting at 4 am because the imperative to create felt so strong and had been kept in check for so long.

And so they decided to retire, and Purlescence will close for good August 28th.

But…but…but…but… !!!

I’m happy for them. I’m very sorry for all the rest of us. I’m glad we got to have that community gathering place as long as we did–and the wait for Stitches next February just got much much longer.

The peaches have started to come in at Andy Mariani’s…

And the plums and the apricots and the nectarines. I snapped a picture as soon as we got home because that box was going down, and fast.

“When will the Lorings be in?”

She checked and came back: “Two weeks.”

I will be there.

Someone explain to me….?

A 45-mph expressway, divided, two lanes each way. A large and expensive SUV pulled over to the side where there was a bike lane but no real shoulder and driver and passenger doors were wide open, the driver’s actually jutting into the lane of traffic. He couldn’t pull far enough off because there was a line of flowering dense shrubbery you often see planted around here on such roadways to stop out-of-control cars.

And behind the SUV was a woman in a long white wedding dress, her hair swept upwards and elaborately braided for just such an occasion. She looked gorgeous.

And she was creating a beautiful bouquet in her left hand from the pink flowers she was stealing from those bushes with her right. I watched her take one as my car approached, staying in the left lane to avoid his car door.

And they were oleander.

Every part of the oleander plant is very poisonous. Our house had one when we bought it and we had little kids and got rid of it for their safety.

If I were the groom I’d keep a sharp eye on that one. Except that that was probably him coming around the front of the car to join her.

Y’know, we could definitely play the game of “write endings to this story.”

I gave up on sweet-smelling flowers, much less fruit, and pruned the mango a lot last week. It looked so shrunken afterwards but it was overdue. It was supposed to have ripening mangoes by now. It was just sitting there, the limbs getting a bit longer but nothing else, when last year, it was starting to flush in January. January!

Three weeks ago I did, reluctantly, prune just two branches, my first time ever, baby steps towards seeing whether that would change anything. Oh boy did it. One, and actually one that I did not, almost immediately sprang into the flush of growth you see here–but the other one I pruned is shaded by the rest of the tree and is still taking its time.

Now, how you prune a tree when you don’t know what its long term growth patterns are is a mystery. What I’ve seen in its first 18 months: the trunk goes up. Then it curves over. Then the branches hang down in the winter. Then they do a wavy curl back upwards in spring, and whether they harden that way or not, whether the new sprouts that showed up at the top in the last two days will continue upwards for long, I don’t know. It’s not a trunk–it’s a puzzle piece.

Cut the branches to about two feet long the first two years, Fairchild Gardens says.  Okay.

The reddish new growth on the lower left of the tree? I’d read that the trick is to cut just past where there’s a grouping of leaves rather than a single one. I did. There are five new not leaves but full branches from it. I like that rate of return.

Cut where there’s a single leaf you’ll get a single branch. Or so they say.

But I found for the first time and bought a pair (and you do need two layers) of bigger frost covers for the coming winter, and I mean big, like, ten feet tall big. So now I don’t have to worry about it growing larger this year than I can keep protected.

I didn’t prune all the branches (see last photo). Maybe there’s still some last flowering hope? The bees so ardently love those blossoms, and so do I, and now that I know my next-door neighbors have a beehive, I can only imagine what their honey could taste like.

Whatever. I think my tree is suddenly going to be much, much fuller. Next year we will have mangoes.

One of the things Ann mentioned in passing on Saturday was that her husband was not a morning person and sometimes you just stayed a little out of his way first thing till he cheered up and became his normal self.

“So that’s where you get it from,” with a wry smile from my husband: clearly it was a family thing.

That said…

Last winter my sweetie went on a business trip to the East Coast.

And I found myself at midnight with a very very cold house and a thermostat that refused to play nice, to put it mildly.

We had installed a Nest, which was operated by our cellphones. It was paying attention to his–and his said he was 3000 miles away, so it had automatically gone into keep-the-pipes-from-freezing mode.

But I was right here! I grabbed my phone and Nest didn’t recognize it. Richard had set it up and I had no idea what username or password were supposed to be nor where I might look it up. Calling him at 3 am his time to ask probably wouldn’t go over well.

I’d okayed it, he’d bought it and installed it and I don’t remember so much as even seeing an owner’s manual. Wait, he’d mentioned something about you can squeeze the thermostat to change the temp. So I tried that.

One degree, two–and then suddenly it flipped way over to Cool and the air conditioning clicked on. NO! Fast, I tried to turn it back but no dice.

I tried again. At some point I did get the AC to at least turn off but other than that, it went into “a little child is playing with me” mode and went dark and refused all attempts to reason with it. No heat for you.

It is safe to say we were not friends at this point.

I gave it a few minutes and tried again. As I turned to heat it flipped to AC, I let go quick, and it went dark again.

It was not a happy night.

My husband, once he found out in the morning, overrode the control to go back to normal heating and saved my very tired day and said he’d figure out what was wrong with my phone’s app when he got home.

When the thing works it works so well you just never think about it. You don’t have to worry about resetting between the furnace and the air conditioning as seasons or temps change, it just takes care of it and most of the time it’s a huge improvement over the 25-year-old thing it replaced.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was getting hot (how?) and I knew I shouldn’t have had that chocolate that late.

At 2:45 am the room lit up: his Samsung tablet, which was supposed to be on night setting, was at full-blast-lightshow. Dang. I got up, walked around the bed, put it face down and half-covered where it still light-leaked, and got thwacked by my husband’s arm as he rolled over asleep.

And it was hot. This made no sense. It was 55 degrees outside. Yes it had been a warm day and we’d run the oven for a roast but that had been hours before and how on earth was he sleeping when it was this hot?

I went over to the Nest. Who on earth set it to that for nighttime? (Neither of us. C’est une mystere.)

At nearly 3:00 am the brain comes up with not-serious thoughts like, Did Nest conspire with the city? The state? to conserve power and turn everybody’s thermostats? What IS this? We paid tens of thousands from what would have been retirement funds to install solar, that’s OUR power and it’s clean energy and if we want it comfortable we earned it, give me my AC back! (I could have opened the window. I knew I would probably also have fallen on my husband’s head trying.)

Checked my phone. Nest still didn’t recognize me there, dang it. Went to the thermostat and re-enacted last winter, in reverse: squeeze, turn.

It went to heat. NO! Tried again. “A little child is playing with me” mode. Dark.

Time out.

Came back. Tried again. Got it down to 72, let go quick before it threw another hissy fit while I had it that good, hauled myself to bed directly below the vent as cool sweet cool began to blow down on my face.

But I did not sleep. My brain was writing scathing Amazon reviews of, I LOATHE this thing.

Dawn came. Well, that was a waste of a night. Thought about getting up but for the chest pains.

Now, I mentioned to my doctor Friday about the chest pains. They come and go and they’re generally an annoying but non-threatening part of being a lupus patient and he found nothing wrong, but when they’re persistently there at night or in the morning one really should mention it so I did, and now I have a cardiology appointment and a mildly worried husband. And they’re gone for the day and I’m fine now but it’s the middle of the afternoon and everything’s better then.

So. One of the first things I did was proclaim the tablet banished from the room if it did that again. (In normal life I might mention and we would talk it out and easily come to an agreement, nobody orders anyone around.) And I asked my nerd husband why he still hadn’t fixed that *%( iPhone.

Because it hadn’t updated–that’s why Nest hadn’t recognized it.

Oh. (Feeling very small.) And it didn’t update because I have too many pictures because I haven’t moved them to the computer because I want to still have all the baby pictures of the grandkids on it and I don’t want to sort through the thousands of not-grandkid ones. And you told me that when you got back from that trip.

Right.

Oh.

I tried to get up, did the dizzy thing in a grand way, went back to bed, and owned up to the accompanying chest pains. I was getting a little less growly but it was a process and there were things I’d wanted to do today but I was in no way driving a car this morning and if I don’t drive him to work well that’s that for the day–we only have the one.

And usually we like that. He gets to decompress at the end of the day and we get time together that’s just for us with nothing else calling at us.

By the time he left for work I was, I hope, closer to my normal daytime self. He was a peach and I wanted to live up to that no matter how tired I was.

A little after noon I checked Facebook to see if anyone needed to be wished a happy birthday.

And read this:

“It has been a long road with many unexpected bumps and turns, but I am glad I have had Alison Hyde by my side for the journey. Happy Anniversary to my sweetheart!”

It’s the 27th already!? It is?! Dang. Forgot. Busted. And loved. All at once. It’s been a life. Love you, too, honey, happy anniversary!

It’s always a good day when your daughter comes over with homemade strawberry pie…

There were visiting speakers from out of state tonight, a mother and son, and we went to hear. One of the perks of college towns and all that.

At the end, Ann, the widowed mother (not to mention a professor), told the story of why she’d never met her mother-in-law: the woman had died when Ann’s husband had been two.

His mother had contracted childbed fever (I could have added, and it was immediately before penicillin became available. Like a month. So close.)

Her sister Frances had come to visit her in the hospital, where in grief she implored her sister not to die.

Her sister, fully aware she was losing that fight, asked her visitor, a young mom herself, Frances? Where are your children?

A surprised, Well, I left them with…! They’re in good hands…! I won’t be away from them for long, it’s okay!

And that was Frances’s answer, the words echoing through the years to come and in memories past: her own mother had died when she was eight. Her grown sister had taken her in.

Frances took in the motherless newborn and raised him with her own five children for six years till his father felt he could cope with the day to day, while Ann’s late husband would be taken care of by the older surviving sister till then.

I went up afterwards to mother and son and said, Let me re-introduce myself. (I think I’d been a child the last time I’d seen her and not much more than that for him.)

Frances is my grandmother. Her daughter Frances is my mother.

I got a gasp and a hug and a “How is your mom?! I LOVE your mom!” and in an instant the world became a smaller, better place.

Mom and Dad? Ann says hi!

(Background chatter after that: Your mom was always so energetic. Is she still energetic? Is she…? …Oh yes she’s still energetic and they’re both in great health! …Oh good!)