(The woman who grew up with east coast hurricanes looking out the window this afternoon in the San Francisco Bay area.)

You just can’t really quite call that rain. More like a liquidation sale at the fog factory.

Out of all the times I’ve cleaned out my inbox, somehow that one from eleven years ago survived and popped up in my search. It was a fairly stunning moment.

I lost my contacts list when Microsoft bought out the maker of the Sidekick phones and shut them down to get rid of the competition to their new phone (which very quickly tanked.) I was never able to get it all back. I lost my email contacts again when my data was supposedly being switched over from my old Dell desktop to my new Mac.

I had it!

The phone number in it was still valid. Assuming it still went to the same person.

I called it from the landline; it went to voice mail. Well, sure, I’m (most likely) a strange number. I texted it and identified myself again, thinking that surely these days everybody’s phone texts (if the number goes to a cell.)

I got answers both ways.

And now a daughter on the other side of the country is breathing a little easier, updated on what’s up with her elderly mom who lives alone and knowing she’s got someone now who can and is willing to help her and how to reach me. The mom needed a contractor but was reluctant to let anyone in the house? Call this guy, I said: he’s good, he’s kind, he’s honest, and when he could have sold me an entire water heater he replaced a simple part and did right by us.

And I’m happy to come over there and be there with her while he works. (She really needs that done.)

She filled me in on a few details, I filled her in on some observations she needed to know, including the event two days ago that had me trying to find her.

I think the last time I talked to her, she was a newly launched adult who had come home to take care of her mom when she’d just been diagnosed with two types of cancer–at the same time that I was with systemic lupus. That makes it 29 years ago. We’re all still here pulling together.

And man, does she have the voice now that her mom did then.

I was just talking to Ruth and I thought I’d pass on to the rest of you, too, what a repairman recently told my daughter: if you have a self-cleaning feature on your oven, don’t ever turn it on. The motherboards are not protected well enough from all that heat and that’s the fastest way to kill your appliance.

Given that about fifteen years ago I was quoted $800 just for the motherboard for each oven of my double oven, labor on top of that, I’d say that self-cleaning is a wonderful feature that sells ovens.

And then sells more ovens.

The contractor came. Chris is the guy who fixed up the mess that the original guy left behind on our remodel 25 years ago, and I wouldn’t want to hire anybody else. Having lived through rain dripping into the overhead light fixtures and coming out the light switch on the other side of the room, when the water heater was set up to leak carbon monoxide (I know, Mom and Dad. Again, right?), the gas and water lines didn’t meet code (why didn’t the inspectors catch that), when we had twelve buckets and had to get bigger ones to catch the rain from our previously working roof–and so many finishing details done wrong, when even a goof plate was too small to cover the hole cut in the wall for the switch plate–in two rooms… When they hung a light fixture such that you couldn’t open one of the doors in the pantry, and instead of replacing the new wooden plank in the ceiling when they moved it to where it was supposed to have gone all along, they just filled the damaged beam in with putty… (And there it remains.)

Chris stood in my kitchen one day back then, looking at that and the slider with the two tall windows beside it that were supposed to be to the same height but had been framed to a mismatch. He was quietly steamed but he wasn’t going to badmouth anybody.

“What’s wrong?” I prompted, giving him permission to say it.

“I get so upset with people who don’t take pride in their work.”

You want someone who’s good and who’s honest working on your house, you want Chris.

We’re all a little older now. He told me his family still has the stuffed animal I knit his kids from their Samoyed’s fur, the beloved dog that we had fun having in our fenced-in yard while he worked. He told stories back then on her barking at skunks at their house, but she never did it at mine. She was on squirrel patrol here. She is long gone, but a bit of her lives on.

He’ll get me a quote within a few days and we need a week of dry weather first for that concrete.

Looking at the divided shed that took on all that rain damage from the redwood’s effects he considered a moment, but no, it does, it needs a rebuild; you can’t un-rot that wood and there’s no sense in putting a new roof onto that. It’s not a big project, he comforted me.

Now I have an idea of what our driveway is going to be like. And he’ll fix that dangerous gap from where the city lowered the sidewalk but not (despite my objections) our walkway to match. I forgot to ask if we can angle things so there’s a space where I can plant my Kishu mandarin on the other side; I’ve already talked to the neighbors about that, so I know they’re good with it.

And so it begins.

Since the critters ate some of my seedlings the rest of my starts have been kept safely behind windows for now.

This squash is just plain ready to go: it’s already got flower buds. C’mon, Spring, hurry!

Last night I was marveling to Richard, I have no vocabulary for this. I’ve never experienced this before. It’s so weird.

Come bedtime, though, I pictured myself writing it down and then the words came: it felt like a water ballon inside that squished up or down as I moved my knee.

It did not want any weight on it. It did not want to let me get any sleep.

Today seemed better but to be careful I still went in: not hurting terribly much when I don’t use it doesn’t mean it will not hurt later when I do–that, and more to the point, my pain levels are completely unreliable as problem detectors. Sometimes those nerves work and sometimes they don’t. Which can be nice. Mostly.

Richard came in with me at my invitation and explained to the doctor, “I’m her ears.”

I made the guy laugh, looking at the sizes of the two of us, when I illustrated that particular idiosyncrasy by describing the time he took off his undershirt, hit the overhead light, it shattered, he fell into the wooden hamper trying to avoid the breaking falling glass and I ran across it to go save him.

Like that works?

Then I sat down and howled with laughter: we are such klutzes!  Because the idea of me pulling him out..! and because I knew that within five minutes I wouldn’t be able to feel what I’d just done to my feet. And I didn’t.

The doctor reassured me that the knee wasn’t broken. “It will probably help a lot if you stabilize it”–he told me what kind of brace to go buy.

It is on. And it really does help.

“Anything else?” This guy was thorough.

The elbow.

The knitting? He glanced at it peeking out of my purse.

The earlier injury, then the weight of the granite-bottomed melanger and the batch I decided to do by myself. “That’s why I hold the bowl,” Richard admonished, but not that one time, and that one time is when I learned how much I need his help.

So the elbow has a brace too now and the reasons why it will help that I didn’t know before.

But here’s the thing: that look of being taken completely by surprise and then the sudden eagerness in the up-till-then quiet face that said I AM SO GETTING ONE OF THOSE!!! when I explained just exactly what a melanger is after the word sailed right past him the first time.

Such big eyes and not a shy bone in his body. He reached for me across the bench. His daddy let him come to me, carefully. He’s about seven months old.

He sat down. I was claimed.

Some babies instantly want daddy back, or mommy, who was the speaker and just a little farther away than he might have preferred; he craned his neck upwards to again see the face of the person whose lap didn’t quite feel like the familiar parental ones.

Still me up here, smiling back. Well alright then, I would do, and we played a little bit while everyone around us hoped to catch a moment’s shared grin with him, too. Which he gave them.

Then he crawled a few steps back towards his daddy, with both of us keeping an arm to the side of the bench when his curiosity and lack of fear of heights seemed a bad combination for a moment there.

A bottle! He snuggled into his daddy’s arms.

He looked over with one last big grin for me when it was done. We were friends now.

I need to remember to ask Kat her baby’s name.

New hawk, no redwood, new technique. I’ve seen it twice now and it’s clearly a pattern–which means I can’t move that cooler that got put out on the patio. It likes it exactly where it is.

It flies in low alongside the house to hide on it where the giant elephant ears and the amaryllises on the old picnic table help shield it from view. I can’t see it there. Usually the finches and doves don’t either, at first. (The towhees, so far, are out of there pronto.) It’s not optimal because it has to leap upward from cooler height to catch its escaping prey rather than coming zooming in ambushing at great speed, but I saw today as it spooked a dove towards the alcove, away from safety, leaving a poof of feathers as it bounced off the screen and somehow still flying fled the other way as the big hawk burst around the patio, wings and tail wide at the sharp turn in pursuit.

Nesting season and a mate and maybe babies to feed already–probably not quite yet, but soon–and the new Cooper’s is a little more willing now to come close to where I am on the other side of the glass.

The tires are a month old. The idiot light came on. The shop told me to bring it on by. I figured all the thing needed was some air against the cold temps we’ve been having, but I brought my knitting because you just never know.

I was running out of that skein and eyeing the second awhile later while they were doing their best squeezing me into their schedule. Eh. With wool as my witness, as Stephanie Pearl-McPhee likes to say, waiting was no problem.

You have to do just the exact right sequence of maneuvers to pull it off and it’s only happened to me once since we bought our Prius thirteen years ago. I’m guessing I started it when I locked the doors while driving over there? As women often do.

The tire was repaired (there was a nail right by the sidewall, they said, and if the idiot light comes on again they’ll replace the thing after all) and it was time to send me on my way.

There seemed to be some kind of holdup.

Oh wait.

They asked me if I had the keys. Uh, no (?)

Priuses are designed so that you can’t lock the keys in the car. They knew that. I knew that. They tried again.

They got a flashlight to help look into where they might be; no sign. Did I have a spare? I checked for a door-only key; wrong door.

At last there was nothing for it but to offer to call Richard at work and then have their clerk drive me over there to get his; it was only two city miles at most away, which was nice, and it wasn’t rush hour.

For the first time since I swapped out phones a couple weeks ago I’d let the battery on the new one go dead. Well, that was a bug.

Richard, thankfully, answered a strange number at work.

We got his key.

We got the car unlocked, and only then did they find mine, dropped down the tight side of the driver’s seat. Success!

The men were young and they were very very sheepish and apologetic despite the fact that I’d said it was probably my fault for not hitting the unlock button when I got out just to be sure. Actually, I thought I had, but clearly not.

So I grinned and quoted Richard’s words as he gave me a kiss at the office’s outer door while handing me his car key: “Just don’t lose it.” Since at that point mine still were.

They guffawed in a complete release of tension, and a good day was had by all.

I just bet you they’ll hit the unlock button before getting out of the next Prius to be sure. If they don’t see the key in the console, it doesn’t mean the clerk has it.

Okay, this is a weird one. I have never, ever seen them do this before. My standing up to photograph it in the act scared it away, but, this is one of the frost covers for my tangerine trees. A squirrel was bracing against it and dragging it by the teeth with great, bulldogged determination and had gotten five or six feet along, with plans one assumes to pull it up to the top of the fence and hoist it into the heights of the taller trees across the fence at the neighbors’.

Man were its babies ever going to have the best and biggest nest! With a living room, a dining room, eleven bedrooms and a ten-walnut garage!

I’m not sure if I was a killjoy or a profound relief to it by interrupting. It didn’t try again.

I knitted today, and it was notably better than any time since that elbow break at Christmas. Hope is firmly in sight.

A question for all the experienced gardeners out there: if you have a squash plant germinate three weeks after the others, does that mean the rest of the arc of its growth and production over time will be less than theirs? Or just that its conditions for coming up weren’t right until they were?

Remember those giant amaryllis bulbs from my dad that the TSA thought were bombs in my carry-on?

We’ve got two flowers open on top with two to go and four open on bottom on this one.

So I was talking to Ron and Theresa of the Buffalo Wool Co Saturday morning at Stitches and after asking if they liked it dark and getting an emphatic YES! offered them a bite of homemade chocolate; I’d brought a bar from the second-to-last batch that had been made from some particularly good nibs from Chocolate Alchemy.

I picked up some of their buffalo/silk yarn, telling them that that in teal was my happy place: ten years ago when I was so sick, waiting for a hospital room to open up at Stanford, the good people at Purlescence had filled a large basket with cards and get-wells. There were hand knit gloves and a hat, oranges from Jasmin’s tree, all kinds of good stuff.

Including two skeins of their buffalo yarn from the owners of that shop. The most expensive yarn they sold in a color I love.

I had to get better. I couldn’t let everybody down. I had to do their generosity justice.

For two years afterwards I wondered what could possibly be a good enough use of that yarn, while feeling I was letting them down by letting it just sit there.

Till the day one of the owners had her own medical scare and her survival was no sure thing. She pulled through, just like I did, but there was no question: those two skeins turned into a shawl and came right back to her and that was absolutely what they were meant to be.

Ten years later, Purlescence is closed and I bought more from Ron and Theresa directly.

I told one of their customers who was looking at their gloves that I had rummaged through my cavernous purse in the dark in Alaska and come up with one of their gloves (these) and one fingerless glove to scrape a deep layer of ice off the windshield with. One hand was just dying, the other–amazingly fine. It could do this for as long as I needed to, no rush. And I have Raynaud’s.

I came by their booth again later, when the crowds had thinned, and told them that now that my husband has worn their socks nothing else lives up to them; I couldn’t buy me their yarn and not him more socks, so… And while I was at it I handed Ron more of that chocolate for the both of them, saying, “We don’t have the tempering perfect yet but we’re learning with each new project. It’s a little like knitting that way.”

Ron’s appreciative response, “It’s got a good snap to it.”

And then he told me to my great surprise that he used to work as a chocolatier.

No wonder I hadn’t had to explain to him what a melanger was!

I gave him the rest of that chocolate for the both of them. Stitches was almost over for me and there was no point in not sharing it with people I knew would enjoy it. (Margo Lynn’s allergic.)

He refused to ring up the socks and stuffed them in my basket.

!!!… I protested, partly at myself, because I should have known better to wait till after…!

He basically said just try to stop me.

!!!

Goodbye with love to my Uncle Wally, who passed away quietly with his local children by his side Saturday at 95.

Welcome to this beautiful brand-new world with love to Annabeth Joan, born to my niece Maddy and her husband Devin this morning.

So this happened while I was at Stitches. My August Pride peach.

More on Stitches later.

I have a mild case of face blindness and I only see them a few seconds a year. And kids change so much.

At Friday’s Stitches, there was some random mom and her young son, five, maybe even six years old, who was clearly trying to be on his best behavior but also was clearly bored with this whole yarn-everything-everywhere-ness.

So I did what I do and coming up from behind, caught her attention and offered her a finger puppet for her kiddo to help make wool his happy place, too, for a distraction. He was still young enough for these.

Caught off guard, she turned around to me and laughed in sudden delight and proclaimed, “He’s got a collection from you!”

My box is starting to get a bit low. I’ll need to order more soon.