I stumbled across an article online that was clearly plagiarized from the original–and they watered it down, which was worse. I went looking. I know people who were there then.

This is the original story. A charismatic young high school history teacher here, trying to answer the question of one of his students in 1967 as to how the Germans could possibly have fallen for what Hitler did, improvised a real-life experiment that spiraled way out of hand to where he and the kids found themselves in a full-blown enforced fascist state–and not just his kids: students were skipping classes at the other two high schools in town to join in.

It was so horrifically successful that Jim Jones, who would later perpetrate the Jonestown massacre where 909 people died, tried to get him to tell him how he’d pulled it off.

And no, that teacher did not keep his job.

Two frost covers, one greenhouse, two strings of incandescent Christmas lights plus a heater made it 54F this morning under the covers with the mango tree vs 29F for the outside temp. Three more mangoes have begun to turn yellow, determined to become what they were meant to be.

Meantime, Malabrigo Mecha is proving to be easier on my tendonitis to knit than that fluffy grabby red alpaca was, and I find it very encouraging. It felt good to see something brand new coming to be.

Rain, rain, and more rain yesterday.

And then–

We woke up to a community-wide warning that a road going into the hills connecting the counties was closed. I could just imagine putting people who’ve possibly never seen, much less driven in snow on that steep narrow windy mountain path at rush hour, and–just, no.

Turns out we *do* have snowplows here! Or at least one, anyway. Who knew? It was a cute little backhoe-looking thing with a plow blade attached to the front rather than the traditional massive snow truck, but hey. We needed it. The Little Engine That Could got to work and cleared the way.

Photo courtesy of the police department.

Tonight, it was 32F already at 8:40 and going down, but there’s no more rain expected before Friday. That’s more normal here: a cold front just before the less-chilly storm.

About ten years ago I was having a conversation online with Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts. The knitters here may remember the story told by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee of the yarn dyer whose Sock Yarn of the Month Club got yanked without warning after 9/11 by its bank as being clearly a source of funding terrorists, because the idea that people would sign up to buy yarn! To knit…SOCKS!! was just too outlandish for comprehension. And so without asking the customers if they’d been cheated by her site nor letting her know that they were supposedly on to her, her bank abruptly yanked all funds paid for that club out of her account and refunded everybody so as to stop her diabolical plans in their tracks.

None of her customers had asked to be refunded. She certainly hadn’t planned for that to happen to her company’s finances.

Yeah that was fun.

Anyway, so that’s how I heard of Blue Moon, and at one point she had a colorway named Rock Creek. My husband grew up a block away from Rock Creek near the Maryland/DC line. So out of sheer curiosity I asked if there were any connection to the one there.

Tina laughed that there must be a Rock Creek in every state of the Union–but, yes.

Wait, so…

We ended up putting down the computers and talking on the phone. Turns out she and I had grown up a mile, maybe a mile and a half away from each other and almost certainly knew people in common and definitely places.

And about dead center between our homes and familiar to all was the old Magruder’s blacksmith shop, built by a man who died in 1751. (The real estate listing got the built date very wrong.) The family home was a much larger house up the hill. It was this tiny one where his slaves lived, climbing a ladder to the loft above for a bedroom, a sober reminder of the past. If you scroll down on the county’s historical register page about it, you can see where the road to the right used to be that they wanted to tear down that house for so they could widen it.

The outcry was such that they rerouted the road past the back of the property instead and dead-ended the original going up the hill from the house. (You scroll down to the very bottom of that link and you see the spot where my mom turning right at the bottom of the photo got hit head-on by a school bus that had lost its brakes and gone over the center to try to avoid cars waiting for the light. Mom was fine.)

Someone from my high school is into historical structures and posted those links on Facebook.

And I wanted to go, Mom! Dad! This says that place has a basement! I think that thrilled me to read because it meant the poor souls who had no choice but to live there a very long time ago had more space to themselves than I ever knew, and I’m grateful for that.

But all my life I’ve wanted to see the inside of that house. Now’s my chance. Just a plane ride away, right?

Edited to add, one of my friends back home found a video showing the inside!

A week ago, while we were packing up their house, B&N on the phone told us all food was take or toss and they urged us to help keep it from being wasted.

They had a big box of a dairy-free shortbread. We had a few more of the organic oranges from the neighbors. (Since you zest them, they really needed to be–it’s the difference between bitter and not bitter in my experience.)

Those two being essential to a childhood memory of my daughter’s (the recipe’s in that link) from before her dairy allergy surfaced, the thought kept percolating for her all week, not knowing that it was in mine, too. But she was the first one to bring it up yesterday, and a box of dairy-free phyllo dough soon followed her home from the grocery store.

There’s a point at which you quit resisting a good idea.

At the last minute it seemed I was out of Earth Balance, the one reliably dairy-free butter substitute I could think of but she found a box in the freezer of a coconut oil/cashew substitute for cultured butter for layering the sheets. I was a little unsure but it’s what we had.

The taste was perfect. The phyllo did come out just a bit tough rather than tender, but hey. I marveled at the end that the strudel was a lot easier to make than I remembered, and she laughed and said, You don’t have four little kids running around to try to keep track of at the same time.

Point.

In honor of my late father-in-law’s birthday. He watched me very carefully a few years ago as I showed him how easy it was to make your own caramel sauce–he wanted to be able to do that, too. Sugar, water, boil, cream? That’s all there was to it? Cool!

He had quite the sweet tooth.

Happy Birthday, DadH.

The first photos on my new iPhone 4S were of my then- one and only grandson as a baby. He’s eight now.

That phone was so old that Verizon is, as of the end of this year, no longer willing to have it on our plan. Which we wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t gone in, and that could have been fun, so I’m passing the word along.

A member of the family had an iPhone 6S that was suddenly possibly not fixable right before a long-anticipated trip to Europe last year and it got replaced fast with no time to lose.

I finally took the damaged one to a shop this week to see what they could do about the exploded battery that had pushed out the case. Was this thing salvageable?

Sure! They handed it back to me with a new battery and back faster than I could knit a second row on my cowl.

I tried it out with the wifi at home–and they were right, the thing worked just peachy fine. For $60. Hey! The phone was familiar and comfortable and instantly clearly better than my slowly dying one.

Today we went in to officially switch the two.

And then Michelle came over and spent hours getting it set up; turns out updates had to happen first. She moved seven years’ worth of photos and caught details like its still claiming the wrong owner. Now if I don’t recognize someone in my contacts list I’ve got an excuse. (“Kathy’s friend NW”? Who?) Mom, did you know your gmail was installed in triplicate and that’s been devouring your memory?

It was? How?!

Wait here, I got told, and watch this for this icon to show up while we go to the grocery store, or it’ll go poof and then we’ll have to start over.

When you have to look up at something once a minute or so and no there won’t be any sound to tip you off, what are you going to do? I would easily get too wrapped up in a book to notice.

That icon never did show up but boredom is a great motivator; I risked doing more knitting than I have since the before-Christmas elbow break. The hand I sprained later is coming along nicely, too. I have so missed my yarn time. I actually finally finished a project! Potato chip knitting for the win!

They came home. No icon? Oh, it’s broken–here let me try this. And at that, whatever magic our favorite Apple expert wrought seemed to do it.

I’d show you a picture of that cowl, too, now, except that she’s gone home and it’s not showing up where it’s supposed to and No Blog Picture For You for now.

Yeah, we don’t have that switchover entirely worked out yet. I do expect though that photos will improve with the newer camera.

(I typed that out, and then…) Richard to the rescue!

More amaryllises! (And a hyacinth.)

Last year I went through the seed catalogs with great visions, as one does. I did plant a few tomatoes, and as a matter of fact one indestructible Sungold next to the house from the year before survived 22F winter nights–again–and is still blooming and producing merrily away. A windstorm blew it backwards two weeks ago but bit by bit it is growing towards the sun again that is likewise reaching out gradually to it.

I looked at all those unused year-old seeds though (Big Boys! Blue tomatoes!) and figured that if I started in January and nothing sprouted then I wouldn’t have lost much time. And if they did, they could be in pots for awhile inside the Sunbubble; I might as well put that heat to the most use I can, right?

Look who just showed up. Now that I’ve got an extra bag of soil so I can put it in something bigger than a used creme brûlée pot. I can’t remember if this is the zucchini or a Waltham butternut, but either way this little squash needs more legroom stat. If anything comes up in that bigger pot over there then I’ll have (at least) one of each.

Knowing that squirrels sometimes go after new sprouts, I brought it inside for the night. No munching on my seedling. This one’s mine.

Edited to add, I posted this and then looked more closely: two! Two Big Boy tomatoes came up today when I wasn’t looking!

Tiny little things.

Yay for tracking numbers. Yay for the post office. That sweet little girl got her baby blanket back Wednesday, cold weather or no.

Sending oxalis flowers towards everybody hunkering down in the record cold going on across so much of the country.

The Tropic Snow peach continues to defy my efforts to get a good picture. The camera wants the lemons.

The doorbell?

Flowers?!

It was from B & N. 

I went looking for a box the right size and realized I might as well use the post office’s priority mail one; it’s usually cheaper anyway. I got something ready and packed for my niece as long as I was going there, set it down, went to address the next…

It hit me. Wait a minute. I’ve known my daughter’s friends for years–but it hadn’t occurred to me that I didn’t actually know their last name. They’d forever simply been B. & N. and since the baby blanket was going 1100+ miles away to a town they don’t normally live in, in the middle of nowhere, there had sure better be a last name on that box for that postmaster if I want that baby to get her blankie for sure.

It took a few hours for the text to get seen, but it was, and it was a relief when I got it–she wasn’t going to have to wait an extra day after all. And for the parents’ sakes: I’d so wanted the postmark to read today, the first day it could possibly have been. I wanted them to know all of us are there for them in their loss of his dad.

Got to the post office an hour before they closed.

And came out of there picturing that small face as she grabs her beloved blanket out of that box with all the exuberance of an 18-month-old, making the adults around her happy for her.

Hold on, little one, it’s coming!

Church. Then Dani and his beloved and our mutual friend Lee, whose birthday party it was where the conversation happened that led to my tree arriving.

I offered the not very large mango to Dani and he inhaled its essence, remembering the Alphonsos of his childhood back yard. I had my good Mel and Kris stoneware set out and we went to it. Mango pieces, homemade chocolate, juice I’d squeezed the night before after the neighbors gave us a boxful from their orange tree.

The mango might have been even better with one more day to ripen, but still: I could honestly say, and did, that he’d been right: that that was the best mango I had ever eaten in my life. Such a depth of flavor. The perfume! So much to that tiny bit of fruit the five of us each had. I did not know they could be like that. Wow.

Dani asked for the seed and the skin: the scent of home, and to prove to a fellow ex-pat friend of his that yes you can grow them here–you just have to want to badly enough.

His SO teased him that she was sure he was going to grow his own tree from it. They’ve told me their condo doesn’t have enough sun, but hey, if he wanted to badly enough. Right?

They headed out after a bit and I got a message from my daughter: could I bring…

She’d been spending all her free time of late helping some friends pack up their house. Their moving van arrives tomorrow bright and early, and they were glad they had that one last weekend to finish everything up.

Except that yesterday morning the guy’s father, a farmer, dropped dead, utterly unexpected, and they dropped everything and ran for the airport knowing how much his mom would need immediate help. There were still two baby bottles in the sink. Michelle was trying to finish what they no longer could and needed something to package some of their papers that they hadn’t intended for the movers to touch.

Sure, I can do that, and I headed off to San Jose with the requested bin.

I took one look around when I got there and knew that this was where I needed to be for the next little while.

I washed all the dishes, by hand so they would be seen on the drying rack and not forgotten in the dishwasher, I folded the clothes that had been washed, I sorted all the socks of all the sizes. I did not find the key to the firesafe that the toddler had run off with, but we were all in each other’s good company on that one. I remembered the days of one child of mine in particular who was always finding what squeezed into what and the hairpins we shook out of a ride-on toy years ago.

We’d been working for some time when…

The baby blanket! This is the couple I’d knitted a cashmere/cotton 50/50 afghan for, and it was their now-toddler’s favorite blankie. It was there. Michelle called them: I was offering to mail it to them tomorrow if they wanted. (Their stuff was going straight to storage given the new circumstances and it might be months.) Or I could keep it at my house till they were ready, free of moths or loss.

Her friend burst into tears: yes please send it?!

First thing, honey, first thing. That, at least, is something I can do.

(And hey, now I know: after 18 months of it going through their high-end washer and dryer, it’s still so very soft, the excess fluff is gone, and it has shrunk only a little. I pre-shrank that yarn hard before knitting it up and it basically held, while the essence of the cashmere endures. And it is THE beloved blankie. I’m quite pleased.)

A quick late post: I found this site about chocolate tempering, and even though her writing’s not entirely clear re when to do what on dark chocolate, we did the temps at her 3. (93F) and after 4. (88F) to see if maybe we’d been adding the cocoa butter when things were still too warm for the proper crystallization. And maybe we needed to stir and let it cool still more after that while the crystals formed.

We have one of those laser pointer thermometers for instant gratification readings.

The result? No more little points of light in the front, although some color variation on the back, still. I promise a photo before we eat it all.

This was Chocolate Alchemy’s Esmeraldas variety, and the others pronounced the results the best so far.

Hey, DANI! This is all your fault! Thank you!

Wondering if it was ripe yet, I just barely touched it and to my great surprise it fell right off in my hand.

My first. Alphonso. Mango. Ever! Already, six hours of being inside the warm house and the fragrance has started to bloom.

The stump. The concrete floor of the shed and the roots below it: he came, he quoted, he said they could do it all, and then he said wait, the crew could probably do that–today, actually, if you want, let me check and I’ll give you a call.

And so they did! (The white stripe is a shaft of sunlight on the now-dirt floor and they have to come back in the morning to collect the mulch.)

I’m still trying to grok the idea that I don’t have to worry about that anymore and that it didn’t cost near what I thought it would, it’s just plain done.

Meantime:

The day I discovered that such a thing as a melanger exists I happened to be in the middle of an email stream with my friend Afton. At the height of being giddy over finding out that not only did such a thing exist but that my husband wanted to use our points to buy one too, I sent her the link.

To which she answered, quite reasonably,

W

A

N

T

And with that a plan began to hatch.

Afton is someone who wholeheartedly befriends every person she meets, both in person and online. She is a born comforter. She flew to Wisconsin to be there for a member of our knitting chat group who was losing her fight to cancer. She drove a long distance several times to another friend in her illness. She drove from New Jersey to Maryland to meet me when I was in town.

And she is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.

Humor and empathy together are a powerful force for good in this world.

She’s also the instigator of Aftober, the KnitTalk tradition of her cheering us on to learn something new and to finish a project before the end of October, before the holiday stress sets in–and if you do she would mail you the Prize of Insignificant Worth ™. A different thing from year to year, some small fiber-related thing tucked in an envelope decorated with a drawing of and allegedly by her cats that is always so perfect that many of us have saved those envelopes for any time we want cheering up.

This last fall saw the deaths of those two woman she’d cared for and the Prize turned out to be something that she spent a great deal of time and expense to create and share with us in order to bless more people going forward, in their names.

Everybody was, as always, to be quiet about what we got until everybody had gotten theirs.

And then this happened: her beloved boy cat took sick, so much so that she rushed him to the vet instead of going to synagogue that Saturday in Pittsburgh. Yes that synagogue.

Her cat’s final act was saving her life as his slipped away in her arms. If only he could have saved her friends’ lives, too.

At last we of her online longtime knitting group had something to quietly work together on to give to her in thanks for all she is and for all she does and all she gives. So many people chipped in. Someone volunteered to handle the logistics. Nobody told.

Today her mail came. I got an email: Beans (they were nibs) and book? Were these misdelivered? Weren’t they supposed to go to me? Should she send them on? (My daughter, husband and I had gone to Dandelion Chocolate specifically to get her a signed copy of their open-sourcing DIY book for her.)

I checked the tracking numbers, grinned, and quietly waited.

It took UPS a couple more hours (and a bajillion page refreshes on my part as concrete smashing sounds went on in the background, then a, YES!)

My phone suddenly blew up in stunned thrilled capital letters, and I told her happily, You’ve been KnitTalked.

Because it wasn’t all just from me, not by a very long shot. Margo Lynn has the names.

Nibs, book, molds, melanger: only the cocoa butter didn’t quite make it there in time for her to start right away.

My fervent, heartfelt thanks to all those who helped make this happen for her. And just like knitting: every time you start a new chocolate batch, you learn something you didn’t know before.

But I don’t think there’ll be any problem finishing off any of those kinds of projects before the end of October.

And the bars are so easy to share.