Seven pounds one and a half ounces, 19.5″ long, 2:51 pm, 10 days early, and the sweetest face on the planet. I just want to hold those wobbly new eyes in  mine.

And to tell Parker what a good job he’s doing of being the big brother.

I knitted the afghan working from two cones of silk at a time, four total.

Today I sat down to see if I could wrangle a baby hat out of the rest of the cone that had the slightly largest amount left. Single stranded instead of doubled, part because I wanted a finer fabric and part because there was so little yarn now. Eyeballing all the way,  hoping I was leaving enough for the decreasing at the top, checking Bev’s size chart, and yay, I made it!

Yeah I could rip out the last dozen rows to add another two of them to the main part. No I’m not going to. (No I did not snip it off yet, either. In case a new day gave me more patience.)

I wonder if I could squeeze a pair of baby booties out of the other near-empty cones. Because just one would look funny.

Two possible routes, the GPS said, one up the most heavily congested freeway in northern California (and that’s saying something), the other a ride through beautiful valleys with the hills to each side, a few extra miles but no extra minutes.

Was this a trick question?

And so after our last session of our church’s Conference this afternoon (there are two more sessions Sunday) Michelle and I jumped in the Prius and she drove as I watched birds hover on the winds through those valleys on our way up past the sign that said Sacramento this way, Stockton, that.

Lots and lots of turkey vultures (that’s a raptor, grinned Michelle as she kept her eyes on the road), but also hawks: redtailed, I think, and there was what might even have been a peregrine falcon. The sky was just overcast enough to soften and deepen the colors all around, and on this fine spring day the hills were green, not yet the gold dust coming in a few months.

And so we arrived in a good mood. There was a couple wrapping up their deal and a few workers around but basically we seemed to have the place to ourselves. We found someone to ask for Dante, and he phoned him; shortly thereafter the man Michelle had emailed with came inside the dealership and led us to the Honda they’d been talking about. (She had told him flat out his price was too high and he had agreed to a lower one without her even being there yet–how often does that happen? And she had the printout in case she needed to prove it.)

He had told the place we were coming and had asked this morning for it to be detailed, and it appears that upon our actually walking in in person someone had gone oh, this one’s real, and had pulled it into the carwash–other than that, the thing had a long way to go. Carpets desperately needing to be shampooed, what looked like a shopping cart having ricocheted all the way down one side, a child’s vivid pink bracelet in the trunk. I’m guessing someone traded it in when they needed to be able to get another carseat in. Or got tired of wrestling with one in a coupe.

Seeing it flawed gave us–her–more leverage than seeing it pristine. Michelle had walked away from several salesmen and cars at this point but I had to make myself not say out loud, Oh, this’ll be so perfect!  As was the salesman, who was the antithesis of pushy; I liked him on the spot. Such a relief compared to some I’ve encountered, about whom the nicest thing I could say is that only my husband existed in their eyes, even when it was my car we were buying.

I did say to her, Do you want to look at that Fit in Pleasanton on the way home?

(Mom, the Fit was in…) she said afterwards. But appreciated the help.

And so we went home. They will clean and they will check out the mechanicals a little more closely and they will get rid of those scratches and they will email her Monday to let her know it’s ready and still at that same price. Or we don’t come back. And they know it, because she is a serious buyer but we are hardly close by.

And so we took 680 home, Michelle happy to drive, me happy to watch raptors soar.

And then I made blueberry pie, because, you know, some Saturdays are just near-perfect like that.

Four more rows of ribbing to finish off that baby afghan as I type. Got the 25 repeats done I was aiming for and found I had maybe maybe enough yarn to do another–and decided to save it for a matching hat (it should stretch that far) and baby booties (which might even fit before he’s three this time. I can only get better at this baby knitting thing.)

Meantime, being thrown so badly back into serious sickness by a common bug had me more worried last week than I wanted to admit, even to me.

Michelle M quilts as well as knits, and four years ago when I was doing all that hospital stuff she was making me a get-well quilt. Somehow its shipping time wasn’t quite there yet… Till she asked me about a week ago how to get this to me?

It’s far prettier than my nighttime sideways snapshot shows. The anticipation, the box, lifting the quilt out and going oh wow!, feeling thought about and cared about and marveling that she would go to all this everything for me, it gave me a tremendous sense of reprieve that I don’t quite know how to say. Her timing was perfect.

And she had no way to know it, but my mom quilts and several years ago Mom and I went to a quilt shop and I picked out fabrics for a quilt for her to make me whenever my turn in line should come up (no hurry).

The light fabric Michelle picked? I did too, or one very like if it’s not that exact one.  Mom’s will be different and the two will go very nicely together. All the more perfect.

The forever question: if you were making a baby afghan out of  a very good natural-fibers yarn, would you stop at baby size if you had enough yarn to make it toddler/young child size or even bigger, or would you continue on? Receiving blankets are so necessary but have such a short need time.

I was going for continuing on, knitting all afternoon with the stereo going. A break for icing my hands and a two hour break for picking everybody up. (When the VP grabs you on the way out the door, the taxi driver cools her flats in the parking lot.)

I almost but didn’t take my knitting along just in case. My hands needed me not to.

Mixed with, the sense of impending arrival is strong and I want it finished by tomorrow night and all ready for him.

It’s slow knitting. There’s still easily seven hours’ worth of work left if I’m going to go for every last repeat I can squeeze out of this yardage.

How do you decide how big to make them?

To clarify on the last post, we can put trash bags in the recycling bin, where some poor schmuck has to grab them out and hoist them onto the trucks going south to the landfill and deal with any mess they make.

Two days ago, we were at two flower clusters and holding on the Fuji apple and the green was starting to pop out so it seemed like that was going to be it. Only two? I wondered if the snails had eaten all the flowers in the night (which they will do) and I just somehow missed them all? Went out tonight and there were new buds bursting out all over the place on the Fuji and new petals all over the other apple. Oh me of little faith. Well there you go.  (And I scattered more of that Sluggo, an organic snail-only-killer, and around that August Pride peach with the new nibble in the leaf, just making sure.)

Meantime, I lost six non-spare pounds in the past week and I’m still pretty wiped so we did Japanese barbecue take-out for Michelle’s birthday and I baked angel food cake. They came home with strawberries. And hey, those berries came in a clear plastic clamshell of just the right size and will be holding one apple or one peach out of some critter’s paws or beak. Perfect.

I told Michelle she shared a birthday with someone.

Oh? Who?

Sandra Boynton.

She looked very pleased.

And the grandson baby blanket knits on (made good progress today). And the baby, unlike his big brother, waits. So far.

Ah my. Our city is starting a pilot program and our neighborhood got made the ones who get to do it. Probably because there is not one member of the city council who lives here.

There will no longer be trash trucks for us. Nope, zip, gone. We’re all such perfect recyclers that we will have recycling and we will have composting and that’s that.

A little compost bucket got dropped off by the front door a few days ago, with a box of biodegradeable liner bags inside. You had to break the lid of the thing to get it to stay upright while trying to put stuff in it, like when peeling a mango with two hands with the bucket needing two more hands to hold it steady and open for the peels . Meat scraps! Those go in too. The bags are to go in the bins that were formerly for yard clippings only and the bucket is intended to stay in our kitchens whether we want them to or not, unless we want squirrels raiding them by day and rats and raccoons by night. (Full or empty, they’re going to smell like food to them.) And no, there are no charcoal filters. (Paging Suburban Correspondent.)

I have an occasional gardener here doing some of the outdoor stuff I with my sun sensitivity absolutely can’t. Mows the lawn, that sort of thing. When he does come, it’s the day before pickup, and now he’s supposed to deal with his work bin having week-old chicken bones in it and the like (says the woman who made chicken broth tonight).

If we want details on the program, do we get a written-out description on the city’s website?

No, we get a video to listen to.

*crickets*

Nope, can’t hear those either. I mean, come on, guys, how hard is it to type out the (insert aggrieved word of your choice here) thing?

And! They want the participants to fill in a survey, and if you do they will give you a $5 gift certificate to…wait for it…Peet’s coffee.

Now, I’m told Peet’s makes great coffee. But we’re Mormons.

The real kicker and the biggest reason this all bugs me in the first place is that anything that really is trash is to be sealed up in a bag and put out in the recycling bin. Which is already way more than full every week, because, y’know, we’re such great recyclers and all; I emailed the city and outlined just exactly what goes in the trash at our house since my colectomy and asked if they really wanted to risk–I mean, have they seen their trucks in action?!–contaminating everything with–that.

So they gave me a second recycling bin to help with the volume issue.

Would the Health Department seriously be okay with this? What this is really about is the city strong-arming the garbage workers’ union they’ve been fighting with.

Tomorrow’s the first day.

One year.

Kicking and screaming all the way.

(And on a more cheerful note, I saw a peregrine falcon hovering at the top of the trees that were cut back from the road as I carpooled and Richard drove to pick up Michelle this evening, and on the way back I saw it again!)

I was asked, so to explain: I got put on antibiotics for a sinus infection and they’re clearing that up nicely, but I also had–well, norovirus really should be a yarn-related description, don’t you think? *cough* Mild flaring too. At the one week mark I figure I’m about halfway done with it all.

It rained last night, and this morning, together, both apple trees opened their first blossoms.

This makes me way too happy. There is a very new plum-cherry cross on the market, Dave Wilson’s Pluerry, not lab-induced but done by good old-fashioned years of field work, and it is supposed to be the top taste winner, period, across all their fruits. The catch is that it needs a plum tree for pollination. I of course have one–but in all the various microclimates around here, they don’t yet know which varieties other than Burgundy will work. I have a Santa Rosa. I’ll wait for now–but it tickles me beyond silliness that my apple trees show how it’s done, to the day.

Kathy, I finally snagged a shot of a chickadee with its beak full of your dog’s undercoat; there’s a bunch of it on the table just below that pot and he dove down in there awhile like a knitter at Rhinebeck, individual fibers flying as he searched out the best, then reappeared on top to show off his prize just before taking off.

And if my Plantskydd (when I get it) is successful, I may actually have to thin the plums.

I finally, for the first time in a week, picked up my baby blanket knitting today (it will be scoured in hot water) and at least made a try at getting it done in time. It felt so good to be working on that beautiful thing again in happy anticipation of our coming April baby.

The timing! The choreography of God.

When we moved into this house, there was a miniature rose bush in the furthest part of the backyard blooming profusely, exuberantly, but where nobody could see it from inside the house. It just quietly did its thing and you had to go look to see it.

About ten years ago, maybe more, a weed tree sprang up near it. But I like trees, I miss the deep green of our native Maryland and this asked no expensive watering of us, and so too late we realized we didn’t like how much it had multiplied via suckers and become a line of trees along the fenceline that dwarfed and darkened the air above the little rose.

Which stopped blooming at all or even, as far as I could tell, growing. It just kind of held its breath.

The neighbors recently took out most of those weed trees with our permission, as I’ve mentioned.

I went outside on this lovely Easter evening we were having to check on my fruit trees, and a flash of pink over to the right caught my eye. And a second. They hadn’t been there before.

It had gotten a second chance. It is reaching to the light and so becoming again all that a small rose bush lives to be.

I washed the windows yesterday while I was overdoing it–or at least the imprints of a few doves fleeing the hawk, which is most of what was needed. They were ghostly, beautiful, the dust and oil in each feather on the chests and on the foremost edges of their wings rendering the perfect film negative with the light shining through. So intricate.  So detailed.

And having them there was a little too… Poor doves. Their swift moment of suffering had allowed my beloved hawk to live. Time to clean.

I was talking to Michelle this afternoon when she said, “Oh, you missed it.” I turned around and in that time he came back: the hawk had landed on the edge of the box a few feet away and was standing there looking in at us.

Perhaps he had come to study those windows that stood halfway between us, making sure. Yes. The glass was still there. The missing imprints could no longer warn off his prey about the solid surface, like that dove that got away yesterday, and so there shall be feasting.  Well done.

Meantime, in San Jose, it looks like we will have two Easter chicks (eyases). Clara the peregrine happened to turn the first egg with a pip right to the camera, which promptly zoomed in and started recording as the egg tooth worked away at the beginning of what will be a perfect cut around the circumference. I thought it looked like a second pip on the egg next to it, and it was reported to be clearly working away too this evening.

New life arises. Wishing a Happy Easter to all who celebrate it.

Woke up worse, Richard hauled me to the doctor, I got put on antibiotics. One single pill so far. I’m by no means cured but I’m so much better (and yes I will faithfully take every last pill for ten days–I can’t fathom not.) I managed to do my taxes start to finish, with a lie-down as needed. Done!

And saw the Cooper’s hawk swoop in. He missed.

He danced around from point to point on the roof of the shed, searching; it looked like he snatched a bug popping up–that’s a first to me–and strode from there well into a tree to flush out whoever might be hiding, twigs brushing his tall shoulders as he went. Nada. He was antsy and in a hurry and I wondered if he had little ones newly hatched or about to hatch? I couldn’t remember when I’d seen him quite so jumpy like that. And I know the San Jose peregrines are scheduled to hatch in the next day or two, and those parents likewise are restless as they listen to the early peeps from inside their eggs.

He swooped in again a few hours later, scattering the finches to the winds; pursued one that got away, but meantime in the surprise of the ambush one went the other direction–into the elephant ears on the patio rather than the trees. They almost always go for the trees. This one didn’t.

Then it thought better of it and tried to flee again, again in the wrong direction, and bounced off the window. It was close by so there was not enough momentum to do it much harm. But. It made that bird on glass sound.

And the hawk knew it.  He came straight back and hopped through the amaryllis leaves, a pot on the table at a time, one, then two, then three, closer, closer. Then he stood on the rim of the nearest (I was glad it had been watered so it could take the weight without flipping him–a heavy pot, too, he lucked out), looking that finch dead in the eye from a distance of about a hawk’s length. Toast: it’s what’s for dinner.

After endless moments of standing there frozen, the house finch had to at least try, and they suddenly sped out of sight with the hawk gaining on it fast. And I thought, I get the drama without the gore, somehow, yet again.

Meantime, in San Francisco, where their falcon nest was a few days ahead of ours, a new female peregrine fought off the resident one a few weeks ago and ousted her. The male was at incubation stage, so he had no interest in mating with her as she claimed him and his territory. But he had this perfect nesting box in the best spot and she wanted it.

Gradually she started trying to mimic him, sitting on the eggs as if they were so many more rocks in the scrape. Scattered them to get comfy. She kicked one out of the box and paid it no-never-mind. She would sit but whether there were eggs under her or not was incidental; the hormones that flow from the mating just hadn’t happened. Gradually she came to sit more directly on them but not in incubation stance–she couldn’t, really, because another part of that hormonal flow is the falling out of feathers in an area called the brooding patch, which becomes a warming spot with swollen blood vessels for the eggs to nestle under. She did start holding a wing out to the side over them. Doesn’t work that way.

The eggs should have hatched three days ago and there is a near-zero chance of them still coming out, for all the male’s valiant attempts in all this time. She would fly in and he would fly out as if exchanging nest duty, but…

So many questions were raised and answered. Yes, the two might mate after Dan finally gives up on those eggs, but who knew when that would be? Nobody had permission to remove them. If it happened soon, they could start over before it’s too late in the season, but eventually the stench of the failed ones would make them abandon that nest for now.

Or something.

And then today to everybody’s extreme surprise, she laid an egg! Right there with the others!

If they create the usual clutch of four it’s going to be interesting seeing if they try to cover up all seven.

There has never since a hundred years ago been enough peregrines still alive to find out much of what happens after territorial oustings.  With the help of nestcams this is all new for the learning.

Slowly.  But the worst is over. And thank you, everybody.

Barf 102.4 ears throat belly.  Tomorrow will be better.

They grow so fast…

Yesterday’s Tropic Snow peach is noticeably bigger than yesterday and the last of the flower that was attached to it is gone. It’s almost April and it’s supposed to be ripe in June, so I guess it’s not wasting a moment. I stuck a finger down into the dirt, which could use some mulch: good. Still moist enough, don’t have to water yet.

I saw the beginning of two on the August Pride, too; they weren’t discernibly certain yesterday. Now they’re well past the just-a-guess, along with the new green plum needlepoints on the tree facing them. That little bit of rain last week didn’t hamper those blossoms after all.

I really like that planting those peaches has gotten me in the habit of walking around the backyard in the evenings and taking in the green and the growing and claiming it for my soul. Watching a bit of God’s knitting coming to be as the daylight stretches slowly longer.

Meantime, it looks like I’ll be able to make the baby afghan go further down towards my feet than I had thought the yarn would be able to reach to, good, and…after a week of dodging it, I’m finally catching Richard’s bug. Hoping that a cold will just be a cold.

(There was a get-together tonight that I was really looking forward to. My chocolate torte got delivered but my conscience needed me not to share the germs and I walked the garden here instead. To the vector, go the soils.)

Robin, looking out on snow in the town we moved here from, was wishing for signs of spring. We’ve got a few to share.

We have the most glorious view out our front windows, with the leaves beginning to come in in contrast to the bright white. Coming home from Trader Joe’s this evening, I scooped up a handful of petals that had somehow clustered on the far side of the driveway, wondering at the thought that I don’t think I’ve ever actually paid much attention to how they felt, not just how they looked.

They were so very soft–and cool to the touch. That surprised me. I’ve joked here before about them becoming our snowdrifts as more and more come down, but in the brisk evening air I expected my hand to feel warmed by being covered in them and in the immediate moment the opposite was so.

Cool.

I let them scatter while they still felt like the ice crackles they looked like.

And behold in the back yard after years and years of wanting to grow these and finally starting to: our very first ever actual peach!