I hadn’t signed into freecycle.org in months. Somehow it just felt like I should, and so I did today, wondering why I was wasting my time on this.

Wait.

Someone had posted two weeks ago that they were looking for some vinyl or linoleum flooring, not a lot, basically enough for a bathroom redo by the sound of it.

When we remodeled thirty-one years ago our contractor’s wife owned a candy shop and he had put an industrial-grade linoleum floor in it for her and then installed it in our kitchen and down the hall and bathrooms. Ten year warranty. Meant to last.

For thirty-one years we had a rolled up remnant of that stuff tucked away.

I hauled it out of there and gave it a look. Eleven inches at one end and five at the other were a waste of time–too yellowed, too kinked.

But the rest of it, from inside the roll? It laid almost flat with no effort and it would be easy to make it entirely so and the color looked great. Like new, which essentially it was. 48.5″x 98″ before cutting? I think they got the sixteen square feet they wanted.

I remember what it was like to want to do some work on the house while having to pay for that house when we were young and raising kids….

A minivan pulled up.

They were so happy to have it. I was so happy to see it literally gone for good.

It will all flatten and spread out the moment water touches it, but I love how fern lace mimics honeycomb cabling while you’re knitting it, and I miss that once it’s gone. Yarn is Malabrigo Rios in Libra colorway.

Such a cute baby gift idea. (Etsy link.) And not to take away from the crocheter’s sales, but I’m suddenly wondering: could you attach the squares with velcro? In such a way that you could attach them to each other in varying ways? Or maybe flaring out from a joined bottom like a hand of cards so as to be able to rearrange them into an impromptu small blanket on the go, like for tucking in in a carseat? Or not permanently joined at all except in little loops and buttons to make a solid surface across as needed?

Who’s the entrepreneur ready to run with that?

The leaves, crinkled and brown, have all given way to the season on my zucchini plant.

So it was a surprise to look out the window this morning and see brilliant upturned yellow on it. I went outside to check: it had! It had bloomed! How?

But once I got close enough to really see it I saw the rest of the story. Something out there in the night had likewise been delighted to find a flower and nearly all of the lower side of it had been eaten clean off, leaving just the top and the inner edges of the sides to go Ta Dahhh!

I chuckled, glad that my plant was still providing sustenance to the world out there. It didn’t have to be for me.

Thursday I got official post-op clearance to drive again.

Today I headed to Cottage Yarns. I was down to a single skein of Mecha, it’s cold and rainy and the season for making thick soft quick wool hats (read: no-looking no-brain knitting) and not being able to pick out colors in person had been bugging me.

I walked out with six skeins. That’s about six or seven weekly Zoom knitting-group meetings.

Meantime, on day 11 of the baby afghan in Rios worsted weight, I’m at 8.5 full repeats of fern lace so far out of the 15 I’m aiming for at the moment.

I need to go wind up that next skein.

So. Today the wound care doctor had him come in.

He told Richard the other guy was full of it. Don’t do it. A PCC line with antibiotics was his recommendation.

(Note that PCC lines have their own infection risks.)

Richard came home going, Who’s in charge??

Me, pointing out what he knew: Doing the other is permanent.

But after a few more minutes knitting and considering the thing, I went back over to him and made a pronouncement. YOU are. It’s your body.

Okay, wound guy had then said to him, You need to go back to the Infectious Diseases guy and have him….

He saw it coming and had already come to terms with it. I didn’t and it threw me. I’d thought, we fought that back once and we’ll do it again.

The wound care guy two weeks ago had said we’re done here and took him off the antibiotics he’d been on since August.

Four days later the bone infection came back. No (over the phone when he tried to be seen again) you’re fine. Yesterday the visiting nurse called the guy and read him the riot act from our kitchen and asked my sweetie, Who’s in charge of this anyway?!

Well, he saw that guy, and the podiatrist, the family medicine doctor, and the infectious disease guy and the answer was, nobody, as far as he could tell.

So today was all the everybody elses. One appointment turned into three with just enough time for him to surprise me with a text, hurry home and grab a quick bite and me for my retina appointment and then head back to the clinic.

Where, when it was my turn, they took pictures and then waited for my surgeon.

The before and after were up. I had been looking at repeats of the same image through two years of screenings–but wow! That one was WAY worse than those had been. No wonder I was having such a hard time seeing those last few months! I’d had no idea it had come that close to tearing through the retina. I had gotten seen and had had it taken care of just in time, and the recovery was and is much easier because of it.

There’s still a bit of red, though, and he wanted me to go back to full dose on the steroid drops and then start tapering off again. But he was pleased with my progress.

Richard, though.

Suddenly he was getting estimates of one week to three months and they’ll schedule it when they schedule it and let him know.

Any travel plans are entirely up in the air right now. I don’t know how long it takes to recover from a partial toe amputation but we’re about to find out. After all this time that we’d thought we wouldn’t have to. He’s totally okay with it. I’m trying to be.

But at least it’s only part of only one toe at this point, and that is far better than it was.

We picked up his new antibiotic on the way home.

Little goals that push the progress along: I want to split-splice the third skein on before I have to haul this to the retina surgeon’s waiting room tomorrow. Got less than an hour left on this one.

The fluttering orange wings caught my eye.

And made me think wistfully of my late neighbors, who had planted milkweed in their small garden for the monarchs. It’s probably still there; the new family would do the same.

But to the mystery of how monarch butterflies know to follow their migration routes going north and then south across multiple generations to finish the task, there is also this: how do they know, out of all the miles of terrain below, where their favorite food is? Should it disappear, how do they find the next patch nearby?

What is it like to see the world from a butterfly’s view?

Where most human faces turn to see them and smile, glad for the moment.

Huh. If you crop it enough you can get the HEIC photo to come out as a JPEG on the re-send and it comes through here.

For whatever it’s worth: I always knit the seed stitch at the sides more loosely when there are yarn overs in the main body, because the moment water touches them they’ll stretch out more than the seed stitch when knit at the same tension. So I give a little bit of extra over there.

Thankgsiving travel: a millionaire with a real answer to the required FAA cutbacks. Wow. Who knew that even that was designed to favor the oligarchs?

Edited to add Abigail Disney’s text in case the link doesn’t work:

“Private planes make up nearly 12% of all flights. Instead of grounding 10% of commercial flights at 40 major U.S. airports, why doesn’t the DOT ground 100% of private flights instead?

So good luck traveling in the coming days, unless you can afford to charter a plane! Because yet again, the Trump admin is prioritizing the interests of the ultra-wealthy at the expense of everyone else.”

We were waiting at a red light and I was admiring the flowers in the strip in front of the gas station. They cut back somewhat during the drought several years ago, but there is always something in bloom there. Always. Someone clearly puts heart and soul into it, and occasionally I’ve even see the guy at it.

Their immediate neighbor is a garden center.

And it hit me: if you’re sitting there manning that booth all day bored and watching people fill their cars–but also watching people just a few feet further away filling their cars, too, only with flowers and plants and colors and hopes and trees of blooms to come–

–yeah, that’s a temptation I would happily succumb to, too. And it definitely makes their spot much more inviting than the other gas station across the street that sees no reason to spend time nor money on things that don’t bring in money.

Oh, but (looking at where the cars line up vs where they only do when this side of the street is too busy) they do. Even though those flowers are their own reward, they do.

After all the intarsia, man, monocolor knitting goes so much faster!

Sean Dunn has been exonerated: the man who had twenty officers sent to arrest him after he threw the Subway salami foot-long (video) he’d just bought at a Border Patrol agent in order to deflect the goons, as he testified in court after they’d tried to charge him with felony assault. And it had worked! They ran after him!

He had been warning people in the neighborhood that the gay bar over there was hosting a latin night so, look out, Trump’s guys had come.

Note that he was arrested and released but then they decided they wanted to arrest him again. Don’t want those pesky onlookers. His attorney offered to have him surrender to the authorities but they refused to accept that surrender and those twenty men broke his door down instead. It’s more fun that way.

Jeanine Pirro at the Justice Department announced he’d been fired from his job there.

The officer who got sandwich-snipered said he’d felt it through his bulletproof vest. That he had mustard stains on his uniform and a piece of onion hanging off his radio antenna.

So scary.

Only problem is, the thing was still neatly wrapped up when it hit the ground and the video proved it. The BP guy had lied under oath.

The other problem is that one of the silly-in-order-to-make-a-point cliches of law school is the prosecutor who’s so good he can indict a ham sandwich–and here we are. Two grand juries had refused to indict the guy, though, so they’d had to make do with only a misdemeanor.

The jury thought the whole thing was ridiculous.

It was (and I am going to borrow freely from others’ comments here)

A salt with a breadly weapon.

BOGO at Subway’s when ICE shows up: one and Dunn!

Lettuce us celebrate that he got out of the pickle he was in. Now he can ketchup with the rest of his life.

Clearly, it doesn’t take years on the job to become a seasoned officer.

Hero goes free because charges were bologna.

When asked for her take on it, Pirro said, No condiment.

Jury foreman: Salami? Where’s the beef?

Trump’s Justice Department is out of hammunition; the defense is on a roll!

So what if he had a machine bun? Second condimentment rights!

If the sandwich doesn’t split you must acquit.

I’ll just add, I think the Pirrotechniques quite blew up in her face.

Note to self: 157 st, Rios, US 6, Libra color way, ~40″ in unstretched seed stitch, will widen out with the lace pattern.

The big blue project I’ve envisioned is going to take me awhile to find all the right skeins to go with the main color, so in the meantime I’m using up some good yarn in my stash for a good reason. There was a false start last night, a frogging, and a restart today.

(Oh, and, the hospital funding measure passed! The tax assessor race looks like it will go to a runoff but the one we so hoped for is way ahead.)