The Musicians in Residence at the local college put on a concert tonight: violin, bass, and a piano played by a dear friend of ours.

And not just a concert but a lesson on Claude Debussy. Russ gave a bit of history and a demonstration of the heptatonic scale typically used in Western music, with a picture of it on a bar of music on the screen behind him. Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music children singing Do Re Mi appeared next to demonstrate and the audience chuckled.

Then he showed the pentatonic scale (five notes in an octave instead of seven) and played it. Then the whole note scale, no sharps or flats. Neither of them sounded like much with so many sounds missing.

But then he started playing some familiar gorgeous Debussy piece whose name I didn’t catch, and then another, using those scales. The fun begins when you mix them up between the two hands or instruments.

See! He said, bounding enthusiastically up from the piano bench and waving his arms at the audience. You can try this at home!

The next screen: You TOO can convert classical music to Impressionism! You just need six things:

1. You have to say it in French!
2. Pentatonic scale.
3. Use the sustaining pedal a lot.
4. Whole note scale.
5. Unusual rhythm.
6. I had a hard time seeing the last thing through the tall head of the guy in front of me and Richard doesn’t remember so I can’t tell you and
7. I’m not actually typing the numbers 6 or 7 but this computer program is expecting me to because I typed that you need six things so it is bound and determined to put a numbered list of six things here and won’t let me type anything without auto-adding those numbers and won’t let me delete the numbers after I do. It’s creating an Impression of what I’m trying to say. Russ would laugh and laugh at that.
8. And then, 8, after I said that and hit Save Draft there was no sign of any of the numbers on my Preview page, including the ones I actually typed and the 8. it put before any of the rest of this sentence.
9. So we’ll just have to see how this blog post plays out. (Still indented, too!)

The news today was horrific, again and again and again.

The new pope was the one great and shining beam of hope. A good moral leader calling on the best in ourselves towards one another is exactly what the world needs right now, badly.

I made myself walk away and pick up my knitting. I will still have nightmares over what people caught on camera being done by our own government on our dime and in our name to innocent people and without so much as a warrant.

But I talked a little to my sister and then I knit for her and tried to be a good voice in the world and found I felt just a little better because I had.

Slippery yarn on slippery needles: I ditched that circ at long last and was surprised at what a difference it made in how I feel about working on this. I’m not having to death-grip them every moment for fear of constantly losing stitches, like the 50 off one end while the other end dropped just a few.

My father grew up in Nevada. Ain’t a whole lot of freely growing lush green around there, and he took so much delight in what grew spontaneously in our yard in Maryland: *wild violets! The tiny wild strawberries, the buttercups, (hey, look! Science!) and under the tree canopy, the mountain laurel and the dogwoods. He played suburban dad with the lawnmower and the grass and all that but he and Mom taught us to love what was there. To blow on a dandelion seedhead and watch how it all floated on the breeze rather than freak out at the weed. To know a chickadee from a titmouse. To notice how the grackles were shimmery purple in the sunlight and black in the shade in disguise.

*That link is to an Etsy shop because all the good pictures I could find were from sites that were either telling you how to kill them off or else selling them.

It was a day of constantly running around getting lots of things done, and when it was time to sit down and figure out the specifics on the next stage of the afghan…

Let’s see, that motif would add up to 12″, do I really want that much space taken up for that, and where should I put the…

Nuts to this, and I picked up my carry-around cowl project and went to town on it. No counting, no decisions, just idiot-proof knitting that looks really pretty, it doesn’t have to be what I planned doing it just has to be done, go go go go go.

The sour cherry that was wearing a tutu has now changed into a bridal veil.

While down below, same tree, the petals have become a ground covering and the first of the fruit is on its way. 

Packing at the end of the most recent trip home, she’d tried, but it just didn’t all fit in; did I have a rollaboard she could borrow?

You can have it, I told her, or borrow, whichever works for you. I quite liked that one but it was just a little small so I hadn’t actually ever used it. The local Costco had cleared them out at all of $13; those FULs sold out in a flash.

I got a text today telling me she was sure I wouldn’t mind. She was sure this was what I would have wanted to do with it.

Oh honey yes and amen.

A single friend of hers had just found out she had breast cancer and then died a week and a half later. Her grieving family had come to collect their daughter’s things the best they could.

My daughter had given them her luggage for it. On a whim, feeling silly about it because she couldn’t see how that size would work out, she grabbed the FUL bag too in case they could use it.

It was perfect. It was exactly the thing that exactly solved a problem and they were so grateful.

They are not people of means, she told me, and this is what I could do.

I nearly cried. In pride in my child, in grief for theirs, and I thanked her for letting me help, too, without hesitation even when I didn’t know yet.

And now I know why I found and bought that bag.

One thing about pomegranate flowers: they are not shy. They start shouting in color before it’s officially spring and keep on coming till the earliest fruits are already ready to pick. Carefully.

Dandelions are nature’s cheerleader pompoms. Pomegranates are her bullthorn.

The green baby alpaca is here! No extra costs that I was told about.

Meantime, I…I… I’m torn somewhere between I have no words and I have lots of words but wow, if you ever wanted to find a fellow knitter in the wild and the KNITTER plates are already taken this is definitely the way to do it: this pattern on Etsy.

I’d just be afraid someone would rear-end me while staring at it. Don’t count the stitches, don’t count the! *Crunch*

Also: I skipped out on the whole Knitted Support Chicken fad but a pelican with fish in its beak? That pattern, I bought. My grandmother at 96 had a large glass candy bowl out next to her for my young kids when we visited; I can just see me in my easy chair at that great old age, pelican by my side offering finger puppets to one and all.

Although one could also put wrapped candies in there for the future great-grands, most definitely.

That’s what Gram did. There were several pounds’ worth in there. While my mom and I were trying to discretely nudge the kids to just take one (they were 5, 7, 9, and 11), Gram got a twinkle in her eye: she ignored us, looked straight at the kids, and said, Have some more!

They each picked and unwrapped and ate a second piece.

Have some more!

(Glances our way from the older two, like, uh, are we allowed?)

Have some more!

There was no hurry, they were being on their best behavior, they took turns.

Have some more!

She got them going to where they ran out of pocket space and were stuffing them, in one case, down his socks, desperately hoping Mom and Grammy (us two generations in between) were somehow, uh, not noticing, while Gram was managing not to laugh. She got all the way to her last, Have some more! when finally there were no more left to have. And she was quite fine with that.

We were walking to the car afterwards when the seven year old burst into tears.

What’s wrong!? Didn’t you have fun?

I DID! But I feel like I’m never going to see her again!

I gave her the biggest hug, suddenly wanting to burst into unexpected tears myself.

It was true. Gram quietly slipped away a few months later, a flight away from us. I figured out that what she had been doing, having lost her own mother as a young child, was making it so that her great grandchildren would remember her and how she had been on their side.

And they do.

So here’s my question: if you order yarn from a country (Britain) that’s had a 10% tariff slapped on them but I think that tariff has come and gone but it looks like it’s back, and the company didn’t add it to the bill, is everything peachy fine? Did Colourmart absorb the cost? Does it get stamped due on arrival? How does this work if the tariff gets re-slapped while it’s in transit? I see references to manufacturing there being under what we were supposed to learn was a terrible idea via the Great Depression, but retail sales, it seems unclear. It’s yarn, not a car.

It seems to be taking longer than usual to get here.

How do you run a mail-order business when your fixed costs are someone’s bouncy laser light on the wall that a cat is frantically clawing at?

Meantime, I finally got going again on that afghan start that I’d mostly ripped out and I’m past where I was and let me just lecture my future knitting self right here that yes it was absolutely worth the do-over. Much better.

But it will need more of that green shortly. I know Colourmart is trying.

Last night:

And so the Grinches puzzled and puzzled till their puzzler grew sore.

Maybe tomorrow, she said, I don’t want to do any more!

So they set it up on the spiral, (it’ll never go viral) with a few pieces missing. With the sections not connected, the thing’s kind of listing. A history of Earth, trilobites to elephant girth, under the same blue sky but what changes by and by!

Today:

Y’know, I told him, every time I walk past that darn thing out of the corner of my eye some part of my brain registers layered chocolate cake.

Him: Me, too! in surprise that he wasn’t the only one.

I figured that when you’re dealing with a new cancer diagnosis there must be moments when you need both a distraction and something to look forward to. So I ratted myself out and sent her the tracking number.

Plus I had this Zoom-knitting hat ready to go in a particularly soft skein of Rios, a lighter weight than my usual thick winter-warm Mecha.

(What update/why does this thing now consistently cut off the tops of my pictures while refusing to let it be fixed? Huh. Oh well, you can see the rest if you click on it and then not quite stand on your head.)

The chemo cap will go in the mail tomorrow.

Sublime brand bamboo/pearl viscose 70/30 from stash. Slippery, so I knit it relatively tightly to counteract that.

I played yarn chicken with the small ball and actually had 70″ left.  Super soft. Note to self, since I have another ball of this green: I used US 5, 80 stitches, 10-stitch fern lace after three rows of ribbing, and it stays on. I’m quite happy with it.

I have no idea if Kathryn at Cottage Yarns in South San Francisco has any of that yarn left–when I bought mine, Sublime was referring people looking for it to her and I just happened to luck out. Pearl chips made into yarn!

(Blouse by MargoEmbroidery in Ukraine on Etsy. I special-requested it in long sleeves and a blue cotton/linen 50/50 blend that they call homespun because it’s woven in Ukraine, rather than the polyester shown in her photo, and I love what she made. Even if I flipped the tassels out of the way for making dinner and forgot about it till just now.)

I sat down in front of him. He looked at my face and asked what’s wrong. I stuck out my lower lip like the best grumpy pout a five-year-old could pull off in order to make fun of myself so I wouldn’t take it all too seriously and explained.

He said something I don’t think he’s ever said before: “Well then you have to rip it out.” He never tells me what to do with my knitting. But he was telling me what I was essentially telling him I had to do with my knitting, and yes, I did have to.

All those eighteen-strand rows: gone, and it feels much better now. There shall be a clean start.(The roots were supposed to go twice the width of the tree, not four times! I had counted from raccoon+tree rather than just tree. It was impressively bad.)

I managed to do it in an hour, including reknitting the last blue/green row, far less time than I’d expected, probably because I was willing to take scissors to those roots when they snarled.

And then I did what I’d been trying to get myself to do all weekend: walked away from the afghan, picked up the long-hoarded Sublime bamboo/pearl chip viscose yarn, paid lots of attention to the length at cast-on and hoped for the best fit as the chemo cap on size 5 US began. That yarn is so soft, and it temperature-controls for both warmth and cold like silk does. It’s in a soft green on the sage side and would go well with the cotton jacket my cousin with Stage 4 ovarian was wearing last time I saw her.

I can’t promise it’ll be perfect. But I did promise the love would be made tangible and get put in the mail, and for right at this moment that is by far the more important project. I just had to get over my fear of doing it wrong to be able to do it right.

Looks like there will be a lot of sweet cherries this year. So many flowers!

Last year with all the rain was the first time it produced more than the critters could raid. I had never had any reach overripeness before–it was instructional. Once those Stellas turn deep red it’s time to invite friends to come help pick quick before they get any darker.

I’m sure they won’t mind.

Begin: the rest is easy, the saying goes.

The math: a sixty-row motif equals how many inches and can that be worked properly into the eye’s need for the design to be in thirds or at the very least set up in odd numbers visually. That’s heighth-wise and at the start of the piece: now, how does it affect it width-wise when you need space to have this and this and add this and this later.

After more sketching and staring at colors in various lights, today I knew I would be disappointed if I didn’t finally just dive in and start to see what it wants to become in real life. So I did. And now the next big afghan project is past the ribbing and on its way.

Eight color changes on that last row, sixteen strands, mostly in yarns that grab as they go past. I signed up for this–and it helps that the new green goes so much better than the one I just, just couldn’t and that caused all that waiting for the new.