There’s a saying in Europe, he said over dinner–France and Spain, at least. It is: We have the songs but they have the guns.

New one to me. I reminded him of the Pete Seeger story, where to his surprise the protest singer was invited to sing in Barcelona during the Franco dictatorship. His car was tailed (and afterwards so much so that he wasn’t sure they would let him live.)

The large stadium was packed and the show carried live nationwide on the radio. Just before Seeger went on he was handed a list by some men clearly intending to look threatening of the songs he was not allowed to sing: most of his set.

So he walked out there, held up the piece of paper to one and all, told his audience what had just happened (knowing exactly how much that would tick off certain people) and said, I’ll tell you what: they said I couldn’t sing them. They didn’t say I couldn’t PLAY them. I bet you know all the words. Tell you what, I’ll play them and you sing them.

And sing they most certainly did, loud and clear. And the whole country heard it and knew they were not alone in resisting the dictatorship.

Franco’s regime crumbled after the concert.

When the people knew they weren’t the only people who had the songs, who were willing to sing the songs out loud and in defiance, the guns became powerless and irrelevant.

I thought of this after the story broke of a doctored video (NBC story link) playing on screens throughout the HUD building after all work-from-homes were required to work-from-work no matter where they actually lived that showed just how humiliatingly subservient 47 is to the (f)Elon. The regime’s men couldn’t figure out how to make it stop other than running from floor to floor and room to room unplugging the screens, knowing that unless they figured out more than that, that video would still be waiting to repeat on endless loops.

And knowing that so many people were laughing over it and that they had not succeeded in keeping it from getting out of the building must have burned.

There’s more than one way for a free people to sing.

This is all bunched up on the needles; spread out, it’s a bit more of an effect of fish to one side and fish to the other with more space between as you go up.

Four Anya apricot kernels I planted this year have started to sprout, and the fastest two went from showing a tiny white nothing of a stub yesterday evening to a raised baby fist of leaves today in a rapidly-opening, deepening green. It never gets old.

At 14″W x 11″ H the pots I put the rooting plugs in are big enough for the trees to grow in for this year while being small enough for me to be able to lift to give away after they do.

I have more kernels still than I thought I would, so if anyone would like to try to grow some of these, I’ll be glad to send you some.

The original orchard referenced in that article was torn down and replaced with almond trees because they paid the bills better, which is absolutely gutting. Because there are no apricots like these apricots.

(And now to go start some tomatoes…)

Chile. Argentina. Uruguay. The Falklands. Antarctica. Penguins! Alpacas! It was their trip of a lifetime and having just come home she had pictures and yarn and I couldn’t wait to see them.

She described the Strait of Magellan where the Pacific meets the Atlantic as being so rough that the water broke some of the windows on the cruise ship.

Their tour was supposed to include visiting the Manos mill, but not everyone could manage the steps so they went instead to an alpaca farm and a more-accessible LYS that sold Manos. She gifted me with some yarn from both.

There’s a punk-rock-looking alpaca picture, too, if it’ll let me load it.

I finally decided to spend the $600, I finally made the appointment, I finally went in.

The ear molds on my hearing aids aren’t just a chunk of plastic–they have microphones to back up the mics in the upper pieces behind the ears.

You clean them with a fine wire threaded through–but it almost never went through anymore. Too many pock marks to catch on after three years, I guess.

If your weight changes, the ear molds don’t fit anymore: gain weight, they can start to hurt, lose weight, they get loose and don’t transmit sound as well. But also, with my connective tissue disease, my ear canals are easily irritated and last time they cut the things down and short so they wouldn’t, literally, make my ears bleed.

But maybe a little too much. And seven pounds I lost with the flu in December somehow never came back.

It all adds up.

So, said the audiologist on Tuesday, what made you decide you need new molds?

I looked at her. I said, You’ll have to repeat that because I didn’t get it at all.

Aaaaah. Got it. And we discussed details from there.

(And also because she’s retiring and it was my last chance to see her for sure and I’ll miss her dearly. Nothing like a deadline.)

The hearing aids needed a software updating so they did that. The ears needed wax out to make the proper mold, so, yeah, that, too. She injected pink foam into my ears, waited for it to solidify, and then off it went to Oticon.

I did it, I finally did it.

Except that now I have to sit here and wait and not have my new improved hearing yet that I’m suddenly allowing myself to want so much and it’s been two days already. Gee, what could I do with my hands to keep them busy and me distracted in the meantime.

They called out a special truck, clearly; I’ve never seen that one here before. It was the length of a semi with a flat bed with planks along the sides like an old gardener’s truck, painted in the cheerful white and green of the city’s recycling contractor.

The toddler next door would have loved this: the guy wheeled the treadmill over to the back of it, where a lift brought it up to the height of that bed. Then he wheeled it further down towards the front–and as far as I could tell my treadmill was the only thing on there.

I took a picture and waved hello in thanks. The guy waved back.

Later when I went to bring the bins in, I found it: Ruth had made the key to turn on the treadmill easy to find and hard to lose by beading a bright piece to attach to it. And then a second section that clipped onto that, just to really be sure. Primary color beads, then the pink and turquoise plaited plastic.

That second part was easy to get off if you wanted to (while keeping the key, just in case.)

And there it was, lying in front of the empty recycling bin, waiting where he knew I would find it. Kind of like half a friendship bracelet. I’m sure he assumed I had put a fair bit of time into making it.

It completely made my day. Such a small thing, but a thoughtful thing, and that’s everything. Hey, RUTH! (Since she’s the one who did make it.)

That truck left just barely in time for the neighbor’s contractor to pull in. More potential two-year-old-boy thrills: it was a cement truck, twirlywhirly in back and all, ready to pour the not-new neighbors’ new walkway. Last week’s weather was too rainy for it but the forecast said we had ten dry days ahead.

Two hours after they arrived, it rained for half an hour.

I don’t know when the actual pouring happened, but two hours after the skies cleared, I left for an errand. Passing that house, with echoes of the returned chaining hovering in my thoughts, I stopped, rolled down the car window, and said to the tired guy closest by, “It looks great!”

His face lit up. He thanked me. He looked at it: it did, didn’t it. He turned to go tell his buddies and I headed out and on my way, suddenly hoping those four men and their families would have a brighter day all from the actions of that recycling employee, too.

It was on their back patio right by the sliding door, protected by the awning, but still: relegated to outside and out of the way because they just were not using it any more at all. That’s when I knew it really was okay to accept it from them.

Ruth traded me that treadmill for a chocolate torte. Which I baked and then froze before we made the roughly two hour drive to her house near UC Davis so that it would be safe on arrival. She fed us lunch, we had a great visit, her puppy was cute, and then we used a wheelchair ramp to roll the treadmill into our minivan and drove it home.

I used it pretty much every single day for eleven years.

Then the belt jammed. Richard tested it recently and said the motor was slow now, too.

I was used to my walking time and I was going to get my walking time and since I can’t be in the sun I started simply pacing around the house for it–and doubled my time because now I wasn’t afraid of falling off that thing (once was enough.)

Maybe we could get a new belt.

Belts cost $99 for that old model, and quite possibly it still wouldn’t work.

Our city has twice a year Clean Up Days, where the usual one-tiny-can garbage restriction is lifted and you can put up to so much of things of this size, this size, this type and/or that.

Tomorrow is that day. We had talked about this for awhile, reluctantly.

But it took up so much space.

We both have temperamental backs and neither of us wanted to have to deal with it.

Yeah but I also had determination, so it started with me trying and failing and then him helping and then me wheeling it down the walkway once he got it past that doorway rise thingamagummy down there.

Gone. (Wait, I probably shouldn’t say that till the morning’s truck leaves.)

A little icing of the back, a bit of time doing stretches, and a whole lot of hope that tomorrow we’ll be fine, but man, it feels good to see that space empty. I expect the garbage folks will lift it with the truck’s mechanical arm, and wouldn’t the two year old next door have fun watching that?

It was a great gift and greatly appreciated and always will be and was much used. But it was its time. It is good to see its metals and plastics sent back into the recycle stream.

It’s not anywhere near as hard as when the childhood home in Maryland was sold.

Mom and Dad were visiting Salt Lake, where Mom grew up, when an old and dear friend told them they had to come see this unit in her building that was on the market. They had no intention of moving after 40 years, but to make her happy they said okay–and walked out of there going, Heyyy. Never shovel snow again. (Where’s that ambulance story around here.) The light rail line a block away to get to the grocery store without driving, free concerts every week just down the hill, grandkids an hour away, a master suite at each end so live-in help when we get really old could have their privacy and space…

No furniture. The previous owner’s kitchen wallpaper that Mom and Dad were always going to get rid of is finally gone. (Yay!) So different. Wiped of any sign of memories and ready for new ones.

The walkway between the kitchen to the back door is set up for a small laundry area, but each floor has its own laundry room so the folks took theirs out and put in a freezer instead. Not sure what the agent was thinking when they snapped a picture of that freezer in that narrow space and labeled it the kitchen! But anyway.

Mom’s place went on the market today. All those closets are a knitter’s stash’s dream.

R is a teen, and she was giving one of the talks in church today.

Her family moved here six months ago, and where they’d moved from had had a group of Ukrainian refugees that had lived in underground bomb shelters for months. She found that included teenage girls who didn’t speak the language here and didn’t know anybody and they didn’t know if they’d ever be able to return. Their home had been bombed.

R’s mom, also reaching out, found that the girls had made a video. Of them doing normal, daily things. Brushing their teeth. Washing their hands.

Only, there was no water coming out, they were just play-acting it. And laughing and giggling and making sport of the absurdity of it all because what on earth else could you do about it, so, hey. Love the old home before you tell it goodbye maybe forever, and they did.

It made me sorry for those Ukrainians that R’s family had moved away from them, but as I said to her mom, From the first day of meeting your daughter I knew: she is one of those people that you instantly know that when you are with them you are in the presence of a friend.

Her parents taught her well.

So, too, did those Ukrainians.

There was a grandchild on the way at the time and I went to Cottage Yarns to get some Malabrigo Rios for a baby blanket.

What leaped out at me was a bag of the thicker Mecha in their Anniversario colorway. It demanded to be bought, it demanded to be knit, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it because it wasn’t what I was planning on at all. Meantime, the Rios got bought and the baby blanket happened–but this did, too.

It was really too heavy for a future toddler to drag around as their blankie, and the thick loosely spun yarn wasn’t really made for what a baby would do to it anyway.

So it went into a ziplock bag and waited its turn. Every now and then I pulled it out and tried to get it to tell me who it was for. I wondered/expected that the day would probably come suddenly all at once.

That it did.

As I wrote to my sister’s son and daughter-in-law: Malabrigo began when Antonio, whom I’ve met a number of times at Stitches, had a flock of very fine-haired sheep but felt, Can’t anyone make something pretty out of my wool?

So he started dyeing it himself. He grew a business that was just starting to really take off–and then his mill burned down.

I told them, my local LYS was upset with them because suddenly their orders were unfilled and there was no response to their emails. They had no idea.

Antonio and his sister and brother-in-law, good, good people, not only rebuilt the mill, they went solar, and they’ve done so well that they’ve revived the sheepherding industry in their part of the world. For awhile there it cost more to pay the shearer than what the farmers could get for their wool; Malabrigo’s promise was, sell us the good stuff and you’ll get a good price for it. Not by the pound (coarser hairs weigh more) but by the micron count.

SO soft.

At their tenth anniversary they celebrated by throwing all the colors at once into a new colorway: Anniversario.

I told them, my son-in-law drove us up a mountain above Anchorage a few years ago in hopes of showing us the northern lights. We didn’t get to see them–but I knitted this to make my own version.

And at last I know why it needed to come to be.

This is the niece and nephew whose house in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground, her childhood home and entire neighborhood gone, my nephew and sister and her husband visiting to fix up the place barely escaping with their lives.

I grieved their loss. I wanted them to have a hug from me always.

Wool has a natural tendency to extinguish flames.

My goal for the week was to get to 40″.

Done.

The forecast had said an inch and a half, then suddenly jumped that by an inch last night as it was starting to come down.

We got 3.22″ of rain. It was a good day for not going anywhere out there.

So.

My ear molds no longer fit (changing the size of your ear canals is the weirdest part of changing weight), I’m going in next week to get new ones made, but meantime it makes every bit of wax a problem and sound isn’t getting through well enough anyway.

I forgot I was holding one hearing aid in my hands to clean it when I heard…

What on earth was that? I listened intently. Screech. Another skunk vs raccoon fight? A little early in the season for that, isn’t it? Although, I guess, food, anytime, though I didn’t know what the source might be. Neighbors talking loud enough to hear across the yard and through the glass? I mean, no, but, what?

I finally got up and walked in the kitchen, asking, Do you hear that?

Hear what?

Just then I looked at the screen behind him and instantly remembered what was in my hands and not in my ear.

‘Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here.’

Well, I was now!

My friend Ellen sent me this picture some time ago and I’ve had the tab open ever since. Any time mine are bothering me I want to say to the ophthalmologist, yeah, feels kinda like that.

It’s a honeybee.

I would say waiting for a good meal to catch its eye.

Old story, but… Our honeymoon, in a comic strip. For us it was marshmallows being toasted over a fire. Just one skunk at first–but it came up right between us and was brushing its tail against my new husband’s arm as it reached over the fire and settled our surprisingly emphatically held opinions over whether a fast burn-and-crisp-and-melt (me!) or a slow browning (him) was the proper way to campfire the thing.

His slightly browned one was it, thankyouverymuchdon’tmindifIdo.

While his face silently begged with everything that was in him at me not to laugh. Pleeeeeeeeeease?!!!

We left the bag on the picnic table as we edged away after it was done. It called its best buddies over and the four of them threw a party. They ate them raw. Heathens.

Good times.

A Wallace the Brave strip just for us. And then this one. (Someone may have been laughing her way through the archives. )

Our phones came today and I spent way too long trying to learn my way around a sometimes very different system before I go out into the wild with it. Still needs a protective cover.

But look at all those options for the hearing impaired!