(With apologies to Simon and Garfunkle on the title.)

Art Museum. Caravaggio exhibit. A painting of St Jerome by an artist of Caravaggio’s time and influence, and I said to Jef, my sister-in-law, Come look at this one. (I didn’t quite say, what’s wrong with this picture.)

I had been taught to see this detail by an art historian I took a class from in college: I told her, Look at his extended arm

(What about it…?)

That’s a female arm, not male. Women’s arms have a distinct change of direction between the elbow and tips of the fingers, as if designed to cradle a baby; men’s lower arms, on the other hand, are by comparison straight from elbow to wrist.

(How many of you are holding out your arms and looking right now…)

Great, flying cranes nearby and overhead as we went into a restaurant for lunch. Wow.

And…nobody noticing. How could this be? I remarked on them to one of the family and she too thought it was cool they were there.

I wonder how much have I missed by not taking the time to just sit in Nature and take it all in.

It’s beautiful out there.

My mother-in-law commented that she hadn’t seen me knitting yet. I know, I know. But sometimes you take the time with family that you can while you can, and the things that can wait, wait their turn.

My mother-in-law got her teal sea silk shawl today, and the first thing she told me was, “That’s a good color!”

Since color is the one thing you can only guess whether someone will like, that was wonderful to hear.

I finished the hats in time. The girl one with the cabled brim and the alternating knit/purl sections for a slouch effect can be turned inside out and the brim folded up so that it can fit the baby as she grows, with the cable right-side-out either way.

I also gave the moms a package of mesh laundry bags in multiple sizes: I told them that once when we were at the baby stage, our washing machine totally backed up. Richard took it apart, and jammed down inside the hose were baby booties, nursing pads, all sorts of very small things that had flown out the top of the tub in the spin cycle, enough all at once this time to finally show why things were disappearing.  Zip them in those bags, though, and they’ll be safe.

Took me three stores to find those. OSH hardware saves the day!

For fun, by the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss the tree that became the paper in a book that became a bonsai tree. Can’t you just picture Snoopy riding it like a surfboard? Cowabonzai!

That first one came out definitely a little big. The second one, a little small. The third one coming up–now, there’s your Goldilocks! With a cabled brim and slouch top-to-be.

Meantime, I’m a blue-haired old grammy. I think. Um.

I got up this morning wanting to finally tackle a dye job I’d been avoiding: a secondhand sweater I’d bought that, when it came, was not the soft green-gray I expected but rather was vivid, and I do mean vivid, fluorescent lemon/lime–but in cashmere.

Which is why I didn’t want to give it away but I sure didn’t want to accidentally wreck it.

I got up this morning and straightway filled the biggest dyepot with hot water and stirred in some teal. I’m in it now, keep going. Stir stir stir. Then I did something different: knowing the dye wouldn’t take up well if the water wasn’t simmering, I handwashed the sweater and then put it in there anyway. Worked the new color through and through and through with my hands. It changed just slightly, but for the most part resisted it at that temp. No big surprise.

All that you were ever taught (correctly) about water, temperature change and agitation being the combination that felts woolens? I did it anyway. No catchy scales on cashmere fibers, right? I squished it some more, and then took the pot to the stove. Turned it on.  Stirred like crazy, and about every ten seconds or so for a very long time I lifted it out with my dye spoon and then put it back down, careful to spread it out as it went back in: I had once had dye adhere in a pattern of dark wrinkles because I hadn’t wanted to risk the agitation. Agitate.

Pulling it out and in again like that cools down the water; it took an hour for it to finally get up to a simmer to start the half hour countdown.

I don’t do well standing on my feet. But. When I finally poured out that pot, my new soft green buttoned shirttailed collared cashmere shirt was absolutely, totally, everything I wanted. To dye for.

Perfect!

(Oh, yeah, except the buttonhole thread must have been polyester. I expected that. That’s why I didn’t make a radical change in the color; I have an accent effect rather than an accident.)

Oh, and the blue-haired grammy thing? I knew it was going to be hot work over the stove, November notwithstanding, so I waited to take my shower this morning till I’d finally finished the job. My hands were teal blue from working in that pot at the start, and washing them afterwards did not get it out. Oh well. It would probably take at least the day for it to be gone, two for the nailbeds.

I stepped out of the shower, happened to look at my hands–and then at my hair…

The Cat In The Hat Comes Back, version blue. Tell me if you spot it, okay?

For a moment there I thought they were going to revoke my knitting license.

I’m going to a baby shower Tuesday for two friends; one is having a boy, the other a girl. I looked up baby hat sizes and measurements tonight and launched into some leftover Malabrigo Rios in Solis blue/green, sure I had enough for the boy one.

Garter stitch, seven across, till the brim is about the right length. Pretty stretchy: do we measure as knitted or as stretched. Hmm. Go for in between (but mostly unstretched). Three-needle-bindoff to seam it, pick up two out of three across the upper side of the circle, standard stuff, although that got me 66 stitches–close to the amount I would use for a worsted-weight hat for me. Hmm. But these needles were smaller than for that. I’m fine.

Richard walked in the room when I was well into it and pronounced, “That looks big enough for you.”

Nooo… That stopped me. I pulled it over my head: a bit tight, but could be done. He was right.

Take it off. Measure. Unstretched? 15″ brim, right on cue for 3-6 months. Height? 6″ and getting low on yarn. I looked for more, but this was the yarn from Parker’s dragonskins baby blanket–there are no other skein ends kicking around but the one.

Baby size it will be after all, then. Knitting license saved! Tadaaah!

Y’know… that would match his blankie…

Okay, I have two hats I need to knit. Starting tomorrow.

(Great Blue Heron, Coronado Island, and Parker, rocking the kelly green, courtesy of my son Richard.)

My friend Kelli is the prime culprit in a particularly nice anonymous favor once done me via Purlescence.

Kelli of late has had to give up knitting: she’s a handcycle racer, with a custom-fitted set of wheels–but autoimmuned hands sometimes have limits and I haven’t seen much of her for awhile. It’s hard to not be able to do the other thing you love to do.

And yet. When Penny in our knit night group had to go on chemo, Kelli is the one who pulled the hand-dyed merino out of her stash and started knitting Penny a super-soft hat.

She couldn’t finish it. She had to ask for help (I knew nothing at the time.) And so Penny showed up one night wearing it, needing to avoid germ exposure but needing to be around friends after months of isolation and needing to show off what those two, a friend helping a friend helping a friend, had created for her to be comforted by.

So. Much. Joy. For all of us.

I recently got some (more) yarn from China, 95/5 cashmere/mink this time; when it came, the green was not quite what I’d expected. I like blueish greens.

This was a kelly green.

Guess how long it took me to figure out who that would be perfect for?

So that’s what I was working on this past week in between baking and packing to help move Richard’s office. That’s what I finally cast off and blocked last night.

And that’s what came out, despite my expectations and all my inspections as I doodled with my needles, to be quite…ruffly.

I was stumped. I said to Richard, But…but…Kelly’s a biker! And then quickly had to explain that that was a joke, son, a joke, biker chick as in that kind of bike, as in trying out for the paralympics. How someone with Crohn’s disease does what she does I have absolutely no idea whatsoever, and I have been in awe of her for a very long time.

But I just don’t see her as the girly-girl type. And this is ruffly!

He considered a moment. Got the biggest impish grin spreading across his face.

“Camo!”

I totally lost it. Laughing so hard I could hardly breathe. Richard saves the day! It was suddenly okay to give her what had been for her all along, silly me, and I instantly quit second-guessing both of us.

Kelli, hon, your girly-girl biker camo awaits you at Purlescence. Love from us.

How you chop 500g chocolate bars: you hold them up high and smash them down on the floor. Carefully, straight down, so the seam doesn’t rip in the paper wrapper (although that can be very entertaining to children for the pinata effect). Concrete-slab floors a la California ranch houses a plus.

Maybe repeat. Open bag. Pour.

My friend Nanci’s youngest is having a wedding reception soon–my stars, I remember when he was a newborn–and Nanci approached me, very tentatively, wondering if I might make a chocolate torte for it.

I always make two. I’d love to. I promised her a pair, if she wouldn’t mind freezing them till the day so I could get them done and out of the way.

She surprised me yesterday by saying she was going to Milk Pail, which is a half-outdoor market, to buy the manufacturing cream so I wouldn’t have to go out in the sun, and was there anything else I needed? Butter? Chocolate?

I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to have someone who doesn’t live with lupus remember what it’s like to have it.  No sun exposure! I told her I had plenty of chocolate and butter; she brought me some butter too anyway, because that was an ingredient that was easy to get just the right one of. I told her there was more than enough cream there for four tortes, and if she wanted, I would try to pull that off in my time constraints.

Her eyes voted immediately yes! If it’s not too much…

And so I started. I made the first pair of cakes yesterday, hurrying to get it done before Richard called for help.

They were a tad overdone; these new darker pans are still a learning curve. Well crumb. I put them aside.

Today I turned the oven down by 25 and the timer by 7, tried again and got it perfect. But when I went to glaze them…

…I’d accidentally picked up the Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bittersweet with almonds rather than plain. Nuts! So I went off in hopes they’d gotten the plain in stock by now–had they had them earlier, the color contrast on the wrappers would have tipped me off: they’re close but not the same.

The parking lot was a zoo and the employees there looked like they were putting a good face on things, but with the holiday (an aside: Happy Veteran’s Day. A solemn time and a necessary remembrance) it almost looked more like the Thanksgiving rush in there. Where were all these people coming from!

I walked in and a clerk I’ve often seen immediately asked me with concern how I was; she hadn’t seen me in awhile. Clearly that had worried her. I was surprised, and touched; I assured her I was fine and thanked her.

I explained to her and the manager the situation: baking for a wedding, I’d bought two almond ones and discovered it when I’d opened the first, too late for that one but I traded them the second, adding in a bunch more bars just to make sure I had plenty of the right ones on hand for next time too. Oh! Wait! I’m out of eggs–and I left the checkout. The woman I’d first talked to had by now taken over a line to let someone else go on break, and I waited the second time in hers.

I’ve still not recovered from our late nights of office packing. I was tired. She rang me up, handed me the bag–and I turned and promptly lost my balance. The eggs went smashing out the top (better them than me.) Chocolate down!

She was indignant: “Those bags are supposed to be good up to 20 pounds!”

It wasn’t the bag, I assured her, it was me, I lost my balance, here, that’s my fault, let me pay for them, as she called someone to get me another box.

No no that’s okay.

Let me clean it up? Please? This is my fault.

No, no, and by now I had several employees assuring me, that’s okay.

And so I went home to my already-chopped (see above) bag of almond bittersweet and those two slightly overbaked cakes, definitely good enough to eat but not quite fancy enough for a wedding.

Which is how my local Trader Joe’s employees got that already-smashed bar returned after all (or half of it, anyway.) I forgot to take into account that the volume of almonds displaced that much chocolate, so the texture of the ganache came out a tad thinner than my normal. Like they would know to compare?

The manager laughed in delight at my semi-sweetly ugly cake with the random almonds. For you all. Trading you for those eggs. Oh yes. Twist their arms.

And as I left, ducking out into the rain, every employee who’d seen it was just bursting with anticipation, fatigue disappeared.

(p.s. Hey Nanci. The first two for you are finished now, the next two are cooling and will be ready to glaze in an hour.)

And it is almost 11:00 pm and we just walked in the door.

Richard just read that sentence and closed his eyes. Yeah. That about sums it up. But: at least, given that we got it down to Decisions Must Be Made, all but the cast-off got done on my project as I coached: Stay or go? Or sometimes, Toss or go?

Boxes closed up and we packed it in.

I was working on a project I badly wanted to finish and block tonight when the phone rang.

Help Cecil help!

It took longer than it should have to get myself to respond, I’m a-comin’, Beanie Boy; I really wanted to…but I instantly knew: so much for that.

My car’s in the shop, he came home to get me, I had dinner ready, we bit into it and threw it out. So much for the quick prefab Costco dinner–I wonder what aisle it got moved to and then put back in their freezer. Or something. We scrounged and scrammed.

His office was being moved and the building was being vacated and everything had to be packed or tossed, and having someone there with zero emotional attachment to anything really speeds an awful job along–not to mention simply having someone else there pitching in. Call it a date night.

Tuesday’s picture of our grandson holding his lion tail was the screensaver on the monitor. Love it.

We’d done a lot, we were tired and slowing down, when he opened a bottom drawer.

Wait. What is this thing?

Oh, he told me, pulling it out and handing it to me, that’s a laptop.

Really?! (Opening it up. Or trying to. Fumble. There’s a latch like that? On an electronic…?) But, I asked him in confusion, it says Digital. (You know, DEC, the big computer company that went blooey before laptops were invented. The folks that moved us to California 24 years ago. Good people there back in the day, we miss them.)

No, they were invented already, and yes, they did call them notebooks, he assured me. (The thing says HiNote Ultra II.)  But they were nothing like today’s. Still. This was really cutting edge, he told me. (Well, yeah!) It was way lighter than anything else out there. It had a floppy drive you could take off, and it had an internal hard drive.

Did you work on this project?

Nah, not that machine…

Dang this thing is cute. (No emotional attachment, eh?)

(Here at home, I just weighed it: both pieces come to 4.4 lbs–we’d guessed five at least. The darker gray piece is the floppy drive.)

Does it still work?

Yeah, probably.  There’s that battery pack I just had you throw in the electronics trash down the hall.

I ran back down there. Irretrievable.  So much for that.

He pulled out a weird-looking plug: there you go.

I’ll probably take it back to that electronics bin tomorrow, but I just have to play with it a little first.  It was like a lost puppy (and I’ve lived in Silicon Valley too long, clearly). As someone who remembers watching the original Apple IIe in action, I had to see what this one looks like when it’s all lit up.

So far, given how wiped we both feel, I’ve only gotten to blogging about it. I keep wondering what its appeal was: maybe it was all in the pretty packaging. So ugly it’s cute. Note that I photographed it on the chair I inherited from my grandmother; gray and gray and age on age, it fit.

I know, give me a day and the novelty will wear off.

Who knew that a doctor’s shoes could connect me with my grandmother?

He was wearing a pair of Wallabys today, new-looking ones; I knew exactly how comfortable those were. Back when they were a huge fad in the ’70’s, my father was on a business trip to Spain and knowing my odd-size feet and how much I’d wanted a pair, and finding some at a good price, took a chance–and they were perfect. It was my first-ever experience at being so thrilled at the most perfect shoe purchase (with the love of my Dad to top it off.) I had never owned a shoe that fit well and was comfortable and was perfectly, totally in style. 6.5EE is never in style, but look at these! Authentic Wallabys!

I wore those through high school, I wore those in college, where I was walking in snow at I forget how many thousand feet up high in the Rockies. The salted soaking sidewalks ate at the suede. I wore them till they looked like Harry Potter’s sorting hat in the middle of a sentence.

My grandparents had recently retired and were living an hour north of BYU campus.

My grandmother was a very gracious woman who would never say a disparaging word to or about anybody. She once said that she’d listened to enough of her friends whine about old age that she’d decided that she, for one, was going to be a sweet old lady. And so she was.

So there I was at Gram’s, cousins gathered around for a Sunday evening get-together, when she notices my feet.

I knew I had this coming. I waited to hear what she would say.

She searched for the right words of–well, encouragement or something somehow, and finally just chuckled: “Alison. Your shoes!”

“I know, Gram. But they’re so comfortable!”

She laughed warmly. There wasn’t much left to constrict my feet anymore anyway–nor my heart. I felt so loved.

I gave up and let them be after that school year; there wasn’t enough left of them anymore.

My grandmother had been a concert pianist.

I said to the doctor today, “How did your concerts go?”

“You remembered! You have a sharp memory!” (Oh goodness if only that were true.)

But how could one forget–and then there were his shoes…

Not to mention the waiting piano hat I pulled out of my knitting bag at the end of the visit, to his astonished delight: I’d knitted this? For him? I’d designed this? “I think that’s maybe one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever received!” and he went out into the hall grinning hugely to model it at the nurses’ station.

I offered, and I’m writing it here just so they know I meant it, to knit something for his wife too. I asked what her favorite colors were?

How many men do you know that can answer that question right off the bat? He’ll get back to me on that.

The yarn is at the ready.

(Oh, yeah, and, my 20% hip bone loss in two years is now 29% in (correction–four), despite chugging the milk and trudging the treadmill. My grandmother went from 5’9″, very tall  for a woman born in 1899, to a tiny little thing. I want to walk in her footsteps and be gentle to all to the best of my ability, but I’m trying to keep my own shoes on along the way.)

I want to celebrate Parker’s first Halloween and the best daughter-in-law ever. We are so blessed.

On the knitting front, I was going to write about the yarn that arrived from China with a label saying plane unfold arid and 95% 5% 15%–of what, exactly, it seems I don’t know, but still: bistro mathematics?

And then.

All linguistic silliness got scooped up and put down gently over there for a moment. I got a thank you note when the mail finally arrived at five that needed its own thank you back.

For the picture of a certain hat being worn and loved and appreciated, and for the words that–I found myself wiping a tear. You know who you are. People like you make it all worthwhile, and many more to come who can’t find the words will be knitted for too: because yours make me never want to miss out. Thank you.

We live within a few hundred feet of the gas main that blew up in San Bruno last year, obliterating homes and lives. We got a letter officially notifying us of that and to call PG&E if we should see dirt bubbling up. (Uh, no. 911. Thanks.) The letter also mentioned that using a cellphone or driving your car out of there could spark the leak if you did.

This is what we live with.

Pipeline 132 blew up again today, 100 yards away from any houses this time, mud erupting across two lanes of freeway.  A knitting friend of mine happened to be right there in her car with her small daughter. I’m so glad everybody’s okay, and thank heavens it was a Sunday and not at rush hour.

They still insist it’s safe and want to increase the pressure in untested lines. It was already such a hot-button subject for me–it’s way too close to home.

So. Much more in the spirit of a good Sunday evening, may I offer this link to a glass music artist. (Notice his keyboard graphic at the top!)

We once got to listen to a concert by a man who had an array like that of crystal goblets filled just so with water; he had a small tray alongside the front for him to dip his fingers into, then he would run them in circles or half-circles along the rims of the goblets.

He had started with a few, gotten into it like a knitter hooked on qiviut, and by the time we met him courtesy of our friend Russ, he estimated he had spent $100,000 to get his set of perfectly-pitched glasses across the octaves: the ones that are are rare and must be searched for and discovered.

And then celebrated!

I asked him if he’d gotten his MacArthur Genius Grant yet. He fervently wished–please, go ahead, nominate him, please! If only.

I asked him how loud he could make one of them. He sheepishly admitted he’d been curious to know exactly that, once, and had kept at it and at it till he’d shattered one–his face in telling me the tale a mixture of the adult rueing the expense and waste and the fact that he had had to search for a replacement (there was a factory he traveled to in, I believe, Germany) and the little-boy impishness in his delight at discovery: he couldn’t not know, now, come on.

I wish I could remember his name all these years later. I was delighted to find someone else doing this too now. Go listen. It’s good for the soul. Beautiful.

I thought I had lost the battle of the sixes.

Who knew you could wear out knitting needles? But some previously well-polished rosewoods, a pair I’ve used a lot for I don’t know how many years, were doing the chalkboard screech thing: even if I couldn’t hear it, my hands sure could and it was awful.

I thought of the days when I had my kids go down the slide on the swingset (that swingset, we moved it here with us), sitting on a sheet of wax paper, just like my mom used to make us do, so although there wasn’t a problem here of dripping tree sap or raccoon paw prints, I got up, went in the kitchen, tore off a piece, and gave it a try. Metal, wood, it’s all a surface issue, right?

It wasn’t perfect but it did help some. I went back to doodling with my yarn. We’ll call it a draw.