Thirty-one plus twenty-eight do not make sixty, no matter how many rows ago you added them together.

In other words, kids, try this at home. I was diving into a new project while keeping one eye on the door for the nurse to call me back to the exam room; when you’re waiting for an appointment, it all becomes bistro mathematics.

A few minutes later, needles mid-row and set aside, the doctor’s phone buzzed while we were talking; she instantly hesitated and then quickly apologetically explained to me that her sister was between two fires in Texas, not evacuated yet…

Answer! Please!

She grabbed it and checked.

Nope. Not her, at least not yet.

I cannot sing the praises of that good doctor enough to begin to tell it. Given how wonderfully passionately she has taken care of me for twenty years, that was the least I could do to take care of her and her own back.

Y’all take care of yourselves out there, y’hear?

Maybe a dozen years ago, a couple of older neighbors were reminiscing over days past when there were a ton of kids in the neighborhood and how much everybody knew everybody back in the day. They missed that.

So let’s do something about it! And so the more gregarious of the two took on the task to walk house to house, getting names, phone numbers, email contacts. They launched our first neighborhood block party. A nearby cul-de-sac was closed off and the owners cleared their cars out of the way, a bounce house and a cotton candy machine were rented for the little ones, barbecue grills were rolled forward from backyards and volunteers manning them presented themselves as a happy captive audience for anyone who wanted to come chat over the chicken vs over there at the rent-a-tables.

And just about every year since then, Labor Day has meant block party day, officially 4-7 but that always stretches till dark, not to be missed.

Richard took my dessert over there, a pluot crisp that I found out later had had the neighbors playing guess-that-fruit. “That was GOOD!”

I waited till a sun-safer 6, then strolled over there too.

My sweetie talked with one fellow about the ham radio/disaster services volunteer work they both do. Meantime, I got cornered by an elderly man whom I am inwardly delighted each year to see he’s still with us: he moved in here when these houses were built in the mid-1950’s.

Only–last year the organizers had both had family conflicts with the date, it had been moved around and finally the party had landed on a day I couldn’t make it. I could have shown up for just the very last few minutes, but I let it go.

And he knew I had not come and he remembered my health was rocky. I have no memory of ever discussing it with him; maybe a chance comment from someone else when we didn’t show?  Whatever–it had meant something to him and he had carried that forward for the whole year.

I was amazed he noticed. Here I was, having to read his name tag yet again despite knowing who he was, and I was quite sorry to have caused him concern.

“It’s good to see you here,” I told him.

He knew exactly what I meant, nodding and looking me steadily in the eye, returning the sentiment.

I had not expected to come away feeling so important. I do believe he did too.

More neighbors. More chatting. Come to find out the sister of one of the burger flippers–call them grilly men, Ahnuld–had also volunteered on a peregrine nest cam. Cool! And he was a bird lover too. Finding out about my feeders, he exclaimed, “So that’s where all my finches and chickadees have gone! I love those chickadees!”

Sorryyyy… Honest, I’ll share…  He got in some good teases about that.

Another neighbor started telling me about her own birdfeeder, but–those squirrels! She admitted with a laugh and a very sheepish look that she kept a supersoaker by the back door to teach them what’s what. She felt much better when I laughed, “You too?!” We swapped a few squirrel-antics stories.

Barbara pulled me over to the bounce house so she could show off her grandsons hopping and bopping to the crocodile rock.

Because one of the neighbors was in an a cappela band, and they performed for us for the fun of it.

And one of the people in that band, not a neighbor, was surprised to see my Richard there, and he to see her: Valerie! Rich! They used to work together when we first moved to California. We had gone to hear her perform at her you’re-great-but-don’t-quit-your-day-job, oh, must be at least 15 years ago now.

Reunion time. He pulled up a chair and sat right at the front and clapped the loudest of all.

Saturday night, at about dusk when the UV wouldn’t be an issue, my husband and I wandered around downtown.

Meandered into the crowded Apple store. Inwardly chuckled at the (possibly Indian?) fellow who suddenly found himself at belly button level with my sweetie and jerked his head way up to see just how far to the ceiling this guy goes! Didn’t hear a friend trying to shout hi across to us as we were leaving, and he couldn’t run fast through all those people; he had to wait till today to tell us.

Applauded the apps and the Apple and walked away, for now, our wallets intact. I told our friend that and he laughed and said his, not so much.

Bought gelato from the cheerful (I have no idea what he was saying, but he was having a great time of it) older guy with “Croatia” embroidered on his polo shirt, with a fairly garish painted mural (was that supposed to be Venice?) on the wall behind him, a street musician at the front of his little shop asking for song suggestions from his foot-tapping audience.

Went into the still-breathing Borders bookstore. Everything must go. Including the Borders gift card my husband had long forgotten he had in that wallet he didn’t take out at Apple, well, will you look at that! Hey! Seeing the size and the weight of the bag he came out of there with, we decided it was a good thing we’d gone in there last.

But it wasn’t.  I nearly walked on by but Richard turned at the sound, beckoning/inviting me too, and it was like a baby boomer’s Narnia moment: we found ourselves coming down a beautiful new-ish walkway opening suddenly out to a courtyard where a band was totally rocking the most joyful rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing.”

And I came home thinking…

And then today. I’ve met her, but whether I’ve ever heard her name I’m not sure; I sure don’t see her often. I think she’s older than my parents. But I saw her today, and she motioned to me and pulled me aside and reached out her aged hand to hold mine: she just wanted to tell me she love love loved my hair! She said it again. She just loved it. She wanted me to know that.  I was very surprised. (I did not by any means have great hair before that moment, but I’m easily persuaded.)

And I came home knowing…

All those years of wishing to be able to get back to my old pre-lupus life and the way things were? Really? I’m there.

From India, who along with Ellen helped get the Warm Hats Not Hot Heads campaign going in January, wherein our fellow knitters helped us get 262 handknit hats sent to members of Congress to ask them to work respectfully and peaceably with one another:

Okay, Constance started this over at FB.

“Dick and I are playing this game, since we like puns, where you think of an occupation, and then add a word with a negative prefix that pertains. So, the Duke was disgraced. The seismologist defaulted. Etc.” Then she added, “The tanner who was dis-suaded. The hair stylist who was dis-tressed. The judge who was ex-honor-ated.

So, the gambler was deluxe doesn’t quite do it. The appliance salesman was deranged; that’s better. The English professor was denounced and (oh who cares about rules when there are puns to be had) de-vowel-you’d–my family would approve.

It seems to be easier to come up with the punchline and take it back-word from there.  Anyone else want to try? So far I’ve come up with:

The chef was served with a deflammation suit.

The campers were given detention.

The math homework (blame the dog) was dissolved and the professor was outnumbered.

(This one is NOT political, it’s all wordplay.) The det o’ nation was way overblown.

The writer was in-dis-pens-able.

They tried to talk about their ancestors, but it just de-gen-irate’d from there. Which leads to,

Oedipus said it’s true, you can’t go home again; it’s dilapidated now.

And on a totally different note, they’re not my pictures and I respect copyright so I’ll just link to them, but my cousin Kathryn’s daughter waited till the moment of a family photoshoot to give her mom the big news. Happy day!

If one were to drop a painting in the washing machine, now that I can finally use mine again (yay!), I have a strong Impressionist would create a laundered Monet trail.

Ahem.

I got a gift in the mail today from Karin, owner of The Periwinkle Sheep, the friend who, three years ago, drove all the way from Albany NY to Burlington, VT when I was there visiting my daughter, so that we could finally get to meet in person. So. She dyed some deep turquoise fingering-weight merino and decided to mail a skein for me to play with, gorgeous, just because; she told me something was coming but I knew no more than that.

I’ll add a picture in the daylight. Sitting where I could hear the doorbell ring, wondering who the strangers were going to be who would come, it was a great comfort and a scrumptious yarn. I am listening to it to see what it wants to be.

We got up early this morning and drove to Oakland Airport across rush hour and hugged Michelle and let her go.

My dentist’s office called yesterday and asked if I could bump my 1:30 appointment up a half hour? The plumber then called me back and asked if he could come at 3:00 Thursday?

Wow. That perfect timing came in handy!

Lee Kratzer came, he tried, his snake was too short. He refused to charge me for the 45 minutes he was here. Instead, he handed me the phone number of the man who had trained him years ago and told me, He’s good, he’s honest, and he’s very reasonable, and he’s got a lot of guys working for him so one should be available.

Joshua, the new guy, got here within an hour.

First he listened to my brief summary. Then, he turned on the water in two places. Observed. Went out to the street. Heard it, saw it–it’s coming out. The first guy had dislodged the stuff enough, even if he hadn’t known it.

Well, but I didn’t want to have to call him right back in a week or a month… True! We discussed the tree, what I’d seen on the six-month-ago-plumber’s camera of that root and what that guy had said about it.

He went after it.  He had a long enough snake, but he could not get that root to give way past a certain width–just like all the previous attempts. We discussed options for a long-term cure of a longtime problem so that it doesn’t become a sudden severe emergency someday.

And then he handed me my bill.

I was stunned. “Are you sure?” I had never seen a plumber who broke it down to a quarter hour and didn’t round it up to a full extra one.  I had never seen one whose rate was that reasonable. He did the job quickly, he did it well, and he did it with a minimal amount of disruption or stress. He was a nice guy, on top of that. That made it the second time in one day that I let a plumber know he wasn’t charging me enough.  Wow.

And his grandmother and I think he said it was his mom are avid knitters and his wife an avid writer. I sent him home with encouragement for his wife and a copy of my book to share with the knitters he loves. He had earned it. He loved it! He flipped through the pages, looking at the patterns, saying all the right things, making my day right back at me.

And then I went hunting for my last ball-and-a-bit of soft, handdyed Malabrigo Rios merino and cast on a hat for Lee, the plumber who had helped me out but wouldn’t let me pay him at all.

You know those crazy last two days before a kid leaves for university when you have to run every last errand, she’s got to wash her laundry, we need to pick up the drycleaning, and your friend Catherine recommended the Vanilla Queen (a gallon of bourbon vanilla, fair trade! Bring on the hot cocoa!) but that was just too far but that Indian grocery in Sunnyvale, let’s try that, and it had every spice you ever heard of (Michelle loves to cook Indian style: so many flavors, so dairy free), and then a dash to Trader Joe’s and Safeway too and Dad my hard drive failed! and pack pack pack and hey, one last chance to see one of her best friends?

And yes. That would indeed be when the plumbing sputters and today finally fails again. Just like last time. Right on cue.

So. (Picking up the baby alpaca.) Tell me why Indian names of things always seem to need an h after the d and an i after the a. And ghee, what was that bright (and I mean bright!) green yam-shaped plant part that had more spikes than an ’80’s punkrocker’s head?

“Are you all together?”

“Yes.”

Michelle noted that she was buying spices and I was buying shelf-stable ready-t0-heats.

They had pretty pictures on the boxes. I figured that potential earthquake supplies might as well be tasty, but what I said out loud was, “The difference between your choices and mine is that you know what yours are.”

The clerk cracked up.

My daughter in Vermont is fine, but after looking around at the videos people shot and posted here, I was going, wow. It’s almost like they had an inland tsunami. Given the 11″ of rain they had, the mountains everywhere, the already-saturated ground and the fact that the people mostly live in the valley areas…

We drove through some of the state two years ago. It’s a lovely, lovely place of fog and pine and views and people who look out for each other and, according to Mr. Ben and Mr. Jerry, colorful cows.

I hope Jill’s shop came out of it okay, but more importantly Jill and everyone else out there.

Meanwhile, we have the much tamer whirlwind here of getting Michelle ready to go back out to grad school. Ordinary life. It’s a blessed thing to be able to have.

Triggered by Stephanie’s very kind post, this is how my baby alpaca fixation got started. (With a half-a-pie photo for Don that I took this morning.)

Years ago, a shop owner showed me some very soft yarn new to her stock that she was quite excited about.

“Baby alpaca” as one of the fiber components was something I had never heard of, but I definitely liked it: all the scratchiness and guard hairs I associated with the word alpaca, gone.

It was about time someone did this. I’d always wondered why there were alpaca rugs that were just the softest fur you could hope to snuggle your toes into, but somehow alpaca yarns and sweaters, alpaca for wearing, were always a weird combination of soft and ick, keep that away from me!

I later read an article by a man who helped change the market. He had flown to Peru to try to convince the local mill owners  that paying alpaca farmers by the pound was resulting in the worst quality fiber going to market, because coarser hairs weighed more, while (he didn’t quite put it this way) the softer-haired animals were being Darwin-ed out by being turned into rugs.

First World knitters would pay a premium to be able to have those softer fibers to work with.

Many didn’t believe him. One mill finally took the leap and gave the idea a chance and did so well that others followed their lead, and in the end, one man and the people who listened to him changed the fiber world.

I must have found some of the very earliest out there. I looked for more over the next year or two and didn’t find it. The one had been a baby alpaca/angora/merino blend; was it possible to find pure baby alpaca? And if I did, how would the fabric I made with it behave?

The younger knitters may not remember when we had a list of web searchers to choose from and had to guess which one would be best at answering a particular type of question. Ask Jeeves?

Google was still new, but we had switched over to it entirely. It didn’t have a lot of pages out there online to search from yet, but my techie husband was sure this one was going to beat the others out totally, he said they’d done their homework with their algorithm.

“Baby alpaca yarn”. Two results. Hard to imagine now. One was not helpful, but the other: a link to a wholesaler who had imported a lot of cones of the stuff in fingering weight and I guess since nobody had heard of it, nobody bought it, and they were selling it on sale, eventually down to at or near cost and closing down their shop altogether.

I bought, I was quite surprised to count up later, over month after month while they sold it at $20, then $15, and even $8 I think on one of the colors PER POUND, three dozen pounds. It was cheaper than any good wool I could find.

As I bought it while I knew I could get it I was also knitting as fast as my needles could fly. I had found the yarn of my dreams. My four tall (or eventually tall) children all got soft afghans knit triple-stranded, long enough to pull up to their chins and curl around their reclining toes and down to the floor, the way my mother says an afghan should be. I made dozens of shawls.

And the light blue baby alpaca, of which there was much and it was cheap, I overdyed into a number of other colors. There’s a picture in my book of a stack of balls of yarn, the original light blue those others all came from at front and center to encourage others to look at the yarns in the closeout bins in a new way: if it’s soft, if it’s animal or silk fiber, if you love the feel but the color, not so much, you can go play with watercolors and do something about it. You will make it all the more uniquely your own in the process.

I was quite surprised to find, while stash diving last week, that I still had a little of that light blue left after all this time. It grabbed my eyes and my memories. I cast on. I’m 2/3 of the way through a lace stole.

I had long forgotten I had gifted Stephanie with some.

A thank you to all who checked in as to how things are where you are; it’s good to hear you all did okay. Hurricanes are random acts of velocity.

Here, the baking binge continued, and as I chopped and sliced and got out the cheater store-bought no-dairy crust from the back of the freezer (uh oh, I’ve disillusioned Scott‘s whole family now) I thought of how my mother always thought of dessert as one last attempt to get good nutrition into her kids.

So enough with the chocolate for a moment. It’s all about the fruit. We were on our second helpings of rhubarb  strawberry pie when suddenly I looked up at my husband and said, “Oh. I was going to photograph this for the blog.”

The general consensus here is that I could always, definitely go make another one.

———

This took less than five minutes to get into the oven.

Recipe: Have a bottom crust ready.

Slice rhubarb (I had three+ cups’ worth) and strawberries to bring it to four cups. Mix 1/3 c flour with 1 1/3 c sugar and 1/2 tsp cinnamon; pour in the fruit, add to crust. (And yes, Scott, I forgot to prick it again. Must have been the strawberries. Some things never change.)

Halfway through you might want to open the oven quickly and dunk the top fruit down so that any flour mixture sitting exposed goes in the goo.

I baked it at 425 for 40 minutes, and then because it was a cheap shiny store-bought throwaway tin had to add another five at 350. Next time I might turn it down after the first ten min like another of my cookbooks says so the outer edges won’t burn; personally, I chuckled at being able to toss some of the empty-calories part of the pie, just enough to free it from guilt. And the rest of the crust had the most perfect crunch.

Baked four chocolate tortes and one lemon chiffon cake today. Got rescued by friends when I ran out of Trader Joe’s Pound Plus bars for the ganache. (Note to self: make sure you’re not buying the “with almonds” ones next time–duh), sent the friends home with tortes and thanks and went back to the oven. Made the lemon chiffon to have something dairy-free/Michelle-friendly as the third dishwasher load ran. Handwashed Don’s and Cliff’s pans again.

As if, knitting being too slow, I could somehow crank out enough chocolate goodness to comfort and feed all the people in the path of the storm back East. Y’all take care of yourselves out there for me.

Some people have just the most perfect names… Lilly Stone wouldn’t take That’s gneiss, dear for an answer when she was between a rock and a hard place.

Tina at Blue Moon, this link is for you: a little of back home for us both and, for me, the memory of once, just once as a kid, letting the older neighbor kids’ peer pressure goad me into crossing over the fence (completely forbidden by both my parents and the signs) to come just close enough to the top of that quarry way over there to see some of the brown dirt of the rough sides and to know that no way was I going to get one inch nearer that drop off. Get me out of here!

My in-laws’ house in Kensington, MD had a beautiful stone hearth and fireplace, and the house I grew up in a half mile up Seven Locks from that scary cliff had a sturdy slate entryway in shades of gray, hewn just close enough to evenness to satisfy but that no snowman-building mud on the boots could ever make it past. The rocks for both surely came from Lilly’s quarry.

But I especially like that it was a woman born in 1862 who, beginning when she was 60, dug deep in the earth and crafted in stone.

Now there’s your original Earth Mother type.

Don wrote about having to wait from 3:00 to 4:20 for a doctor to show up for his appointment, which I imagine is a long wait when you don’t knit.

The one time I got stuck waiting for an hour and a half, years ago, I knew going in that I was going to be one of the last patients of the day; I imagined all those extra moments adding up throughout the shift as that good doctor would have been taking his time not so much by the clock but as each patient needed him. I knew from experience that he would do so for me, so I certainly didn’t mind if he did it for others. I came prepared.

And so I sat in the exam room in my paper gown, yarn in hand, and waited.  And waited and waited. And waited some more. You know, it was getting to be a bit much, though, especially since I hadn’t heard any voices going past in a goodly while.

Finally, I peeked out into the hall and all the lights were turned off! Except the emergency nighttime ones! (It was winter.)

I knew it had been awhile, but– ! I called out loudly into the dark, empty hallway, feeling foolish. No response. Finally, I ducked back in the room and pushed the emergency call-nurse button, figuring if anybody answered, great, if not, well, they’re sure not charging me for this appointment!

A nurse came rushing in about 15 seconds later, very apologetic. The doctor had been held up at the hospital, hadn’t they told me? No, but I could imagine a cardiologist could end up spending a lot more time with a patient there than he had planned on.

The doctor himself finally came in about two minutes after that, embarrassed as all get-out. I was just relieved that I hadn’t been entirely stupid sitting there alone unknowing as the building had emptied for the day, quietly knitting away, glad to have an excuse to get some progress made on the thing instead of anything else needing doing just then. I showed him the work in my hands, tiny needles and fine laceweight, and nodded to the pound cone of soft merino (a gift from Karin, thank you!) that I was working from: see? Thousands of yards left on that. I had a long, long way to go before I ran out of things to do.

You know that if I ever bring a cone to his office again he’s going to burst out laughing and start teasing me that I hadn’t had to wait *that* long this time!

Jury duty: still doing the check in at 11 am/check back at 5 pm thing. Almost done.

May I just say that, re the instructions on the summons, requiring people who need to ask for closed captions in the court to request it not online but rather to call for it is, um, kinda missing something there. Yo?

Meantime, my childhood friend corrected herself as new messages got through: her son’s house near the epicenter in Virginia is standing, it’s his neighbor’s around the corner that’s down. He’s waiting for a structural report to find out if his is safe to go in.

I needed something intense to work on. I printed out some lace instructions I’d worked out on paper a year ago but had never spent the hours to actually knit through it and make sure it worked.

Hey.  So I grabbed some baby alpaca that had been in the stash for quite awhile, not quite my shade of blue–and yet somehow the moment I saw it it was the most beautiful one ever to my eyes. Oooh, that one! Yes!

Curious. That has always come to mean that it’s needing to go somewhere in particular that I don’t know about yet. Every color is someone’s favorite.

And on a side note: when you have a complicated pattern you’re trying for the first time? A solid color helps the eyes read the stitches a whole lot easier. And so (having learned that, and ignoring that beseeching handpaint over there), this is.

(And one last picture of us holding Parker while he was here.)

Just a week ago my husband reminded me that our old family-size tent had given up the ghost a number of years ago, the fabric aged and damaged and the thing unusable. It was bothering him that we weren’t prepared. He was thinking we should replace it in case we might, as we eventually will, have another big earthquake.

We looked at models, prices, talked budget. He knew I’d like an Ipad, which is a total toy (Don you old sweetheart don’t you even THINK about it!) A tent, on the other hand, we would hopefully never need to use (my camping days are over), but if we did need one, it would be so far from a frivolous thing. Got to keep those ravenous squirrels away from my millet-hull pillow.

Tent wins.

One thing that I read today said, “East Coast freaks, West Coast rolls its eyes”; 5.9 didn’t sound like all that much over here.

Different geological structures have different effects, though; ask anyone living in a liquifaction zone in California–we’re close to one but I think we’re okay, knock on rock.

Someone I grew up with, (Mom and Dad, that’s Ky), has a son living in Louisa, Virginia. His house is gone. Reading her note today, I was at first quite surprised–that’s real damage, not just a traffic jam.

But then I remembered that when we had our big earthquake, no news came out of the mountainous epicenter area for days because reporters couldn’t get in and phones there were down. The only mention of the Loma Prieta area in the news was from the USGS’s reports that gave the quake its name.

My husband’s aunt–who knew Ky as a small child–lived a half mile from that epicenter and her house was heavily damaged; her neighbor pulled into his driveway in time to see his three-story home collapse before his eyes, with, as it turned out, the two inside escaping harm because when the mom had called the teen moments earlier to come help cook dinner, the kid had come–joining her in the only room that turned out to be safe.

Do what your mom tells you.

I wonder what news reports will start trickling out of Louisa now, too.

But we had no way to know back then how the aunt’s family was, and her aged mother in Washington DC, dialing all night, called at 4 am our time to ask if we knew anything: she’d finally gotten through at least to us, but we too had heard nothing yet. (It was quite the experience, but they were okay.)

That did it. He’d been thinking of it for some time. My husband got his ham radio license right after that.  He has ever since volunteered with the city, the county, and the Red Cross doing disaster services and emergency communications drills. He’s done a lot of good with it: because, once upon a time, there was an earthquake and people we loved were unaccounted for and maybe hurt.

And he never again wanted to be unable to know and unable to help.