I’m willing to do my civic responsibility if I can. I woke up one day in the last few weeks with my blood pressure so low I couldn’t walk upright for the first little bit, much less drive a car. It threw me; I haven’t had the brainstem lupus flare up like that in quite awhile. But I had been exposed to a cold and that first day especially, my immune system was on the attack.

Jury duty, day one: instructions to check online at 11:00.

Instructions at 11:00: check for instructions at 5:00.

Instructions at 5:00: check for instructions at 11:00. (I’m sure a lot of you know the drill.)

They could require me to show up five cities away in the morning rush hour. Technically, though, I’m already out of there because I asked and was told parking at San Jose would be several city blocks’ walk in the sun and impossible to do in under two minutes. Exactly the thing that would set off inflammation in my brain, eyes, and heart.

I mentioned about the parking to my doctor and he offered me a note faster than I could request it.

The courts are underfunded like everything else and the paperwork appears not to have been processed yet. Part of me hopes, moreover, to be able to play my part in the process of granting someone their fair trial. And so I check my juror number, my pocket scissors already off my keychain.

And wait.

Church was long when you’re not quite two and the usually very cheerful little guy had had enough. It was over but his parents were still busy talking to their friends.

After he ran halfway across the foyer, I’m not quite sure whether he tripped or threw himself on the floor; I caught the motion out of my peripheral vision.

He let out a loud yowl of declaration for extra effect.

I went over to him from his oncoming direction, got down on all fours, and leaned my head down towards him with a curious grin. He was turned away but suddenly he bounced his up high like a sphinx, he grinned the biggest grin at me as if glad someone was in on the joke with him, then he leaped into the air with a happy dance and ran to his mommy.

I guess church turned out not quite so long after all.

There has been a juvenile Cooper’s hawk in view several times this past week, the first time I’ve seen one all year and after I had reconciled myself to the thought that no fledglings had succeeded from the nest above the house.  I guess one did!

Two days ago I saw it swoop from the fence, spread its striped tail in a circle and do a tight U-turn to line itself up just so to come up from behind a squirrel on the ground, which froze. It started to reach for it–and then I, trying to get a better look, apparently spooked it away from its lunch. (Sorry!)  But what a sight!

Meantime. I mentioned to a friend just yesterday that in our temperate climate the songbirds will often brood twice if conditions are good. (I didn’t say I thought that was roughly at the spring and summer solstices.)

When Kathy was here a few weeks ago, she brought me a bagful of fur brushed from her dog to scare the squirrels away from my amaryllises. It was pretty well mashed together; this was good, it had enough heft it wouldn’t easily blow away. I spread it around the pots with the biggest fistful closest to my daughter-in-law’s birdfeeder.

It’s been long enough now that I can definitely say, it worked! And the stuff stayed put, too!

Today I did a doubletake: there was a small clump of it, quite loosened up and now in a round-to-oval shape (or at least the part that I could see), peeking out from under the wooden box on the patio. Moving. With one sunflower seed stuck in it as if to mimic an eye.

Wait, what?

I looked at the amaryllis table and there was a big gouge facing me taken out of that big clump,  but I had no idea how it had come off after all this time. The wind was still catching at the loosened fuzz, meantime, which was going up, down, up, down–but wait–what wind?

As I puzzled over it, a little Bewick’s wren popped out from under the box and looked up at me as if to say hi. Or maybe, duh. (The clump had stopped moving.)

And then the fur and the bird were gone. Poof!

It was at least a half hour, maybe an hour later that I looked out again and saw this small amount. (It was much lighter in the sun’s direct light than the camera’s. Note the new shape.)

The most white part of the fur had been separated out and rejected. Beige only, thank you. We like to keep the lights down low, shhhh now, our babies will be sleeping.

The doorbell rang. Huh, too early for the mailman, I ran to open it to see–Cliff! Don’s son, with Don sitting on the passenger side of his car at the curb in front of the house waving a happy hello. Cliff, meantime, was pulling a really nice nonstick springform pan out of a bag, grinning as I about died with laughter, my jaw on the ground at the same time with a speechless, you didn’t…! And then he pulled out another.

I gave him a hug and a heartfelt thank you, then ran to Don and he got his hug too and I told him, “You’re wonderful, you’re terrible!,” laughing.

“Well, I have to have my cake!” he laughed back.

Much nicer pans than my old ones, and let’s see, we’re out of butter, fix that, okay, and I put them right to use and emailed Don that I hoped I wasn’t jinxing it again, but…

Right. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

But it worked, because of course new pans deserve that and so do Don and Cliff. Who now have two chocolate tortes by way of a thank you; the pans almost handwashed themselves, they were that easy, not that you have to but I’m going to. I want them to stay as perfect as the gift they are.

An aside to them: I didn’t put plastic wrap over the tortes because they were too new and the glaze hadn’t finished setting in the fridge yet (but it was getting late); the plastic can pull and mar the surface when you take it off if it’s put on too soon, before it completely sets.

Like anyone would mind. Thank you! Enjoy!

I’m sure going to!

I saw the dermatologist again: two new spots on my head. They looked to her like an autoimmune reaction to the surgery, but she made sure I did indeed have an appointment for four months post-op on the skin cancer. I do. Meantime, though, she was relieved and I was too.

She mentioned that a friend of hers had knit baby blankets for her two children when they were born and they loved them; she marveled that her five-year-old was still so latched onto his.

I loved hearing that some other knitter’s work was so prized by that good woman’s children.  What better could one ask for?

And so I came home wanting to celebrate all around. Hey. I’d found some manufacturing cream actually in stock yesterday and bought it; I owed Don a chocolate torte, I could drop one off at his house on my way to Knit Night if I hurried.

Um.

The original incarnation of my recipe is dated June 1991. My pair of 8″ springform pans has been well used for a long time.

And they’re showing it. The latch on one is a little loose, the other, more than a little and it’s leaked a bit a few times; I try to make sure the foil lining on the bottom comes up and covers that join.

Nuts, I forgot to do that this time, I thought a little later as I started to smell smoke; I really should spring for those new pans. Oh well, open the oven a crack for a moment to keep the cakes from tasting smokey and hope it burns off fast.

Okay, this is where I’m glad I had my hair pulled back.

Waiiiit… Try that again…

Slam it shut.

NOW what do I do?!! The one torte, if I had an oven free that I could… Are the neighbors home? Right, ‘scuse me, could I borrow a cup of 350 degrees for 25 minutes?

Take a deep breath. (No don’t.) Turn the oven off.  Be glad the smoke alarm system has a timer so you can turn it off for 25 minutes. Hope the mailman going by doesn’t call 911. Take the good cake out. Move the racks. Acknowledge to myself that yes, I really did do that: I put a springform pan in the oven without closing the latch.

And yet half that torte was still somehow in the pan. I poured the unset part of the batter into bowls and nuked its sorry remains. The other torte had to sit on the counter and cool its heels while I scraped and scraped the oven out with a metal spatula (no don’t reach for the nylon one!) and then reheated it, opening it again and again to let more smoke out, waited some more, okay, try again.

I sent up a silent ‘Thank you Larrick Hill’, our architect on the remodel 16 years ago, for the screened open-able skylight he put in this kitchen that even when it’s opened still keeps most of the direct sun away from me. Up, smoke, up. No, mailman…

It was a total guess how long to bake the behaved one.  Note that neither of us who can eat dairy have ventured to cut into it yet, much less waste a ganache glaze on it.

But that happy email to Don in between baking steps around the kitchen about dropping off a torte on my way to Knit Night? That was a half-baked idea. Maybe next round?

My hands have needed me to take it a little easier than I would like, so I set myself a goal: knit one hour, stop. Knit one hour after dinner, stop. Knit in snatches in between but don’t overdo.

Somehow that created enough progress to keep me happy; I’m halfway through the skein so far, doing three repeats of the Constance lace from “Wrapped in Comfort” plus edging.

Meantime, I tried to identify a new bird: very white and long tail, medium gray covert, very nearly white wings and head in direct sunlight deepening to a very light gray in the shade. Feathers smooth, body and head very slender, eyes red, a lot smaller than any dove I’ve ever seen but looking like one and walking with bobbing head motions. It came right up to the window and turned around, so I got a good look. No spots, no ring to its neck, and (looking at Inca doves in Sibley afterwards) I didn’t see square feather ends but I wasn’t looking for them, either; it was sleek, not ruffled-up-looking. Maybe a very very light almost-albino morph of an Inca? Beautiful, petite bird, glowing in the sun.

I’ve never seen anything like it before. I love that it came right up to me.

(Note re the pattern: Martingale says they will be releasing their out-of-prints as e-books, available from them directly; some titles already are. Meantime, Purlescence has the real thing in stock.)

(With a Parker picture courtesy of my son.)

I was reading an unexpected message from a friend and had one of those moments of utter clarity: a thought I had not expected instantly felt not just right but compelling.

That teal-green Madeline Tosh yarn given me last Thursday by a mystery someone. It is, I suddenly realized as I read that note, exactly the color of… she would know why…

That’s about as much as I can say right now, other than, although I had yarns in my stash close to it, I didn’t have one that was exactly THE shade, but that one was. Perfect pitch.

Colors are so evocative of memories. Someone I know needs the balance of remembering better times and to feel someone cares, softness in the precise color of a hug, yes!

I just want the person who gave me that yarn to know that they picked out something exactly, totally perfect just when, though I did not know it yet, it was going to be needed.

And they gave me the push forward by making that color’s physical presence real to me to make it actually happen. Okay, hang on, let me get back to work on this, I’ve got about six more hours to go…

You may remember this from a few weeks ago. There was one more reason that I didn’t say there why I was so angry at them.

I was still angry the next day. This had to stop. It felt imperative that I take that stress and put it on the shoulders where it belonged so that actual changes for the better could happen, and so I googled, found the name of the chief medical officer, printed out my words from that blog post and slapped a Forever stamp on it and felt, walking away from my mailbox, like the world had been lifted off me.

But before I put it out there, I dithered, I thought, I decided that, no, they need to know; I didn’t put in any details, hey, let them go look it up. I’m sure they did.

I added that a medical error there had widowed G years before.

I did not say a stunning, egregious error that made me gasp out loud when I heard what they’d done–that any reasonable person, medical background or not, would too.

They weren’t going to take my friend G away from me too.

G got a phone call from that chief medical officer: an abject apology and a concern for her well-being and a promise to look into their procedures. Then, “I got a call from Sacramento!” G laughed; she told me of her initial confusion at being told a grievance had been filed. She knew she hadn’t.

“No, it was filed on your behalf,” they said, and she told me, “I knew instantly who had done it.” She thanked me, wondering out loud if she shouldn’t have done so herself.

But she’s a nice person who doesn’t like to complain.

I’m a nice person who doesn’t like to complain.

But I sure can if my friends need me to stick up for them. It was so necessary.  She told them that day that she had not just me but two other people lined up in advance in case there was any problem, but they would have none of it. She was bullied that day.

And I was paying it forward for all of you who bombarded Caremark when they refused to process my Humira prescription with life in the balance two years ago; thank you forever for that.

“They all came back clear!” All the biopsies. All the worry.  And now she is finally free to go ahead and have the other surgery that will make her well.

At Kaiser.

Some may remember how, back when my lupus was new and my children small, back when my friend Lisa offered to trade a few hours’ babysitting time every morning, swim therapy for me and then gym time for her, how her little boy David used to leave some favored object, usually a toy, stashed away somewhere in my house every time to make sure he’d have to come back to get it. Somewhere where I wouldn’t see it and go chasing after their car, somewhere where only he would know.

Every time. I think he started doing that before he turned three.

Richard, Kim, and Parker flew home this afternoon.

And David’s going to love seeing what we found after they left.

A hike around the Dish with Michelle. (Nope, no mountain lions spotted.) A Concert in the Park with Grandpa Richard, Michelle, and Kim’s grandparents to hear The Sun Kings.

And in between and after, they were here and I was too. Bliss.

And if you ever want your hair to look nice and thick and full, a few dabs of baby applesauce will add a little color, too, just to make it perfect.

He’s definitely bigger.

And he definitely latched onto Diana’s turtle and then LauraN’s octopus: special toys you get to play with when you come to Grammy and Grampa’s house.

It’s so good to see our son Richard and our daughter-in-law Kim, and they’re such tender, good parents.  So much joy.

More tomorrow!

I don’t know whom to thank, so thank you to all of you out there.

I was at Purlescence tonight when Nathania got that sneaky grin thing happening again: she was clearly very very pleased at what was just about to happen and at the fact that I had no idea. And then she got to watch my face go: But, but—!

Totally nonpsychodegradeable. Wow.

Now, I just looked back through my posts–when I talked about that shawlette start that needed to be frogged? The one that the color had been so perfect, but the texture, not so much? That got me to grab the Whales Road Malabrigo for the softness? (That project’s now at the stage where I could either cast off the very next thing or maybe continue for one more repeat.)

Somebody… Nathania said, “I know nothing. I don’t know who, I don’t know how, I don’t know when it was put in this basket to wait for you.” (I would not be surprised if the other owners of Purlescence conspired to keep it that way till after she’d given it to me.)

But my name was written on a skein of Madeleine Tosh fingering weight she was lifting out of that basket to hand to me.

The same weight as the sock yarn I’d deemed too strong a twist, designed to withstand sockitude, not quiet shawlitude.

So soft.

The very same color.

I never blogged the color that was so perfect but that the yarn just hadn’t worked for what I’d wanted. But someone nailed it.

I’ve never in my life bought a skein of Madeline Tosh; I’ve picked up many of them, petted them, then put them regretfully back, thinking, next time maybe.

And now I have some MadTosh softness at last.  I love that their website has a little image of a bird up by their URL. I love the Cousteau name for the color. I love the yarn. I love the thoughtfulness and the generosity and the challenge to try to live up to that. Thank you whoever you are, thank you all of you, thank you Universe and thank you Purlescence for enabling the culprit, and with so much happiness.

Wow.

The trash and recycling trucks came through today and I know they sometimes brush the lower branches on my flowering pear. Picking this up off the ground, glad nesting season was over, I marveled at its intricacy: the dried grasses up top, the thicker weeds down below, the tiny down feathers woven perfectly spaced throughout. Birds are such natural artists. Cupping it in my hands, I marveled at how much the little thing instantly warmed them; I had not expected that.

I was telling Neil yesterday about the adult zone-tailed hawk I saw fly in that one time, so huge. It was such an incredible moment not just for me but for some of my fellow bird enthusiasts; they are so very rare and new this far north. Then I wondered out loud to him if being near the Bay were the reason I got to see it.

Today I needed to get myself to the recycling center and finally ditch the self-exploding microwave. Extra sun time, but we’ve all got nesting syndrome around here with the baby coming.

The center was next to the Baylands preserve, near the post office that I go to specifically to enjoy the drive past the restored wetlands area–where a magnificent black-stockinged, strikingly-white great crane once swiveled its head and stared eye to eye with me as I drove slowly past it on its high-footed walk down the suddenly magical sidewalk.

The reeds in the marsh have been getting high and dry as the summer has been getting long. And there they were: the goats. Cute as you could ask for, teddy bears with horns, some of them, very small goats (and sheared. Yes I noticed), trimming away at the brush.

The shepherd had arrived.

Right at the eventual light. Right and again, right. I pulled into the center. Put my microwave on top of someone else’s old one for it to be stripped of its parts, offered some good and usable stuff way up high to the fellow manning the Goodwill trailer, not daring to climb his ladder with my funky balance and my arms full; headed out and on my way.

And coming back, there at the edge of the marsh, flying overhead, I saw it.

I took a good look, glad to have zero traffic around me. Surely it couldn’t be. Rather than the next errand on my list, I went straight home first to look it up in my bird book: I flipped through the hawk pages again and again, thinking, nahhhh, a lot of the hawks have dark-morphed individuals, but still, there was only one that matched that. And I had seen an adult.

As far as I could tell, this one was a juvenile zone-tailed. Right there at the edge of San Francisco Bay.  I guess it heard about the blueberry and cinnamon chevre and was trying to find a local source.

Honey, I think we’re going to need a bigger nest.

Let’s see if I can get myself to put this knitting down a moment. That Whales Road yarn demanded to be ended in the jellyfish motif from the Monterey shawl and I really really like how it’s coming out.

Meantime, (and I found I needed to work on a more mindless project during the process), the piano is tuned, ready for my son who minored in organ performance to come home to on Friday.

My friend who tuned it today, who volunteers doing wetlands restoration work, took the time first to stop and admire quite the flock going on just outside the window.  He told me about some of his and his wife’s birdwatching. He asked if I were trying to attract a specific kind with a specific seed; I told him not really, but I do avoid anything with millet because it’s the favorite of alien-species house sparrows, which actively kill off all other songbirds around them and their eggs during nesting season.

But what I didn’t say was: simply by hanging up some sunflower, I get to see so many species.  But what’s so cool is that others who would never touch the stuff simply drop by to see what the fuss is about.  Some of those have stayed: the nuttall’s woodpecker got joined this year by a mate and I got to watch their mating ritual, a dance between the trees and around each other up and down and around almost as if they were carrying yarn and knitting stitches into the air; today, one was pounding away at my neighbor’s clothesline right after Neil left.

The whole cycle of life, right up close at my window. As Kathy said, one could never get bored.

p.s. And if sunflower is too pricey, a small $2 wire cage with a $2.00 to $2.50 suet cake lasts several weeks to a month here. The squirrels tend to ignore the ones that don’t have peanuts mixed in.

Nope, didn’t rip yesterday’s yet, I just put it aside and glommed onto something else in my stash. (Just wait till I run out of needles.) My friend Nancy moved away! Nancy loves to frog other people’s projects: total angst-free  ripiteedoodahh, ripiteeyay, here you go, done.

I wish.

So. Whales Road colorway in Malabrigo Lace, bought from Diana‘s de-stashing, knitted with one strand of a very thin cashmere that when it arrived awhile back in such a vivid neon blue, I wondered what on earth I would ever do with it.

Well now. Put these two together in the playpen and look how well they get along.

I say that thinking of a picture we got recently via the other grandmother of Parker and his new cousin born in April in identical baby seats side by side, with Parker reaching out and holding her tiny hand in his, looking at her tenderly as if to let her know that it was okay, he was going to be looking out for her always.

I want to be like Parker when I grow up.