I plunked myself down next to my daughter Michelle. She is not a knitter. (I have not yet given up hope.)

“So I had this new yarn, and it sparked an idea I wanted to try, but I wanted to do a practice run first, so I grabbed a yarn that was what I wanted and I got started and. But. It’s tightly spun and it’s not soft enough against the neck, and I want soft enough against the neck, and I looked at it and I looked at this sock yarn by Creatively Dyed and I thought hey, those two knitted together would be really pretty and make a great baby blanket! Machine washable wool for a new mom. Practical!

But it would mean ripping out what I just did.” And I explained why I wanted that particular color, super soft or no super soft. “And you’re the closest thing here to a knitter to ask.”

Her face was getting more and more impish as she tried not to burst out laughing. We both knew what was coming next.

“Well, you either keep going or you rip it out.” With the unspoken, my Mom is asking ME for yarn advice.

We both laughed, I got up, I started to go back to my perch in the other room and turned and added, “And sometimes you throw it in a corner and look at it the next day.”

And then, she’s right, Eurypides. Because that baby blanket idea is just too good to pass up.

While I was pureeing strawberries today some beautiful, soft strawberry yarn appeared at my doorstep. With my thanks to Deb: a hank of Floating, from A Verb For Keeping Warm, a local dyer who uses only natural dyes; I’m curious to know if this was done in madder or cochineal, the two red sources they list. You can see how fast it got all wound up about it! (That’s an 11″ serving bowl, by the way.)

Sesame Street: “Do you know what’s going to happen next?” I am, sings Cat Stevens, on the road to find out. Follow the mellow brick, row’ed (or will be).

Attempts at babyproofing have commenced: Parker and his parents will be here next weekend! To say I can’t wait doesn’t begin to tell it–we three so badly want to see those three again that we’re about to burst in happy anticipation.

Michelle points out that my drumcarder in its box is so leaving that floor.

Uh, YEAH. Here, let me go take care of that, quick…

It was a sign of the day to come: I woke up with Jim Croce singing in my head, of all things, “Speedball Tucker,” a song I hadn’t heard in forever. That got me to go look around and find out that Croce‘s wife and baby weren’t on that plane that day and the son is now making his own music. I’m going to have to try it out.

So it was go go go thank you for the news magazine Don good to see you got only ten minutes at knit night to see Purlescence‘s new place (a few doors left of the old) and then the phone buzzes and time to go pick up the daughter across two towns and then go and off to the grocery store, quick.

When the left foot doesn’t quite remember how to keep up and in sync with the right on the treadmill and has to be told consciously to keep the rhythm of the steps then you know maybe I’m a bit tired.

Well, then, keep on walking a good one, that’ll cure that.

I remember how many days I couldn’t possibly have managed any of today, just an ordinary day, and I tell you, life is good.

You know it’s all good when you get not a phone call asking you to come in to be told the news by a sympathetic human being in person but rather an email asking you sign in to your account to get the message that your scan came out just fine.

Yup.

Meantime, I debate from time to time what kind of fruit tree to plant next; it would have to be dwarf to keep from overshadowing the panels on our roof. (Last month’s electric bill during our 100 degree heat wave, though it was nothing like everybody else’s heat wave: still. With the AC running nonstop. Four cents.)

I’d really like an avocado tree, although I hear they’re messy and drop leaves constantly, and if anyone has any experience re growing them vs squirrel and raccoon raids, I’d love to hear.

But it would certainly be funnier to join the throw the book at ’em club, as seen on Okra.

Nope, no bungee-jumping ice cubes today. But I’ve spent most of the last seven hours slogging through some design work that needed to be done, and there’s such a sense of satisfaction in having it come out right after all that work.

Got an email reminder, went in yesterday, got my mammogram out of the way: I don’t think I could have faced my sister-in-law if I had made excuses or just not bothered. She’s lucky she had one done when she did, and even so, it’s a hard fight. She is in her 40’s.

Let me just say upfront, I’ve never understood those who kvetch and forward emails about how awful a process it is. It is not. You’re uncomfortable or maybe in pain for 10 seconds max, four times.

Then it’s done and you’re done and you walk out of there free of all that. If you get to find out you’re one of the lucky ones, all the better. And if not, you have the comfort of knowing you took good care of yourself from the start.

One of the side effects of 21 years of lupus with longterm, severe pain, mostly faded out of the scene now but always ready to flare up a bit here and there at the least provocation is that I find it a struggle at times to be patient with people who have not yet learned that the fear of pain is far worse than any actual pain. Longterm pain is simply a different avenue for learning about life. (The author is at Harvard Medical and knows the subject personally). You can do it.

Now go get that mammogram/colonoscopy/irregular spot (I don’t care how old or young you are, a child of mine was 18 months) checked. We need you around. (That child is in their 20’s. It was caught at the precancerous stage.)

A whole new reason for why, when I buy coned yarns, I scour the mill oils out, soaking the newly-made hanks in hot soapy water rather than knitting them as they come.

You know you live in a knitter’s house when you open the freezer and find some yarn plunked on the door for a quick chill-out just in case after a moth was seen in its general vicinity while it was out having some unprotected fresh air.

You know you live in a crazy-knitter-level knitter’s house (watch my husband’s and children’s heads nod in vigorous unison) when you go to get an ice cube out of the front dispenser on the fridge and it delivers a dangly soft strand of merino with your square of cold. Wait, whaaaaa..?

There was a speaker in church today who, from the heart, spoke of how Jesus had given up everything. Everything.  Had suffered everything. For us, so that if we would repent of that which separates us from God and come to Him and embrace Him, we too could be filled with the love He so freely offers to all. He knows each one of us personally.

Then he read the story of the rich young man who had come to Jesus seeking spiritual advice.

That was it. That was exactly what I needed to hear, boom, straight to my heart. My lingering inner question about a certain project I’d worked on…

All selfishness evaporated on the spot and I felt such a joy as I looked forward, at last, to giving that beautiful bit of knitting away. I knew exactly whom it would make quite happy.

And to think that before that point I had thought, not quite out loud to myself where I could hear it, that I somehow could do better with it myself than that?!

Purlescence closed for a week to move to their new digs–a few doorways to the left from the old, a bigger space. They put in new wood floors. They puzzled over how to get the tall yarn cubes out of the old shop, those having been assembled inside for the original Carolea’s Knitsch decades ago.

Today was the grand reopening celebration, but they just didn’t need my nagging bit of sore throat.

So I decided to celebrate in spirit: I found some Kid Seta I’d bought from them and thought about starting something with it. But I have some knuckle inflammation going on, it was a bit hard for my hands to hold that fine a strand.

I pulled out a skein of very thin cashmere that had stumped me when it had arrived from an online purchase.  The color. Brilliant red on the orange side? Not so much here. That fine a laceweight would take a lot of time to use up a color that didn’t do it for me.

The Kid Seta was a muted red with the silk shimmering lighter, rather pinkish against the fuzzies.

Put those two balls side by side (the nighttime photo doesn’t capture it), and my first thought was, Nah, they fight…

But wait. Colors affect how the one next to them is perceived, they’re like humans that way, maybe they just need to be closer together. I cast on. I knitted. It lagged and got interrupted at first as I wasn’t sure, and then the further along it got the more I liked it till it was hard to put down and suddenly I was 26″ into the thing.

And it is gorgeous! Who knew?

Quick, tell Congress: the differences blending together are what make it come out so pretty.

(Pattern: Rabbit Tracks with an extra stitch each side as there should be.)

Someone on my high school’s page wrote about it last week. A few days ago, Deseret News did. I have no idea how the subject appeared in both places one after the other all these years later, but it was one of the funny parts of my growing up.

The Washington, DC Mormon Temple was built on a hill above a place where the DC Beltway takes a sharp curve: so that as you’re driving down the freeway at night, the hillside covered in woods remains dark, emphasizing this white, illuminated building with towering gold spires that seems to float in the air above you. The outer loop of the road bends away to the left just as it looks like you’re about to tunnel right under.

The place promptly got dubbed “Oz” among the locals.

So what came next was a total delight to everybody I know, at church, at school, you name it.

“Surrender Dorothy!” (Done in a carefully proper manner, with newspapers stuck in the chain link fence on the overpass, nothing harmed.)

That promptly got taken down by the authorities, of course, but then came another, although one that required too high a level of risk.

“Surrender Dorothy!”

(Hey, Karen, am I right in remembering a version on the sound wall too?)

And on a personal note, the landscape architect for the Temple needed a temporary home while the place was being built; my parents volunteered, and so a sweet old guy came to live with us for awhile. And (though it’s true I remember him from a young teenager’s perspective) I do mean old: come to find out he had known my father’s grandfather, and he was able to tell Dad about the grandpa he never knew.

Building a yellow brick road for us linking us to our ancestor as those daffodils went in.

Yesterday I was not feeling well, dragging, just not up to a run to the store and neither were the others.

Last night I looked in my kitchen and wondered how… And every one of those avocados so far that I’d cut open was bad, which is highly unusual here. BLTs totally wouldn’t do, and and and. What to plan.

Today (feeling a lot better) I couldn’t wait to tell my husband thank you when he got home.

My friend Holly arrived on my doorstep in the early afternoon and we chatted and knitted and caught up and were so glad for some time together–very rare given that a) she lives in Germany and b) she just did a deployment to Afghanistan.

But she’s safely out of there now, she and her husband were in the area for a few days, and she carved out some time for me–and earlier for Ruth, too. She gifted me with German Zauberball long-repeat sock yarn, German orange milk chocolate, a travel kit, all very good stuff. But best of all, her time. (Thank you, Holly!)

A few days ago, my Richard and I were at Costco and he went looking for and found that they still had an artisanal cheese I’d had some of a few weeks earlier: exquisitely good stuff.

But I didn’t need to splurge on it, I told him. And it would be mostly me eating it, Michelle can’t and he shouldn’t and really, that’s just too much for one person.

Rather over my objections he put some in our cart anyway and firmly insisted that since I liked it so much, I should have it for protein in my lunches. It wasn’t for him; it was for me.

Twist my delighted arm. We did have some crackers it went well with…

Fast forward to  me telling Holly, who is vegetarian, that if she’d like, I had peaches and I had a goat cheese with blueberries and cinnamon to serve up with crackers–adding quickly that yes, that sounds weird but it’s really good. (Side note to Holly: I just looked it up and turns out it’s not quite so locally made after all, it’s from Canada. Not so much on the Napa Valley thing.  Oops.)

She had the same reaction to it we had had. Wow! I offered to take her to Costco and buy her some; she said customs would be the problem, getting it back to Germany, but oh, my.

I have this wonderful husband who likes to make me happy. It was a little thing…but it turned out to be so much bigger a thing and better than he imagined at the time he went looking for that cheese for me. He rescued my day, in sickness and then in health. I wanted to spoil my friend like he’d wanted to spoil me, and it was just the thing.

Sometimes The Onion gets it exactly right. Now we just need our lawmakers to. Send in the eighth grade civics teachers!

And I finally found an actual source, a good 25 years after I first read the children’s story Ladle Rat Rotten Hut over the DarpaNet. Now you too can heifer kayak in either tune.

Silicon Valley Women was presenting a talk tonight: it was to be given by my friend Nina of the shawl named after her. No way was I going to miss it.

Phyllis (of that story too) did the driving.

I was sure I was going to be the odd person out in the audience, though, out of a group like that; between my kids and then the limitations of illness, I never did step into the full-time other career I once thought I’d be well into by this point. I tucked a copy of my book (ie, a reach for a visible sign of success) in my knitting bag along with–hold on, I needed a mindless project to work on, what to grab, what to grab, okay, that one. Hand-dyed silk.

We arrived, Phyl and I took our seats, I cast on.

Nina spoke awhile and then went around the room, asking each person to talk a little about themselves, what they were doing, what they were hoping towards, coaching them on how to get there.

I knitted away.

I hoped the others didn’t mind the distraction. I thought again how I once thought I would never stay home with my children–till I had children. I once thought I’d be well into the next role of the working wife by now, certainly, till lupus etc got in the way. As the old joke goes, the way to make God laugh is to tell Him your plans.

In my case, He handed me yarn for the punch line.

I was not expecting to hear my younger self: a few younger women talked about how hard it was to put their old work world aside to stay home with their kids now while their little ones needed them so much. I knew that my choices and experiences of years ago offered validation for their current ones. This is not to argue working/nonworking, rather simply to affirm yet again that we are all in this life thing together.

Now it was my turn. Nina bragged on me. Bragged on my book, told them how it had come to do so well, what I had done right, and how cool it felt that her shawl was in it. She held me up as an example of doing what you love and the good will follow.

That praise in that place coming from someone who has lived the successful Silicon Valley executive life, who did the working-mom thing, who went back for a new degree mid-career like I never stayed well long enough to do–someone whose path has been so different from mine, but who is also my friend–that meant more to me than I expected.

Thank you, Nina.

I said that every mother of small children needs something that Stays Done. Another middle-aged woman in the room thought a moment and then laughed that yes, that’s true!

And at the end everybody wanted to see the book, one woman was going oh cool at learning that lace could be knitted as well as crocheted and another pointed out that the pattern (and to a lesser degree the colors) I’d been working on that whole time…

…matched the shawl on the cover of the book.

I did a doubletake.

I had not noticed at all.

A certain child of mine was swapping eye-contacts stories with a friend today, and the friend mentioned going camping in the Himalayas and, they said, you have one count’em one chance to get that thing properly in your eye because if you drop it in the snow…

And then they added the kicker: the yak.

Waiiiit, hold on, (says my kid) any time you say the word “yak” you have trumped any story of mine.

The friend said that they and their significant other had been awakened by the horns that had come through their tent at 6 am, tearing this way and that rip–rip–rip, destroying the thing while they wondered what on earth they were supposed to do now. In the end, being in a group, they huddled really tight into the others’ tents till they could get out of those high mountains.

(Whether they found their contacts again or they were stomped on or what, I don’t know, that part somehow got lost in the rest of the story, the visual image of a feral yak attack blurring such details.)

I know, I know, what a thing to go through, but still–you know I will never be able to knit yak yarn again without giggling over a potential sudden Zorro mark in the fabric. You know what color I’d have to choose: Hi, ho, Silver! Away!

Network no worky. I am typing blindly and then walking away for five minutes to see if this sentence will appear. Later!