First peach flower of the year. (Tree pruned by a tumbling raccoon its first year. It got that one first-year peach, though, so it was okay with that.)

p.s. Wallace the Brave, just for fun.

Had to run some errands and was going to be within a half mile of a local yarn store that I seldom step into. I know what I like, I know they have some nice yarns, and I know that what I buy the most of, they only carry a little of.

But they do have a few colors of Rios, and checking online first they had Whales Road in stock. Worth a look. I didn’t need it, but one skein in a lighter morph if possible for where the coral is closer to the surface could be a nice touch. (Turned out theirs were darker than mine.)

I don’t think I’d ever seen either employee before.

One of them was wearing a sweater I instantly recognized–that was a Caitlin Hunter pattern. Caitlin knits Alaskan motifs and I have two grandkids who were born there and I love her stuff.

So I asked her, Is that the haddock pattern?

She looked at me a moment. Another heartbeat. Then said, Yes.

It wasn’t till I went to go look it up this evening so I could link to it here that I had my forehead-smacking moment.

Halibut. Not haddock. Right. I knew that. It was a gorgeous sweater.

But either she was humoring me or she was blanking on the word, too. I’m guessing the former. I’ll just have to go back sometime so we can have a good laugh over it together.

We did it, we finally did it. We talked about it at Christmas when they had a good deal but there were too many unknowns in the air re the other lines on our account.

Verizon has non-stop promotions, says he, they’ll still have this up after Christmas.

Nope. They had offers, just not of the ones we wanted anymore. I checked almost daily.

Yesterday they changed that.

The one thing I needed to know was, would the heavier phone be too much for my hands.

It was raining. That is absolutely when you want to go to Verizon during a good promotion. We learned that lesson long ago.

The display models were leashed to the wall with a bulky apparatus covering most of the sides so you couldn’t really tell what the heft of the phone itself would be, and I lamented that fact.

The saleswoman, who was clearly enjoying the fact that we were the only customers in there so she didn’t have to be pulled in multiple directions at once, thought about that a moment.

And said, Well, I can’t hand you a 16. But I can hand you a 16 Pro: mine, and she did.

It has a better camera, it has better battery power, it’s a little longer but not much wider–but it’s an ounce heavier and the moment I hefted it I instantly knew the one thing I’d had to know: would holding those 7.03 ounces, like during the two hours of reading captions in church, damage my ability to knit as many hours as I wanted to.

The answer was yes. I thanked her very much, gave her back her phone, and she rang up the 16. Which currently is free with my trade-in (which made her laugh when I told her it was an iPhone 6) and that three-year commitment not to switch to their competitor. Fine by me.

But we both upgraded on memory (but it doesn’t have to be teal! You wanted teal, get the teal) which means the models weren’t in stock. (The future Otterbox will cover that teal right over.)

Well, if you’re going to twiddle your thumbs while you wait for the mail you might as well be using them to knit. Got six rows done today.

There was a demo tonight to a large and eager group (oh yeah) of women at church tonight about how to make your own chocolate truffles. The guy had printed out the basics, which was very helpful for people like, y’know, me. We were handed one of his as we came in and after the lecture and demo made four of our own: squish it, work it, roll it, dip it, done.

My question, which I did not ask because I had no way to know if he’d already addressed it, was, how do you assume the cream in the ganache is safe when the truffles are left out at room temperature like he said they should be? He was adamant that they not go in the fridge.

From what I was able to find afterwards, the answer is, it has to be at least 50% chocolate, and more is better. Liqueurs help, too. (For those who eat such, I don’t.) It’s the amount of available water that is the problem.

I brought mine home to share in the morning, when the chocolate won’t keep me up all night but mostly because I thought that in all fairness the men should have been invited, too.

I’m living dangerously. Having never gotten sick from eating anyone’s truffles, I’m leaving them on the counter.

So far, anyway.

Update: and then, having written that, I went back to the guy’s instruction page and turned it over. Oh. There it says refrigerate leftover ganache and only roll and coat the truffles you’re going to eat that day.

Okay, then. Common sense and caution wins out after all. Mine went straight in the fridge.

Earworms: the music memes of the brain. After being stuck with one long enough, he transferred it to his mouth and then I got stuck with it. I hadn’t heard that one in decades.

Thus the following conversation:

‘Old Screwball was a racehorse,’ he sang.

Stewball. I still heard consonants when I was a kid, that’s a t, I told him.

I always thought it was Screwball, he insisted.

I went and looked it up. Nope. Stew not screw.

He was trying to remember some of the words in a later verse.

It’s, ‘I bet on the silver, I bet on the bay, if I’d a bet on old Stewball, I’d be a free man today.’ I always assumed that meant a slave wishing he’d been able to buy his freedom.

Is THAT what it means?!

I always thought so. (There are reminders of that hellish institution where we grew up, including a blacksmith shop just down Seven Locks Road that was used by George Washington.)

Turns out it’s an old folk ballad about a real race. Peter Paul and Mary recorded the version we knew growing up, but Stewball was an actual racehorse and the song was sung by, among many others, slaves in chain gangs dreaming of freedom. My heart broke a little reading that.

1741. How many horses, I asked him, have been so famous that 300 years later we know what year he was born?

Not many, says he.

He’ll even sing it as Stewball, just for me.

I don’t think I ever met him but I knew both the person who had the conversation with him and the person who’d referred him.

There was a college student who got a job in DC that he thought was really something. Democrats were the enemy, and he got assigned some cloak-and-dagger type excitement on behalf of the President himself. Pretty heady stuff for a kid just starting out.

Until someone asked him at church, Are you honest in your business dealings?

He said yes, because of course he was…but then because he did feel he was honest, he stopped to backtrack a moment, suddenly a lot less sure of himself. He explained what he was doing at work.

He got counseled to quit that job immediately, and he did, and thus rescued his name and future from infamy.

That was the day before the Watergate break-in. He had been doing preparatory groundwork for it, though I’m not sure he knew that.

He would be about 70 now, and he instantly came to mind when I read that the hackers going from Federal department headquarters to Federal department headquarters plugging in their servers and wreaking havoc on the workings of our entire Federal system under an unelected, unvetted billionaire who’s not even a Federal employee and has zero legal authorization to bypass Congress on any of this, while falsely invoking the authority of US Marshalls if the professionals didn’t comply, are all probably thinking they’re doing the country a great favor.

And they are college students. Or just graduated. With not a clue how the world really works nor the impact nor the treason of what they’re doing. The youngest, 19, went to our local high school and I wonder what his parents think of the job they now know he has. I mean, that’s too young to even be fully myelinated and he’s doing this?!

Creating the biggest data breach in the history of mankind and putting every single American’s financial security at risk. And that’s not even starting on the assault on our laws, our democracy, and our system of government. Not just the civil servants but members of Congress were locked out of the building when they showed up to ask questions.

Did those kids stop to think that Elon Musk–a man who came on a student visa but ghosted the college, ie an illegal immigrant–could now empty nearly every bank account in the country? Or let Putin do so? Or sell every piece of data in the Treasury to China, while Musk makes false demands to clear out the entire Civil Service coupled with severance offers of illegally high amounts that will not happen?

But back to the hackers. Every single dime the Federal government sends out or where it collects from is now exposed and at risk. Already there’s been a report of an automatic Social Security payment not going through but labeled Pending, with its intended recipient wondering how on earth they’re supposed to pay rent on time.

Gee, that’s a great story they get to tell their grandkids someday.

It is a crying shame that apparently there was nobody along those very young mens’ paths to ask them this one simple, direct question: Are you honest in your business dealings?

And if that doesn’t work, then, Would you be proud to tell your grandma what you’re doing?

Little by little….

You can’t get a great deal of detail into little fish compared to the ones in my first Ocean afghan what with the limitations of drawing in wide V shapes. But that just means it’s a new way of exploring what my needles can do.

The folks who bought the house next door a few months ago were thrilled at being offered an apricot tree.

Of the three Anya seedlings I had left, this one was as nearly perfectly balanced as you could ask for, a beautiful specimen. It’s the one that grew only a few inches tall its first year after its growth tips had died while we were out of town (the 4″ vitamin K-uptake-killing coir pot hindering leaf production did not help) but it was still alive so I kept watering it. Last year it hit 53″. It’ll be standing on its tiptoes to wave hi over the fence before you know it.

I explained that I’d chosen a smaller one for my yard for its late leafing-out and its slower growth for my limited space. I’d almost put the big one in anyway just because it’s such a perfect, healthy tree.

Big was fine with them. They knew exactly where they wanted to plant it, and when they told me, I told them that’s where the former owners had kept their garden for years. A very good sunny spot and it’ll have plenty of room. Very cool.

They told me of losing a plum tree to disease at their old house and how hard that had been.

Their big tree on the other side of the house, I told them, is a Santa Rosa plum that was there when the sellers’ parents had moved in about 60 years ago. They will have their plums back.

So now this tree has been dolly’d to its new home. And if by chance either theirs or mine ends up needing a pollinator–and having one always helps anyway–there will be one right on the other side of the fence, same mother tree but already clearly just different enough.

While the adults were talking, their little boy discovered our toy corner and in great excitement with each discovery arranged all our Hot Wheels into a curved-just-so traffic line behind the big yellow Tonka truck leading the way. And life is good.

Welllll, the package was pretty. The contents were in the what’s not to love department. So I bought it.

Fire-roasted root veggies (sweet potatoes/carrots/parsnips/onions) in a giant Costco freezer bag were a bit daunting after the fact. I knew the fiber content was beyond me as a colectomy patient, and yet there it was.

Unless…(she thought, staring at the bag a couple of weeks later.)

The Cuisinart. Not the blender, I didn’t want puree, although, close. Into the pot. Throw some Trader Joe’s frozen fire-roasted bell papers in the machine, just a couple of twirls of the blade. A little broth, a half hour simmer, let’s just see what we get….

Hey.

There was a whole lot more where those had come from.

The second time, I oven-roasted an entire Costco pack of cherry tomatoes for half an hour and then those I did puree and threw in the pot with the root veggies that were by then looking vaguely like sandpaper grit floating at the top. (The parsnips: like pimples just waiting to be popped. Hey, I’m trying to give you a visual, where are you going?!)

On an oh just try it, I added the leftover third of a cup or so of pumpkin puree in the fridge. And some sausage.

Half an hour more of simmering from there. You can’t quite make out the pumpkin specifically but it really added to it.

I’m writing this down so I remember what I did where I can find it and because I’m actually hoping now that they’re still selling those root veggie bags. There’s a potluck next week and that was really really good.

The only problem is, I am forever now going to think off it as parsnippimplepopper soup.

Remember that truly brilliant idea someone gave me to freeze a paper cup of water and then put a penny on top, so that if you ever had a power outage happen while you were away you could check to see if your frozen foods had thawed and then refrozen and were unsafe?

I kept thinking the last few months that evaporation was getting to mine and that I really ought to refill that cup, but the penny was frozen onto the top and, eh. It’s cool.

The door on our garage freezer bounced slightly open and was apparently like that overnight–on a night that hit 31F. (Unless we had a very small earthquake that shook it ajar. Dunno.)

There was this moment of horror, followed by the realization that I could actually know something about the effects: check the penny!

It had slipped to the edge of the cup and then slid down the side and was frozen in place upright. The door had not been closed yet but the ice seemed solid. The food seemed solid, even the bag of cranberries on the door right next to that cup. Small things thaw faster, exposed things certainly do, and they weren’t.

Lucked out.

More Anya apricot seeds went out in the mail, with a few left.

It is going to be cold and (finally!) rainy the next five days here, which feels fitting: the skies themselves mourning those lives lost in the air crash in DC.

James Fallows, pilot and reporter, says helicopters are forbidden above 200′ in that airspace. The New York Times says they were at 300′ and a half mile off the course directed by the controller–and that the helicopter pilot had flown that route before and knew those restrictions before they hit that plane.

It took me straight back to my mom’s close friend’s agony waiting to hear whether the father of her children during his commute home had been on the 14th Street bridge that another plane from National (now Reagan Airport) hit 40 years ago after not de-icing. He was not heard from for hours–but he was safe.

All those rescuers on those cold waters, hoping to be able to deliver that same news to other families but seeing only wreckage and worse.

Knitting. I tell you. Six rows again today. Needed to. Bright colors, fishy fish, creation-ing.

That second octopus’s last arm is just going to be too short if I don’t add another strand and put up with weaving its ends in, too. (Appraising look.) Nope. I’ll never be satisfied with it if I don’t. First thing tomorrow.

Remind me to break off a longer piece next time.

My grand niece is three today. She will tell you that she is not little. (Her dad called today to say they’re expecting in two months; that might have something to do with it, although you know she has no idea how her life’s about to be upended.) She will also say firmly that she is not big.

She is medium.

She runs a tight ship, observed her dad. She will tell you how it is.

Flood the zone, the felon-in-chief’s favored fellow felon advised. Put more out there than the media can deal with at once.

And so 17 Inspectors General, those tasked with rooting out abuse or waste in government, were fired in an illegal manner yesterday, today all Federal grants were suspended in an illegal manner (meaning as part of it not just school lunches but that all Medicaid disbursements were stopped, till a Federal judge stopped the stopping but only for now) while ICE agents raided elementary schools for anybody suspected of being an illegal immigrant even if they were too young to know what that was or that they were born here and are citizens. And even if they weren’t.

Traumatizing the children. Y’know, when you let any disturbed individual buy a thousand rounds of ammunition for their many guns once they’re 18 but not yet fully myelinated, you just might want them to have the happier childhoods their loving parents were planning on instead. Think ahead.

Two million Federal employees were told in an email that they had the choice of emailing back “resign” and getting paid through September or to assume they’ll be fired or at best demoted.

Don’t do it. All of that was in violation of the law, too, including the sums any severance could entail per person. They want you to be the guilty party on losing your job. Air traffic controllers? Who needs them, right?

An old friend reposted his friend’s experience of having multiple ICE agents pull him over and wave guns in his face and yell and threaten him and lie that he had done things just now that he absolutely had not while he called the local police, who came to his aid and told the agents to get the hell out of there and leave the guy alone. And that was in a red state.

And if they’re already doing that to a citizen based on his name or looks…

Are there Republicans who are as outraged as the rest of the world looking on in horror? Are they hearing from their constituents?

We must speak up–like an individual stitch in a sweater, every voice matters.

I know they want us to throw up our hands and not look. I’m making myself look because I owe that to my dad’s memory for his service in WWII. The rule of law. Integrity. Compassion. Democracy. Those are ours and we will not let them be taken from us.

And then I knit four rows of afghan and started some bright new fish. Because that felt wonderful and hopeful, picturing a grandchild’s future delighted face.

Slowly, slowly getting there.

Never seen them before.

Old enough to walk. Not old enough to talk. Starting to be fussy.

(Let’s see, I’m overdue to order more but, checking, oh good yes I do.)

Then I saw her brother.

Then her dad walked up with the oldest and they, too, sat down in front of us, along with what were clearly his wife’s parents, given that their ancestry was multi continental. Three kids in five years with one on the way.

The second kid started fussing a little too to match his sister and the meeting hadn’t even started yet. You know I had an answer to that, (oh good I did have three in there) and I reached over the pew and told the mom, Happy Birthday!

The middle kid, half an hour later, did something I’ve never seen any kid do before with one of those finger puppets: he worked out the woven-in end on his ladybug, got it out to a good foot long and yo-yo’d it and then hey, better than that, let’s twirl it around and around and around!

Which was fun. But. His mom intuited how quickly that could escalate on a three-way matchup and put a stop to it. Awhile later he got his ladybug back and obediently did not twirl it. Except once. Because that is what you do when you’re three. You experiment to see if your parent meant it and are relieved to learn that they did and that a rule is a rule to live by. So you could know what to do and not do and what to expect even if you didn’t yet know all the huge WHYYYyyyys behind everything and the world felt a little safer.

When the meeting was over (eternity o’clock by little kid time), she turned to thank me and we introduced ourselves.

I told her she reminded me of me our first year here. I told her they were doing a great job.

We drove home with me remembering time after time when some older person had said that to me, back when my kids were little, and how much I’d held onto that, knowing they were just being their new-to-this-world selves and driving me quite bonkers. I hoped those good folks knew I’d someday be thanking them by passing it on when it came my turn.

They’d made my emotional world feel a lot safer.