All these times I’d talked about my hawks and Richard had never seen them.

I was in the kitchen making my hot cocoa this morning when I heard a loud thump. Richard called out to me from the family room. What, dear–Oh!

His voice and my sudden appearing didn’t scare it away: there was the male Cooper’s, standing on the wooden box looking in the window straight at us.

It’s been clear to me for some time that not only do those hawks know precisely where the windows are and that they cannot go through them, but also that smaller birds can be panicked into trying to. Hey! No talons to deal with, no beaks fighting back, just put in your order at the drive-through and go on over to the pick-up window.

Except this prey hadn’t started off from the usual spot and he was going, Which window? I can’t believe I lost it! I know it’s around here somewhere, I heard it…

And so there was my inquisitive male again, hopping down from the box and exploring the L-shaped patio around where the doves usually go.

He hopped past the table. He went around the birdseed can. Over to the left a little, and peered around the earthquake-supplies can.  He didn’t mind that I’d come across the room to follow him, and he looked back at me as if to shrug his wings: I know it’s here–where IS it?!

He again didn’t spook (his mate would have) as I turned sideways across the room and got up on the couch and looked: there it is! Feet up.

And so I pointed at his waiting mourned morning dove on the far side of the box and looked back at the hawk.

Well now. Hmm. He couldn’t see around that thing. He hesitated just a moment and then half-fluttered half-walked over to where I was pointing.

So *there* it is! Breakfast! ‘Kthanksbye, and he grabbed it fast and flew off to the fence with it pulled up so close that I could not see from right there that it was two birds exiting, stage left (the dove was well past knowing). He put it down on the top board up there and started plucking.

And darn if a large gray squirrel didn’t start cautiously coming in close to watch: if that hawk lost its prey for a second that squirrel was going to go for it. They need protein for their young, too, but they don’t like to mess with actually killing something that could attack them back, that’s the hawk’s job. The squirrel got to about six feet nearly straight above with just enough sideways for the leap, tense, watching.

Another hawk flew overhead, I assume the female Cooper’s sneaking a peak at the day-before-Mother’s-Day buffet about to come in.  Hope he doesn’t forget the maple syrup or eat all the pancakes.

A pillowcase-worth of feathers floating in the air, and finally the hawk had had enough squirrellyness and removed all temptation, off to bring the now-ready breakfast to the waiting mother of his eyases. Raise the wings high and flap, Jack.

“It was quite spectacular,” said Richard later.

Wait, what? It can’t be that late. It was light outside only just a few minutes ago!

(p.s. I want the dark wood one, fourth picture down. I’d need a second story for it, but eh, details.)

(p.p.s. Since I posted that they replaced the photos with links to the photos–sorry about that!)

Laceweight (the darker turquoise blue) dries fast. This is a good thing.

I finished at 1:00 pm. Spun the shawl out in the washer (no spraying water) to speed it up, laid it out, about two hours later set out another white sheet and picked the shawl back up and laid it out over there now so the first, now damp sheet wouldn’t slow down the process. A hair dryer was tried and given up on.

They laughed tonight when I added, “So I didn’t turn on the air conditioning on a hot day to speed up the process.”

The lace pattern is a play on the recipient’s name, and since she enjoys the occasional bit of bird news, it looks to me like a flock of birds in flight.

When I was desperately ill two years ago, the folks at Purlescence gifted me with two skeins of Mooi buffalo blend as a mind-blowingly-nice get-well wish in that basket they delivered to our doorstep, full of other things too from various knitting friends pitching in to the cause. Being able to sit up and knit again was a dream at the time, but I have to tell you, it really did give me something to hold onto and look forward to: I couldn’t let them down. And that Mooi was such soft stuff.  What I would make with it someday, I did not know yet, but I knew I would.

One of the Purlescence women was in the hospital last week. You know I finally knew exactly who that yarn was meant to be for all this time–it had just needed the right time.

Delivered. Done. She loved it. YES!

This link courtesy of LynnM: who knew that Prince Harry, handknit fingerpuppets style, would think to plan against a small royal meltdown? (I wonder if the growly-faced one wanted one too.)

(Let’s see, do I cast off here or do I do two more inches on this shawl. Graceful long length vs the practicality of not snagging it on everything, and it’s laceweight but fairly wide so that factors in too. I think it does need another pattern repeat. Hmm.)

In other words, if I dither over it some more than I don’t have to stay up tonight doing that cast-off.

Okay, so here’s the long story.

Compared to some, it wouldn’t have been the biggest nor the densest, but it was so in the wrong place.

I had some friends visiting from out of state last Fall, who, driving around in their rental car, had to ask me this question a little later: why is it that California is full of the weirdness of dense developments in the middle of the strangest places?

And one of the answers is that California’s reaction to air pollution, traffic, etc, was to threaten and fine cities that had too many jobs relative to the amount of housing if they didn’t comply with the order to try to fix that. Didn’t matter if people took the Caltrain or BART or whatever commuter trains from where they could not only more easily afford to live but might prefer to live for being able to have more space–like my husband’s co-worker, who has a guard llama for his horses and… Yeah. In the city, not so much on the guard llamas.

So our fair town’s reaction to that was to open a loophole in their Comprehensive Plan (overused and now closed, I found out last night) to allow office buildings to theoretically be torn down for multi-family housing as long as it wasn’t near single-story homes, which is what most of the housing in the city is. The downturn came, a whole swath of those office buildings came down, and developers made a fortune. All of it at our end of town.

The kicker is this: from what I heard last night, by state law you could not consider the impact on schools when debating building that housing.

I have no doubt who wrote *that* law.

Meantime, back in the ’70s, you had a perfect storm of Baby Boomers no longer being in all those schools that had been built for them and the passage of Proposition 13, which gutted school budgets across the state. Many school properties were sold off to developers.

The school-age population has been rising, even in the unchanged properties as the older generation has been moving on, just like everywhere else.

You see where this is going?

The elementary playground that my kids used to run around on during recess not at all long ago is now, I’m told, having multi-story classroom space plunked on top–and I thought a few modular classrooms in front of the redwoods were bad our last few years there. To quote Cat Stevens, “But tell me, where do the children play?”

Next to our street is a business with a large field behind it, immediately next to a school that was closed but the building still used by the district. I believe that was their old field.

Anyway, the owner of that business is retiring and he wants to cash in bigtime. The would-be developer of the man’s two-plus acres told the neighbors with a straight face that the 26, then 23 houses they were going to build there after we argued, were going to have zero impact on the schools. We guffawed; their rep was immovable on that point–and I wondered what it must be like to have a job that required you to check your integrity at the door.

The school district badly wanted and needs that land but could not match the (undisclosed) price.

The main artery alongside our neighborhood is near a fairly-new Caltrain stop in the next town.  Which is why that town has been redeveloping, with plans for something close to 2,000 new housing units overall a half mile to a mile away from us. And remember our own new housing units on the other side.

It’s getting a little crowded.

There’s more than that, even, like the already-inadequate sewer line that the City had put 30 years out on its schedule for fixing. Our part of town has been being shafted, bigtime. And the only way out of our side of the neighborhood is past that business and straight to what has to be one of the most dangerous intersections in the city.

To her credit, one of the council members drove it to see what the fuss was about and went yowza!

The one great thing in our favor was that that speculative bid was based on the hope that the city would rezone for it. And, traffic concerns aside, the proposal on the table included very little parking and a danger in terms of firetrucks trying to squeeze through the narrow proposed street because you know cars would be lining both sides of it.

The developer threatened the city with a lawsuit if their proposal weren’t passed. Now we’re talking playground bully.

The neighborhood association just north of our small one showed up organized and in force. They did an environmental impact study to a degree the city had not (as far as I could hear), pursuing facts the developer did not want mentioned. They had a powerpoint presentation and a stack of papers to be read off. Each person was only allowed three minutes to speak before the city council, so when their time was up, they would put their finger on the spot on the page and the next person would take it right from there, a relay team fighting our battle alongside us.

When the first resident to speak asked all the residents who opposed the rezoning of our area to allow for that redevelopment, I was one of about 30 who stood. Many who could not be there that night had already emailed the council. Not a one spoke in favor, and online likewise as far as I know.

My hearing stinks, I had a cold, I didn’t dare try to get up to speak when I was just missing too much information to do a good job of it–but they did a good job and I made a darn good guard llama. That I could do. Sitting through hours of meeting and standing together with the others to be counted. Our participation mattered. I’m glad I went.

Those horses did not get past that barn door.

It’s 11:30 pm, I just walked in the door, our issue was the last of the evening, every single member of the city council had to speechify and boy could some of them speechify, and my stars, it just went on and on and on.

And it was worth every minute it took–we literally stood up for ourselves and demanded, visually at least, to be counted. There were a lot of us.

I turned to the neighbors who’d been sitting next to me as dozens of us streamed out the doors at the end and said, “There are some times in my life where I really really hate being deaf. Usually I can handle it. This was one of them”–and I thanked them for filling me in at a few key spots.

I went in totally expecting our side to lose. The voting was unanimous.  We won!

More later. I’m still not over this cold. Time to go crash.

Boy, was THIS not the post I expected to write tonight!

My brother was on the subway. He called our parents to say he was okay and they at first didn’t know why he wouldn’t be; “Turn on the TV,” Mom and Dad.

My sister-in-law had many students who lost their parents.

My cousin, not far from there, saw the first plane, thought it a terrible accident, went to the top of his building to watch, saw the second come in, and with his colleagues walked the long, long walk home.

My son saw the gaping hole in the Pentagon.

The Washington Post showed a live feed of the White House, and in view was a man in baggy, faded jeans and Cancun t-shirt checking out the sound system, talking intermittently to someone out of view. This went on for awhile till someone apparently realized they were live, at which point the picture cut out and a loud emergency-broadcast-system-type squeal substituted for the sound.

Uh, no. I switched to CNN.

A fair bit later than when the Post had guessed it might start, the President strode up to the podium and began. Waiting for it, I knitted out my nervous energy at full tilt, picturing the man who in his youth had debated trying to become a professional writer now somewhere back there behind the scenes, writing the speech he knew would reverberate through generations to come and societies throughout the world–knowing how important every word was, the consequences of a misspoken one, how solemn the occasion, how important.

The Leader of the Free World has spoken.

Well done, sir. And to our troops too: well done. And thank you.

——

Ed. to add Monday night: It is a solemn and a somber time. I just wish I had the humility of my friend Lyn S, whose instant reaction was to pray for his lost soul. And it is never right to be gleeful at the death of another.

But I do have such a profound sense of relief: at last the personal face of evil can of himself cause no more harm to any living thing.

Michelle’s home, Michelle’s home!

And she came home by way of visiting her brothers for a few days (they live about an hour apart), reporting from my aunt that her granddaughter Abby loves loves loves her purple cabled hat. (Abby told me too.)

It was Michelle’s first chance to meet Parker: she swoons over his adorableness and his fine manner of pronouncing “Goo” towards all things agreeable.

We were talking away in her room this evening, catching up, and in the conversation I mentioned hey, we should consult a dictionary. Got a paper one in here? (We looked at each other and laughed; we’re so old school, you know.)

Sure, Mom, to the right, top shelf up there.

Okay, I knew immediately what was coming but it didn’t occur to her: I grinned, went over there, stood on my tippy tippy toes, the ends of my fingers brushing but barely as I tried to grasp the bottom of the book’s spine. No can do.

She giggled as she realized she’d forgotten that small detail–Mom’s short.

Give Parker another ten or twelve years and he’ll tell me I am too. I can’t wait!

Meantime, he is demonstrating for the Pappa-razzi how to do this hat thing in the proper royal style.

I had a tree service person here twenty-odd years ago, and given that so much of the Californian vegetation was so exotic and so new to me, when he was done with the job at hand I pulled him around the yard and had him name everything in sight for me. I knew I would never remember it all, but at least some of it would stick.

He was delighted at being able to be a teacher in the moment to someone interested in everything that his life’s work revolved around.

We had an elm? I thought all those were dead!

No, this was a Chinese elm. They’re not affected by Dutch Elm disease.

Oh cool!

Once a year I participate in the UCSF study of lupus long-term outcomes; this year’s  didn’t involve traveling to San Francisco, I only had to spend an hour on the phone answering questions. Easy enough.

They always insist on giving me a $25 gift card as thanks. I always try to tell them not to and that I’m certainly not in it for any kind of payment; they always say it’s already a done deal, sorry, take it.

And so an Amazon card arrived in the mail. I’d already forgotten about it and it took me a moment to put context to the envelope. Ahhh. Yes.

David Sibley is quoted on Amazon saying that after all these years studying birds, well, you do see a lot of trees in the process. And trees hold still while you’re trying to sketch them, and they seemed the logical next subject somehow…

Eight-three cents on my credit card to bring up the difference (a few cents cheaper in tonight’s listing), and “The Sibley Guide to Trees” showed up on my doorstep yesterday, two pounds four ounces’ worth of them right there in person.

How many books are that potentially useful for your whole life? Did you know there was such a thing as an ape’s-earring tree?

———-

p.s. Did you see the little three-year-old bridesmaid in the picture, a millisecond before the first royal kiss, holding her hands hard over her ears with a face clearly demanding at the cheering crowd, “It’s too loud! Make it stop!”

Second p.s. The resident female Cooper’s swooped at something clearly on the roof above me as I looked out across the patio from inside, and I suddenly got a notion of what it must be like to be on the receiving end of that speed. Wow. (Speaking of which, I added a link in yesterday’s post to Eric’s photo of Clara strafing Glenn as he climbed back up City Hall; don’t miss it.)

And third p.s. The squirrels eating the calcium-rich fire brick? They’ve not only started again on it for this year, but they’ve carved off two big chunks. One ran up a tree with one, looking for all the world like it had a large pastry in its paws as it happily nibbled away.

And… One squirrel has been gnawing away at the metal barbecue grill. Iron deficiency, maybe? Sharpening its teeth for the hawk? (It wishes!)

Maybe we need a forest animals book next.

(Ed. Friday to add this link, with thanks to Eric for the picture.)

I loved the moment where an eyas stopped screaming, looked way up straight at the face of the human holding him and suddenly stopped in wonderment, a scene straight out of the children’s book, “Are You My Mother?” And the classic recoil, “You are not my mother! You are a Snort!”

Three males, one female. The baby falcons at San Jose City Hall were banded today by Glenn Stewart, the biologist from UCSC behind the peregrine recovery effort. The video is here, with the parents swooping and circling and then at the very end standing guard together, almost touching, side-by-side above their babies in the nestbox.

What it doesn’t show is that all four eyases learned that the world really is bigger than inside there. All four of them tumbled or landed somehow onto the runway area later in the day and all of them figured out how to jump/flap/somehow lift just enough to get safely back home again.

Just wait till they stand on one of the ledges of that HVAC unit for the first time and look 18 stories down!

Nope, no knitting. Another sore throat,  another fever, more resting, fourth round this year, kinda gets old.

But. I got to see one of my hawks, tail and wings wide, swoop down from above the awning–and its nemesis, the taunting big black squirrel, instead high-tailing it for cover under the table. Meantime, a dove freaked, ricocheted off the window then the awning, shedding a few feathers, and then flew a bit lopsidedly out of there–straight to the waiting hovering Cooper’s.

They both gained just enough altitude before surely the last moment that I didn’t have to see, nothing but two birds about to become of a feather.

By the way, if you ever need a project frogged, get the beginnings of the ball going and I’ll be glad to experiment with playing catch out there sometime…

Meantime, Clara (peregrine wingspan 41″) was seen today at San Jose City Hall decisively escorting a juvenile golden eagle (wingspan 79″) away from her babies and the heck out of there. You don’t mess with the mama.

I’m saying that loud enough for the germs to hear.

A chance conversation today led to my finally spelling out the thought behind my standard phrase of, it all works out.

Meaning, not just that something was meant to be, but more specifically that despite all our human efforts vs our failings, our sacrifices vs our screw-ups, God can make good use of it all when our genuine hope is to do right by each another. And sometimes He even makes use of the worst in us (about halfway down there)–pretty humbling stuff, that.

I got stymied and stopped on a project about a year ago. I wondered what on earth was wrong with me when I’d put so much effort into designing it; getting it to feel right shouldn’t be so hard.

And today I knew why.  I’m so glad things worked out the way they did!  (This female house finch let me come right up to it today, holding still for me as it studied the yard at long length like I’d studied those stitches; I managed somehow not to scare it off even in opening the door and going back inside.)

I’ve put the knitting down for the night now and am sitting here marveling at… More in a few days.

I finished it I finished it! I had a new idea I was working away at and really wasn’t quite as sure of as I wanted to be the whole time. You know how lace does this crumpled tin foil act while you’re creating it.

Today it was dry. Done. I picked it up, put it around my shoulders, stood in front of the mirror, and marveled, oooooh. *This* is exactly what I’d hoped it would be when it grew up! But you never really entirely know till that point. It not only worked, it taught me a whole new thing in the process and I find that deeply gratifying.

It was Abstract Fibers’ Picasso yarn in the Valentine colorway. (Baby alpaca. Anyone surprised? And Picasso–being an art dealer’s daughter, how could I not knit that?) I’d told my husband it was my big splurge at Stitches West. Bright bright bright and the perfect celebratory thing to be knitting away on to celebrate Spring and, on Easter, the rising again to Life.

And another reason I’ve been so happy today: I wove in ends that had long needed it and mailed off a project that the recipient knows nothing about but that sure made me feel good anticipating the look on her and her parents’ faces that they’ll see, even though I won’t. I knew the color was right and the yarn too. This is what all those stitches we do are for in the first place: showing others that they are well loved.

The squirrel update: I’m a creative meanie. I had a now-empty 20-lb bag of birdseed, all safely poured into the metal can but the bag still smelling highly of sunflower.

I threw a few very stale cashews way down in it. (I’m certainly not going to eat them.)

As the day progressed and this unknown object sat there on the patio, I watched the progression: scared squirrels, then nosy squirrels, then squirrels anxious not to have me be around seeing them while one of them tried to chew his way in from the side, apparently not liking the inner liner, though, and then finally, at last, when just one was there, a tail disappeared, fluff by cautious fluff.  The little thing had to have crept clear to the very bottom of the bag–whereupon I stood up and opened the back door.

Furry black lightning. In full zigzag/eaglesighting mode. Wish I could breakdance like that.

And then since I’m nice I walked out of its sight so it could come back and have a snack. Chocolate, me, cashew, you. Thank you for the entertainment; fair enough of a tip.

A blessed and happy Easter to all who celebrate it, and a lovely, happy Sunday to all who celebrate.

So I’m walking into Trader Joe’s for some quick Easter-dinner shopping and the person walking in right behind me as I’m putting my car keys in my pocket I recognize a moment late as someone who occasionally shows up at Knit Night, although my brain blanks on her name.

She stops me, admires the scarf I’m wearing, and asks if it’s one of my designs?

You know, sometimes you kind of want to look halfway dignified. But just then I was suddenly trying to figure out why I was entangled on myself sideways and then trying to extricate a stitch from the end of the scarf from the ring on my keys which were not coming back out of my pocket because I couldn’t see because the rest of the scarf was in the way, and having your scarf snagged out of sight but immovable and you don’t want to snag the stitch even worse and you know it is and you’re trying not to be distracted when someone’s being nice and you know your hair looks terrible today anyway and–

What can you do but laugh and say yes it is and thank you?

—————

(Notes on today’s pictures: there’s been this one male house finch I’ve been trying to snap for awhile whose side feathers look like Isaac Asimov’s sideburns from the ’60s. I have no idea why. It can fly just fine, but boy do you notice that one, it’s three bird-bodies wide!

The tree photo, taken by zooming and which you can see especially via embiggening, is of a flock of small birds at the top; I think finches but I was able to make out a crest of a titmouse way up there too. I’ve seen crows on that tree before; Glenn Stewart of SCPBRG has spoken about how families of crows will gang up to harass a predator that’s bigger than them, particularly a more vulnerable young one. The Cooper’s hawks’ nest is tucked about ten feet below this picture–and the small birds have always stayed well away from there before, maybe an individual passing by but nothing like this. Curious.

I did see one of the Cooper’s two days ago, so they seem to be fine. Maybe the house finches were throwing a coming-out party for this year’s fledglings? Mi casa es su casa. Oh–wait…