I was at the bird center this afternoon stocking up on seed for the month.

Freddie, the owner, asked me, glancing at her computer, if I wanted a suet cake this time with that?

No, I was set, thanks–and then I told her my Nuttall’s, my woodpecker, had not been seen for a few weeks and I’d been missing it.

Yesterday, trying to entice it to come back, I’d replaced the broken bits of the old cake that were in the holder with a big solid new one that had been waiting for it, wondering, if I made it look prettier, set it a nice table up there, would that do it? Had the hawk gotten her? Had she migrated?

I checked it this morning and even though the chickadees like it and the finches will occasionally give it a peck when the feeders are both crowded, it was simply untouched.

No point in buying more yet, then, so, thanks, Freddie, hopefully next time.

And so it was that I was sitting here not long after I returned home, having run gobs of errands after that first one, finding that the grocery store was in total crazy mode, (well…yeah…) having company coming tonight rather than Thursday for dinner, getting home, getting the groceries put away, how to get it all in there and everything done, needing a moment to just finally sit down and crash for a moment, suddenly–

–who should fly in.  My goodness, that brilliant black and white outfit looks formal and perfect for celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday: there she was!

I simply watched, all else fallen away, not glancing away for a second, knowing how fast she can fly out of sight, all the more keenly aware for her absence of how blessed I am to have such moments.  Wow that’s a gorgeous bird.

She ate and ate and ate some more, diving into her food, more than I’ve ever seen her do in one visit. ‘Tis the season.

The Bewick’s wrens, meantime–I actually saw two at once–who never, never fly up to the cake but who come for the crumbs that fall from the woodpecker’s table, have been celebrating the extra crumbles I put out from yesterday’s taking-down; one showed up underneath the Nuttall’s for more, the perfect exclamation point in the flick of its tail.

Dinner to cook, still.  But those wild birds made the weight of it light as a feather.

Having one of the guests later exclaim, “OH! This is my FAVORITE!” topped it all off.

And a good meal was had by all.

Stepping away for a moment from the intensity of a new knitting project…

So. I have this cane. It’s made from sassafras wood, it’s spotted and hand carved and very cool, and my childhood friend Karen found it at a shop in Williamsburg, Virginia. (Yes–that is her on the left in the original Water Turtles shawl; new book copies available at the cover price+shipping at Purlescence.) I’ve used it as my main cane for five years now; I have to admit, the upper curve in the handle is looking rather well used by now.

Shown in the picture above, I have another one from Karen, who finds just the coolest ones, this one from Africa with painted animals on it and an ankh symbol for a handle: zebras, the perfectly-colored and -spaced spots of a giraffe, it’s got it.

Some small child got entranced with it at church recently and a zebra lost an ear.  It’s not very noticeable, except to me, but, so that one got put away for special occasions for its own good. Hearing aids for wooden horses are in short supply.

I went looking today out of idle curiosity, my local shop seeming to have gone to ugly aluminum only last time I checked, and where’s the artistry in that? I say, if it’s a permanent part of your life it needs to earn it a little bit.

And so I found someone who took an old cane and had fun with it. He steampunked it!  There’s a gear here, another few there, leather added to the handle, and, of all things, a lace-up black leather corset going up the shaft. It’s really, really cool! (But I can’t buy it without seeing if it’s comfortable with my hand leaning on that metal there, and I need  35″ and have no idea how long his is.)

I tell you. With apologies to my fellow knitters, this way beats the candy-cane stocking cover that every year about this time I start to daydream about knitting it for the season. Or maybe it’s just that that idea has lost its novelty for me by now.

Hmmm… How would you decorate one?

“So,” Phyllis, our Sunday School teacher today, said to my husband re his response to her question about humility, “you’re saying we should say” (quoting the Lord’s prayer)  “‘Thy will be done’?”

“By us,” I added.

She stopped and appraised that thought a moment.  “Thy will be done by us?”

Oh, if only.  If only always.  Is there anything that requires greater humility and love than that?

We can’t know, only God knows from moment to moment, how we could use our time and talents for the best, right here right now and in working towards some moment in the future we cannot really know.  We try to do the right thing; we try to see ourselves honestly, our faults and our warps, pray that our intentions might be as pure as we want to see them as, and offer our hearts to Him and our fellow man:

Here I am. There’s only one of me, but I can do some things, at least.  Point me in the right direction–and please, loudly enough that I might stand a chance of hearing it above the noise.

Rain is falling, mellow slow-mo California style, a child’s connect-the-dots plaything, nothing whatever like the great raging storms I grew up with in Maryland.  And then: rare-here lightning and thunder just struck. Reports from friends just south are of a simultaneous thunderlightning *BOOM!*

Cooool.

Meantime, Friday, my daughter-in-law heard that what she had spent these last three years working hard towards, she had actually accomplished: she has now passed the California bar. Go Kim!

Backstory here and then here.

I finally got it blocked and the ends run in.  (Not the project I’ve been working on all week, which has the cast-off left to do.) Maybe it should have been sent off sooner. Maybe it is the right time for her right now for reasons I cannot know; maybe it was simply easier for it to arrive after she finished moving (which is what I was aiming for) or maybe that’s all just rationalizing my lateness. I don’ t know.

But it’s finished and it’s finally into God’s hands from mine: a silk and merino shawl in her sister-in-law’s pattern, the yarn coming from my favorite shop, which is, of course, Purlescence.

Karen plotted with me and it will show up on Sally’s doorstep next week.

(Silly timestamp. Wrong time zone.)

You know you live in Silicon Valley when, instead of knitting after Knit Night, you help solder some electronics to help the husband create himself a toy when a funky angle needs a third hand. It’s the equivalent of his holding the hank of yarn while you wind. (That’s his ham radio in the pocket: he’s a Red Cross volunteer.)

For those looking for a new copy of “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls,” Purlescence now has some at the cover price. I haven’t signed them yet, but I certainly could be talked into going back into my favorite yarn shop.

And that red or blue question? Blue.  Totally the blue.

I’m going to punt on the wordplay tonight (although, I might say that throwing out the department store ads that come with the paper like I just did before you even look at them is a Kohl-ectomy, and running them through the shredder will get you Kohl slaw) and go straight to the knitting: 15 rows today and I’m ready for the edging and into the final stretch.

6735 stitches.  And each one counts.

I cranked up the stereo to knit by and wondered when the mockingbird will be doing a Dan Fogelberg impersonation?

Earlier in the day, clearly the hawk dove in for his mourning meal. Michelle Millar writes that doves have a lot of dust in their feathers that they leave behind when they hit something.

It had imprinted on this house as its place of safety but discovered it to be a bit of a pane.

And yet I do think it had a ghost of a chance. I found no flurry of feathers. From all I can tell, it escaped the worst and it lived.

And the mockingbird de-clears the stained glass artist a one-hit wonder.

(Thirteen rows today, twenty-eight to go.)

As I ice my hands…

If you remember this story. (Seriously–don’t miss it.)

The one thing to add to it is that Gigi herself had started that first shawl, test knitting for me early on in the process of Wrapped in Comfort, and I should have given her credit for it publicly in that post. She’d returned it to me with the yoke finished and enough of the body done to prove the pattern was written correctly, but, feeling she was just never going to get it done, she let it go. Wistfully.  So of course I finished it and gave it to her; she’d thoroughly earned it, by her friendship as well as her work–and it was such an easy way to make her so happy!  Then I finished the second one for the publisher.

It came in handy in the end, too, definitely.

Now, I’ve known Gigi’s son-in-law since he was dating her daughter Jasmin. He’s a peach; that expression on his face when he opened that door that night said it all (but I already knew that).

And so when Gigi commented that she was “Off to show my love and affection to the son-in-law by heckling him,” after reading my post on teasing, I found myself breaking into random giggles all day today–I know how much those two love each other!

I got a note from her this evening: “I think I almost killed him tonight, he was laughing so hard.”

Dying laughing is what it’s all about in the first place. Together, and happily so.

(Meantime, the knitter mumbles, 445 stitches per row on the laceweight, got 12 rows done today. Halfway finished.)

I happened to mention to my husband the other day that while I was down in San Diego last weekend, our son was teasing his mother-in-law.

Now, by that I took for granted that he knew I meant a good-natured teasing, and he did; any other type is simply not in any of us.

And my husband’s response? He took it as a sign of closeness between them, answering me simply, “You don’t tease people you’re afraid of or that you’re not comfortable around.”

I’d never thought of it quite in those words, but yes, exactly!

p.s. With thanks to the crochet-y Suburban Correspondent for the heads-up, go here if you want to see a car that is Smart-ly at-tire-d.

YES!!

Boy, that was quick. The folks at Cottage Craft had me wait a bit while they dyed more, not having enough in the same lot, and then threw in an extra 20g as a thank you for my patience. I was surprised and very very delighted. I’d bought enough for one of my shawls (a few more skeins than shown) and now I have a little extra breathing room just in case.

Is it as soft as the stuff Rachel spun up for me? No, but hers was 100% qiviut from the raw fiber, painstakingly dehaired by hand. This is half merino.  Still. This is well carded, well spun, a fragile, fine fiber made as sturdy as one could ask it to be, and I wish I could reach out a skein to everybody through the screen and go oooh, feel this!

I do still have to go finish that baby alpaca project first, and it’s in laceweight so it’ll take me a good week or so.

Meantime, my friend Krys did a grocery run for us tonight.  We are quite grateful; Richard seems to be coming down with my germs.

p.s. and Karen? If you think you recognize that background, you do: that’s the dogwood quilt you helped tie for me around the time of our high school graduation.  Dogwood trees are rare out here but prized because, though the trees grow slowly, their blossoms last a very long time. The pink ones are, as they have always been, my favorite.

A few more thoughts on the cochlear implant.  I’ve lived through brain arguments. Once was when the brain was telling me up was in two different directions at once: the right one, noted visually and muscularly, and the other ever and forever to the left, falling. It KNEW, just KNEW… No you don’t know! Stop it!

After my car got smashed into ten years ago, I had to learn how to walk despite that inner screaming match. I still fall down when there’s too much or too unfamiliar visual stimulus throwing me off unless I can counter it with enough tactile feedback. Hence the cane. Sticks not groans will brake my bones.

And there was a short while there where I had to wear an old hearing aid and a new one with differing sound responses. It was hard not to feel irritable, sitting in church trying to listen to the speakers and music while finding my consciousness being jerked between one side incoming vs the other, unmatched and unmeshed.

So I have some background experience keeping me from rushing into the implant on one side thing. And yet… Writing yesterday’s post showed me I really have been needing to simply go ask more questions and stop hanging back from finding out more. And I need to try to find out during this open enrollment period whether it would be covered.  Some do some don’t.

I also realized, as I answered comments yesterday, that I will always be able to plug the hearing-aid side via wires I already own into an Ipod (note that I don’t quite own an Ipod yet, but that can be fixed) and listen to my music that way. It won’t be communal listening; my children will exclaim, No no that’s *quite* all right, Mom, do NOT worry about that!

Heh.

It’ll all work out.

Meantime. The feeders were deserted today. I didn’t see the hawks, although one had clearly taken prey from one of them before I got up. No sign of the neighbors’ cats. I knew the wildlife is aware of far more going on than I, but it was pretty quiet out there.

So I scattered a few nut pieces outside in the afternoon, bringing me Instant Black Squirrel at last. Just one.

I’ve noticed that if a squirrel pronounces all-ee all-ee in-come free, it’s safe, the birds follow immediately. And so it was. Instant flock.

I’ve wondered about that. Is it because squirrels have a sense of smell for an extra layer of warning, which birds, flying through the clear air, don’t really need and don’t have? Do the birds watch the squirrels for tail flicks? Clearly they do.  Michelle Millar in her “The Birds and Beasts Were There” is convinced that the birds who never returned to her after the great Coyote Fire in Santa Barbara had simply died in the night, asleep and unable to see or smell the oncoming disaster.

Don’t know. I do know, when I’m willing to share a few stale nuts with a squirrel, my birds come back to me.

Meantime, (I know, I’m meandering like bird hops here) I’m picking up steam and back to knitting again. I celebrated with baby alpaca, wanting to wrap this project up before my qiviut arrives.  Knitterly FYI: I bought a skein of their arctic blend, which I’m told will be back in stock in six weeks or so, and it passed my test: yes, it is totally de-haired and very soft, as anything with qiviut in it should be, and so I ordered the 50/50 to try that out too. If you hear a delighted squeal of YES! at the doorstep, that will be me with the box.

And I will crank the music up high and knit.

I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’ book “Musicophilia” today. Sacks writes of various patients he’s known and of the neurological reasons for why they experience what they do. I got hooked on his writing years ago with “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.”

One of his patients in the new book (wait–going and checking–he just put out a newer book last month, reviewed here) is a woman in her 70’s who, after losing enough of her hearing that if she couldn’t see your face she couldn’t hear you, she finally went ahead and had a cochlear implant.

And it was as the audiologist told me: her hearing for speech became normal and she was thrilled. He noticed that she was free now to look around the room as he spoke and she followed everything.  Her voice modulation was normal too because now she could tell when she was speaking too loud.

But it was also as I have feared and why I haven’t pursued the idea yet: she had totally lost all sense of music in her environment except for what was already in her brain from memory. There was certainly plenty of that at her age, and he speaks at length of how music is stored and handled within oneself and even of how Beethoven was probably better able to concentrate to compose after his deafness was complete.

Looking at Wikipedia, there are 16,000 hair cells in a healthy inner ear, and an implant substitutes (permanently and irreversibly) for all of them with 24 electrodes. Ouch.

But what if one ear is the old way with an aid, with all its limitations, and one the new? Can you have it both ways?  I guess one of these days I’m just going to have to find out.

Hmmm. *checking* Nope. Still sick. Still being boring. But catching up on some of the reading I’ve wanted to do. For the record? “The Birds and the Beasts Were There” is laugh-out-loud funny at times but I was looking up a lot of bird photos and descriptions to know for sure what she was talking about.

My parents would be pleased with that, and rightly so.

There were a couple of obviously sick people on my flights on Saturday and now I’m doing the cold/mild fever thing myself and taking it easy.

This morning, I got an email from my childhood friend Karen (Water Turtles shawl Karen, yes) that, though she didn’t know it and didn’t know I needed it, challenged me to be positive with her simple question, had I seen any good birds lately?

I glanced out the window wistfully, thinking,  not since the juvenile Cooper’s swooping hunt in front of me that I will forever associate with Smokey. That was really cool.

Just a few moments ago as I write this, a sense of motion caught my peripheral vision, though, and I turned: there was an adult Cooper’s with its striking blueish and white striped head, regal, huge, that had just landed on the dolly that is outside on the covered porch from where it got left out after hauling something or other back and forth to the car.  It was still there because someone (ahem) had mused to herself that it was out of the rain and you know, it might make a possible moment’s perch sometime.

Indeed.

It was facing me. Holding still.  Given its size, I’m guessing it was a female.  (They’re bigger than the males.) I admired the hawk’s long, wide-striped tail; in the moment I thought that, it casually stretched it wide for me in seeming yawning response, slightly gap-toothed to the left where a feather was growing back in. (Yeah, my hair’s been like that too after last year’s everything…)

It regarded me, turning its head to the side a bit for a closer look. It lifted one foot a little off the cold metal but not high enough to show it was relaxing the way birds do, and then having said hello to cheer me up, took off for the warmth and stealth of the tree branches.  Besides, how are you going to catch that squirrel when it’s cowering between the legs of those chairs in the way.

The squirrel reappeared under the feeder almost immediately after the hawk left.

Careful, little guy. We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner here.