It had such a pull on me and I tried to figure out why. Yes it had the curved shape I prefer: for twenty years now I’ve used a shepherd’s crook-style cane and twirled it like a cheerleader with a baton to shift it onto my arm when I need my hands free; it’s just an extension of my body by now. Plain, practical–and the wood was starting to crack at the curve right where the weight of my hand goes.

So I ordered a pretty one. I love it. But you can’t twirl it, you have to hold it, and I find it easy to accidentally drop. (Not a friendly-looking move.) Reluctantly I find I save it for church. As I said to Richard today, Sometimes you find what you need by buying the wrong thing first. (Although I do not regret that one, even if it’s unwieldy when you’re not actually walking.)

So yeah, this one was cool and it reminded me of the Monterey Bay Aquarium and it had a long enough of a curve–hopefully–not to fall off my arm doing cool cheerleader moves.

But since its artist was in Ukraine there was no way to try it out without paying for it.

There was a video on one of the listings of the guy whittling away at the wood to create his designs: the (sold out for now) Great Blue whale at the crest of a wave. There’s a shark with teeth, a more simply carved killer whale.

Or a gentle blue dolphin.

I didn’t *need* this. Although, for the price, I could get another cheap rustic crooked crook probably from China just like the old. Meh.

I debated for a week before finally caving.

It wasn’t till ten days later after checking the tracking many a time that I realized why it had been so compelling.

That was three days after I had finally started working on the abandoned afghan again. The indecipherable red blob whose chart and plans were long gone had by then morphed into a fish I really liked, the whole thing finally taking on life and becoming delightful to my hands and eyes. I had needed that for so long.

It was the cane that did it. And I hadn’t even laid eyes on it in person yet. Maestro Syvatoslav Lashkiv’s art had at long last offered the spark to revive my own. Since I began it several years ago I’ve thought this afghan would need a dolphin near the top of the water, like the previously knit ocean, because, well, I like dolphins.

I kind of held my breath hoping the cane would live up to my hopes, too.

It came today. The blues swirl down its back like light on the movement of the waves. Like the ocean itself laid out before the eyes of all those grieving homeowners in LA: the Pacific is still there for them. The tides, the sounds, the water, stillness and motion all in one.

It always will be.

Unasked for but included was an unobtrusive arm band to attach if I wanted to, or not, so that this cane will never have to be dropped. But the choice is left up to me.

My cousin Kathryn’s funeral was held today; I watched by Zoom.

Her sister recounted how she always knew everybody’s birthday, always connected with anyone she met, and she had always had a note, a card, a message ready any time for anyone, and added, “And she’s probably sent one to you.”

I realized with a surprised start that that’s exactly what had happened and I felt the truth of it in my bones.

Because yesterday I had reminded myself that the funeral was at noon and Do. Not. Miss. It!

Suddenly, as if in an aside in the middle of an ongoing conversation I felt the words, Remember that’s 11:00 California time.

Whoa. How could I have been so dumb as to forget to notice that, and how had I suddenly remembered in spite of myself?? Because I was sure *I* hadn’t remembered, and yet–yeah, no way was I going to forget now! And I didn’t.

Her sister was right. I would have been devastated to have missed it, especially after not having been able to go in person.

So Kathryn made sure I didn’t.

Our niece’s childhood home, per fire reports given the family, is gone.

My nephew has a mother-in-law unit downstairs that walks out to their garden, a beautiful spot; last Monday my sister and her husband were there from Atlanta helping our mom to move in. Mom is great at taking care of herself but at 94 she needs not to be alone anymore. Her young great-grands are looking forward to having someone who’s not their mom helping them with their homework and reading to them, and my niece-in-law is a treasure. So’s her husband.

They also own a house in southern California that is a rental, which I totally get: it is an aphorism here that if you ever sell your house in California you can never afford to move back. So. It had a plumbing problem.

So said nephew left Gram in his wife’s good hands and flew with his folks to fix that thing and my sister was looking forward to a little California in January.

Which is how she found herself taking pictures today as the smoke came closer and they were packing the car and then suddenly the fire itself leaped over the mountain top and came barreling down at them from less than a mile away in the Santa Ana winds as they rushed to evacuate. They were turned back three times because of the spreading flames. Official guidance: Go this way! No, no wait, don’t! Traffic was gridlocked.

It took them four hours to get off that mountain and get the wildfire behind them. But they did it. Our niece, meantime, had booked them a hotel room from the get-go so they had a place to land.

I debated adding one of my sister’s pictures here and thought, nah, the last thing she needs right now is me pestering her for permission, that is just not something she should have to worry about right now.

I don’t know how long it will be before we know if the house is gone–but they are safe. As of this typing there are zero known deaths from the fire. Praise be.

Octopuses: how the oceans doodle fireworks displays.

Two rows a day, I promised myself. About 45 minutes each. That’s all you have to do. And I have. A right-side row then a wrong-side row so that you’re ready to see it clearly on the right side again the next day and to plan any new colors or motifs from there.

It surprises me how much shows up below my needles when I just keep doing my one small part for the day. I have finished two fish.

I also know that the further along it gets, the more I see how it’s coming out, the more I’ll be able to see how I want the rest of it to come out and the more I’ll be working on it. So it’s okay to be slow in the initial discovery process.

(Photo: about a third of them.)

There’s a big zipped storage bag that’s been moved around again and again these last four years. It had the leftover yarn from the original ocean afghan. It had the added deep royal skeins for the background of the coral reef one. It had the leftovers of any Malabrigo Rios seen coming or going since those were started.

Some of it had become a tangled mess.

Today was suddenly somehow the day to just go deal with it.

Every ball that needed it is now rewound. Every tangle is banished. Every yarn is ziplocked away squished in with its nearest peers and only then put back into that big bag. I know now what I have, I know for sure what I don’t have, I know none of them have room to run around and cause problems again inside those, and I know how to find exactly the color I want amongst the dozens of others. Greens here, blues here, purples…

And it all started with wanting a close but different shade for the next section of coral. All the times I’d gone through that bag, I stared in amazement, I had not seen that one; how could it be so.

Then a sense of determination: so what else was hiding in there?

And now they’re not.

Cottage Yarns (they have more Malabrigo than anyone I know) is a few miles down the freeway from San Francisco Airport. I dropped Michelle off and then went to go make up for the fact that I ran out of Mecha yarn for Zoom mindless hat knitting at Thanksgiving and had not been up to making the drive in all that time. I could now.

Three future hats came home with me. I resisted so much temptation. But that Mecha is part of my usual Sunday evening Zoom knitting group: I can read the captions and be part of the discussion and knit at the same time.

I glanced at my email after I got home and there was the tail-end of a discussion that had started New Year’s Eve’s Eve, fellow knitters promising not to buy any more yarn for the rest of the year because they had enough in their stash. Then today, someone so proud that she hadn’t bought any yarn this entire year so far! (Keep the joke running!)

I laughed–and then suddenly went, wait a minute. I did!

And then was surprised that that surprised me.

And yet. It wasn’t online nor impersonal clicks. Face time with friends you know and love and want to support doesn’t count towards one’s skein count. Right?

There will be more knitting time after her plane leaves tomorrow, but that doesn’t make it any easier to see her go.

She was describing the weather she’s returning to and I grinned, Yeah, when we were heading back to Logan Airport from our house hunting trip out here and the pilot announced what the temp was in Boston, I muttered under my breath, Turn that plane around!

She laughed. Brrr. She was totally with me on that one.

Happy New Year!

Begin as you mean to go on, I told myself.

For so long I really didn’t want to do this but I really wanted it done. Now I was actually starting to want to work on it. That made the turn of the year a great reason to dive in.

I untangled all the balls and finally actually didn’t just stare at the thing but did that first row on the resumption of the coral reef afghan for New Year’s Eve, and then again today. Forty-five minutes a row. Five rows to the inch.

If only I hadn’t lost all my sketches and early chart-outs. If only I could see the end from here it would never have been left waiting like that.

But–I’m beginning to. Just a little bit, but the surprising thing about doing that one first row was that the two areas where I had no idea what I’d been doing several years ago or how those blobs were supposed to make sense, suddenly I did. Glad I hadn’t ripped it back. All I had to do was go at it and wherever it was in my brain knew. It just knew.

The Miyoko (vegan butter) had come to room temperature for the cookies, but she’d forgotten and suddenly realized she had to do XYZ before leaving for the meet up with her friends and–oops.

I can bake them, I offered.

She texted me a recipe to squint at and, being so much my child, told me of the things she does just a bit differently. Triple the cinnamon. Double the vanilla. Use chocolate chips instead of raisins. One cup of flour, one and a half cups of oats, old-fashioned, not quick (did that). Half sugar, half brown sugar.

Then she ran to do that errand that had to be run.

Even embiggening it I had a hard time reading it and my phone kept turning itself off fast.

Every cookie recipe everywhere says one teaspoon of vanilla, so okay, I put two. And then found the recipe said a half? Who puts a half a teaspoon of vanilla in a batch of chocolate chip dough? Too late.

The Miyoko went squish when I tried to cut it. Much better to have a bit much than not enough if you’re not sure. Cold butter you can displace in water to check the measurement, but warm Miyoko? No. So let’s add maybe that’s a tablespoon but who can tell.

The big Costco brown sugar bag had never been opened but nevertheless was fairly dried out. I mostly filled the measuring cup from it and used a little white sugar to fill in any gaps–so much more flavor than plain white. Plus I wanted to squish as much as I could of the rest into my small OXO container for it and be able to securely tie off the rest of that bag.

It calls for baking soda and baking powder? Why do people do that to perfectly good cookies? (I actually went looking for the baking soda but I so dislike the taste of it that all I had is that five pound bag under the bathroom sink along with vinegar for clearing out drains and darn if I was going to pick that up to wreck a perfectly good batch of cookies. Double the baking powder it is–like the vanilla, it had only called for a half teaspoon of each in the first place.)

The second sheet of cookies came out of the oven just as she was walking in the door to get ready to walk back out the door.

She tasted one. She pulled a face.

Did you triple the cinnamon?

Oh! Dang. Sorry, no I didn’t.

Weak, she pronounced them. Needed more cinnamon.

But quadruple on the vanilla! They’re vanilla oatmeal chocolate chip cookies!

I did not tell on myself over it being almost all brown sugar. Some dire secrets are meant to be kept close.

Man, it’s good to have family visiting! And man did I get a lot done. Kinetic energy squared!

My hubby helped overbuy on frozen foods on Thursday, I told C at church, and there was no room for the chocolate torte in there anymore. It got moved to the fridge, where there wasn’t really space for it either; it had to go. Could she take it off our hands?

She couldn’t believe it. She told me if I wanted to cut off a slice for myself/ourselves first she was totally fine with that. Were we sure??

Her kids are home for Christmas break and I knew that getting rid of the whole thing was not going to be a problem and that it’s one of her favorite desserts.

But what I said later as I dropped it off at her door was, My daughter’s in town. She’s allergic to dairy–but she remembers how much she once loved these.

Ah. We were not eating it in front of her. Got it.

She sent me off with some oranges she’d just picked from her tree in happy anticipation of sharing back. They are so good.

You know, I thought to myself yesterday while cleaning out the back of the fridge of stuff that had been ignored while I was sick from Thanksgiving until a week ago, The chances of someone showing up at the door go up astronomically when you wash something really stinky down the sink (turning on the disposal to try to be fully rid of it and debating tossing the washable Rubbermaid containers. Where’s the baking soda.)

Those were pretty bad. The stuff in them should never have been saved over the five days we were going to be out of town at the time, much less since then but were because I had been too flattened to do any kind of a deep dive in there after we got home.

It felt so good to get to it and have a clean fridge at long last–even if the kitchen didn’t quite smell like it yet. Yow.

I stepped out of the room a moment and didn’t hear that doorbell and wasn’t the one who answered.

I am told it was the new next-door neighbor, showing up at our door for the first time, bringing oranges from her tree and not just homemade chocolate chip cookies but ones with grated peel from that tree and man were they good.

There’s a pocket door between the front door and that sink but it’s almost never closed, so we’re talking a few steps apart. First impressions and all that.

I imagine it’ll be a story to laugh over with her and her husband for years to come.

She’s home, she’s home!

I hadn’t heard of the Cube Rule of Food? Oh, Mom, she told me, you’ve got to see this!

And now you get to.