I ordered more Rios. I have to wait a week to find out if it matches well so the baby blanket can get bigger than 43×40″ (I will knit in alternating dyelots if they’re really close) or if not, the two new skeins will become a mostly-matching outfit while I go buy a contrasting color to put in ribbing all around the thing: I like my baby blankets generous. I’d bought all that Golden Fleece had in that lot, hoping 840 yards worsted would do it. It won’t.

My son told me tonight that my daughter-in-law had been secretly hoping I would knit something for the baby.  I just might.

So. Back to Lisa’s Blackbewwie.

I measured and was sure I had enough to do just one more pattern repeat. It’s always nice to see how far a yarn will go, right?  I know my electronic scale gets a little wonky the closer you get to zero, but it looked like I would have two grams left over, maybe three. That’s cutting it far closer than I like, but the results held steady.

I decided to give it a try.  I confess to knitting perhaps less loosely than usual–I had visions of having only a yard to spare.

It took me three hours to finally cast off, not because it took three hours to cast off, not because I couldn’t bear to see, if, if…  but simply because I could.  No worries.  Clearly, looking at that ball at the very end, I had enough. Alright! Six grams left over! That would be about 30 yards.

Then I threw the shawl in the bag. Done! At last! Two weeks to knit that. I never take that long, but it was 1090 yards of light fingering weight and 72 rows of 439 stitches on smaller needles than I often use and it simply took a lot of time. (Not to mention there was this other project…)

Go do something else!

Like that lasted. Out with you. I was curious.

In the crumpled tinfoil stage, I got 12.5″.  It is now drying in the other room at 26″: add a little water and it’s like Wile E. Coyote after the steamroller went through.

And here I am bouncing back up again and off to the next.

After much trial and error on the baby blanket that did the sturdy Malabrigo Rios not the slightest harm, I ripped to the beginning yet again today and went back to the pattern I’d started out with in the first place.  (After going up three needle sizes on this fifth attempt; I’ve been out of worsted-weight practice.)

This is what I’d wanted all along:  Barbara Walker’s “Dragonskins” pattern. Good and solid, and what it needed to be.  Because every little boy deserves to be dressed in dragons.

I wanted to go back to reading one of the most important books I have in a long time–Greg Mortenson’s Stones Into Schools about his work setting up a school for girls as well as boys in one of the least accessible areas of Afghanistan. He is one of those rare people who changes everything.

It’s up there (only at distinctly higher elevations) with Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr. Paul Farmer, the Harvard doctor who set up a medical clinic in Haiti. And then a school. And then decent housing. And so on.

Still, I had a deadline I wanted to meet. I kept going at that Lisa-yarn shawl till I finished the third repeat, the end point I was going for, but found I have enough yardage to do an edging after all. Well, cool!  So much for being done tonight.

Wonder if I’m too old for sneaking a flashlight under the covers.

With thanks to Margo Lynn for the heads-up: I have to show you this. I’m just glad the birds’ cameras didn’t catch on anything, especially the goshawk’s while going through those trees Star Wars style. Wow.

I was in the Martin Luther King library in San Jose once when one of the peregrines from the nest across the street suddenly flew down the narrow treeline along the side of the building, so fast I had to blink a moment and question whether I’d even actually seen it–I knew I had, but it had gone by too fast to even begin to make out anything other than the sheared-off vision of speed.

(Oh, and, while we’re at it: a few Eagles. Congratulations to my sister’s sons!)

I heard it from both sides today.

Our friend Jean, Marguerite‘s mom, flew off to go visit her grandson, Marguerite’s nephew. He’s in the bishopric in the student ward where he’s finishing his doctorate.

And there, sitting in that church in Ann Arbor, was our daughter Michelle.

Jean has known Michelle since she was a year old.  Both of them had this jaw-on-the-ground moment of, What are YOU doing here?!

The answer, of course, was, finding themselves feeling very, very loved and treasured and suddenly very much at home.

So: January baby. Cold climate. Needs warmth. Right? I keep thinking of the Afghans for Afghans campaign, where they specifically say, We need animal fibers for warmth and we need the patterns solid, no yarnover holes.

Nice and solid first baby blanket attempt: I think you could have arranged it in a circle and had it stand upright like a box.  A little too earnest in the endeavor–not to mention, using 20g to get less than an inch, um, we’re not trying to create bulletproof here and there isn’t *that* much Rios Solis. R i i i p that hour and a half’s work.

Then, frog four rows because I changed my mind again.

Now it’s back to about 45×4″ so far, and I keep dithering. It’s the background pattern to this blog, with the M1s turned into YOs.

It’s lace. Not a very open lace, but still, there are holes. And after 23 years of living in California, having fled 75″ of snow in 17 days, my memories of Cold with a capital C might be a tad warped. Should I start over again? Should I go up one needle size even more to let the fabric relax a bit more (the yarn would say oh thank you thank you very much) and just think of it as an indoor blanket?  I’d get a bigger blanket if I did.

I keep thinking, oh just wind another ball and start again on the 9s and don’t tell the 8s you’re doing that till it’s too late and the 9s are going hahatoldjaso and the 8s are screaming noFAIR but they lose.

Or something.

You know, if I’d actually swatched *any* of these ideas…

Hey! How about that Lisa yarn over there?

I finally put the Rios down to just let ideas simmer a bit while I went and read. I needed to relax about this and not try to knit thirty things at once. This is a baby blanket.  This is not (name your favorite major political crisis.)  This is just a few skeins of good wool. And when it’s all knitted up, honest, there will be more.

I know, because the more is sitting there drumming its fingers over there wondering why it didn’t get to go first and trying to tell me shhhh, Lisa’s!

I explained yesterday’s post to Nina and told her, So I have to choose the blackberry flavor. She laughed and allowed as how, yes, I did.

We were at (psst–Nina–what was the name of that place? Miriam’s? Marianne’s?) Makes all their own ice cream. In Santa Cruz.

Nina’s on the email list of the Golden Fleece yarn shop down there and they were having not only Malabrigo Rios in stock as of today but were putting it on sale–IF you bought ten skeins.

The hottest new yarn out there, with a lot of stores on a waiting list, and an incentive to go buy lots of the stuff? Hey. Turns out some of her customers showed up last night to see if the box had arrived yet, it just had, and they were going through it before the owner even got to see in there, picking out their favorite colorways they’d been waiting for.

Meantime, no way no how was I going to go buy ten skeins of yarn right now and I doubted the two of us together could, either. But I wanted some Nina time, and I do like seeing Malabrigo in person because the colorways have enough variation from dye lot to dye lot and you know how it goes…

(I can just see all the knitters nodding, oh yes, we know how it goes…)

Rios is the yarn I’ve been waiting for all this time that I snatched up that test-marketing skein of in April.  It is THE softest merino worsted I have ever come across.  Superwash, too.   Someone (thank you RobinM!) gave me a heads up that Webs had it now: I’ve been watching that page–they got some in on Wednesday and it is going fast. (Guilty as charged on the credit card. I did not know I was going to get an email from Nina right after I did.)

I did not need to up my supply in Santa Cruz. Really, I didn’t.

And then we got there.  I have a grandchild on the way, and new moms need good warm things for their babies *that they can throw in the washer*.  (Because at 4 am after the baby’s already gotten you up twice it’s probably going to end up in there anyway just because you’re too tired to think straight. I vividly remember a knitting grandmother I know scolding her daughter for turning the baby blanket she’d slaved over for x months into a, quote, postage stamp that way. I want my knitting gifts guilt-free.)

You see that photo in that old post?

Golden Fleece had that exact colorway.

They had it in two dyelots, and when I separated them and stepped back, it was clear they really were separate dyelots.

They had some of their sock yarn with that same Azules nametag on them, and it was markedly different. Not baby friendly, either; much darker, and where did that almost-black-in-this-light streak come from?

I have some Azules coming from Webs.

I have no real idea what it will look like till it gets here.

I want to start serious baby knitting, like, NOW.

You can see where this is going.

And so I bought the Solis green.  To match that hat I made.  And that’s it!  (Yeah right.)  I bought the Azules, to have  on hand for sure the colors that were exactly the way I wanted.  If that means an adult gets a Webs-yarn vest to match our little one, worse things have happened.

We stopped for ice cream on the way home, because it was another Santa Cruz institution Nina didn’t want me to miss, and I picked the flavorway I did in Lisa’s yarn‘s honor.

Which I now need to finish up, like, really really fast because I got me some serious Rios knitting to do.  Twist my arms.

Hey, Lisa? Your Blackbewwie  Sock! Merino is coming along nicely on that second ball–about two more days and I’ll be done. (Colorwise, mine is between her Blackbewwie and her Mulberry photos and the yarn is soft with a lot of shimmy and shine to it.)

When the first of my nieces got married years ago, my brother, parents and I flew to Seattle for the wedding and before we left, we ate at a restaurant that served me the most perfect one-person mixed berry pie, the best comfort food one could ever hope to find. There was just barely enough crisp crust to contain all that good dark fruit; it was a meal to remember all by itself.

That yarn color reminds me of that constantly as I knit.  I keep wanting to go make berry pie! I aspire to make one as good as that one was; I’ve never yet achieved it.

Or maybe I could at least zap up some berry sauce and let it start to melt a little ice cream to celebrate when I finish this project.

It looks like I will go right down to the last 25 g or so of that wool.  Small electronic scales are very useful for measuring how fast a yarn is disappearing into the fabric.

Went to Purlescence with an old friend tonight and got one whole long row done. Too much listening and laughing to get more done just then.

It was needed and it was perfect.

An exit interview I found interesting, even if I often don’t agree with my uncle’s politics. Gotta love that secret CIA/Senate committee briefing in the secret room because Patrick Moynihan wanted it scooped on the front page the next day.

Note that my uncle’s son is helping the Democrat candidate’s campaign now that his dad is out. It’s the candidate that matters far more than the party.  Go Jim!

—————–

Update: PG&E was awarded nearly $5 million by the state three years ago specifically to replace that high-risk pipe that later blew up. PG&E did not replace it. They did, however, give that much in bonuses to their executives. And now they’re asking for money to… Yeah…

Go lawmakers go! This is the kind of thing we vote you into office FOR!

And then they grow! (Our older son, the father, being 6’9″.)

Okay, so, just to distract you from the rant below: I made great headway on a new shawl today but at one point put it down, picked up the tiny hat on the tiny needles that make my hands tingle to work on, and simply did those last few rows. I needed the satisfaction of having it done. The bluegreens are deeper (and I think prettier) in person.

Just looking at that tinyness makes the idea of our coming grandson more real. Richard looked at it and was reminiscing over newborns, holding his arms as if to cradle the little one right then and there.

We can’t wait!

This is not a feel-good post. My apologies.

PG&E has gone to the California Public Utilities Commission, pleading that their liability insurance costs are 4x after the big wildfires last year: those fires that were sparked by unmaintained PG&E utility lines brushing trees in their right-of-way, which should have been trimmed by them and were not, causing arcing. They specifically want their ratepayers to reimburse them for fires caused by their lack of maintenance on their lines.

The San Bruno gas pipe that exploded had had a sewer line criss-crossing it that was replaced two years ago by explosives bursting it outward as a new sewer pipe went in.

This was a few feet from the high-pressure 30″ gas line.

Which PG&E said it inspected afterwards. According to the local newspapers, when pressed hard this week, they admitted no, not internally they didn’t, not that stretch of it, and no the type of pipe was not now up to code, no it shouldn’t have had that seam, that’s not standard, no, we didn’t know it was corroded. Because we didn’t look inside that particular section after the sewer work.

There was a homeowner whose walls cracked after the same sewer company used that same method near his home in Millbrae. (He sued, they settled.)

PG&E just spent nearly $50 million in ratepayers’ dollars trying to push a fraudulently-presented election measure that would have given them monopoly status and shut down many cities’ efforts to go green. When Prop 16 failed, they tried within days to get regulators to let them raise rates to cover the amount they’d spent on that campaign.

Think how far that money could have gone towards trimming trees that make the power lines arc. Towards replacing old and substandard pipes.

PG&E is trying to look magnanimous towards the homeowners whose friends and neighborhood they just blew up by offering them money they want their customers to then have to provide. Again, they want their shareholders to have a direct disincentive for holding them responsible for maintenance and public safety. As a friend put it, only the profits are privatized.

One of those who burned to death, Jacqueline Grieg, was a CPUC regulator of their lines.

Now they want her co-workers to make her heirs have to help pay for killing her.

Utter, bitter, classic chutzpah.

One might think the CEO who’s running the corporate culture of Pacific Gas And–the word that unfortunately leaps to mind is–Evil would have the sense to wear a little financial sackcloth of upgrading equipment and getting the actual work done that the public pays for while so many of San Bruno Mountain’s families, the ones still alive, stand among only ashes.

Fire the guy. And CPUC, please, do right by us all. In Grieg’s memory.

Bathroom: eh, floors could use a mopping next.

Towels: in washer with a goodly amount of bleach.

Plumbing (which otherwise hadn’t been used in awhile, thank goodness): FAIL.

Bathroom floors: all nice and bleachy-smelling and fresh now.

Plumbing, after careful tests with small amounts of water over several hours: seems to work peachy fine now, no need to call the plumber yet. The cotton must have had a hairboll.

Me: Um, gee, thanks, old house.  Sort of.

We had our twice-annual stake conference today in the town just north, wherein five wards (congregations) come together for one really big meeting. Lots of old friends there one rarely gets to see and lots of unfamiliar faces, too.

When it was over, of course, there were a whole lot of cars leaving all at once. One woman, younger than me, dressed in a rather tight skirt and medium heels, walked past us as we waited to exit the lot. I assume she was walking home to somewhere nearby rather than adding one more car to the mess.

As we got onto the road, there was a side street right next to the lot with people exiting from that, too, a traffic jam, a light ahead we were all trying to get to, and that woman was a goodly ways up ahead.  Walking never looked so sensible.

When, there in a brief patch of unpaved gravel where some work had been done, suddenly, she fell. Hard. Immediately two cars pulled to the side to rescue her, and we would have too but they beat us to it. I have no idea who she was or who they were, but a young woman was leaping out of the first car and, after a moment’s pause for taking a deep breath, was helping her carefully up. Clearly the older one was in pain, because they kept their arms around each other’s shoulders as the young one helped her to her (or possibly her parents’?) SUV. We will take care of you.  We will not leave you alone.

I felt for the one who fell (and that skirt made the fall more difficult to control–there’s a reason I like mine loose-flowing and long, but then I *know* I’m going to do some falling from time to time.) But whoever you are who pulled over, I wish I could tell you, thank you.  You helped all of us up.

(Ed. to add: I had a photo I was looking for for this post but stumbled across this one first.  When I shot it awhile back, it rather annoyed me that my straight needles in their holder had reflected in the window.  And yet.  Yesterday, it was striking to me that that reflection looked like the top of one of the Towers, with the needles as the cell-phone antennae that had been on the roof.  There/not there, with the peacemaking birds as the intended subject of the picture several months ago.)

Watching the various species that have been coming up to my porch and my birdfeeders the past 17 months, I’ve learned something:  each of the territorial types chases after newcomers of their own species.  There is plenty of food for all but when the level in the feeder gets low, I seem to get more, not fewer finches, as if suddenly they need to make sure there’s enough for them even if they have to fight to get to it.  They often do not all come back after I refill their supply; they just seem to need to know it’s there.

But do the towhees feel threatened by the doves? No. Do the doves feel threatened by the titmice or the adorable little Bewick’s wren that flips itself around by the tail?

No.  Even when they eat the same sunflowers or skitter around the same area: they only feel a need to establish dominance over the ones the most like themselves.

(Then there was that remarkable pair, the little junco feeding his ladyfriend finch that I got to watch over several weeks.)

We are all most like each other.  We need to get to know one another better for the fear of the different, of the unknown, to be replaced by our common human ground.  I loved this article (thank you Margo Lynn).

We are better than birds, and it is said that He knows even the sparrow in its fall. And I have to tell you that, outside their native European element, sparrows are absolutely terrible to those around them.  But He knows them too.

There are no strangers before God.  All He asks is that we live as best we can by love as He freely offers love to us, however we may understand the life He has given us.

Remember when I said I needed more rice bowls?  Mel and Kris answered and offered to drop by with some today so that I wouldn’t have to be out in the sun at Kings Mountain Art Fair.  They are *such* nice people; I couldn’t wait to see them.

RobinH emailed last night to say she was in town (she lives near where we used to in New Hampshire) and could she stop by?

Hey, let’s have a party!  And so it was that I got me some wonderful Mel and Kris time and then I got me some wonderful Mel and Kris and Robin time, and chocolate torte and much laughter was enjoyed by all–except, next time, Kris, I promise to bake something celiac-friendly. Does anyone have a good gluten-free cake recipe they would recommend? (Kris, if you want something other than chocolate, chime in for me, because I’m intending to put that same ganache glaze on it for you so you can finally have some.)

Robin was working on a sock and also a gorgeous green Aran that just grabbed me, and it took me a moment to figure out why my reaction to its heathery greenness was so intense: my mom had knitted just that coloration in an all-over diamond pattern for her father when I was a kid. He had wanted something formal looking, something he could wear in the halls of Congress without his suitcoat on and still be proper.

Mom couldn’t find yarn thin enough and ended up buying fingering weight in the form of–are you ready–needlepoint yarn.  Size 2 needles.  It took her a year. He wore it for decades, till he died at 95.

I watched that sweater coming to be and I adored it. I begged Mom to knit me a sweater next, and she let me pick out the yarn. And of course I wanted it in that pattern.

Worsted weight and much bigger needles and much faster, but yes, she did.  Now that I know what I asked of her…!

Mel and Kris headed out to Capitola for their next show.

I had to laugh, though, when Richard came up to the front door and a woman not his wife cheerfully pulled it open for him with a grin of Hi you live here don’t you.