Hey, KarenL, remember helping me tie this quilt in high school with the frame set up in your living room? Simon and Garfunkel playing in the background: Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., and I forget what the other album was.

Michelle’s comment about peacock tails got me reaching for peacock colors afterwards. I knew I was about to go off to Stitches, about to go buy gloriously gorgeous new yarns, but I just couldn’t have a day without a project!

Yeah, well.  I way overdid it with my hands on that chair Friday. (Thank you, Sam, so much for taking it over on Saturday!)  I simply had to wait, with all that lovely yarn staring at me, not that I wanted to confess that to the blog. Not Going To Happen Right Now. No Knitting Allowed. Heal.

Today was dark and stormy, the kind of day for curling up with a good yarn; I was doing better and gave it a go.

I’m actually glad now that I have something in my way that will take me a good dozen hours to finish up:  time to be creative in while keeping my mind open to what the first of the new wants to be when it grows up.  I knit so much and with so many yarns: they come, they go, it’s on to the next.  But, unlike some skeins, I don’t want to just play with these from Lisa, Dianne, and Melinda–I want them each to be in the perfect design from the get-go. They’re just too pretty not to be.

Knitting time. Thinking time. It’s all good.

(Oh, and yes, I found our certificate from when we tied the knot. Phew!)

So the hubby comes home tonight and opens his mail.

And now we know the details.

To all those who think employer-based healthcare plans are the pure and only true path to medicine? Given my medical history, insurance is a subject close to home here.  Are you sitting down?

My husband and I are celebrating our 30th anniversary this summer.  Thirty years ago, with both of us having grandfathers on the political scene in DC for decades, they knew everybody, they had us invite everybody to the reception, we sent out 500 invitations and 500 people actually showed up! We were standing in that receiving line for three and a half solid hours with no breaks in the flow of humanity, most of whom my new husband and I didn’t know, all these people taking the time out of their lives to come shake our hands and wish us well.

We solemnly promised our own children we would never do that to them.

I guess one could say now that we had a lot of witnesses, having no idea we might someday need them. (One thank-you note, on the other hand, was returned two months after the wedding as “recipient deceased.” That was fast. We might be in trouble here.)

My husband’s employer, a Fortune 500 company, now says we must produce our marriage certificate, and fast, or they are cutting off my medical insurance on the assumption of fraud.  They are doing this to everybody.  We claim John is our son? We’d better produce the birth certificate and prove it, and his school transcript, too.  We have to order the license or the birth certificate from the states they happened in? Oh, those states are furloughing workers and are weeks or even, in California’s case, months behind on all paperwork?  So sad too bad, you’re out.

It took California over ten weeks to process my auto registration payment, and that’s when they were in effect getting paid money by me to do so, and not just some nominal fee.  Okay, yes, we have the kid’s birth certificate, but not his transcript.  And what of all the people who don’t have a copy on hand for their kids?  Or of their marriage certificate?

I so much want to ask the CEO, whose own insurance, I am sure, is in no way imperiled: exactly what kind of corporate culture do they think they’re trying for here? Are they familiar with the term meta-message? Could you shake each employee’s hand, look them in the eye, and convince them you were wishing them and their families…well?

I’ve stalled out.  Too many choices.  (Embiggen for full effect.)  Too much that wants to be knit all at once, right now! (This is Saturday’s Creatively Dyed haul, minus the duplicate skeins. In order: Waterfalls Hang laceweight, Steele sockweight in Tull, Spanish, and Jasmine, and Waterfalls laceweight Elegant.)

There’s only one thing to do: *Make a choice, set the rest aside and put it out of sight.  Knit the first project, bring out all the beautiful skeins, repeat from * as needed.

It’s a wonderful problem to have.  Even the Roomba got carried away by the yarnly possibilities and stalled out. (Hey, you, gimme back my bobbin, where’d you get that.)

That reminds me, the squirrels? This round went to me.

Two days away from my usual spot and it was a squirrel war on my previously-rodent-free birdfeeder. And they are emphatically copycats: if one does it, each one in the vicinity has to try, just like little kids: Well, but HE got to, so why can’t *I*?

Yo? Did you see your littermate hit the ground running from up there when I opened the door? It couldn’t have been fun.

So today one was keeping an eye on me, judging to see if I might walk away out of sight so it could have a go at that awning pole and then go leaping across to the food from there. Like I didn’t know exactly what it was thinking–I’ve seen them do a “Mother May I” game, running a few feet forward if I turn my head away, freezing if I turn back to see.   They charm me so, the little toddlers.

What he didn’t realize was the neighbor’s cat was watching him intently from halfway across the grass. Not stalking him; more like it was watching the wing-and-foot show and noting where future snackage was to be found should the need arise.

I opened the door and squirrel, birds, and cat fled to safety.

Those black squirrels’ preoccupation with me and that feeder was Darwinizing them.  I took some aluminum foil. I taped a short length of it to the pole opposite the feeder–nothing harmful in any way, but nothing for agile little feet to pitch their in-tent from either.

Went off to church. Came home to find crinkled foil, still holding–someone must have tried from below–and a little black squirrel sitting among my amaryllises on the picnic table, staring longingly up, wondering if maybe, just maybe, he could make the leap from over that-a-way.  All that lovely, lovely millet and sunflower seeds.

Not a chance. (So far.)

I’ve been staring at this blank page.  Where to start.

(Maybe if the yarn weren’t all in hanks. But it is. And I am too tired to wind it up into balls.)

But still.  All these glorious, glorious yarns and colors.  And a thank you to Dianne’s husband for running out to their truck for my Waterfalls Elegant hank from their stock.  Where to start.

I tell you, it’s going to be a very fun year.

I got to see Lisa and Rod, so dear to me for so many years, and Sheila.  Dianne.  The folks at Blue Moon.  Karen at Royale Hare, Melinda and Tess at Tess.  I got to meet the folks at Malabrigo: to my surprise, I found myself in a conversation in French at one point, but we all spoke yarn. And I got to see so many, many friends who were simply walking around trying to take it all in, too.

To Jasmin‘s brother Sam, who pushed me today, sparing my hands and arms for knitting, Michelle and I plan to get that manufacturing cream on Monday–you earned that chocolate torte! (Recipe in comments, actual cake forthcoming.) Thank you!

And I have now held an actual vicuna-blend hank of hand-dyed gorgeousness, 15% vicuna and still in the qiviut-ic stratosphere.  Which is a good thing. Pay those South American ranchers well.  Shear a wild vicuna, save a vicuna by making it worthless to poachers, save a species–well done, Peru!

And someday I will afford some and knit some.  (No, new skeins, that wasn’t a sheep shot.)

(Knitting needles as models have limitations. They’re always trying to make a point.)

“You know nobody’s going to see my shawl. They’re just going to look at that hat,” I told Michelle.

Truer words… I was planning on taking it off after I no longer needed it for warmth nor to keep my slightly damp hair away from my hearing aids. But on it stayed, because all day long I had people stopping me and wanting to comment about what was on my head and I do have this ego thing going on. Had I designed it? Where could they get the pattern? It was a doodle?!  One told me, “I’m a piano teacher!”  I laughed over the ignored Tara pattern and got told by one knitter, “There are a lot of shawls. There is only ONE piano hat!”

Well, no, actually, there are two. But I rather doubt the surgeon who got the other one minds.

Yarn: merino laceweight single ply in a base like Malabrigo’s, from Tess Designer Yarns; blackbewwie sock!merino, very soft and just the thing for shawls, sapphire baby alpaca laceweight, and Lake Superior silk from Lisa Souza. And no, that’s not all; Dianne at Creatively Dyed and I had a delightful time together.  Uh, yeah. She would confirm that.  Definitely.

Having rather un-chair-itable thoughts at certain battery packs that cost $150 a whack and then don’t recharge, because it’s a use-it-or-lose-it and I didn’t try to since…um, Stitches… (Wait, that would be TWO years ago, Sam was pushing me last year ten days out of Stanford. Right. Okay, then.  Never mind.)

Back to the manual one. At least I’ve finally got a much-needed new cover for thisssss old thing.

I’m not sure why I find myself wanting to catch up on old yarns as Stitches approaches.  But I do.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I bought a wholesaler’s closeout of natural-brown 90% cashmere 10% nylon cones at–are you knitters ready for this?–$15/lb, and I bought ten pounds of it, all they had.  And then they found a few more in their warehouse and I bought those too.  They were giving it to me at their cost to get rid of it.  It needed a strong washing, and not just for the mill oils.  It was single-ply and cobweb fine, impossibly fragile; I plied it on my wheel into all kinds of useful, stronger thicknesses, scouring after spinning, and I made so many things out of it for several years.  Afghans, yarn that my mom knitted up into the most glorious Aran sweater, you name it.

Till I was down to the very last few pounds.  The idea of actually running out of this resource after all those projects… The rest of it kind of got tucked away, waiting till I could bear to let it go.

At some point, though, I wound some off, 64 g here, 66 g there, and threw them in the dyepot, one into a little red, the second a bit of purple.

And then those hanks, too, simply sat there.  I certainly didn’t do any spinning last year with all the stitching they did on me.

I got some Handmaiden laceweight silk awhile ago. Hey. While I was working on the shawl in Cashmere Superior and Dianne’s laceweight, the fuzzy and the colorful, I wondered if this new silk would look good with those two, and it would definitely add strength…

So today I tried it.  Plied the cashmeres first, then the silk around the other two. The yarn is balanced; no twisting in the finished skein, it hangs straight. So my being so out of practice didn’t hurt it.

The silk glistens, the cashmere fuzzes around it.  160 yards, drying now, waiting.  There’s a whole lot more, potentially, where that came from.

Another round shawl was laid out, blocking… And Michelle came home and walked into the room. She stopped. She considered it a moment.

“The peacock called. He wants his tail back.”

Watch out, the kid’s pretty, wired right now.

They teach us patience when they’re little so that we have it on hand when they become too big to scoop up into our arms and make it all better with the simplicity of a hug.

A young mom with two adorable boys ages three and one-something and one on the way was one of the speakers at church today.   Her topic was repentance.

She said there had been an incident, (for which the details were irrelevant because the whole thing was so universal), but basically, her older boy had done some behavior in public that she had felt in a moment of fatigue had made her look bad as his mother.  She’d been cross with her sweet little boy.

And then she’d felt horrible.

Okay, is there a single mother out there who can’t relate to that?  Who doesn’t understand that yes, you are the mother and yes you should be in control of your own reactions, but who nevertheless gets what it’s like to have little ones out in public acting normal for their age in a society that looks down on them unless they’re behaving like little adults with an absolute decorum that even adults don’t always master, to be sleep-deprived, tired, pregnant, and–well, just plain needing a moment in the time-out corner oneself. With perhaps a good pillow.  Or a mug of hot cocoa and a little me time.  You know, I got seriously back into knitting when my own kids were little: it was something creative and of my own choosing, beautiful, and–this is important–that Stayed Done.

She described repentance as being when she and her pride have a stare-down contest in the mirror.

And so she’d apologized to her little boy for her flare of temper.  He, of course, had simply thrown his arms around her and told her “I love you Mommy!” with the complete and utter adoration of a small child. Total heartmelt.

She likened God’s forgiveness, which so easily blesses us when we seek it in acknowledging our shortcomings, to the pureness of her little son’s.

And I sat there and thought, and the other thing God gives us? Grandparents for your children. I include in that category anyone whose own little ones are bigger than they are by now, who remembers the days, who would love to be charmed by that all-NO!-ing toddler, ready to smile or play or sing them out of it to give the moms a chance to regroup.  Even just a smile in a needed moment can make all the difference.

Totally count me in.  That’s what I’m here for.

If anybody here doesn’t already know, Stitches West is next weekend at the Santa Clara Convention Center.  If you have ever had any desire to hold a skein of yarn in your hands in your life, and you can in any way make it there, go!  Inhale the wool fumes! The colors, the creativity, the sheer size and enthusiasm of the crowd of fiber lovers.  Heady stuff.  (Not to mention parking is free; what have you got to lose?) Come check out that silky new yarn made out of sugarcane fibers! (I kid you not.)

It used to be held in Oakland but it completely outgrew the place, and the last year there, the organizers learned that they needed to go to online ticketing after there was a two and a half hour line just to pay the entrance fee to get in the door.  We are not few. I didn’t mind; I could sit in my wheelchair–necessary for long days out–and knit and chat.

There are classes, there’s the market, but what I love best of all is getting to see people I never get a chance to see at any other time. It’s all about the friendships, and they grow from year to year.

Speaking of which. I flashed that picture of Cashmere America fiber at the interwebs the other day, hoping the lady that ran that booth might google and see it and come say hi.  Then I googled her co-op and found that Cashmere America had gone out of business–no wonder I hadn’t seen her nor her booth the last few years. I miss her.  If she reads this over there in Texas, I hereby wave hi a little louder.  You are part of our community, and you are missed.

No project! (I know, you heard that line a few days ago.)  So I grabbed some yarn and my book on my way out the door, figuring inspiration would hit me one way or another.

The Newsweek also in my bag didn’t stand a chance.  I was a few rows into a Concert scarf, (Fleece Artist, very soft Wool Silk, one skein will be plenty, I’m 20 g out of 100 and 15″ into it), sitting in the exam room for a quick appointment to catch up on some old questions and fill Dr. R. on where things have been since the last surgery.  Waiting…

…And he walks into the room.  Looks down at my hands. “You’re knitting. This is such a surprise.”

I think he’s on to me.

Julia rightfully warns of carbon monoxide poisoning. If you go here, you’ll see why I’m so glad she brought it up.  Yesterday, a little too personally aware of the subject, we had the sliding door open just enough for the cord to pass through and kept the generator as far from the house as we could manage.  We have definitely had a CO alarm since that day 24 years ago.  I’m glad for that warning to be out there for others before, rather than after; thank you, Julia, for that.

On a more fun subject. More stitches and more rows than last week’s shawl, another five-day project, I did it! A ball-anced life, definitely.

I got home from Purlescence and Michelle asked me, “So how was your cult night?”

I explained to her that they’d just gotten a long-delayed shipment in of some of my most-favorite yarns in my most-favorite colors. And I hadn’t bought a single skein. (I didn’t add, “yet.”)

She looked at me with big eyes, and asked, “How did you DO that?”

“Stitches is next week.”

She guffawed. Busted in advance.

Our city has a reverse-911 system, and so, this morning, the robo-calls began.

Treat all intersections as a four-way stop. And avoid driving!

I got up, wondered, got in the shower anyway, planning to make it very brief just in case, and–Richard knocked on the bathroom door: It’s the city (another robo-call), to say, Don’t take showers!

Rinsing as fast as I can!

And it made me think once again how much water is my insulin.  Since the colectomy I can’t absorb a lot of it anymore and I have to constantly replace what the body is resisting.  Come to think of it, we hadn’t replaced the emergency water in the outside earthquake-preparedness containers in years. Ick.

No ‘Net here.  Even the landline didn’t work, except for the 25-year-old AT&T desktop that drew its power from the phone line.  The ones with the recharging bases kept telling incoming callers the line was busy, while the cell phones were iffy.  Ham radios won the day–John had his on, monitoring in case the Red Cross should need him.  Meantime, the city called Richard in to help run the emergency communications center. He’d gotten his ham license after his aunt’s house had been a half mile from the Loma Prieta epicenter in ’89.

(Okay, the funny part of his coming in is that they had everybody wear these vivid yellow vests so everybody would know who was who/doing what.  When he got home, I tried his on–it fit me. Note that I am 15″ shorter and a whole lot smaller around than he is.  Yeah, oops.)

Michelle had to take the car into work, because she sure couldn’t work from home today, but at least the traffic lights worked most of the way in that direction. I wrapped up with my knitting in much-needed blankets created by the hands of my wonderful friends; John curled up with a good old-fashioned book.

And every now and then, we opened the fridge.

Backing up a bit–last fall, our friend Ken sent an email: there was a grand opening special that included this type of generator at this price. Richard looked it up, went, wow, that’s better than I ever expected to get for that much, and we snagged the last one.  It had bothered him a long time that we didn’t have one, and now we finally would.

So now we’ve tried it out.  It was far quieter than I’d expected.  The fridge and freezer were good to go.

It was the dumb little things that kept tripping me up; I wanted a mug of hot cocoa fiercely in that cold, to the point even of debating moving the big microwave out of the kitchen and wrestling it into the middle of the family room floor where the cord could reach the generator’s plug-in.  (The generator itself was safely outside.)  Maybe John could strong-arm it for me?  But it seemed like a really bad idea all around and we voted against it.  Don’t overload that thing.  He admitted he’d checked out the Starbucks when he’d gone for gas to power the thing, but they were closed down–no hot chocolate there, and you just didn’t want to be on the road for dumb stuff.

And then, like I say, the car went (carefully) off with Michelle anyway.

One commentator I read allowed as how everybody in town had taken the day off to enjoy the warm California sun, and I thought, ?! Where are you typing THAT from!?  Okay, granted, compared to, say, DC’s snowmaggedon, but, it was in the low 50’s this morning.

But all of this is just noise, and stupid noise at that, compared to what others are going through that they’ll never be able to turn on the lights again and have it just be over with.  To the folks at Tesla Motors, makers of my dream electric car, and your families–our whole city grieves with you in your losses.

And marvels at the skill and care of that pilot in landing on that crowded street with only one wing left, in such a way that despite all the people present in that neighborhood, somehow nobody on the ground was hurt.  You knew you couldn’t save yourselves, but you did everything you could and so you saved everybody else.