Writing this while awaiting our election results to start to post.

The doorbell rang this afternoon: a young woman doing some last minute canvassing for Proposition 50.

She was too young to remember the days when voters fervently wanted this stupid gerrymandering to be over with and, after years of trying, got a proposition on the ballot that neither party much wanted that set up an independent redistricting commission. Its members were required to be balanced between the parties.

But we did it and it passed. The districts finally made sense. We don’t have seats like what Georgia did, where Marjorie Taylor-Greene was certainly going to lose her first re-election bid so their legislature ran a rope down the cliff to swing it around in a town an hour south.

Today Schwarzenegger was claiming credit for that commission. No, sir. We did that.

So you would think Prop 50 would fail–but what is often skipped over in the national press is that this wasn’t imposed on us: the voters were being asked if the voters wanted to temporarily suspend our commission and adopt a map specifically in direct answer to Texas’s non-Census-year attempt to wipe out Democrat-held seats there. Right there in the official Voter’s Guide, the why of this, and what that new temporary map would be.  We got to choose the districts. Come the next Census, we would go back to our commission, or before, if we said so. We decide.

Texas having put a literal bounty on the heads of women fleeing its draconian laws, making no exceptions even for molar (turning into cancer instead of a fetus) or ectopic, there is no way we’re going to have them rule over us on a national level.

We already voted, I told the woman, but the smile on my face matched the hope in hers and I added, Absolutely, we voted for it, and thank you for doing this!

We had two other things on the ballot: the tax assessor’s office that was surprisingly important and a 5/8 cent sales tax to cover the Federal cutoffs to the hospitals to keep the smaller ones open and the larger ones fully functional.

I don’t like it much, he said last night as he filled in the Yes circle.

I don’t either, I said as I filled in mine, But we have to take care of the poor among us.

That was a given for both of us.

Now to go hit refresh on those California and local results… Sixteen minutes after the polls closed and they’ve already called it: 50 passed!

And now it’s finished, because…

Him: We need to go to Urgent Care.

Me: Blink. Right now? Are we in a hurry? Do I have time to use the restroom first? Find yarn?

Today…

I had to figure out fast what the next carry-around project was going to be and to grab a second needle for the decreases on the current one, because the last time he threw me like that ended up in super-long waits at UC for two days and then his five days in the hospital.

After being on antibiotics since August, they had taken him off last week. And now one toe was turning raw again.

It was a quiet day at Urgent Care and they got him right in. Back on the boot and the toeless sock, after a single day of covering that foot in his favorite bison silk sock and a normal shoe for the first time in all this time. Back on antibiotics. Back to the wound care specialist who told him last week that it looked like we were done now.

(P.S. And then we ran just now and got our ballots in at the box to make up for all that. We voted! Man, it feels so good.)

Two conflicting thoughts:

I have a lot of Malabrigo Rios.

And two, I thought I had a lot more. (The greens, how could there not be more greens. Maybe because I keep using them all up.)

I do, actually, I have a couple of dyelot bags of ten and I have close to this many more individual balls that didn’t make the cut: I was sorting out the ones that had noticeable brown or black added to the dye bath. I wanted bright. (Which is why that lavender from an indie dyer.)

I’m not sure all these will still make the cut and there are a few that are so screamingly loud that they risk being that stuck key on a piano that demands the hands hit that one note again and again, visually speaking.

Most of these are leftovers from the ocean afghans so they’re not full skeins.

But what I do know is that sometimes you have to stare at something awhile and sleep on it a night or two while it seeps through the brain before you really get going on making something you’ve never seen before.

Which is why the plain-and-fast Mecha hat I started last night is almost finished.

It’s your decor, I texted my sister, showing her colors but no details, and your choice. Do you want bright? Or subdued?

Subdued, she wrote back.

I’d been thinking more and more that she would; I’m glad I asked. The one I knitted last year does match her paintings better.

My fingers were getting antsy after spending yesterday and today trying to figure out what the next big thing was supposed to be. All this yarn, all these half-baked ideas, no sense of certainty.

I cast on a new one tonight because the Matisse Blue said that even if I knit it early last year it was next. I told Richard it was to make Y design. But Z is already going Hey! No, me, ME! I counted the stitches again to tell it to hush.

Let me go knit a single row while I remind it that I, in fact, am the boss of me. Not my yarn.

Sometimes.

We almost never get trick or treaters. We always hope.

It’s the day of the hat, the Cat in the Hat hat that makes him about eight feet tall. After all these years of being scrunched into a box 364 days a year, it was just slightly wrinkle-ish in the middle but once it was on his head it stood proud and tall in its fine bright stripes, trying to make his intimidating height into a relatable and good thing from a small child’s vantage point.

Not once on the doorbell.

I just walked in the other room where he was and guffawed. His hat! (While he looked at me like –What?)

The top half had fallen in on itself and then flopped over. Like a tired kid on candy overload needing to be put to bed and put over its parent’s shoulder as they carry their little dragon home.

(Now if I can just get a photo of the finished afghan to come through here.)

I grew up near the C&O Canal and always walk part of it whenever I’m back home. So historical footnotes on the subject tend to get my attention.

How is it that nobody ever taught us this one?

At the beginnings of the C&O and the Erie canals, and after traveling to Niagara Falls where he saw a ship run aground and all that had to be done about that, one bright young man foresaw the problem in the canals if the water should get too low in one section.

So he thought up a device to lift them. Someone made a model of it for him and he submitted it to the Patent Office, where it got approved.

The inventor?

Abraham Lincoln.

Radiology department. They took him to the exam rooms for awhile. Sent him back to me. Made him wait. Made him drink something. Made him wait. Ran him through a CAT scan.

The waiting room was very small. There were five chairs, full most of the time; the receptionist let someone take the sixth chair next to him from time to time since no one else was on duty just then. Except for when there was.

I had two hours to knit quietly.

I had put on a green turtleneck this morning, and before we’d left had decided the only gerdan I had that really went with it was the huge sunflower one. (Photo is from when I got it.) It’s kind of loud, but–why not. It might make someone’s day. So I did.

Two women came in. They were clearly mother and daughter, the ages of mine and me.

The younger woman checked her mom in and settled her in a chair in the other corner, standing next to her.

And from there she glared at me.

I considered whether to offer her my seat. But the only place I could go other than where she was standing just then was behind the door swinging open, and I cannot stand for long periods of time and it would be weird to move over close to her mom in her place. There was no other spot, there was no room.

Just then they called Richard back, so hey, that makes it easy, there you go.

She tended to her mom a moment and then returned to glaring at me. Standing. She refused to come sit next to me.

Huh. Okay, whatever.

My knitting did not distract her eyes, though the receptionist or her mom did a few times. Right in the eyes. I’d never seen her before in my life. I was the only one she glared at and that glaring was what she wanted to do with her time. It struck me as unspeakably sad. And yet her mom smiled quietly at the staff and was clearly grateful for their efforts. I was glad I had wool and wood needing my attention and distracted myself with thoughts of some future happy recipient loving that shade and softness.

Finally they were called and the mom shuffled painfully, slowly down the hall with her daughter looking out for her. Good for her.

I mentioned them to Richard on the way home. They had passed him in the hallway, turned out, with the daughter translating for her mom.

He voiced the same thought I had had, the only one that made any sense: maybe they were Russian. Maybe they have a son or brother fighting.

We do have a number of Russian ex-pats in the area.

But why, I wanted to somehow ask them, would you find fault that a stranger supports people who don’t want to live under Putin’s murderous rule when you didn’t want to either and you got out?

Grabbed a random ball of yarn and needles and went with him to his doctor appointment, started another hat in the waiting room, got home, picked up the afghan, and now the third side of the edging is done.

All that is left is to rib out–now there was a Freudian slipstitch of a typo, as I decide to leave it there–the too-white beginning edge of the lesser-cashmere-content yarn. I finally no longer have live stitches elsewhere to worry about. Umpteen stitches, eleven rows.

So close.

I decided what I wanted to finish the most was the two hats for the two eye surgeons. I’m not going to see either one for two weeks, but you never know. (These are a tad darker in real life.)

So there you go.

I got to meet Bethany and Nick!

My big sister said her friend was moving to the area and we both told the friend that I’d love to meet her.

Today was the day.

I had no idea what to expect but still, I was kind of picturing someone about Marian’s age.

They looked younger than our kids, and came here for the same reason we did years ago: the tech jobs. They arrived with a gift of ripe lemons from the tree next to their ADU.

The four of us swapped stories for a bit, older Silicon Valley meeting new.

Looking out our window, Bethany was exclaiming over the trees and I offered a tour.

Yes please!

Blueberries, mandarin, pomegranate, sour cherry, apricot, orange, mango, sweet cherry, peach peach peach later-ripening lemon peach peach plum apple apple fig and tucked way over in the far corner over there, a pear.

Did you plant all these? they asked,

All but the lemon and that apple that died and the rootstock is starting to come back up. (For the second time. The Yellow Transparent is my zombie that refuses to stay dead.)

We had completely lucked out in getting a big (.2 acre) yard with a southwestern exposure for all this; it was a for sale by owner, a bit of a fixer-upper and well under market. If only I could replicate that affordability-plus-yard for them!

There was clearly some serious desire to dig in the dirt, and they offered to come help in the garden any time.

I’m looking at my sweet cherry and thinking, biennial crop because I didn’t thin two years ago? Is that why there was so little fruit this year? How about you do a big burst again next spring? One needing some thinning, and then help harvesting? I want an excuse to see them again and to let them come have all they’d like.

Meantime, I sent them off with some pomegranates, and they were as delighted at that as I was at being surprised with their lemons.

I could see why Marian spoke so highly of them. I liked them from the moment we opened that door.

Many many moons ago, there was the annual December Birthday Club party (we unwrap a present we got ourselves and sing Happy Birthday To Us) where Virginia, who always got something funny, gave herself a hand mirror.

Only, when you picked it up it activated two things: a light sensor and a laugh track. (This is the closest I could find to it.)

Put it down flat, it’s silent. Pick it up to check out that wisp of hair out of place and it guffaws at your vanity. Loudly. Busted.

It was hilarious and I had to know where she’d gotten it. Alright then. So I ran down there and bought one for my dad for Christmas, because there was no one who could laugh like my dad.

How to ship it across the country, though, between the glass and the electronics.

An arriving package solved that problem: it was full of those (hated) styrofoam peanuts.

I took a plastic grocery store bag and filled it full of those peanuts and slipped the box inside and tied the top, then put that inside a larger box with other stuff for the folks with the bag safe at the center of it all.

I got comments from my folks Christmas day about how that was such a good use of those peanuts: they didn’t go flying all over the room when they opened the box, they cushioned everything while at the same time they were contained. Nice. They talked about the other stuff we’d gotten them.

But what about…? I had to know and finally asked, That bag. Did you look inside it?!

No, why would we?

Dad…

It had been tossed. It got retrieved.

And that is how I later got told that Mom and Dad threw a party and Dad snuck that mirror onto the long low (mid-century modern and all that) side cabinet to see who it would catch. Which of course it did. Thankfully the victim had a great sense of humor, and the friends of my parents I knew growing up all found out where that had come from. Busted right back.

Virginia loved that story.

And I mention all this because I got my Aftober Prize of No Particular Worth ™ from Afton today: the ever-changing annual item in celebration of having finished a project in October that everybody in our online knitting group looks forward to every year.

I opened the envelope and went oh that’s cool, I like that. Put it down and walked out of the room.

A few minutes later I walked back–and spotted what was now half-hidden in the rug. Oh wow, look at that!

I’m not going to describe it because others haven’t gotten theirs yet, but, it had been well packaged and hiding inside that envelope and then flipped out without my seeing. I almost never knew it was there.

And I laughed and laughed and missed my dad and thought of my mom (I can just picture her going Oh you didn’t at Dad when she heard that laugh track going) and of Virginia too, gone about 25 years now. Look what she started.

Thank you, Afton!

I couldn’t do a thing about the destruction of the East Wing of the White House so I scrubbed and cleaned and made my own better today. And then read up some more on the candidates on the ballot.

The guy who’s been the property tax assessor for 30 years finally retired at 84, triggering a special election.

Do we vote for the “only I can fix it” firebrand with no relevant background nor expertise but lots and lots of glossy fliers in the mail? For County Assessor. Since when is that such a big expensive race.

Oh wait.

Or the experienced lawyer who knows this subject inside and out and took the second in command job when the old guy was fading, who then had a man promoted over her as “acting commissioner” who’s running too now while she’s the one actually running the 250-person office and updating the systems per the local reporters. She’s taken on the big tech companies who’ve been snapping up buildings in a big land race between themselves and then fighting their property assessments by suing over billions of dollars at the same time that Proposition 13 from the 1970’s has already shifted most of that tax burden off corporations and onto homeowners. And now the richest companies in the country want to pay less. She’s on it.

Just where does all the money for all those glossy fliers for one person coming from nowhere who knows nothing about the job come from?

We have to pay attention to the local races.

The A-fib thing when he was in the hospital: cardiology put a heart monitor on him after he got out to see how well the meds were working.

Two days later, it fell off. Just, plunk, on the floor just like that. Now what do we do??

They had a solution I’d never heard of, although it took a long wait for an operating room: an implanted monitor, good for five years of readings. About the size of the tip of a matchstick, they said.

(Can’t we just buy an Apple watch? I guess not.)

Looking at the incision tonight he said wryly, Y’know, they didn’t say whether that was a wooden matchstick or a paper one.

Get there by eight, they’d told him; we’ll have you out by about 11:00.

Last night I considered dragging the afghan there and decided emphatically not. I went stash diving. Did I find a ball of yarn for the rheumatologist I wrote about yesterday? I did not. What I found was just the one, it felt like, for the cataract surgeon. I had a few already-done Mecha hats but none had ever felt quite right and this skein in my hand demanded to be it instead. It totally was the boss of me.

In Rios. In ribbing, like for the retina guy; they’d operated together, let them be twins.

It felt so right that I didn’t even mind doing the 1×1 stuff again. I figured I wouldn’t get very far during his operation but at least I’d get some of it done. I cast on and did two rows before bed just to give it a running start.

Heavy traffic. Different town. Eight o’clock. Signed in. Waited.

They finally called him back, and once he was set up on the gurney with his pretty new bracelets they called me to come join him while they waited for the surgeon. (It always amuses me that at every surgery setup I’ve ever seen, spouses are not allowed to be there to watch the other undress for it. Ever.)

It was after eleven when a nurse pulled back the curtain and basically said, You guys still here? Let me go check on that doctor.  …Followed by, She’s almost ready. She had someone ahead of you.

Waiting…

I read a news article on my phone from time to time to give my hands a rest. But I did learn that I can knit on size 5s comfortably for longer than I can the larger sizes; I’d forgotten that.

But then it’s been a long time since I’ve done a six hour long block of almost continuous knitting.

Two more inches, then the decreases. And here I’d thought it was going to take me a week.

Eighty stitches, 1×1 ribbing throughout, Malabrigo Rios, US size 5 needles.

Last week, I was sitting in the waiting room at my cardiologist’s working on this when who should come out but my rheumatologist.

He wasn’t expecting me and didn’t see me with my mask on so I called out his name as he went by.

He spun around in delight. I introduced him to my daughter. He looked at the knitting in my hands and exclaimed, “Oh, that’s pretty! Who’s it for?”

“The doctor who operated on my retina two weeks ago,” I told him, realizing as I said it that, wait, in all these years, I’d never knit anything for *him* and I’d known him a whole lot longer.

If it occurred to him he never let on. He cheerfully said to Michelle, “If you live long enough you’re going to need two things: a cardiologist and a rheumatologist.” And then he laughed at his own joke.

But it WAS funny, because the last time I’d seen him, a year ago, he’d sent a message afterwards marveling that “After all these years, for the first time, the ANA is negative.”

ANA being antibodies to the nuclei of one’s own cells, ie the single most definitive marker for lupus.

So I’d lived long enough to, in fact, not need him–assuming that holds.

“The system is fluid,” he told me years ago when I asked if an allergic reaction now meant one forever because I had seemed to have had less of a one on an exposure, and I’d thought it always went the other way, ie getting worse each time. Curious. I’ll take it!

Anyway. So today I finished all but weaving in the ends for this other guy.

Maybe there’ll have to be an appointment made, remission or not.

Or maybe I can just drop one off at the desk in his department with a thank you for looking out for me all these years.

I’ll have to actually, y’know, decide on yarn and colors and knit one before I can start debating delivery methods.

I knew they wouldn’t be anything near Andy’s but they were pretty and I was missing fresh peaches. What I’d forgotten, though, was the likelihood that Costco late-season US-grown ones would be clingstone. And clingstones that had never been allowed to ripen.

After several days, they were beginning to soften up but the nose knew. Oh well, that had been a given all along.

They held onto those pits like a toddler guards its favorite toy, and when I finally managed to work them loose, my peach halves lost a chunk of their innards.

I scraped the mashed-up bits off as best I could and put them back in the centers.

Hey. I filled the centers with raspberries. Melted a quarter cup butter with maybe a bit more than that of brown sugar and some cinnamon (lemon would have been good, too–next time) and spooned that over the raspberries and took their pretty picture and then baked them for about an hour.

Stuffed peaches, there you go. Is that a thing? It is now.

He needed seconds to use up his ice cream. As one does.