Don did look up my blog a day or two after  he got home from Trader Joe’s. He did read my entry about him and his beloved wife, who passed away November 11th.  And then he asked me if I would read the part of that entry about them at her memorial service the coming week.

I said absolutely–that he could hold it at 2 am and I’d be there in her honor and his.

And then my Crohn’s went bonkers.

When it’s like it was last Saturday, a single swallow of even water can create an effect like a bad case of stomach flu; fats make it worse. (An aside–I wouldn’t mention that here, except that I want to explain to the several kind people who offered me the cake that was chocolate in memory of Don and Amalie’s wedding cake back in the day.  I did think it was a wonderful way to celebrate her. It was hard to pass it up.)

But I was going to that celebration of life, and there was no way I was going to let a little thing like Crohn’s stop me.  I did give him a heads-up just in case, but I was going.  It eased up enough, and today, (thank you dear God!) after being extremely careful all week, I got to go hear stories on one of the good influences and good friends of my younger life.

I did have to chuckle at one woman’s asking me, before things got started, if I’d met Amalie at the Senior Center.  I didn’t tell her I was only 49, although part of me was tempted to grab onto that number and dangle it in protest, as if it weren’t 364/366ths of the way towards its expiration date.  I mean, I know the hair’s gray and that there are good plastic surgeons in California, but… Too funny.

I loved the story Don told of when he proposed: “Will you marry m”YES!!!”  He chuckled and said it was exactly like that.  To which I wanted to say, well, of course; Amalie knew a good thing.

Don, am I allowed to share the one about her not coming out at the “Here comes the bride” music being played in your friend’s living room because she was still trying to decide which wedding dress to put on?  The friend popped her head in the door, Amalie asked which one looked better, the friend pointed to the one on her (because, um…) and exclaimed, “THAT one!”

I hadn’t thought they had any children, but then, there weren’t waterproof hearing aids to wear at the pool back in the day; they had a son who is clearly as gentle a soul as his good parents.  He noticed that other people had someone to sit with whom they knew, and I did not, so he sat across a table from me and we shared a bit of the day together.  When I struggled to hear, he was entirely patient with that.

His good parents raised him well.

I dearly wish I could tell his mother that in person.

Although, in a way, I think I just did.

After writing a year and a half ago that we hadn’t had any gopher plants come up in years, this summer a seedling somehow popped up, so now I can show you what they look like.

Next, these cheerfully declare each year that December is for green and yellow in California.  They’re just starting to bloom, and they open up in the light each morning and then pull the blankets over their eyes at night. They totally charm me.  And if there should be a freeze, the plants look for awhile like all is lost–and then they grow right back up and bloom all over again, declaring the season theirs and not to be wasted.

My kind of plant.

I was on my way to the post office today and pulled over to snap what picture I could get, curious that one pond in the marshlands here was full of birds (enbiggen to see them) and the other had none in sight.  For whatever it’s worth, the one big fire we had in town last summer was at the city compost heap, that long low mound in the upper right.

I have a fondness for gophers, and I love how this last picture resembles the fur on one.   On the other side of the street and down a bit from where I pulled over to snap the baylands, there was a gopher mound.  One that made me laugh, albeit a tad ruefully, for its sheer ambitiousness: there was a paved bike path.  Then a grassy strip, then the two-lane access road I was on, then a busy freeway with eight lanes’ worth of pavement, and the mound was between the access road and that freeway.

I wondered how many times, tunneling under the path and then the two lanes, the gopher had tried to come up for air or to see if it could finish its tunnel yet and had hit hard pavement with its paws or head.  Nope, that doesn’t work. Keep going.  It had finally made it all the way to where there was soft dirt on top and green growing things and new flavors of roots to chew on.

Good thing it could go back to where it had come from.

I got a message out of the blue yesterday from a friend I hadn’t heard from since high school graduation.  Turns out she’d been looking for how to contact a classmate I’m in touch with who’s been quite ill and who I’m sure was thrilled at being offered pictures of them in first grade together.  Then today, another long-lost classmate sent me a hello too.  I tell you, in great delight: you CAN go back where you came from!

I didn’t get this person today at the lab.  Someone else won.

One friend suggested hot tea for all that ails a person.  I don’t drink tea, but I could take that idea and run with it–I zapped and boiled a cup of water with a tablespoon of sugar.  Squeezed a lemon from the backyard tree.  Poured the syrup (calling it that is a bit of a stretch) into the lemon juice.  Voila: I didn’t cook the vitamin C out of the lemons, the sugar didn’t all sink to the bottom but was completely mixed throughout, and it was nice and warm and good on a chilly day. Tart, definitely tart.

My daughter in Vermont missed being able to go pick lemons out of the backyard any time as she pleased, so somehow she found her own Meyer lemon tree at a nursery.  She keeps it as an indoor plant most of the year.  And it produces.  In Vermont!  Cool.

Meantime, the knitting gets a move on and one of the lab workers came over to see what I was making this time. The patient next to me asked, “Is it a gift?”  Yes.  And it put a smile on her face for whoever it might be for.  I wished on the spot I had one ready for her, too.

It’s kind of dangerous to post pictures of things friends have made for me because I can’t possibly fit everything in here–but it is all appreciated.

From my friend RobinM, quoted with permission:

“This morning I heard an interview with singer Tom Jones.  Members of the radio audience had submitted questions.  A woman said she had been to lots of Tom Jones concerts; no matter what mood someone was in when she went to the concert, she emerged with a smile.   What made him smile?

He said that he had been bedridden for a couple of years with TB.  He used to look out his window to see kids playing by a lamppost.  He told himself if he could ever get to that lamppost, he wouldn’t complain about a thing.  He’s never forgotten it.  What makes him smile is to sing and see the smiles on the faces of the audience.”

I loved this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403537.html It states that someone had studied the effects of being happy on others: a shared guffaw, a smile, a thoughtful act.  I’d have been curious to follow them around to see exactly what their methodology was, to see for myself whether the presence of the researcher had contributed to the positive expectations: whether people felt they had to show the stranger that the kindnesses of their friends was important.  Curious.  But either way, they found that the ripple-on-the-pond effect goes out to three degrees of separation to people who didn’t even know nor see the originators, and that it can extend up to a year.

I would guess that it actually goes far longer than that, although I’m sure it depends on how you define it.  After all, just think of someone who went out of their way to do something uncommonly nice for you, and doesn’t it lift your spirits years and years after the fact? That teacher who believed in you.  The friend who gave up her time to listen when you needed it.  The stranger who smiled hi in passing on the day you most needed it.  That provides motivation, years after the fact, to go and do the same for someone else.

We knitters have an edge in all that.  What we make and give is a tangible reminder of how we feel about someone, a way to bless them over and over and over, bringing a smile to their face as they put the shawl to their back or socks to their feet, feeling warmed and thought about.

That’s powerful.

And hey, Jasmin, with the Crohn’s and lupus flares going on, I put on that second pair from the right today. I didn’t get to take you up on your hot cocoa offer yesterday, so I carried you around with me all day here instead.

Thank you all of you and to every person who comes to read my blog.  Much appreciated.

I was in the middle of working on a post, and I’ll get back to it, and I’m throwing a gratuitous photo into this one of a Wanda’s Flowers shawl from “Wrapped in Comfort” because ’tis the season and it’s a really great book and I need people to buy lots of copies and you’ll love the stories and the shawls in it if you do, etc etc…

But I just had to laugh: the editor of Wired magazine spoke to a Silicon Valley group yesterday and talked about some of the latest and greatest high-tech stuff, and one item thrown out there had no context given to it–just the idea of it was apparently expected to excite the audience into thinking, oooh, cool!

And I just have to ask: who thought of this. Who would buy this.  WHY?  An electric mascara applicator.

To paint eyelashes on your VW Bug to make it cuter, or what?

It took a minute to pull it together when I stumbled across where I’d put it down.  A flyer for my book, a plastic sleeve for it…

…Crum. Okay, so I must have gotten distracted while looking for a mailing envelope (which would be kept near the laundry, and there’s always laundry needing doing, and…)  Someone wanted that.  I was going to mail it to them. I have absolutely no memory of who or where they were. If that was you, I apologize!

I did find the cotton/cashmere and redid that one spot. My friend Nancy dropped by, looked at it, and she thought the sweater was okay, but I think it’s definitely a work-in-the-garden sweater now.  Or good for a walk in San Francisco along the wharf while the seagulls hope for a handout.

Gotta watch those flyers.

Suffering from writer’s blog, and then I was surprised when the doorbell rang just now, rescuing me: Jim,  (written about here, here, here, here, here and here–he’s Nicholas’s dad) holding a sweater out sheepishly.  This was clearly one of his favorites, not to mention it’s pine-green-wearing time of year anyway; it’s the second year he’s brought it to me.  I assured him quickly before he even asked that I’d love to mend it for him and that it would only take me five minutes or so.

But notice I didn’t invite him in for those five minutes, and I’m pretty sure he was on his way to work at the university anyway.

What I didn’t want him to see was, yes, I can do a pretty good job of mending a small hole in his sweater–but often after several passes at it.  Take matching yarn and dissect one ply from the rest to have a thin enough strand.  Thread needle with it (is there any question that I’d have yarn?) and weave up and down, recreating the missing stitch while connecting it to the still-existing ones. Pat self on the back for doing a good job, check it from the right side to be sure, grumble, carefully undo work so as not to make the hole bigger in the process, rethread needle, try again.  Have the single ply shred due to lack of twist from having been freed from its mates–undo, try again.  And so on.

That’s the part I would just as soon skip having an audience for.  So.

The sweater looked in good shape otherwise, and I was surprised when I looked at the inside to find I’d mended not one but five holes the last time he’d brought it by.  I finished mending today’s and held the thing up.  Right side out again, you really couldn’t tell; I was pretty pleased with myself.

And then I saw it.  Oh, *that’s* going to leave a mark!  About half a dozen stitches and rows’ worth of a mothbite, probably a carpet beetle’s at that size.  I tried. I really tried.  Hey, Jim, did you know that you can throw an old sweater in the washer and dryer several times and then cut it up into really useful hotpads? In green, to match your Christmas decorations!

No, I’m not ready to tell him that yet.  Writing this gave me my required five minutes of throwing up my hands at it, and now I’m ready to dive back in. Undo, ditch the baby alpaca–it has too bright a sheen to it for the wool for that big a space, it calls too much attention to itself–go find the cashmere/cotton that I used last time that’s a closer color match, and go try again. I can make this work.

Marguerite‘s mother spoke in church recently, detailing what her daughter had gone through, thanking God and every member of the congregation for their help, their love, and their prayers. For all the encouragement and hope that always seemed to come in at the moments it was most needed.  It was her daughter’s birthday, and her mother wanted to celebrate her good health out loud with us.

As she spoke, Marguerite was everybody’s daughter. She was already everybody’s friend.

Tiny Tyrant’s comment made me guffaw and cry uncle: okay, I’ll post!

I got there a half hour early in case I might get any argument as to whether I actually had an appointment, given their system’s mess-up, and with the traffic, who knew how long it would take me anyway; rush hour here starts at 3:00 and I was scheduled for 3:25.  (That muffled sound you just heard was everybody in Vermont patting themselves on the back that they don’t live here, with their thick mittens on their hands and their lined overcoats drawn tightly around.)

It was quite crowded.  I plunked down on the floor while in the first line–I don’t do standing for long stretches very well, and it seemed at first as if this was going to be a very long one.  But it got going in good time.  As soon as I got out of that line, a man offered me his chair, which was very sweet of him, but he didn’t see that there was an empty one behind him.  I did.  So I would say we both won: we both got to experience his kindness, he got thanked for it, and we each got a chair.

It did feel very slow.  This is more due to the fact that I was obsessively clutching my F 143 number tightly in my hand so as not to have to start over and not get bumped to the non-appointment line–and that made it impossible to knit.  I had my ticket to speed.  But in all honesty, I was out ten minutes after my appointed time.  They simply wanted a new picture is all; the clerk knew no particular reason why.

I’m casting on a smaller project to have a more portable one to throw in my purse while hoping that doesn’t mean I’ll run out of knitting to play with.  You never know.

Trade in an old decade or two and you get to report into the DMV in person.  They want to know: has anything on my license changed since they issued the original in ’87?

Well, the hair isn’t brown anymore.  And the height–I could stand an extra inch there, don’t you think?  How about that birthdate.  The ’50’s are so…so ’50’s.  I don’t even remember them anyway.  Bag it.

They now let you make appointments beforehand, supposedly so you don’t have to stand in long lines.  The automated phone system, though, wanted me to go to the Redwood City office–which happens to be closed.  It’s being remodeled.  I think I’ll try again.

On hold… I think whoever programmed their system to play an eight-second song while you wait was very, very optimistic.

Bag that. Try online.  Okay, got it, hit the confirm button–

–and get random computer squigglings.

Good old DMV.  Still its same old self.  After all these years, isn’t it good to see: it hasn’t changed a bit.

(Edited to add: the one back home in Maryland was pretty good, actually.)

Having given him my card with my blog address, I’m not waiting till tomorrow to post this. I want to wave hi now.

After my lupus diagnosis, starting when my youngest was two, for several years I swam Monday through Friday at the CAR pool, CAR being an acronym for the Community Association for Rehabilitation.  It was a very warm pool to help those with arthritis and it was indoors, which was absolutely necessary with my new sun-sensitive disease.  You could only swim there if you had a doctor’s prescription to get in.  So everybody there had something going on and everybody knew it.  We looked out for each other.  Often, if someone didn’t show for awhile, people would go checking on them to make sure they were okay.  This is where I met Jonathan, who was one of the lifeguards and who is now an assistant professor at a university in Singapore (ie, if you follow that link, his story did come out well in the end.)

There was the time I lost a roll of film out of my purse there and didn’t know it; it got found, and the only way to figure out whose it was was to develop the film. Since I took the pictures, I wasn’t in any of them and it didn’t help them any; so then the staff showed them to people coming in until I went, Oh! That’s Steve and Tobie! Those are my photos, sorry about that, how much do I owe you?

It was pictures of their wedding.  Tobie is half Hawaiian. Steve, it turned out, was a dead ringer for the young husband of one of the lifeguards and there had apparently been quite some consternation when those pictures came back from the shop–I think they were hiding them from Michelle-the-lifeguard just to be sure.  There was a huge sigh of relief when the groom in the pictures turned out to be someone completely different.  Too funny.

Then there was the time one of the other swimmers mentioned that he liked to bake, and I told him of a bizarre cheesecake recipe in one of my cookbooks: Oobleck Pie, for the Dr. Seuss story.  Honey lime avocado cheesecake with a wheat germ crust. Did that sound Marin County or what?

The guy asked me for the recipe. And then he actually made it.  Didn’t touch it; just brought it to the staff and presented it to them as a gift.  Heh.

I walked in the door a few hours later, and one of the lifeguards pushed that seasick-green dessert at me and told me, “This is *your* fault. You have to eat the first piece!”

Oh my.  Well.  Once you get past the shock of the first bite, it was actually pretty–okay, at least.  They had too much fun watching my face as I ate.  Yes, I’d say it’s pretty good; here, you have some!

So that gives you a little background on the place.  There were no strangers there.

There was a delightful couple there, Don and Amalie, a generation older than me but younger than a fair number of the regulars–as a young mom, I was definitely the baby in the crowd–and they were gregarious, funny, and the life of the party there.  They were essential to me as I learned how to cope with my very changed life: they had both had strokes at quite a bit younger than most, and they were perfectly cheerful about life and clearly quite in love with each other.

I remember telling Amalie once about wanting to buy some mohair yarn that was in the most perfect-ever color a yarn could ever hope to be.  It had been discontinued, so my chance to get it was a one-time thing and I knew it.  But I was highly reluctant to spend to get it.  She looked at me, and with a wisdom that I knew came of experience she had and I didn’t yet, told me, “It’s only money.  Money can be replaced.”

I bought that mohair, and it became the ribbing, collar, and cuffs as well as in the diamonds of my Kaffe Fassett coat.  Amalie made it happen.

When we decided to remodel our house, they invited me to come over to their place to show me the work they’d had done to help give me ideas, knowing that the only way to know how to do a remodel is to already have done one, and of course nobody goes into it having that.  They’d done a lovely job.  They had pet birds that I got to meet, too.

John, my baby, was I think in first grade when I quit going there: the local Y had opened an indoor pool and offered a family plan for what I’d been paying for just me.   We just couldn’t afford both plans.  CAR lost. It was terribly wrenching.

John is 20 now.  I ran into Amalie a few years ago: she was sitting in a scooter, waiting for a bus.  I didn’t recognize her at first; her hair had gone completely snow white by then, and I didn’t expect her to be in a chair.  If memory serves, I was walking home from the car repair shop, so I happened to be walking along the busy street where she was.  We had an impromptu visit that left me realizing how much I missed my old friends at CAR, wishing there were some way of having a reunion.

I saw a letter to the editor in the paper once, noticed the name, and exclaimed to my husband, Oh cool! It’s my friend Don from CAR!

Fast forward.  Michelle and I ran a few errands today, and as we got in the car after the first one, she apologized for taking so long at it. Not a problem, I quickly assured her.

Later I told her I was so glad she hadn’t been in a hurry.  The timing!  Our next stop was to Trader Joe’s for some goodies for her to take back to college that she can’t get out there.  I saw an elderly man in an electric wheelchair…

…and thought, could that be?  Don?  Nahhh.  If it were Don, Amalie would be here.  (Radiating thoughtbeams at him, Turn. A. Round.  Turn. A. Round.) Okay, that didn’t work, so from the next check-out line over, I said his name loudly, figuring that if it wasn’t him the word would simply vanish into the general hubbub of the store.

A little more volume the second time, “DON?”  Some part of me somehow just refused to be deterred, and I thought, what the heck, I’m in it now, so I said his full name loudly.

That did it.  Don turned around. It WAS him!!!

He couldn’t immediately place me, and that was no surprise; I’ve certainly aged.  My hair is completely different, and instead of being the mother of young children, I’m the mother of four 20-somethings.  But he was as sweet as ever and certainly willing to hold a conversation with someone who clearly knew who he was and was so glad to see him.

I reintroduced him to my tall Michelle, telling him she was four years old when he’d first met her.  We chatted a little, and I think he got who I was.   Then he opened up and told me, “My wife passed away a few weeks ago. It was very sudden.  It was very unexpected.  She…” He stopped.  “She didn’t suffer.”

My heart went out to him.  “Oh, honey.” I told him, “I’m so sorry.”  I told him how very glad I was to see him.

While I thought, I am SO glad that today of all days and this moment of all moments we ended up in this store and that you did too.  And somehow in the lines right next to each other right here.  I am just SO glad.  Dear God, thank you.

And Don, I look forward to the next time I get to run into you.  Take good care of yourself, y’hear?  I need you to.  When my own life was upended, you and Amalie are the ones who showed me how to cope.

A really nifty idea: this is a row counter bracelet from Debbie at Knitnsewstudio.

You push the small beads through the little circle of beads for each row up to nine and then a large bead to mark the 10th row.  It’s on your wrist so you don’t lose it, the beads don’t fall through the circle like a post-it note falling off the page, and on mine, the beads are wood, a plus for this natural-materials fanatic.  Very cool.

If all problems could be solved so easily.  I took a shawl project with me on Thursday, because, well, being a knitter, what else would I do?  Besides, since it was early in its process, that way I couldn’t possibly run out of yarn to play with.

After dinner, a game of Trivial Pursuit 80’s edition got going, and it was one of those things where, given the size of the group and the number of ongoing conversations, eh on my hearing; I pulled out my needles over to the side and nobody minded.

Lisa Souza’s Timbuktu has a shine to it and just enough variations in the shading to make it a really gorgeous yarn.

I wanted it knit perfectly.  It had to be bookworthy.  I wasn’t sure of matching the upper and lower lace patterns and experimented rather than thinking it through.  In hindsight, a project at the point where it needed a lot of thought was probably not the best one to bring to a crowd.  I’d actually knitted the pattern before, but had lost my notes while packing for the trip East.  Swatching again would have been the right thing to do, but I didn’t.

I went ahead, sure I’d gotten it, found that nope, I’d made a mistake, and debated: do I tink back three whole rows, nearly 1200 stitches worth, or just wholesale frog them and then work them carefully back onto the needle? I looked around at the crawler, the 18-month-old, the 3-year-old and the 4-year-old and the dog and wondered about the ball rolling around forgotten on the floor and one of them running off with it with my stitches running freely.  No thanks.  Tink it is.

Which would have worked, too, had I not let myself get distracted by cries of delight and gotcha over from where the game was going on. During which I managed to drop a few stitches that quickly became (oh goodness) something like 15, down down down.

Yeah I could have worked them back up carefully. But yes I wanted everything looking exactly perfect, and I was being a little obsessive about it.

The three younger children had been put to bed during my tinking.  Hmm. I thought of a comment on my blog awhile back, someone saying she’d never regretted frogging.

I frogged.  That made seven rows’ worth.

The four-year-old started watching as I did, and clearly that looked like it might be a fun thing to come over to help out with; I looked him in the eye from across the table, smiled, and told him, I’ll play with you when I finish this.  Please don’t touch it before that.

Oh, okay! Cool! And he hopped off to something else.  (Phew!)

Then last night, as Michelle worked at her laptop in the chair next to me, throwing out the occasional comment and conversation, I reknitted those stitches.  I have it written down now, no longer on lost notes as to exactly how that lineup should be worked.  There is no question now about how to work that pattern. And it’s on paper.  Solid.  It WAS worth it all.

Meantime, a little showing off:

Amanda aka NHKnittingMama never knew that I kept looking at her Huarache yarn on her Etsy site and debated buying it; and yet, somehow that was the skein she picked out and surprised me with when I met her at Kaleidoscope.  See how well it goes with the Creatively Dyed Yarn’s Seacell I bought at Stitches?  I do like those colors.

On that note, Paula aka MadAngel likewise surprised me at Kaleidoscope with some cashmere/merino. Nice work!  I’m a dunk-the-whole-skein-in-the-pot-at-once kind of dyer, and people who do multicolorwork are way beyond my skills.

Speaking of which.  Melinda of Tess Designer Yarns gifted me with some of the most gorgeous merino she’d dyed. I don’t know the name of the colorway, but was there ever so cheerful a yarn?

And, just in case of homesickness, I now have this Maisonette yarn by Neighborhood Fiber Co. in the colorway “Grant Circle” to remind me of Washington, DC, dyed by a fellow native.  Karida and I instantly hit it off, and as knitters so often do, could have talked for hours.  I’ve been wishing I could knit her yarn into, say, the Lincoln Memorial or some such.

Over the river and through the redwoods, to Aunt Mary Lynn’s house we go…

Sixteen adults, four small children, one visiting dog, one house in the Santa Cruz mountains.  One husband-and-wife pair’s birthdays, so a large pecan pie got roasted and sung over.

I didn’t catch the eighteen-month-old before my camera battery died, but I did get the youngest on her determined way.   Doggone, but Cinnamon the Norse (I think that’s what they said) terrier learned fast that tiny people who walk funny or crawl are to be kept a distance from–it was amazing watching how adept the dog was at ducking around, under, and between those chair parts.  Not in an overly big hurry, just, nope, kid.  Must be so big or bigger to come play.

In the kitchen, I told Aunt Nancy at one point, “Here, let me do that,” and her reaction was, “Are you kidding? I found a chore I could do. This is mine!” Which is a lot of how the day went: people looking for their chance to pitch in and help, when there were already so many ready hands.

Aunt Nancy is the wife of my father-in-law’s oldest brother. She has beautifully-done dark strawberry blonde highlights.  I looked at her and grinned, “It’s not fair; some of us, you know, our roots don’t grow in dark.”  (Not that I’m dyeing mine anymore anyway.)  She looked at me and my gray, a good generation younger, and guffawed appreciatively.  We had a wonderful visit.

I brought my Lisa Souza Timaru yarn in Peacock and had a few of the women going oooh! over it, telling me how gorgeous it is.  And it is.  I’d show it to you, too, except I forgot to recharge that camera battery last night.

And a very good time was had by all.

Open that door for me, wouldja?  Thanks.  Wait–no?  You’ll walk into it and burn yourself?  You are SO my child!

(Waits ten minutes.  Checks email.  Child/perpetrator wanders off. Back in kitchen, alone now.  Opens oven door.  Waits.)

Dustpan and brush?  Check.

No. Wait. Synthetic. Might melt. Hmm.

(Re-establishes dominance over oatmeal pie crust: you WILL adhere to those sides this time thankyouverymuch.  No playing trampoline this time.)

Opens oven.  Broom proves a little awkward–let’s not sweep old hairballs all the way across the kitchen onto the newly-reestablished pie crust, okay?–moves upper rack to the top and recommences sweeping oven. Thinks might not ever again get a chance to actually sweep an oven.  Thinks how cornstraw makes a nice fire starter and about being at the other end of all those starters–but at least they won’t melt.  Uh, yeah, fire extinguisher still good.  Sweeps oven some more as the piecrust bits run and hide under the heating element.  Sees more bits go down inside the hinge socket of the door: entombed forevermore, to be excavated by some future Egyptmeofpietologist.  Pokes at run-and-catch-me’s with a wooden fork.

Child enters.  Oven devoid of major pieces, down to the last sandyish bits.  Exclaims, I didn’t mean for you to have to do that!  Tells child to look at pie crust.  Oh Mom, you did it!

Blows across fingertips.  Heh.  Puts rack back in place. Turns oven back on.  Tells child she can prebake her pie crust shortly.  Doesn’t mention not actually liking banana cream pie child is looking forward to, much less banana soycream pie. There’s another crust, safely baked, spread with melted chocolate, waiting for strawberries and strawberry puree filling; that will definitely do the job nicely.

(With a bajillion thanks to the fellow at Whole Foods on Emerson Street in Palo Alto, who, after four stores earlier in the day, got the phone call asking if please please did they have Earth Balance Sticks for the severely dairy-allergic kid who wanted to make a pie she could actually eat on Thanksgiving Day with the relatives. Who said, We discontinued that; no, wait, let me check. We stocked it for the holidays! We have it! Come! And whom I thanked in person as we loaded our basket with four boxes, to his very obvious delight at being thanked in the craziness that was a grocery store the day before Thanksgiving.)

Michelle flew home last night from college.  And boy are we going to celebrate.

She and I spent today at the clinic with a break at home for a quick lunch.

The tumor on her eyeball–the eye doctor’s description of it a year ago, not mine–that they’ve been keeping track of got finally laid to rest today as a simple small growth of cells leftover from her cataract surgery at age 7.  No tumor. Normal. Class dismissed.

The hematologist sent her to other departments for further testing.

No arteriole blood clot.  No bone marrow biopsy: no need now or hopefully ever.  Platelets high, but no cancer.  Class dismissed.